“To guide our own craft, we must be captain, pilot, engineer; with chart and compass to stand at the wheel.... It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman; nature, having endowed them equally, leaves them to their own skill and judgment in the hour of danger, and, if not equal to the occasion, alike they perish.”
—ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, “THE SOLITUDE OF SELF”
I have always loved the smell of lilacs. They make me think of love and revolution.
I was six years old when my parents took me on the Staten Island Ferry to meet my aunt Natasha and uncle Vuluga.
We stayed for lunch, and as my parents sat smoking and talking with Vuluga, Natasha took me conspiratorially out into her small garden. She was quite old, with silver hair and light blue eyes. The soft edges of her accent caressed me as she proudly showed me the lilac trees in her garden, telling me she’d had them as a child in Russia.
Even then I was transfixed by the story of her life. In the late eighteen hundreds Natasha and Vuluga were part of the terrorist group Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), best known for multiple attempts and ultimately the successful assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia. They were caught, tried for treason, and sent to a labor camp in Siberia for life. Somehow, they managed to escape. They made their way across miles of snow-covered Siberian steppes, crossing Eastern and Western Europe and finally the ocean to settle in Staten Island, New York. The family talked about Natasha and Vuluga in hushed tones of respect and awe. Audacious and courageous, they had put their lives on the line for their ideals.
Before we left, Natasha gave me a sprig of purple flowers from her tree. I clutched it in my small hands on the way home, desperately trying to pick up its magical scent through the overpowering smell of the Hudson River. Natasha and Vuluga remained fixed in my memory.
My relatives were warriors for a cause, but they also fought their own intimate war against cultural expectations. Never married, they lived together by choice at a time when alliances such as those were considered far outside the pale. And in confronting a common enemy, their love was strengthened and deepened.
MY MOTHER’S PARENTS were first cousins. They came from a long line of Russian radicals, musicians, and rabbis. The knowledge of their consanguinity was a cherished family albatross around all of our necks. Explaining to others and to ourselves why so many of us were extraordinarily talented, we would laughingly point to our “incestuous grandparents” as the organizing principle. The uniqueness of my mother’s family was a standard of being for me. Iconoclastic, intellectual, artistic, and temperamental, their lives put most other people’s in soft focus.
My paternal relatives were no less romantic. It was 1879 when my nineteen-year-old great-grandmother Blume Hoffman plucked up her courage, left her abusive husband in Lithuania, and with three children in tow, moved to London. Her siblings went further, emigrating to the United States to join an uncle who was well established in Leavenworth, Kansas. Blume’s brother Dave struck gold in Alaska and begged her to come to the United States, but she had used up her courage and was terrified of crossing the Atlantic. Her son, my grandfather Sam, decided that he would try his luck, and in his early teens he worked his way onto a steamer to the United States, eventually making his fortune in industry.
Wearing diamond studs and cuff links, Sam courted my grandmother Kate, rewarding her beauty by throwing bags of money onto her kitchen table. But I never knew my grandfather when he had money—only after he’d lost it, playing the horses. His nickname for me was “Citation,” after the famous Triple Crown winner, because I was always running about. He would sit at home, bitter and depressed, refusing to work because he considered paid employment beneath him. He is unsmiling and uncomfortable in the photos I have kept, like a deposed king mourning his lost empires.
I WAS BORN IN PHILADELPHIA in 1946, on the cusp of what would always be known as the “baby boom” generation. I shared a bedroom with my parents in a two-room apartment on East Tioga Street with my father’s mother living down the hall. The bedroom window looked out onto another four-story brick apartment building, rows of which defined our young middle-class neighborhood.
When I was a baby still in my crib, I would watch pigeons roosting on the windowsill. I heard them cooing and clucking while I writhed in pleasure at the touch of my parents’ hands oiling me, their lips gently passing over my body. This paradise was lost when I grew old enough to tell my mother that I liked the way Daddy played the drums. The thrusting of my father in intercourse, my mother’s body rising up to meet him, must have sounded like rhythmical music to me. But the idea that I had witnessed the primal scene shook them. I was given my own space, my parents self-banished into a foldout bed in the living room, and my acquaintance with solitude began. I don’t remember whether or not I missed the comfort of my parents next to me. But the separation was the beginning of a lifetime of aloneness in the form of both retreat and punishment.
