The Rubins, Ben and Lois, were our neighbors on Washtenaw Avenue in West Rogers Park. We lived on the same floor in a yellow-brick six-flat on a street made dark by elm trees whose branches met in the center of the road and cut off most of the light even on sunny days, which in the Chicago of that time—the middle 1970’s—for some reason did not seem plentiful. The Rubins, who were about fifteen years older than my wife and I, were transplanted New Yorkers. Ben was a social worker in the city’s welfare department. Lois, who occasionally published poetry in magazines with more contributors than subscribers, stayed home to raise Marney, a child they had had in their early forties and who was now an adolescent. The Rubins cared only for culture and for Marney, for whom they held out very high expectations.
Ben was short, stocky, with a fair complexion, thick sandy-colored hair, and an impressively low hairline. Having lost my own hair in my twenties, I notice such things. He never left for work without a book under his arm, usually a novel; his taste tended toward writers of the realistic school, Balzac and Zola, Dreiser and Gissing. I notice this kind of thing, too, since I’m a high-school English teacher, in those days still working on a Ph.D. dissertation that, what with one thing and another, never got written.
That I was trekking down to the University of Chicago for graduate-school courses certified me as O.K. with the Rubins—Lois especially. She was a snob, cultural division. Or at least I used to think so; in time I became less and less certain. When it comes to culture, who knows, I may be a bit of a snob myself. A better word for Lois, I eventually concluded, was “fantast.” She was dark, with what my father used to call a chosen nose. A few inches taller than her husband, she was rather matronly by the time I knew her, yet with something fragile or vulnerable about her. I’m sure that she thought of Ben and herself, there in the midst of middle-class West Rogers Park, as living the bohemian life.
In their case, bohemian meant passionately artistic. Lois and Ben had met in high school. As Ben once told me, they fell madly in love from the start—and so they remained. It was as if they had gone out on a first date and the date had never ended. One morning I met a tired-looking Ben in the hallway. “Lois and I were up all night arguing about whether Stravinsky had made a mistake late in his career when he turned to composing serial music,” he offered by way of explanation. “Hope the records we played didn’t wake you.”
The Rubins drove a ten-year-old Dodge, and they didn’t seem to care much about clothes or other possessions. Not that it was any of my business, but they seemed to spend a great deal of money on tickets: they were subscribers to the Chicago Symphony, the Lyric Opera, the Ravinia Festival in the summer, the Goodman, and just about every other small theater company in Chicago. They were always going off to a production of Beckett or Ionesco, or traipsing down to the Art Institute or a gallery on Michigan Avenue or to catch some visiting ballet company. They were that couple you see intensely investigating a Cézanne drawing in the museum, or posing a lengthy and altogether too convoluted question at a poetry reading. Ben often brought along a score to follow at concerts.
I was never sure quite how to take the Rubins. Sometimes I thought of them as purely comical. I remember a night they had Carol and me over to dinner; Lois was an ambitious cook, and it was the first time I had ever even heard of ratatouille or cassoulet. With the arrival of dessert, the two of them fell into a heated discussion over exactly how long the novels of John Dos Passos were likely to last; at some point my wife and I murmured our excuses and slipped away, with their hardly noticing.
But I also found their dedication to culture impressive. Unlike so many who indulged a pretense in that direction, they had made genuine sacrifices in their pursuit of the culture gods, living far from grandly and, in Ben’s case, deliberately subordinating work and career to what he most cared about. Besides, I was in some ways a member of the same tribe. Unlike most of the boys I’d grown up with, who went for the dough in advertising or law or dentistry or medicine or a family business, had I not chosen to teach high-school kids about books because I thought of myself as a missionary of culture?
The trouble was that, for the Rubins, Art & Culture were good things absolutely and by definition, things of which you could never get enough. This belief, when it came to judging particular works or performances, made them strangely uncritical, and hostage to received opinion. They would eagerly compare the six different performances of Death of A Salesman they had seen, beginning with Lee J. Cobb’s, or listen with rapt and pristine excitement to old warhorses like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture—or argue over Stravinsky’s development. What was missing was perspective, discrimination, distance, above all moral judgment.
I once made the mistake of telling them how dreary I’d found Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. They reacted as if I had attacked their religion, which, I guess, is pretty much what I had done. And that reminds me of our one serious argument, which was over none other than Mrs. Woolf herself. In doing research for my abandoned dissertation, which was about anti-Semitism in 20th-century British and American literature, I had discovered how virulent the anti-Semitic strain ran in Virginia Woolf. In her diaries (I had been allowed a look at the manuscripts), few Jews were permitted to pass unspat upon. I supplied chapter and verse to Ben and Lois, who really, I sensed, preferred not to hear it. “And yet,” Lois said, piously, “her opinions are one thing, her art another. To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves: noble books that will live forever.”
