B I saw my lawyer about starting divorce proceedings. The first thing he said was that he'd heard I had a lover.
J Oh no, did he have to call me that?
B Don’t look so pained. Would you rather be called a bounder? An adulterer?
J I’d rather be called Jack.
B Anyway, Mr. Golden said, "From now on, you must be very discreet.” That’s such a farce. A husband can have lovers by the dozen, but his wife is supposed to be like Caesar's, or at least very discreet. He said I mustn’t do anything to give Ed ammunition.
J What does he mean by ammunition?
B Finding evidence that I’m committing adultery. He said Ed might even break in with photographers and if he caught us in flagrante delicto, I’d have no case.
J What the hell is what you just said?
B It’s Latin for being caught in the act. It’s so unfair, but according to the law, I’m not allowed to do what he’s been doing for years. I’m not really worried, though. Ed would never stoop to such sordid tactics.
~~~
B Have you recovered from last night?
J I’ve recovered enough to do a small electrical job before I do anything else.
B There we were, as flagrant as a couple can get, when the room suddenly lights up. I was never so shocked!
J It takes a lot to shock you, Barb, and that was a lot.
B I could hear my heart pounding Yours too.
J I thought, My God, we’re being raided!
B I said, “Look, Jack. Look at my desk lamp. I knew the socket had a screw loose but never before has it misbehaved at such an inopportune a time.
J Oh, it was opportune, all right, considering what we’d just been talking about. . . .
8-28-73
 |
| PLEASE DON'T THREATEN ME. |
J Look at this. Oh, Jesus, I am bald. [No, you’re beautiful.] I’m bald! You know, I don’t realize how bald I am till I see a picture.
B This one—remember the night when we were sitting around and I said, “Don’t move,” and I got the camera? I love it, but it’s a little too light. I’ll have to do it again with something over the flash. It shows your beautiful mouth. You’ve got to admit that’s handsome, Jack.
J It’s better.
B You can see it’s not centered the way I wanted it, but I’m learning. I want to get another one just like that. [How are you going to get another one like that?] I’m going to make you sit down and—
J You are not, Barb. Please, don’t threaten me.
B And then I’m going to enlarge it and put it on my bureau.
J I must have taken this one of you standing in front of the stove.
B Yes, you do better than I do. That’s a beautiful picture of my kitchen. And isn’t this good of Carol?
J Yes, it is. It really is. In fact, those are all good pictures of Carol.
B I’ve got to learn how to center them better. Kathie looked at this one of Miette carrying her dish and said, “I’ve seen that pose a million times.”
~~~
B Irwin said, “Well now, what about a car? All the gas, the oil, the maintenance, the repairs.” I said, “Yes, he does all that, and I suppose I should ask for a new car when I need one.” He said, “Oh, we can do better than that.” I think he was going to suggest that I ask for a new car every year. And I said, “I like the one I have."
He said, “You’ve got to say something about a car. You want one every three years or four years or what?” I said, Okay, why don’t we say a new one next spring and then one every four years. But it makes me sad because it all seems so materialistic.
J They’re paid to be realistic, Barb. It’s nice to be a particular way in this, but they’re thinking, She’s come to me, and she wants me to take care of her interests.
B Well, I’m not exactly a Pollyanna, because he read off everything I’d asked for, and he said, “Suppose we fix this so that regardless, if he marries again or whatever, you’ll always get everything that’s listed here.”
If I have to compromise here or there, I’ll do it. I wish him well, and I hope he finds somebody that he marries and that they’re comfortable. But I spent more than thirty years of my life with him, and I want to be comfortable, too.
J You saw the close times, Barb. You saw the times when the luxuries weren’t around as they are now. I suppose you kind of—not resent, but there’s a word for it, somebody coming in at the prosperous time.
B I hated talking about wills three or four years ago, but Blake kept saying, “Ed hasn’t made a will, and he ought to make a will, and you should, too.” So I made mine, but Ed kept putting it off. He resented it; he acted as if I were hoping he’d drop dead any minute. But with Blake pushing for it, he finally did.
J It’s like a fellow having no insurance. It’s the same thing. A will is insurance.
