Back Then by Anne Bernays Page B

bring us together; I think she read my parents’ correctly: ostensibly liberal, they were emotionally conservative and maybe even as xenophobic as the generation that preceded them. White girls did not date dark-skinned men unless they didn’t care if they were ostracized. Patsy told me that Anatole’s mother and father were Negroes. “You don’t object to that, do you? He doesn’t look it, you know. His hair is straighter than yours and his skin is white.”
    Patsy and I met during the summer of 1945, when I was about to turn fifteen. We were both at a music camp on Cape Cod; all the students except Patsy and me were prodigiously gifted. Patsy explained her being there by saying her mother needed a summer off. As for me, my mother believed—erroneously—that I had the makings of a pianist—or maybe a singer. The camp’s directors, apparently persuaded that the ability to perform on an instrument is the natural companion of emotional maturity, left us, when we weren’t busy with music, to our own feral devices. The camp issued no rules, and I learned, during those two summer months, as much as I needed to know about the art of kissing, the craft of petting. My parents never suspected the wilder side of the camp they had blithely entrusted me to. It turned out to be a memorable summer in other respects, including, as it did, a fire that threatened to devour the camp, flames leaping and roaring over a nearby tree line and turning the sky orange, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan’s surrender to the Allies.
    After that, Patsy and I spent a lot of time together over the next five years, although we went to different schools and graduated from different colleges. Patsy was so smart you had to watch your step with her, always careful not to say anything stupid because she would let you know whenever you did. She was ash blond and brown-eyed, courted risk, and draped herself in an attitude that my parents—who nevertheless liked her—assured me was a cynicism unsuited to someone so young. My parents had paid Patsy’s passage to Europe; every so often she punctuated her conversation with a reminder to me about how rich, compared with hers, my family was. This made me uneasy, but I didn’t say so, partly because I was afraid of her sharpness and partly because I didn’t know what to say. To apologize for being rich is one of the more stupid verbal gestures; it only lands you in even hotter water.
    Patsy and her mother (her father had split when Patsy was an infant and her mother had not remarried) rented the top floor of someone else’s four-storey house in the Village, a skylit apartment I visited frequently and where we lay on the floor listening over and over to her long-playing record of “Songs of the Auvergne,” music that managed to be ethereal and sensuous at the same time and that ignited buried feelings. Patsy and her mother worked uptown, Mrs. Fitzsimmons as a publishing executive and Patsy as a junior copywriter at an advertising agency, a job she loathed. Her heart belonged below Fourteenth Street. Patsy assured me that Anatole and I would get along just fine.
    1950 Greenwich Village was still coasting on its reputation as the hub of bohemia, although the word was now almost obsolete, having given way to beat or hip , and with this, a fixed conviction that almost anything goes. One of my Barnard classmates had posed nude for e. e. cummings in his Washington Mews studio. Drugs emerged into the open. Delmore Schwartz lived there, and Franz Kline, Ad Reinhardt, and Dwight MacDonald. But the area was dangerous only if you were threatened by uncertainty.
    On the night we had agreed that I would meet Patsy, Milton, and Anatole, I put on a gray wool skirt and a pink Brooks Brothers button-down shirt (styled for women), told my parents I was going out and ignored my mother’s “when will you be back?” I