Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [69]
chapter seven
A N N
He said, “She’s a very nice girl.” I said, “My mother likes nice girls. I don’t like nice girls.”
As restless as he could be creatively, Will Eisner preferred rock-solid stability in his life away from the office. To say that he didn’t change readily would be an understatement. On the day he celebrated his thirty-second birthday, he was still living with his parents, brother, and sister, his daily routine alternating between work and family, just as it had been before the war. He still contributed to his family’s financial welfare, assisting whenever necessary with the rent and bills. He’d even helped with his sister Rhoda’s college tuition, assuring that she would obtain the degree he’d never have. He wasn’t wealthy, but he was very comfortable. Ever the child of the Depression, he guarded his money carefully, always aware that in his line of work prosperity could disappear very quickly and with no warning. His social life had slowed to a crawl shortly after the war, when his relationship with the young woman from Detroit had fallen apart, victim of distance and Fannie Eisner’s disapproval of her son’s dating a Gentile. As far as Eisner was concerned, this was okay: American Visuals was progressing steadily, and The Spirit, although not as compelling to Eisner as it had once been, remained a steady, reassuring presence. Eisner’s priorities, like those of any serious artist, began with his work.
Eisner looked forward to spending the extended 1949 Labor Day weekend on a brief vacation in Maine. He and a friend, Arthur Strassburger, made arrangements to drive to Camp Mingo in Kezar Falls, where they planned to relax, enjoy a few drinks, and, in Eisner’s case, maybe pick up a local woman for a holiday fling. Eisner looked forward to his time away from the city.
Their plans changed abruptly when Strassburger called Eisner and asked if he’d be willing to give a young woman named Ann Weingarten a lift to another town in Maine. Eisner was immediately suspicious. The town wasn’t anywhere near their destination, and from what he could surmise from this and subsequent calls, Strassburger’s request was a formality; his friend had already consented to giving the woman a ride.
“Did you promise her?” Eisner pressed.
“Sort of,” Strassburger answered sheepishly.
It turned out that Strassburger was interested in Ann Weingarten’s younger sister, Jane, and his invitation to take Ann to Maine was spur-of-the-moment. Arthur and Jane had been sitting on a couch in the living room one day when Ann walked in and mentioned that she was hoping to visit her older sister, Susan, and her two young boys, Allan and Carl, aged five and two, respectively. Susan, seven and a half years older than Ann, had been widowed very young when her husband had a heart attack, and she and her sons were spending the summer in Maine. “Susan and I were very close,” Ann would remember. “We were much more alike in tastes and things like that than Jane and I.
“Anyway, Jane was sitting in the living room with Arthur, and I happened to walk in. We started to talk and I said, ‘I’d love to go up and see Susan over Labor Day.’ Arthur said, ‘Oh, this friend and I are going to Maine, and we’ll be glad to give you a lift.’ Arthur then called Will and said, ‘You want to give some girl a lift up to Maine?’ and Will said, ‘No, I don’t want to give some girl a lift up to Maine.’ Arthur kept calling him and pushing him, and Will finally said, ‘Okay, okay.’ He was a good friend.”
None of this appealed to Eisner, who suddenly saw his boys’ weekend out turning into something much more tame and domesticated than he’d bargained for. He tried unsuccessfully to pawn her off on a friend, Jerry Gropper, who didn’t know her any better than he did but who was driving up that same weekend. Gropper turned him down, using the transparently lame excuse that he didn’t want to drive his new car over 35 mph until he’d broken it in properly. Eisner was stuck.
The trip went much better than either