Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [5]
My father was thirteen years older. He’d been in New York longer and was in his element, as though he’d been born rushing somewhere in a single-breasted charcoal suit, a topcoat easy on his arm. He’d been a pilot during World War II and had flown a Martin B-26 Marauder over Utah Beach. In the winter of 1945, on R & R in Miami, he met a girl at the Delano Hotel and scrapped his plans to join the Flying Tigers and fly the Hump to China. He married her three months later—the daughter of a showgirl and a Chicago industrialist—and they settled in her city, where he went to Northwestern Law on the GI Bill. But the marriage was unhappy, and when I was ten and allowed to know such things, my aunt whispered that when it ended, my father was crushed. For him, New York was a fresh start. At thirty-one, he became publisher and president of Everywoman’s magazine (later Family Circle), before moving on to run a thriving boutique advertising agency. He had no intention of remarrying. There hadn’t been children with his first wife, and although he wanted them, he believed it wasn’t possible.
My father ran with a fast crowd, mostly Madison Avenue types like himself, and twice a month they held “scrambles.” To all appearances, these were martini Sunday brunches at someone’s Midtown apartment. But the point was women, and the rule was that each bachelor had to bring three “recruits,” preferably models and no repeats. My mother went with her friend Tex, and although she was impressed by my father’s Tudor City aerie, she recognized the situation for what it was and left quickly. She also found him annoying. He didn’t like The Music Man, and she did. He, however, was smitten. Richer men, kinder men pursued my mother then, but my father was fun, and after a date or two, she decided that was what she wanted.
On May 4, 1960, six days before Senator John Kennedy won the pivotal West Virginia primary, I was born, the child my father hadn’t thought possible. He filled the room in the old wing of Lenox Hill Hospital with balloons and flowers, and smoked Partagas downstairs with his best friend, Lloyd. That summer, as they did for many summers to come, my parents rented an old farmhouse with nine bedrooms, a potbelly stove, two fireplaces, and a rickety old dock on Quantuck Bay, not far from the gabled house where they had married the year before.
When I was small, my mother read the story of Cinderella to me every night, at my insistence, and when she tried to skip a page out of boredom, I knew. I didn’t want the Disney version, although we had that, too. It stayed on the shelf by my ballerina music box, and she would alternate between the Perrault and the Grimm—the one with the talking doves, the wishing tree, and the blood in the shoe. And when I could read, I devoured every color of Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books.
I would ask my mother then to tell me the story of how my father had proposed. Her answer was always the same. One day we just started talking about it. One day we just knew. This horrified me. There was no kneeling, no meaningful locale, no diamond slipped into a champagne flute or buried in chocolate mousse. No glass slipper. I kept thinking she was hiding the truth from me and if I just bothered her enough, she’d tell. Despite my badgering, that never happened, and I vowed, as seven-year-olds do, that it would be different, far different, for me.
Still—in the wedding pictures that filled the cream and gold binder, separate from the albums of my brothers