In 1953, nine years before I was born, my father fell in love with a young woman named Dorothy Gribetz. She was a beautiful Orthodox Jewish girl who was, at twenty-seven, startlingly old to still be single in the moneyed religious urban world of my father and his family. My father was fresh out of a miserable marriage, stinging from a custody battle for his six-year-old daughter, Susie.
He married Dorothy in the living room of her parents' modest Brooklyn apartment on April 11, 1954. She wore ivory satin, and carried a bouquet of pale flowers streaming with ribbons. Her enormous blue-green eyes were hidden beneath her veil and a tiara rested on her dark, wavy hair. My father was handsome in a morning coat and silk ascot. His best friend and best man, Danny Schacter, stood behind him. The rabbi placed a glass wrapped in a cloth napkin on the floor, and my father raised his foot to perform the ritual that ends every Jewish wedding. He stamped hard and smashed the glass. The guests shouted "Mazel tov!" and applauded as he and Dorothy kissed.
My father was beginning his marriage with a secret that only a few people shared. At the end of the evening, after the dancing, cigars, and toasts-when he and Dorothy ran laughing out of the building and into the brand-new Oldsmobile coupe her father had given them as a wedding gift-Dorothy was bundled up in her sealskin coat and jaunty hat. A bit of black netting drifted over her pretty eyes. She looked the way any bride might, embarking on a life filled with plans and expectations.
Dorothy was my father's second wife. My mother was his third. I was seventeen before I ever knew Dorothy had existed. My half sister, Susie, let it slip one day. "Once, when Dad, Dorothy, and I were upstate," she began, and I interrupted her: "Who's Dorothy?" The few details I learned that day of this marriage of my father's, a marriage so painful he never spoke of it, were all I knew for a long time. But, still, it made deep, emotional sense to me. My father had been missing for most of my childhood. He had retreated behind a wall of pills and prayer. Occasionally, playing ball with him in the back yard on a beautiful summer morning, I would catch a glimpse of the young man he must once have been – a deep belly laugh, a crushing hug, a sudden sparkle in his eyes – and I would want to reach out and hold onto him and to make things better for him, without ever knowing what had gone wrong.
In a photograph snapped seconds before I was married last year, I am standing next to my husband-to-be under a canopy draped with my late father's ivory-and-white-striped tallis. In front of us, the rabbi recites a blessing. My heart is racing. I know this isn't a case of premarital jitters. I have no second thoughts, no doubts about the man I'm about to marry. Before we leave for Paris, I call my doctor and ask for a prescription for tranquilizers. I have never taken pills before. Pills make me think of my father. He was addicted to Valium, Percodan, and Empirin for most of his life. I have a childhood memory of him sitting at the kitchen table in front of a lazy Susan filled with prescription bottles, checking his pulse, two fingers pressed against the side of his neck, his face contorted with fear. I spend my honeymoon certain that I'm about to die. I feel this not in an abstract, intellectual way but in my bones. And I take the first tranquilizer of my life in order to get on the plane home.
I have been married three times – once at nineteen, then at twenty-eight, and now, for the third time, at thirty-five. My first husband was a shop owner, a boyish free spirit. He took off on buying trips for months at a time. I was a teen-ager, unprepared for marriage or solitude. I threw dinner parties, cooked the one dish I knew, and pretended to be a grownup. Less than a year after the wedding, I left. I don't think either of us was surprised, but I was a divorcee at twenty, and ashamed of it. My second husband was an investment banker. He was exactly the man I'd been brought up to marry: Jewish, stable, financially secure, with a life planned down to the last millisecond. I felt numb. I was giving up at the age of twenty-eight. The marriages had just this in common: they marked the only times in my life when I have been governed by severe, crippling anxiety.
As soon as I met Michael, I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. The insanity of those earlier alliances became even starker when for the first time I realized what love actually felt like. Yet the panic persisted. Why did I equate being a wife with being destroyed?
My father's first wedding, to Susie's mother, had been a gala, candlelit affair in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, marking the union of two powerful Orthodox clans. Elaine Brody was from a textile and real-estate dynasty whose properties included the Essex House and the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Her great-grandfather had been the chief Orthodox rabbi of New York. My father never even proposed to Elaine; his parents proposed to hers. After the wedding, he began to work at his father's silk mill, in Blackstone, Virginia, and would travel there for two weeks of each month. My grandfather was a self-made millionaire, and my father was firmly under his control. He didn't even receive a salary. Whatever he needed in the way of money he had to petition for. When Susie was a toddler, my father and Elaine moved into an apartment on Park Avenue. But Elaine never accepted the role of traditional Jewish wife. She had been a serious pianist before getting married and wanted to continue to perform and even, perhaps, to pursue a doctorate. Nine years into their marriage, my father returned home from a trip to Blackstone to find the apartment empty. His wife and child were gone. The furniture was gone. Only his clothes remained, folded neatly on the top shelves of the closets. Divorce was unheard of in their circle, a rarefied community of Eastern European Jews who had brought their Old World values with them to America. Everyone pitied my father, but also backed away from him. What had he done to deserve such bad luck? Everyone knew something about it: Elaine had always been too ambitious for her own good, people gossiped over ice-cream sodas at Schrafft's or lunches at the Tip Toe Inn, on Broadway and Eighty-seventh. She had left my father without even a bed to sleep in. And then there was talk that she had been having an affair with Susie's pediatrician.
