Page 397 - WhyAsInY

Portrait of a (first) MarriaGe
full-fledged member of the family, and that was certainly the case. But it was also the case that the exclusion of the women, particularly the exclusion of his daughter, was a manifestation of Harry’s view of the role of women, generally—and of Phyllis’s role as the baby in the fam- ily, in particular. (Harry often reinforced what I took to be his very patronizing fashion with Phyllis by saying that the day upon which she was born was the happiest day of his life.) I hasten to add that Phyllis was completely comfortable with the arrangement—indeed with any arrangement of her father’s.
When it came to the place of women in our world, Harry was mili- tantly traditional, arguably to the point of misogyny. When Arthur met with me at the Harvard Club as he tried to open divorce settlement discussions on behalf of his sister, he told me—to explain the thrust of the “Rebell position” on the economics going forward—that Harry believed, and had told Phyllis, that Phyllis’s mother had never worked and that Harry, who would clearly play a part in the approval of a settle- ment, believed that there no reason for Phyllis to do so. That was hardly a surprise to me. I told Arthur that that might have been one reason why he and I were having our Harvard Club talk.
As the years went by, Birkenhaus became an issue for me in another way. In the 1980s, a major part of my real estate practice entailed the need to close tax-driven transactions prior to year-end. Thus, I would be swamped with work in December, which was one of the months in which the Rebells had held their annual Birkenhaus family ski vacation. The other was January. In 1983, however, for reasons that I don’t recall, the trip was booked for late December, a time that was absolutely impos- sible for me. When I learned of the plan, I approached Harry to tell him that there was no way that I could make the trip, and to ask whether it couldn’t occur after year-end. I don’t recall any of the substance of the conversation, except that December had not been an imperative when the booking had occurred and that Harry concluded the discussion in a tone that I had never before heard him use. He spat out two angry and frightening words: “You’re outvoted.”
Prior to 1983, I had one other unpleasant interaction with Harry. • 379 •