Back Then by Anne Bernays

and Swiss. During one party I watched, open-mouthed, as one of our friends lifted a small book from a shelf and slipped it into his pocket as casually as if it were a shell he’d found on the beach. Aware of being observed during the heist, he shrugged and met my eyes, making me an accomplice. Then he came over to me and explained, “They’ll never miss it.”
    We—Francine, Linda, Anna-Maria, a girl named Vera, and I—decided that we were just short of spectacular, miles smarter than our classmates, more worldly, capable of more fun and more profundity. Armed with a sense of our own superiority, we persuaded our English professor, Barry Ulanov, to tutor us once a week in the late afternoon, on the writing of poetry. We met every week for a year, at the end of which we produced a pamphlet of poems, published at Barnard’s expense. Each of us contributed her favorite three poems. The best of the best were by Francine, who showed a genuine flair, while the rest of us had composed competent but uninspired verse. When I showed this little book to my father he said, “People would just as soon sit on a tack as read poetry,” having, no doubt, learned his lesson when, as a young press agent, he himself had contributed to a slight book of poems, called The Broadway Anthology . During our senior year Francine won the Putnam prize, given annually to the creative writer the English faculty deemed most worthy. You couldn’t envy or begrudge Francine her success: she was too generous, lovable.
    Lovable: men turned to jelly in her presence. It was a joke among the rest of us. She would meet a man and within a week or two he was her heart’s slave. At least three men confided to me that they were insanely in love with her and would do anything to make her love them back. Could I help them? I told them, “Get in line.” Once or twice she passed one along to me; I was pale compared to Francine, and they soon lost interest.
    Francine invited me to midday Thanksgiving dinner the year we graduated. I arrived at her house in time to see the cook, looking somewhat familiar and wearing an apron over a black cocktail dress, emerge from the ground-floor kitchen, carrying a silver platter on which sat a glistening turkey. “Marlene has prepared our dinner,” Francine told me as I took off my coat. The cook was Marlene Dietrich. “This is my friend, Ahn ,” Francine said, introducing us. Dietrich gave me the briefest once-over and then, having failed to acknowledge me in any other discernible way, proceeded upstairs to the dining room with her burden. “Don’t mind Marlene,” Francine said, “she’s a bit rude. But she has a kind heart. Cooking is her passion.” I remained unconvinced: Dietrich continued to ignore me throughout the feast. I was upset by her rudeness. Could she, a German and probably anti-Semitic, have known that I was Jewish? But that didn’t make sense: her host, Francine’s stepfather, was not only Jewish but also had a Jewish nose. In my parents’ house the famous were, if anything, oversolicitous to the little girl whose house they had been invited to: movie stars Madeleine Carroll and Edward G. Robinson, publisher Bennett Cerf, and others whose names blossomed regularly in the gossip columns of Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons (some of them planted there by my father). They made a fuss over the bashful child with long braids and polished shoes, who was thrilled and detached at the same time, feeling, too, that she was just another ornament in her father’s house, like one of his pieces of statuary or a painting. The fact that Marlene had acted as if she were royalty and I a filthy street urchin only underscored what I had long suspected, namely that celebrities are long on charm when they want something, short on grace when they don’t. The turkey was delicious.

CHAPTER 2
    When Annie and I moved from East Nineteenth