Most summers my family would take day trips to Rocka-way Beach. One of my mother’s six brothers lived there, and we spent many lazy, fun days at the ocean. The highlight of these days was always the moment when my father took me in his arms to the water. He would hold me tightly as I laughed and jumped at the oncoming waves.
We would take winter trips to Florida. Once my father and I were in a pool and he playfully held me underwater, but he held me there too long. I felt I was drowning and had to push against his hand with all my strength so he would let me up to breathe. He let me surface in time, but I never again trusted his judgment or ability to protect me—in the water, in my home, or in my heart.
Even in my dreams, I was alone. My first nightmare went on to recur throughout my childhood. I walk along a beach, barefoot in a light summer dress. The sky is dark and foreboding and the ocean rises beside me in an enormous, pulsating, threatening wave. It is the color of old meat, and the cresting water creates patterns of stark white veins. I keep walking, my bare feet making patterns in the sand as the wave rises high with tension beside me. It never breaks, but the fear of it causes me to wake in the night.
I WAS THE ONE AND ONLY occupant of my mother’s womb. She used to show me an old photo of herself at eight months pregnant, vainly telling me, “No one knew I was even pregnant, like you weren’t even there.” But oh, she so much wanted a daughter, a reincarnation of her own loving mother, who was her protector and ally against her six older brothers, and who died when she was seventeen. And so I became my mother’s daughter, sister, mother—and her competition for my father.
Born in 1917, my mother was the youngest of seven children and the only girl. She came of age when not much was expected of girls except to get married and have children; her own mother had left the marital bed after finally giving birth to the little girl she’d always wanted. But my mother inherited a love of music, and a frustrated desire to compete, excel, and perform. She wanted to be on the stage so much that she had one of her brothers convince my grandparents that she could travel with a dance troupe when she was sixteen. “Good girls” did not go on the stage, but her parents finally gave in.
Her dream was short lived. The chorus line finished their contract after two months on the road, so her small taste of freedom and spotlights ended. She went back home to fulfill her biological destiny.
I felt my mother’s thwarted ambition, along with her ambivalence. She may never have had the ability to realize her own dreams, but the need to exert influence was there, and when I was born, it was transferred to me. Her ambition for me was so basic a component of our relationship that it influenced my very name. “A star is born—Meryl Holly” reads the first page of the baby scrapbook she made for me. She gave me that middle name because she expected it to be my stage name; she intended to mold me into a performer. I changed my first name to the more powerfully androgynous Merle—French for “blackbird,” I later found out—as soon I was old enough to understand the significance.
She was a good mother according to the mores of the time, but as a child, I couldn’t bear the degree of power my mother had over me and the lack of wisdom with which she wielded it. She exercised the ultimate power of no, withholding her approval and love when it suited her, and more importantly to me, preventing my father from expressing his own love and approval.
We moved to the second floor of a small redbrick two-family house in Northeast Philadelphia when I was six years old. Every night I would wait at the top of the stairs for my father to come home from work, excited to see the top of his fedora hat, which led to his six-foot-two frame, then that invariable smile coming up the stairs to greet me. He would sweep me up in his arms, hold me a foot away, search my face as if seeing it for the first time, and say, “How’s my little girl today?”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” my mother’s voice would call from the back end of paradise. “Do you want to know what she did today?” With a slow, well-practiced disengagement, my father would put me back on the ground and walk to the dining room to prepare for dinner.
As the youngest of seven children and the only girl, my mother was forever “Baby Ruthie.” My father, needing the security of her dependency, reinforced her immaturity, so that by the time he died she could not write a check or pay a bill. After a child’s fashion, she was stubborn, competitive, demanding, and full of rectitude. For this reason it was always she who bore the brunt of my frustration when my will to do what I wanted, when I wanted, how I wanted, was thwarted. I experienced the boundaries of her parental rule as a cruel fortress that I could not escape, and my rage toward her grew as I did.
My father was the parent I always wanted to be with, the one that I most related to and wanted to be special for. Like my mother, any dreams he had for himself had to be deferred and ultimately denied. Because of my grandfather’s refusal to work, my father had to leave school at age fourteen, selling balloons in the street to help support the family. His older brother died at twenty-one from a long struggle against rheumatic fever, increasing my father’s familial responsibilities even more. The week of my uncle’s death there was a funeral workers’ strike in New York City. As a result, my father was forced to dig his own brother’s grave with the help of a few friends.
