The timing of my proposal turned out to be a blessing in that
planning for the wedding got us through an unusually severe New York winter.
When I was a kid, I had loved snowy days in the city, but four years in Ithaca
– where from October to May precip falls almost daily, mostly as sleet and
freezing rain – cured me of my snow-globe fantasies, and now I really hated
those endless, dark days in which the snow either froze into sooty mounds that
lasted for weeks or melted into puddles of icy slush that were always deeper
than they looked. Engineering our nuptials had no effect on the weather, of
course, but it did preoccupy us, especially Nancy, who shouldered the entire
burden. With no family in New York, everything was up to us, and I deferred to
her.
It was November of 1968 when the process began, and she decided
that late winter or early spring of the following year would be about right.
She mentioned the middle of March, but I quoted the relevant lines from Julius
Caesar, so we pushed it up to the first Sunday of the month, which turned
out to be the 2nd. That’s still winter in the Northeast; the days don’t really
start to lengthen or the climate to moderate until April, if then, but we were
a little impatient. The larger question was what sort of wedding we
envisioned. Joe, of course, was paying for it, and since he might have to pay
for three more as the sisters came on line, we didn’t want to set an expensive
precedent. Still, we wanted to do things with a modicum of style. It was a
given (Beulah was the giver) that it would be a Jewish wedding, despite our
secularity. We weren’t members of a synagogue, of course, but we knew we could
find a rabbi to marry us, and we started at the top: we visited Ronald Sobel,
associate rabbi of Temple Emanuel (later chief rabbi, now rabbi emeritus) to
discuss arrangements. I was nervous. I remembered my encounter with the family
of my friend at P.S. 9, who were scandalized by my apostasy. Would I have to
confess to Rabbi Sobel that I hadn’t had a bar mitzvah, that I knew not one
word of Hebrew? When I was 13, I was the only Jewish kid in a boarding school
in Greenwich – and unaware of it.
Nancy
at least had gone to Hebrew school and attended services in Grand Rapids on the
High Holy Days; though my parents and I had been invited to seders at friends’
houses, I’d never been inside a shul. But none of that mattered; Rabbi Sobel –
much younger and hipper than I had expected him to be, and clean-shaven – was
used to the many shades of Judaism that Manhattan had to offer. He would marry
us in his study; we’d make a small contribution to the temple, and that would
be that. “Nothing fancy,” he assured us. “It’ll be your standard eleven-minute
ceremony, with just enough Hebrew so your relatives won’t think it’s an
Episcopalian wedding.” Problem solved. At the rite itself would be only
immediate family – my mother and my Aunts Eve and Rose from Montreal, Nancy’s
parents and sisters, and my best man.
That
was the only decision I had to make by myself, and it wasn’t an easy one. My
friendship with Michael Rosenthal had struck an iceberg due to a silly
misunderstanding; I wanted to invite him to the wedding as a way of patching
things up, but best man was too much of a reach. Tom Steiner now lived in Santa
Barbara, where he was teaching, and Richard Freeman in Boston, and when I sent
out feelers to both, I didn’t get much enthusiasm back. Harry Wise wasn’t
dependable. I finally settled on Tom Jackson, to whom we had turned when we
wanted celebration and affirmation on the night we got engaged. We had fixed
him up with our friend Ciba, and the four of us had become very close. Tom and
I were nothing alike on the surface: he had been a Navy test pilot, and I, still
the Fearful Flyer, loved hearing about his adventures and misadventures in the
top-secret fighter jet that finally proved too balky for the military and was
never adopted. It was a finicky plane, and given to sudden malfunctions; Tom
once had to bail out at an altitude of 60,000 feet, setting a record for the
highest parachute descent by someone who hadn’t planned to make a parachute
descent. And if I thought my doctoral orals were grueling, here’s what he had to do: fly coast to coast
blindfolded. An instructor was in the seat behind him, Tom at the controls with
a shade covering the windshield, navigating entirely on instruments from
Pensacola to San Francisco. There was no time to be anxious, he said; it
was all he could do to keep track of where he was and how the plane was
performing. After four hours, the instructor told him to raise the shade, and
there in front of him, five miles away, was the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’ve
seen Top Gun or The Right Stuff, you know all
about macho, fun-loving pilots, and Tom, though he looked nothing like Tom
Cruise, was both those things, but thoughtful and bright as well, and wonderful
company. And he and Ciba, it seemed to us, were themselves on a glide path
toward matrimony. Maybe officiating at our wedding would give them a little
shove toward theirs. We wanted to share the wealth. The only problem with Tom
serving as my best man was Beulah’s he wasn’t Jewish, and she was scandalized
at the thought. Bear in mind that her temple was Reform; it wasn’t as if this
was to be an Orthodox wedding, with the men dancing with each other and the
women barricaded in another room. But how could she face her friends when it
emerged that her eldest daughter had brought someone named Jackson into the
sacred mysteries? Her solution was elegant in its simplicity: when the
announcement appeared in the Grand Rapids Press, “Jackson” had morphed into “Jacobson.”
