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Show KATHLEEN NORMS Here's How to Rob a Marriage happy dream of memory. With Jo-Ellie Jo-Ellie she is a little snappy over homework and school clothes. With Bud she is cool and noncommital; he doesn't belong in the life she has found for herself and he knows it. That's cheating. Another serene, complacent cheat is Augusta, wife of George Wilson. Augusta had a daughter, Betsey, some 30 years ago. She told me herself that her first remark to the baby was, "I don't like girls. You should have been a boy!" A year later she had a boy, and her idolatry of this beautiful child robbed husband and daughter of any companionship with Augusta, for from that time she lost interest inter-est in them completely. The girl became a nervous, anxious little creature, living a lonely life of her own. At 12, on the advice of a psychiatrist, she was sent away to school, spending all holidays with an aunt. Augusta talked "Lionel, my son, my boy," until everyone within, hearing disliked the child. When he went away to war In 1943, Augusta almost went melancholy melan-choly mad, a process she completed complet-ed when young Lionel fell at Coral sea. George la in Arabia, whence come rumors that he is not entirely entire-ly uncomforted. Betsey and her husband and twin sons live with Augusta, and listen by the hour to stories of "my son." Augusta for the 32 years of her marriage has been a cheat. lyrANY YEARS AGO, when I used to play mahjongg frequently with a group of about a dozen friends, we became aware that one of our number was cheating. It was a sickening moment when this particular par-ticular woman went on confirming our suspicions without the slightest idea that anyone was checking her. It is easy to cheat at mahjongg. Apart from the fact that the tiles get certain little identifying nicks and scratches, no one is too observant observ-ant as the hands go down. Everyone is set on her own score and the apparent ap-parent winner may display 15 tiles or 13, instead of the requisite 14; she may count doubles wrong, make hasty and incorrect calculations, and even slip and extra dragon or honor hon-or into the hand, quite unobserved. In mahjongg you play a lone hand and everyone is absorbed in her own. A Cheater Is Caught This woman, call her Zenobia, was detected in all these means of cheating; when she discarded she would pick up an already-discarded tile to help her hand, or she would draw two and keep the one she did not want in her lap. It was one of the most shocking experiences experi-ences of my life to be asked to watch her and to see these things with my own eyes. We all had been exasperated at her complacent little lit-tle air as she won and won and won, but this was too much! Eventually we disbanded the group, organized again without Zenobia, and made no explanation of a course we knew she understood. But the strange thing is this. Women who would regard Zenobia with horror might, many of them. No, we wives don't have to palm mahjongg tiles to be cheats. It is a lucky marriage indeed or rather rath-er a strong and wise one that has not a cheat on one side or the other. Sometime a marriage has both. The wife keeps a slovenly, untidy house and a slipshod table. 0f Ull! ilid .. L Jill ". . . fascinating divorced woman . . . be cheaters, too, and in a much more serious way. They might be marriage cheaters, going back on their wedding-day promises with never a scruple, year in and year out, and feeling themselves entirely blameless. By marriage cheaters I don't mean merely in a sexual sense. I mean in the hundred and one ways that a wife can rob a marriage of everything she promised to put into it, and yet be accepted as a charming and honorable woman. Some Other Cheaters Lily, for example. She married Bud, a quiet, unexciting, plodding sort of man, 10 years ago. They have one daughter, Jo-EUie, and a nice home with all conveniences, car, club, the usual American suburban sub-urban picture. But in Lily's life there is Marilyn Booth, a fascinating fascinat-ing divorced woman of 40, who has plenty of money and no occupation at all. Marilyn entertains "the girls" at lunch nearly every day; they play poker or canasta afterward after-ward until about 5. Unattached young men, artistic, musical, cultured, cul-tured, drift in late in the afternoon for a cocktail, and Lily rushes into her home flushod and weary at 6 o'clock, dashes food on the table, apologizes absently to Bud and Jo-EUie, Jo-EUie, and lives all evening in a |