B This was back in the days when he had his girlfriend in New York, and I suppose I sounded like a pain-in-the-neck wife, who wasn’t interested in anything except his money and what she’d get when he died.
J Either that, or he’ll want your kids to have it
B No, he’s always said, “To heck with the kids.” He made it on his own. Although I don’t think he feels that way about Kathie. She’ll get this house, that’s for sure. It’s ideal for her.
J I stopped at the cemetery last Sunday and picked off all those dead things from Memorial Day. If you don’t mind, I should go take another quick look.
B I don’t mind. I’ll help you.
J You will? Why would you want to do that?
B I love you, that’s all. I was thinking about what you did for me when Mother died. Going all the way down to Pennsylvania with me. Helping me find the cemetery.
J For crying out loud, are you kidding? That was nothing.
B It was not nothing.
J It was. I was being with you. What the hell.
B It was not nothing.
J It was. I was being with you. What the hell.
B You made all the difference between being totally grief-stricken and being comforted. . . .
9-2-73
Labor Day
J So you won’t be sending me away like you said last week.
B I forget. Where was I sending you?
J You said you were going to sign some papers and have me put away. You were kidding me, huh?
B You just keep behaving, and I won’t sign the papers.
J Didn’t I say I didn’t want to go?
B That didn’t work for me. I didn’t want to go, either, but they said, “You’re going anyway.”
J Do you think it did you some good, Barb?
B I do not!
J Do you think it did you some good, Barb?
B I do not!
J You don’t think it was necessary then, at the time?
B I think I could have been taken to an ordinary hospital and been treated like an ordinary human being, instead of like a nut.
J They treat nuts like human beings in regular hospitals, don’t they?
B Psychiatric hospitals are frightening places. I talked to some of the people there about shock treatments, and I said I wasn’t going to have them, no sirree. They said, “If they decide you’re going to have them, you’ll have them. You have no say about it at all.”
J Who does decide that?
B The doctor would get permission from Ed. He scared me when we talked about it. I said, “I’ve read too much about shock treatments and what they do to your memory,” and Kathie had told me over the phone, “Don’t let them do it.” He said, “But dear, if the doctor says it’s the best thing for you. . .”
J He respects Kathie’s opinion, but he’s disregarding it in this case.
B In the end he did listen to her. But it frightened me. I felt so helpless, knowing they could do this to my brain—you saw that play, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I would talk to people who had these treatments, and they wouldn’t remember having had a conversation with me a few hours before.
J I’ve gotta be careful. See what cigarettes do to my fingers?
B They say that when people find they have cancer of the lung, they have no trouble stopping smoking. They stop immediately. Why don’t you pretend you’ve got it and say to yourself, Jesus, I hope it isn’t getting worse.
J Getting worse? If you’ve got it, it’s going to get worse, that’s all there is to it.
{He did get it, and it did get worse until he died in 1995 at Carol's home in California, his six-foot frame shrunk to under a hundred pounds. BBM 2-19-02}
B Have you heard from Eileen? I thought she would be calling by now to make amends.
J This whole thing could have been completely avoided.
B If you had just been there, you mean?
J That’s right. She said some things to me I didn’t think she was capable of, but she must have been so upset that she couldn’t help herself.
B Have you thought about writing something to her, saying okay, I was wrong, but then adding some kind of self-defense, too?
J I don’t have a self-defense.
B Well, I think. . . I don’t know what you could say.
J I went and got my mother-in-law something for her birthday yesterday, and I wrote something on the card. I said that I was sorry, and I was actually ashamed, and I hoped that some day . . .
B That’s what I mean, that sort of thing.
J Oh, no, no, I can’t do that with my sister-in-law. I can with my mother-in-law, but I can’t with Eileen.
B Then that ought to be enough. She must have heard by now that you did write. [No. No, no, no, no.] You don’t think she has?
J No, I don’t think she has. See, we went over to my mother-in-law’s. She wasn’t home, so we left it on the steps there. She just got home last night.
B You don’t think she might have called Eileen and talked to her?
