In early August 1978 I set out with our loaded van for Spokane—this time, for a change, via Canada and northern Michigan, connecting with I-94 in Minneapolis. Having accumulated enough savings for a small down payment, we had rather optimistically decided to buy a house in Spokane in the hope that this would be our final station in my seemingly endless search for a permanent teaching job. I planned to drive to Spokane with some of our belongings, buy a house, and fly back east before returning with Trina to Spokane for the start of the semester in early September. As usual, I kept a bit of a travel diary, beginning with an entry in North Bay, Ontario, on August 9th:
Snack bar in Whiteriver, Ontario. Ordering a “butter tart,” but sending it back when I saw it had a rich dairy-based filling. “You mean you didn’t know what a butter tart was? They been out a long time.” But then the waitress-owner relented. “It’s not so unusual, eh? When I first got married I didn’t know what celery was. I grew up around Niagara Falls, we never grew it, and we couldn’t afford to buy such stuff. When I saw my husband eat it I thought it was some sort of green pepper.”
The next day in Ishpenning, Michigan, I noted “the smokestacks amid the forests on the banks of Lake Superior” and “the reverse side of the coin: railways still ‘disfigure’ Canadian villages.” I was subjected to an
attack of mosquitoes at a rest area in Jacobson, Minnesota, forcing and following me into the car. Turning on the radio, I am informed: “That mosquito bite might be more serious than you thought. Investigations are still under way into whether the death of an eight-year-old Windham boy was caused by encephalitis borne by mosquitoes.”
The radio was my constant companion, offering me such apothegms as Malcolm Muggeridge expounding on the uniqueness of the Jews: “God is their king. There are no Caesars.” I spent the night of August 11th in Fargo, North Dakota, noting that the entire town smelled “like my breakfast bran buds.” It must have been a seasonal thing, because on our return trip the following spring, the smell was entirely absent. In Miles City, Montana, I was impressed by the ubiquity of the wide-brimmed Western hats. I recorded a
dream of having an insight about Mama and recording it in my journal, to wit that she had experience of only two countries, the U.S. and Germany, and that this experience was alike. Both countries “always wanted more.”
My final stop before Spokane was in Bearmouth, Montana, thirty-five miles east of Missoula—the first destination I did not make on schedule. In Spokane the next day I was heartened by a sign in front of a church: “Failure is the path of least persistence.”
I stayed at the Shamrock Motel on Sprague Avenue, the main East-West business street, while searching for an affordable house with the prearranged help of a local real estate agent. She was quite enthusiastic at first, but her interest declined rather noticeably when she found out that my starting salary at Gonzaga would be only $14,000. I soon discovered that houses in the most attractive residential area, the South Hill, were priced beyond our means. The next best option, it seemed, was to buy a house in the Mission district, within walking distance of the Gonzaga campus. I made an offer on a $32,000 house on Augusta Avenue, which was in fact accepted. However, only a half-hour later, my agent called me at my motel, informing me that the owners had changed their minds. Apparently I had made the mistake, while touring the house, of telling my agent rather too loudly what a good buy I thought this house was. The remark had been overheard by the current tenants, one of whom was the owner’s daughter. She promptly reported my comment to her parents, encouraging them to demand the full price, as it seemed reasonably certain that if pressed I would pay more than I had offered. My agent tried to convince them they were making a mistake in a rather depressed housing market (and in fact the house did not sell until the following spring). I was offended by the impropriety of their belated repudiation of a legitimately concluded deal and took it as a signal to explore other options, even though my return flight left me only one more day for my search. Early the next morning I revisited a house I had already looked at in a semi-rural area known as Pasadena Park seven miles east of town. The one-acre property at 9708 East Maringo Drive was located directly on the Spokane River and was zoned for small-scale farming, which meant I would finally be able belatedly to make good on my promise to Trina many years before to buy her a horse when she turned ten (a date that at the time had seemed safely in the distant future). But what really clinched my decision to buy the house was seeing a mallard take off from the scenic river in the early-morning fog. This evidence of romantic rusticity so close to town seemed too good to pass up even though it would lengthen my commute to at least twenty minutes each way. Fortunately, we had just enough savings to make the required $8,000 down payment on the $40,000 house.
