Women Who Leave. Men Without Hats.

Woke up at 3:30AM. Whispered to Ben, "Are you awake?"

"I am now," he said.

"But I said it so softly."

"You have me well-trained."

For a while he rubbed the small of my back, and we cuddled and talked about nothing. Almost like old times. We've been getting along well recently, and part of that — I note ironically — is that we're finally at the same level. Both unemployed, both drifting more-or-less aimlessly, the high points in either life something cute that either the animals or the children did that day. Actually, he is more employed than I am since he started a small computer network business and goes off from time to time to upgrade networks. I sit in the house all day, unless I make an excuse to leave. More and more frequently, I haven't been making excuses.

"I wonder if I'll ever hear back from any of those agents," I said.

"It's been a while," he says. "Maybe it's time for a little note."

"I shouldn't have wasted a year writing that book," I said. "Eating up my capital. What was I thinking? It was an indulgence."

"It's a good book," he said.

"Yes, but so what? There are a lot of good books. I'm an overweight, fifty year old woman and nobody's going to sprinkle fairy-dust on me. Do you ever feel like all you're doing is waiting around to die?"

"No."

"I do," I said. "Nothing pulls me. At any moment I could get up and walk away, and I'd never look back."

He sighed and said, "That's that Vogel thing."

"What? You mean you think I'm clinically depressed?"

"Not exactly. I don't know what to call it. The women in your family have this romantic fixation on getting up and walking out. As though that's going to fix everything. The blood myth or something."

Women who leave...

While I was in New York last summer, I met up with Susan B______, the keeper of the family archives on my mother's side. One of my grandfather's sister, Helen's daughters. A round, plain, serene woman with a bowl haircut, living in a pleasant townhouse in Englewood, New Jersey. Her art is everywhere. Huge, scrappy abstract canvases, painted china, macramé hangings. Presently she's into weaving. She favors purple and green bolts of hairy wool, the fleece of sheep grazing on the cover of some swords and sorcery paperback romance. She's married to a plastic surgeon who dotes on her. (A month or so back, when I was pouring out a carefully edited version of internal angst to Marybeth over beet salads at the Bistro, Marybeth put down her fork and regarded me thoughtfully: "You've only really ever made one mistake, you know. You didn't hook up with a man who could support you. You had the chance, God knows, so you must have had your reasons.")

Susan and I spent a leisurely afternoon leafing through photograph albums and scrapbooks. In the 1920's my great-grandfather, Abraham Vogel — a middlingly prosperous trader on something called the sidewalk exchange — founded something called The League For Men Without Hats. The League was picked up and tossed merrily about by numerous press outlets, even becoming a Talk of the Town item in The New Yorker. Who knew? Among Susan's souvenirs is a studio photograph of my great-grandfather, the patriarch surrounded by his family, all eyes upon the camera. The photographer's studio could have been smack in the middle of the Warsaw ghetto.

There's my grandfather, a little older than my oldest son is now, grinning goofily into the camera. He's got slanted Mongolian eyes and full, sensuous lips. He was the fuck-up, the ne'er-do-well who dabbled in socialism, writing briefly for a radical journal, traveling to Russia, the son who didn't go to law school. Did my great-grandfather offer the chance, did he refuse it? Or did my great-grandfather write the offer off before it was made as a poor investment risk?

There are my two great uncles, serious, Tweetie-bird Herbert and handsome Richard who, with a brief costume change — flannels for the dark suit and tie — could have strolled out of an illustration for an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. There's my great-grandmother. I remember her from my childhood, ancient, smelly, doddering, talking to ghosts in the living room at 79 Lefforts. ("Are they real?" I asked her. I was six, I was fascinated. "Are they people that you used to know?" But she could only shake her head, terrified, backing off from their invisible onslaught.) In the photograph, she's probably the same age that I am now, a proud woman, draped in multiple strings of pearls. And poor Aunt Helen who must have been about twelve, looking startlingly like one of my cousin David's daughters, decked out in a hideous middy dress, the most serious expression of the six.

I looked at the photograph of my great-grandfather, his wife and their four children, and wondered: when did it all start to go so horribly wrong? Herbert and Richard went on to Harvard Law School. Within ten years, both had been disbarred, caught embezzling at the height of the Depression to support their gambling habits. Alfred, my grandfather -- a ship perpetually drifting just outside of harbor -- went on to marry the seriously pathological Henrietta. A dozen years after they were married, he came home from work one day -- he was an English teacher at Seward Park High School in what was then the Bowery and is now Tribeca -- to find exactly half the furniture missing, and his wife AWOL. He was left to raise three young daughters alone.

Etta resurfaced years later, wandering the streets of Miami, smeared with her own excrement. There are very few clues from which to piece together the story of the missing time. Apparently, she'd gotten work as a pianist in a cocktail lounge. She had some talent as a musician -- in her early twenties, she'd been the featured entertainment on a cruise ship crossing the Atlantic. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff was rumored to be onboard, so one night she abandoned the Noel Coward and Al Jolson she was paid to play in favor of Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini's. A difficult piece, I'm told -- Rachmaninoff wrote music to showcase the span of his own oversized hands. One envisions her dancing on the pedals and noodling like a madwoman. At the end of her performance, an ancient, shrunken man in a chair was wheeled over. "You do me great honor," he croaked to the woman who would go on to become my grandmother.

