Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [76]
Her husband returned her idealized love with loyalty, support, and a strong sense of protectiveness. He enjoyed meeting people and attending movies and plays. She had lost her interest in movies and preferred to stay at home, and so they did. “I have no hobbies,” she proudly noted in an open letter to readers of The Fountainhead in 1945. “I have few friends. I do not like to ‘go out.’ … Nothing [besides writing] has ever mattered to me too much.”
Nothing except him, that is. He mattered a great deal, though not in an ordinary way. Everyone who knew them believed she loved him passionately. But she possessed little or no empathy, a useful and maybe a necessary tool for intimacy. She sometimes didn’t seem to know who he was. She conflated him with her heroes; she insisted that he shared all her convictions, her desires, her tastes, and her propensity for moral outrage and contempt. “He’s on strike,” she would later tell friends who wondered why such a powerful woman had chosen to marry such a sweetly unambitious man. The only time his temper flared was when he saw Ayn being badly or unjustly treated—and sometimes when they argued. Even then, the larger issues between them remained unspoken.
She wanted to know everything about him, however, and when his father died in late December 1938, at the age of seventy-four, from the effects of arteriosclerosis on the heart, she went with him to the funeral. She was curious to see Lorain, Ohio, the small Lake Erie steel town where her husband had been born and raised, and to view Dennis O’Connor’s body at the wake, she told Mimi Papurt. She wanted to know whether Frank had inherited his willowy beauty from Dennis, a retired steel roller. By all accounts, he had. She was less curious about the rest of the O’Connor family, most of whom she was meeting for the first time. No doubt she disapproved of the Roman Catholic funeral ceremony and felt uncomfortable amid family small talk; small talk remained something she didn’t do well and often didn’t try to do. The Ohio O’Connors, in turn, did not entirely take to her. With her Russian accent, mesmerizing gaze, and air of being intellectual but also bored and fidgety, she struck them as aloof, high-handed, and too “drab and homely” for Frank, said Mimi’s younger sister Marna Papurt, later Wolf. Marna, then eleven years old, thought her new aunt’s clothes and shoes were dark and “junky.” She also objected to the way the woman “mothered” Uncle Frank, telling him what to eat and not to eat. During one dinner, Marna recalled, Rand warned him not to drink a glass of cold water and then eat ice cream; he might get a chill and come down with polio. The polio virus that had crippled Franklin Roosevelt in the 1920s was a source of dread throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but the disease could not be caught as the result of a chill. She had an ongoing phobia about germs, however, perhaps a vestige of an adolescence in which waves of typhoid and cholera rolled through her native city. Still, Frank didn’t eat his ice cream. Marna’s mother Agnes Papurt, Frank’s younger sister, and other relatives were wary, lest one of their family favorites become separated from them by marriage to an exotic stranger. This didn’t happen; Rand was immensely fond of Nick and Joe, kept in touch with other members of the family, and became good friends with Mimi. Later in the marriage, however, acquaintances recalled, Rand did increase the distance between her husband and his family, even if unintentionally. She grew more possessive of him as time went on.
In late 1938 and 1939, Ayn and Frank were living in a large, modern red-brick apartment building on East