She maintained for the rest of her life that the paper had made the error.
Lunch someplace elegant for 30 of our friends seemed only a bit
of a stretch. My mother knew someone who procured for us the perfect space: the
Plaza Hotel is seven blocks south of Temple Emanuel, and the Blue and Gold
Room, featuring views of Central Park and the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army
Plaza (there are two; the other is in Brooklyn), with its allegorical figure of
a nude Pomona, the goddess of abundance, carrying a basket of fruit. The
symbolism seemed optimistic.
Now the guest list had to be constructed, the rings selected,
the menu chosen, the honeymoon planned. And of course, none of those decisions
was simple. Harry Wise and Dorothy Kalins were newly divorced, but it was
unthinkable not to have them there. So we’d invite them both but seat them
apart. And of course, Dorothy and Michael Rosenthal had been a couple not long
before; we’d have to be careful to sit them apart too, but also to separate
Harry and Michael. The wedding rings were simple to acquire– we just went down
to the Diamond District and bought plain gold bands, but I had never worn
jewelry of any kind, and I was sure I’d never get used to it. I was right; I
took it off on March 3rd, and never put it on again. The menu wasn’t as
complicated as it would be today, when everyone is vegan or lactose-intolerant
or allergic to gluten, but there were still people with eating issues to be
considered; we finally settled on tiny roasted boneless squab chickens, one to
a plate. They looked like Al Capp’s comic-book shmoos – no heads, all body with
two little legs sticking out the bottom, and like shmoos, they tasted great. The
honeymoon would be a bigger problem: I still wasn’t comfortable in airplanes,
and we dithered until the last moment, when someone told us about a fancy, old-fashioned
hotel on a cliff overlooking the Hudson about a hundred miles from the city
called Lake Minnewaska Mountain House. We decided we’d drive up there after the
lunch, spend a few days decompressing, and then plan a more substantial trip in
the summer. It never occurred to us to spend our wedding night in the plush
confines of the Plaza. Would that it had.
All this dithering took its toll. Nancy, normally immune
to pressure, developed a rash called pityriasis rosea, also known
as a Christmas Tree Rash because it consists of a red area shaped like a tree,
beginning at the neck and spreading down the body. It’s not a serious
condition, and it was hidden by most of her clothes, but it was certainly going
to affect her choice of a gown, assuming it hadn’t gone away by the second of
March. Gambling that it would clear up in time, she chose a sort of flounced
miniskirt with a scalloped hem. She thought of it as a practical choice, a
dress that she’d wear to parties for the next ten years, but she never put it
on again. I went out and bought myself a conservative pinstriped
double-breasted suit and what was probably my first pair of black dress shoes.
January and February, those useless months, passed quickly, then March was upon
us.
The Wassermans arrived in New York en masse a
couple of days before the wedding. The girls had never visited the city. Had
they been Olga, Masha and Natasha, it would have been the Moscow they were
longing for – but there was nothing Chekhovian about those girls. Julie, the
youngest, hated Manhattan on sight; she, primed for a career teaching natural
science in elementary school, couldn’t stand all the concrete, the noises, the
smells, and not even Central Park could lift the curse of urbanity from Manhattan.
Debbie, in the middle, loved every inch of Manhattan, was excited by the very
things Julie despised, and would in fact move there when she was 19. Margie
hardly noticed New York, so brimming over with romantic sentiment was she at
the prospect of our marriage; she saw everything through the veil of tears she
couldn’t stop shedding. Joe and Beulah kept their own counsel.
