1
Growing up in Bexley, in the suburbs of Columbus, Pru had been drawn to the older boys, thinking they could take her far from home. Her father was from Brooklyn, her mother from Manhattan&rsquo s Upper East Side, but they met in the middle of the country, in Ann Arbor, at a freshman mixer in 1944. Pru&rsquo s father was studying engineering, and when he graduated he went to work for GM. But he wasn&rsquo t cut out for the auto industry, for its assembly lines and economies of scale, and Pru&rsquo s mother didn&rsquo t like Detroit and its suburbs&mdash Ten Mile Road, Eleven Mile Road, Twelve Mile Road&mdash everything measured in a car. But Pru&rsquo s father was happy in the Midwest, and when an opportunity arose in Columbus, he settled on it. And on Torah Academy, where Pru, as a kindergartner, was dropped off every morning at eight o&rsquo clock.
Pru liked the Hebrew songs, liked apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, liked staying home on Passover and eating matzo brei. But kindergarten became first grade became second became third, and she started to feel constrained. She had an older brother, Hank, but they weren&rsquo t close it was just her and the other students in her class. &ldquo Torah Academy&rsquo s so Jewish,&rdquo she told her parents.
&ldquo Well, it is a Jewish school,&rdquo her mother said.
In eighth grade, on a trip to New York, the students were taken to the Streit&rsquo s Matzo Factory, and to Ratner&rsquo s for lunch. Years later, living in New York, Pru went out to La Difference, a kosher French restaurant, ostensibly high-end, but when she tasted her food, she told her friend Camille, &ldquo La Difference is this food sucks.&rdquo
Pru&rsquo s mother wasn&rsquo t Orthodox&mdash she&rsquo d agreed to keep a kosher home for Pru&rsquo s father&mdash and one time, a friend of Pru&rsquo s saw Pru&rsquo s mother at a restaurant eating breaded shrimp. When Pru confronted her, her mother said that when Pru turned eighteen she could eat as much breaded shrimp as she wanted to.
Was that why she was attracted to older men? If she couldn&rsquo t be eighteen, she would go out with boys who were eighteen. In seventh grade, she dated a tenth grader, captain of the JV basketball team. In high school, she went out with a young man soon to graduate from Ohio State.
She was two months shy of her eighteenth birthday when she arrived at Yale in 1972. There was breaded shrimp to be had everywhere, but a curious thing happened those first few weeks at college. It wasn&rsquo t that she missed her parents, though late at night, listening to her sleeping roommates, she would think of her family back in Ohio and grow teary-eyed. She lay in her dorm in her OHIOANS FOR MCGOVERN T-shirt while Derek and the Dominos looked down at her from the wall. She shivered: wasn&rsquo t it supposed to be warmer on the East Coast? Fall had come early that year, and, walking across Old Campus, she was already wearing a parka. Torah Academy was eons ago&mdash she&rsquo d gone to public high school, where her graduating class had been four hundred strong&mdash but she wasn&rsquo t prepared to be so far from home. Torah Academy had seemed too small and too Jewish now Yale seemed too big and not Jewish enough.
She was no longer forced to keep kosher, but to her surprise, she continued to. Then spring came and along with it Passover, and she was answering questions from her secular Jewish friends, who weren&rsquo t quite as secular as she&rsquo d thought. Why weren&rsquo t peanuts kosher for Passover? Beer they understood, but corn and rice? And was it hypocritical to eat your cheeseburger on matzo?
She was again dating an older man, a graduate student in history, the president of the Yale chapter of SDS. Returning from services one Friday night, she joined him at an antiwar rally. One, two, three, four, we don&rsquo t want your fucking war! Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win! But when someone passed her the megaphone, she handed it back to him because she wasn&rsquo t allowed to use a megaphone on Shabbat.
She did theater at Yale, and when she moved to New York she tried to make a go of it as an actor. Camille had done theater at Yale, too, and they dreamed of starring onstage together. They found an apartment in the West Village and worked as temps. When their bosses weren&rsquo t looking, they would leave work early for auditions. &ldquo Ah, the casting couch,&rdquo Camille said.
