Just Kids [25]
Picasso didn’t crawl in a shell when his beloved Basque country was bombed. He reacted by creating a masterpiece in Guernica to remind us of the injustices committed against his people. When I had extra money I’d go to the Museum of Modern Art and sit before Guernica, spending long hours considering the fallen horse and the eye of the bulb shining over the sad spoils of war. Then I’d get back to work.
That spring, only days before Palm Sunday, Martin Luther King was gunned down at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. There was a picture in the paper of Coretta Scott King comforting her young daughter, her face wet with tears behind her widow’s veil. I felt sick at heart, just as I did as a teenage girl watching Jacqueline Kennedy in her flowing black veil, standing with her children as her husband’s body passed in a horse-drawn caisson. I tried to speak of my feelings in a drawing or poem but I couldn’t. It seemed whenever I wanted to express injustice I never had the right lines.
Robert had bought me a white dress for Easter, but he gave it to me on Palm Sunday to assuage my sadness. It was a tattered Victorian tea dress of handkerchief linen. I adored it and wore it in our apartment, a fragile armor against the ominous portents of 1968.
My Easter dress was not suited to wear to the Mapplethorpe family dinner, nor was anything else we had amongst our few pieces of clothing.
I was fairly independent of my parents. I loved them but was not concerned about how they may have felt about my and Robert’s life together. But Robert was not so free. He was still their Catholic son, unable to tell them we were living together out of wedlock. He had been warmly welcomed in my parents’ house but worried I would not be welcome in his.
At first Robert thought it would be best if he slowly introduced me in phone calls to his parents. Then he decided to tell them we had eloped to Aruba and had gotten married. A friend of his was traveling in the Caribbean and Robert wrote his mother a letter, his friend postmarking it from Aruba.
I felt this elaborate deception unnecessary. I thought he should just tell them the truth, really believing they would eventually accept us as we were. “No,” he would say desperately. “They’re strict Catholics.”
It wasn’t until we visited his parents that I understood his concern. His father greeted us with icy silence. I couldn’t comprehend a man not embracing his son.
The entire family was grouped around the dining room table—his older sister and brother and their spouses and his four younger siblings. The table was set, everything in place for a perfect meal. His father barely looked at me, and said nothing to Robert except, “You should cut your hair. You look like a girl.”
Robert’s mother, Joan, did her best to offer some sense of warmth. After dinner, she slipped Robert some money from her apron pocket and took me into her room, where she opened her jewelry box. Looking at my hand, she took out a gold ring. “We didn’t have enough money for a ring,” I said.
“You should wear one on your left ring finger,” she told me, pressing it into my hand.
Robert was very tender toward Joan when Harry wasn’t around. Joan had spirit. She laughed easily, chain-smoked, and obsessively cleaned house. I realized Robert got his sense of order not entirely from the Catholic Church. Joan favored Robert and seemed to have a secret pride in Robert’s chosen path. Robert’s father had wanted him to be a commercial artist, but he refused. He was driven to prove his father wrong.
The family hugged and congratulated us as we left. Harry stood in the background. “I don’t believe they’re married at all,” he was heard to say.
Robert was cutting out sideshow freaks from an oversized paperback on Tod Browning. Hermaphrodites, pinheads, and Siamese twins were scattered everywhere. It