Wreathed Read online

“Stop it,” I said. “Just stop it. Now. Please. I am begging you.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re going to get all prudish on me, Wendy. That’s not like you.”

  “This is making me extremely uncomfortable,” I said. “I mean, for God’s sake, Mother, I don’t need the play-by-play, that’s all. I get it. You let Sheldon Berkman get in your pants over Thanksgiving weekend in 1962. Stipulated. That doesn’t explain why you’re dragging me down to Cape May for his funeral fifty years later.”

  “If you want an explanation, then let me finish the story.”

  “Finish the story, by all means,” I said. “I just don’t want to hear the sordid details.”

  “The sordid details make the story interesting.”

  I knew my mother had a sexual past, obviously. I knew Sheldon had been in love with her. On an intellectual level, I could understand that they’d had a physical relationship. But all I could hear in my head was squick squick squick squick squick. “Mother. Please. Just give it a rest. For the love of God.”

  She sighed one of those signature Emily Thornhill sighs, this one signaling exasperation with a thin overlay of parental affection. “All right then. Where was I?”

  That should have been the end of it, as far as I was concerned. I didn’t think that the relationship would go anywhere. Sheldon wasn’t my idea of long-term boyfriend material, never mind husband material. And the worst part of it was that he wasn’t discreet. He bragged to his friends about it, and of course that got back to my brother, and he popped Sheldon in the eye. I hoped it was worth it for him.

  My parents were out of their minds over the whole thing, of course. It wasn’t anything personal towards Sheldon, you understand. They were just being horrible old-money snobs about the whole thing, just because Sheldon’s father owned a janitorial services company. They thought Grandfather Borden would disapprove. Of course, he disapproved of everything, so I don’t know why they bothered. Anyway, it didn’t matter. My parents told me I couldn’t see him again. They thought that would solve the problem, but of course it just made Sheldon that much more attractive to me. Forbidden fruit, you understand.

  Today, you would sit your children down and talk with them and explain to them why you didn’t approve of who they were dating, the way we did when you wanted to take that smarmy Carruthers boy to your prom. Keep your eyes on the road, dear.

  Of course, that would never happen in my generation, because it would have been awkward. So my parents decided to drag us all down to Daytona Beach over Christmas break. The idea was that I was supposed to find another boy to drool over and forget about Sheldon. It didn’t work, of course. I spent the whole time writing love letters to Sheldon. I have no idea if he got them, but I hope he did, because they were steaming hot.

  So my parents took things to the next level. They told me they were sending me to a finishing school in Montreal to learn French. I locked myself in my room and cried for three days. When I came out, they told me that they’d had a change of heart, and I could keep going to school in Philadelphia, but I had to promise not to see Sheldon again. I said yes, of course, but I kept seeing Sheldon behind their backs anyway.

  Of course, nothing good ever lasts. Sheldon graduated from high school and got a job at the soup factory in Camden. I spent the summer in Europe and went back to prep school, looking for someone who was better husband material. Our relationship had collapsed naturally, without hurting anybody.

  I turned eighteen in October of 1963. My parents threw me a surprise party at our house. They’d hired caterers, of course, and it just so happened that the caterer was a friend of Sheldon’s parents, and he let Sheldon work as one of the servers. And in the middle of the party, as bold as you please, Sheldon managed to sneak us both into a closet, and he told me his plan.

  He explained that since I was eighteen now, it was legal for us to get married. His caterer friend owned a vacation house in Cape May, and knew a minister at one of the churches down there. Sheldon had talked to the minister, and he had agreed to marry us, if we could make it down there. Sheldon’s plan was that we would leave the party, drive straight down to Cape May, get married as quick as we could, and have a honeymoon at the vacation house.

  I remember standing there in that closet, listening as he told me how much he loved me, and how much he wanted us to spend the rest of our lives together. I never knew that I loved Sheldon. I liked him, of course, and even though I know you don’t want to hear about the sex, it was fantastic. I had told him I loved him a hundred times, but I had never really felt passion for him before. But it was the first time I had ever felt anything that deeply, that completely. I told him I would run away with him, and it felt right. It felt perfect. We left the party and drove down to Cape May. We sent our parents a postcard so they wouldn’t worry.

  “So why didn’t you go through with it?” I asked.

  “Oh, but we did.”

  “You are kidding,” I said.

  “Oh, no.”

  “In the last thirty years,” I said, “I have never once been told that you were married before. It’s absolutely unbelievable that you are telling me this now, after not saying a single word about it before.”

  “It wasn’t any of your business before, and anyway, it all happened long before you were born. And if you had asked me, I would have told you.”

  I felt as though a large chunk of my past had suddenly come loose, the way that cargo comes loose in an airplane hold and crashes through the bulkheads and causes a crash. I had to calm myself down and concentrate on my driving. If I didn’t know a basic fact like my mother having been married before, what else didn’t I know?

  “Please at least tell me you didn’t have kids,” I said. “I mean, I don’t have any older half brothers or sisters out there, do I?” The thought made me feel strange and disoriented, like I had suddenly realized that I had a third arm that I hadn’t noticed before.