Leaving school at an early age prevented my father from achieving personal or professional actualization, but in his youth he dreamed of being a major league baseball player. He was good enough to be sent down to Florida to train in the minors, and eventually made it to the tryouts for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the end he failed to make the cut. But my father had the Hoffman business gene, and by the time he married my mother, he owned a toy factory. After a fire destroyed the site and inventory, he spent the rest of his life working as a salesman for various companies.
He was an extremely intelligent autodidact with a book of philosophy always by his bedside. We would share the stories of Sherlock Holmes and recite poetry together. He saw the contours of my fantasy life and entered them, while my mother never seemed to have the imagination or the psychological generosity to move enough out of her own reality to enter into mine.
Beneath his gentleness I knew my father dealt with a deep-seated sadness and rage. He had violent nightmares that shook our household. I would wake up to the sounds of his loud wails and my mother running after him, screaming, “Jack, Jack, stop, stop!” Terrified, I’d pull the covers over my head, curl myself into a fetal position, and try to become as small as possible—invisible—so he would not come in and kill me. He never entered my room during those times, but as with the wave in my dream, there was always the fear of it.
My mother told me that it was the memory of digging his brother’s grave that haunted him, but I never believed that was all of it. Perhaps he felt it was his own grave he had dug as well—his future, his dreams that went down into the red earth with his older brother.
BOTH OF MY PARENTS were victims of the dreadful silencing that characterized the fifties. The collective socialization was so powerful that it could not be questioned, and my parents’ struggle to communicate and express their individual realities mirrored the political context of the time. Their repression was obvious to me even then. Our family had hired an African American woman named Jane to come to the house to clean once a week. As she went about her chores one afternoon, I asked her if she was grateful she hadn’t been alive in the eighteen hundreds, when she would have been a slave. My mother gasped with embarrassment, but I felt that as upsetting or surprising as my question might have been for Jane, my parents’ inability to even acknowledge that historical reality and how it was shaping the relationship at hand was infinitely worse. Anything they didn’t know how to handle was absorbed into the silence.
School offered little relief from my isolation. On Valentine’s Day in the second grade I made as many cards as I could and addressed them all to myself, so that when the class went to the Valentine box to collect our love notes, I appeared to be far more popular than I was.
During the solitary hours I spent in my bedroom I created ways to escape the silence through my rich fantasy life. There, I could be free from the boundaries of my physical self, my mother’s autocratic injunctions, and my father’s withdrawals. There I became queen, king, or knight, able to move and manipulate the world to my way of being. No one could touch me.
This internal world of mine first sprang to life when my father took me to the movies to see Knights of the Round Table with Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner in 1954. I sat in the front row throwing kisses at Taylor while my father sat in the back chuckling. Alone in my room, I was Sir Lancelot, resplendent on a white caparisoned horse. I was Elizabeth I, exhorting her troops to fight the Spanish Armada at Tillbury, with the words, “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the stomach of a king.” I was Sir Gawain the Pure, searching for the Holy Grail. I stormed the ramparts as Joan of Arc, played by Ingrid Bergman, sword high, shouting, “Now is the time. This is the hour.” I rode with Amazon women, hair flowing wildly behind me as I drew my bow to strike. Unlimited by gender, I was Richard III and Henry V, defending their crowns in battle. I would set the scenes in my imagination and speak the lines aloud.
The ancient Greek philosophers said that to “do philosophy” was to practice dying. Our apartment was blocks away from a large Christian cemetery, and whenever I could I would visit the tombstones, imagining the lives lived, trying to capture the reality of death. I had a feeling that I was a changeling, that I didn’t really belong to my time, place, or parents. Where were my troops, my courtiers, my enemies? My demons—anxiety and loneliness—became dragons to triumph over and slay.
WHEN I WAS TEN, I discovered another way to break the silence of my childhood: music. It became my crucible, the stage upon which I played out all my competitive and ambitious drives. It was my family’s way of measuring intelligence, talent, and excellence.
My cousin Marilyn embodied that excellence. She was the first child of my Uncle Harry, and displayed unusual musical talent from the age of two. She debuted at Carnegie Hall at eleven, and by her early teens she was an internationally famous violinist. When Marilyn played on the radio my parents and I would sit in the living room listening to the performance in rapt attention, my mother usually crying. Marilyn had the power to do that.
