PART 23: MEET THE PARENTS

THE WASSERMANS AND THE HORWICHES

The First Ordeal

Nancy confessed to me, several months after we’d met, that she had called Grand Rapids the day before my episode of Reach for the Stars aired and told her mother to watch if she wanted to see her future son-in-law. Getting married was still not on my to-do list (maybe not even on my bucket list), but I was enjoying, for the first time, the experience of actually living with a woman. Because it was still the late ‘60s, the proprieties of such behavior were dictated by the parents’ generation, and as a consequence, although cohabitation was becoming common, talking about it was not. The husband of one of Nancy’s work-friends (a man I couldn’t stand), whenever we found ourselves in a restaurant together, would summon the waiter over and, pointing at us, stage-whisper, “They live together, but they’re not married.” It wasn’t even funny the first time. When Nancy’s roommate left and I invited Nancy to move in with me, she did so, but she rented a small, cheap studio on West 78th Street, in which she never slept a single night, just so she could give her parents an address that wasn’t mine. Of course, she couldn’t give them a phone number. The telephone installers were on strike, she told them, and it just dragged on and on, but you can always call Dick in an emergency and he’ll run over and get me. Uh-huh. They were relatively clueless, but I’m sure they didn’t swallow that.

After about a year, Nancy decided it was time for the ritual introduction of the new man to the parents. I had a certain academic interest in meeting her father, because the triangle of father-daughter-suitor is at the heart of Shakespearean drama. The fathers’ role is to serve as an obstacle to marriage, which is surmounted by the end of the play by disappearing him or neutralizing him in some fashion. He’s an unsympathetic figure, and no one cares when Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream exits without a word at the end of Act 4, or even when Hamlet kills Ophelia’s father Polonius halfway through that play.  There are hardly any mothers to provide an ameliorating influence in the plays, so I had no idea what to expect from Nancy’s, but I expected a certain wariness, or suspiciousness, from her dad. Some of the fathers of my various girlfriends had been friendly and welcoming, but this was different. I wasn’t auditioning for a role as a family member when I dated Mimi Matsner in the 10th grade. Sue’s parents expected me to do the Right Thing when we graduated, though Ben in Brooklyn didn’t much cotton to me, this wise-guy know-it-all from Manhattan who hadn’t even been bar-mitzvahed.

Grand Rapids is no one’s idea of a tourist destination, though in its center stands a very impressive Calder stabile --

as well as the Grand River, which flows through the center of town, in which you can see salmon negotiating the rapids on their way to spawn. 

We flew to Grand Rapids in the dead of winter, when that small city is not at its best – freezing, sleeting, and dark at four in the afternoon, and Beulah and Joe met us at the airport. Beulah lovingly prepared her specialty for me that first night, brisket, the one dish that could stand up to her penchant for overcooking. There were potato pancakes and apple-sauce too. Nancy and her three sisters left their plates half-full; I cleaned up their leftovers, and earned Beulah’s undying love by so doing – what with four daughters, and her culinary ineptitude, more food had been thrown out in her kitchen than consumed in the dining room. Joe was not a big eater; by comparison, I, who had grown up with a master chef for a mom, was a bottomless pit. 

About those sisters: they were spaced exactly four years apart, so that in 1968, Nancy was 24, Margie 20, Debbie 16 and Julie 12. Julie, Nancy whispered, existed only because Debbie wasn’t a boy, but after that, her parents ran out of bedrooms and  stopped trying. Margie looked like a smudged copy of Nancy; Debbie was adorable in a teeny-bopperish way (more about that later), and Julie was simply unformed as yet. She and Margie were a little shy with me at first, but as soon as I opened my mouth, Debbie doubled over laughing. She’d never heard any speech but Middle-American before, and she thought the way I spoke was hilarious. That was the word she used, though she pronounced it “hill-air-ious.” 

Now to the enactment of the ritual. In The Merchant of Venice, if you want to marry the beautiful and wealthy Portia, you have to submit to a test devised by her late father and proclaimed in his will: there are three metal caskets, and you must choose the one that contains her picture, based on the metals themselves – gold, silver and lead – and the riddles attached to them. Choose wrong, and you forfeit your right ever to marry anyone. Choose right, and you’re set for life. The testing motif appears in many fairy tales; the only way to get to Rapunzel is to climb up to her casement window using her hair as a ladder.