  “No, and thank goodness for that. Pregnancy would have made things much more difficult, and things were already difficult enough. Mother and Father turned up the same day they got the postcard in the mail. They were furious, but once Sheldon showed them the wedding license, there wasn’t anything they could do after that.”

  “Grandmother Borden must have been angry enough to roast you over a slow fire,” I said. The entire Borden family was known for its longevity and its irritability, which meant that it produced a remarkable proportion of miserable old bats. Grandmother Borden had been a typical example; she’d had her final stroke while screaming at a Puerto Rican aide at her nursing home because she hadn’t made the bed with hospital corners.

  “Well, I’m sure she would have liked to. Fortunately, Father got her calmed down by the time that we came back, and she just found other ways to take her revenge out on me. But they put a brave face on it; they had to. So we went back to Cherry Hill, and my parents even threw us a reception. It was paltry compared to the bash that they threw when your Aunt Paula got married, but I didn’t care.”

  “I want to make sure I understand this. What I have been told, my entire life, is that you and Dad met in college.”

  “Did your father tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “He told you lots of things, sweetheart, but not all of them were true. That one was only half true. Yes, he was at Penn when I was at Bryn Mawr, but I never once gave him a second look. His face was spotty, and his hair was greasy, and he was dating this obnoxious twit who ended up married to an even more obnoxious federal circuit court judge—a Reagan appointee, of course. I didn’t date your father until years later, after college, after we’d both had a chance to grow up a little.”

  “I want to make sure I understand what you’re telling me. This man, Sheldon Berkman, whose funeral we’re going to, he was your ex-husband, and you never once told me or anyone else about him until just now.”

  “You never asked, dear.”

  “I read the obituary you sent. It said he had been pining for
you all these years. I thought he was still hung up on his high school sweetheart. But he wasn’t, was he? He really was rejected by the one true love of his life.”

  Mother threw back her head and laughed. It was a truly appalling sound, a cross between a cackle and the last ding-dong of doom echoing against the last worthless rock. “Good Lord above, Wendy,” she said, when she finally came up for air. “You’re not seriously telling me you believed everything in that obituary, are you?”

  Chapter 8

  I pulled the car over at the service station on the Atlantic City Expressway, ostensibly to get coffee and gas but mostly to give myself a break from listening to my mother. My mother, who had until now been perfectly willing to let me think that she hadn’t ever been married to anybody other than my father.

  I tried hard to remember what I’d been told about how my parents had started dating. I knew it had something to do with the McGovern campaign, but the details were hazy. They’d gotten married in 1974, ten years before I was born. I never once suspected that there had been someone else for either of them.

  They hadn’t lied to me, exactly. They just hadn’t told me everything. And I couldn’t blame them. If I ever have children, I won’t tell them one thing about any of the guys I have dated. Hearing the story of my mother and Sheldon Berkman was incredibly weird, though, like wearing someone else’s eyeglasses, or waking up in the wrong apartment wearing somebody else’s T-shirt. Not that I have done that last part. At least not recently.

  It did explain why Mother wanted to go to Sheldon’s funeral, unless it didn’t. She’d been married to Sheldon, at least briefly. He’d won her, at least for a while, and lost her, and wanted her back. If he hadn’t been lying about it, of course. But that just explained why he wanted her there. It didn’t explain why she felt she had to be there—or why she felt she had to shanghai me into driving down here with her.

  As horrible as it sounds, I was absurdly relieved that Sheldon had died. As awkward as it was going to be to go to his funeral, I couldn’t imagine how awkward it would be to meet him in person. It was the one positive aspect, I thought, that had come from the whole experience, although it couldn’t have seemed that way to poor Sheldon, of course.

  There was more to the story, and I knew I would hear the rest of it. We were still an hour away from Cape May, and I had the choice of either listening to her tell the story of how their marriage fell apart or having her quiz me more about my love life. I knew which I preferred.

  I pulled the car back onto the expressway. I’d decided on espresso and a biscotti to fortify myself against the rigors of the final leg of the drive. I took a sip of hot coffee and initiated the next section of the conversation. “So what was it about the obituary that was a big lie?” I asked.

  “The bit about refusing all romantic entreaties, dear, for one thing.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “He didn’t cheat on you, did he? The rat.”

  “Not at first. We were too busy at first—I was still in school, and he had a job. We hardly had time to see each other, and what time we did have, we didn’t waste. The problem was that he needed to get an education, but he didn’t know what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to get an engineering degree, but he didn’t have the math aptitude for it.”

  “You could have had your grandfather get him a job, though, right?”

  I glanced over at her as I said this, and she looked mildly embarrassed. “Your great-grandfather was a rich and powerful man, and rich and powerful men, in that era, were paternalistic like you would not believe. Your great-grandfather could have given him a job, of course. But he decided that a couple of years in uniform would be just what Sheldon needed—to toughen him up. So he convinced Sheldon that the best way for him to start his career was to enlist in the Air Force. The idea was that Sheldon would be assigned to McGuire Air Force Base after he got out of basic training, so as to be close to both our parents.”

  “Who thought that was a good idea?” I asked.

