My birthday was on a Wednesday. Mike and I went out to another Hollywood movie that Friday at the downtown RKO Palace theater. I wanted to see “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.” It starred Theodore Bikel, whom I’d seen when I was a kid in The Sound of Music with Mary Martin, and was about a Russian submarine run aground on “a New England island,” supposedly off the coast of Massachusetts. I wanted to see if they’d actually filmed it on Martha’s Vineyard.
While we ate at the Terrace Hilton cafeteria afterwards, I groused, “There’s no way that was a ‘New England island’. Did you see the trees? And the dunes? Nothing at all like the Vineyard.”
Sagely, Mike pointed out, “At the end, I saw the credits; it said ‘Thanks to Mendocino County Film Bureau” or something like that.”
“Mendocino?”
“Yeah, that’s in California.”
“California! Hollywood,” I grumbled. “They never get the East Coast right. Too much sun. I can’t wait until we go back to the Vineyard, to the real New England.”
Mike looked a little startled, raising his eyebrows in the middle. “Going back? When? How long?”
“What, you forgot? I told you, right after school. We’ll probably be there until the end of July. Remember, I said Eddie’s coming with his wife and daughter for the whole month?”
“End of July…” Mike said, under his breath, almost to himself. He pulled something out of his inside sport coat pocket and handed it to me. “Here, I wrote this for you.”
I extracted and unfolded a shiny piece of onion-skin paper from the unsealed envelope. It was prefaced “#34 May 21, 1966. 12:50 P.M.” Typed below:
TO JANIE, ON HER SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY
So.
You’re seventeen.
It doesn’t seem right,
Somehow;
For you to be seventeen,
I mean.
But it’s not the day that advances your age;
Everyone knows it’ll come with the sun,
In the summer:
You’ll be seventeen,
At last.
For you’ll have grown,
And I’ll have grown;
We’ll have grown
Apart.
********
The first two weeks of June, Mike was busy with graduation as well as trying to find a job for the summer. We only got together once, on the Saturday before the end of school. He picked me up, and we drove to his house. Walking in, he informed me, “I’ve got to get my final paper for American History finished, Can you give me a few minutes while I type it out? It’s all done, but I’ve got another due for English tomorrow, so…”
His mother, whom I hadn’t met yet, had come to the front door when she heard the car pull up. She grabbed my hand with both of hers, smiling as if with relief. “Janie? We’re glad you’re here.” She guided me into their small den as Mike raced upstairs.
I asked, “Is this the room Mike sprayed Reddi-Whip all over?” He’d told me that the first night his parents had gone out for the evening and left him and his sister alone, he emptied a whole can of pressurized whipped cream on the wallpaper of their den, trying to write something or other for his parents to see when they got back. They’d had to strip the paper off the walls, and paint the room to cover the stains.
She smiled forlornly, looking a little downcast. “Well, he’s always had his own mind. We didn’t like that, not at all. It was a big expense, but how do you get kids to grow up when they seem to want to raise themselves?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I studied her. Black glasses, white around the edges; dark eyes, firm cheeks and chin; trim, about my height. She walked with authority. Sitting down, she kept he back straight, her head turned expectantly towards me.
“Mike says he drives you to Rollman every day before he goes to school.”
“Yes, I’m finishing my Ph.D. in psychology at UC, and I’m doing the research for my dissertation there. I also do a little clinical training, that’s part of the doctoral program as well.” She paused, collecting her thoughts, maybe wondering how to proceed. “It’s taken me 10 years, since I started school up again. I wanted to wait until the kids could take care of themselves after school. With Mike, that seemed to come earlier than his sister. By the time he was 7, after first grade, he was so independent, didn’t seem to want me around that much anyway.”
“How…um, why did you get interested in psychology?”
“I grew up on a farm, in Iowa. My father was a physician, but he got tuberculosis, and wanted to be someplace that might be healthier. He wasn’t a very good farmer, though, and I think it made him a little bit angry. I also think he was disappointed not having a son. My sister is older, so when I came along, he was all ready with boys’ names, but not girls’, and he never let me forget that. He never made me act like a boy not anything like that, but he didn’t treat me, or my sister, with the respect I saw him give even the farm hands. My mother, the same way. We, the three of us, talked about that a lot when he wasn’t around, about what made men act like they could lord it over women, that we couldn’t grow up, say, to be a doctor like he was. I think that’s what made me start wondering about why people do what they do, and about how to help people change themselves.”
This woman was not like the moms I knew growing up. I got the sense she was proud of her son, and cared about where he was going in life, that he be a success in his life. But she also had an ambitious plan for her life, apart from her husband and her children.
“So how did you finally become a psychologist?”
“I went off to college at the state university in Iowa, and majored in Psychology. It was the depression, and I had to have money, so I went back to Omaha, across the river from where I grew up, and got a job in a bank. I met Mike’s father there, and then the war came. We got married right away. I can’t remember if it was because he went to the Naval Academy for two years before his eyes went bad, or his age, or his work as an engineer, but he didn’t have to serve. Instead, we went to Boston, to Lynn, where General Electric was starting to build jet engines in a factory there. Women were working too, everybody had to work, and I got a job in a lab at Harvard where they were studying how the brain reacts to sounds, to try and prevent concussive injuries from all the bombs soldiers were exposed to. The Harvard Acoustics Lab, it was called. The head man there saw my interest in psychology and suggested I enroll for a Master’s. Of course, women couldn’t get into Harvard, but you know about Radcliffe, don’t you? I was one of the first to be a graduate student at Harvard through their women’s college. I finished in 1946, and wanted to go on for a doctorate. But, kids came along, we moved here when GE built a new plant, so I had to wait ten years to start up again.”
I wanted to hear more. She had such a clear sense of who she was, a strong will, someone who would not give up, ever. But Mike came down, saying, “OK, done. Come on, let’s go.” He didn’t acknowledge his mother as he breezed through the kitchen to the garage.
Sternly, she called after him, “When are you going to be back, Michael?” He rolled his eyes, sighed through his nose and said, “Don’t worry about me. ” A couple of beats later, he begrudgingly added, “We’re gonna go to Clifton, see some friends there. I’ll be back this evening.”