Page 492 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
at the conference was pro forma, indeed almost compelled. This would be bad enough were it all that she did. But there was more: From her first mention of the meeting that she had had with Phyllis, she acted as if I were some sort of irritant who had no place in Rachel’s life. She insisted on referring to Rachel’s mother as “the parent”! “The parent feels that Rachel . . .” “The parent would prefer that . . .” “The parent and I have decided . . .” Even as I bristled and objected, there was no stop- ping this unthinking brat with a master’s degree in psychology. When I tried to complain to the head of the school, a man formerly very nice to me, he was curt and rejected my criticism out of hand. After all, I was gone, and Phyllis had always been the real Jew in the family. And let’s not forget that, by this time, Harry was paying the tuition and making the donations.
As I noted, the dividing up of loyalties, the choosing up of sides, was more than institutional. My relationship with Bob and Ellen Israel, one that had gone back to Danny’s birth and had been important to me, was inexplicably gone: they never called. So too were my relationships with our neighbors, the Klausners, among others, and, of course, Phyllis’s brothers and my nieces and nephews. (In fairness, I must also say that, after a few years, Michael called to reestablish bonds, but I rejected that idea, feeling that the Rebell family had been, as would be natural, arrayed against me in the divorce.)
On the other hand, and weighing extremely heavily in the balance, Rebecca and Marcel Margulies stood by me and have remained close and cherished friends of mine to this day. (To be light for a moment, this fact was very important to me on a very mundane level as well: I do not know what I would have done had their guest bathroom not been avail- able to me when I would drive to Farragut Road to pick up or deposit the children.) And the relationship has paid great dividends. Rebecca and Kathy have become close friends.
Probably the most vivid example of the problem of division of loy- alties came in April 1987, when Peter was bar mitzvahed. Whose guests were whose? What would people be saying? Would they be casting side- long glances and watching for the anticipated tensions. Here I was, back
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