Leaving

Jean margaret garrison reminded herself a hundred goddamned times to keep her mouth shut. And still she forgot when it mattered. She dug the fingernails of her left hand into the cuticles of her right, lacerating the already wounded ridges of half moons, and thought angrily, I never, ever learn. 

She faced a roomful of wide-eyed criticism glossed as patronizing interest. Her husband’s family didn’t fool her. Artificial sweetness shimmered in the air like canned fruit in a Jell-O mold. She tugged apricot-colored braided ties at the neck of her turquoise crepe peasant blouse. A worn denim maxi skirt flared around her ankles, above bare feet shod in strappy sandals on cork platform soles. She loved the indifferent comfort of clothes that said, “I am an artist.” She fiddled with a tightly curled strand of her shoulder length hair. It glowed like a burnished penny and made her feel especially apart from them. Things had to change. She’d been idling, requiring nothing less than full throttle to shift her creative drive back into high gear.

Rona Shottenstein smoothed a non-existent wrinkle on her trim, salmon-colored skirt. She fidgeted a string of pearls from the neck of her ivory shantung blouse. Her smile-in-waiting had begun to wilt. 

She addressed her daughter-in-law through gritted teeth, “Why now, darling?”

Jean babbled helplessly. “Oh, you know. It was…um…already in the works before…um…before Fred’s—.” She’d had no choice in giving up her surname, is what she wanted to say. Or at least she was unaware of a choice when she married in ’69, the year before fifty thousand women hit the streets of Manhattan demanding equality. 

“It was quite an ordeal. To get my name back, I mean, going through the courts and all.”

Jean’s announcement quieted the gathering, no small feat as they gushed over Frederick, who was still slightly hollow-eyed from a recent hospitalization. Everyone minced carefully now, as if they were barefoot on a stage scattered with crushed glass.

Rona waved aside an invisible nuisance. “So, nothing is wrong then? Frederick approves?” 

Jean followed the manicure. Fingernails the color of the inside of a seashell rose to a powdered cheek. Her mother-in-law’s hand clenched and then relaxed as she patted jet-black hair lacquered into a croissant at the back of her head.

Frederick sidled up beside his wife, patting Jean’s head like an indulgent parent warning a sharp-tongued child. “Nothing is wrong, Rona. She means her artwork, how she signs her paintings.”

Frederick’s family resumed interest in the food laid out on the dining room table. Jean’s sister-in-law, Dawn, cast a benign glance at her five-year-old twins fingering the pickles. Her husband—Frederick’s brother, Adam—was in finance and traveled a lot. He was out of town. 

Jean inspected a table laden with what looked like the entire menu of the Madison Deli. It was Uncle Maury’s doing. This was not a time for his sister’s fancy schmancy “petty fours” or whatever Rona called them. The family summoned for such an occasion required comfort food. And there it was, in abundance, loaded onto oval Lenox platters with scalloped edges threaded in gilt. 

At the center of the table was a football-shaped mound of chopped liver, surrounded by rough clods of parsley—a symbol of Frederick’s high school glory days.  Cold cuts, rolled and speared with toothpicks colorfully bewigged in frilly cellophane, had begun to dry at the edges. A pair of old Sheffield silver chafing dishes separated pastrami and brisket from lacy discs of potato latkes. Smoked fish stared dolefully back at Jean. Humbler staples, coleslaw and potato salad, had been upgraded into blue-and-white Chinese porcelain bowls. Griselda, the ancient live-in cook and housekeeper, stood quietly at a distance. She regarded the prepared spread as an insult.

Jean watched as Uncle Maury launched himself over pocked lumps of glistening gefilte fish. His broad, car salesman’s grin transformed easily into a gangster’s scowl. “It’s tradition,” Maury said almost woefully, scooping an impressive pile onto his plate. “Poppy’s favorite.” It was the first time the dish had appeared since Frederick’s grandfather died. No one else touched it.

There was too much food and too much family. It was a lot to take on for a girl raised on vegetables boiled to death by her British-born mother. Jean’s American father had left them—as her mother insisted—before Jean was five years old. Dennis was a trumpet player on tour with a big band when her parents met in Leicester. They married and her mother, Margaret, returned with him to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Jean was a late-in-life baby. Her mother said little more about her husband than it was the drink and cigarettes that killed him.

“It’s where you get it from,” her mother said, repeatedly.

“I don’t smoke,” Jean shot back, repeatedly.

“You know what I mean,” was Margaret’s even reply.

Jean sipped her Campari. She’d asked for bourbon. The imprint of her lips clung to the sticky rim of the glass like an sos. 

