huge bed with the slub linen spread: I still treasured my independence. Yet was it too much to hope that someday my role within the family might be legitimized?
Marriage remains, for me, a mysterious institution. For instance, Ernest and Nancy often argued in my presence. If our practice session was going late, and he needed my help with a chapter from his book, he would feel no compunction about striding into the living room and shouting, “When the hell are you two going to be done?” To which Nancy—not missing a measure—would reply, “Hold your horses,” and continue playing. Ernest would storm out again, only to reappear a few minutes later to repeat his demand. She yelled, he left, he returned. With almost blithe disinterest they threatened and rebuffed each other, their voices rising, the level of tension escalating—and then we would finish, and it would be as if nothing had happened. Nancy would announce gaily that she was going to Safeway; Ernest and I would head up to his office. “Like water off a duck’ back,” as my mother used to say, which made me wonder if this was the secret of marriage: to develop—no, not a thick skin; rather, a down at once fragile and light, by means of which you could shake off, in an instant, any unpleasantness and go about your business. Yet it would protect you, too. Marriage protected. I wished I could have known that feeling of safety, a safety so deep it meant you could say anything, and never have to calculate all that you stood to lose.
Just before Thanksgiving of 1968, Nancy received a letter from Anne Armstrong in which her friend announced that she had left her husband, Clifford, and was living in a rented apartment with a novelist called Jonah Boyd—recently hired as writer-in-residence at Bradford. Nancy took the news hard, and would not say why. Perhaps the casual ease with which Anne had abandoned her marriage made her wonder if staying with Ernest all these years had been a mistake; or perhaps the discovery that Anne was having an affair ignited some fear in her that Ernest might be doing the same thing. All I know for certain is that the Saturday Nancy got the letter, for the first and only time in all the years I knew her, she could not play. Her fingers shook so badly she could barely form them into a chord. At last, pleading a headache, she asked if I’d mind forgoing our weekly session this one time.
The full story came out over the course of the next several Saturdays—details, background, and Nancy’ mess of a reaction, as Anne kept her abreast of developments through letters and phone calls, and Nancy passed the news on to me. She had no one else in whom she could confide. That Anne’ life, since the Wrights’ departure from Bradford, had taken such an eccentric if not downright self-destructive turn was something for which, it appeared, Nancy blamed herself. Perhaps if she had stayed, Nancy speculated, and thus not deprived Anne of the outlet that their piano playing provided, Anne never would have left Clifford in the first place. For without her, Anne had nothing in Bradford. No children. No friends. Only Clifford, a well-meaning if remote mathematician.
I learned more about Anne. She was younger than Nancy by five years. Because she came from Brooklyn, she often expressed a longing for concerts and restaurants and galleries—all categories of experience in which Bradford, especially in the sixties, was sadly lacking. All Bradford had was a coffin factory. Anne never fit in easily with the other faculty wives, their malign chitchat, the bridge afternoons over which a cigarette haze hung, as well as a faint stink of gin. Clinking noises: ice against glass, glass against tabletop, engagement ring against wedding ring on fingers the nails of which were lacquered the color of plums. On these occasions, Anne sometimes drank. Too much. She never managed to pick up the finer points of bridge. She was tranquil only with Nancy, who somehow kept her recklessness in check. On her own, without Nancy to supervise, Anne became obstreperous. She had her ears pierced, and started introducing the word “orgasm” into bridge table conversation. (Usually the context was Clifford’ failure to give her any.) Not that there was anything wrong with Clifford to look at, Nancy said. He was big and hirsute and possessed of a sort of blond, bland handsomeness that Nancy, at