The Wassermans had devised three such tests for me. The first was the Ordeal of the Fiery Furnace. Boyfriends, in those days, were certainly not bedded down with their girlfriends in her parents’ home, and even if they had been, this family had just moved to a smaller house than the one Nancy grew up in, and all four girls slept together in one large dorm-like room. So a cot was set up for me – in the basement. It was not the sort of man-cave that contains a wet-bar, a pool table, and a giant TV; it was just a dank concrete space, its ceiling honeycombed by plumbing, full of luggage and unwanted furniture. There was no bathroom, no reading light, and the stone floor was gritty. And the cot was right next to the boiler. It cycled off and on all night long and when it was on, my bed felt like an oven. When it went off, the temperature dropped precipitously. I awoke at the start of every cycle because the machinery made clicking and gurgling noises, and then I’d either throw off the covers or burrow into them, waiting for that blessed few minutes at the midpoint, when it was neither too hot nor too cold. We were there for three nights, and on the second and third, I waited for everyone else to go to bed, tiptoed upstairs carrying a blanket, and bedded down on the living room couch until dawn.

The Second Ordeal

Joe Wasserman, Nancy’s father, reminded me of Mr. Bennett, Elizabeth’s father in Pride and Prejudice, who left the raising of his four daughters almost entirely to his dithering wife. Mr. Wasserman also had four daughters, from whose daily dramas he too remained aloof. Mr. Bennett took refuge behind his newspaper while Mrs. Bennett schemed to arrange advantageous marriages for her girls. Beulah Wasserman did not believe that her duties included matchmaking, but of course there were daily dramas, and Joe’s chessboard was his bulwark against the assaults of family life.

Joe’s interest in chess was not a mere protective screen. He had been something of a prodigy as child, and if he’d grown up in Russia, or even in New Work, his genius might have flourished under proper mentorship. But the Grand Rapids leather-goods dealer played well enough to have earned a Master’s rating, and was, when I met him, the senior champion of the state of Michigan, who, In fact, was better than the champion himself. No one in Grand Rapids could give him a game, so he played a lot of postal chess (a pastime since ruined by computers; you never know if your opponent is a human being or some offshoot of IBM’s Big Blue), and once a year competed in the Midwestern Open in Milwaukee, which always fell on Beulah’s birthday. He usually finished in the money. When he turned 65, he was the 10th-ranked player in that age group in the United States. The first was the legendary grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky, whom Joe had played in a simultaneous game (Reshevsky against ten other players in a circle, moving from board to board, a test of thinking on one’s feet. The other nine lost; Joe achieved a draw.)

Almost the first question Joe asked me at the dinner table the night I arrived was whether I played chess. If I’d known what was in store for me, I’d simply have answered no. The fact is that I did play chess, occasionally, with a neighbor. We each knew the first few moves of the Ruy Lopez opening and the Sicilian Defense, but after that, we played carelessly and erratically. Joe’s rating was over 2000; if I’d had a rating it would have been . . . . maybe 6. Nancy shot me a warning look when the subject arose; after dinner, she took me aside and said, “Don’t play chess with him.”

“Why?” I asked. “I play with Bob Bumcrot all the time.

“Because he’ll destroy you,” she explained. “He’s a different person when he playing.”

Shortly after breakfast on the second day of my visit, Joe brought out a board and began to set up pieces. Now was the time for me to temporize, apologize, confess my inadequacy, but it seemed simpler just to get on with it; we’d play one game, he’d see that I couldn’t give him a match, and it would be over in a few minutes. He extended two fists toward me, and I drew Black. I wasn’t unhappy about that; Black is expected to achieve a draw at best, and there would be no shame in losing. I waited for him to make his first move, which in my neighbor’s case was to advance one’s king’s pawn two squares. Instead, Joe pushed his king’s knight’s pawn two squares.

I was baffled. I had no idea what that called for in the way of a response. It was, in fact, as I later learned, an opening called the Sokolsky, aka the Orangutan opening, and it is considered “irregular” in chess circles. (It got its nickname in 1924, when a world-class player named Tartakower consulted an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo before a match, who somehow suggested it to him.) Well, I thought, I’ll just develop my pieces until I see what he’s up to, so I went for control of the center and threatened to capture his pawn by advancing a knight. He looked at me, his lips curving up in the beginnings of a smile. “You don’t want to do that,” he said.

