Composing a Further Life

clean and as neat as I thought she should have kept them. That was basically the way I saw her life,” Dick told me. “Now, she was interesting to other people, and so she would develop friends every place we lived, and they would interact with her and sometimes rescue her from this existence she was in. But she always met them through me. We would be invited out to dinner, the wives would meet, they would call each other and they would come over and every now and then she would go over to their houses, but most of the time they would come to our house. That was true in California, it was true in Wilmington, Delaware, and it was true in New Haven. Everything was almost exclusively through me. She had very little life outside, and at the time I didn’t think there was anything unusual about that.
    “I didn’t spend much time thinking about her or her needs, but I was good at pointing out to her what I perceived as her inadequacies! I was an absentee dad and husband. When I was around, I interacted strongly with the children, and they enjoyed the interactions and so forth, but I wasn’t around a whole lot. And often when I was at home I was working on a lecture or a book, and when I was doing this, I told her I had to have absolute quiet and privacy, and my wife made sure that I had those things. She surely did. She developed some backbone about the ninth or tenth year of the marriage and began to come into herself and talk back to me.
    “When we got divorced, I left her with four children and went off to Harvard to do a sabbatical there. They were in suburban Woodbridge, Connecticut, for almost a year, and then she moved the children back to St. Louis, into an all-black inner-city ghetto where they were perceived as talking funny and acting strangely. The kids got beaten up in school all the time. She realized that what she had to do was to impose absolute discipline on them or they might not survive in that neighborhood. And from a distance I would sympathize with the kids when they got whipped because they had said the wrong thing or something. I can see now that she had to be strict to raise four children in that situation without anybody getting in trouble or getting arrested. Not easy, especially for our son or for any black male coming up in St. Louis at that time.
    “Barbara Ann got very much involved in politics. She was known around St. Louis as a tough, kick-ass community leader. People didn’t mess with her around there. She led all kinds of boycotts and that sort of thing. Got herself a job as a court bailiff and retired from that job with all kinds of honors and people saying nice things about her. If I had had the kind of obstacles put into my path that I put into hers, we wouldn’t be having these conversations now.”
    I asked Dick what had ended his marriage to Barbara Ann, and he replied that a chance to make some extra money allowed him to get away. “I had my first sabbatical from Yale coming up, and I was able to make a triple salary that summer. I made a salary on my grant, I had my academic salary, which was paid in twelve installments, and then I had the extra bonus of working in a summer enrichment program for black kids at Yale. I had my exit door—enough money to maintain a family and a separate existence in another city. We never had any money to speak of, not because we didn’t make a good salary. Yale paid very well. I was just a poor financial manager.
    “I hardly dare tell you how I left. The day before I was going to leave, I took my wife out for dinner and a movie, I took her home, and I told her I was leaving. It was just an incredibly terrible, terrible thing to do, to lift somebody up and then do that sort of thing to them.… I was a nice person to other people, I’ve always been pretty nice, but I was self-centered and unthinking and uncaring.
    “I had no doubt that I would continue seeing the children, I loved them and I cared about them, I just wasn’t going to live with her anymore. That’s all. I thought that’s how it would play out. Well, it didn’t play out that way. I didn’t see that I wouldn’t be an integral part of their lives and they of mine. The first month, I lived on campus at Yale until I could take up my sabbatical tenure at Harvard, at which point I lived in Adams House. That was 1968–69.”
    Barbara Ann eventually died of diabetes after a series of amputations. “She lost one leg and then the other, and she gave up. I remember talking