The Corinna Posts 2: First Husbands

My oldest friend died of cancer a little less than a year ago.¹ There’s a lot I want to write about her, so this is the second post in an occasional series. You can read the first here.

Corinna (in brown flowers) and short-lived boyfriend (in brown suit) at my wedding

Meetings

My parents met when my mother was 15, my father was 16, and they were counselors at a Fresh Air summer camp in upstate New York. My mother’s best friend L was there too, so she knew my father from the beginning. In fact, he was the Captain and she was Little Buttercup in the summer show, H.M.S. Pinafore. My mother played the piano.

I met my husband at synagogue over the High Holidays when I was recently 15 and he was almost 16. We didn’t go to school together, and I kept him secret for a bit, but I’m sure Corinna was my first friend to meet him.

Corinna met her first husband the summer we turned 18. B was a couple of years older than us, visiting from France, and staying with one of our high school friends. I was not the first to meet him, but I was the first to stay in his apartment in Paris, where Corinna moved the following January after spending the fall working and saving money while the rest of us went off to college (if you want to keep track of Corinna’s determination to do what she wanted to do regardless of what anyone else was doing, you can start your list with her high school specialization in French boyfriends - B was her second - and the gap year she took before we even knew that was a thing).

Marriages, Divorces

My mother and father commuted between Flatbush and Washington Heights (on the subway), then Boston and Ithaca (in friends’ cars). They got married the September after my mother graduated from college at 19 (they skipped lots of grades back then). L was her maid of honor.

My parents split up a couple of weeks before their 26th wedding anniversary. I was 19. After they told me (my sister was at camp and they told her when we picked her up), I called L. She and her husband came and got me, took me vacuum cleaner shopping at Sears, and reassured me, implicitly and explicitly, that my entire world had not collapsed.

Corinna and B got married two peripatetic years after they met. He went back to France at the end of that first summer. She joined him in France the next winter and returned to the US to start college the following fall. He joined her in the US that winter. They got married the following summer, when she was still 19. I wasn’t there and didn’t even know about it until she called me that night or maybe the next day. It was a small, quick wedding, ostensibly so he could stay in the country, but I’m fairly certain Corinna would have found a reason to do it regardless (you can add that to your list).

When Corinna and B split up several years later, Corinna and I were on the phone for weeks.

My husband and I got married several months after Corinna and B split up. She came to the wedding with a new boyfriend. They broke up the next day. My husband and I are still married.

When Corinna married her second husband, eight months pregnant in a red satin dress on the Coney Island boardwalk, I was there, holding a canopy pole with my six-year-old daughter.

When Corinna and her second husband split up 20 years later, we were on the phone for a year except when we were texting.

The morning Corinna eloped with her third husband, four months before she died, I texted Happy wedding day! The next morning, I texted How’s marriage? She replied It’s so great and I’m very happy.

Deaths

L died of cancer seven months after my parents split up. They visited her separately in her hospital room to say goodbye.

Corinna died of cancer last April. By then she had long since become good friends with B, who had also remarried and had three sons. Over the many years between their divorce and last April, I had seen him only twice, at Corinna’s parents’ memorial services.

The week before Corinna died, I spent a couple of days with her in Brooklyn. The last day I was there, B showed up. It’s hard for me to go back to those days, which were among the most difficult and beautiful of my life, but B shines through them like a lovelight.

He brought delicious food (I mean, he’s French) and old photographs (he’s a photographer). Corinna napped, and B and I talked about the long ago past and unbearable present. I asked him to clean out the refrigerator, the one thing I hadn’t been able to cope with in the hours I’d spent wrestling the kitchen into order. When he finished the refrigerator, he tackled the garbage, which was as heroic as it gets.

That night Corinna played her last ever show with her band. I managed to get her dressed and out the door. B drove her there. I sat in the front row monitoring her energy. He took photographs, as always. I said goodbye to her, knowing it was for good. He drove her home, where her sister took over. Then we talked for another hour on the phone, me driving through the pouring rain of Connecticut, B through New Jersey.

B had once been part of my life. Corinna had reconciled with him long before I did. Being with him again under the darkest cloud was the smallest silver lining, though we both would have given it up in a heartbeat if we all could have escaped the cloud.