When I returned to Spokane with Trina in late August in time for the start of school (Steffi and Nicky were once again to follow at the end of October), I realized what poor condition the house I had so impulsively bought was in. Apparently the previous renters, forced to move when the house was put up for sale, had taken their revenge on the landlord by destroying two of the toilets in the house and doing much other damage besides, most of it not immediately visible. The landlord did agree to replace one of the toilets, but most of the damage did not come to light until some time had passed. Trina, however, helped me get over my discouragement by her evident delight in the property. “This place is great,” she exulted; “there’s lots of sawdust in the barn!” Steffi’s reaction, when she finally joined us in Spokane in the fall, was less positive: “This is not a house I can be proud of.” Its dimensions paled in comparison to our Victorian Irasburg home, but it did have lots of tiny rooms, one of which we converted into Steffi’s Werkstatt. The children slept in the two upstairs bedrooms, which adults could only reach by ducking down very low at the head of the stairs. Detracting from the otherwise rather idyllic location was the Inland Empire Paper factory about a half mile downstream on the other side of the river. Some precautions against pollution have been taken since the 1970s, but excessive toxic effluent is still regularly discharged into the river even today, and fine sawdust continued for many years to blanket properties on the opposite side of the river when the wind was right, or rather wrong. Nonetheless I remained at 9708 East Maringo Drive for twenty-three years, until finally I could afford to move to the South Hill in 2001, in part because the factory was willing to buy up properties on “our” side of the river to prevent any concerted action by residents to push for environmental controls.
Through Trina’s seventh-grade classmate and best friend Colleen McCuddin, who shared her passion for horses, I got to meet the artist Mel McCuddin and his wife Gloria, who lived across the river close by and for a time became our best friends. Mel was still a teamster at the time delivering milk early in the morning to make a living that would permit him to pursue his true calling after hours. Evenings he spent in his hand-built backyard studio, turning out paintings with a very distinctive personal style that can perhaps best be characterized as a dream-like mixture of realism and phantasmagoria. Mel reminded me of my cousin Nick Edmonds in his total commitment to his art. Both felt most at home in their studios, to which they frequently retreated, without any rancor but never feeling it necessary to erase the impression that they were only too happy to limit their contacts with the “workaday world.” Mel and I played tennis together and took turns chauffeuring the girls to their weekly riding lessons in Deer Park about fifteen miles northwest of Spokane. He and Steffi traded paintings for jewelry, allowing us to build up a nice little collection, to which I added over the years while his paintings were still affordable. As he was able to devote more time to his art, Mel’s work became quite well known locally and regionally. Like all true art, his work was refreshingly blunt and unconventional. Commissioned to paint the murals for the new Spokane sports arena in the 1990s, he caused a healthy controversy by painting the American flag upside down, ostensibly to protest our government’s neglect of its veterans.
Politically 1979-1980 was a historic year of transition as amidst growing stagflation at home President Jimmy Carter’s conciliatory, human rights-based foreign policy increasingly lost public support. The hopeful historical moment ushered in by the end of the Vietnam War and the collapse of the Nixon presidency was rapidly passing. The turning of the tide was presaged by the election of Margaret Thatcher as Europe’s first woman prime minister in May 1979. Elected on the promise of cutting taxes, restraining unions, and dismantling the welfare state, her popular libertarian motto was “free choice is what ultimately life is about.” Never mind that a totally unregulated market inevitably meant support for the rich at the expense of the poor. In January 1979 the Shah of Iran had been forced to flee a popular Islamic insurgency after 37 years of brutal U.S.-supported dictatorship. In July the dictator Anastasio Somoza, whose family had ruled Nicaragua with American backing since 1933, was ousted by the left-leaning Sandanista revolution. A violent insurgency was threatening the repressive American-supported military dictatorship in El Salvador as well. Carter did enjoy some transient successes, chief of which were the peace accords between Egypt and Israel negotiated at Camp David (though the results brought no relief to the Palestinians in the occupied territories) and the signing of the SALT II arms control treaty with the USSR (though the failure of the Senate to ratify the treaty meant that it never officially went into effect). The crowning blows to Carter’s popularity and prestige came in the fall of the year. In late October 1979, his government granted entry to the Shah in the United States to seek medical treatment for an as yet unknown disease that turned out to be terminal cancer. In furious retaliation, revolutionary Iranian students seized the American embassy in Teheran with support from the Khomeini regime, taking 52 hostages who were not released until the day of Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981. Meanwhile, an effort to free the hostages by military means failed badly in April 1980, further throwing Carter’s leadership into question. But the crucial blow to Carter’s reelection was probably the Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979. Carter immediately toughened his cold war stance, going so far as to invoke a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in the summer of 1980. In toughness, however, Carter could never compete with his Republican rival. Ironically, the Carter and Reagan administrations also mobilized and armed the very same anti-American (and anti-Soviet) Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden’s Al Quaida, which would later launch a world-wide “jihad” against our nation.
