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Life Stories: How I Came Into My Inheritance & Strangers in the House - Softcover

Gallagher, Dorothy

 
9780812972658: Life Stories: How I Came Into My Inheritance & Strangers in the House
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812972651 ISBN 13: 9780812972658
Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Here are two acclaimed memoirs in one remarkable volume. In an extraordinarily compelling voice, Dorothy Gallagher tells stories taking us from her parents’ beginnings in the Ukraine to her own childhood in 1940s New York, through the many adventures of her extended family and into her own adult life. Her themes are universal: the fragility of friendship, the power of love, the marital crisis brought on by chronic illness, the role of dumb luck at the heart of life–Gallagher dramatizes her stories with acute insight, strong feeling, and edgy wit.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy Gallagher is the author of How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories, a New York Times Notable Book, one of Time magazine’s best books of the year, and a runner-up for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir; Hannah’s Daughters: Six Generations of an American Family, 1876—1976; and All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca, a New York Times Notable Book. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, and Grand Street. She was born and raised and now lives in New York.

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Chapter 1

The Making of Me

I ran into Jack Hoffman on the street. I hadn’t seen him in ages.

We said “How are you?” and “What’s new?”

“Did you hear?” he said. “Victor’s dead. Heart attack. Five years ago.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Really.”

“Dr. Nielsen?” I said the first time I went to his office.

He nodded. He never argued with that form of address.

This was Victor Nielsen, not any sort of doctor; a former opera singer (Danish). Those were the days when anyone could hang out a shingle as a “lay” analyst.

You might expect a Dane to be tall and blond. Not so Victor. He was about fifty then, not in the least handsome, short and stocky, with a fleshy face. But he had a large head, thick gray hair, and he looked bigger sitting down. Sitting down was a major part of his job. Also he had very blue eyes; and his low, well-trained, charmingly accented voice, a beautiful voice, which gave him great authority; and in the end you had to say that, all in all, he was an attractive man.

His office was somewhere on the Upper West Side, Eighty-sixth Street, I think, just a few doors in from Broadway. It was a large room, bright, uncurtained, just above street level. Standing, you had a perfect view of the street life below; sitting, you saw the heads of people walking past the windows. I sat across the desk from Victor. (“Call me Victor,” he said, waving away any need for the spurious title.) I had expected a leather couch, but his office contained only the desk, a couple of chairs, a Marimekko sort of rug, and a daybed with a rough cotton throw, drab blue, as I remember. In due course, I thought, I would be invited to lie down.

Why was I there? Hindsight shows me that I was just ahead of the sea change. Only a few years later, a nineteen-year-old girl—confused, moody, depressed, reluctantly promiscuous—would be engulfed by a culture and a cause—drugs, casual sex, communes, Vietnam; would know what clothes to wear—

vintage dresses, army castoffs, jeans, T-shirts; would know how to do her hair—parted in the middle, flowing down her back; and would know what music belonged to her—Dylan, Baez, etc. As it was, I wore the hateful garter belts and stockings of my time, straight woolen skirts and shirtwaist dresses; set my hair every night to appear as a shoulder-length pageboy in the morning; listened to Frank Sinatra and Vaughn Monroe, who certainly weren’t bad but weren’t mine.

My mother was at her wits’ end. She consulted her cousin Sylvia, the social worker.

“I can’t deal with her,” my mother said. “She leaves school, she stays out all night, she won’t tell me where she goes, she moves out of the house, she moves back in, she can’t keep a job, she won’t talk to me.”

Sylvia, being a social worker, knew what to do. “Send her to an analyst,” she said. “I know someone.”

So now I was sitting across the desk from my analyst, and what did he say to me?

“I’m going to make a real little woman out of you.”

Once a week, over a couple of years, I saw Victor Nielsen. Apart from that promise, which he often repeated, I can’t remember another word of what passed between us. No doubt I talked about my mother, my father, and how they had ruined my life. At the time, I happened to be lovesick for a man who would marry me two years later; in the meantime, he had dumped me, and I was sleeping with almost anyone who asked. Each time I told Victor about one of these incidents, he said, “You have the makings of a real little woman.”

Who was right about this: Victor? Or my father, who had taken to calling me a prostitute?

Well of course I was not a prostitute, although I could see where he might get that idea. If he had known about it, for instance, my father could have said that I once did it for a dime. I was visiting San Francisco, and a guy whose name I no longer remember had kindly taken me to see the sights. We spent a long day together, and then a long evening. After dinner he suggested we spend the night together. I was staying across the Bay, in Berkeley, with my cousin Vivian. It was late, it was raining, I was tired. I didn’t particularly like this guy, and furthermore, I had my period. I thought about this. And then I thought about waiting for the bus, which ran infrequently at that hour, about the long bus ride to Berkeley, and about the walk through the rain to my cousin’s house. The dime was the bus fare.

I had once briefly shared an apartment with a girl who was desperate to lose her virginity. She was very strange. The things that happened to me happened to girls all the time. And it was always easier to say yes. “No” was impolite. “No” would be taken personally.

“Why not?” the guy would say incredulously. “Don’t you like me?” That was a possibility so far out of the question, it had never entered his mind.

Or he might get mean: “Are you frigid?”

Such a foolish girl! So acquiescent to the imperious male. So careful of his pride. One night I let such a guy, prideful, imperious, take me to bed. He was not only married, he was impotent, and he wanted to keep trying again and again. It was extremely unpleasant. Finally, I said, “No, really, no more.” I was very nice. I didn’t mention that I was sore and exhausted and repelled. I didn’t mention that he didn’t have the wherewithal. I politely said, “Listen, I know you’re married; I don’t like one-night stands.”

He turned vicious. “You better get used to one-night stands,” he said, “because that’s all you’re ever going to have.”

You’d think that Victor might have helped me out with these situations.

After a couple of years, Bob and I got married, and I didn’t see Victor again until Bob and I separated three years later. By that time I had a boyfriend named Jack. (Yes, that Jack; the Jack who would tell me that Victor had died.) And here’s where the story gets interesting.

Jack had once been married to a girl named Sheila. Sheila was not happy in the marriage. She went to see an analyst. Guess who? Victor! And guess who Sheila was now married to? Victor! They had a little baby.

“Really?” I said.

By the way, I said to Victor, “Isn’t this situation—you, me, Jack, Sheila, all of us involved in one way and another—isn’t it, well, a problem for you, professionally speaking?”

“No problem,” Victor said. “You’ll like Sheila. She was a confused little girl when she first came to see me, but now she’s a real little woman.” He added, “You and Jack, you come and spend a weekend with us.”

Jack and I spent several weekends with Victor and Sheila. We all became good friends. Of course, I saw more of Victor than that, since he was still my analyst.

One day I told Victor I was tired of Jack.

“Ah,” Victor said.

And it seemed that due course had arrived.

Victor took my hand and led me to the daybed with the blue cotton cover. I lay down. In that position I could no longer see people walking by on the...

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Verlag
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812972651
ISBN 13 
9780812972658
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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