Then Comes Marriage (11 page)

On their way out to the Hamptons one Friday afternoon late that summer, Thea stopped the car, pulled over by the side of the road, and got out. She went down on one knee and took Edie's hand in hers. “Will you—” she began, but before she could finish the sentence, Edie jumped in to say, “Yes! Yes!”

“Let me finish!” Thea cried, annoyed that Edie had interrupted her carefully planned proposal. She pulled out a circular diamond pin and presented it to Edie. It was not legal at that time for two women to marry anywhere in the world, but that did not make Thea's proposal any less real or powerful. Thea pinned the diamond brooch to Edie's blouse, and thus began what became a very long engagement.

Thea had chosen a pin instead of a ring for a very specific reason. She had previously invited Edie to speculate about what would happen if Edie showed up at the office one day wearing a diamond engagement ring. Edie explained that that was clearly impossible since everyone at IBM would then ask, “Who's the lucky guy and when do we get to meet him?” and those were not questions that Edie could or would answer. Edie adored her colleagues at work, but she had not dared to tell any of them that she was a lesbian. But she could wear a diamond pin whenever she liked, and no one would ever ask to meet her fiancé.

I have told this story of Edie and Thea's engagement dozens of times by now, yet it never ceases to amaze me. The year 1967, when it happened, was two years
before
the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village that led to the modern gay rights movement. The idea that two women could have had the courage, the self-esteem, not to mention the foresight to become engaged to each other then is nothing short of miraculous.

In the 1950s and 1960s the only books that a gay person could read that actually talked about lesbians (as opposed to obliquely referencing them) were pulp fiction. The following passage from such a novel,
Three Women
, is a reminder of what those times were like:

She had realized then for the first time that her love for Byrne made her different. But everyone was entitled to love . . . Yet she knew now that they must always hide their feelings, no matter how wonderful their love seemed. The world's judging eyes condemned them, forced them to sneak and lie. Something in Paula screamed against that pain and injustice, but she did not forget that loving Byrne was as natural and right for her as marriage and children were for others.

“As natural and right for her as marriage and children were for others?” Edie and Thea not only believed that their love was natural and right, but that they were even entitled to get married. That's amazing enough when it happens between any couple—gay or straight—today, but it is almost unbelievable that it happened between two women in 1967. (It is worth noting, in the interest of accuracy and true to the pulp genre, that one of the women in
Three Women
was murdered, the second was her killer, and the third ended up getting married to a man.)

BY THE TIME
of their engagement, Edie had been working at IBM for nearly a decade. She had first moved to New York City in the mid 1950s “in order to be gay,” as she would later put it. Her first apartment was a tiny walk-up with a shared bathroom on West 11th Street, a few blocks from Washington Square Park. It was not glamorous, but it was in the Village where she had wanted to be.

The biggest problem that Edie had at that time was actually not that she was gay since she, like most gay people in the 1950s, lived most of her life in the closet. Her biggest problem was that she would have to earn her own living. As a middle-class Jewish woman growing up in Philadelphia, Edie, like so many others, had assumed that her husband would end up supporting her financially. While Edie had a bachelor's degree in psychology from Temple University, that was not much help for a twenty-three-year-old woman trying to make it on her own in Manhattan. As she later explained to Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed: “I wanted to be like everybody else. You marry a man who supports you—it never occurred to me I'd have to earn a living.”

So Edie taught herself dictation and typing in order to find a job as a secretary. Even though she landed a job as the “confidential secretary” to the CEO of the Associated Press, it paid little better than a regular secretary's salary, and she soon realized that there was no realistic possibility of promotion. She switched to bookkeeping for a while, working for a necktie manufacturing company, but that was no more promising. Finally, Edie realized that she needed a real profession. She had always been good at math, so in 1955, she decided to apply to New York University's graduate program in applied mathematics.

Unable to afford the tuition, Edie applied for a secretarial job, knowing that the university covered tuition for its employees. Originally, the university was reluctant to hire her because Edie was so overqualified for the job, but eventually they placed her in a secretarial job at NYU's Math Institute that was partially subsidized by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) so they could pay her more. She worked from eight to four each weekday, then took math classes in the late afternoons and evenings. In her spare time, with the money she saved from the free tuition, she took piano lessons and tap dancing classes, and on weekends, she went to the Bagatelle to sip coffee and read magazines. It was a busy and exciting life, and although she had not yet found lasting love among the lesbians of Greenwich Village, she did find another kind of love—for computers.

From the moment that Edie started studying computer programming, she knew that she had found her calling. When she helped out a few fellow students by typing their research papers, they reciprocated by teaching her how to operate the eight-ton UNIVAC computer that took up almost the entire floor of the Math Institute building on the NYU campus. “The first night I was working on the machine, I was terrified,” Edie recalled. She learned how to load tapes and input data on the UNIVAC, which was used by the AEC.

Edie's obvious computer skills and her experience led to a full-time job at IBM in 1958. At IBM, Edie was a talented programmer, eventually earning their highest technical rank. She loved her colleagues at IBM but still could not bring herself to reveal to any of them that she was gay. “I never thought I was inferior,” she has explained, “but I was worried that they might think that I was inferior. So I lied all the time.” Edie worked closely with one male colleague who was also gay, and although each knew the truth about the other, neither of them ever said anything, even though they worked together for ten years. That was just how life was at that time when most gay people had no choice but to live their lives in the closet. The stakes were just too high.