&ldquo Would you do that?&rdquo Pru said. &ldquo Sleep with someone to get a part?&rdquo
&ldquo Why not?&rdquo
Pru wondered: Was she less ambitious than Camille? Was she simply a prude?
One day, Camille announced that she was quitting theater. She was tired of temping, tired of auditioning for terrible parts. Secretly she&rsquo d applied to law school. She was starting NYU in the fall.
Maybe she was wrong, Pru thought: maybe she was the more ambitious one.
Or maybe she just clung to things. She had a new boyfriend, forty-seven when she was only twenty-two. &ldquo My God,&rdquo she told Camille, as if she&rsquo d only just realized it. &ldquo Matthew&rsquo s more than double my age.&rdquo
&ldquo Well, good for you!&rdquo Camille said.
For a time there was talk about marrying Matthew. At least Matthew was talking about it, and Pru, flattered, started to talk about it, too. Convention be damned, she thought, even as she cleaved to her own conventions, keeping two sets of dishes, one for milk and one for meat, making sure on Friday evenings before the sun set to extinguish the joint she&rsquo d been smoking.
But eventually, she and Matthew broke up, and she moved uptown and started graduate school at Columbia, in the doctoral program in English literature.
Her first day of class she looked up from her seminar table and saw Spence Robin, her Shakespeare professor, enter the room. He was only six years older than she was, but he was the professor, Columbia&rsquo s rising star, so when she passed him on a snowy afternoon outside Chock full o&rsquo Nuts, she glanced away.
&ldquo Are you pretending to be shy, Ms. Steiner?&rdquo That was how he addressed the class&mdash Ms. Steiner, Mr. Jones, Mr. Thompson, Ms. Dunleavy&mdash doing it with an edge of humor, as if it were a mild joke. &ldquo We do spend most of our day outside the classroom. It&rsquo s not like we just materialize in Philosophy Hall.&rdquo
A gale blew past them, and Spence&rsquo s jacket collar flapped up to his ears. His shock of auburn hair was covered in snow, and Pru was tempted to offer him her hat. But her hat was pink, and if she gave it to him, then she would get covered in snow, and she knew he wouldn&rsquo t countenance that.
They seated themselves in Chock full o&rsquo Nuts. &ldquo The coffee&rsquo s terrible here,&rdquo Spence said.
Pru agreed, though she was inured to terrible coffee. She drank terrible coffee most days, often from Chock full o&rsquo Nuts.
Spence removed a packet of peanuts. It was an old habit, he explained, a product of his fast metabolism. He&rsquo d been so thin as a boy he&rsquo d been sent to summer camp by the Fresh Air Fund, and when he failed to gain more than a few pounds, he got to stay for an extra two weeks.
The snow was falling harder now at this rate, they&rsquo d be skiing home. Pru said, &ldquo Are we going to talk about Coriolanus?&rdquo
&ldquo Do you want to talk about Coriolanus?&rdquo
&ldquo As long as you don&rsquo t make me recite.&rdquo It was what Spence did in class, saying that word, recite, with the same little ironical smile he wore when he called her Ms. Steiner.
&ldquo How about you tell me where you&rsquo re from?&rdquo
Under the influence of the coffee, and urged on by the wind coming through the open door, Pru started to loosen. She was from the suburbs of Columbus, she said.
&ldquo Sounds like a tautology to me.&rdquo
She surprised herself by saying, &ldquo You little snob!&rdquo
&ldquo Little?&rdquo
It was true: he must have been six feet tall.
&ldquo And what&rsquo s in the suburbs of Columbus?&rdquo
&ldquo Oh, just a bunch of complicated Jewish families like mine.&rdquo
&ldquo Another tautology?&rdquo
&ldquo So you know about complicated Jewish families?&rdquo
&ldquo I come from one.&rdquo
This surprised her. With his rangy, slender frame, his pale face, and thatch of red hair, he put her in mind of the Irish countryside. And Spence&mdash she thought of Spencer Tracy&mdash not to mention his last name&mdash Robin&mdash well, you could have fooled her.
&ldquo My Christian name is Shulem,&rdquo he said.
