a group of strangers clustered together on a street corner; I stood with them, shrugged and nodded at whatever they said, and then moved on. And of course I wasn’t the only unattached soul wandering around like that, that day. By the time I got to Spielvogel’s the waiting-room door was locked and he had gone home. Which was just as well with me: I didn’t feel like “analyzing” my incredulity and shock. Shortly after I arrived at Susan’s I got a phone call from my father. “I’m sorry to bother you at your friend’s,” he said, somewhat timidly, “I got the name and number from Morris.” “That’s okay,” I said, “I was going to call you.” “Do you remember when Roosevelt died?” I did indeed-so too had the young protagonist of A Jewish Father. Didn’t my father remember the scene in my novel, where the hero recalls his own father’s grieving for FDR? It had been drawn directly from life: Joannie and I had gone down with him to the Yonkers train station to pay our last respects as a family to the dead president, and had listened in awe (and with some trepidation) to our father’s muffled, husky sobbing when the locomotive, draped in black bunting and carrying the body of FDR, chugged slowly through the local station on its way up the river to Hyde Park; that summer, when we went for a week’s vacation to a hotel in South Fallsburg, we had stopped off at Hyde Park to visit the fallen president’s grave. “Truman should be such a friend to the Jews,” my mother had said at the graveside, and the emotion that had welled up in me when she spoke those words came forth in a stream of tears when my father added, “He should rest in peace, he loved the common man.” This scene too had been recalled by the young hero of A Jewish Father, as he lay in bed with his German girl friend in Frankfurt, trying to explain to her in his five-hundred-word German vocabulary who he was and where he came from and why his father, a good and kindly man, hated her guts…Nonetheless my father had asked me on the phone that night, “Do you remember when Roosevelt died?”-for whatever he read of mine he could never really associate with our real life; just as I on the other hand could no longer have a real conversation with him that did not seem to me to be a reading from my fiction. Indeed, what he then proceeded to say to me that night struck me as something out of a book I had already written. And likewise what little I said to him-for this was a father- and-son routine that went way back and whose spirit and substance was as familiar to me as a dialogue by Abbott and Costello,…which isn’t to say that being a partner in the act ever left me unaffected by our patter. “You’re all right?” he asked, “I don’t mean to interrupt you at your friend’s. You understand that?” “That’s okay.” “But I just wanted to be sure you’re all right.” “I’m all right.” “This is a terrible thing. I feel for the old man-he must be taking it hard. To lose another son-and like that. Thank God there’s still Bobby and Ted.” “That should help a little.” “All, what can help,” moaned my father, “but you’re all right?” “I’m fine.” “Okay, that’s the most important thing. When are you going to court again?” he asked. “Next month sometime.” “What does your lawyer say? What are the prospects? They can’t sock you again, can they?” “We’ll see.” “You got enough cash?” he asked. “I’m all right.” “Look, if you need cash-“ “I’m fine. I don’t need anything.” “Okay. Stay in touch, will you, please? We’re starting to feel like a couple of lepers up here, where you’re concerned.” “I will, I’ll be in touch.” “And let me know immediately how the court thing turns out. And if you need any cash.” “Okay.” “And don’t worry about anything.
I know he’s a southerner, but I got great faith in Lyndon Johnson. If it was Humphrey I’d breathe easier about Israel-but what can we do? Anyway, look, he was close to Roosevelt all those years, he had to learn something. He’s going to be all right. I don’t think we got anything to worry about. Do you?” “No.” “I hope you’re right. This is awful. And you take care of yourself. I don’t want you to be strapped, you understand?” “I’m fine.”
Susan and I stayed up to watch television until Mrs. Kennedy had arrived back in Washington on Air Force One. As the widow stepped from the plane onto the elevator platform, her fingers grazed the coffin, and I said, “Oh, the heroic male fantasies being stirred up around the nation.” “Yours too?” asked Susan. “I’m only human,” I said. In bed, with the lights off, and clasped in one another’s arms, we both started to cry. “I didn’t even vote for him,” Susan said. “You didn’t?” “I could never tell you before. I voted for Nixon.” “Jesus, but you were fucked up.” “Oh, Lambchop, Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t have voted for him if she hadn’t been his wife. It’s the way we were raised.”