On the night before the ceremony, Joe hosted a dinner for the
wedding party at a Hungarian restaurant called Czardash, where we endured the
gypsy violins as we ate the really quite good goulash and palacsintas that the
place was known for. I don’t know how Joe had discovered it, but it was a
fixture of Yorkville, a Mittel-European neighborhood on the Upper East Side,
until it closed sometime in the new millennium. There was a gypsy dancer too,
of course, who made up in energy what she lacked in grace; I was fascinated by
how much she perspired considering how little she was wearing. The party was
not exactly a rehearsal dinner – there was no choreography in the proposed ceremony
– but it was a way to spend the evening. When it broke up around ten, Nancy and
I for the last time went through the charade of pretending we were going
back to our separate apartments, and took a cab to 77th Street. As
we climbed into bed, it crossed my mind that the end of our courtship and the
beginning of our marriage were at the same time a rite of passage and more of
the same: we’d go on just as we were, living the same life in the same
apartment. I thought about what marriage must have been like for
people who had either not slept with each other or, particularly in the case of
women, anyone else. I pictured an eighteenth-century eighteen-year-old girl in
Boston or London, who had led a sheltered life in a bourgeois family, whose
marriage had been arranged for her by her father, who had perhaps exchanged
only a chaste kiss or two with her intended. How could the wedding itself be
anything but an anti-climax? When night falls and the two of them are utterly
alone for the first time, the event – whether dreaded or longed for – must have
been quite different from whatever she’d fantasized. Ian McEwan’s On
Chesil Beach (written decades later) draws a graphic picture of what
might and often must have gone wrong. The early American practice of “bundling”
– having the engaged couple spend a night in bed together, trussed like turkeys
so that nothing carnal could occur – was designed to ameliorate the shock of
horizontality; they could get used, at least, to sleeping together before they,
you know, slept together.
But Nancy and I had been sleeping together for more than a year,
and so when we got into bed on that penultimate night, we were more preoccupied
with the details of the following day’s events than with sex. Nancy rehearsed
me, for the tenth time, in the order of things: she would creep out very early
and go to the Plaza to begin the ritual of dressing, attended by her siblings
and mother. I was to meet them all at ten o’clock, polished to a high sheen, in
front of the elevator at the side entrance of the Temple. Nancy had no reason
to fear that I would forget, or change my mind, or simply turn up late; what
she and I have come to call the Horwich Curse is our mutual habit of arriving
early for every occasion. We always allow too much travel time, and either walk
in on a hostess who’s still in her robe or dither for ten minutes outside until
some other guest shows up, so we won’t be the first.
We had had a long evening, and we had a long day coming up, so
by unspoken mutual consent we didn’t rehearse our wedding night before we
turned out the light. In the middle of the night, though, I had a dream in
which I Nancy and I were making love. I woke up and . . . there she
was! But could I bring myself to wake Nancy just to complete my
dream? Uh . . . yes. So we had a moment that Keats described
perfectly In the most romantic poem I know, The Eve of St. Agnes, in
which Madeline has been dreaming of Porphyro making love to her,
unaware that he is in crouched in her bedchamber. He awakens her, and “Into her
dream he melted, as the rose / Blendeth its odor with the violet -- / Solution
sweet.” It was indeed a sweet solution, to both Madeline’s problem and
mine. I took that dream as an omen of success, my unconscious giving
me its blessing. We both went back to sleep, and the next morning, when I
awoke, I was alone. Everything was proceeding according to plan.
Except that I had overslept, by about half an hour. Was my
unconscious having second thoughts when I set the alarm clock the night before?
I showered and dressed as quickly as I could, wasting precious seconds choosing
a tie, and ran up the block to West End Avenue looking for a cab. Yeah, right,
at 9:45 on a Sunday morning. I sprinted to Broadway and found one. I
breathlessly pushed open the door of Temple Emanuel at ten minutes past ten.
There was the entire Wasserman family, my mother and my Montreal aunts, wearing
expressions of mingled consternation and relief. Nancy was the only one who
looked totally composed. Beulah’s expression suggested that she was
contemplating that comical/tragical stage moment when it’s clear that the
bridegroom isn’t going to show. My mother rolled her eyes.