Apart from the discipline her music demanded she was a wild child, never expected to conform to normal behavior. When we went out to dinner at a restaurant, she would pick up the food—big pieces of steak or chicken—in her hands and chew on it in total oblivion to the rules of etiquette. No one bothered to correct her because she was a “genius.”
I witnessed and absorbed her aura of fame and talent and its accompanying field of exemption. The scene after her concerts was always fascinating. Marilyn would stand in the middle of a glittering group of admirers, smiling tentatively, surrounded by flowers. My father would always bring the largest and most beautiful bouquet. Uncle Harry would come over to us and say something about the fact that Marilyn was very unhappy; she was usually unsatisfied with her performances, and would mull over one passage or another that she felt she had not performed perfectly. Everyone around her praised her, but the only praise or judgment that really mattered was her own. It was a powerful lesson in the ways of the internally directed.
I wanted what Marilyn had. I wanted to be able to do what I wanted when I wanted—to be the measure of all things, as it seemed that she was. So I focused my inchoate ambition and desire for recognition on becoming a great concert artist myself. After many months of asking, crying, and begging for a piano, my parents finally decided to get me an accordion.
I hated that damn squeeze-box; it never felt serious. But I practiced and worked, and in a few months I showed a great deal of natural ability. After my teacher told my mother that it was time for me to get an adult-size accordion, she relented and bought me a piano.
I knew I was very good at it early on. I finally had something special, something that enabled me to stand apart. My mother was not telling the neighbors that I was a genius yet, but I was determined to give her the opportunity. By this time our family had moved to Queens, New York, and after taking lessons there for a couple of years I applied to Chatham Square Music School, a special school to train concert artists. I was twelve when I applied and was accepted.
CHATHAM WAS ON the Lower East Side, and the mix of harsh discipline and Eastern European atmosphere of the school gave me a feeling of being out of time and place when I was there. It was at Chatham that I learned to value criticism and discipline. In the master class only the best students were chosen to play for the maestro, Samuel Chotzinoff. The teachers could compete with each other through the performances of their students. On the day of my first performance, everyone was there: the students who were playing for the class, their parents, and the rest of the school. The atmosphere was tense and expectant as I played the piece I had prepared, the Chopin Waltz in C-sharp minor.
Playing for Chotzinoff took a special kind of courage, as did all of the performances. It took the ability to believe in my own talent and trust my body, trust that my hands would obey me and fly across the keys, that my emotional and psychological states would translate through the music, that the sweat and anxiety would not interfere with the mechanical process of playing, that the dryness in my mouth and the knot in my stomach could be controlled, and most of all, that my playing would be brilliant.
MUSIC WAS A TEST for becoming: for creating, for competing, for seducing, for communicating, for loving, for longing, for greatness and acceptance. While I was studying to be a concert pianist I was also entering my teenage years. I was quite serious about my music, but I soon became aware that my teachers were beginning to look at other places besides my fingers.
I was attractive. My teachers acknowledged it, and I knew the boys at school were attracted to me. I dressed in the style of the times, with a cinch belt, sweater sets, and felt skirts with poodles on them. Everyone wore these things, but not everybody looked the same in them. I enjoyed being sexual, balancing boldness and restraint. The strict conventions of the fifties fostered an atmosphere of anticipation, of going slowly, and I found a strong eroticism in that type of withholding. I discovered a sexual resource I had inherited just from being female: I possessed something that I could exploit, grant, or withhold.
One Friday night in junior high I was invited to a coed party that was hosted by a group of girls from school. Since I was studying to be a concert pianist, my days consisted of getting up, going to school, coming home, and practicing for three or four hours every afternoon. When I was not practicing, I kept to myself and read Nietzsche and George Sand. My bedroom featured posters of Chopin and Liszt, while my classmates peopled theirs with Elvis and other rock stars. I didn’t have many friends, but I felt hopeful about the event that night.
It was a costume party, so I wore my mother’s catsuit, a one-piece pedal pusher outfit with a black corduroy bottom and a leopard top. We all played spin the bottle and turned off the lights while the girls sat on the boys’ laps. It never went beyond necking and light petting, but somehow, by the end of the party, I had a developed a very bad reputation. The story that my top had been zipped all the way down and someone’s tongue had been in my mouth—major sexual sins of the time—spread throughout the school. My reality changed overnight from being generally accepted by my peers to being a pariah.