J I don’t know. What can you do? They can hate you forever, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
B No, what you’ve just done with Mrs. Keezer, that’s all anybody should expect.
J When I forgot to show up for the Mass, I wouldn’t have expected Eileen to let it go, but I didn’t know she’d bring up a lot of other stuff.
B Probably she liked having you drop in every weekend to sit around and talk.
J Yeah, she thinks I need it. Maybe a lot of people do, but I don’t.
B You might need it if you didn’t have me.
J That’s true. I’m losing sight of that. I’d need a psychiatrist if I didn’t have you.
B She ought to be glad you’re able to be self-sufficient.
J My version of it and her version of it are not the same thing. This isn’t the way you’re supposed to be self-sufficient.
Barb, when you said, “You have me,” you should have seen the look on your face. You were right, though, because I remember what it was when I didn’t have you.
B You had somebody. but you didn’t have the right one yet. Right?
J Right, right, right.
9-6-73
J What’s this?
B That’s my marriage certificate. My lawyer said I had to have it. Little did I know when I was
married the first of January, 1940 that I’d be sending for it all these years later, and that the date of issue would be Kathie’s birthday. August twenty-eighth. [The date of issue? Oh, the date they issued this one.] Yes, this new one. It’s a strange co-incidence.
J You were married January first?
B New Year’s Day. Seabrook, the marrying town, they used to call it.
J And you filed your intentions there, too.
B We had to go up a week ahead of time and have blood tests.
J And you filed your intentions there, too.
B We had to go up a week ahead of time and have blood tests.
J Arthur Penniman was the Justice of the Peace?
B Yes. Ed and I were in New Hampshire four or five years ago and thought we’d stop in to see him. Mr. Penniman had been concerned about us because I was obviously so young. I was wearing loafers with a skirt and blouse, and one of my socks had a hole in the heel. That was it for my wedding day. We went looking for the Penniman house—
J What do you mean, you went looking for the Penniman house?
B Where we’d been married. We asked around. I wanted to tell him we had four grown children and were still happily married. We were directed to the house, and a woman came to the door, and we said, “Is this the house of the Justice of the Peace?”
She said, “I’m the Justice of the Peace. Do you want to get married?” I said, No, we’re looking for Mr. Penniman, he married us many years ago, and he was kind of worried. He told us, “You know, this knot isn’t untied as easily as it’s tied.” We wanted to reassure him that everything had worked out all right.
She said, “Mr. Penniman’s living up in Maine with his third wife. He didn’t practice what he preached, did he?”
~~~
B Is your back still bothering you? It should feel better. [Why, dear?] Because I’ve been working on it in my laboratory.
J My brother-in-law called me. Marie’s brother Joe. I was telling him about my back, and he said, “It just hurts when you move a certain way?” I said, Yeah. He said, “I think you’ve got a kidney stone.”
B Maybe you ought to see a doctor.
J Oh, I should see a doctor all right. But I don’t believe I have kidney stones. I refuse to have kidney stones. I don’t like the sound of them.
B You mentioned something else about your family on the phone, something unpleasant. What did they do to my Jack?
J Nothing much. Carol called, I guess, when I wasn’t there. In fact, I didn’t know she had called until Joe called me. He wanted me to call his mother. And I said I would. [That’s Mrs. Keezer?] Yeah, but I didn’t know how things were, how Eileen was. I found out from Carol.
B Eileen was what?
J She said a lot of nasty things to Carol, about the situation. She’s really upset. If she stuck to this one thing, I could understand, but she didn’t. She was bringing in a lot of things that have no relation to what happened today. Maybe she thinks they do. She said some things I thought she never would say in any situation. Bobbie said, why didn’t you defend yourself? If she said that to me . . . I said, Be quiet, you’re making things worse. Your aunt said a lot of things that she meant, and a lot of things she didn’t mean, so why don’t we just let it cool down a little and hope that the next time we see her things might be a little better. There’s nothing to discuss with her. You have responsibilities to do something, and if you don’t do it, there’s no cheesy excuses you can make. She’s right. I should have been there with my girls.
B Does this go on every year, indefinitely?
J What’s that, the Mass, dear? Well, this is the second year. We had one the first year.
