Crossroads

“It’s a fact, not a feeling,” she said.

“What exactly do you mean by that?”

Marion closed her eyes and didn’t answer. After a while, she began to wonder what would happen if she continued to say nothing, stayed silent for the rest of their “hour,” and then left the office without another word. She had enough Sopors to last another week, and she was very tempted to refuse to give Sophie anything more to work with, to make the dumpling just sit there and look at a patient whose eyes were closed, to punish her for not having helped her get better, to drive home how little she was better; to be the person who was withholding, not the wife and mother being withheld from. Each potentially therapeutic minute she stayed silent was another forty cents wasted, and the deliberate waste of minutes was tempting in the same self-spiting way that eating cookies had been. The only waste more evilly satisfying than to say nothing for the rest of the “hour” would have been to be silent from the moment she sat down. She wished she’d done that.

After several minutes of silence, marked only by the whir of dental equipment down the hall, she gave Sophie a half-lidded peek and saw that her eyes, too, were closed, her expression neutral, her hands loosely clasped on her lap, as if to demonstrate her powers of professional patience. Well, two could play at that game.

In the summer, in the early rush of their paid friendship, Marion had told Sophie the truth about certain things she’d outright lied to Russ about, or had omitted to mention and now could never tell him. The principal facts were that she’d spent fourteen weeks in a mental hospital in Los Angeles in 1941, following a severe psychotic episode, and that, contrary to what she’d told Russ in Arizona, soon after she’d met him, she had not had a brief, failed marriage to an unsuitable man in Los Angeles. There really had been a man, who really had been married, albeit not to her, and she’d felt obliged to warn Russ that she was previously used goods. She’d made her “confession” in a legitimate storm of tears, fearing that her having been “married” and “divorced” would cause her beautiful good Mennonite boy to recoil in horror and refuse to see her again. Thankfully, Russ’s forgiving heart and his sexual attraction to her had carried the day. (It was his more sternly Mennonite parents who later recoiled.) She’d believed that she’d become a new person in Arizona, firmly grounded in reality by her conversion to Catholicism, and that the ghastly events in Los Angeles no longer mattered. By the time she gave Russ half the truth of half her story, she’d stopped going to confession.

It wasn’t until she found her way into Sophie’s box, more than twenty years later, that she realized how much she’d needed to unburden herself. Because patient confidentiality was as strict as the confessional’s, she could have safely gone ahead and told the dumpling everything, but some things were only for her and God (and, once upon a time, in Arizona, God’s priestly intercessor) to know. The absolution Sophie had given her was not of her sins but of her fear that she was manic-depressive. Apparently, she was merely chronically depressed, with obsessional and mildly schizoid tendencies. Compared to manic depression, these terms were a comfort.

Up to a point, the story she’d told Sophie in the summer, while Sophie jotted on her notepad, was the same story she’d told the young Russ. It began with her father, Ruben, the capable son of a German Jewish widower in the San Francisco shoe-repair trade, who’d attended Berkeley around the time of the great earthquake. Rooting for Berkeley’s football team, the Golden Bears, Ruben had gotten the idea of starting his own business to manufacture athletic uniforms. The nation had gone crazy for high-school and collegiate sports, and after he finished college he had some success selling uniforms to high schools. The universities, however, were controlled by men from old California families who conducted all their business in the same Jew-excluding milieu. Marion reckoned it was partly cold business calculation, partly social ambition, and presumably some modicum of sexual attraction that led Ruben to pursue an “artistic” young woman from that milieu. Marion’s mother, Isabel, was a fourth-generation Californian from a family whose once-extensive property holdings, in the city and Sonoma County, had largely been squandered—poorly husbanded, inopportunely liquidated, charitably donated to garner status points, inadvisably divided among shiftless offspring—by the time she met Ruben. One of Isabel’s brothers ruthlessly managed what was left of the family’s land in Sonoma, the other was a landscape painter of scant means and little note. Isabel herself had vague musical aspirations, but all she actually seemed to have done with herself was appreciate culture in San Francisco, ride around in the cars of richer friends, and spend long weekends at their country houses. How exactly Ruben found his way into one of those houses, Marion never learned, but within two years he’d parlayed an advantageous marriage into contracts with the Stanford and Cal athletic departments. By the time Marion was born, he was the largest manufacturer of athletic gear west of the Rocky Mountains. He built Isabel a three-story house in Pacific Heights, and it was there, as a rich girl (for a while), that Marion had grown up.