A Life in Motion

6. Marriages, Yes, All Four of Them

— 134 — First comes love; then comes marriage; Then comes Florence with a baby carriage. Street Rhyme Iremember the moment, one summer in the late 1960s, sitting beside a friend, Ellen Cantarow, who was driving me to her small apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she said firmly,“I see no reason to get married. I don’t ever want to have children.” I barely noted the first sentence, for the second sentence shocked me deeply. “I’ve never heard anyone say that,” I responded. “I mean, I’ve never heard any woman say she didn’t want to have babies. I can hardly believe you.” Ellen was more than ten years younger than I, and from a privileged background. Now living independently, she was unembarrassed about the silk wraparound Gucci dresses in colorful heaps at the bottom of her closet or even on the floor outside the closet of her tiny Cambridge apartment. My eighteen months as an assistant buyer in an upscale department store in Baltimore had made me respectful of Italian imports. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, beautiful Ellen, a graduate of Harvard, silvery-voiced in Italian and French, seemed to me at that moment an anomaly,though I didn’t recognize her language as that of the newly blooming women’s movement. But, of course, I was shocked, since I had, by then, spent almost 6 Marriages, Yes, All Four of Them — 135 — twenty years of my life marrying for motherhood, or, to put it another way, considering marriage the route to establishing a family . I wanted that middle-class family I had long idolized. One version had remained fixed in a memory that went back to the late 1940s, when Lois Trencher, a friend at Hunter College, invited me to dinner at her home. It was an ordinary midweek evening, but a white tablecloth covered a dinner table set with silver, china, and glassware for five, and a small bowl of flowers stood in the center flanked by candles. Lois’ father, still wearing a jacket and tie, asked us about our day, and Lois’ mother served us from covered dishes of steaming food. I remember none of the conversation, but I have a snapshot in my mind of Lois and her sister across from me, Mr. Trencher on my left, and Mrs. Trencher on my right, from where she would rise occasionally to move to or from the kitchen. This was what I wanted, or thought I wanted. My first marriage at nineteen, in 1948, began as a June wedding in the private home of a Hunter College sorority sister and ended three months later in an annulment. I had met M. at a sweet-sixteen party in the home of his cousin, when I was almost fifteen. I was particularly flattered that M. chose me as his dancing partner, for he was an“older man,” the only person in uniform at the party. Perhaps he was twenty-one. Certainly, he was not handsome, nor was he tall. I remember bright, squinty blue eyes, a beaky nose, and great vitality. A more mature person might have seen much in him, but I was a child and had been taught by Hollywood that handsome men were tall and dark haired like Tyrone Power. Also, I had learned by then that I was not a beauty, and that handsome men would be attracted only to beautiful women. I was still attending a girls’ high school, and I had had no other dates. I saw him a few times, and, on one occasion before he went overseas, we had sex, unprotected sex. Of course, I told no one, certainly not my mother, and for a year or so while he was abroad, I wrote to him frequently and imagined that we would have to marry because we had had sex. When he came home in 1946, I was at the end of my freshman year at college, and we began to date. His — 136 — friends came from middle-class families in the area around Prospect Park and, coupled, they were moving into marriages in which the wife would stay at home and the husband would find a job. Only those who had been in service were going to college. By the time I had ended my sophomore year at Hunter College, I had accepted an engagement ring, and M. was entering Brooklyn College on the G.I. Bill, preparing...