That's where he met and jnarried Marcia...
That's where he met and jnarried Marcia SchwartzIt was hard for the Swede to understand how a strongly built, not unhandsome guy like Barry could free himself at the age of twenty-two from the desire to be with anybody else in this world but Marcia Schwartz, already so opinionated as a college girl that the Swede had to battle in her presence to stay awakeSat there and listened to herDidn't at all seem to care that she was a slob, dressed even in college like somebody's grandmother, and with those buoyant eyes, unnervingly enlarged by the heavy spectaclesDawn's opposite in every wayFor Marcia to have spawned a self-styled revolutionary--yes, had Merry been raised within earshot of Marcia's mouthbut Dawn? Pretty, petite, unpolitical Dawn--why Dawn? Where do you look for the cause? Where is the explanation for this mismatch? Was it nothing more than a trick played by their genes? During the March on the Pentagon, the march to stop the war in Vietnam, Marcia Umanoff had been thrown into a paddy wagon with some twenty other women and, very much to her liking, locked up overnight in a Djail, where she didn't stop talking protest talk till they were all let out in the morningIf Merry had been her daughter, things would make senseIf only Merry had fought a war of words, fought the world sac chloe with words alone, like this strident yentaThen Merry's would be not a story that begins and ends with a bomb but another story entirelyA bomb tells the whole fucking story
Hard to grasp Barry's marrying that womanMaybe it had to do with his family's being so poorWho knows? Her animus, her superior airs, the sense she gave of being unclean, everything intolerable to the Swede in a friend, let alone in a mate--well, those were the very characteristics that seemed to enliven Barry's appreciation of his wifeIt was a puzzle, it truly was, how one perfectly reasonable man could adore what a second perfectly reasonable man couldn't abide for half an hourBut just because it was a puzzle, the Swede tried his best to restrain his aversion and neutralize his judgment and see Marcia Umanoff as simply an oddball from another world, the academic world, the intellectual world, where always to be antagonizing people and challenging whatever they said was apparently looked on with admirationWhat it was they got out of being so negative was beyond him; it seemed to him far more productive when everybody grew up and got over thatStill, that didn't mean that Marcia was really out to needle people and work them over just because she was so often needling people and working them overHe couldn't call vintage gucci bags her vicious once he'd recognized that this was the way she was accustomed to socializing in Manhattan; moreover, he couldn't believe that Barry Umanoff--who at one time was closer to him than his own kid brother--could marry someone viciousAs usual, the Swede's default reaction to not being able to fathom cause and effect (as opposed to his father's reflexive suspiciousness) was to fall back on a lifelong strategy and become tolerant and charitableAnd so he was content to chalk up Marcia as "difficult," allowing at worst, "Well, let's just say she's no bargain
But Dawn loathed herLoathed her because she knew herself to be loathed by Marcia for having been Miss New JerseyDawn couldn't stand people who made that story the whole of her story, and Marcia was especially exasperating because the pleasure of explaining Dawn by a story that had never explained her--and 34i hardly explained her now--was so smugly exhibitedWhen they'd all first met, Dawn told the Umanoffs about her father's heart attack and how no money was coming into the house and how she realized that the door to college was about to be slammed shut on her brotherthe whole scholarship story, but none of it made Miss New Jersey seem like anything but a joke to Marcia UmanoffMarcia barely bothered to hide the fact that fendi big when she looked at Dawn Levov she saw no one there, that she thought Dawn pretentious for raising cows, thought she was doing it for the image--it wasn't a serious operation Dawn ran twelve, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week; as far as Marcia was concerned it was a pretty House and Garden fantasy contrived by a rich, silly woman who lived, not in stinky-smelling New Jersey, no, no, who lived in the countryDawn loathed Marcia because of her undisguised superiority to the Levovs' wealth, to their taste, to the rural way of life they loved, and loathed her beyond loathing because she was convinced that privately Marcia was altogether pleased about what Merry was alleged to have done
The privileged place in Marcia's feelings went to the Vietnamese--the North VietnameseShe never for a moment compromised her political convictions or her compassionate comprehension of international affairs, not even when she saw from six inches away the misery that had befallen her husband's oldest friendAnd this was what led Dawn to make the accusations that the Swede knew to be false, not because he could swear to Marcia's honorableness but because for him the probity of Barry Umanoff was beyond question"I will not have her in this house! A pzghas more humanity in her than that woman does! I saddle christian dior don't care how many degrees she has--she is callous and she is blind! She is the most blind, self-involved, narrow-minded, obnoxious so-called intelligent person I have ever met in my life and I will not have her in my house!"
"Well, I can't very well ask Barry to come by himself
"Then Barry can't come
"Barry has to comeMy father gets a terrific boot out of seeing Barry hereHe expects to see Barry hereIt's Barry, Dawn, who got me to Schevitz
"But that woman took Merry inDon't you see? That's where Merry went! To New York--to them! That's who gave her a hiding place! Somebody did, somebody had toA real bomb thrower in her house--that excited herShe hid her from us, hid Merry from her parents when she needed her parents mostMarcia Umanoff is the one who sent her underground!"
"Merry didn't want to stay there even beforeShe stayed exactly twice at Barry'sThe third time she never showed upShe went somewhere else to stay and never showed up at the Umanoffs' again
"Marcia is the one, SeymourWho else has her connections? Wonderful Father This One, wonderful Father That One, pouring blood on the draft recordsSo cozy she is with her war-resister priests, so buddy-buddy--but they're not priests, Seymour! Priests are not great forward-thinking liberalsOtherwise they don't become gucci back pack pries