Areas of Unrest

14 February 2000 - Are You Married? Why Not?

QOTD: "Gentlemen prefer bonds." - Andrew Mellon

Reading: Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning... Was the Command Line

Listening to: At Home With The Chenille Sisters

Imagine an immigration shed, a simple tin-roofed building at the edge of Karonga, Malawi. There's no visa fee for any of our group - though I've heard that Swiss citizens need visas in advance and often get sent back to Nairobi because there's no embassy in neighboring Tanzania. The immigration check was perfunctory enough but this border has a health officer who wants to see our vaccination certificates (a.k.a. "yellow cards"). He checks that my yellow fever vaccination is current, then says, "ah, American! How's Bill Clinton?"

This is just after the Monica Lewinsky story broke but my access to news for the past month has been limited to one issue of a British tabloid somebody showed me a few days ago on the ferry from Zanzibar back to Dar Es Salaam. So I just say "I haven't been home in over a month but I hear he's having some trouble."

That satisfies the health officer as far as politics go, but he must ask the essential question that all third world bureaucrats ask all women. "Are you married?" When I say "no" he continues with the inevitable "why not?"

There's not an easy answer to that. For these purposes one just stammers out something about not having met the right man and hopes that the inquisitor doesn't go on to ask "what if I'm the right man?" (By the way, taxi drivers like that tack, but can be brushed off if you promise to take their address and write to them, which of course you won't actually do but it saves face. Bureaucrats usually just go on to grill the next woman in line.)

The truth is always more complex. For one thing, there are the role models I have regarding marriage. My parents had an okay marriage, though I still think that my father thought he married beneath his class. The complexities of social status between immigrants and native-born Americans can fade over nearly 30 years, I suppose, and one can question whether an extra 20 years in New York makes up for subscribing to Reader's Digest (vs. The New Yorker) and drinking Schlitz (vs. a nice red wine). Mostly my parents made things work by going their separate ways a lot. Dad took more vacations than Mom did, for example, going off to various spas for a week or two at a time. They traveled together too, so it's not like they never spent time together. But they always had their own interests and it wasn't a big deal for them to do things alone.

This whole independence issue has been the killer of a lot of my relationships. From my very first real boyfriend when I was 15 who expected me to want to go to college with him to a guy I dated for a couple of months about 8 years ago who left a series of increasingly desparate messages on my answering machine when I went on a business trip, it's hard to find men who don't want constant togetherness. That's one advantage of a long distance relationship, although there's such a thing as too much independence too.

But I was talking about role models for marriage and I can't do that without talking about my grandfather. Dad's mother was his first wife and she was most likely killed at the 9th Fort in Kovno. Grandpa remarried in a D.P. camp in Italy and that marriage was floundering long before I was born. I remember my father getting lots of threatening phone calls from Wilma, who hated him ever since he translated an article from a women's magazine for her, an article that apparently claimed second wives are never as loved. One time my parents were out and she kept calling and threatening to come after Dad with a knife. I never actually met Wilma but I didn't have to in order to be terrified of her. Worst of all were the stories about how she abused one of Dad's half-sisters (both of whom are far closer to my age than they were to his). The complication was that this was all before the divorce laws were liberalized in New York State and it was essentially impossible for Grandpa to get a divorce without Wilma's consent. They were legally separated, though, and his still being married didn't stop him from having a grand time at Roseland (a famous ballroom in New York).

When Dad took me to the city to his office, we'd sometimes meet Grandpa for dinner afterwards. We always went to Lou G. Siegel's, a very famous and very fancy kosher restaurant noted for having bowls of schmaltz (chicken fat) on the table, which everybody else smeared on onion rolls. (The thought of that schmaltz is probably why I eat bread dry to this day, come to think of it.) Anyway, Grandpa didn't come alone to these dinners. His companion was a woman named Rose. I'm still not sure if they were living together, though I doubt it because of the subsequent events. Wilma met someone else who was as crazy as she was and consented to a divorce. Not long after the divorce, Grandpa announced his engagement ... to Edith. Apparently Rose sued him for breach of promise and he had to pay her off. Sometimes I wonder what became of her after that. She must have been at least in her 50's and I imagine that she regretted the years she wasted waiting for Grandpa to be free.

It turned out she wasn't the only one who had some cause for regret. During the week or so after the engagement was announced, at least a dozen different women called our house (where Grandpa was living temporarily) and asked "is it true that Leo is getting married? I'm so disappointed."

The story gets even more tangled. Edith made the mistake of talking Grandpa into a condo in Florida. Now, women have a longer life expectancy than men, so there are lots of eligible widows in those Florida retirement villages. Maybe the divorce laws in Florida were far more liberal than in New York or maybe it was how time had changed or maybe Edith just decided to cut her losses quickly, but if I recall correctly, that marriage lasted only a couple of years.

And it wasn't much longer before Grandpa was on the phone to Dad with big news. If they didn't want us to eavesdrop, they spoke either in Yiddish or Italian (the latter prevented even Mom from eavesdropping). So one night I was sitting at the kitchen table and I heard a rapid stream of Yiddish from Dad, who was talking on the phone. And then his vocabulary must have been exhausted because all of sudden he said in English, "Pa, you don't have to get married again. In America they call it shacking up!"

Not that it mattered - Grandpa did marry again. And divorce again. There might have been a fifth wife, also. I'm a bit hazy on this since I was no longer at home by then. As I understand it, there may have been some question about the legalities even of the fourth wedding, since Jewish law doesn't require any special qualifications for the person performing the ceremony while the laws of most states do.

The very funniest part of all of this is that Grandpa was a clergyman of sorts. He had a cantorial degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary and acted as the cantor at our synagogue on the High Holy Days (and other special events, like my brother's bar mitzvah). He even had business cards which identified him as "the Reverend Cantor Leo Nadel." Incidentally, while I'm sure the cards had more to do with his making a few recordings of liturgical music, they were very handy if we ever had to visit anybody who was hospitalized. We parked in clergy spots and slipped one of Grandpa's cards under the windshield. But that's another matter.

There are a couple of other negative marriage stories in my family. Dad had been engaged when he met my mother. I've never heard the entire story since it makes my mother cringe to bring it up at all. But I've gathered that this woman was a golddigger extraordinaire. She tried to get Dad to take a factory job instead of going to school. What I've heard is that she wasn't willing to wait for him and was unfaithful, which ended the engagement, but not without some payout he couldn't really afford.

And then there's the matter of my mother's uncle, Phil. He fell madly in love with a woman who my great-grandmother disapproved of. She had won some sort of beauty contest, but the real reason for the disapproval was that she was divorced. The story goes that my great-grandmother extracted a deathbed promise from Phil that he wouldn't marry her. He kept that promise... but never found anyone else he wanted to marry.

Not that my role models are all bad. My mother's parents had a truly romantic story. Grandma had emigrated to New York, was working as a seamstress and had gotten engaged. (I'm not sure of this, but it might have been an arranged marriage.) She found out that her fiance had false teeth and got very upset over this. Not that she was picky, mind you, but she wanted a man who had his own teeth. She wanted to break the engagement off right away, but a friend persuaded her to take a vacation and think about it. In those days, people went to Havana the same way they might go to the Bahamas nowadays. I've heard one version in which they met on the ship and another where the house her friend had arranged for her to stay at was next door to his house. However it happened, she mailed her engagement ring back to the man in New York and married my grandfather two weeks later.

So, essentially, I'm not married because most of my family stories about marriage are negative. And we don't have diplomatic relations with Cuba. It's far easier to tell immigration and health officers (and taxi drivers) that I just haven't met the right man.