Voyager: Travel Writings by Russell Banks Page B

to Darlene had been unconsciously designed to expunge my parents’ record. The sad truth is that I would not have married Christine at twenty-two if I had not married Darlene at nineteen and divorced her and abandoned our child at twenty. So, yes, although I didn’t know it at the time, or was only vaguely aware of it, my two early marriages were profoundly, if not causally, connected.
    Otherwise, there was too much against me and Christine to marry. Our youth, for starters. Even though in the early 1960s men and women married at a much younger age than now, Christine and I each had a lot of unfinished business that would be harder for us to finish as a married couple—like college in her case and some sort of profession (back then she said she wanted to be an actress), and everything else in mine. I had no college degree and was barely employed, after all, with no imaginable way to provide for Christine in the style to which she was not only accustomed but was sure she deserved as well. Her father and uncle owned and ran a large pharmaceutical business, and the family on her father’s side by any standard was rich and had been for generations; my family had been working-class poor even longer, and, after my father’s departure, poverty stricken. Also, well before meeting me in person, having only heard about me from Christine, her parents, especially her father, hated and mistrusted me. Her mother less so, maybe, but enough to say that she’d be relieved if Christine left me for another boy, and she had a few suggestions.
    They had learned of my first marriage and fatherhood and divorce by hiring a private detective who dug it out for them and then sprang their discovery on Christine, home from college during spring break. She quickly disappointed them by telling them that they’d wasted their money, because she had known about it from the start. Which was true. I had told Christine the whole sad story, at least as much of it as I knew and understood at the time, the first night we were together, making out passionately in the backseat of her roommate’s boyfriend’s Thunderbird on an after-party, alcohol-fueled, overnight trip from Boston to Vermont. To my surprise, my confession seemed to give me, in her eyes, a certain mystery and gravitas. Christine whispered that she’d never been fucked by a divorced man before. I assumed that meant that as soon as we got back from Vermont and went to her apartment or mine, she would want me to fuck her. And she did, and I did. So I was glad I had told her the truth about Darlene and Leona.
    Her parents not only distrusted me, they were also afraid of me, especially her father—rightly, perhaps, but not for the reasons they gave. This is Christine’s imitation in bed in Boston of her father speaking on the phone from the brick Colonial family home in Richmond in his long-voweled Tidewater drawl: Christine, the young man is not Jewish. Doesn’t have to be Jewish, you understand. But it’d help a whole lot if you and he had a similar background. A college dropout who claims to be a writer, but he hasn’t published anything yet, has he? Maybe never will. Not that I hold it against a young fellow who wants to become a successful writer, you understand. But it might help the boy’s prospects some if he got himself a college degree or two. And a reliable source of income. How do you know the boy isn’t some kind of gold digger, anyhow? His father is a plumber or something like that in New Hampshire. An alcoholic. Abandoned the family years ago, you said. I feel sorry for the boy, naturally. And the mother, too. The mother, she’s a kind of clerk or something out in California? And the boy, all he does for a living is wash dishes part-time in a restaurant? Or house-paint? Wasn’t that in the private investigator’s report? Honey, it just sounds like he sees you as an opportunity, his golden calf. Don’t laugh. If he were Jewish I wouldn’t think it. But a poor Gentile