“Trust the tale, not the teller,” Ben put in. “That’s D.H. Lawrence’s advice.”
“Another Jew-hater, by the way,” I said.
“And one of the most powerful novelists of the modern movement,” Lois replied.
This could easily have turned into one of those relationship-ending discussions, but I wasn’t eager to be living next door to people with whom I wasn’t on speaking terms. The subject was immensely complicated, I suggested, and let it go at that.
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The reason I came to know so much about the Rubins attending all those plays, concerts, poetry readings, and the rest is that, when they did so during the middle of the week, they would often ask Carol and me to look in on Marney. On weekends they usually arranged to take her with them. What Marney got out of all this I couldn’t say. She seemed to go along with the program. Sometimes, when her parents were out during the week, she would study over at our place. Carol, a psychiatric social worker, thought Marney was the indirect victim of parents who loved each other too much—too much, that is, for there to be enough love left over for anyone else.
I myself found it hard to gain Marney’s attention. She was never rude or contemptuous toward adults the way teenagers were beginning to be, but something about her always seemed to be elsewhere. Although she went to Mather High, where I taught, she was never in any of my classes. Other teachers told me she seemed bright enough but far from fully engaged.
Short, round-shouldered, rather bulky, with mousey blond hair and dark eyes that never quite looked at you, Marney Rubin, whenever I spotted her in the halls of Mather, seemed lost. She dressed without apparent concern for what she was wearing. Boys could have taken no interest in her, and in their crude adolescent way no doubt referred to her (I hoped only behind her back) as a dog or a pig. So unexpressive did she seem, so unforthcoming, that one couldn’t even quite tell whether she was unhappy or just terminally bored. Not notably cheerful myself, I made an effort to greet her on an upbeat note whenever I passed her at school or in the foyer of our building on Washtenaw. All without much success.
Ben and Lois always spoke of their daughter with an air of promise. They never directly said they hoped she would become an artist, but that is what we assumed. Carol and I had stood by as poor Marney was put through piano and then cello and then flute lessons. “She doesn’t have a musical bone in her body,” said Carol, who had studied piano for more than a decade. Then they sent her to drawing classes for children at the Art Institute. Saddest of all was the sight of poor shapeless Marney, in her tutu, being driven off by Lois in the old Dodge to ballet class at Miss Olga’s, a storefront studio on Devon Avenue near Sacramento.
I’ve taught lots of teenage girls, and they tend to fall into one of two categories: perky or sulky. Some do perky and sulky both, several times a day. Sulky also comes in two modes, ticked-off and passive. Marney did passive sulky. Even her posture suggested passivity, shoulders hunched forward, eyes down.
The Rubins were one of the few families—perhaps the only one—in West Rogers Park who would have welcomed a struggling poet or painter for a son-in-law. From squibs of conversation, they made it fairly clear that they looked down on all those petit bourgeois Jewish parents longing for sons-in-law who were physicians or lawyers or other “professional men.” Their own daughter was cut out for something more elevated. I suppose all parents invest in their children the aspirations they themselves have not been able to realize, and in that respect the Rubins were no different from most. I myself imagined Marney going on to a dullish job as a file clerk or an office temp, and with luck marrying an accountant or maybe an insurance man—with luck, as I say.
After graduating from Mather just below the top half of her class, Marney went on to the University of Illinois in Chicago, each weekday morning taking the Devon bus to the Loyola El and then catching another bus to Halsted Street, there to submerge herself in the school’s morose gray concrete buildings. When I asked her what she was studying, she said she was an English major.
“An English major,” I said. “Really? In what regiment?” The joke elicited a little smile, the first I could recall in all our years as neighbors.
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Only in her second year at college did I begin to note a change in Marney. She suddenly seemed, I won’t say calmer—she was always a little too calm for my taste—but looser, more relaxed. She began to stand up straighter, and even started to greet me in the hallway or on our common back porch. These days she was toting around a guitar, her parents’ latest musical idea; soon, Carol and I joked, the poor girl would be reduced to castanets and a triangle. But Carol also thought something radical had happened in Marney’s life; perhaps, she suggested, a boyfriend.
