than increasing, had fallen off by about thirty per cent since Judge Rosenzweig had first ordered me to pay Maureen five thousand dollars a year out of the ten I was then making. Rosenzweig’s decision had been based on a tax return that showed me earning a salary of fifty-two hundred a year from the University of Wisconsin and another five thousand from my publisher (representing one quarter of the substantial advance I was getting for my second book). By 1964, however, the last of the publisher’s four annual payments of five thousand dollars had been doled out to me, the book they had contracted with me for bore no resemblance to a finished novel, and I was broke. Out of each year’s ten thousand in income, five thousand had gone to Maureen for alimony, three to Spielvogel for services rendered, leaving two for food, rent, etc. At the time of the separation there had been another sixty-eight hundred in a savings account-my paperback proceeds from A Jewish Father-hut that too had been divided equally between the estranged couple by the judge, who then laid the plaintiff’s legal fees on the defendant; by our third appearance at the courthouse, the remainder of those savings had been paid out to meet my own lawyer’s bills. In ‘65 Hofstra raised me to sixty-five hundred a year for teaching my two seminars, but my income from writing consisted only of what I could bring in from the short stories I was beginning to publish. To meet expenses I cut down my sessions with Spielvogel from three to two a week, and began to borrow money from my brother to live on. Each time I came before the referee I explained to him that I was now giving my wife somewhere between sixty-five and seventy per cent of my income, which did not strike me as fair. Mr. Egan would then point out that if Mr. Tarnopol wished to “normalize” his income, or even “to improve his lot in life, as most young men strive to do,” he had only to write fiction for Esquire, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, or for Playboy magazine, whose editors would pay him-here, to read the phenomenal figure, he donned his tortoiseshell glasses-“three thousand dollars for a single short story.” As evidence in support of his claim, he produced letters subpoenaed from my files, wherein the fiction editors of these magazines invited me to submit any work I had on hand or planned for the future. I explained to the referee (an attentive, gentlemanly, middle-aged Negro, who had announced, at the outset, that he was honored to meet the author of A Jewish Father; another admirer-God only knew what that meant) that every writer of any eminence at all receives such letters as a matter of course; they were not in the nature of bids, or bribes, or guarantees of purchase. When I finished writing a story, as I had recently, I turned it over to my agent, who, at my suggestion, submitted it to one or another of the commercial magazines Mr. Egan had named. There was nothing I could do to make the magazine purchase it for publication; in fact, over the previous few years three of these magazines, the most likely to publish my work, had repeatedly rejected fiction of mine (letters of rejection submitted here by my lawyer as proof of my plunging literary reputation), despite those warm invitations for submission, which of course cost them nothing to send out. Certainly, I said, I could not submit to them stories that I had not written, and I could not write stories-about here I generally lost my temper, though the referee’s equanimity remained serenely intact-on demand! “Oh, my,” sighed Egan, turning to Maureen, “the artiste bit again.” “What? What did you say?” I threateningly inquired, though we sat around a conference table in a small office in the courthouse, and I, like the referee, had heard every word that Egan had whispered. “I said, sir,” replied Egan, “that I wish I was an artiste and didn’t have to work ‘on demand’ either.” Here we were brought gently to order by the referee, who, if he did not give me my reduction, did not give Maureen her increase either.
I took no comfort in his “fairness,” however. Money was constantly on my mind: what was being extorted from me by Maureen, in collusion (as I saw it) with the state of New York, and what I was now borrowing from Moe, who refused to take interest or to set a date for repayment. “What do you want me to do, shylock my own flesh and blood?” he said, laughing. “I hate this, Moey.” “So you hate it,” was his reply.
My lawyer’s opinion was that actually I ought to be happy that the alimony now appeared to have been “stabilized” at a hundred a week, regardless of fluctuation in my income. I said, “Regardless of fluctuation down, you mean. What about fluctuation up?” “Well, you’d be getting more that way, too, Peter,” he reminded me. “But then ‘stabilized’ doesn’t mean stabilized at all, does it, if I should ever start to bring in some cash?” “Why don’t we cross that bridge when we come to it? For the time being, the situation looks as good to me as it can.”
