For Better or Worst

During eras of rapid social change like our own, works of art can provide important guideposts to the way things used to be. In A.R. Gurney's 1982 play The Dining Room, a series of insightful vignettes about life among upper-class WASPs through several generations, an adult baby boomer returns to her parents' home with the news that her husband has taken up with another woman. The father advises his daughter simply "to fly back and kick her out," and confesses to an indiscretion in his own past.

"One time I became romantically involved with Mrs. Shoemaker," he tells his daughter. "We took a little trip together. To Sea Island. Your mother got wind of it, and came right down, and told Betty Shoemaker to get on the next train. That's all there was to it. Now why don't you do that? Go tell this woman to peddle her papers elsewhere." And in the charming 1938 film The Sisters, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn, a young woman with a straying husband enlists her two sisters to drive the troublesome homewrecker out of town altogether. (Now that was sisterhood.)

Yes, those were the days of wifely prerogatives, when the force of custom, culture and conviction, even short of the law, supported the marriage contract. When, indeed, there was a marriage contract, with the second half of that term getting far more stress than it does today.

Those were the days when the mistress cowered on some "back street" while the wife continued to reign magisterially in public. Now the situation is reversed, it seems, and the wife hovers tearfully in the background while the mistress smiles broadly for the local tabloids.

Those, too, were the days when marriages often survived the spouses' shifting affections. Now, however, the loss of her husband's favor can mean banishment for a wife. According to present social protocols that stress only the primacy of individual preference and choice, the disfavored consort is apparently supposed to recede discreetly into the shadows like the odalisque who is no longer the sultan's favorite. How dare she make any claims when the interest of her husband has evaporated?

Of all the outrageously cruel remarks made by Rudy Giuliani's divorce lawyer Raoul Felder about Donna Hanover, and on Mother's Day no less, the worst was not the one about her "howling like a stuck pig" (making light of her pain at the wreck of her marriage), or about having to be dragged "screaming, scratching, kicking," out of what is at the moment her home (as if she intended to stay beyond the end of her husband's term), or even about her being "an uncaring mother" (something swiftly denied by people in the know). No, the worst was the brutal retort that she should stop "trying to cling" to the marriage and "get a life."

Excuse me? Get a life? She had a life in her marriage and children, and she had every right to think that she had a life, and every right to be upset and angry at its being destroyed.

Alas, the unseemly spectacle at Gracie Mansion stopped being private when the Mayor, so admirable a person in so many other respects, decided he was entitled to go public with his new girlfriend. After that, the entire city was made to bear unwilling witness to his infidelity. People often deplore the hypocrisy of the old arrangements, in which spouses carried on illicitly while observing surface proprieties, but is today's openness any better? What about the compromise and corruption it requires on the part of friends, supporters, subordinates, who are made to validate the mistress' presence in public, lending explicit support to adultery and further undermining marriage?

It is time to think of marriage less as something that gratifies individual "needs" than as a kind of spiritual journey, less about self-gratification than self-transcendence. It is about serving something larger than the self and gaining meaning from that larger whole. And it is a public commitment that two people make and that each has every right to expect the other to honor.

I knew of a woman who wanted to leave her marriage to deal with a crisis in her career. Her husband insisted that being married meant that if there was a problem, they'd have to work it through together. A somewhat less dignified but no less effective response was that of a wife whose husband was in the very act of leaving her. She forgot her forbearance, followed him outside, threw herself across the trunk of the car and begged him to stay. Stunned, the husband returned to the house, and, I'm told, they lived happily together ever after, once he got over the shock.

Why shouldn't abandoned spouses try to "cling"? As the determined wife in The Sisters insists, "Marriage is supposed to be a sacred thing. Tom took the same vows I did. He can't break them and expect me to do nothing about it." Decades of liberation have told women that it was a form of heroism to let go when they were no longer preferred by their husbands. But maybe it's time to take a cue from the past.