Carl kept yelling words so humiliating and ugly that I slipped away into the bathroom and swallowed a handful of sleeping pills.
When I returned to the room he was still being cruel and abusive, but I could no longer reply because my mouth was going numb and my body limp. Then everything went fuzzy as I crawled out to the balcony and climbed up on the rail. Way beneath, the blur of Manhattan was beckoning like a sequined black velvet bed.
By now Carl realized what he had driven me to doing and started pleading with me not to jump. “Don’t let go, Xaviera,” he said. “I love you. We don’t want to have a scandal.”
As he was trying to pull me back, it occurred to me that if I died my poor mother would be left alone. “Your father could die at any moment,” I started telling myself, “and you don’t have any brothers or sisters to help her out and write to her. And she is the only person that really ever loved you. Don’t die, live, live, live…”
I woke up after it was dark next day, and Carl was there with red roses and gentle words, trying to be the old Carl.
In an effort to compensate, he suggested we spend a long weekend with his parents at their big house in the Hamptons. If he’d said let’s spend a weekend in the Women’s House of Detention, it couldn’t have been less appealing to me. But I went along with any effort he made to keep our engagement alive, even though by this time the thought of his mother made me choke, and I was sure the feelings were mutual.
The weekend came around, and his mother outdid herself in meanness. Even though she was aware we had now lived together for more than half a year and there was no reason to “keep up appearances,” she pointedly assigned me a bedroom on one floor and Carl a room at the other side of the house on a different floor. She even went as far as locking the freaky little dog in Carl’s room at night so that if I came in or he went out, the toothless little beast would bark. And she was not satisfied to stop there. This woman, who had lived in Manhattan all her life, went into his room at two in the morning to ask him the New York telephone area code.
Carl’s mother was so possessive about her son that if there were a law allowing her to marry him, she would have done so. He also had a mother complex, but not based on sentiment. She once threatened to disinherit him if he married me, and the thought of missing out on her money almost gave him a coronary.
The weekend was, as expected, thoroughly depressing, and I spent most of the time staying out of the way to avoid a scene. Her husband had not come along, preferring to go fishing and – I suspect – keep as far away as possible from his wife’s insane babble. So I spent most of my time at the piano because I had studied the classics for twelve years, and it always gives me great pleasure to play. And at least it gave me something to do.
When the last afternoon mercifully arrived, I was sitting, reading a book, in the room off the entrance hall when Mrs. Gordon came out to answer a ring at the doorbell.
From where I was sitting I could see that outside was a gorgeous seventeen-year-old boy with a suntan and shoulder-length blond hair.
Her hatchet expression immediately changed to her version of a smile. “Hi,” she croaked. “What can I do for you?”
“Is this Dr. Johnson’s house?” the beautiful boy said.
“Why, no, I’m Dr. Stone.” She always preferred to be called by her professional name. “Will I do?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Johnson,” the boy said impatiently. “Isn’t this his house?”
“No, it’s not, but come in anyway and let me pour you a drink,” she giggled grotesquely.
“No, thank you, ma’am, this is an emergency,” he said, and hurried away.
Mrs. Gordon shut the door, smiled at herself in the hall mirror, and adjusted her bow, and for the first time noticed me sitting there.
“Why, Xaviera,” she said, blushing and flushing, “you’re there!” Then she added: “Did you see that? What was it, a boy or a girl?”
“If that was a girl,” I said, “you would not have been jumping up and down like some jack-in-the-box.” At that moment the phone rang and she answered it and was grateful for the interruption. But I had already said too much, and I knew the old harridan would not rest until she had my scalp on her belt. In the car on the way back to New York she went after it.
As usual, Mrs. Gordon was sitting up front beside her darling son, Carl, and I, the fiancée, was banished by myself in the back. Her incessant chatter got onto the subject of housing in general, and, at her engineering, in Holland in particular.
“I guess the rentals for apartments must be very high in Amsterdam,” she said.
“Oh, why?”
“Because it seems to me Dutch girls have the habit of moving in with their boyfriends without marrying them, and there has to be a reason.”
To me, this was the last drop in the bucket. I couldn’t keep quiet anymore.
“Mrs. Gordon,” I began, “it is not from choice that I live in an unmarried state with your son… If you can stretch your little brain and recall, your son officially proposed to me through my parents, brought me here on a false promise of marriage, set me up in his home on a temporary arrangement, which has now been going on for nine months.
“What’s more, I paid my own fare and I am now working to support myself in order to get a place of my own. So altogether the Dutch treat has been on me!”
But I didn’t stop there. All my pent-up anger had to be released on this dreadful woman.
“I have put up with a lot of nonsense from you, too. Your trite phone calls in the middle of the night. The inhospitable atmosphere in your funeral parlor of a house, where, if there is no maid around, you would not be gracious enough to extend your arm to pass around a drink or put some peanuts on the table.
“What a difference from my own mother, who is a darling and can’t do enough to make sure her guests are happy.
“No wonder your husband can’t stand you and has not even slept with you for over ten years – and that interesting little piece of information was told me by your own dear son, Carl.
“Yes, your own family smiles about you behind your back, and your only real friend is the freaky dog, and he won’t be around much longer, because, like you, he is falling apart.
“You have the hide to criticize my background. Let me remind you that I come from a similar background to Carl, and my father was an even more famous doctor than your husband.
“But we Jews lost what we had while you just sat back and read about it. And we don’t deny being Jewish and have been proud to suffer for it.
“You, Mrs. Gordon, might be a happier person if you would stop your futile efforts to stay a teen-ager and relax and learn to live with the half-century that you are.”
With that she whirled around and slapped me hard across the face.
Carl never said a word during the whole tirade, nor did he speak now, even though I had hoped he would come to my defense. And the rest of the trip was spent in agonized silence.
I knew that Mrs. Gordon would be determined, however, to have a final word, and as we dropped her off on Sutton Place, she hissed, “I’ll see you on a plane back to Holland. I’ll get you deported. Who are you, anyway, you’re nothing, not even an immigrant.” She stalked into the house and slammed the door.
Back at our apartment, as Carl and I undressed to take a shower, nothing had been said, because I was waiting for him to break the silence with an apology to me.
Instead he started yelling. “Don’t you ever address my mother like that again,” he raged. “Now you have absolutely wrecked all our marriage plans.” As if he had any intention anyway.