I was filled with a sense of shame for something I had not done. All of a sudden the few friends I had became unfriendly at school and the phone stopped ringing. One day I went to a girlfriend’s house and knocked expectantly on the door, but her mother appeared instead. She stood at her half-opened screen door, blocking the view of my friend behind her, and said, “Go home. You are a bad influence. I never want you to have anything to do with my daughter.”
I wanted to die as I stood on that stoop. But I turned around, head held high, and walked home, keeping the secret of my shame to myself. At school I was called a tramp, whore, and slut, all the nomenclature of sexual repression. The few friends I had didn’t protect me from those rumors. The bold stares, the faces turned away, and the laughter behind hands hurt just as much.
These girls were parroting the traditional female party line that their parents had taught them: there were good girls, and there were bad girls. They were so easily led by this lie that their friendship and love could quickly turn to disdain and shunning. In a way, though, I understood. My own experiences with my parents had taught me how it felt to be powerless in the face of social conventions.
All my life I have been a target for some reason or other. I’ve turned my ability to handle being singled out into a political attribute. Walking down a hall of people looking at me, knowing what they were thinking, knowing equally that it was not true, and keeping my head up, saying, “I will not show them I care”—it was a painful lesson. It trained me for what I confront now.
I WAS SIXTEEN when my parents sent me to Indian Hill Music Camp for the summer. Set in the beautiful Berkshires, minutes away from Tanglewood, Indian Hill was a kind of adolescent Arcadia of the 1960s for talented young musicians, performers, and artists. Marjorie Mazia, second wife of Woody Guthrie, taught dance while I was there, and Arlo Guthrie fiddled away under the trees. An internationally famous concert pianist named Daniel Abrams was musical director for the summer.
Danny, as we called him, was my piano instructor. When I played my Chopin Waltz in C-sharp minor during my first lesson with him, he told me it made him cry. There it was again, that emotional power, but now the energy of the music had translated into the realm of the erotic. It was the first time I felt the intensity of my own feelings for another, the sensation of not being able to breathe for the fluttering in my stomach, an unexpected inarticulateness in speech and action when he would sit next to me to explain a phrase, or pace behind me, listening, watching me play.
As musical director for the summer program, he was to conduct the camp orchestra at the end of the season, a showcase of the most talented students at Indian Hill. He decided I should study the Mozart D minor Piano Concerto as my performance piece. I took two or three lessons with him each week and practiced for hours daily. In the afternoons we would sit together in two Adirondack chairs on the beautifully manicured lawn in front of the Victorian house where the campers lived for the summer. He would pick flowers and hand them to me while his wife, who worked in the administrative offices, looked on from her window.
There was never any real contact; we merely touched hands. But the power of our connection was shattering for me, and everyone at camp saw it. My passion for Danny began spilling out, and he felt it, too. He spoke to me of his love, his desire to be with me, Mozart serving as the backdrop to our romance. Was this love or madness?
The strength of my own feelings frightened me. When my parents came up on visiting day I told my father about the relationship. He was furious, and threatened to kill Danny. When he went to report Danny to the camp administrator, I was filled with a mixture of terror and relief. Now I could be safe from the intense feelings that were threatening to overwhelm me.
After my father’s outburst, the scandal spilled into the open. It was complicated by accusations from the administration that I was sexually active with a close girlfriend with whom I bunked. We were affectionate with each other, as young girlfriends often are, but our touching was never sexual. Yet for these transgressions I was asked to leave the camp two weeks prior to the end of the season. I refused. I wanted to play the Mozart D minor with the orchestra, and I was not going to give that up. Danny stayed away from me except during rehearsals.
A couple of days after the incident with my father, Danny’s wife, Sonia, approached me. We sat in her light brown VW on that dark, rainy afternoon and drove round and round the circular driveway. “He’s really not in love with you,” Sonia said calmly. “He doesn’t want to marry you. You’re very young, you’re just imagining all this.”
I looked at her steadily. “No. Your husband is in love with me. He does want to marry me. But I will not marry him.” Nothing she could say would move me from what I knew to be the truth.
At the final concert I played the Mozart D minor—brilliantly, to spite them all—with a cadenza that Danny had written especially for me. The transcendent emotional and sexual eroticism I felt that evening was amazing. Our music was all around me: his conducting, his gaze, my playing. Nothing before or after ever reached that particular romantic height.