Our move to Spokane did not alleviate the strains in our marriage, which paralleled the nation’s political decline. There probably is some truth to Tolstoy’s famous remark in Anna Karenina, to the effect that all happy families are alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. Speaking from my own experience, I can identify neither one specific event nor one specific cause that precipitated the breakdown of our marriage. That it was not of recent vintage, however, became clear to me as early as our year in Burlington in 1970-1971, when I could hardly believe that two people we knew were getting married. “How can anyone want to get married?” I thought. “Do they really have any idea what they’re getting into?” Steffi later pinned the blame on me for wanting a younger woman, but I did not even meet my second wife Sally until six months after our divorce became final in April 1983. Infidelity certainly did play a part in our break-up, but we were probably about equally guilty on that score and it has never become entirely clear who took the first misstep (which already occurred in Germany). Suffice it to say that there was no single act of infidelity on either part that can bear the brunt of blame for our parting. More important was a basic incompatibility which came out in a number of ways, not least in escalating mutual recriminations. We were different in many ways, differences that only surfaced or only caused friction over time. One example was in the way we made our living. Steffi was a craftsman with a strong aesthetic sense, which from her perspective I entirely lacked. She did not like intellectuals, preferring artists or people who worked with their hands. This was a sentiment reinforced by her sister Ulrike who referred to me (when I was out of earshot) as “that intellectual asshole”. When she first met Sally in the late eighties, before Sally and I were married, Steffi warned her that I was “all brain and no body.” Steffi didn’t particularly like the Jesuits, either, and accused me of kowtowing to them. Like a true artist she valued independence above all, and some of her criticisms of the Jesuits were actually quite well taken.
Das Leben der Pater is falsch (the fathers’ life is false). They look for a secure niche in the Church. But life is not like that; life is struggle.
Steffi even offered to set me free to pursue a career in the Church: “Do you want to become a priest? I’ll gladly separate from you to give you the opportunity.” To my chagrin even Mama seemed to suspect me of wanting to return to my wartime Catholic roots–for opportunistic reasons. I, on the other hand, thought I had been hired by Gonzaga to reaffirm and strengthen their links to the larger secular academic community from which I had been recruited and in which I had originally hoped to find an institutional home. Nonetheless, I was always aware of a certain underlying tension: would I succeed in giving Jesuit education a more liberal turn, or would the Jesuits succeed in making me more religious? The contemplative life had an undeniable appeal.
Reinforcing our differences, Sally was very gregarious and found it difficult to be alone, whereas I had few close friends and enjoyed my solitude. In the final analysis it may have been simply our living arrangements that made divorce too easy to forgo. With two houses 2,500 miles apart the opportunity to split was simply too great. Our dispute rested on what on March 9th, 1981, I diagnosed as a mutual charade:
Steffi’s claim that she wants me to give up my job and move to Vermont and my claim that I want her to give up Vermont (sell the house) and move here. For reasons of self-vindication we must invent the myth that separation is the other person’s choice alone.
In the end I was no doubt mainly to blame, because I welcomed the split, while Steffi regretted it (or at least that’s what she said).
As is undoubtedly true in most failed marriages, infidelities were more a sign that something was wrong in the marriage than the actual cause of the final break. One obvious sign that something was wrong was a development in the spring of 1979 that took me quite by surprise. I fell in love with one of my students. I had been attracted to students before, and would not wish to deny that there is a benign erotic-charismatic component to most good teaching (in one of his books the always provocative Paul Goodman claimed that one of the great perks of college teaching was to be able to spend so much time around vivacious, intelligent, good-looking young people), but this was something new. Toward the end of my course on twentieth-century Europe in spring 1979 one of my students—let’s call her Kaye—started attending my office hours with suspicious frequency. What really caught my attention was the fact that she had no hesitation admitting she had not read one of the assigned readings in my class. This struck me as a rather risky way of gaining an instructor’s attention, but I couldn’t help admiring the seeming indifference to grades that her ready confession implied. In fact, however, she was an A student, who wrote an outstanding final exam in the course and got all A’s in her other courses as well. I was flattered to learn that her greatest motivation to excel in my class was to live up to my expectations by showing me what she was capable of! When Steffi had returned to Irasburg in the spring of 1979 (I had to wait around for the end of Trina’s school before driving back to Vermont) I invited Kaye to visit me at home after the end of the semester. She was a basketball cheerleader and a state beauty queen, the kind of girl I would never have suspected