B If I were Marie I would feel much worse about your being given a hard time over this than not being there for the Mass. If you love somebody, you don’t berate them over something they didn’t do on purpose. Did anybody else have anything to say besides Eileen?
J I haven’t talked to anybody.
B She’s a lot younger, so she doesn’t know yet that it’s not all that easy when you have teenagers. But I suppose if something happens with her kids, she’ll blame you and your kids for setting a bad example.
J No, she couldn’t do that. My kids aren’t that close or involved with her family. She talked about our morals. Oh, she said some terrible things. I wouldn’t have believed she was capable of thinking that way.
B I must be in there somewhere, whether she said anything about me or not.
J No, this was about the kids, Bobbie you know, I don’t even want to repeat it. Bobbie going back to school and then telling Eileen it’s the last day she’s going.
B What’s that got to do with morals?
J The morals part wasn’t elaborated. I don’t know what the hell it’s about. It was shocking not to have us there at the Mass for Marie. That’s the whole thing
B Is this a Catholic tradition you follow year after year for everybody that dies? Every member of the family? You could spend the rest of your life just going to Mass by the time you have enough relatives that are gone. Do you do this for your sister? [No.] Your father? [No.]
J I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll be glad to get away from the area. I’ll be glad to get further away than I am. {Before he moved to Stoughton, Jack was living in a small house by the beach that I would pass every day when I moved to Weymouthport in 1974. A ten-minute walk.}
B To me, the important thing is not just following some custom. If they could hear the way you talk about Marie, the way you remember her and speak of her so often . . .
J I was thinking of that today. I was thinking, What about the twenty-three years?
B This isn’t the reaction Marie would want from her sister over a thoughtless mistake.
 |
| BALCONY FORT LAUDERDALE |
B When they’re attacking your daughters’ morals, they’re attacking you, and they’re attacking me. They think that somehow I’m at the root of the whole thing.
~~~
I called Al Ellis, our real estate man down in Fort Lauderdale, the one who wouldn’t come to see me when I was down there with you, and then wrote me the letter about Ed being the finest man he’d ever known. I told him we were getting divorced and I wondered how much we could get per month for renting the condominium during the season. I also filled him in a little on what had happened and why I was getting the divorce. He said, “I never knew any of this. I guess there’s always two sides to every story.”
J So is he going to be in touch with you?
B He said he’d check into it and see what they’re getting for comparable apartments, and he’d write to me.
J I’ve gotta go home. I’ve got to be up early.
B If you have to, you have to.
J You’re acting like you knew it.
B No, it was a jolt, but I’ll feel worse if I sit here and fret about it. How about tomorrow night? Can you stay tomorrow night?
J You’re acting like you knew it.
B No, it was a jolt, but I’ll feel worse if I sit here and fret about it. How about tomorrow night? Can you stay tomorrow night?
J Yeah. I have to go to early Mass tomorrow, seven o’clock.
B To atone?
J Yes, that’s what I’m doing. I’ve gotta do something, Barb. I don’t know what else to do. It was a poor subject to end on with Eileen, and I couldn’t make myself show up at church this morning. I might meet them coming out. It was terrible.
B To atone?
J Yes, that’s what I’m doing. I’ve gotta do something, Barb. I don’t know what else to do. It was a poor subject to end on with Eileen, and I couldn’t make myself show up at church this morning. I might meet them coming out. It was terrible.
B That’s just so unfair. Because you’re such a good person.
J Jesus, you wouldn’t think so to hear Eileen talk. You’d think I was something—[evil?] Not evil, but not nice and not good.
B What right do people have to make judgments like that?
J Well, because she’s my wife’s sister, I suppose.
B She’s so perfect. She really is. The priest tells her to take somebody into her house and treat him like a son, and she does. She does what she’s told.
J She can’t help the way she thinks, you know?
B Does she get some of that from her friend Arleen, do you think? Marie was never like that.
J Marie was never in a situation like her sister is now. I don’t know what she would have been like if she lost Eileen. I don’t think she would have carried on the way Eileen did. Eileen was younger and looked up to Marie.
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