Admittedly, it was the wrong time for Jean to reveal that she was reverting to her maiden name. Or bad timing, as her father-in-law had suggested in the affluent surgeon’s deliberately imperious manner. But why did Frederick have to add that he thought she’d be more comfortable with her maiden name? That would surely open a can of worms from an already overstocked shelf. Jean rid herself of the glass. She stopped at the walnut-and-glass bar cart, popped a neon-red maraschino cherry into her mouth, and examined the labeled cut glass decanters. “Even the liquor gets dressed up,” she mumbled. She poured straight bourbon over ice and gulped from her glass, tapping the pressure in her chest. That was better, much better, she thought, starting for the living room, where the rest of the family had retired. They volleyed trivial remarks with forced jocularity, avoiding any chatter about why Frederick had been hospitalized. 

Sprawling apartments on Central Park West were like museum exhibitions in the hands of successful doctors’ wives. These women aspired to be meticulous conservators, displaying their possessions under recessed lighting in specially crafted alcoves, and underfoot in the kind of exotic carpet one valued by its knots.

Maury’s generous profile shadowed curtained windows cloaking a view of the park. Cigarette smoke hovered in the room like a depleted dust storm. Tasseled tiebacks pulled in the drapes and reminded Jean of loosened belts on overfed guests. She hated the gold-and-cream-colored damask that choked the light. She had never understood the purpose of a valance. The plump, elaborately floral-patterned sofa—that Jean habitually and wrongly called a couch—was overrun with decorative needlepoint pillows. Gilt bronze-and-crystal wall sconces, Oriental vases rewired as lamps topped with pleated silk shades—she hated all of it. No surface basked uncluttered. There was nowhere to park the eye and just rest a while. Cloisonné was her mother-in-law’s passion. Ornate pillboxes, paperweights and miniature vases were reverently displayed in every room. Even the soap dishes in the bathrooms were her handiwork. Rona’s abstract paintings embodied Mondrian, hung alongside expensively framed lithographs by Picasso and Dubuffet. When Jean’s paintings were mentioned, Rona coyly offered that she, too, dabbled a bit.

Frederick’s nephew sneaked up behind Jean, and filliped her on the back of her arm. She yelped and shooed him from her.

Frederick reappeared, wearing his time-to-get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge look. “What’s with Jakey?” he said.

Jean waved vaguely, as if to say it doesn’t matter.

“Are you drunk?” he asked.

“No…maybe a bit. It’s been a long day,” she replied, nibbling cold latkes.

Dawn held out a fringed wool rectangle. “Don’t go off without this,” she purred. It was Rona’s go-to gift for family and friends: the needlepoint pillow. Gone Antiquing and Daydreaming were her favorites. Jean made a reluctant grab at the pillow. Her mother-in-law had presented it to them earlier. Jean had promptly tucked it out of sight.

“Thanks, I think,” Jean murmured.

“I already have two of these,” Dawn sighed. She flipped a strand of naturally blonde hair behind her ear. She nodded to her children, who were tearing up and down the long hallway, skidding like frenzied kittens on the geometric pattern of a headache-inducing kilim rug. “Your turn,” she said.

Jean studied the meticulous stitching. Whenever a child is born, so is a Grandmother.

Usually, in good weather, Jean and Frederick left his parents’ building on Central Park West and took a footpath through the park to their third-floor walk-up in an old brownstone on East Ninety-Fourth Street. The staying power of summer light was still evident in August, so she was annoyed when Frederick insisted on hailing a cab.

“We’re practically there,” Jean griped.

“You’re tired,” he said, “And drunk.”

In their apartment, absent the scrim of family, she noticed Frederick’s paleness, an uncertainty in his movements. There were patches of gray in his dark brown hair, as if he’d been patted with a floury hand.  He’d lost weight and his jacket hung from his frame like an empty garment bag. With one year left, he would not immediately return to the medical school at Mount Sinai Hospital, where his father was chief of surgery. His father, Abraham, had connections. Frederick would be granted leave to consider his options. Already there had been inquiries made at Rockefeller University. Jean had not been included in these plans. She was the last to know that he had been hospitalized.

Jean had also quit school, before she met Frederick. Her mother wanted her to be a social worker or a teacher, even a nurse. She wanted her daughter never to have to struggle as she had done, to be self-sufficient. Her mother wanted her to be something. Marriage was not something. An artist was not something. 