of having the slightest interest in me, but to my delight she was evidently quite taken by me as well—although I suspected it was more the challenge of getting a professor to come down from his high horse that provided her incentive (reminding me of Professor Unrath’s unhappy fate in Heinrich Mann’ novel and in “The Blue Angel,” the movie based on it). She was beautiful, sensitive, and intelligent—the ideal student. Above all she represented youth to me, the youth I no longer possessed. I was also very taken by her insistence that age difference makes absolutely no difference when two people are in love. I could not resist fantasizing about having a beautiful wife who actually appreciated intellectual people and was open to tutelage and instruction. For a while I was infatuated enough to believe that a student-teacher relationship was the perfect match (and this at a time when the equal rights amendment and the corrosive effects of power imbalances in personal relationships were everywhere being debated)!. No doubt this was for me the start of a mid-life crisis that culminated in my separation from Steffi in 1981. Kaye and I were well aware of the risks we were running—especially me, as a romance between teacher and student was an absolute no-no at Gonzaga, regardless whether it occurred inside or outside the halls of academe. In the end the romance did not last beyond a week or two that spring and remained mostly in my mind. But I cannot deny its strong emotional impact. As absence makes the heart grow fonder, so my infatuation reached its height in Irasburg in the summer of 1979. I could not believe the ending of some television show in which the hero magnanimously foreswore a certain romantic relationship for what seemed to me to be utterly conventional and insufficient reasons. Virtue triumphing over love because social mores demanded it—is that even remotely credible? I could not help thinking of something I had read somewhere by Bertrand Russell: “Of all forms of caution, the one most fatal to happiness is caution in matters of love.”
Steffi and I resumed our cross-country shuttle in academic year 1979-1980, Steffi as usual arriving at the end of October and returning to Vermont with Nick in May. Trina stayed behind to complete the school year. In May 1980, after dropping off Sally and Nicky in Vancouver for the trans-Canada train trip back to Vermont, I made my first return trip to Germany since 1967 for my father’s seventieth birthday. Leaving Trina with the McCuddins, I traveled via Canada, participating in a chess tournament in Vancouver on the way. The timing was fortuitous, as we left Spokane several days before Mount Saint Helens blew its top on May 18th. There had been warning signs for weeks beforehand, but no one expected the strength of the eruption when it occurred. It unexpectedly made my flight to Germany much more comfortable as the clouds of ash from the eruption prevented us from landing to pick up the passengers in Calgary, thus leaving the plane half empty. Most of us had two or three seats on which we could stretch out and even get some sleep.
With Sylvia, Papa, Tante Lulli, Stella, and Stella's husband Ernie, May 1980
After I returned to an ash-clogged Spokane in June, Trina and I drove east, this time accompanied by Gloria McCuddin, who was planning to spend the summer with friends and relatives back east. We also brought along a stray mixed-breed dog by the name of Bursche (lad) whom we had picked up during the year (or, more accurately, who had picked us up). After dropping off Gloria in Connecticut we headed straight for Olaf’s son John’s June wedding in Kent, where the rest of the family had gathered as well.
With Steffi at John Stackelberg's wedding in Kent, CT, June 1980
The summer of 1980 marked the crisis of our relationship. It turned out that Steffi had a male counterpart to Kaye in Vermont. Dale was a skilful furniture restorer and decorator, only in his early thirties at the time, but he had struck Steffi’s fancy. The relationship had apparently been going on for some time. Whereas I yearned to teach a receptive Kaye about history, literature, and philosophy, Steffi looked forward to learning from Dale the secrets of fine craftsmanship in wood. She also wanted to give him the confidence he lacked to make something out of himself. Both Steffi and I basked in the admiration of our respective young fans. We thought of them as our muses and potential protégés, sources of inspiration, full of erotic charm. I found out about Dale when Steffi called him at 3 in the morning one night—I had followed her downstairs and overheard the conversation. Steffi thought I’d be much angrier than I was, but I was full of mixed feelings. Though the Kaye lodestar had dimmed in the past academic year and we had not resumed our brief romance, she was still very much in my thoughts, as I imagine Dale was in Steffi’s. Was this our opportunity to go our separate ways? I knew it would be hard on the children, now nine and fourteen, respectively.
Trina and Nick in Spokane, 1980
We decided to stay together for the children for at least one more year. Trina was an extremely bright student going into her last year at the old Argonne Junior High School in the fall of 1980. We decided it was our duty to do whatever we could to further her education. In July 1980 I took her to Concord, New Hampshire, to interview for admission to St. Paul’s, where Olaf and I had gone to school from 1946 to 1948, and which now was open to girls as well. However, Trina adamantly insisted on attending a school that had a riding program, something St. Paul’s did not have at the time.
