Page 382 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
As I boarded the plane at LaGuardia, all aglow both professionally and personally, I had no idea what the future would bring to our family, but everything was wonderful.
On Saturday, January 29, 1983, almost thirteen years after I had called Phyllis from the Delta shuttle terminal, Phyllis and I followed our then normal pattern and left the children at home so that we could go to Sabbath services at Temple Israel Center. We were joined there, as we often were, by Phyllis’s father. After Adon Olam, we stayed to social- ize, to take advantage of the spread that was customarily provided by the parents of the bar mitzvah boy and, as was our habit, to talk to Rabbi Turetsky at his usual station, in front of the liquor table. Sylvia arrived with Laura, Michael and Susan’s daughter, joined in the socializing, and then got Harry to leave after a reasonable interval. They were taking Laura to Mahopac and driving up in separate cars.
We got home between around 1:30 and ate an additional light bite. I then got out of my suit and tie, got into jeans and a sweatshirt, and sprawled on the family room couch finally to relax and to listen to a recording of Bellini’s opera I Puritani, which I had just purchased. I can still hear it: I must have dozed off during the third act, for the next thing that I experienced was a very loud and frantic banging at the front door. I rushed to the door to see what the disturbance was all about, and, as I opened it, Harry came crashing through and stumbled forward, shout- ing breathlessly and incoherently.
I certainly didn’t know it then, but as I later tried to understand events, I would mark that moment as a turning point, a point at which my beautiful family (and Phyllis’s as well) would start to fracture, irrep- arably. That view is, of course, faulty, too facile. The marriage would not physically come apart for another twenty-seven months, and it undoubt- edly had its problems—serious problems, I now see—well before the shock of January 29.
I would later identify January 29, 1983, as a turning point because the horrible event of that day would seem in retrospect to have been catalytic; it would seem to have joined and brought into focus forces that had already started to erode the foundation of our relationship. I
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