He was right. The game lasted about eleven moves before I was checkmated. Joe immediately began to rearrange the pieces; this wasn’t to be a one-time affair, but the beginnings of a match that stretched out over three days, which included dozens of games, all of which I lost in different, sometimes startling ways. I didn’t feel I could say to him, “Mr. Wasserman, I’m sure it’s no fun for you to beat my brains out, so let’s quit,” because it obviously was fun for him to beat my brains out. In every other social situation, he was retiring to the point of passivity, but not here. Bobby Fischer was once asked what the point of playing chess was, and he answered, “To annihilate your opponent’s ego.” The only reason that didn’t happen on this occasion was that my ego’s existence didn’t depend on my prowess at chess. I realized quite soon that he was toying with me; instead of closing in for the kill, he’d knock off my pieces one at a time, so that I’d find myself with a King and three isolated pawns, facing his entire complement of pieces. I felt like the knight in Money Python and the Holy Grail, who gets his arms and legs lopped off in battle but is expected to keep fighting. Another of Joe’s tactics was to leave the chessboard almost as soon as we’d begun a game; I’d call out to him what my move was (I knew enough about chess to do that), and from the kitchen, where he was making himself a sandwich, he’d call back his reply. He could easily keep the whole board in his mind, and usually moved immediately, having worked out in advance all the possible permutations -- though once, on the morning of the third day, I made a move that gave him pause. He had envisioned a strategy whereby, five moves later, I could have captured one of his rooks. But I had not envisioned any such strategy, so my my next move was a blunder, and I went down yet again to gory defeat. After we were through for the day, he said to me, “You know, in that sixth game, if you’d promoted your bishop’s pawn instead of castling, you might really have had a strong position.”. But I couldn’t remember three moves back in the last game we’d played, let alone the entirety of a game from earlier that morning.

Needless to say, I never played chess with my future father-in-law again. I grew quite fond of him after Nancy and I married, and I sympathized with his predicament: even after he had retired and they moved to Florida, he couldn’t find skilled players. When chess-playing computers came onto to the scene, I suggested to Nancy that we buy him one, but he made it clear that he held them in contempt, and indeed, the earlier ones weren’t very strong players. He held onto his skill and mental acuity, which typically deserts even the best players in their middle years, for a long time, but age finally caught up with him. and on one visit to Florida, when he was in his eighties, he was beaten badly by the not-very-serious program on my laptop. “They’ve really improved these, haven’t they?” he asked, and I assured him that that was the case; I wasn’t going to tell him how much his skills had eroded.

So what was going on during the Meet the Parents trip? Was I being tested, and if so, for what? The fact that I couldn’t play chess was obviously not a reason for him to forbid me to court his daughter; maybe he just wanted to see if I could keep my cool under fire. Or maybe he just enjoyed it.

The Third Ordeal

“Poor Dick,” said Beulah with a smile, as we spooned down our Cheerios the morning after we’d arrived. “How are we going to keep him busy for three days in our little city?”

She was only partly joking. Grand Rapids is not a tourist attraction. These days there’s the fish ladder where you can watch salmon negotiating their obstacle course to the spawning grounds, and the enormous Calder stabile in the revived downtown, but then, there were no cultural or natural attractions to speak of. In fact, the city was dying, one more rust-belt burg that had outlived its purpose. The furniture factories had moved south, and the center, where Joe’s leather goods store was located, was shrinking as malls began to sprout up. All the young people were moving out. Nancy’s family was a case in point: she ended up in New York, and her sisters, respectively, in Minneapolis, Austin and Los Angeles. (What does it say about the bond among them that they couldn’t have chosen to live farther from each other unless they’d left the country?)

But my visit was during Christmas week and that night we toured the wealthier neighborhoods (including Wealthy Street) where people decorated their houses for the holiday very elaborately. This photograph is recent, but things haven’t changed much.

