Composing a Further Life

Nevertheless, there is indeed time now for more. The critical question about regrets is whether experience led to growth and new learning. Some people seem to keep on making the same mistakes, while others at least make new ones. Regret and remorse can be either paralyzing or inspiring.
    Some of my interviews with Dick Goldsby were joined by his wife, Barbara Osborne, and revolved around years of domestic happiness combined with professional collaboration, but when we met separately to discuss the earlier stages of his life, Dick described his first two marriages very much in terms of his own inadequacies and limited understanding, the mistakes of a very young man. Barbara is Dick’s third wife. His first wife was named Barbara Ann, and his second wife Ann, a sequence of names that made for confusing listening, so although he often refers to his first wife as Barbara, I have consistently included her full name for clarity.
    “One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my life was to choose the woman that I married first, a terrible mistake for me and for her,” Dick told me. “I had never had sex before and was desperate to, and she seemed available. So the wedding night came along. She hadn’t grown up enough, and I hadn’t grown up enough either. I was absolutely overbearing, totally dictatorial. She eventually turned out to be an extraordinarily strong person, but she let me treat her that way for eight or nine years. I wanted her to work, but she never really developed a skill that would allow her to hold a job for long, and then, for godsakes, I had three children, one right after the other, and how was she going to find the time to go to work? Marilyn was the fourth child; she came in 1966. These children were all born without our intending them to be born. I was a terrible husband, not a bad father but a terrible husband. And it was a very bad marriage. I was truly abusive. I didn’t beat her up or anything physically, but I beat her up emotionally and verbally all the time.”
    I listened in amazement as he said these things. The Richard Goldsby I know and have known since 1982, now in his seventies, is unremittingly gentle and considerate, and his present marriage seems fulfilling both for him and for Barbara. And ours is not a casual relationship within which a superficial view would be possible. As dean of the faculty at Amherst, I was involved in hiring him and was in some sense his boss; we later coauthored our book on HIV/AIDS at his suggestion; and he and Barbara once rented the apartment my husband and I have in Cambridge when they were both on sabbatical. All these relationships had a high potential for friction. We continue to get together frequently, as individuals and as couples.
    One point of contrast that struck me immediately was that, after two failed marriages, Dick married a professional colleague and peer who evokes a level of mutual respect that was missing from his earlier marriages. Growing up in Kansas City, Dick had been fortunate in finding mentors who encouraged the drive and circumspection necessary for an African American child to realize his potential, and I often noticed a preference for ambition and striving in his descriptions of others. Barbara Ann was clearly highly intelligent, but as a young woman she’d lacked a sense of direction. Dick told me, “I was disappointed in the fact that Barbara Ann didn’t seem to have the kind of focus it took to get anything done. As an outstanding high school student, she had been selected to go to St. Louis University to integrate the place, and she had slept through her classes the first year there. Her mother had then sent her to Lemoyne College in Memphis, where she also slept through class. She reentered college when we were out in California, really didn’t have the follow-through to pass her courses. When I met her, she was doing absolutely nothing. But she was very interesting.”
    Dick’s mother had been a schoolteacher before she married, but his father, who was running an insurance agency that served the black community, asked her to stop working.
    This was a version of domesticity that was still strong in the fifties and early sixties; one that was replicated for Dick and Barbara Ann as he progressed through a series of jobs and eventually joined the faculty at Yale. “Her life was to a large extent taking care of children, taking care of a house, having dinner ready at the time I insisted on, keeping things as