Intimate Wars (11 page)

Licensed facilities like Flushing Women's were the best option for all women, wealthy or poor. We were required to meet hospital standards for care, staff, space, and management procedures, and our doctors were extremely skilled.
⁷

The Department of Health conducted routine inspections to ensure that Flushing Women's was meeting all of the promulgated
standards and requirements. Each time, they spent two to three days reviewing hundreds of charts, looking at every piece of equipment, examining staffing patterns, and even staying in the ORs to watch procedures. During the exit interviews, when they reviewed their findings with me, I invariably talked with them about combating the “Medicaid Mills” stereotype that led so many to choose private practices and hospitals over clinics. Didn't they have jurisdiction there? Couldn't they do something to educate women about the crisis? Did it even matter if a clinic was better than a doctor's office if few patients knew the difference?

They agreed with me that clinics were the best option for women seeking abortions, but they maintained that educating the public was not the mandate of the Department of Health.

Even some of the pro-choice activists who had fought for legalization felt there was a “dirtiness” about the business, that the providers were stained with blood, as it were. Once I was at Ellie Guggenheim's Sutton Place apartment for a pro-choice fundraiser and I happened to mention second trimester abortions. She widened her eyes and turned up her nose. “You don't
do
those, do you?”

This was the politics of abortion, the bifurcation of the realities of the procedure and the political arm of the movement. The philosophy of the early pro-choice activists had become unmoored from the provision of services. Now the clinics were gaining a pariah status, the doctors were being labeled “abortionists.”

Early second-wave feminists upheld reproductive freedom as the very foundation of women's freedom and equality. Yet women's struggle against gender violence had not ended with
Roe
. Their biological and historical inheritance of bloodshed through botched childbirths, illegal abortions, and
forced sterilizations continued. Now the Hyde Amendment passed relatively unnoticed. Where was the great outpouring of political anger at this affront to low-income women? Where was the march on Washington? What the now silent pro-choice majority failed to see was that the denial of health care to people who needed it and the stigmatization of abortion clinics and providers would ultimately hurt all women, not just those who were poor and black.

The gap between the women who had abortions and the activists of the pro-choice movement who had made abortion legal had to be closed. The inability to really look at abortion reduced activists' capacity to recognize the depth of this issue. How could they commit to the political passion necessary to fight for reproductive freedom and equality if they'd never been inside a clinic?

I wanted activists to speak with my staff. I wanted them to hear the stories of the eleven-year-olds who were raped by their fathers or uncles, the young women whose promising lives were waylaid by an accident. The physicality of abortion—the reality of the thing itself—made people uncomfortable. It involved pain, blood, anxiety, discomfort, and guilt, and it was easy for even die-hard feminists to hold the issue at arm's length. But if they could only feel the weight of compassion after seeing patient after patient in counseling, holding their hands in the operating rooms—the preteens, the older women, the rainbow of lives that came through the doors, the stunning repetition of the event itself—perhaps they would understand how high the stakes were.

I suppose I was making the assumption that what so motivated me—the reality of abortion—would also inspire them. But their personal radicalization, like mine, had to be motivated from within.

AFTER THE POLITICAL AWAKENING I experienced with the passage of the Hyde Amendment, I became absorbed with finding new ways to right the systemic wrongs that were now so clearly visible to me. I had long been a fixture at HIP meetings and dinners, attending them with Marty in the role of his talented colleague. Armed with the confidence of my growing political energy, I turned my attention to HIP itself and the enormous opportunity it presented.

I was in a position to reach out to potentially thousands of women, thousands beyond those who came to my clinic for abortions. The majority of HIP's subscribers were women making health care decisions for their entire families. If the powers that be refused to educate people, HIP could take on the role. Strategically, it would serve my vision and would also benefit HIP. By presenting itself as an advocate for women's health, HIP would be at the forefront of a changing medical landscape, which would ultimately result in more subscribers; in other words, it was good for business.

