Norma and Freida
That Norma still glows in my heart, even as her memory dims and her demands multiply, I credit to her surpassing grace and generosity. We have argued over this and that all our years together. But she's never been mean, shrill or small-minded about anything. That's what I recall during the tough hours.
I offer as Exhibit A: 1974-75, our year of living strangely.
In 1973, 13 years into our marriage, I fell in love again—not in place of Norma but in addition to Norma. As a campus firebrand in the late '60s, I had ample opportunity to stray with various of my students, but the pull was never strong enough. With Freida, it was different. She and I were co-workers at a federally funded “educational laboratory” in Charleston, West Virginia. She outranked me, out-earned me and altogether dazzled me with her droll assertiveness. Before we allowed the sparks to ignite, though, I told Norma that Freida and I were attracted to each other and that I was determined to let the attraction lead me where it would. Instead of confronting me with an ultimatum, she acquiesced—and not in a beaten down way, either, but simply as an intelligent person dealing with a situation she could understand. Freida was divorced and had two children, a daughter, 16 at the time, and a son 8. Norma and I had one daughter 12, another 2 and a son 7.
My dual loves continued smoothly for the next few months. Then the laboratory lost funds and Freida and I were let go. She eventually found a well-paying job in the state education department in Nashville. I, however, was reduced to food stamps—and with a newly acquired house in West Virginia to pay for. Displaying a magnanimity that still astounds me, Freida invited my family and me to move in with hers in Nashville. Lacking any other prospect, we did. It became one of the most harmonious years of our lives.
Already courteous toward each other, Norma and Freida soon became solid friends, and our kids got along like brothers and sisters. There was no rank. Not once did Freida act like the benefactor she was. If our oldest daughter, by then a teenager, wanted to borrow a blouse or a skirt, Freida would scold her for the formality of asking permission instead of just taking the garment. Since I was earning zilch, Freida covered all the rent and groceries until Norma finally got work at what was then Peabody College. Unable to find a job, I stayed at home, baked bread, grew bean sprouts and ferried our youngest daughter to and from daycare, which I paid for by working there twice a week as an attendant and van driver. I could hardly wait for Norma and Freida to come each evening to give me glimpses of their shiny outside worlds.
While I did enjoy the love of two women all that year, Hugh Hefner I was not. There were no threesomes (drat!), no swinging parties, no neighborhood bacchanals—just monogamy one night at a time. After a year, we moved away from Freida's—but with mutual regret--when I snagged a teaching fellowship at a college in Ohio. Had Norma been conventionally possessive or jealous—as she had every legal and traditional right to be—our marriage would have ended by our 13th wedding anniversary instead of enduring now past the 60th. And who would have benefited from that? Freida and her daughter remain among our dearest friends. (Her son, who was close to our kids, died in a boating accident in 1988.) Norma dedicated her first book to Freida, who comes to see us often.
In the years that followed, Norma and I would each accommodate and respect the other's “parallel loves.” Neither of us has ever doubted the wisdom of doing so. (There weren't that many.) Our other loves were “pure” in the sense that we engaged in them for their own intrinsic value, not as vehicles for something else, like variety, leverage or payback. Through it all, Norma has been honest, serene, rock steady and impossible not to cherish. Just ask me.