It was a long way down after that moment. I entered what would be the first of many depressions throughout my life. I slept a lot, ate little, and felt an overwhelming despair. I had experienced these soaring heights of emotion, accomplishment, and power, only to be brought low by scandal and rumor. It was middle school all over again. It seemed there was no exit for me, no one who could possibly understand. I could not communicate with my parents about my struggles, and I still didn’t have many friends in whom I could confide. Having dipped into Freud, I decided I needed to express the imaginative and demonic forces that beset me without the anxiety of being judged. I convinced my parents to take me to a therapist.
I had always been told to restrain my intensity. My teachers had mocked my affairs with history and gazed with gentle irony at my ego ideals. Now my first therapist, Dr. Stanley Rustin, whom I would go on to visit on and off for many years, described me as a “body of exposed nerves.” But unlike the others, he did not pathologize my passionate and artistic nature. He taught me to see it as a challenge and a gift. Our weekly sessions became a kind of pit stop for me, an oasis of quietude, reflection, and sympathy. With his help I gained more power over myself and my environment.
AFTER THE SUMMER at Indian Hill, I attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. A young teacher, Jerome Charyn, was substituting for my English literature class. He had a French bohemian look that I loved: longish dark hair parted on the side, a compact body, and languorous eyes. We only had a few minutes of conversation that day. Then I didn’t see him for a couple of months.
My classmates and I always ran down the hall from gym class; the gym was on a different floor from the lockers, and it was the only way to make it to the next class on time. One morning I was the first one out the door, as usual, a few feet in front of the rest of the roaring crowd. I glanced to my right into an open classroom door, and there was Jerome Charyn, standing and gesticulating a point to the class.
I stopped dead, overwhelmed by my attraction, and called to him, “Hello . . . Hello . . .” But before he could answer me I was knocked to the ground by the rush of girls behind me. The blow was so forceful that I was taken to the emergency room at Harlem Hospital, where I had to have three stitches.
Before long, Charyn and I began meeting in his apartment, or sometimes at the Cloisters, a good place for assignations. It was quiet there, with the sarcophogi and sculptures of the Saints, the Lady and the Unicorn looking impassively at our twentieth-century lust.
I was learning just how powerful my sexuality could be, but I didn’t lose my virginity to Danny or Charyn. No, my first lover was a Chilean concert pianist, Ivan Allehandro Nunez. The announcement that the pianist Vladimir Horowitz was going to play again after a nine-year hiatus created an electrical shock throughout the classical music world, and people were lined up for three days to get tickets. I met Ivan sneaking into Carnegie Hall after we both discovered we were too late to buy tickets. At intermission we ran through the ticket takers and up the stairs to the first box we saw. We caught our breath and looked around at the box’s rightful inhabitants: George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. “Please,” I begged, “We are poor students and we have to hear Horowitz!” They appeared to be charmed by our passion. I was invited to sit down, and Ivan stood behind me as I reveled in the scales of the Mephisto Waltz by Liszt. So began my romantic four-month affair with Ivan.
I had slowly learned to equate sex with power, but fear of pregnancy as well as the feeling that I was now vulnerable to rumors made me feel psychologically diminished after having sex. Though my affairs were intense, sex could make me feel as though someone had had me. After the trauma of being called a slut as a girl, it seemed to me that “giving yourself” to a man meant losing yourself.
I wanted these men as lovers, but I was competitive with them, too. I felt myself to be just as talented and ambitious as they were, but they had egos that had to be nourished. One lover, an Israeli concert pianist named Amiram Rigai, had me turn pages for him when he recorded his first Gottshalk performance. He also told me in no uncertain terms that when he got home he wanted “dinner on the table, not Chopin on the piano.”
I had no desire to be a character in someone else’s adventure. I wanted someone to match me, stretching my abilities and emotions. I wanted more than a lover. I wanted an ally.
NINETEEN SIXTY-FIVE was the beginning of huge, hungry changes for me. Riding into the city from Queens on the E train with my father, I told him I had to go to Paris to study piano—that nothing, no one, in the United States was anywhere near what I could find there.
When I graduated the High School of Music and Art my parents gave me a trip to Europe as a present. I stayed with some cousins in England for a bit and then decided to go to Scotland to visit the historical sites associated with Mary Queen of Scots. I traveled to Holyrood Palace and saw the room where her secretary David Rizzio was murdered while holding onto her skirt when she was five months pregnant. I made more pilgrimages to sacred musical relics: Chopin’s piano in Mal-lorca, where he lived with George Sand; Beethoven’s piano in Vienna, where he composed the Fifth Symphony; Liszt’s, in Budapest. As I put my fingers on the keyboards I felt that somehow I was channeling their energy. I was eighteen, passionately romantic, and greedy for experiences.