At a social dinner with the president of HIP and Marty, I took the opportunity to pitch my program. First of all, why were there no gynecological evening hours? Women worked, and they needed that flexibility. And what about birth control? All HIP gynecological staff should be trained to counsel patients on their options. Finally, I proposed we have a conference with a combination of academic and political speakers and workshops to bring these issues to the forefront.

The potential publicity benefits for HIP were obvious, and a meeting was arranged for me with Julius Horowitz, the head of HIP's public relations department, to begin the planning.

We decided on a combination of heavy-hitting speakers and educational workshops to highlight the themes of women as medical consumers and decision makers within the family and society. New York City mayor Abraham Beame was to be
the keynote speaker, introduced by Marty. I would moderate a panel that included Bella Abzug speaking on “Women as Leaders” and Barbara Ehrenreich on the “Current Status of Women.” It would be a historic event, an entire conference on women's health—a field that was hardly recognized.

First Bella spoke, in her ubiquitous hat, full throated and powerful, bringing the crowd to its feet. Here, for the first time, was the presence of a woman I wanted to emulate
.

Everyone was high on the energy in the room when I took the podium for my speech, “Challenging the Medical Mystique: How Can Consumers Influence the Health Care Delivery System?” HIP physicians, politicians, patients, doctors from all over the country, press, and college students and professors filled the hotel's main ballroom almost five hundred strong. Standing there, looking out over the crowd, feeling all the eyes on me in curiosity and expectation, I was at home. I felt I'd been destined for this reality.
⁸

 

MARTY HAD BEEN SUPPORTIVE of my desire to organize the panel, advising me on logistics and helping me see it through to execution. He saw me as his student, his rising star, and I remember the sight of him beaming proudly from the audience when I stepped down from the podium at the conclusion of my speech. He was moving in powerful political circles and was drawing me into them, too. Everything that I did reflected back on him, and the light was growing to be very powerful. I was not just a midlife crisis, not just a trophy girlfriend, but his protégé.

After the stimulation of putting on the forum and the sublime satisfaction that came with its success, I realized that while I appreciated his professional support, it alone was no longer adequate. I was beginning to lose patience with our affair. Stealing moments in Marty's office upstairs, sneaking
off to have lunch dates, pretending to be merely work colleagues at HIP functions—it was all starting to feel stale. On Saturday nights and holidays, his time with his family, I was always in second place, alone. It had taken a couple of years for the glow of the romance to wear off and the reality of the
powerlessness
of my situation to fully hit me, but when it did, the desire—no, the demand—for him to leave his wife became the obsession of our relationship.

Marty also felt the confines of the adulterous cage. We had tumultuous, raging, exhausting arguments about whether he would leave his wife. One weekend he took me to New Orleans, telling his wife he was going to a conference. We stayed at the Royal Sonesta in a suite with rooms overlooking Bourbon Street. There was jazz pouring from every open doorway and dancing in the streets. I whimsically ordered two dozen white roses to put in the bedroom. But the romance quickly wore off, as it was apt to do then, and our lovely evening disintegrated into a screaming match on the street.

He finally had the realization that leaving his wife would mean leaving the prison of a life he no longer wanted. He could start over, show everyone that he was made of more than the small family practice and the constricting family ties that had so long defined him. He could show all the people who'd refused to let him into their WASP schools or country clubs that Marty Gold could have power and influence. And I would be the catalyst of his arrival.

We had our first public coming out as a couple at the annual LaGuardia Dinner Dance, the HIP gala dinner held every year at the Plaza Hotel. Wearing a long, light, thin-strapped black dress, I walked imperiously down the grand staircase in front of all the HIP physicians and board of directors. Someone dropped a plate of hors d'oeuvres when we
entered. A couple came over and asked Marty, “Where's Bernice?” I answered for him, “He's not with her anymore. He's living with me.” I loved the transgression and the power of that act, even though I suffered from needing the approbation of others.

