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story of mine rejected by the man who became my husband.
    The evening was stiff, clumsy, but it did not lack talk. What it lacked, perhaps, was mutual curiosity. I served dessert and coffee, after which we repaired to the living room. Clem sat down at once in a big armchair that appears to me in memory as magisterial: because Clem in his husky voice had soon launched out into one authoritative disquisition after another. My nervousness made it difficult for me to follow him. Jim Purdy spoke less, but with his outrageous, often comic contempt for the whole world, especially for other writers. Clem was in the middle of delivering still another pronouncement (I wish I could remember on exactly what); they had become heavier and heavier; then I heard Martin’s voice intone, “Yes, Lord.” Clem stood up and without looking at anyone left the room. We listened in silence as the front door closed with a bang. Purdy laughed briefly.
    Clem had suffered a nervous breakdown after being drafted into the army during World War II and had been given a medical discharge. Martin said he had refused to put up with being in the army; his soul had simply rebelled against it. Martin told me that he rather admired Clem for it. He himself had fitted too well into the army for four and a half long years. Clem had a second breakdown when the two brothers were editors at Commentary. Martin and his first wife had taken him into their Great Neck home for quite a while until he recovered.
    After we were married, Martin and I usually met Clem, though not often, at my father-in-law’s apartment. At our first encounter there, he walked over to me purposefully and, speaking with grim emphasis—obliged, it seemed to me, by his personal, special commitment to speaking truth under all circumstances—declared the ineradicable gratitude he felt toward Martin’s first wife. I fell back a step under the admonitory force of his words, shocked. Why would I ever dare to question his feeling of gratitude toward one who had sheltered him? It was his feeling; it had originated long before we had met.
    Clem’s brief first marriage had produced a son, Danny. His second, to Jenny, lasted, with interruptions, for the rest of his life. They had a daughter, Sara, who now has two children of her own.
    Jenny visited us once in Manhattan, mainly, it seemed, to convey Clem’s resentment of Martin’s apparent neutrality in the war Clem was waging with their father. But Martin seemed hardly neutral to me in his attitude toward his father. I had suggested to him that he try to make some kind of peace with Joe. Fathers and sons notoriously don’t get along for many reasons, of which the oedipal one has proven to be of no special importance. A fog obscured the Greenberg battlefield for decades. Joe died at ninety-six. I had found him interesting, often amusing, but the filial visits were, after all, tedious. His sons’ struggle with him was hardly affected by his death.
    We saw little of either brother during our first years together. In 1963 we traveled on Martin’s Guggenheim Fellowship and lived on the island of Thasos off the Thracian coast for six months. I don’t remember any correspondence from them. When we returned, Sol had left his painter wife and taken up, as it turned out permanently, with Margaret. She had a large apartment on Fifth Avenue with a grand view of the city, expensively furnished but dull, lacking in individual taste.
    On one evening visit I told an anecdote that caused Sol to spill over with laughter throughout the hours afterward. A girl I had heard of at second hand had attended a coeducational boarding school. She went with a boy she had recently met but whom she adored to the school’s ice-skating pond. The youth was elegantly provided with two dachshunds, which wandered, sniffing, around. He removed his boots to replace them with ice skates. He was wearing thick brown socks. The girl, searching