  “Grandfather Borden did, and Sheldon’s parents did, and my parents did,” she said, not bothering to hide the acid in her voice. “I thought it was a stupid plan, and I said so, and nobody listened to me. But I wasn’t the one holding the purse strings. So Sheldon went to basic training in San Antonio, and I stayed behind and finished up my last semester of prep school. They let me fly down to Texas for his graduation—it was like a second honeymoon, almost. I thought we were going to go back to New Jersey and be happy together, but we reckoned without the whimsical ways of the United States Air Force. Instead of sending him to McGuire, like we thought they would, the bastards sent him to Elmendorf.”

  “I saw that in the obituary, but I didn’t look up where it was.”

  “Elmendorf is in Alaska, dear. Just outside Anchorage. Cold, lonely, and far away.”

  I tried to picture Mother in snowshoes and a parka, and wasn’t coming up with anything. Then I tried picturing me following someone to Alaska, and I started shivering. “So what did you do?” I asked. “You didn’t just go with him, did you?”

  “Of course not. I was not about to leave my family, and ruin any opportunity I had to get an education, to live in on-base housing in the Arctic. It was simply unreasonable, and I told Sheldon so. He understood. It was a tough situation, he said, but as long as we loved each other, we could work it out.”

  “But it didn’t work out,” I said. I knew, from the obituary, that there had not been a happy ending, at least not for poor Sheldon. I hadn’t thought at the time that the relationship had been sad for Mother, although obviously it must have been.

  “I wanted it to,” she said. “I did. But I wanted an education more. I hated to do it, but I went to your great-grandfather and asked him to pull some strings. He made a couple of phone calls and managed to get me into Bryn Mawr. I worked hard and studied and wrote Sheldon a letter every day. I thought I was being wholesome and virtuous for my husband, who was, after all, serving our country in a lonely, faraway outpost.”

  “That sounds very noble of you.”

  ”I do not need your sarcasm, young lady. I thought I was being noble. It turns out, as it so often does, that what I thought was nobility was actually foolishness. It turned out that Elmendorf, although a far-away outpost, was not as lonely as it appeared. Sheldon, the rat, wasn’t there three weeks before he started cheating on me. And it wasn’t three months before he filed for divorce. No letter, no explanation, no anything, just divorce papers that an Air Force lawyer drew up for him.” The bitterness in her voice had an edge to it that fifty years hadn’t dulled.

  “You are kidding,” I said. I didn’t have a worse breakup story than that one, and I’d been dumped by more guys than Taylor Swift and Adele put together. I felt real sympathy for my mother for the first time in years. “I hope you made him pay for that.”

  “I did, quite literally. I sent them back, unsigned, postage due. In a box with two cinder blocks.”

  “Nicely done.”

  “I wrote on them, with spray paint. One of them said ROT, and the other one was supposed to say IN HELL, but it got a little runny. Still. It got the point across to the little bum.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I got a letter back from him a week later. He tried to tell me, if you can believe it, that it was a mistake. He said he’d asked for the lawyer to put the paperwork together, but the lawyer went ahead and sent it to me accidentally. As if I would believe anything that foolish. He admitted he was having an affair, and he said that he wanted a divorce—he just hadn’t meant to tell me that abruptly and heartlessly.”

  “Who was the girl?” I asked.

  “Oh, I never bothered to find out. It didn’t seem worth it. The issue wasn’t even the girl, whoever she was. Sheldon thought that my family was keeping me away from him—which was totally irrational; there was no way I was ever going to Alaska with him or anyone else. And he thought that once he left the Air Force, my family would be running his life forever.”

&n
bsp; “Well, when you put it that way, it makes sense.”

  “If he had been able to get a decent education and a decent job, we could have made our own way and thumbed our noses at our families. It didn’t work out that way. I’ve always regretted that. It would have been nice to have that independence.”

  I decided not to comment on this particular point, having gotten through undergrad at Temple through as a recipient of the Arthur S. Borden Endowed Scholarship. Independence is nice and all, but dependence has its good points, too.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I love your father; still do, despite everything. I am glad we had the chance to be together and have a family together. I just wonder, sometimes, how things would have been if I had stayed with Sheldon. He must have thought that, too, when he was drafting that wretched obituary. To think that we were both thinking that, at the same time, but neither of us acted on it. And now it’s too late.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, and I meant it.

  “Is that the exit for the Parkway up there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t know why you didn’t take the Parkway the whole way.”

  “Less traffic coming down 295, now that the construction has worked itself out. Not as many toll booths, either.”

  “How much farther?”

  “We’ll be there in twenty minutes. Just in time for dinner.”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  We rode in silence all the way to the last exit, which led to the little peninsula of Cape May. A chill March wind was blowing in off the Delaware Bay. Most of the bed-and-breakfast places were still closed down for the season. We’d gotten two rooms in a touristy beach hotel, which I was surprised to find came attached to a respectable-sized liquor store.

  “I see you looking at the inventory,” Mother said. “Don’t think that I don’t.”

  “It’s an unusual setup,” I said, because it would have been impolite to explain just how much I needed something cold and sweet and alcoholic just then. It had been a long, emotionally draining day and if there was a better cure than a cocktail, I could not imagine what it might be.