I learned early in life that there is a heavy price for transgression
.
Marty had been known as a pillar of the community, a loving family man. Now the wives of his married friends prohibited their husbands from having social communication with him. And I was not a free woman anymore; I was living with a man more than twice my age, and my single friends slowly moved away from me. It was impossible to socialize with my coupled friends, too; Marty had nothing in common with their men, who were so much younger and just starting their careers. As a result, we lived relatively hermetic personal lives.

Our political lives, filled with dinners, parties, and dances, were always quite another matter. There were often formal events in major New York City hotels, and I was always seated with Marty at or near the main table. At one dinner, I met Jimmy Carter and heard him speak seriously about the threat of nuclear annihilation; at another, I chatted with Walter Mondale about health care. During a Bicentennial gathering in 1976 held by Jack Bigel, the top financial and bargaining adviser to many of New York City's most powerful labor unions, Marty and I watched Operation Sail's Parade of Ships on the Hudson from the balcony of his office building overlooking the New York harbor. After speaking with Bigel I overheard him tell someone, “That girl wants a career more than anyone else I know.”

Many of the events we attended were surreal, male-run affairs where misogyny and traditional roles were heavily on display. I would always dress very carefully for these occasions,
choosing something from my collection of glamorous gowns, aware that it was not only my mind that was being presented. I had fun playing along, bantering with the men and engaging in their discussions.

That changed at a dinner Marty hosted to pitch a new idea for a business venture. Someone had the absurd idea to hand out soft plastic vaginas as party favors. The men passed them around, laughing and fumbling to fill them with dollar bills. Shocked, I made a disparaging remark, got up from the table, and stalked out. At another event, women dressed in bikinis and fur coats performed on roller skates during dessert. I stomped out of that one loudly, too, saying that they were treating women like animals and animals like commodities. Marty and I would have major rows after these scenes. I couldn't believe he sat there and laughed at the disgusting behavior displayed by his colleagues. But to him, it was a joke. Men were men, and I was being a poor sport.

Our happier times were those we spent alone with each other, away from the politics, where we could allow our minds to drift from Flushing Women's and HIP. Marty had finally served his wife with divorce papers, and we planned to marry as soon as it was finalized. Furious, she'd resolved to make this as difficult as possible, and decided to countersue, resulting in a very long, very expensive divorce. But we knew in the end we'd be together, and we were able to let ourselves be almost carefree when we took our weekend excursions to the countryside of New York and Connecticut, exploring romantic country inns, antique shops, and restaurants.

I had always loved the mountains and forests a couple of hours north of Manhattan. One leisurely trip took us across the Bear Mountain Bridge fifty miles outside of the city to Garrison on Hudson, a quaint Revolutionary War-era town.

We decided to purchase a house there, a 1960s, four-thousand-square-foot wooden structure with an indoor pool and a retractable glass roof, on six acres of mountainous land with a pond. Having only $25,000 between us as a result of the divorce settlement, Marty had to borrow $5,000 from my mother for the down payment on the mortgage.

Our home's beauty was internal and quiet. I especially loved the pond, where I put up a large log to sit on, creating a kind of “green study” like the one Dostoyevsky was said to inhabit when he wrote. And there was one more touch that truly made Garrison feel like home: now that I had some land, I could finally act on my lifelong desire for animal companionship. I adopted a cat and two adorable Akita puppies, the first of many animals who would come to live with me there.

And so, alone together at our house in the country, Marty and I continued to explore the contours of our relationship. Life outside the city made our age difference feel more pronounced, and Marty, particularly sensitive to this, made efforts to show me he was still physically and emotionally youthful enough to keep up with me. Thinking back now, our foiled attempts to participate in youthful activities together underscored the fact that ultimately we had few things in common apart from our love. He was operating in another world, an older world where the roles of men and women were clearly delineated, and I was poised to tear down any barrier I encountered. There were dozens of reasons to break off our ties, and dozens of opportunities to do so.