During the years when Edie was single, she often went out socially with her IBM friends. “It was an amazing group, just amazing, and the weirdness of it is that I lied to every wonderful person whom I really loved,” she explained. “I mean, we ate lunch together, we drank together after work, we partied together.” She went out with the group on weekends, too—until she got together with Thea. Her colleagues loved to go to wine tastings on the weekends, but Edie could not bring Thea as her date, and she certainly was not going to leave her at home, so she just stopped going. When her colleagues asked why, she made up excuses. And when others noted that Edie seemed to get a lot of calls at work from Thea, she explained that that was because she was dating Thea's brother, Willy—actually the name of a wooden doll from Thea's Dutch childhood that the couple kept in a closet in their apartment.

But as her relationship with Thea grew more serious, Edie hated having to keep it secret. She was still too scared to tell her IBM colleagues, but there was another group of computer programmers she had come to know well—people she did not work with every day but saw twice a year at a biannual conference. Each time the conference rolled around, she sat silently as her friends regaled each other with stories of their children, their spouses, and their family lives. “I knew about everybody's wife, and how she was, and I knew whose kid was no longer on a three-wheeler but was on a two-wheeler, everything,” Edie remembers. But she never revealed anything about herself. Until one day, she did.

The night before the conference started, she went out for drinks with a group of fellow programmers. “Guys, the most important thing in my life is happening,” she blurted out. And then she told them about Thea. To her surprise and relief, everyone was supportive. One male friend told Edie the next morning that he couldn't help fantasizing about Edie with another woman. “Oh, honey,” Edie said, laughing it off. She had spent years feeling petrified that her friends would ostracize her—this, she could handle.

Despite having to remain closeted to most of the world, Edie and Thea had a thriving social life in Manhattan and in the Hamptons, where Edie bought a small cottage on the wrong side of the tracks for Thea's birthday in 1968. The couple threw rollicking dinner parties, with Thea, a gifted cook, preparing homard à l'Américaine from Julia Child's
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
for dozens of guests. They went to parties and dances, twirling around dance floors all over New York doing the merengue, the lindy hop, the hully gully. Later, they enjoyed making up lyrics to the latest unintelligible seventies disco hits.

In 1974, after sixteen years at IBM, Edie decided to retire. The company was closing its Manhattan office, and the only remaining positions available in New York City were in sales, which did not interest her. Now in her mid-forties, Edie was burned out from the job and wanted to travel more for pleasure. As a private therapist, Thea could set her own schedule, and if Edie quit, the couple would be able to take trips wherever and whenever they wanted. “I did not see the point of going on,” said Edie. “I was exhausted from sixteen years of really working my ass off.” It was time for her and Thea to enjoy the fruits of their labors—which they did for three joyous years, touring Europe and reveling in their hard-earned, newfound freedom.

Then, one day in 1977, as they were preparing for a trip to Japan, they realized that Thea had started to drag one foot when she walked. That began a whole new chapter in their lives.

AT FIRST, IT
was just a small issue, the kind of thing that happens to hundreds of people every day. Edie made a joke of it, noting that Thea must need a pair of new shoes. Neither woman thought much about it until later, when Thea began stumbling more often. Then Thea couldn't swing a golf club correctly anymore; her foot seemed stuck. Concerned, she made an appointment with a doctor to find out what was wrong.

After examining Thea and giving her a spinal tap, the doctors told her they weren't sure what the problem was. At the time, multiple sclerosis was not as well understood as it is now. But as Thea's condition continued to worsen over the years, they realized that it was something far more debilitating: Thea had progressive multiple sclerosis, which meant that over time she would gradually become quadriplegic, losing motor control over her limbs.

Edie leapt into action, doing research about MS, going to lectures, and even taking a three-month nursing course. Both she and Thea were determined that their lives would change as little as possible, despite the disease. They put up a sign on their refrigerator that said “Don't Postpone Joy” and they meant it.

Thea began using a cane, but within a couple of years, as her legs continued to weaken, she switched to Canadian crutches. What Thea dreaded, though, was the inevitable move to a wheelchair. Then in her late forties, Thea could not get accepted to clinical trials in the United States. The couple hoped that they might be able to get Thea a particular drug that was being tested in the United States but administered in Israel; it had shown promise in treating MS patients at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.

As her motor control continued to deteriorate, Thea and Edie booked their tickets and flew to Tel Aviv in 1980, planning to stay a month. Yet as soon as they arrived, they learned that this new drug was no longer being administered in Israel because patients had experienced serious complications. Edie and Thea were tremendously disappointed, of course, but true to form, they decided to make the most of the situation. They had a month in Israel ahead of them, so they made arrangements to go sightseeing. Although both Edie and Thea were Jewish, they had never had much interest in Judaism until this visit. But from the moment they got off the El Al plane, they both felt a deep connection to Israel and an increased interest in their heritage. They soon realized that there was so much to see in a country that was then still very young, yet also very ancient, and they took full advantage of it.

One day in Jerusalem, while Edie was recovering from a bout of flu in their room at the King David Hotel, Thea made her way down a long flight of steps in the Old City with a taxi driver. When she got to the bottom, Thea realized that there was no way she could get back up the steps. The taxi driver turned to her and said, “Wait—I will go get the army.” He returned shortly with three young female soldiers from the Israeli army who had been walking nearby. The women cheerfully strode over, picked Thea up in their interlocked arms like Queen Esther, and started carrying her up the flight of steps. “Stop!” Thea suddenly commanded like an Israeli general. “Please give the driver my camera to take a picture, because nobody will believe this!” That photograph, of a beaming Thea in the arms of those soldiers, still hangs on the wall in Edie's bedroom.

Not long after the Israel trip, Thea was forced to acknowledge that she needed to use a wheelchair. Edie walked into a surgical supply store and bought what she now calls a “goofy blue wheelchair.” She had never bought one before, so she did not realize that they could—and should—be tailored to the user's individual needs. “I had no idea that you do all kinds of dimensioning,” she explained. “It's like buying a special car.” There was a steep learning curve in dealing with Thea's MS as its toll on her body increased.