On a snowy night in February, coming back from a late movie at the Nortown, I dropped Carol off in front of our building and went in search of a parking space. I must have been twenty minutes looking. As I finally climbed up the front-hall stairs to our apartment, I couldn’t help noticing a couple—Marney and who else?—planted before the Rubins’ front door, kissing. It was impossible to avoid disturbing them without walking back downstairs and around to the back of the building, so I soldiered on, making a great throat-clearing noise to announce my presence. Marney and her boyfriend unclenched. Only it wasn’t a boy she had been kissing, but a young woman, tall and slender, with black hair cut short, wearing a peacoat with the collar turned up.
I believe Marney said “Good evening, Mr. Greenberg,” but I’m not sure about that. I fumbled with my key in the lock and finally made it into our apartment. “Jesus, Carol,” I called out, “you aren’t going to believe what I just saw.”
Carol was in her nightgown and robe. “I can’t imagine,” she said, “except that you look two steps from a stroke.”
“I just saw Marney Rubin being made love to in the hallway by another girl. She’s a lesbian, for God’s sake. Our little Marney’s a lesbian.”
Carol didn’t seem sufficiently shocked. But then, as a working psychologist, she did not shock easily.
“Really? Are you sure it was a girl?”
“Absolutely sure,” I said. “And not too good-looking a one, either.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about the looks,” Carol said, “since it’s pretty clear that you aren’t going to be asked to sleep with her.” She’s good at defusing me, my wife.
“I wonder if the Rubins know?”
“And if they do? What can they do but accept it? They really haven’t a choice.”
“I feel sorry for Marney,” I said. “If Lois and Ben come crying the blues to us, I can always remind them that Virginia Woolf was a lesbian.”
“Try not to add that she killed herself.”
Carol had a theory about homosexuality. She thought that gay men were born and lesbians were made. Genetics played an operative role in turning a man gay, but it was often life’s experiences that turned a woman lesbian. Almost uniformly, it seemed, her lesbian patients had had terrible relationships with men or else thought themselves insufficiently attractive and had given up in the battle of the sexes before it really began.
Which, I wondered, was the case with Marney? Even though I had watched her growing up, I didn’t really know her all that well. Falling short of her parents’ expectations seemed to me a tough enough life experience already; I hoped she hadn’t also been brutalized by boys. Nobody, these days, it seemed, got to grow up without lots of complications.
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Around ten the next morning, a Sunday, Marney knocked at our front door. When I invited her in, she demurred, saying she just wanted to ask a favor.
“Sure, Marney,” I said. “What is it?”
“I’d be grateful, Mr. Greenberg,” she said, looking at the floor, “if you didn’t mention what you saw last night in the hall to my parents.”
“Of course,” I said. “You have my word.”
“Thanks a lot,” she said, and turned away, without ever quite looking at me.
So Ben and Lois didn’t know that their daughter, their only child, their great hope in life, was a lesbian. Would they be shocked to learn it? Saddened? Angry? Not in the least displeased? Maybe even a touch delighted, for artistic reasons? Hard to know.
Marney, meanwhile, continued to change her look. From her old drab clothes—ill-fitting jeans, gray sweatshirts—she now turned up in colorful Hawaiian shirts worn with women’s pleated slacks out of the 1940’s or in print dresses with large flowers. She wore shoes of the kind called wedgies and carried large colorful purses. She dyed her hair ink-black, put on blood-red lipstick, and wore dangling costume-jewelry earrings. It became a point of interest for us to see what she might be wearing on any given day. Carol thought she had a wonderful knack for matching unpredictable colors.
I was emptying the garbage on our back porch when Ben Rubin emerged on the same errand.
“How goes it?” I asked.
“Not so great, Michael,” he said. “Marney wants to drop out of school.”
“Any reason?”
“The reason is she wants to go into something called the vintage clothing business with a woman named Donna Salkin, who has a store on Halsted, just off North Avenue near Steppenwolf.”
“Maybe she’ll get over it,” I said. “Nowadays, you know, the kids who leave school call it stopping out, not dropping out. Maybe Marney’s just stopping out for a while.”
“God, I hope so,” he said. “We didn’t raise her to sell schmattes.”
Marney, it turned out, never did return to college. She moved in with Donna Salkin, the woman with whom I had discovered her necking in our hallway, and remained with her for a little under three years.