Cynthia Colquitt-Craven, a descendant of English aristocracy whom I had met at a local pub while traveling down the Cornish coast, ran a large stable and riding academy. When she invited me to her home for a visit, we became instant friends. I lived in her small stone cottage for eight months, rising at dawn each day to help her feed the horses and muck out the stalls. She taught me to ride and I learned to share her passion for fox hunting.
I jumped five-foot banks, galloped across fields, and tried, like everyone else, to be there at the “kill.” Sometimes we’d pass antihunt demonstrators with signs bearing a quotation by Oscar Wilde, calling hunting “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.” At the time I was too far into the English aristocratic fantasy to relate to the protesters. It would be years before I allowed the cruelty of what we were doing to enter my mind. In the meantime I rode to the hounds à la Tom Jones, in full regalia with a small flask in my jacket for whiskey. At night I sat by the fire sipping brandy with Cynthia and the hunt master, his dogs at my feet after a long day of riding. I learned to play a good game of darts at the local pub and went galloping along the gorgeous beaches of the Cornish coast with Cynthia for pleasure, wild and free.
Cynthia shared my fantasy. Not only was she actually descended from the English Plantagenet kings, but she lived there in her head. We parried back and forth about the most obscure historical facts, quoted Shakespeare and recited Elizabethan poetry, and walked on the bluff where Walter Raleigh had played bowls while the Spanish Armada gathered force. We were sisters and allies in multiple realities. In the years to come, when our lives became so different—I holding the hands of my patients on the operating tables and she always with her horses in Cornwall—that wonderful sense of connection would return every time we talked. With Cynthia I experienced a true sense of trust. It was the first time I’d ever felt that with another woman.
I went to Europe again and again. I studied music in Paris for eight months, living in a room with no windows and surviving on bread and cheese. I attended a bullfight in Madrid, where I caught the ear of a bull thrown to me by a triumphant matador. I lived in Cologne for five months with Walter Kinzel, a German research psychologist whom I met in the lobby of the Americana Hotel. At twenty-two I learned to play backgammon on the QEII from Prince Alexis Obolensky, just before the first international backgammon tournament. He noticed I was traveling alone, and we began a friendship that lasted the duration of our transatlantic crossing.
ALL OF THESE ADVENTURES were self-selected and self-defining. I began to feel that I could make things happen, create realities from the visions in my head.
I came back to the United States when my money ran out and I received news that my father was ill in the hospital. I worked part time, practiced piano, and read constantly. But I couldn’t escape the fact that I was back in Kew Gardens, Queens.
It was becoming clear to me that I would not be a great concert artist. It was far too hermetic, and the possibilities of becoming internationally known were few. It seemed to me that entering this world would in fact be like entering a nunnery, practicing five to six hours daily and giving up everything else. And I saw what had happened to my cousin Marilyn, a prodigy who had the opportunity to become a great solo artist. None of that had come together for her.
Most importantly, I had come to the point where playing music no longer filled me up emotionally. It was too loaded with my own subjective demands for excellence and a competitive edge. I could only touch the pure joy of music through listening to others.
Leaving this identity was an existential predicament. I knew it was the right thing to do, but where would I find the greatness I sought? On what set? I knew that any kind of well-travelled path would be death for me. None of the traditional female roles that surrounded me drew me in. I felt I was drowning in everyday life.
PARALLEL TO THE LIFE I was living, another world was coming into being: the women’s liberation movement was gathering steam. I felt isolated, cast out, and groundless, and I didn’t see myself as part of anything—certainly not the band of angry young women who were calling themselves feminists. I hardly noticed them.
In fact, the war I would come to call my own—the multiple battles for abortion rights—was raging all around me. Abortion was illegal in the United States, and women were fighting across the country in creative, radical ways for reproductive freedom. The speakouts, rallies, and marches swelling in New York City were paving the way for my entrance into a conflict rich with history and full of meaning, with warriors who exhibited the qualities of courage, creativity, and integrity of purpose that I yearned to find and express in myself.
In my early twenties I knew I had the personal power to attract what I wanted, and I was unafraid to engage it. I had been preparing for battle my whole life. I had no way of knowing that a movement, a history, a war was waiting for me. But I was ready.