The Swan Thieves

There are some things about my time with Robert Oliver that I have never been able to set straight even for myself, and that I would still like to set straight if such an act is possible. Robert said during one of our final arguments that our relationship had been twisted from the beginning because I had taken him away from another woman. This was terribly, patently untrue, but it was certainly true that he was already married when I fell in love with him the first time, and still married when I fell in love with him the second.

This morning I told my sister, Martha, that a doctor had asked me to tell him everything I could think of about Robert, and she said, "Well, Mary, here's your chance to talk about him for twenty-five hours without annoying anybody." I said, "You of all people won't have to read it." I don't blame her for this caustic, loving remark--at the worst point, her shoulder caught most of my tears over Robert Oliver. She's an excellent sister, a long-suffering one. Maybe Robert would have done me more harm than he did if she hadn't helped me get away from him. On the other hand, if I'd followed her advice, I might not have experienced a lot of things that I can't quite bring myself to regret now. Although my sister is a practical woman, she occasionally regrets things; I usually don't. Robert Oliver almost qualifies as an exception.

I'd like to be thorough about this story, so I'll begin with myself. I was born in Philadelphia, and so was Martha. Our parents divorced when I was five and Martha was four, and my father was a receding figure after that: in fact, he left our neighborhood in Chestnut Hill and receded into Center City, into his suits and his handsome, bare apartment, where we visited once every week, then once every two weeks, and mostly watched cartoons while he read stacks of paper he called "briefs." He called his underwear by this name, too, and once I found a pair of his briefs tangled under his bed with another pair of underwear. The other pair was made of beige lace. We weren't sure what to do with either pair, and it didn't seem right to leave them there, so when Daddy went to the corner for the Sunday Inquirer and our bagels, which usually took him three or four hours, we carried the two pairs of underwear into the back garden of his brownstone apartment building in a soup pot and buried them together between the wrought-iron railing and an ivy-covered tree trunk.

When I was nine, Daddy left Philadelphia for San Francisco, where we visited him once a year. San Francisco was more fun; Daddy's apartment there sat high above a fog-blanketed ocean, and we could feed seagulls right on the balcony. Muzzy, our mother, sent us there on the plane alone as soon as she thought we were old enough. Then our San Francisco visits faded to once every two years, or every three years, then now and then when we felt like it and Muzzy was willing to pay, and finally Daddy faded away into a job in Tokyo and sent us a photo of himself with his arm around a Japanese woman.

I think Muzzy was pleased when Daddy disappeared to San Francisco. It left her completely free to attend to Martha and me, and she did this with so much vigor and energy that neither of us has ever wanted children. Martha says she knows she would feel obliged to do everything our mother did for us and more, and it would bore her, but I think we both secretly know we couldn't measure up. Using her parents' excellent old Quaker bank account-- we were never sure whether it was filled with oil, oats, railroad stock, or actual money--Muzzy put us through twelve years of a fine Friends' school, a place where soft-voiced teachers with perfectly cut gray hair got down on their knees to see if you were all right when someone hit you with a block. We studied the writings of George Fox and attended meeting and planted sunflowers in a bad neighborhood in North Philly.

My first experience of love occurred while I was in middle school among the Friends. One of the school's buildings was a house that had been a stop on the Underground Railroad; there was a trapdoor blended with the floor of an old cupboard in the attic. That building held the seventh- and eighth-grade classrooms, and when I moved up to those years, I liked to stay inside for a few minutes after everyone left for lunch recess, to listen for the spirits of men and women escaping to freedom. In February 1980 (I was thirteen), Edward Roan-Tillinger stayed in at lunchtime, too, and kissed me in the seventh-grade reading niche. I had been hoping for this for a couple of years, and as a first kiss it was not bad, although the edge of his tongue felt like a tough cut of meat, and I could see George Fox staring down at us from his portrait at the other end of the room. By the next week, Edward had turned his attention to Paige Hennessy, who had smooth red hair and lived out in the country. It took me a few weeks, not more, to stop hating her.

It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men--first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over whenever they occurred. (Our teachers deplored this and added extra units about social history and protest movements, but that was still the message of the books.) I don't know why women so often tell stories that way, but I guess I've just started to do the same thing myself, maybe because you've asked me both to tell who I am and to describe my contact with Robert Oliver.