Best Man Tom, me, Nancy, a weepy Margie, and Rabbi Sobel,
with Joe looking on from the background.
I remember nothing of the ceremony itself except its merciful
brevity; Rabbi Sobel had kept his promise. Wait – a phrase comes back to me –
something about “the white wings of death,” the Rabbi setting an outer limit to
the term of our vows. Then, everyone piled into taxicabs except the now-legal
cohabiters, who walked down Fifth Avenue to the Plaza with Tom and Ciba. It was
a cold, gray day and there were leftover patches of snow on the pavement, but
we knew what we were letting ourselves in for when we chose March 2nd. In the
Plaza, all was bright and cheerful in the Blue and Gold Room – which happened
to be the colors of Nancy’s alma mater, which was supposed by her family to be
the reason for the choice. Champagne was drunk, toasts were offered; the
obligatory cute pictures were snapped during the course of lunch (Nancy feeding
me a forkful of cake, the two of us kissing in silhouette). It was the only
time I can remember when every member of the both our immediate families were
together in the same room.
Debbie, Joe, Beulah, Nancy, Himself, Sally, Margie and Julie,
all the women standing with their feet at the angle mandated by
the photographer.
A couple of hours into the festivities, I
glanced out the window and noticed that snow was falling. Flurries had been
forecast, but these looked like snow showers at the very least. And we had a
substantial drive ahead of us. I dragged Nancy away from the clutch of friends
admiring her dress, and we had a brief confab. “Why don’t you call the place
and see what it’s doing up there?” she suggested. I borrowed a quarter from
someone, found a pay phone in the hallway, and called the Mountain House.The
woman up in Lake Minnewaska told me, in the professionally reassuring tones of
a day nurse, not to fret; yes, snow was in the forecast for New Paltz but she
was sure it was nothing to worry about, and they were expecting us. So I told
Nancy that Plan A was still in effect, and at about four o’clock, we said our
goodbyes to friends and families and took a taxi uptown to the garage where our
rental car awaited us.
Like almost everyone else, I own an SUV now,
and with its high road clearance and all-wheel drive, it loves a challenge – a
foot of new snow on our steeply-sloped hundred-foot driveway hardly makes it
break a sweat. Such vehicles were
unknown in 1969. Even front-wheel drive was new and radical; I think the only
car that offered it was the Olds Toronado. The car offered us by the rental
agency was not an Olds Toronado; it was just a nondescript large blue sedan – I
can’t remember the make, but it seemed quite new – with snow tires. I asked the
guy behind the desk if he had anything with chains on it. People in wintry
areas were still putting chains on their tires; all city buses had them, and
they made a distinctive New York sound, like untuned sleigh bells. He laughed
and said that nobody wanted to rent a Mixmaster. So we set off in what we were
given, heading north on the Henry Hudson Parkway toward the New York State
Thruway – the same route I’d taken dozens of times to Ithaca. That was a six-hour
schlep, but this trip would be only as far as New Paltz, about a hundred miles.
Traffic was fairly heavy; it was Sunday
afternoon, and people who had spent the day in the city were on their way home
to New Jersey and Orange County. After we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, I
thought, we’d have smooth sailing. But the snow was getting heavier, so cars
were slowing down. The snow was building up and turning to ice on the pavement,
and the guy in front of me fishtailed a couple of times. So far, our car was performing in a dignified and
stable manner, but I didn’t want to be dinged by some old pickup with bald
tires. Night had fallen, and the wind was from the north, blowing the snow
directly at us, big white flakes streaming across the windshield, making it
hard to see the fast-disappearing lane markers. Nancy and I weren’t saying much
to each other. Neither of us wanted to listen either to the weather or traffic
reports. We were trying to hold onto the romantic glow of the occasion that was
fading as each mile ticked off. Normally, on dry roads, New York to New Paltz
would have been about a two-hour drive; by the two-hour mark, we’d only gone
forty miles. It occurred to me that the prudent thing to do might be to turn
around and slink back to the Plaza, but what kind of precedent would that have
set for the travails of marriage? Weren’t you supposed to weather life’s storms
together, both metaphorically and in this case literally? We pushed on.
