"Some research…"
Okay, I know what Listener's thinking — same as Ned did when he found my diaries. And I grant it sounds like we were going at it. But as Cindy makes clear in her story, it was really more like modeling for life drawing classes in art school. If Manny's mock — Mythic Hero "Fred," for instance (the male lead in the Fates novels, as in Wye), is having himself an early-midlife crisis — as he does in Atropos after dodging the Korean War draft and realizing that he and his wife are evolving in different directions — and one of his colleagues' wives happens to hit on him, and he's reminded of some crazy sex he had back in college days with a girl who looked like a younger version of this one, and Manny needs to describe exactly how Fred feels being in a motel room at age forty with a thirty-year-old married woman naked on all fours, and worrying that he might not get it up for her because of the novelty of it all, dot dot dot? But I swear on Bill Clinton's testicles that I never had sex with that man: I merely might as well have, since I told my damn diary all about us, chapter and verse.
No comment.
"Ditto — except what if Mister Manny needed to know exactly how it felt to Mister Fred there to ball the lady's brains out?"
No comment. What I want to get said is that after '62, when the Dickson-Mason connection was history, it was a real relief for me to abandon my make-pretend writing ambitions and get back to full-time wifing, mothering, and school-teaching. I loved Ned Forester, damn it, different as we were in too many ways. And our kids meant the world to me.
I beg to disagree with that "make-pretend": Not only did you teach literature and composition for a living, and fill umpteen diaries with your take on everything from losing your cherry at age sixteen to posing bare-assed for Manfred Dickson in a Howard Johnson motel room at age thirty; you also "edited," quote/unquote, every page he wrote for seven years! Thelma and I supplied him with a certain amount of information—
"Not to mention a few demos here and there—"
But you were muse and editor rolled into one.
"So to speak."
So okay, you didn't write Manny's books. But The Fates would never have gotten themselves written without you.
For better or worse, thanks, depending on where you're coming from. Junior himself half wishes he could prove I wrote them, we half suspect, so he could shoot down his big bad daddy's main claim to fame — except that there would go his only fame-claim, too. But my diaries made it clear which of us was the novelist and which the typist/editor, as does dear Cindy's Wye.
"Pity Junie didn't get to read 'em. And the world."
A painful subject, so let's get done with it. I never kept those diaries hidden, Listener: neither the ones that Manny found so useful, from back in our tuition-earning days, nor the later ones from our reconnection. They were lined up on a bookshelf in my study, where anybody from the kids to the housecleaner could pick them up. But they were under lock and key, sort of, because like a lot of schoolgirls I'd started with the kind that have a little locking tab to keep them private, and I kept on using that kind, half out of habit, half as a joke. Ned and the kids used to tease me about "Mommy's deep dark secrets." I even made the little brass keys into a charm bracelet, usually tucked away in my jewelry box, and never imagined that et cetera.
And to this hour I don't know quite what prompted Ned to fish out that bracelet one day in December of1973 and unlock those locks. He'd been in bed for a few days with the flu and got bored lying there alone in the house while the kids and I were in school; said he noticed that key-bracelet on my dresser (possible, but not likely) and thought what the hell, no harm in just taking a peek — and that was that. Just as the Arab oil embargo and economic recession of '73 ended the American sixties, of which The Fates had become an emblem, Ned's reading those diaries was the end of the world as Grace Mason Forester had known and enjoyed it. Twenty years of contented marriage and eighteen of happy motherhood down the toilet, not to mention my job and poor Aggie's at Severn Day.
What happened, Listener — contrary to the "C. Ella Mason" version — was that Outraged Hubby threatened to put those diaries in evidence if Grace contested their immediate separation and divorce — although of course he'd prefer not to, to spare all hands the embarrassment of everybody's learning that nice Missus Forester is an ex-hooker who later shacked up for seven adulterous years with a famous dirty-book writer.
Which I didn't, but who'd believe me?
"I still think you should've called his bluff and said, So go public, asshole. He had as much to lose as you did."
I couldn't do that, Thelm, for the kids' sake. And for Ned's, too. I'd loved him, damn it, and what he'd found out about me cut him to the quick. I didn't want him publicly humiliated too.
So the bastard insists on divorce for irreconcilable differences, full custody of the kids, and Gracie's and my resignation from Severn Day, where he was sure we'd been corrupting our students' morals: otherwise he'd blow the cover on my porn-queen past along with Grace's diaries. But if we agreed to his terms, he promised to destroy the diaries, keep mum about our naughty résumés, and make a generous alimony settlement.
"And Listener should understand that the matter of Grace's visitation rights with their kids was academic anyhow, so to speak, since Ned Junior was about to take off for Princeton and Cindy was a fifth-former already at Severn Day. Even so, I think you should've dared him to go ahead and cover the whole family with shit."
Nope. And as things turned out, I'm glad I didn't — rough as it was for Ag and me to quit teaching, pretending that we were burned out.
Plausible enough for Grace, who'd been at it heart and soul for twenty-plus years. But I was only two years into the best job I ever had! As for how things turned out…
Poor Ned.
"Would you stop it already with the Poor Ned?"
No. What poor Ned had learned about me literally broke his heart. Cindy has him jump out of his high-rise office window — her way of getting even with him, I suppose. But in fact her dad died of a coronary, Listener, the very next year, at age fifty.
"On the fifteenth hole of his club's golf course, and in the opinion of some of us, his coup de grâce, excuse my French, was Tricky Dick Nixon's disgrace and resignation after Watergate, on top of all the rest."
So there went those cushy alimony payments, with which my sweet sorrowful sis had been helping me out while we both scratched around for new jobs. But she regained full custody of two well-off kiddies indeed, with their dad's estate added to their trust funds, and their mom in charge of the show till they reached twenty-one.
By when I'd long since explained to them what Mom and Dad's split had really been about.