Except a marriage.
One evening in the early spring of 1973 when his chauffeur met him at the airport, Danny urged him to drive as quickly as he could to Bryn Mawr. He rushed into the house to announce his latest coup: he had been offered the directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In fact, the orchestra wanted him so badly that they had agreed to his keeping the Philadelphia job as well. He would be a transcontinental conductor.
“That’s super, Daddy,” Sylvie cried. “Does it mean we’ll be moving out to California?”
“Well, it might be good to get away from the snow and ice. But we’ll really have to let your mom decide.”
He looked at Maria. She was stone-faced. And said nothing.
“Hey, what’s the matter, darling?” he asked at dinner, when the kids were gone.
“Danny,” she said slowly, “we’ve got to talk.”
“You mean about California?”
“No. About ‘Miss Rona.’ ”
“Who?”
“Please, Danny, don’t play the ingenue. Her column is syndicated even in a hick town like Philadelphia.”
“Well, what slimy rumor is she spreading now?”
“Oh, nothing scandalous,” Maria replied sarcastically. “Just a little tidbit about a ‘famous composer-pianist whispering sweet nothings to Raquel Welch at a Malibu restaurant.’ ”
“Do you really believe that kind of crap?”
“The only thing I’m not sure of is whether that item came from her press agent or yours.”
“Wait a minute —”
“No, maestro,” she retorted. “This time you listen. All these years I’ve tried to look the other way because I felt it was somehow my fault, I mean that you have to have your little affairs because I was inexperienced and couldn’t satisfy you. But why do you have to do it so damn publicly? You’ve already proved your manhood to the whole world — why haven’t you proved it to yourself?”
There was a pause. Then Danny asked calmly, “What suddenly brought this on?”
“It’s not sudden. I’ve just finally reached the end of my very long rope.”
“Maria, we’ve been through this before. I’ve never claimed to be a Boy Scout. But I still think I’m a good husband. I mean, I take care of you and the kids, don’t I?”
“Every way but emotionally. Your, daughters are starved for attention, which I can only assume you haven’t noticed. And I dread the moment they first see your name in a gossip column.”
Danny had two concerts to conduct the next day, so he tried to mollify her. “Darling, you know there’s only one person in the world I really love, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she retorted. “Yourself.” And then added wearily, “Look, I simply can’t take it anymore.”
There was another pause. “Are you asking for a divorce?”
She grew angry again. “That’s what any woman in her right mind would want, isn’t it? But we’re Catholic — at least I still am. And besides, it would devastate the girls.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“In separate bedrooms,” she replied.
He looked at her incredulously. “You can’t be serious. You don’t mean that our sex life is over?”
“With each other, anyway.”
Her innuendo threw Danny off balance. “Do you mean you intend to have affairs?”
“Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t?”
He was about to say, You’re a wife and mother. But then, he was a husband and father. Still, he was furious. “Maria, you can’t do this to me. You can’t.”
“Danny, whether I can or I can’t is not for you to judge. And whether I do or I don’t is not for you to know.”
By the spring of 1972, Jason Gilbert had taken part in so many operations of Sayaret Matkal that Zvi insisted he take a sabbatical to “relearn what normal life is all about.”
He went back to the kibbutz and finally began to get close to his two sons, Joshua, now five, and three-year-old Ben.
He discovered that he could derive joy from family life and even from tinkering in the garage.
“What are you doing to that truck, Daddy? Is it very broken?”
Jason looked up from under the hood to greet his firstborn. “It isn’t really broken at all, Josh. I’m doing what in America is called ‘souping it up.’ ”
The little boy laughed. “That sounds so funny-feeding soup to a machine.”
“No, chabibi. It’s just a way of saying ‘make it go faster.’ Want a lesson?”
“Yes, please.”
Jason lifted the boy high into the air and held him over the exposed entrails of the vehicle. “See that? It’s what’s known as a carburetor — m’ayed. It mixes the air and the gas.…”
For the next three afternoons, Jason lovingly introduced his elder son to the arcana of automotive engineering.
As he joked to Eva, “He’ll be the youngest hot-rodder in the Galilee.”
Since his own childhood instruction had been by an array of professionals, Jason took particular pleasure in being his sons’ tutor for everything.
With josh as his “assistant professor,” he taught the younger one how to swim in the communal pool.
“Keep kicking, Ben, you’re doing great. Pretty soon you’ll be a regular fish.”
“I’m not a fish, Daddy, I’m a little boy.”
Eva sat in the shade of a nearby tree, smiling with satisfaction, praying that this idyllic summer would never end.
Sometimes she would cook a simple dinner for the two of them in their bungalow. And they would share some of the red wine from the lot Yossi had obtained in a trade for oranges with a nearby moshav. Marriage and motherhood had wrought a profound change in Eva. She was more relaxed than she had ever been in her life. She smiled. She even dared to feel happy.
In mid-July Isaac Stern, the violinist, came up to Vered Ha-Gaul and gave a concert in the dining hail. He also left several of his latest LPs for the kibbutz library.
When Eva borrowed one of them to play on their hi-fi, Jason noticed that the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto had been recorded with the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Daniel Rossi.
This evoked a torrent of reminiscences about the college days.
Eva reached over and took his hand. “Are you feeling slightly homesick, my love?”
“Yeah, now and then,” he confessed. “For stupid things like the World Series, the Super Bowl — even the Harvard-Yale game. I’m going to take you to one of those someday, Eva. It would be a nice change — it’s a fight to the death where nobody dies.”
“When shall we go? I can pack in fifteen minutes.”
“When there’s peace,” he replied. “Then I’ll take all four of us over to visit Harvard —”
“And Disneyland, I hope.”
“Naturally. We’ll hit all the cultural high spots.” And he repeated his proviso, “When there’s peace.”
“I think we’ll be too old to travel by then, Jason.”
“You’re a pessimist, darling.”
“No, I’m a realist. That’s why I want you to give me at least a tentative date.”
“Okay, okay. I’m First Marshal of The Class. I’ll have to go to my Twenty-fifth Reunion.”
“When is that?”
“Oh, just eleven years.”
“Good.” She smiled. Her lack of irony surprised him.
“You mean you don’t mind waiting that long?”
“No. It’s perfect. That’s exactly one year before Josh goes into the army.”