This section is primarily for family, as you are the most interested in the personal lives of your parents/grandparents/great grandparents, – hence the password. If I am to recount events and feelings candidly I want to do so in the form of correspondence, not broadcast them to the internet world. It will be anecdotal, because if it were a memoir it would need to start at the beginning, and doing it sequentially would probably be stiff and often boring. I will start with the summer of 1942, which was the beginning for Eric and me.
A long and sometimes tumultuous, but always committed, relationship
Imagine!
I knew Eric by name and reputation long before we met. We were both raised in Mt. Vernon NY and even lived across the street from each other for several years, without ever meeting. He had been a star at A.B. Davis high school, where he was president of his class and of the student body, and recipient of a full scholarship to Columbia. He was 4 years ahead of me and two years older than my brother Howard who also went to Columbia. They sometimes commuted together to NYC by train. But although they often played tennis together they were not close friends.
In June 1942 when I was 18 I returned home after freshman year at Mt. Holyoke with plans to attend summer school at Columbia. The U.S. involvement in World War II was 6 months old and had caused a huge upheaval in the plans of everyone we knew. I was anxious to join the war effort so wanted to accelerate and graduate from college in 3 years. Eric had graduated in mid-winter, was a conscientious objector, and had signed up with the American Field Service, a non-army ambulance corps which had served in WW I and was again active in Europe. Howard was a junior at Columbia, an English major, a crew member and classified as 1A.
I heard voices downstairs one morning about a week after getting home and came tripping down to find Eric setting up a tennis game with Howard. According to him, it was love at first sight, altho what I remember is that he was weirdly tongue-tied and rather gawky, definitely not living up to his glowing reputation. I don’t think that the tennis game ever happened, for somehow he managed to get himself together and initiate our first date. By the end of the week, during which we saw each other every day, I was also in love. It was the first time for both of us but still we knew it was the real thing.
Eric was alerted to leave for the European war theater on very short notice, by cargo ship via the long route around the Cape of Good Hope, as the Mediterranean was heavily mined and cruised by German U-Boats. So our routine was to say goodbye each Sunday night and he would don his uniform on Monday morning, take his duffel, and go to the AFS office in NY ready to leave. Routinely he would be
back in late afternoon and at our door. This went on all summer until one awful Monday in early September when he didn’t come back. It was a shock I still remember. I didn’t hear from him for 3 months, as that was how long it took to go around Africa and up thru the Suez Canal to Aden. In the interim I had returned to Mt. Holyoke and the fall semester was almost over. There are very few photos from that summer, but here is one of Eric, his mom and me in our back yard.
Our “Summer of ’42” had no resemblance to the movie. It was the most romantic interlude imaginable and we treasured every day, knowing it would end any Monday. I commuted to Columbia daily, taking Chemistry, a required course for a Zoology major at MHC. I didn’t want to take on campus as I had no interest in it and was certain to do badly and lower my GPA, thus jeopardizing my scholarship. I also took an English literature course for the love of it as well as for more credits. Eric would usually come and meet me in NY in early afternoon after class and we would roam the city together. He knew it much better than I, having explored it since childhood and especially when at Columbia where he had a cadre of buddies who all liked the same things. He introduced me to some wonderful places, now pretty jumbled in my memory, but some instances are vivid.
Like the Cloisters, the uptown branch of the Met, on its own campus with a wonderful medieval garden. It is devoted to medieval architecture and painting and was, and still is, under-visited. It felt like our own special place, well off the beaten path.
And the Frick Museum, which we returned to many times, and introduced to our children. It has recently been in the news as the home of ‘The Goldfinch’ by Fabritius, which is the centerpiece of Donna Tartt’s eponymous novel.
Memorable too were the concerts at Lewisohn Stadium, a huge coliseum on the City College campus built for athletic and cultural events. It is gone now, having made way years ago for Columbia expansion. The NY Philharmonic played there in the summer. We explored Chinatown and Greenwich Village and found inexpensive restaurants, some of which still exist. A favorite was the Russian Tea Room, now much pricier and surely with an upgrade in cuisine. Au Steak de Pommes Frites (which does not show up on Google) served steak and French fries and I don’t remember if anything else, as that is what we always ordered. The Kungsholm, also long gone, was a Swedish smorgasbord with unlimited seconds and thirds; it was also the place where Eric proposed to me in 1944. Often my Dad met us for dinner and treated us to a little better grade of cuisine. And often it was the Democratic Club, of which he was a member. (Mom was at Lake Buel all summer and Dad went there on weekends, and that summer I kept him company in Mt. Vernon.) There was a magical ride thru Central Park in a hansom one night, and experiencing it with the man I loved was the realization of many a young girl’s dream. (Perhaps I should mention here that fear of pregnancy was so real and so terrifying in 1942 that it overrode even intense passion and kept us from being lovers. Our chastity had little to little to do with social and sexual mores, altho these were severely constraining in 1942.)
I learned so much that summer, altho very little Chemistry. Eric and I were constant companions. We listened to a lot of music. He introduced me to Berlioz and the Symphony Fantastique was a wondrous opening of a window. Forever since it has brought back memories of our first summer. I had long loved classical music but knew mostly Bach, Beethoven and Brahms; Berlioz was a new dimension. There were visits to Lake Buel, where my family spent every summer at our enclave on the lakeshore that included a big house and two smaller ones. We swam and sailed together, took lots of walks, went to concerts at Tanglewood, and ‘necked’ at every opportunity. But Eric was a constant target for my two teasing brothers, Howard and John (two years my junior). They would get him down on the floor and tickle him til he was helpless, trying to make him look foolish in front of me. They were merciless, watching for any contact between us to mimic and make fun of, and thinking back I guess it was part mischief and part jealousy, as Eric was the first (and only) serious male in my life. I remember once at the lake when we were eating dinner on the porch as usual. I had baked a chocolate cake that was rich and heavy and the boys made great sport by dropping a piece on a plate and thumping a foot to illustrate how heavy it was. I was not happy. Then Eric said quietly “I’d like another piece, please” and they went wild – such potent ammunition. I loved my brothers and especially Howard, but never mastered the art of dealing with their teasing.
Then came a morning in early September when Eric went down to the city and did not return. By mid-afternoon we knew he was on his way, but I didn’t know it would be two years before we saw each other again. Withdrawal was acute and agonizing and I felt utterly adrift; our lives had joined over the course of the summer.