Of course, you could take the same picture in any bedroom community in the United States, but to a city boy, it was a revelation. This suburban version of keeping up with the Joneses took on new meaning for me. Of course, New York had the tree in Rockefeller Center and the windows of Saks and Bonwit Teller, but those were institutional productions, not private ones. In my UWS neighborhood, the heavy concentration of Jewish residents made such display unthinkable; though many middle-class families, such as mine, might put a wreath on the door, a tree in the living room and stockings on the mantle (if there were a mantle), you didn’t see illuminated plastic Santas disappearing down chimneys or life-size plastic reindeer pulling a sleigh over the eaves of Manhattan I loved it. I was very attracted to that Norman Rockwellian America that I had glimpsed when I’d visited my roommate’s home in Omaha, and which was on display for me here. That Christmas tour was the highlight of my visit.

The next night, I was treated to what became a rite of passage for prospective suitors: the exhibition of home movies. I have two brothers-in-law, and both of them remember vividly sitting through this cinematic marathon, which seemed to say, here’s what you’re in for if you marry a Wasserman girl; are you man enough to take it? Joe was an avid movie-maker, and a quirky one. When he took still pictures, he typically turned the camera 45 degrees, which weirdly distorted his subjects, and his 8mm movies – hours and hours of them – featured an acrobatic style, to say the least: stomach-churning zooms, dizzying pans, sudden transitions. Of course, this was before the days of videotape, when you could, if you wished, edit your raw footage together in some coherent fashion; what we viewed that night would have made about 45 minutes of family history once the five hours of outtakes had been cut. I will say that all these reels that he loaded into the ancient projector and displayed on the cracked and yellowing screen were in chronological order, so at least we got some sense of the family growing up, the various stages of the various girls’ maturation process – which were pretty much the same in all four cases. Nancy was the featured player; by the time Julie came along, eleven years later, Joe’s zest for documenting childhood had waned. But at family occasions – Thanksgiving dinners, trips to Beulah’s relations in Minnesota, birthday parties, you could keep track of the passage of time by watching the girls struggling toward and at last reaching adolescence.

There was no sound on the film, so all the narration was provided by Joe and Beulah. Often, disagreements surfaced. “And this is Margie, in her pink snowsuit,” Joe would say as a blurry image of an eight-year-old building a snowman appeared.

“No, Joe, that’s Debbie,” Beulah would counter in an exasperated tone. “Don’t you remember? She got the pink one when Margie grew out of it. And Margie got Nancy’s old green one.” In truth, so bundled up were the girls, their faces buried in the hoods of their parkas, that they were interchangeable; any eight-year-old onscreen might have been any of them. The girls themselves, dutifully seated next to us, had little interest in setting the record straight, except for Debbie, who was blonde and had blue eyes and didn’t look at all like her siblings. “There I am!” she’d exclaim, when a clip featuring a raft in the middle of Whitebear Lake appeared, but they were all wearing bathing caps, so you couldn’t be sure.

We had begun this marathon endeavor at about 7 o’clock; by 10:30, we were only up to Nancy’s high school graduation. To say that I cared very little which squinting, smiling nymphet I was viewing at any given moment was the essence of understatement; at first, I was curious about my girlfriend’s previous incarnations, but so generic were they that I lost interest quickly. “And this is when we were at the Rosenbaums’ for Buddy’s birthday party.”  “And this is when we and the Kravitzes went to Lansing for that football game and it rained so hard we just turned around and drove home.” “And this is all of us at Fingers.” Fingers, as I discovered on subsequent visit, was the best restaurant in town; their fried chicken was the main attraction, but the quirky décor was another. The men’s room didn’t have urinals; instead, there was a gushing waterfall that everyone peed into together. I told the owner that it reminded me of the even mightier cataract in the gent’s room of the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, and he beamed. “That’s where I got the idea,” he told me.

There was a single, shining moment during the hours of home movies. Joe had his camera trained on Margie, age 4, who was sitting on the back of a little red wagon. Some unseen hand jerked the wagon out from under her, and she somersaulted onto her head and came up shrieking. Joe, in a moment of cinematic inspiration, kept filming, zooming in, closer and closer until the screen was filled by just her open and screaming mouth – you could actually see her uvula. Nancy and I applauded.  “I wish you wouldn’t show that one to everybody,” Margie exclaimed.