confessed “stranger to herself,” trying her hand first at music, then at painting, and after getting nowhere with either of those pursuits, turning to poetry and short stories, some of which she managed to publish (no doubt on the strength of her father’s name), but the work was heavy and awkward, mediocre at best—excluding one line from a poem quoted in Miriam’s manuscript, which I like enormously: As the weird world rolls on.
Add to the public portrait the private facts of her elopement at twenty with young writer George Lathrop, a man of talent who never fulfilled his promise, the bitter conflicts of that marriage, the separation, the reconciliation, the death of their only child at the age of four, the final separation, Rose’s protracted squabbles with her brother and sister, and one begins to think: why bother, why spend your time exploring the soul of such an insignificant, unhappy person? But then, in midlife, Rose underwent a transformation. She became a Catholic, took holy vows, and founded an order of nuns called the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, devoting her last thirty years to caring for the terminally ill poor, a passionate defender of every person’s right to die with dignity. The weird world rolls on. In other words, as with Donne, Rose Hawthorne’s life was a story of conversion, and that must have been the attraction, the thing that sparked Miriam’s interest in her. Why that should interest her is another question, but I believe it comes directly from her mother: a fundamental conviction that people have the power to change. That was Sonia’s influence, not mine, and Miriam is probably a better person for it, but brilliant as my daughter is, there’s also something naïve and fragile about her, and I wish to God she would learn that the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations—they’re an essential part of who we are. She would suffer less that way. The world wouldn’t collapse every time something bad happened to her, and she wouldn’t be crying herself to sleep every other night.
I’m not going to pretend that divorce isn’t a cruel business. Unspeakable suffering, crippling despair, demonic rage, and the constant cloud of sorrow in the head, which gradually turns into a kind of mourning, as if one were grieving a death. But Richard walked out on Miriam five years ago, and you’d think by now that she would have adjusted to her new circumstances, put herself back in circulation, attempted to reconfigure her life. But all her energy has gone into her teaching and writing, and whenever I bring up the subject of other men, she bristles. Luckily, Katya was already eighteen and off at college when the breakup happened, and she was old enough and strong enough to absorb the shock without going to pieces. Miriam had a much harder time of it when Sonia and I split up. She was just fifteen, a far more vulnerable age, and even though Sonia and I got back together nine years later, the damage had already been done. It’s hard enough for grown-ups to live through a divorce, but it’s worse for the kids. They’re entirely powerless, and they bear the brunt of the pain.
Miriam and Richard made the same mistake that Sonia and I did: they married too young. In our case, we were both twenty-two—not such an uncommon occurrence back in 1957. But when Miriam and Richard walked down the aisle a quarter of a century later, she was the same age her mother had been. Richard was a little older, twenty-four or twenty-five, I think, but the world had changed by then, and they were little more than babies, two crackerjack baby students doing postgraduate work at Yale, and within a couple of years they had a baby of their own. Didn’t Miriam understand that Richard might eventually grow restless? Didn’t she realize that a forty-year-old professor standing in front of a room of female undergraduates could become entranced by those young bodies? It’s
Add to the public portrait the private facts of her elopement at twenty with young writer George Lathrop, a man of talent who never fulfilled his promise, the bitter conflicts of that marriage, the separation, the reconciliation, the death of their only child at the age of four, the final separation, Rose’s protracted squabbles with her brother and sister, and one begins to think: why bother, why spend your time exploring the soul of such an insignificant, unhappy person? But then, in midlife, Rose underwent a transformation. She became a Catholic, took holy vows, and founded an order of nuns called the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, devoting her last thirty years to caring for the terminally ill poor, a passionate defender of every person’s right to die with dignity. The weird world rolls on. In other words, as with Donne, Rose Hawthorne’s life was a story of conversion, and that must have been the attraction, the thing that sparked Miriam’s interest in her. Why that should interest her is another question, but I believe it comes directly from her mother: a fundamental conviction that people have the power to change. That was Sonia’s influence, not mine, and Miriam is probably a better person for it, but brilliant as my daughter is, there’s also something naïve and fragile about her, and I wish to God she would learn that the rotten acts human beings commit against one another are not just aberrations—they’re an essential part of who we are. She would suffer less that way. The world wouldn’t collapse every time something bad happened to her, and she wouldn’t be crying herself to sleep every other night.
I’m not going to pretend that divorce isn’t a cruel business. Unspeakable suffering, crippling despair, demonic rage, and the constant cloud of sorrow in the head, which gradually turns into a kind of mourning, as if one were grieving a death. But Richard walked out on Miriam five years ago, and you’d think by now that she would have adjusted to her new circumstances, put herself back in circulation, attempted to reconfigure her life. But all her energy has gone into her teaching and writing, and whenever I bring up the subject of other men, she bristles. Luckily, Katya was already eighteen and off at college when the breakup happened, and she was old enough and strong enough to absorb the shock without going to pieces. Miriam had a much harder time of it when Sonia and I split up. She was just fifteen, a far more vulnerable age, and even though Sonia and I got back together nine years later, the damage had already been done. It’s hard enough for grown-ups to live through a divorce, but it’s worse for the kids. They’re entirely powerless, and they bear the brunt of the pain.
Miriam and Richard made the same mistake that Sonia and I did: they married too young. In our case, we were both twenty-two—not such an uncommon occurrence back in 1957. But when Miriam and Richard walked down the aisle a quarter of a century later, she was the same age her mother had been. Richard was a little older, twenty-four or twenty-five, I think, but the world had changed by then, and they were little more than babies, two crackerjack baby students doing postgraduate work at Yale, and within a couple of years they had a baby of their own. Didn’t Miriam understand that Richard might eventually grow restless? Didn’t she realize that a forty-year-old professor standing in front of a room of female undergraduates could become entranced by those young bodies? It’s
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