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10 Chapter Three Chrysalis Later, Sunday morning Stephanie was conscious now and no longer convulsing. But I had left her “eating butterflies from my hat.” Had her brain been damaged by her seizures? I had little knowledge of the workings of the mind, and terms like aphasia, when a stricken person thinks of a particular word but cannot speak the word and says something completely different, those terms and conditions were not known to me. I was still confident that Stephanie would be home for Christmas. However, I felt uneasy as I drove home. I had driven this route a myriad of times, but for some reason I felt more acutely aware of every turn in the road, of every building as Sunset Strip turned into Sunset Boulevard. The tree-lined avenue, with its large stone mansions told tales of an earlier time when Hollywood was young and fortunes were made from dreams on celluloid and translated into dreams of stone. The landmark pink bungalows of the Beverly Hills Hotel appeared, as they still do on postcards, framed by bottle-green paper cut-outs of palm trees. We had made reservations there for the annual Christmas lunch. It was a highlight of the holiday season the children looked forward to. My thoughts tumbled as I turned north at the corner of Benedict Canyon and Sunset and then headed west to our secluded street. Seeing our home appear when I turned the corner made me feel warm and safe. The two-story Tudor-style house was a California fantasy of Chester or Oxford, but with Stephanie in the hospital I would gladly have made a Faustian bargain—with angel or devil—and traded this lovely house for the smallest hovel if only Stephanie would be made well. This house on Ridgedale Drive sheltered our family like a breathing, protective presence. This was the first house I could call my own, and a grand first house it was. But sometimes I woke from a nightmare. I dreamt I wasn’t married at all, and my life was an illusion. I found myself back amid the bombed- Chrysalis 11 out ruins of postwar Berlin. In the dark, and only half-awake, I glanced at the shadow of my sleeping husband, and hearing his gentle snore, I slipped back into my own slumber. No, I had not dreamt this life. I was the same immigrant who had arrived eighteen years earlier with a debt to Mormon relatives of five hundred dollars for my passage. I was indeed married to the man I had fallen in love with at first sight, just like in a romance novel, a man both good-looking and highly intelligent. It was hard for me to believe this man loved me back. Life seemed perfect, but then something seemed to be missing—yes, a baby. After extensive examinations, the doctors told Marvin that he had no sperm. None. He would never father children. A private adoption service arranged the details, and soon we became the parents of Steven, then two weeks old. But miracles do happen, and I conceived. Marvin had been in Freudian therapy for several years, and the good doctor (Joseph Teicher, MD, professor at USC) took credit for this miracle when he published an article in a psychiatry journal on how he helped a patient’s psyche (Marvin Finell’s) achieve a breakthrough and develop sperm, overcoming his formerly self-imposed sterility. This seemed strange to me—that he, the doctor, enabled Marvin to create this wonder that grew inside of me. I thought the doctor’s theory was ludicrous. For the first time in Marvin’s life, he felt a genuine desire to have a family, a desire he had not experienced in his previous marriage. It was Marvin, with a little help from me, who had created this baby. Nine months after Steven became ours, Stephanie was born. We named her for her brother, whom I thought would almost be a twin to her. I lived the California dream and was fully aware of my good fortune. But I have to admit, our lives had their degree of superficiality. Cocktail parties, charity balls, horse races, trivial pursuits. Still not all was frolic and frou-frou in my life. I was working toward a doctorate in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, often studying until the library closed at 2:00 a.m., then getting up a few hours later to get...

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