At the end of her second year at Hunter College—with her mother at a safe distance in Florida after retiring from her job at Metropolitan Life—Jean became an artist. Her mother bemoaned hard-earned money wasted and refused to talk to her. Jean remained in the small apartment in the Jacob Riis projects. When Jean met Frederick, she had just started working in an art gallery on Madison Avenue. The clientele were mostly women with too much money and not enough time to spend it.  If they didn’t play tennis or mahjong or engage in ego-stroking charity work, then, like Frederick’s mother, they shopped. Jean remembered watching him push open the door to the gallery while his mother fussed at his shirt collar.

“Rona,” he whined comically, “Behave.”

“My son, the absent-minded doctor,” Rona trilled, to no one in particular.

Jean was new to the job as well as to a son being on a first-name basis with his parent. Hers was “Mum.” To address her mother as “Margaret” was unthinkable. She’d been left to entertain Frederick while the gallery owner took Rona, a valued customer, under his wing. Frederick joked self-deprecatingly, was pleased with Jean’s laughing response and expressed interest when she told him she was an artist. Well out of his mother’s earshot, he’d asked for Jean’s number.

Despite deprivation, Jean had been a surprisingly cheerful child with a singular imagination. Her mother, albeit unconsciously, tried to tame liveliness in a daughter who challenged her own angry inner life. Jean had always been content in her solitary pursuits, but she realized soon after meeting Frederick that she was lonely. An impetuous courtship offered a way to breach that desert.

Jean moved in with Frederick. She quit the gallery and they eloped. They returned from Maryland a married couple. She found an entry-level job in the Fine Arts Library at Columbia University. It was quiet work. She enjoyed handling rare, leather-bound volumes and perusing folios of master works. She shared a basement art studio, a few blocks further east and downtown from their apartment, and she set to painting seriously. Between Frederick’s studies and her job and dedication to her art, they rarely spent time together. When they did, it was at family gatherings or parties thrown by Frederick’s fellow med students. Jean had never quite understood Frederick’s heated pursuit of her. It all fell into place when she met his brother, Adam. Sibling rivalry—striving to upset the most apples in the parental cart—had compelled the brothers to marry “outside.”

Frederick’s brother had met his wife in New Orleans when they were students at Tulane University. She was the daughter of vastly prosperous Texans. Her family “picked cotton”—in her words—on their property, second only in size to the Lyndon B. Johnson ranch. Their religion was oil. Cool, blonde, a cheerleader and a veteran debutante, Dawn bested Adam’s revolt and horrified her parents by marrying a New Yorker, a Jewish New Yorker. After discreet inquiry on Dr. Schottenstein’s part, Dawn was received like a bit of exotica that had fallen into their midst, something to be re-fashioned and to enhance their status. Dawn played the folksy card like a resourceful gambler. Before the birth of her twins, she’d converted to Judaism. She gave her in-laws attractive, precocious grandchildren. She started a decorating business from home, a late ’50s architectural sugar cube in suburban Pound Ridge. She began placing Rona’s abstract paintings in living rooms across Westchester County, seducing her mother-in-law’s circle with her irresistible Southern charm.

Jean remained the enigma.

Frederick and Jean were like strangers now. He left for regular appointments with a psychiatrist three mornings a week. He’d lunch with his father sometimes, meet with his school advisor or spend the afternoon, with his mother at the helm, shopping to fit a thinner frame. He was never allowed anything less formal than tan chinos and polo shirts emblazoned with little green alligators. 

The incident that led to Frederick’s hospitalization was forgotten, or at least left unsaid. Jean kept track of it all in her journal. He’d accompanied her to work that morning, telling her that he needed a change of scenery. She’d gone home at the end of the day thinking he’d left and just not bothered or had forgotten to tell her, not unusual for him. She’d been unaware that Frederick had been found unconscious in the Physics Library on the floor above in Schermerhorn Hall. It wasn’t until later that evening that her father-in-law telephoned. Frederick had been admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital and they had called Dr. Schottenstein. Frederick, it seemed, had had a breakdown. He was exhausted, his father said, and they would concentrate on helping him get his strength back.

The following day Jean visited her husband in the hospital. She had not been prepared for the wrist restraints, his motionless body. She was certainly not prepared for a doctor’s revelation that Frederick had been found in the bathroom, belt still around his arm. They were unable to identify the substance in the hypodermic that had been recovered. She told the doctor that she had no idea that Frederick used anything other than pot. Alone with him in the hospital room, she felt pointless. She grabbed a stray sock that lay on the floor like a failed flotation device. Suddenly Frederick reared up, stared confusedly at his tethered hands and then faced her, wild-eyed. Jean leaned in to catch something, like an ominous draft from a deep cave, and whispered, “Fred. What is it?”

“I want to kill you,” he croaked.