By seven o’clock, what had been forecast as
light snow had become a blizzard. By eight, we started discussing what Plan B
might be, or even if there was one: we’d come 70 miles by this time, and
driving back would be as difficult as going on. Cars were spinning out, sliding
off the roadway and down the steep hill to the wide gulley that divides the
north and south Lanes of the Thruway, where it was obvious that they were in
for a long night. The miles crept by on the odometer. When we got to 90, we
gave a little cheer. At 103, we saw the sign for the New Paltz exit. We had
been driving for seven hours, and we had had a busy and tiring day. There was a
large sign directing traffic to the College Motor Inn right at the exit (New
Paltz was the home of one of the branches of the State University of New York)
and I slowed, wordlessly asking Nancy if she wanted to trade in the splendors
of Lake Minnewaska for the light and warmth of what looked like a middling
chain motel, but she shook her head and we pressed on.
But now that we’d left the Thruway, we were
inching along a winding unplowed two-lane country road. No other cars were in
sight. It was nine miles from the Thruway to the driveway of the Mountain
House, and when we finally arrived we discovered that the driveway was unlit,
as steep as a ski run, and covered with deep snow. And there was a chain across
it, secured by a padlock. So much for “We’re expecting you.” Even without the
chain, it was clearly impassable (as it would be seven years later, when the
resort burned to the ground in another blizzard because the fire trucks
couldn’t make it up the driveway).
A couple of hours into the festivities, I glanced out the window
and noticed that snow was falling. Flurries had been forecast, but these looked
like snow showers at the very least. And we had a substantial drive ahead of
us. I dragged Nancy away from the clutch of friends admiring her dress, and we
had a brief confab. “Why don’t you call the place and see what it’s doing up
there?” she suggested. I borrowed a quarter from someone, found a pay phone in
the hallway, and called Lake Minnewaska. The receptionist at the Mountain House,
in professionally reassuring tones, told me not to fret; yes, snow was in their
forecast but she was sure it was nothing to worry about, and they were
expecting us. So I told Nancy that Plan A was still in effect, and at about
four o’clock, we said our goodbyes to friends and families and took a taxi
uptown to the garage where our rental car awaited us.
Like almost everyone else, I own an SUV now, and with its high
road clearance and all-wheel drive, it loves a challenge – a foot of new snow
on our steeply-sloped hundred-foot driveway in East Hampton hardly makes it
break a sweat. Such vehicles were unknown in 1969. Even front-wheel
drive was new and radical; I think the only car that offered it was the Olds
Toronado. The car offered us by the rental agency was not an Olds Toronado; it
was just a nondescript large blue sedan – I can’t remember the make, but it
seemed quite new – with snow tires. I asked the guy behind the desk if he had
anything with chains on it. People in wintry areas were still putting chains on
their tires; all city buses had them, and they made a distinctive New York
sound, like untuned sleigh bells. He laughed and said that nobody wanted to
rent a Mixmaster. So we set off in what we were given, heading north on the
Henry Hudson Parkway toward the New York State Thruway – the same route I’d
taken dozens of times to Ithaca. That was a six-hour schlep, but this trip
would be only as far as New Paltz, about a hundred miles.
Traffic was fairly heavy; it was Sunday afternoon, and people
who had spent the day in the city were on their way home to New Jersey and
Orange County. After we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge, I thought, we’d have
smooth sailing. But the snow was getting heavier, so cars were slowing down.
The snow was building up and turning to ice on the pavement, and the guy in
front of me fishtailed a couple of times. So far, our car was
performing in a dignified and stable manner, but I didn’t want to be dinged by
some old pickup with bald tires. Night had fallen, and the wind was from the
north, blowing the snow directly at us, big white flakes streaming bouncing off
the windshield, making it hard to see the fast-disappearing lane markers. Nancy
and I weren’t saying much to each other. Neither of us wanted to listen either
to the weather or traffic reports. We were trying to hold onto the romantic
glow of the occasion that was fading as each mile ticked off. Normally, on dry
roads, New York to New Paltz would have been about a two-hour drive; by the two-hour
mark, we’d only gone forty miles. It occurred to me that the prudent thing to
do might be to turn around and slink back to the Plaza, but what kind of
precedent would that have set for the travails of marriage? Weren’t you
supposed to weather life’s metaphorical and literal storms together? We pushed
on.
