Page 395 - WhyAsInY

Portrait of a (first) MarriaGe
be the owner. On one level this arrangement made sense to me. On another, I was uncomfortable with it for reasons that I could not clearly articulate at the time.
Being around Harry also meant being around monetary pressures that were entirely new to me. On my first Kol Nidre night with Phyllis, which occurred in Temple Beth El of Manhattan Beach one week after our engagement, I was exposed to an all-new form of money raising for a charitable cause: “card calling,” during which, when a man’s name was called (it was never a woman’s), he was obliged to stand and publicly make his pledge to the United Jewish Appeal for the New Year. Presum- ably, the greater the amount of the pledge, the greater would be the likelihood of being inscribed in the good book for the year to come. I was told that no pledge was ever below $1,000, a huge amount of money.
Harry told me that, inasmuch as Phyllis and I were not members of the temple, I would not have to make a pledge and my name would not be called, but I knew that I would be dealing with this kind of pressure soon, too soon. I was right. After Phyllis and I were married for about three years, and living paycheck to paycheck, it was Harry’s year to be honored during a UJA fundraiser in the temple. He was going to give $25,000, a princely sum, more than $160,000 in today’s dollars. I, a pau- per by my reckoning, was told that I had to pledge one-fifth of that amount, $5,000. And I did. Again, there was no reaction from Phyllis. This helped the family look good in their community, and I guess that it helped make me look good to Harry, but it didn’t do much for me.
This is not to say that being in the Rebell family was without its compensations. The Rebells gave us an enormous amount of help when it came to decorating the entire house. That was great, but ultimately it seemed to me that when Harry gave us money, Harry was exercising a not-too-subtle power over us. Much as I was delighted to be the benefi- ciary of the largesse, I did not like the idea of feeling dependent.
And it felt as though in some fashion Harry wanted it that way. It was clear that he liked to play the hero when it came to his generosity, that he wanted to be a hero within the family at large, that he wanted visibly to maintain control. A small example of that tendency was his
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