His mother appeared then and Frederick fell back against the pillows. “You should get some rest, dear,” she said, casting an apprehensive glance at Jean. “You look terrible.” 

Dawn had arrived at the hospital and, after what seemed like an eternity, pulled Jean’s crimped fingers from the sock, leading her from Frederick’s room. Jean noted in her journal that she’d arrived home in a cab, but could not recall if her sister-in-law had accompanied her. 

While Frederick was in the hospital, time dragged in slow motion. Her father-in-law suggested she stay away. Nothing personal, he said. Her presence just complicated things.

Jean took a few days off from the library. During the weeks that Frederick was hospitalized, she rarely went to her studio. Dawn was the only one who made contact, and that was on the telephone. Jean lived on fast food. She ordered pizza, burgers and Szechuan take-out. She washed the food down with cold beers on their matchbox terrace in the rear of the apartment. It was not often used for anything other than storage because the eccentric on the floor above them fed the pigeons. Jean scrubbed the apartment until her fingers puckered. The floor was uneven and every closet door stuck. Casement windows she’d thought were quaint were murder to wash. Very little sunlight eked into the front room through the tiny diamond-shaped patterns. Soon every bit of furniture—family cast-offs—shone with Olde English polish. 

Not long after his homecoming, Frederick and Jean had a heart-to-heart. 

“You’re not—.” Frederick started.

“I’m not what? Happy?” Jean retorted.

“No. I was going to say you’re not painting.”

Taken aback, Jean fumbled, making small excuses. “I’m a bit blocked…only temporary. I’m drawing more.” Which was not entirely true. But she was writing in her journal and that was a kind of drawing.

“What’s happening with Havermayer?” Jean asked. “Have you seen him? Does he know about…you know? You never mention him.”

Frederick and Robert Havermayer were close friends, seemingly inseparable. Frederick called his professor by his surname. Everyone called him Havermayer, or Doc. Jean had only seen him at raucous parties in the professor’s SoHo loft. In the months before he was hospitalized, Frederick had returned red-eyed, jittery and uncommunicative after spending time with his professor. 

Frederick ignored her question, quickly changing the subject. 

“You seen Taylor lately?”

“Not yet,” Jean replied.

Mary Jo Taylor was her full name, but because she was never sure if she preferred the feminine or the masculine, she called herself Taylor. She shared the basement studio with Jean.

Taylor admired Jean. She was in awe of Jean’s passion, but also a little intimidated by her. They’d met at a party at Havermayer’s, the only two who were not med students. Taylor was, like Jean, an artist. She was fresh from Louisville, Kentucky and new to the city. Jean liked her right off the bat and asked her to share the studio space. Taylor worked in a bar on nights and weekends. It was perfect. 

“Is she back?” Frederick asked. “Invite her over for a drink.”

The next night, a half-finished bottle of Henry McKenna held down one corner of the map Taylor had spread out on the floor of the front room. Marijuana smoke hung in the air like an evanescent hammock.

Jean pouted and rooted in the ashtray. “I’m jealous.”

Taylor smiled, gratified. “There’s more where that came from.” She produced another joint and continued tracing a route with her fingertip. “I only made it to the Painted Desert. Next time I want to go to Abiquiu.”

“Yes!” Jean hollered and raised a jelly glass half full of bourbon.

Frederick looked puzzled. “Abiquiu?”

Taylor and Jean sang in unison, “Georgia O’Keeffe!”

“Oh,” he said, chastened. “Of course.” Gamely he offered, “You ought to do something like that, Jean.”

Jean resisted a sharp comeback. Instead she ignored him and spoke pointedly to Taylor. “You know. I just might.”

Taylor looked up from the map, exhaling a plume of the sweet smoke. “Really? Cos if you’re serious I’d go right back. We could go together. We could paint!”

“She doesn’t have a license,” Frederick declared. And then, as if his wife had not heard, “You don’t have a—.”

Taylor interjected. “You can get one, a temporary one, in a few weeks.”

“She doesn’t drive,” Frederick said, slightly more insistent.

“She can learn,” Jean snapped.

“I’ll teach you. We’ll start right away,” Taylor said.

Jean dragged deeply on the joint and grinned at Taylor. “Let’s start now.”

Frederick watched helplessly as the two women threw themselves across the map. Head-to-head, they giggled and plotted. “Well, maybe start tomorrow?” he cautioned. “You’ve had a bit too much to—.”

Taylor’s excited response rose above Frederick’s appeal. “We’d better make some tapes! We cain’t count on the car radio. There’s gonna be some lo-o-ong stretches of highway. Godalmighty, it was torture listenin’ to “Havin’ My Baby” all the way through Kansas.”

