A Complicated Marriage by Janice Van Horne Read Free Book Online Page A

else. And there, set before the Nazi honing his knife, the carcass of the goose, who had laid its last egg.
    Later, they would surely ooh and ahh over the blue flames of the plum pudding, and smack their lips over the schlag and crack their teeth on the marzipan and unforgiving German cookies. And then the presents, opened one at a time, with disparaging smirks at those not up to par. And Elfrida, would she cap off the ceremony with a spirited rendering of her annual family poem, which highlighted our doings in dum-de-dum rhymed couplets? My stanza excised.
    At long last the candles would be snuffed and the glockenspiel angels halted mid-flight. Was it a Christmas like any other? Or would Betty shed a tear, then take a tiny compact from her tiny purse and powder her tiny nose until it was caked with powder and her lovely blauen augen were cloudier than usual? Would my aunt get more “tipsy” than usual
and slur and sashay to the kitchen and back, too gay and laughing too much? After dinner, would she sit at the piano and croon an after-dinner song, her face moist with feeling? And Marlene, was she stewing in sullenness, her father-mouth turned down more than usual? Was Manfred shadowing his father, keeping the troops in line?
    And my mother, what did she do? I liked to imagine that five minutes after I left she drew herself up, squared her shoulders, said, “Enough is enough,” and marched herself out. Or at least before the plum pudding. Whenever she left, she would take a taxi to 125th Street, then a train to the Manor Inn, where she would join her husband Harry, who had always known better than to set foot in 1155 on Christmas Eve. But no solace would await her there. He, a Jew hater, would say, no doubt had already said, “I never want to meet that man. She made her bed . . . ” And she would shed more tears, silently in the bathroom, before crawling into the bed she had made to wonder how such a thing could have ever happened to her. What had she done wrong? And then she would do what she always had done when life went sour. She would sugar it up. They hadn’t really meant all those nasty things. Surely tomorrow was another day and things would be better. And I hoped her dreams were of Tara.
    Those were my thoughts as I headed downtown to Bank Street. Yes, I had someplace to be. Yes, a man waited for me. The catalyst of all those people’s rage. The man none of them had ever met. But when I arrived, truth was, the man wasn’t waiting for me. Oh, Clem was there, reading at his desk under his treasured green-glass lamp, but had he even noticed my absence or remembered where I had been going? I sat in the armchair and cried out my story, and he did put his book down and he did listen. Then he made me a drink, his panacea for all things distressing, and, before I had time to blow my nose, made it clear how relieved he was. Having severed connections with much of his family over the years, he now would be spared having to deal with mine. “Besides,” he said, “those people are obviously barbarians. You’re well rid of them.”
    And with that, the lid slammed shut on my feelings. They fled into the cracks and crannies of me. Easy as that. My mother had taught me well. I washed my face, glued myself together, and off we went to the parties.
Dinner with the Whitmans at Chambord—no goose on the menu—then on to a Christmas party at the “Skinny” Iselins’. Very fancy.
    What I hadn’t foreseen was an attack of such virulence. No one screamed in my family; violence happened sideways and sotto voce. I had struck a mother lode of bigotry that had been mostly hidden but was startlingly close to the surface. Marriage! The gloves came off. Jews were perceived as “foreign,” “other,” and by association, I was tainted. Yet, even so, I hadn’t foreseen that I mattered so little that they would throw me away. Bigotry vs. Jenny: I