Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [19]
As I descended into their midst, Mr. Donegal rose and handed me the glimmering dress.
“A little memento of our meeting,” he said, meeting my gaze.
“I couldn’t possibly . . .” I said.
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Donegal. “You must. It suits you perfectly.”
I took the dress, feeling I was dangerously out of my depth.
On the long drive back to Roxbury from Philadelphia, Dart was desolate and not a little contrite.
“I am mortified that he asked you for money,” Dart said.
“Not to worry,” I said. “I see what you mean about him. He’s quite an act to follow.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Dart. “First of all, he never fought in the Pacific theater—that’s a total fabrication. Furthermore, do you know he’s been to jail?”
“It doesn’t surprise me,” I said. But after I heard Dart’s story of his father’s malfeasances (he embezzled money from a client and was disbarred), I did not have the heart to tell him what had happened in the attic. I almost wondered if it had happened—or if I had imagined it all, conjured it out of the dust and moonbeams.
“I want to be a good man for you,” said Dart/Trick, tears running down his cheeks. “I don’t want to be like my father.” And I believe that was true in every respect. But between men and their fathers, intention is the last thing that matters.
3
Strong Woman’s Blues
No father to guide me,
no mother to care,
Must bear my troubles all alone.
Not even a brother to help me share,
This burden I must bear alone.
—Bessie Smith
I wasn’t always the queen of SoHo and Litchfield County. I grew up poor, in Washington Heights, with a mother who had a habit of getting arrested in embarrassing places—the White House, the United Nations, the Russian consulate, demonstrations for the Rosenbergs—and a father who made silver jewelry on Eighth Street, was a beatnik and hippie before either of those terms was invented, and an alcoholic before anyone knew that drinking was more than good clean fun.
I came, in short, from a “dysfunctional family”—to use the lingo so in vogue nowadays. (Sometimes I wonder if there is any other kind of family. Certainly no one I know comes from a functional family, whatever that anomaly may be.)
My father had been a fixture in the Village and in Provincetown since the thirties: Dolph Zandberg, born 1900, died 1982—the year I met Dart. Dolph was a Marxist in the thirties, a war resister in the forties, a heavy user of weed, alcohol, mushrooms, in the fifties, and a Village legend in the psychedelic sixties. He knew everyone—from Edmund Wilson to Ken Kesey, from Henry Miller to Jackson Pollock. On the fringes of every fringe movement of the twentieth century, he could (like Mel Brooks’s two-thousand-year-old man) say of any counterculture heroine from Louise Nevelson to Margaret Mead: “Honey—I went with her.” He and my mother, Theda (named for Theda Bara, natch), had one of the first “open marriages.” Theirs didn’t work any better than the later ones did. It was patched together with the dubious glue of alcohol, Marxist theory, and me—the lonely only, born when my father was forty-four and my mother twenty-nine, almost an old maid for her generation.
Oh, I know that Dolph and Theda must have adored me, even as I adore my own twin girls, Edwina and Michaela, but that didn’t make them automatically know how to love me into health. In fact, I’m sure they didn’t even know what health was. Narcissists that they were, absorbed in the drama of their own stormy marriage, they alternately ignored me and treated me like the Wunderkind of the Western world.
From the time I was four, I was sketching, sketching, sketching; I almost don’t remember a time when I didn’t draw. I could always “get a likeness”—as my father called it. And from the start I picked up all his tricks: origami paper sculpture, bending silver wire as if it were saltwater taffy, making collages of cloth and paper, newsprint, plastic, and silk.
By the time I took the test for Music and Art, when I was twelve, I was a better artist than most of the teachers and they knew it. The oohing and aahing