My father first met Dorothy Gribetz at the Brunswick Hotel, in Lakewood, New Jersey. Since his separation, he had been trying to meet eligible Orthodox women, going to Kosher resorts like Grossinger's or the Concord, in the Catskills, or the Brunswick, where Dorothy was staying with her parents. She was devout, educated (with a degree from Cornell and a master's from Columbia), and warm. She was kind to Susie. Orthodox Jews in the nineteen-fifties weren't as strictly observant as they've since become, and my father and Dorothy had a courtship typical of its time. She saved the orchids he sent her each week and pinned them to her bedroom wall. On their Saturday-night dates, after Shabbos, they'd stop into a cocktail lounge for Cuba libres. They'd go ballroom dancing at the Plaza or the Pierre. For a nice kosher dinner they'd go to Lou G. Siegel's, on Thirty-eighth Street. My father presented Dorothy with an emerald-cut diamond engagement ring--and this time he proposed himself.
The summer before she met my father, Dorothy had a cough she couldn't shake. Her doctor told her it was whooping cough, and he hospitalized her briefly. While Dorothy was having tea at the Waldorf-Astoria, the winter before her wedding, my father's younger sister, Shirley, noticed her carefully examining her cup before taking a sip. Dorothy explained that she had caught a virus in Nantucket the summer before, and she believed it was from drinking tea out of a cracked cup. My father's family became concerned. Dorothy would grow suddenly pale, and unnaturally dark circles would appear under her eyes. On the advice of his parents, my father called Dorothy's internist. The doctor assured him that Dorothy was fine.
But a distant cousin of my father's who was an intern at the same hospital had interpreted Dorothy's pattern of symptoms, and he didn't think she was fine. He stole a peek at her medical records, and saw page after page of scrawled blood-test results: she had Hodgkin's lymphoma, at the time a uniformly fatal illness. Once diagnosed, most patients could be expected to live about a year. Not knowing what to do with this information, the cousin called my father's best friend, Danny, and told him what he had learned. Danny was married to the daughter of the renowned rabbi Joseph H. Lookstein, and he immediately went to his father-in-law for advice. The rabbi was emphatic: Danny had to tell my father what he knew.
The wedding was two weeks away. That night, Danny went to see my father, who was camping out in his parents' study, a black-and-gold book-lined room twenty-seven floors above Central Park West. Oil portraits of the Shapiro ancestors – men with white double beards and black skullcaps — hung on the walls. There he broke the news to him. Dorothy was dying. She didn't know. Only the doctors and her father knew the truth, and a decision had been made to protect her. Danny advised him not to marry Dorothy, for the sake of his future--his reputation was already tarnished as a divorced Orthodox man in 1954--and for the sake of his six-year-old daughter, who had already lost enough.
The morning after Danny's visit, my father took a Checker cab to Brooklyn to see Dorothy's father. Louis Gribetz was a short, wiry man, a respected attorney who had written a book about Mayor Jimmy Walker and made an unsuccessful run for City Council. He had studied for the rabbinate. He would have known the Talmud generally prohibits telling a terminally ill patient the truth about her condition. Dorothy was the oldest of his three children. Eleven years earlier, the youngest, a son named Stanley, had died at the age of seven, of rheumatic fever. Louis, in his living room high above Grand Army Plaza that night, explained to my father that he hadn't told him because he wanted his daughter to know happiness in the last months of her life.
My father postponed his wedding to Dorothy for ten days. He had a boil on his stomach, and he checked into Beth Israel Hospital on Friday morning to have it removed, and to buy some time. He didn't get in touch with Dorothy to let her know, and once it was sundown on Friday, the Sabbath, he wouldn't be able to call her until at least sundown on Saturday. In the meantime, his sister Shirley made arrangements to come down on the overnight train from Boston. My father was determined that his parents shouldn't be told about Dorothy's illness. He had been under his father's thumb his whole life. This time, he was going to make his own decision. But he needed advice. The next day, through a series of favors and connections, Shirley reached and made an appointment to see the Grand Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. In 1954, decades before he was thought of as the Messiah by many in the Lubavitcher community, Rabbi Schneerson was already a mythic figure. While my family were considered Orthodox by most standards, Hasidim would have considered them assimilated. The Shapiros and their crowd kept their religious practices private. They didn't wear yarmulkes on the street; they ate dairy or fish in regular, non-kosher restaurants; men and women danced together cheek-to-cheek. Shirley and my father knew that their parents had met Schneerson and respected him, but in turning to him they were moving outside their social circle.
Shirley is now seventy-four, and the grandmother of twenty. Her oldest son is an Orthodox rabbi, and most of her male grandchildren wear payess and dark clothes. I haven't visited her often. By the time I was born, my father had moved--or perhaps was pushed--away from the Orthodox fold as Shirley and her family became even more deeply involved in it. My father had been divorced, then widowed, and had then married a woman--my mother--who wasn't religious. With each move he drifted further away from the Manhattan shuls of his youth and the community that went along with them. "That day, I took a taxi to Crown Heights," Shirley told me. "I was wearing my suit from Saks, but I was worried that I didn't look religious enough to meet the Rebbe. So I had the taxi stop at a store on Delancey, and I ran inside and bought a tichel, a black rag. I took off my fancy hat and tied the tichel under my chin. When I got to 770 Eastern Parkway, I was shown straight into the Rebbe's study. He was such a handsome man, with clear, clear eyes and a snap-brim fedora. His desk was absolutely clean. He sat quietly while I told him the whole story. And when I finished he was quiet for a few minutes. And then he said, 'Tell your brother to postpone and postpone.' "
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