&ldquo That doesn&rsquo t sound very Christian to me.&rdquo
In kindergarten, he said, he&rsquo d changed his name to Spence. At five, he became an Anglo-Saxon, at six a Francophile. &ldquo It&rsquo s the old immigrant story. I was trying to escape the Lower East Side.&rdquo
&ldquo Well, you&rsquo ve done a good job.&rdquo He was the youngest tenured member of the English department the author, at thirty, of an award-winning book a guest on PBS with Bill Moyers. &ldquo You&rsquo re not still religious, are you?&rdquo
He laughed. His paternal grandfather had been a rabbi in Lithuania, but his parents&rsquo god had been Communism. He hadn&rsquo t even been Bar Mitzvahed. One Yom Kippur, he&rsquo d gone to the Museum of Natural History to stare up at the great blue whale.
She told him about growing up Orthodox in the Midwest, how she&rsquo d moved to New York to become an actor. &ldquo So here I am,&rdquo she said, as if everything she&rsquo d done&mdash leaving Columbus, going to Yale, moving to New York to do theater&mdash was in order to be seated where she was now, having coffee with Spence Robin.
&ldquo I could never be an actor,&rdquo he said. &ldquo I don&rsquo t like to perform.&rdquo
&ldquo That&rsquo s not what I heard.&rdquo His lectures were said to be packed to the rafters people were up in the nosebleed seats.
&ldquo Acting&rsquo s different,&rdquo he said. &ldquo I&rsquo m a shy man.&rdquo
Yet here he was, talking to her&mdash talking to this stranger.
But then he stopped talking, and she became shy herself. The snow had tapered off, and with the weather no longer keeping them indoors, she thought she should make her getaway. She got up, and he followed her.
&ldquo That&rsquo s me,&rdquo she said, in front of her building.
&ldquo And that&rsquo s me.&rdquo Spence pointed up Claremont Avenue. &ldquo If I work on my arm, I could throw snowballs at your balcony.&rdquo
&ldquo I&rsquo d like that.&rdquo And then, feeling foolish&mdash she wanted him to throw snowballs at her balcony?&mdash she rushed inside.
###
Growing up in Bexley, in the suburbs of Columbus, Pru had been drawn to the older boys, thinking they could take her far from home. Her father was from Brooklyn, her mother from Manhattan&rsquo s Upper East Side, but they met in the middle of the country, in Ann Arbor, at a freshman mixer in 1944. Pru&rsquo s father was studying engineering, and when he graduated he went to work for GM. But he wasn&rsquo t cut out for the auto industry, for its assembly lines and economies of scale, and Pru&rsquo s mother didn&rsquo t like Detroit and its suburbs&mdash Ten Mile Road, Eleven Mile Road, Twelve Mile Road&mdash everything measured in a car. But Pru&rsquo s father was happy in the Midwest, and when an opportunity arose in Columbus, he settled on it. And on Torah Academy, where Pru, as a kindergartner, was dropped off every morning at eight o&rsquo clock.
Pru liked the Hebrew songs, liked apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, liked staying home on Passover and eating matzo brei. But kindergarten became first grade became second became third, and she started to feel constrained. She had an older brother, Hank, but they weren&rsquo t close it was just her and the other students in her class. &ldquo Torah Academy&rsquo s so Jewish,&rdquo she told her parents.
&ldquo Well, it is a Jewish school,&rdquo her mother said.
In eighth grade, on a trip to New York, the students were taken to the Streit&rsquo s Matzo Factory, and to Ratner&rsquo s for lunch. Years later, living in New York, Pru went out to La Difference, a kosher French restaurant, ostensibly high-end, but when she tasted her food, she told her friend Camille, &ldquo La Difference is this food sucks.&rdquo
Pru&rsquo s mother wasn&rsquo t Orthodox&mdash she&rsquo d agreed to keep a kosher home for Pru&rsquo s father&mdash and one time, a friend of Pru&rsquo s saw Pru&rsquo s mother at a restaurant eating breaded shrimp. When Pru confronted her, her mother said that when Pru turned eighteen she could eat as much breaded shrimp as she wanted to.