In September 1964, the week after Spielvogel had published his findings on my case in the American Forum for Psychoanalytic Studies, the Warren Commission published theirs on the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald, alone and on his own, was responsible for the murder of President Kennedy, the commission concluded; meanwhile Spielvogel had determined that because of my upbringing I suffered from “castration anxiety” and employed “narcissism” as my “primary defense.” Not everyone agreed with the findings either of the eminent jurist or of the New York analyst: so, in the great world and in the small, debate raged about the evidence, about the conclusions, about the motives and the methods of the objective investigators…And so those eventful years passed, with reports of disaster and cataclysm continuously coming over the wire services to remind me that I was hardly the globe’s most victimized inhabitant. I had only Maureen to contend with-what if I were of draft age, or Indochinese, and had to contend with LBJ? What was my Johnson beside theirs? I watched the footage from Selma and Saigon and Santo Domingo, I told myself that that was awful, suffering that could not be borne…all of which changed nothing between my wife and me. In October 1965, when Susan and I stood in the Sheep Meadow of Central Park, trying to make out what the Reverend Coffin was saying to the thousands assembled there to protest the war, who should I see no more than fifteen feet away, but Maureen. Wearing a button pinned to her coat: “Deliver Us Dr. Spock.” She was standing on the toes of her high boots, trying to see above the crowd to the speaker’s platform. The last word I’d had from her was that letter warning me about the deluxe nervous breakdown that I would soon be getting billed for because of my refusal “to be a man.” How nice to see she was still ambulatory-I supposed it argued for my virility. Oh, how it burned me up to see her here! I tapped Susan. “Well, look who’s against the war.” “Who?” “Tokyo Rose over there. That’s my wife, Suzie Q.” “That one?” she whispered. “Right, with the big heartfelt button on her breast.” “Why-she’s pretty, actually.” “In her driven satanic way, I suppose so. Come on, you can’t hear anything anyway. Let’s go.” “She’s shorter than I thought-from your stories.” “She gets taller when she stands on your toes. The bitch. Eternal marriage at home and national liberation abroad. Look,” I said, motioning up to the police helicopter circling in the air over the crowd, “they’ve counted heads for the papers-let’s get out of here.” “Oh, Peter, don’t be a baby-“ “Look, if anything could make me for bombing Hanoi, she’s it. With that button yet. Deliver me, Dr. Spock-from her!”
That antiwar demonstration was to be my last contact with her until the spring of 1966, when she phoned my apartment, and in an even and matter-of-fact voice said to me, “I want to talk to you about a divorce, Peter. I am willing to talk sensibly about all the necessary arrangements, but I cannot do it through that lawyer of yours. The man is a moron and Dan simply cannot get through to him.”
Could it be? Were things about to change? Was it about to be over?
“He is not a moron, he is a perfectly competent matrimonial lawyer.”
“He is a moron, and a liar, but that isn’t the point, and I’m not going to waste my time arguing about it. Do you or don’t you want a divorce?”
‘What kind of question is that? Of course I do.”
“Then why don’t the two of us sit down together and work it out?”
“I don’t know that we two could, ‘together.’”
“I repeat: do you or do you not want a divorce?”
“Look, Maureen-“
“If you do, then I will come to your apartment after my Group tonight and we can iron this thing out like adults. It’s gone on long enough and, frankly, I’m quite sick of it. I have other things to do with my life.”
‘Well, that’s good to hear, Maureen. But we surely can’t meet to settle it in my apartment.”
“Where then? The street?”
“We can meet on neutral ground. We can meet at the Algonquin.
“Really, what a baby you are. Little Lord Fauntleroy from Westchester-to this very day.”
“The word Westchester’ still gets you, doesn’t it? Just like ‘Ivy League.’ All these years in the big city and still the night watchman’s daughter from Elmira.”
“Ho hum. Do you want to go on insulting me, or do you want to get on with the business at hand? Truly, I couldn’t care less about you or your opinion of me at this point. I’m well over that. I have a life of my own. I have my flute.”
“The flute now?”
“I have my flute,” she went on, “I have Group. I’m going to the New School.”
“Everything but a job,” I said.
“My doctor doesn’t feel I can hold a job right now. I need time to think.”
“What is it you ‘think’ about?”
