Jackie, My Love
Weekends I met very attractive young ladies. One of them became part of my carpool. Her name was Beth. I did not equate study of the law with raw passion until she was sitting in the back seat of the car we used, and was rubbing her knee against mine and I reciprocated. This ended in an exciting affair which was consummated in my bedroom or on a double chaise lounge on the porch of our house, long since abandoned there.
A short time later I met a charming young Vassar woman whose name was Jackie. Her mother was a Brooklyn municipal court judge, who was a very difficult and strict person. As a matter of fact the Daily News ran an editorial about her saying that in one of the few large blizzards to hit the city of New York when no one could move their cars, much less get a tow truck, she fined anyone brought in front of her for illegal parking, even though the cause was the blizzard. The Daily News thought it was excessive punishment and castigated her in print. I didn’t know her that well. Occasionally I had dinner with her and her daughter but I didn’t realize there were aspects of her ideas that spilled over into her daughter’s relationships. I became engaged. She was an outstanding young lady. She wrote the music for the school’s theatrical shows and also wrote her own music and was very popular and very pretty, with auburn hair and sparkling eyes. We were engaged in July 1946 and planned to marry in the spring of 1947. The amount of physical contact was minimal in that she was finishing up at Vassar and I was in my first year of law school.
After I quit law school I took office space in a large office complex on Forty-Second Street, which consisted of an old lady and eight cubicles each tenanted by one desk, one filing cabinet and two chairs. The lady rented out the use of the space, the telephone and also took phone messages. After hours this became a place of passion for me and Jackie, which is very difficult in a cubicle that small. So there was very little consummation, a lot of warm hugging and cuddling. As a matter of fact we never consummated our relationship sexually, as Jackie was very circumspect and wanted to wait until we got married, which was the reason we were in such a rush to get married. When word came out about my father, Judge L asked to have dinner with me. By this time Jackie was out of school and living at her family’s Brooklyn home. I had dinner with Judge L wherein she told me that she had heard about my father’s misfortune, and she was sure it would hurt my career badly, and wanted us to break up our engagement until such time as I was out of law school and had a job with a law firm. I got into the ‘sins of the child…’ but it did not seem to make any difference. She was adamant. Jackie’s parents sent her to Florida for three weeks, to forget.
After I started business, Jackie called me several times but wouldn’t see me. She was then working for the president of Decca Records and living in a suite above his office on 57th Street. I found out later that my idol Jackie was almost thrown out of Vassar for promiscuity but there was no way of knowing. In line with putting this background together I contacted Jackie fifty years later and asked her to give me some idea of how this whole experience had affected her. She said ‘she didn’t want to revisit those emotions which she said were inexplicably entwined with her feelings about her mother’. “Whenever I think about how she controlled my life throughout, I am filled with anger and depression. Right now these emotions are much too difficult to deal with” she told me. “Right now, I am glad that each of us has managed to make a pretty good life, despite the disappointment and unhappiness of almost fifty years ago”.
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"LIFE IN THE MARGIN" by Morton Gladstone