Slowly Etta had succumbed to madness. We're told it wasn't Alzheimer's, but some other kind of dementia — garden variety paranoid schizophrenia, maybe? Somewhere along the way she'd picked up a Cuban gigolo who'd bilked her for all she was worth -- a tidy sum, because the week before she abandoned my grandfather, her mother died and left her a small, but respectable fortune in AT&T stocks. (My other great-grandfather was a chemist who invented an efficient formula for manufacturing dynamite.)

Women who leave. Men without hats. So many stories. And they all culminate, somehow, in me. It's an odd feeling that I can't quite name though I feel it strongly when I think of those old photographs or look into my children's faces.

On the phone several weeks ago, evil Aunt Jane – now an eccentric old woman, a kind of updated version of Betsey Trotwood, defanged and de-toothed – told me, "And I know I'm the only person who remembers little Lynnie slyly hiding the eggs our mother kept making for us even though she knew we hated to eat them, into the drawer of the dining room cabinet. And she's dead now, I'm the only one who remembers that – "

And I thought: voila! That's it. Shared memories create a kind of psychic symbiosis. That's the real diminishment as you grow older – yes, there are the physical impairments, all the ways that the body punishes back for all the times you ignored it while you were young and careless and strong – but the real heartbreak is the lonely guardianship of all those memories, floaters from an increasingly ephemeral past.

Except that it's not only about memories, it's also about genetics.

Max inherited his grandfather's mouth. "Jagger lips," I heard one of
his friends call them. (The same kid who signed Max's middle school
yearbook, "yo' niggah," who lives in a two million dollar house in
Carmel Valley, the contemporary equivalent of Hitler's dream village.)
I like the eponym – the sense it gives of peering into a future I
won't live to see. Long, long after rock 'n' roll has been delegated
to the same wavelength that blasts There's Whiskey In the Jar and
Stardust to mutinous angels, "jagger lips" will live on. Somewhere
Captain Boycott is smiling.

Thick lips are supposed to be an indication of a sensuous nature. I
suppose my grandfather's history gives some evidence to this. In my
possession – how, I don't know, except that maybe nobody else wanted it
– is Alfred's autobiography, three-hundred pages of single spaced
typing, the crowning accomplishment of his golden years. While he was
still alive, in his eighties, he was forever sending off chapters to
distant family members to review. Lynn and Anne both took turns at
pretending to edit it. I was too busy being a femme fatale to get
involved; Jane was too preoccupied nursing the hideous flesh that once
housed Etta. As literature, the manuscript has dubious value. As the
distillation of experience, even less: blessings are often
indistinguishable from curses, and my grandfather was singularly
blessed with the ability to filter out the family darkness, to render
it invisible. Maybe it really was invisible? Or maybe they were
memories that simply did not belong to him?

"Nature," he writes, 'does not neglect her duty of reminding young
males of their primary function in life."

He was describing an experience that happened to him in 1919, his
seduction at age 15 by a married woman.

"In the human species," he continues, " this mission is manifested in
curiosity about the female anatomy, a growing interest in sartorial
elegance and clean finger nails, and a compulsion to grope and fumble
on living room couches and the back seats of automobiles. Social
taboos, of course, vary with time and cultural mores, but sooner or
later all of us come to realize the urgency of our sexual nature."

Performance was libido's tool. Clara was a teacher and cast Alfred in
the title role of her high school production of The Mikado. Soon,
they were embracing passionately backstage. Ever the cerebralist,
Alfred turns his first sight of a naked woman's body into an
intellectual moment: "Arthur Koestler must have experienced the same
restructuring of his fantasy in the light of reality. In his book
Arrival and Departure, he writes, 'Do you know what a shock it is to
see the woman one is in love with for the first time undressed? One is
suddenly confronted with with the familiar face attached to a body
which is a stranger to which one has not been introduced.'"

It was the pubic hair that threw Alfred. He wasn't expecting hair at
all. No one had prepared him for it. Apparently, such depictions of
female nudity as were available to him – Goya's Maya? Manet's Picnic
In the Park? – totally left that detail out.

"Her private parts were covered with a Negro's thatch," he wrote. One imagines he was tempted to use the N word here, which would have been common parlance at the time the sexual encounter took place. "Nappy, crinkely, curly. Quite unlike the thick, luxurious hair that crowned her head."

But don't get me wrong, he liked it. "Lying there open to my view,"
he wrote, "her body seemed so innocent, childlike, unthreatening. Her
fragrance, her breath, her frantic movements drew me into a painful
urgency to crush and dominate. The unobtrusive breasts, the delicately
contoured belly, the slender torso, so lacking in the heavy
musculature of men's bodies, the unexpectedly broad pelvis and thighs,
and the shock of pubic hair – these filled my eyes with a sense of
gratitude as for a priceless gift."