9 – North of Boston
The Spofford family joked that they had lived in poverty in this country for three generations, but fortunately those were the first three generations. The succeeding five generations fluctuated between comfortable and wealthy, never quite reaching that steady state attained by New England’s great bedrock families where the money grew as it passed from one generation to the next, building on itself through trust funds and conservative investments. On the other hand, Spoffords were never financially uncomfortable.
Marrying a Jew was not quite the social suicide it would have been two or even one generation previously, especially since Sally Spofford had developed a Bohemian reputation, as grandmother Bo Peep – a name earned at prep school when her girlfriends followed her like sheep – commented to anyone who cared to listen to her boast about her favorite grandchild. And Ben Shapiro wasn’t too Jewish. He looked almost British, sometimes, dressed the right way. And he was a Boston lawyer. He was not an ambulance chaser or divorce lawyer, although most of the family wasn’t quite sure what he did, except get his name in the Boston Globe once in a while for representing a criminal. It was assumed those were charity cases he took only to please a judge.
Sally was not especially charmed by Shapiro when she’d first met him in college as the Vietnam War was coming to a close. He happened to be lying in front of the doors to the student union building at Wesleyan University, blocking the doors so they could not open. She was so terrified about being asked back for a second interview for a summer position at publisher Houghton Mifflin and about being three minutes late for the interview that was to take place inside the student union that she stepped on Shapiro’s chest before she saw him lying on the ground.
She was unaware that Dow Chemical Company was also conducting interviews in the building. Even if she’d known about it, she wouldn’t have made the connection between Dow and napalm, which Dow manufactured and the United States Army had spread over the countryside of Vietnam.
She was embarrassed that her first reaction was to apologize for walking on the man lying on the ground, keeping her from opening the door. Her second reaction was to feel foolish for apologizing. Her third reaction was to jerk the door open anyway, causing him to roll over, grabbing his side, as she rushed into the building for her interview.
He was being dragged away by campus police when she left the building, a half hour later, job offer in her hand.
Sally was sitting by herself reading between bites of turkey and mashed potatoes in her dormitory cafeteria the next evening, struggling to distinguish Bolsheviks from Mensheviks during the Russian Revolution, regretting she ever signed up for the European history course, when Shapiro sat down next to her.
“Are you going to apologize to the babies your new employer incinerates?” he asked. “Or didn’t you get the job?”
“What in the world are you talking about? And who the hell are you?” Sally was used to boys trying to pick her up. Her long straight blonde hair and athletic build carried her through adolescence with the problem of which boys to go out with and which to turn down. “A book publisher burning babies?”
They’d spent the rest of the evening arguing, he trying to condense a complete history of the Vietnam war and America’s foreign policy toward developing nations throughout the Twentieth Century, she defending this country as the freest and finest place on earth and why didn’t he leave if he felt America was so awful.
They continued the argument over pizza at midnight and scrambled eggs at 6:00 a.m. at an all-night diner. Sally continued arguing with Shapiro, not willing to quit until she won, slowly realizing she wasn’t going to beat this man at what she suspected was a game he owned.
Idealism was not in short supply in the Spofford household where Sally grew up, it was nonexistent. Student council, the glee club, editing the school newspaper feature section insulated Sally from whatever outside influences managed to leak over the wrought iron fence surrounding the Garfield School for Girls, where she’d lived the four years before college.
During the next week, Ben Shapiro introduced Sally Spofford in one strong dose to the heady mixture of political rallies, marijuana and rock music most of her generation had absorbed gradually. She was fascinated by the freedom he offered her, the freedom in which he lived. Fascinated, but not drawn in. She cradled him in her arms and dripped Visine into his eyes when he was tear gassed by the police at an anti-nuclear demonstration, but she could never bring herself to chant those silly slogans or actually carry a protest sign.
After two inseparable years the only thing they had in common was that none of his friends and none of her friends had any idea what they saw in each other. What it was, they came to realize, was that she could drag him back to earth when his plans to run a weekly newspaper in Vermont after graduation didn’t consider who in Vermont would be interested in reading anything he would be interested in writing. And he satisfied a need in her for, if not the exotic, at least something beyond what now seemed the shallow and self centered world of her parents and their friends.
They were married the September following graduation. She proofread historical novels at Houghton Mifflin in Boston while he attended Boston University Law School. He worked for a small general practice firm after graduation. It was two years before he earned as much as his secretary. He grabbed the opportunity to work for the District Attorney’s office when a new, surprisingly liberal District Attorney was elected. For the first time he would be earning a salary at least at the bleacher level of the ballpark of what a lawyer was expected to earn.
It was four years before Sally’s “The Adventures of Ish the Fish” was published. Six “Ish the Fish” books later, her income did not quite match his, but it was enough so that she was satisfied with herself and content with her life, except for one thing. Despite years of writing for children, it was not until she was 46-years-old herself, and long after she’d given up hope of having a child, that miraculously, or so it seemed, Adam was born.
They sold their city condo and bought a small house in a seaside town north of Boston, tucked at the end of a dead-end street, their backyard abutting a salt marsh divided by a tidal creek winding out to a beach and the sea. They agreed Adam would go to Hebrew School when he was older, that he would celebrate Christmas and Easter now and that they would worry about the problem later. Sally ate buttered bagels religiously on Sunday mornings, although she could never get used to the concept of having smoked fish for breakfast. To her, Ben’s being Jewish was one more odd fact about their relationship. It didn’t hurt anything and it didn’t really make much difference. That was why she was so surprised to see him consumed by the tragic events in Israel. He was aroused by America’s initial open-hearted reaction and without even asking her he wrote a check in an amount far greater than she would have approved the night of the All-Star fundraiser for Israel. After the Damascus bombing, she listened to him scream at the television as American hearts hardened and the tide of public opinion turned against Israel. Was his being Jewish keeping him from seeing the burned Syrian babies, she wondered.
Sitting on the floor in their living room, with Adam coloring dinosaurs nearby, she saw the fire from his college days rising again in her husband and knew she had long ago outgrown that kind of passion in herself.
“Turn off the TV,” she said hopefully. “I’ll put Adam to bed then the two of us can snuggle.”
“No, you go ahead,” Shapiro replied, without looking away from the television. “I want to watch CNN a bit more. Geez, can you believe we aren’t sending troops in there. I can’t believe it. We invade every two-bit country on the planet. Why don’t we send troops when millions of Jews are dying? Where are the Marines when we need them?
“And those ships in Boston harbor. I’m going to lose that case. Why don’t we let those poor people come ashore?”
She carried a drowsy Adam up to his bedroom, smiling to herself at her husband calling for the Marines, remembering the man she’d walked over to get to a job interview, a man who would sooner have called for help from a magician than the United States Marines. Has he changed that much, she wondered. Or is it me? Being married to a Jew had been a quirk, she realized, with very little downside to it. She feared that was about to change and she did not know how she would react.
She put her son to bed, then went to bed herself, ducking her head under the pillow to cover the sound of CNN.