Was that why she was attracted to older men? If she couldn&rsquo t be eighteen, she would go out with boys who were eighteen. In seventh grade, she dated a tenth grader, captain of the JV basketball team. In high school, she went out with a young man soon to graduate from Ohio State.
She was two months shy of her eighteenth birthday when she arrived at Yale in 1972. There was breaded shrimp to be had everywhere, but a curious thing happened those first few weeks at college. It wasn&rsquo t that she missed her parents, though late at night, listening to her sleeping roommates, she would think of her family back in Ohio and grow teary-eyed. She lay in her dorm in her OHIOANS FOR MCGOVERN T-shirt while Derek and the Dominos looked down at her from the wall. She shivered: wasn&rsquo t it supposed to be warmer on the East Coast? Fall had come early that year, and, walking across Old Campus, she was already wearing a parka. Torah Academy was eons ago&mdash she&rsquo d gone to public high school, where her graduating class had been four hundred strong&mdash but she wasn&rsquo t prepared to be so far from home. Torah Academy had seemed too small and too Jewish now Yale seemed too big and not Jewish enough.
She was no longer forced to keep kosher, but to her surprise, she continued to. Then spring came and along with it Passover, and she was answering questions from her secular Jewish friends, who weren&rsquo t quite as secular as she&rsquo d thought. Why weren&rsquo t peanuts kosher for Passover? Beer they understood, but corn and rice? And was it hypocritical to eat your cheeseburger on matzo?
She was again dating an older man, a graduate student in history, the president of the Yale chapter of SDS. Returning from services one Friday night, she joined him at an antiwar rally. One, two, three, four, we don&rsquo t want your fucking war! Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win! But when someone passed her the megaphone, she handed it back to him because she wasn&rsquo t allowed to use a megaphone on Shabbat.
She did theater at Yale, and when she moved to New York she tried to make a go of it as an actor. Camille had done theater at Yale, too, and they dreamed of starring onstage together. They found an apartment in the West Village and worked as temps. When their bosses weren&rsquo t looking, they would leave work early for auditions. &ldquo Ah, the casting couch,&rdquo Camille said.
&ldquo Would you do that?&rdquo Pru said. &ldquo Sleep with someone to get a part?&rdquo
&ldquo Why not?&rdquo
Pru wondered: Was she less ambitious than Camille? Was she simply a prude?
One day, Camille announced that she was quitting theater. She was tired of temping, tired of auditioning for terrible parts. Secretly she&rsquo d applied to law school. She was starting NYU in the fall.
Maybe she was wrong, Pru thought: maybe she was the more ambitious one.
Or maybe she just clung to things. She had a new boyfriend, forty-seven when she was only twenty-two. &ldquo My God,&rdquo she told Camille, as if she&rsquo d only just realized it. &ldquo Matthew&rsquo s more than double my age.&rdquo
&ldquo Well, good for you!&rdquo Camille said.
For a time there was talk about marrying Matthew. At least Matthew was talking about it, and Pru, flattered, started to talk about it, too. Convention be damned, she thought, even as she cleaved to her own conventions, keeping two sets of dishes, one for milk and one for meat, making sure on Friday evenings before the sun set to extinguish the joint she&rsquo d been smoking.
But eventually, she and Matthew broke up, and she moved uptown and started graduate school at Columbia, in the doctoral program in English literature.
Her first day of class she looked up from her seminar table and saw Spence Robin, her Shakespeare professor, enter the room. He was only six years older than she was, but he was the professor, Columbia&rsquo s rising star, so when she passed him on a snowy afternoon outside Chock full o&rsquo Nuts, she glanced away.
&ldquo Are you pretending to be shy, Ms. Steiner?&rdquo That was how he addressed the class&mdash Ms. Steiner, Mr. Jones, Mr. Thompson, Ms. Dunleavy&mdash doing it with an edge of humor, as if it were a mild joke. &ldquo We do spend most of our day outside the classroom. It&rsquo s not like we just materialize in Philosophy Hall.&rdquo
A gale blew past them, and Spence&rsquo s jacket collar flapped up to his ears. His shock of auburn hair was covered in snow, and Pru was tempted to offer him her hat. But her hat was pink, and if she gave it to him, then she would get covered in snow, and she knew he wouldn&rsquo t countenance that.
