The Divorce Papers: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

assistant
    166  editor at
Femina
magazine. Do you remember
Femina
? It
    167  believed in good clothes, good haircuts, and good books. I was
    168  making $28,000, which wasn’t bad for that kind of job. Daniel
    169  had finished school; he has an M.D./Ph.D. from Columbia
    170  but was only making $23,000, as a resident, working 90 hours
    171  a week at Presbyterian Hospital. All of his salary, after taxes,
    172  went for child support. But at least he had no med school
    173  debt. M.D./Ph.D.’s are fully funded. Our rent was $325;
    174  we had a Columbia apartment, on baja Claremont. It was a
    175  serious comedown for him. When he was married to Helen,
    176  they lived off Central Park West on West 69th. But he was
    177  never home, and I didn’t mind it. My father might have given
    178  us some money, but his money always comes with strings;
    179  I didn’t think it was worth it. Except, he did give us each
    180  $10,000 a year as a gift once we married. And then after Jane,
    181  our daughter, was born, he gave her $10,000 a year too.
    182  Q. Tell me about Jane.
    183  A. She’s perfect. She’s 10 years old, almost 11. She goes to the
    184  Peabody School, where I went and everyone in my family went,
    185  back to the egg. My mother was a trustee and her mother and
    186  her grandmother were trustees. We are old, old New Salem.
    187  My mother was a Mather and Granny was a Peabody. I don’t
    188  she was a Maria. We are all Marias, from mother to daughter,
    189  back to my Great Great Great Gran, whose mother’s first
    190  name was Humility. The family was, is, horribly ingrown. Up
    191  through my mother’s generation, you couldn’t marry outside
    192  themagic circle. My father didn’t really belong; his family
    193  were latecomers, upstart 19th-century immigrant Scottish
    194  merchants, but they’d gone to the right schools and weren’t
    195  Catholics. My mother’s full name was Maria Maple Mather
    196  Meiklejohn. Her family nickname was 4M. My full name is
    197  Maria Mather Meiklejohn. [Pause] Durkheim. I need to ditch
    198  that. In school, I was called 3M or Scotch, for Scotch Tape.
    199  Daniel used to say my family went back to the
Mayflower
and
    200  his to the ark. I never imagined I’d be back in New Salem. I
    201  thought I had escaped. I was working on becoming—rather
    202  successfully, I thought—a New York Jewish intellectual. Here,
    203  I’m seen as part of the cotillion crowd.
    204  Q. Are you working?
    205  A. I’m a writing tutor at Mather. I decided to get my Ph.D.
    206  in American studies when we moved here. The only publisher
    207  in town is the Mather Press, and I wasn’t interested in
    208  publishing foreign-language translations, which is what they
    209  mostly do. Their big project now is a complete translation by
    210  a French/American couple of
Remembrance of Things Past
.
    211  Did you know no one has ever finished translating all seven
    212  volumes? They all die mid-series; it’s like a curse. Have you
    213  read Proust?
    214  Q. No. My mother is French, and if I ever read it in English,
    215  instead of French, which would do me in, she would be very
    216  disapproving. So I don’t read it at all. You?
    217  A. I’ve read the third book,
The Guermantes Way
. Bill
    218  Pritchard, Tom’s English professor at Amherst, said to start
    219  there, then go backward. But I couldn’t.
    220  Q. Are you making progress with your Ph.D.?
    221  A. I finished my course work in 1996. For my thesis, I’m
    222  working mostly on Jacob Riis but also on other late 19th-/
    223  early 20th-century American journalists, photojournalists,
    224  muckrakers. This divorce thing has thrown me off. I can’t see
    225  making much progress this year. Some days, getting out of
    226  bed is a serious challenge. I do manage to do my job, but it’s
    227  a