My high-school years, to continue being thorough, were certainly not only about boys; they were also about Emily Bronte and about the Civil War, about botany in the sloping Philadelphia parks, about tombstone rubbings, Paradise Lost, knitting, ice cream, and my wild friend Jenny (whom I drove to the abortion clinic before I took even my shirt off in front of a boy). In those years I learned to fence -- I loved the white clothes and the spongy, damp smell of our undersized Quaker gymnasium, and the moment when the tip of the foil whipped your opponent's vest--and I learned to carry a bedpan without spilling it, in my volunteer job at Chestnut Hill Hospital, and to pour tea for Muzzy's endless charity meetings and to smile, so that her charitable friends said, "What a lovely girl you have, Dorothy. Now, was your own mother blond, too?" Which was what I wanted to hear. I learned to brush on eye shadow and put in a tampon so I couldn't feel it there (from a friend; Muzzy would never have discussed such a thing), and to hit the ball squarely with my field-hockey stick, and to make colored popcorn balls, and to speak French and Spanish not at all like a native, and to feel privately sorry for another girl as I gave her the cold shoulder, if that was necessary, and to reupholster little chairs in needlepoint. At the margins of all this, I first found out about the feel of paint under my brush, but I'll save that for a little later.

I thought I learned many of these things on my own, or from my teachers, but I understand now that they were always part of Muzzy's comprehensive plan. Just as she scrubbed between our toes and fingers every night in the bathtub when we were toddlers, getting the tender webbed places with a firmly wash-clothed finger, she also made sure her girls knew to tighten their bra straps before each wearing, to hand wash silk blouses in cold water only, to order salad when we ate out. (To be fair, she also wanted us to know the names and centuries of the most important English kings and queens and the geography of Pennsylvania and the way the stock market worked.) She went to our parent-teacher conferences with a little notebook in her hand, she took us shopping for a new party dress every Christmas, she mended our jeans herself but had our hair cut at a special salon in Center City.

Today, Martha is glamorous and I am passable, although I went through a long stage of wearing only dilapidated old clothes. Muzzy has had a tracheostomy, but when we go to see her--she still lives at home, with a maid on the second floor and a kindergarten teacher renting the top-floor apartment--she gasps, "Oh, you girls have turned out beautifully. I'm so grateful for that." Martha and I know that her gratitude is mainly to herself, but even so we feel larger-than-life in the little antique-filled living room, we feel large and graceful and accomplished, undefeatable, like Amazons.

But what was all this dressing, polishing, finishing, strap-adjusting for? Which brings me back to men. Muzzy did not discuss men or sex, we had no father at home to threaten our boyfriends or even ask about them, and Muzzy's attempts to protect us from boys were too polite to amount to much. "Boys will want something from you if they pay for a whole date," she would say.

"Muzzy"--Martha would begin her customary eye-rolling-- "this is the nineteen eighties. It is not nineteen fifty-five anymore. Hello."

"Hello, yourself. I know what year it is," Muzzy would say mildly, and go to the phone to order pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving dinner, or call her sick aunt in Bryn Mawr, or stroll down to the lamp place to see if they also repaired antique candlesticks. She always said that she would gladly have gone out to get a job, but that as long as she could pay for our education herself ("herself" meant the oil or oats in the bank), she felt she was most useful being home for us.

For my part, I thought she stayed home mainly to keep track of us, too; but since she never asked about boys, we didn't tell her much, unless the boy was a prom date, in which case he came into the house exactly once, in his tux, to shake hands and call her "Mrs. Bertison." ("What a nice boy, Mary," she would say later. "Have you known him long? Doesn't his mother do the organic-vegetable drive at school, or am I thinking of someone else?") This little ritual somehow made me feel less guilty, somehow actually sanctioned--as the prom years went by--when the boy later slipped a hand down the low back of my dress, for example. As I grew up, I told Muzzy less and less, and by the time Robert Oliver entered my life, I had already spent my adolescence in a world I shared with myself, the occasional friend or boyfriend, and my journals. Robert told me while we were living together that he had also felt alone since childhood, and I think that was one of the things that most endeared him to me.