They seated themselves in Chock full o&rsquo Nuts. &ldquo The coffee&rsquo s terrible here,&rdquo Spence said.
Pru agreed, though she was inured to terrible coffee. She drank terrible coffee most days, often from Chock full o&rsquo Nuts.
Spence removed a packet of peanuts. It was an old habit, he explained, a product of his fast metabolism. He&rsquo d been so thin as a boy he&rsquo d been sent to summer camp by the Fresh Air Fund, and when he failed to gain more than a few pounds, he got to stay for an extra two weeks.
The snow was falling harder now at this rate, they&rsquo d be skiing home. Pru said, &ldquo Are we going to talk about Coriolanus?&rdquo
&ldquo Do you want to talk about Coriolanus?&rdquo
&ldquo As long as you don&rsquo t make me recite.&rdquo It was what Spence did in class, saying that word, recite, with the same little ironical smile he wore when he called her Ms. Steiner.
&ldquo How about you tell me where you&rsquo re from?&rdquo
Under the influence of the coffee, and urged on by the wind coming through the open door, Pru started to loosen. She was from the suburbs of Columbus, she said.
&ldquo Sounds like a tautology to me.&rdquo
She surprised herself by saying, &ldquo You little snob!&rdquo
&ldquo Little?&rdquo
It was true: he must have been six feet tall.
&ldquo And what&rsquo s in the suburbs of Columbus?&rdquo
&ldquo Oh, just a bunch of complicated Jewish families like mine.&rdquo
&ldquo Another tautology?&rdquo
&ldquo So you know about complicated Jewish families?&rdquo
&ldquo I come from one.&rdquo
This surprised her. With his rangy, slender frame, his pale face, and thatch of red hair, he put her in mind of the Irish countryside. And Spence&mdash she thought of Spencer Tracy&mdash not to mention his last name&mdash Robin&mdash well, you could have fooled her.
&ldquo My Christian name is Shulem,&rdquo he said.
&ldquo That doesn&rsquo t sound very Christian to me.&rdquo
In kindergarten, he said, he&rsquo d changed his name to Spence. At five, he became an Anglo-Saxon, at six a Francophile. &ldquo It&rsquo s the old immigrant story. I was trying to escape the Lower East Side.&rdquo
&ldquo Well, you&rsquo ve done a good job.&rdquo He was the youngest tenured member of the English department the author, at thirty, of an award-winning book a guest on PBS with Bill Moyers. &ldquo You&rsquo re not still religious, are you?&rdquo
He laughed. His paternal grandfather had been a rabbi in Lithuania, but his parents&rsquo god had been Communism. He hadn&rsquo t even been Bar Mitzvahed. One Yom Kippur, he&rsquo d gone to the Museum of Natural History to stare up at the great blue whale.
She told him about growing up Orthodox in the Midwest, how she&rsquo d moved to New York to become an actor. &ldquo So here I am,&rdquo she said, as if everything she&rsquo d done&mdash leaving Columbus, going to Yale, moving to New York to do theater&mdash was in order to be seated where she was now, having coffee with Spence Robin.
&ldquo I could never be an actor,&rdquo he said. &ldquo I don&rsquo t like to perform.&rdquo
&ldquo That&rsquo s not what I heard.&rdquo His lectures were said to be packed to the rafters people were up in the nosebleed seats.
&ldquo Acting&rsquo s different,&rdquo he said. &ldquo I&rsquo m a shy man.&rdquo
Yet here he was, talking to her&mdash talking to this stranger.
But then he stopped talking, and she became shy herself. The snow had tapered off, and with the weather no longer keeping them indoors, she thought she should make her getaway. She got up, and he followed her.
&ldquo That&rsquo s me,&rdquo she said, in front of her building.
&ldquo And that&rsquo s me.&rdquo Spence pointed up Claremont Avenue. &ldquo If I work on my arm, I could throw snowballs at your balcony.&rdquo
&ldquo I&rsquo d like that.&rdquo And then, feeling foolish&mdash she wanted him to throw snowballs at her balcony?&mdash she rushed inside.
###