Before feminism, girls in America were expected to be “popular.” But exceptionally, in my high school, I got an exemption. So, what high school did I go to?
At that time, it was generally thought both democratic and fair to set aside public schools for the gifted. New York City boasted two such high schools: The Bronx High School of Science and The High School of Music and Art. If you could paint or draw, sing or play an instrument, you went to Music and Art. I could paint and draw.
So I didn’t have to be popular! Of course, when the caption under my yearbook photo read, “A good mind possesses a kingdom,” that was going too far, like hanging an albatross around one’s neck. But that was my own fault, for having been too far above it to have provided my own caption, as the other kids knew enough to do.
Eventually, my classmates sorted themselves into the five girls who would become close friends. Together, we participated in “The Literary Club,” with a rotating presidency in which capacity each of us, on our respective college applications, could claim to have served. (We also got a fair number of good books read.)
Looking up at the wide blue sky beyond high school – we each and all intended to grow up to be Wonderful. So, how did that turn out?
After college, Deborah secured a one-year fellowship to study in Rome. I forget what she intended to study. A movie of that period, “Three Coins in the Fountain,” had the theme of three young American girls tossing their coins in Rome’s Fontana di Trevi. Legend had it that, if you made a wish before tossing a couple of coins, and the fountain looked favorably on the wish, you would find your true love in Rome. We were too sophisticated to swallow such a movie straight, but that didn’t mean we were above the wish.
I doubt the fountain had anything to do with it, but Deborah did get herself an Italian true love. During my Fulbright year in Paris, I visited them in Rome. By then they were married, she was pregnant, but alas, her Roman husband had not been the first! He hadn’t been deceived in this respect, nor did he exactly condemn her. He only told her, repeatedly – and in vividly depicted contrast to her own case – how pure and ecstatic was the perfection of a wedding night when the bride was an Italian virgin!
I didn’t know the term “brainwashing” then. When later I saw them in New York, his control seemed tighter and the Fountain of Trevi more distant. But the opinionated, thoughtful, serious-minded girl I had known in Music and Art – that girl I never saw again.
Another in our group of five was Lily. She had been a young beauty and a gifted painter. In both capacities, her method had been simple, direct and intuitive. Like poetry.
She married Steve, her sweetheart from long ago pre-high school days. He’d been more a man of prose than of poetry. Such a husband could have provided grounding and protection, while still respecting her own winged flights in the realm of color, line and vision.
So far as I could tell, it didn’t work out that way. When I visited her after the honeymoon, the colors of the painting she was working on were muddied. Then, in that still-early time of their marriage, a mutual friend had been murdered in their new neighborhood. She pulled back into a syndrome of dread and fear that, in the years ahead, would require periodic hospitalizations.
As the husband of a wife who had morphed into a patient, Steve was what he had always been: a man you could count on.
What about Marian? She’d been an outspoken, politically-committed young woman – farther to the Left than the rest of us. A feature that she’d perhaps kept backstage during the courtship phase of her relationship with Harry. After marrying, she was working at a humdrum job, helping to put him through med school.
We met again after my return from Paris. She told me that Harry had to be very disappointed with her. She’d not proved to be the girl he’d married. Now she was morose, downcast and boring. On my side, I urged her to read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. It had not yet been translated, but we Fulbright girls read it in Paris and discussed it with much interest. From that book, I said, she would learn that her sense of failure was not her fault!
I might have been right, but what actually failed that day were my persuasive powers. She was as implacable in her self-condemnation as earlier she’d been in condemning rich capitalists!
It was a couple of years before I saw her again, this time alongside Harry. Now she looked the smiling, unflappable wife of a young doctor. Either she had learned to prize the life she’d chosen or else she’d erased the memory of the outspoken girl she had once been.
Arlette is the only one of the original five with whom I’ve remained friends. We’ve stayed in contact through the years. She continued to be a very fine painter. Her husband had been posted to a Far Eastern country that, oddly, harmonized with the extremely intelligent, truthful and unsentimental girl she had been in Music and Art. She’s had two kids, and loved them as they now love her. Life doesn’t shock her. She’s warmed to it.
And what about me? Well, if you want to know how it worked out, every step and misstep, read Confessions of a Young Philosopher… and the story turns upward from there … .
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