City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [13]
All of the Schaefers, somewhat surprisingly, had a terrific sense of humor, dry and self-deflating. They were all devoted to their mother but had a more difficult rapport with their father, a big lovable man who’d tear up when he’d had a few schnapps, who still had a German accent though he had been born in Iowa—and who had an unfortunate habit of defending anything Germany did, including the election of Hitler as chancellor. He was what the French call a négationiste, someone who denies that the Holocaust took place (a crime in Europe that can result in prison time). Back in the religious colony he’d been trained as a youngster to be a carpenter. After joining “the world” he became a successful real estate developer and builder. At first a union man and progressive in politics, he soon drifted to the right.
Marilyn loved her father but found his politics infuriating and his assumption of traditional gender roles even more maddening. Old Mr. Schaefer would, no doubt, have had no idea what she was talking about, though he had learned to cool it in public with his views on the Führer. She grudgingly admired his interest in history, though she regretted he was always deep into the latest worshipful biography of Bismarck or Hindenburg. When her family went to Europe, it was to head directly for the Fatherland; even a change of planes in France or England they thought of as sullying them.
I learned (and remembered) all of this about her family because I idolized Marilyn, coaxing stories about Amana and its strange rites and regulations out of her. For instance, I knew that if a young Amana couple wanted to get married, it became a cause for regret, since the elders thought it was tragic to bring more children into the world. Accordingly, the betrothed pair were first separated for a long time to see if they would still want to persist in their folly.
Marilyn had retained none of these beliefs, but her zeal in defending her brand of socialism (and later feminism) struck me as extreme. Now she’d say that I was exaggerating the violence of her opinions of that period. Although Marilyn liked the “sophisticated” side of New York (the songs of Bobby Short and Mabel Mercer, the chic black singers at the Café Carlyle), she was less susceptible than I to the rush toward celebrity, the push to be famous in the arts that dominated New York life in that period. I was obsessed with being famous—not rich, which held no interest for me, but famous among the top echelons of the cultural elite. Marilyn found my ambition incomprehensible—and laughable. She was “down-to-earth,” to use a favorite American phrase that always puzzles my European friends. I have never stopped being influenced by her sensible, de-dramatizing way of looking at the world, though by nature I am overwrought and desperate for recognition.
She was enamored of passionate Puccini arias, and she and I would listen over and over to Manon Lescaut. She was esepcially fond of the great passionate Swedish tenor Jussi Björling and, after seeing him at the Chicago Lyric, reported back that he was short and corseted and elderly—a real dumpling. She liked that his youthful heartrending voice didn’t go with his looks at all. She was also a big fan of the Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi. In those days everyone was either for Tebaldi or Maria Callas (as so often happens,