When I tried to console her for the lack of riding at St. Paul’s by telling her of the many other activities, she replied: “Would you want to switch from chess to checkers?”
She ended up being accepted at Kent School in Connecticut, another prestigious preparatory school now open to girls, where she was to enter the fourth form (tenth grade) in fall 1981. If Steffi and I were going to separate, it made sense to do so at that point. Trina had already made it clear that she did not want to live with either of us.
Trina playing both sides against each other as a means of l legitimately asserting her independence–for who can blame her for refusing to live with quarreling parents??
The summer of 1980 was an emotional roller-coaster ride for the entire family with lots of ups and downs, bickering and caustic exchanges. Neither Steffi nor I were sure what we wanted to do, although each of us insisted that whatever decision we reached, it would be our own, not the other one’s. “Ich bin hin und hergerissen (I’m torn back and forth)” Steffi told me; “not between two men but between two ways of life (Lebeweisen).” Both of us felt increasingly hemmed in by our failing marriage. My condition for staying together another year was for Steffi to accompany me back to Spokane in August. I did not want to leave Steffi on her own in Vermont for another two months as in the past. This is the way I put it in my journal on July 15th:
Taking Steffi along in August: the obvious motive is vanity—to show that I can do it. But perhaps there is a more subtle motive as well: to insure that the break, when it occurs, is final: to prevent Steffi from following after (for instance, by arrangement with Gloria, who would pick her up in Calgary) thereby perpetuating the lifestyle she would prefer: six months here, six months there, with a lover in every port.
With Steffi at her sister Ulrike's place, summer of 1980
All summer we argued about whether Steffi should come to Spokane in August or whether we should call it quits right then. Our problematic marriage was the talk of the family that summer. Mama actually commented on how much friendlier Steffi had unexpectedly become to her. Steffi even noticed a change in herself. “I’m full of love this summer. I want to embrace everyone.” But Mama was critical of Betsy who first told Mama about Steffi’s romance: “It’s slightly pornographic to see those kinds of things. Betsy is interested in that kind of thing.” But then she conceded: “It is interesting.”
Mama in Vermont, summer 1980
As it happened, Steffi’s entire family, mother, step-father, and sister (Ulrike and her boyfriend Nick Plein had bought some property in Vermont), visited us that summer and were very much witnesses to the drama.
The matter-of-fact way in which Steffi’s mother and Hans have accepted the situation, as if prepared well beforehand (through Steffi’s letters?). Their reaction has been only an increased sense of proprietorship over the house, as with total impunity they now plan restorations and remodeling without once thinking it might be necessary to consult me.
Ulrike and Nick Plein's property in Vermont, 1980
When Steffi asked her mother for advice what to do in her dilemma, Lilo was noncommittal: “Choose Dale,” she said, ”only if he is an improvement over what you have.” But unwittingly she encouraged Steffi’s indecision by admitting, “Ich traue keinem Mann mehr (I no longer trust any man).” Steffi even sought the advice of my friend and former Harvard roommate, the psychiatrist Paul Russell, who practiced in Boston and occasionally came to see us in Vermont with his girlfriend Franny: “I want to ask Paul whether leading a double life can make one sick.” I had earlier written Paul about Kaye. “That was a powerful letter,” he told me later, immediately making me regret that I had not had the courage to send the letter to Kaye instead. Even Trina got into the discussion by citing for me a slogan that hung in her school: “If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was yours anyway.” Trina later told me that at the time she had thought the term “nuclear family” referred to its potential for explosion. I was working on a paper on Nietzsche that summer. Steffi attributed my bad moods to the influence of “diesen Weiberhasser (this woman-hater).” But reading Nietzsche was a solace to me, especially this pronouncement by Zarathustra: “Wohl brach ich die Ehe—aber zuerst brach die Ehe—mich (true, I broke the marriage—but first the marriage broke—me)!” I also rather liked his analysis of why some women hated men:
Also sprach das Eisen zum Magneten: “Ich hasse dich am meisten, weil du anziehst, aber nicht stark genug bist an dich zu ziehen.“
Thus spake the iron to the magnet: „I hate you the most, because you attract, but are not strong enough to draw [me] to you.“
The academic year 1980-1981 was our final year together. The coming separation gave all our activities that year a wistful, melancholy quality, but my mind was made up. I did not know what the future would hold, but I knew I wanted a change and was determined to seize what would very likely be my last opportunity to make that change. Steffi was more ambivalent, mainly because in that fateful summer of 1980 Dale had not exhibited the level of enthusiasm for and commitment to their relationship that she had hoped for or expected. Falling for weak and passive men seemed to be her unenviable fate.