Jean got her learner’s permit. They went out driving in Taylor’s tangerine-colored Beetle. They began slowly—after the evening rush hour—navigating the park drive in Central Park. Sometimes they started out at midnight after Taylor’s shift. Jean’s confidence grew.

“Damn, girl. You are a natural,” Taylor said.

They cheered when Jean no longer stalled at a red light. When she was able to stop nervously shifting into a lower gear on the steep incline at 103^rd and Lexington, Jean felt an unfamiliar thrill. Some weekends, when neither had to be at a job in the morning, they worked in the studio through the night until just before daybreak. High on turpentine and glorious anticipation, Jean navigated the Beetle carefully downtown on the FDR Drive. At first her heart raced faster than the speed they were traveling. Soon they ventured across the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge and doubled back just in time for sunrise over the city. They celebrated their achievement with French toast and Bloody Marys at Pennyfeathers, an all-night café in Greenwich Village.

Everything looked different behind the wheel. The city, especially the Upper East Side, lay in dormant splendor. They cruised past the Andrew Carnegie pile on Fifth Avenue and speculated about the proposed museum. Jean pointed out where Truman Capote had begged for alcohol from startled passersby below a mansion window of the imposing rehab center on Ninety-Third Street. Jean and Taylor never tired of the drive past the ghostly façade, silhouetted against a moonlit sky, of the old armory on Madison Avenue, just up the street from Jean’s apartment. 

Taylor spotted the squadron motto: Boutez en Avant.

“It means Charge!” Jean said.

“Bootayanahvant!” Taylor yelled as they sped away.

Jean passed the written test and aced the road test. She slipped behind the wheel like a seasoned diver into a dry wetsuit. She stopped tearing at her fingers, seeing them displayed so nakedly on the steering wheel.

Frederick remained unconvinced. He was sure Jean’s flight of fancy would be brought down to earth before long. Taylor screwed up her courage and asked Jean why she was so eager for the trip. She’d be away from her husband for what, three weeks?

“I’m feeling really shadowy, that’s why,” Jean answered. She added that they couldn’t rush a thing like this. Maybe they needed more time—a month, six weeks. “If you can swing it,” she said and did not wait for Taylor’s answer.

It was nearly 3:00 a.m. Jean’s bags stood on the landing, just outside the door to their apartment. She had only to pack the cassette tapes. She and Taylor had agreed to mix tapes of their personal choices. Taylor was more Harry Chapin and the Allman Brothers. Jean was Joni’s Free Man In Paris. She was Steely Dan and Bob Dylan and Zappa. They bonded over the Eagles and the Stones and early Beatles. They agreed to throw in Stevie Wonder, Elton John and Grand Funk. 

They had their doubtful moments.

“Barbara Streisand. Really?” Taylor asked.

“I dunno,” Jean said. “It feels right. I loved the movie.”

So that gave Taylor Jim Croce and the Steve Miller Band. The Trogs’ Wild Thing was a “yes” and John Denver a definite “no.”

Jean closed the bedroom door. Frederick had an interview at Rockefeller University later that morning. She had not told him that she’d quit her job at the library. Her sketchbooks lay on the coffee table, unpacked. Instead, she had decided to bring lined notebooks. She’d splurged on a classic Mont Blanc fountain pen. Frederick often said that Jean saw everything in black and white, not necessarily meant as a compliment. Maybe she did. Her studio wall was hung with huge white sheets of Rives bfk covered with graphite line drawings that Frederick described as diluvial, like a Biblical flood. 

A familiar car horn tooted in the quiet street. Jean leaned from the casement window and waved to Taylor. It was still dark. The air breathed cooler as the seasons changed. 

There was cash in her wallet. Money was no object in Frederick’s world, but Jean’s had a kind of restraining order. Marriage to Frederick meant rent-free, thanks to his parents. All of his needs were taken care of. He’d never seen a dentist’s bill or paid for even the smallest article of clothing. Jean’s salary had been her own, though it had not allowed her much more, after groceries, than her half of the studio rent and
art supplies.

Jean smiled and recalled having arrived, uninvited, at Havermayer’s loft on a murky stretch of Greene Street a few days earlier. Frederick ignored her questions about his friend. She’d begun to put two and two together. She didn’t have time for the passive drama of blackmail, so she’d boldly made a case for the sale of one of her larger paintings. Havermayer quickly agreed. It was easier than she’d expected.

She left the credit card on the table. Who was Jean Schottenstein? Her temporary driver’s license said Jean Margaret Garrison. Jean would make sure to be at the wheel for the last leg of their return. She pictured herself driving into Manhattan at daybreak. Nothing better.