Their division of labor was conventional; Eleanor didn’t read The Feminine Mystique until after the last baby. Rupert was the breadwinner; she raised the boys and ran the household, as she had been raised, with help from nannies, maids, cooks, and drivers. They were kind, supportive, and respectful to each other, publicly and privately. Handsome, clever, and rich, they were popular with friends and colleagues. Eleanor’s lineage allayed any questions about Rupert’s idiopathic origins. Over time Rupert’s friends diagnosed his rudeness as “an English thing,” like eating Marmite, and paid it little mind. At the law firm, the associates kept lists of his taunts and insults, comparing them almost as badges of honor. They pined for his praise.
Eleanor and Rupert had a floor-through apartment in the Hotel des Artistes, the old studio building on West Sixty-Seventh. In pursuit of Van Vlietism, Eleanor had wanted to live on the Upper West Side. Her father approved and bought the apartment, originally two apartments, as a wedding present. He put it in her name. The boys never knew another home. Their attachment to it was primal. After Rupert’s death, they all worried that Eleanor might sell it. “Who will buy it if she does?” Harry asked his brothers. They all offered although they knew it was unhinged sentimentality.
“Do we keep it as a shrine to our childhood, never changing anything?” Will asked.
“It must cost a fortune to run and maintain,” Sam said.
“I love it,” Tom said, “but I couldn’t live in it. I’d feel like an imposter.”
“Who’d get to sleep in their bed?” Jack asked.
Eleanor’s old boyfriend, Jim Cardozo, didn’t marry until 1975, when he was thirty-six and had finished his residency in cardiology. His wife, Anne Lewisohn Lehman, was also a Vassar graduate, six years behind Eleanor, a biology major. She was short, blond, sturdy, and kind. They were married at Temple Emanu-El, the Reform German Jewish synagogue that looked like a bank on the outside. Reading the wedding invitation, unexpected and unwelcome, Eleanor felt a twinge of irritation, realizing, after fourteen years of marriage to Rupert, she hadn’t thought about Jim in years. Her heart had broken and then it mended, good as new. I was twenty, she thought. I didn’t know there was sex without love. Jim had loved her, she knew, more than she had loved him, but she couldn’t believe he harbored at this remove anything more than passing wistfulness for their ardent youthful selves. Perhaps he wanted her to know he had landed on his feet.
The Cardozo reception was at the Harmonie Club. There were six hundred guests, including Eleanor and Rupert. Their gift, from the registry, was a sterling fish server, in the same pattern as her parents’. Jim and Anne spent all their holidays with her family, an uncomplicated bunch who loved tennis, sailing, practical jokes, and charades. Anne loathed Jim’s parents. Meeting the young Cardozos for the first time at their wedding, Rupert pronounced Anne a “good sort.” He never said what he thought of Jim, except to say “damp handshake.”
—
Eleanor thought of her marriage as a stroke of luck, sweeter for being unexpected. In her romance with Jim, she had seen herself as the victim of selfish and uncaring parents, more interested in their comfort than in her happiness. As she grew older, she acknowledged her conventionality and her cowardliness—and Jim’s too. She had been bred for marriage; even her high-powered Vassar education had only served to make her more marriageable to the right sort of man, and she hadn’t known what else to do with herself. She hoped she might come to love Rupert, and by the end, her attachment to him passed for love. To her delight, he had turned out to be sexually gifted. Who taught him? she wondered.
Rupert married Eleanor because she was the girl of the year in 1960, because all the other men he knew wanted her, because she knew the difference between sarcasm and irony, because she was a knockout, because she’d read George Orwell, because she was sexually electrifying, because he could talk to her. She was like an Arabian racehorse, angular and lean, almost as tall as he, with dark hair and eyes. Reverend Falkes had been dark, probably Welsh. Seeing the photo of him that Rupert carried in his wallet, Eleanor thought, dark and tall like me. Makes sense. Rupert’s blondness was one of his minor selling points, the un-Jim.
Rupert understood from the start theirs was a marriage not of convenience exactly, more of mutual benefit, and all in all, he thought they’d both held to the bargain and made it work. Once, years into the marriage, he asked her whether she was fond of him. She was quick to answer. “Of course I’m fond of you,” she said, “and I admire you.” He nodded and smiled at her, then took her hand in his. Later, she marveled at the oddness of this exchange, after so many years together. The meagerness of his expectations—or sadder, his desires—was painful to her, as was this unexpected, transient willingness to expose himself. He didn’t risk asking whether I might love him, or could love him, or did love him, or ever loved him. Her thoughts took a sharp turn. Of course, I’ve never asked him if he loved me. Did I mean to marry a man who didn’t love me? She wondered sometimes whether he’d ever been unfaithful. She had never required fidelity, only discretion. Their sexual bond was the glue of the marriage, but almost a thing apart from their emotional connection and requirements. In their couplings they were like world-class athletes. They didn’t think about what they did. Eleanor thought downhill skiing came closest to sex with Rupert.