But it was only a few days after the last of our hearings that a letter arrived from Maureen; admittedly, I should have destroyed it unread. Instead I tore open the envelope as though it contained an unknown manuscript of Dostoevsky’s. She wished to inform me that if I “drove” her to “a breakdown,” I would be the one responsible for her upkeep in a mental hospital. And that would come to something more than “a measly” hundred dollars a week-it would come to three times that. She had no intention of obliging me by being carted off to Bellevue. It was clearly Payne Whitney she was shooting for. And this, she told me, was no idle threat-her psychiatrist had warned her (which was why she was warning me) that she might very well have to be institutionalized one day if I were to continue to refuse “to be a man.” And being a man, as the letter went on to explain, meant either coming back to her to resume our married life, and with it “a civilized role in society,” or failing that, going out to Hollywood where, she informed me, anybody with the Prix de Rome in his hip pocket could make a fortune. Instead I had chosen to take that “wholly unrealistic” job at Hofstra, working one day a week, so that I could spend the rest of my time writing a vindictive novel about her. “I’m not made of steel,” the letter informed me, “no matter what it pleases you to tell people about me. Publish a book like that and you will regret the consequences till your dying day.”
As I begin to approach the conclusion of my story, I should point out that all the while Maureen and I were locked in this bruising, painful combat-indeed, almost from the moment of our first separation hearing in January 1963, some six months after my arrival in New York-the newspapers and the nightly television news began to depict an increasingly chaotic America and to bring news of bitter struggles for freedom and power which made my personal difficulties with alimony payments and inflexible divorce laws appear by comparison to be inconsequential. Unfortunately, these highly visible dramas of social disorder and human misery did nothing whatsoever to mitigate my obsession; to the contrary, that the most vivid and momentous history since World War Two was being made in the streets around me, day by day, hour by hour, only caused me to feel even more isolated by my troubles from the world at large, more embittered by the narrow and guarded life I now felt called upon to live-or able to live-because of my brief, misguided foray into matrimony. For all that I may have been attuned to the consequences of this new social and political volatility, and like so many Americans moved to pity and fear by the images of violence flashing nightly across the television screen, and by the stories of brutality and lawlessness appearing each morning on page one of the New York Times, I simply could not stop thinking about Maureen and her hold over me, though, to be sure, my thinking about her hold over me was, as I well knew, the very means by which she continued to hold me. Yet I couldn’t stop-no scene of turbulence or act of terror that I read about in the papers could get me to feel myself any less embattled or entrapped.
In the spring of 1963, for instance, when for nights on end I could not get to sleep because of my outrage over Judge Rosenzweig’s alimony decision, police dogs were turned loose on the demonstrators in Birmingham; and just about the time I began to imagine myself plunging a Hoffritz hunting knife into Maureen’s evil heart, Medgar Evers was shot to death in his driveway in Mississippi. In August 1963, my nephew Abner telephoned to ask me to accompany him and his family to the civil rights demonstration in Washington; the boy, then eleven, had recently read A Jewish Father and given a report on it in school, likening me, his uncle (in a strained, if touching conclusion), to “men like John Steinbeck and Albert Camus.” So I drove down in their car to Washington with Morris, Lenore, and the two boys, and with Abner holding my hand, listened to Martin Luther King proclaim his “dream”-on the way home I said, “You think we can get him to speak when I go to alimony jail?” “Sure,” said Moe, “also Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They’ll assemble at City Hall and sing ‘Tarnopol Shall Overcome’ to the mayor.” I laughed along with the kids, but wondered who would protest, if I defied the court order to continue to support Maureen for the rest of her natural days and said I’d go to jail instead, for the rest of mine if need be. No one would protest, I realized: enlightened people everywhere would laugh, as though we two squabbling mates were indeed Blondie and Dagwood, or Maggie and Jiggs…In September, Abner was student chairman of his school’s memorial service to commemorate the death of the children killed in the Birmingham church bombing-I attended, again at his invitation, but halfway through a reading by a strapping black girl of a poem by Lang-ston Hughes, slipped out from my seat beside my sister-in-law to race over to my lawyer’s office and show him the subpoena that had been served on me earlier that morning while I sat getting my teeth cleaned in the dentist’s office-I had been asked to show cause why the alimony shouldn’t be raised now that I was “a full-time faculty member” of Hofstra College…In November President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. I made my walk to Spielvogel’s office by what must have turned out to be a ten-mile route. I wandered uptown in the most roundabout fashion, stopping wherever and whenever I saw