By seven o’clock, what had been forecast as light snow had
become a blizzard. By eight, we started discussing what Plan B might be, or
even if there was one: we’d come 70 miles by this time, and driving back would
be as difficult as going on. Cars were spinning out, sliding off the roadway
and down the steep hill to the wide gulley that divides the north and south
Lanes of the Thruway, where it was obvious that they were in for a long night.
The miles crept by on the odometer. When we got to 90, we gave a little cheer.
At 103, we saw the sign for the New Paltz exit. We had been driving for seven
hours, and we had had a busy and tiring day. There was a large sign directing
traffic to the College Motor Inn right at the exit (New Paltz was the home of
one of the branches of the State University of New York) and I slowed,
wordlessly asking Nancy if she wanted to trade in the splendors of Lake
Minnewaska for the light and warmth of what looked like a middling chain motel,
but she shook her head and we pressed on.
But now that we’d left the Thruway, we were inching along a
winding unplowed two-lane country road. No other cars were in sight. It was
nine miles from the Thruway to the Mountain House, and when we finally arrived
we discovered that the driveway was unlit, as steep as a ski run, and covered
with deep snow. And there was a chain across it, secured by a padlock. So much
for “We’re expecting you.” Even without the chain, it was clearly impassable
(as it would be seven years later, when the resort burned to the ground in
another blizzard because the fire trucks couldn’t make it up that grade).
Where we would have been if we'd ever gotten there.
Resigned, I turned the car around – not easy, backing and
filling across what was little more than a narrow lane – and we made our way
back down to the College Motor Inn. We reached it at about eleven thirty. There
weren’t that many cars parked in its lot, but imagine our surprise when we
walked into the lobby and discovered people sprawled on all the sofas and
across all the chairs, not to mention several who had spread their coats on the
floor. We made our way over and around the bodies to the desk, where a
harried-looking woman nevertheless smiled gamely at us. “No rooms, I guess?” I
said.
Where we ended up.
“This is not the problem,” she explained, in a faintly Italian
accent. “We have perhaps sixty empty rooms. But the maids couldn’t get in, and
the New York State says it is illegal to rent a room unless it has been cleaned
and made up. So, very sorry. You are welcome to stay here in the lobby, if you
can find any space.”
“What a way to spend our wedding night,” said Nancy –
brilliantly. The nice Italian lady looked stricken. “You just got married?
Today? Where?”
“In New York,” I answered. “We’ve been driving for seven hours.”
“This cannot happen,” said the woman behind the desk. “I am
going to go make up a room for you. Wait here; fifteen minutes.” And, grabbing
a parka off a coat rack behind her, she disappeared. We looked at each other
with disbelief; a fairy godmother had appeared to look after us. Back she came
in a little while, bearing a room key. “105,” she said. We thanked her
profusely – blessed her -- and went back to the car to get our luggage. The
snow was shin deep as we floundered our way to Room 105. I put the key into the
lock, and it was frozen; I could get the key out, but I couldn’t turn it.
Back to the lady at the desk. “Okay, I can open it,” she said, in a
no-good-deed-goes-unpunished tone, and after more trudging, we were at the room
once more. She inserted the key, jiggled it for a while, and the lock opened.
Without a word, she turned and went back to the office, and we entered a small,
somewhat shabby bedroom with two twin beds and a vestigial bathroom. We dropped
the cases, looked at each other, and said in unison, “I’m hungry.”
Once again, fate was on our side. From our window, we could see
a bar and grill, brightly lit up, almost next door. It was called something
like The Compleat Angler, and it lived up to its name; every piece of furniture
and décor had to do with fishing. There were mounted largemouth bass hanging on
the walls, fly rods and spinning reels hanging from the ceiling, photographs of
unknown fisherpersons smilingly displaying their whoppers. We ordered steak
sandwiches and washed them down with draft beer – a superb meal, we agreed.
When we got back to Room 105 (I had practiced opening the door before we left
until I was sure I had the jiggling down pat), we stripped off our wet, heavy
coats and dropped them on the floor, followed by the rest of our creased
finery. In our undies, we slipped into one of the narrow beds, and gave each
other the look that means, “Do you want to?” And shaking our heads no, we
kissed, turned back to back and were asleep instantly.
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