When Marney finally returned to her parents’ apartment on Washtenaw, she was twenty-three, and physically almost nothing about her was the same. She had shed twenty pounds, her old slumping posture was entirely gone, she had a good short haircut, very chic. I was taken by the daily pageant of her shoes, which were always unpredictable and often amusing: for example, she removed the tops from a pair of old Chuck Taylor white Converse gym shoes and used them to cover over a pair of black three-inch heels. Carol learned that she and her partner had broken up, but Marney seemed not in the least troubled by it.
One day the teenage girl who had been unable to look me in the eye rang our back doorbell and asked if we had a free ten or fifteen minutes. There was something she wanted to discuss with us. What she was after, it turned out when the three of us were seated at our kitchen table, was any thoughts we might have about financing for an idea she had.
“What I have in mind is making vintage clothes and shoes, but making them new, and at a very reasonable price,” she said. “I plan to call my company Gladrags & Kicks. The market is women my age who find raffish clothes fun. I really think they’ll go for it in a big way. I really do, or I wouldn’t have come to you.”
“What kind of money are you talking about, Marney?” I asked.
“To get off the ground, about a hundred and fifty-thousand dollars.”
“Have you talked to your parents about this?” Carol asked.
“They think it’s a big mistake. They’d like me to go back to school, finish my degree, and after that they want me to go to the University of Florida for a master’s degree in arts administration. I can’t think of anything that would interest me less.”
“I’m sure they intend the best for you,” I put in, platitudinously.
“I’m afraid I’m not at all the daughter they wanted,” Marney said. “Too bad things didn’t work out the way they hoped. It used to hurt me that they didn’t.”
“We don’t have that kind of money,” Carol said. “But I have a cousin who’s gotten rich in the commodities market. He currently calls himself a venture capitalist, and he’s always on the lookout for private companies to invest in. Let me see if he’s interested.”
“I really appreciate your taking all this seriously,” Marney said. “It means a lot to me.”
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The cousin Carol mentioned was Earle Diamond, her Uncle Marvin’s eldest son. Not long after dropping out of Roosevelt College, Earle had scared up enough money to buy a seat on the commodities exchange, where he made a killing in aluminum. He had the confidence—the brashness—that early success often gives a guy. He was also, where family was concerned, sentimental. I always half-suspected he couldn’t bear the thought that his cousin Carol, whom he was crazy about, had married such an evident loser.
When Carol called, Earle said sure, bring the kid around. At the meeting, she told me later, Earle grilled Marney intensely for more than three hours, and at the end of the session said: “I like this, kiddo. I’m going with it. Give me a day or two to think about the figure.” Three days later he called her to announce that he was in, and not only for the whole amount she was trying to raise, but for more. “I don’t think a hundred and fifty is enough,” Marney reported his words back to Carol. “I’m going to put up a quarter of a million.”
The deal Earle cut with Marney gave him 18-percent ownership of Gladrags & Kicks, out of which he gave Carol 3 percent as a finder’s fee.
Marney Rubin, to make a long story short, made a terrific success of her little company. Before she was forty, she sold the business to one of the larger design houses in the country for just over $30 million. Fifteen percent and three percent of $30 million—I’ll let you do the math. Part of the arrangement had Marney continuing to run Gladrags & Kicks, at a very generous salary, for the next decade.
So we all had Marney wrong. She didn’t marry the schlubby, dull accountant I had predicted for her. She didn’t become an artist of the kind her parents had hoped. Only Carol, who didn’t predict or desire anything for Marney, seemed to have gotten everything right, including the lesbian question. Two years before she sold her business, Marney married a very successful real-estate developer in Chicago, a widower with two adolescent kids.
As for Ben and Lois Rubin, they are in their early eighties now, living in a retirement home on Sheridan Road called the Breakers. They have a two-bedroom apartment on the twenty-sixth floor, with views of the lake and the Outer Drive, and from their dining-room windows they can see downtown Chicago. Marney pays for the apartment and somehow finds time to look after most of their other needs.
The Rubins haven’t lost their passion for the arts. Every Monday afternoon, in one of the common rooms at the Breakers, Ben Rubin gives a little talk for residents on the subject of a great composer, bringing along his violin to supplement his exposition with brief selections from the music. Wednesdays, in the same room, Lois Rubin lectures about and reads from the modern poets—occasionally, I’m told, slipping in a sample of her own verse. Neither one of them draws a big crowd, but they don’t seem to mind.
On Thursday nights Marney meets her parents for dinner in the large dining room. Sometimes, Marney tells Carol, the conversation is easy, sometimes less so. Try though they genuinely do, the Rubins somehow can’t ever quite disguise their disappointment at the way their only child’s life has turned out.
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