First Husbands, Funerals, Grief

My parents shared two children and now also share four grandchildren, so they have been together at countless graduations, weddings, naming ceremonies, bar and bat mitzvahs, seders. They are always nice to each other, but there are generally lots of other people to talk to and that’s generally what they do. Except for the time, a couple of years ago, when my husband, my father, my mother, and I went to the funeral of D, my father’s oldest friend. My mother met D soon after she met my father, he drove her from Boston to Ithaca, she remained friendly with his first wife after their respective divorces and became friendly with his second wife as well. At the funeral and into the next day, my parents talked as I hadn’t seen them talk in decades, reminiscing about D and their youth, memories of their shared past illuminating the life and loss we were commemorating.

Corinna died on a Monday night. I knew she was going to die, but I didn’t cry. On Tuesday morning, I looked at my phone, saw she had died, and didn’t cry. I didn’t cry as I told my husband, children, parents, and sister that she was dead, as I wrote her obituary, as I drove to New York Friday morning for the service before her cremation.

19 of us gathered at the small cemetery chapel. I didn’t cry as the men - Corinna’s son and husband, dear family friends we had known since we were young, B and his older brother who had come from France to say goodbye to Corinna and arrived an hour before she died - carried the wicker casket into the chapel and laid it down. I didn’t cry as others spoke and cried. I didn’t speak either. I couldn’t.

When the speaking was done, the casket cover was removed so we could view the body. I’m Jewish and that is not my tradition, plus I’d already been upset by a photo of Corinna’s body from the night she died, so I was planning to stay in my seat. But when B went up to the casket, I knew, suddenly, fiercely, inevitably, that I had to do this with him, so I rose and went to his side. Holding each other tight, we looked down at Corinna for the last time. Finally I cried, and we cried together.

I would never generalize about first husbands. Some are terrible and should be left far behind. Some slip fully away into other lives and that’s ok. But a first husband who you met when you were young, who is not terrible, who is still part of your life - or returns to your life - can be a powerful conduit to the past and a true comfort in the present. Even if he’s not your first husband and especially if you both loved his first wife.

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Because we still deserve nice things…

I first encountered Connie Converse in Biography of X, Catherine Lacey’s tremendous novel about a widow researching the life of her confounding artist wife. The book takes place in an alternative history 20th-century United States, and X is a Zelig/Forrest Gump figure who shows up everywhere and meets everyone. At a certain point, I started googling characters who weren’t recognizably real (David Bowie) or fictional (X’s family members), which is how I discovered that Connie Converse was real. A folksinger often described as the female proto-Bob Dylan, she disappeared in 1961, apparently frustrated by the failure of her activism and art (in real life, she drove away from her home in Ann Arbor and neither her body nor her car were ever found; in the novel, she reappears, but that’s another story).

It turned out we were having a low-key Connie Converse moment, because To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse, an actual biography, came out six weeks after Biography of X. Except it turns out that Connie Converse moments come around on the regular: a record in 2009, a 2014 documentary, a 2022 Hanif Abdurraqib article in the NY Times.

Once I knew who Connie Converse was, I saw her everywhere, like a word you learn and the next day it’s in the crossword or the unexpected urge to own a blanket scarf and suddenly blanket scarves saturate the sidewalks and Instagram. But I hadn’t listened to her music until last weekend, when I read yet another Connie Converse article, and realized it was ridiculous that I had never heard her songs.

Well, she truly is great! Her voice takes some getting used to, but the songs, especially the lyrics, are irresistible. I’m partial to the first song on the album, “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains),” a plaintively plucky, lost love ballad par excellence. If you like that, you can just keep on going. If you don’t, you can stop!

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1. I first wrote my oldest friend died 11 months ago, but that’s not quite right, for it’s really 11 months and five days, which could also be phrased as 11 months and a bit. Then I wondered how that was really different from a year. I tried last year, but that was too indeterminate (three months? 14 months?), and nearly a year, but that sounded like it was hiding something. I landed on a little less than a year, which is essentially the same but felt more accurate, perhaps because nearly sounds like I am excited to get there, whereas a little less better captures my fear of getting there. The comparison, of course, is babies, whose age we start out describing in days - she’s three days old, five, eight - and then chronicle in weeks - three weeks, seven weeks, 11, maybe even 19 if we’re compulsive. Though we might make it to 15 or even 18 months, we’d never say a child is 35 weeks or 49 months old. I don’t know if the cutoff is when the number gets too big, regardless of the units, or if it’s simply two years, at which point we live the rest of our lives in years, often augmented for children, but never adults, with halfs or quarters. In other words, how we count time passing - days, then weeks, months, and finally years - is another way death is like birth, except birth is an ongoing emerging and death an ongoing receding. In this context, to say a little less than a year, rather than nearly a year, staves off, for at least a little bit longer, the imminent anniversary of Corinna’s death, which will take her that much farther away from us.