My Mother's Snobbery Wrecked My Relationship

Old Money vs. New Money

In 1983, my mother banned my second-ever girlfriend Eda from our family’s apartment. I lived at home, having graduated from college one year early at the age of twenty-one.¹

My mother’s ban of Eda was preemptive, a vicious and effective sabotage of a relationship she feared could lead to a marriage that would disparage me and our family.

Parents care deeply about who their children marry. A parent’s assessment is not always limited to universal values such as kindness, stability, and ambition. For some parents, class and culture are also key considerations. And in the case of Eda, my mother saw a stark clash of cultures between the new money Eda had grown up with vs. our old money.

Eda was from the five towns of Long Island ² and had been raised in a suburban affluence that was louder, newer, more striving, and more overtly Jewish than the Park Avenue, private school milieu I came from. I had great grandparents who had been wealthy. Eda’s father was a self-made man in the garment trade. He had a work ethic that led him to make a monstrously long commute in the early morning hours, back late in the evening.

An accent can be a definitive marker of class, and Eda had a Long Island accent that marked her as a “Jewish American Princess.” It would have been painful for my mother to hear Eda’s voice and think that hers would be the voice, harsh and cloying, that would travel down the family line and infect her grandchildren. Painful to think of Eda as her daughter-in-law. Painful to see her oldest son marry down. ³

It sounds like exceptional snobbery. And it was.

Everyone should be a rebel at twenty-one but I was not

At the age of twenty-one, I should have been at peak rebelliousness. I should have been eager to dissociate myself from my parents. My mother’s declaration of war against Eda should have backfired on her and made me more determined to continue and advance the relationship.

I could have left home and taken my own apartment. I was a college graduate, had a Wall Street job, and plenty of financial resources. Why stay in a home from which my girlfriend had been banned?

But I never considered those actions in response to my mother’s diktat. I never considered marrying Eda in spiteful response to my mother’s attempt to control my life.

Why I failed to act is part of the story. But first, Eda.

Meeting Eda at the Breakers

Eda and I met at the Breakers Hotel ⁴ in Palm Beach around Christmas of 1982, Back then, it was a formal hotel. In the evening, you had to wear a jacket and tie in the lobby and guests ate together in the dining room because breakfast and dinner were included with the price of all rooms.

It was a glamorous setting. The hotel is designed in the style of a great Italian villa. All the public rooms are vast with high ceilings. The dining area included the Florentine Room and the Circle Room with its expansive, intricately painted dome.

Eda’s older brother made the approach. He was a charming, chatty wingman with a salesman’s natural smile. Eda was hovering behind him in a white dress that set off her deep tan. Her brother introduced first himself and then Eda to our family’s table––my father and younger brothers and my friend Steve.

My mother was absent but we called her daily with reports of our activities, so I’m sure she heard all about Eda, her pursuit of me, and her accent.

Soon Eda and I were together, walking around the lobby and then out along the seawall. Before us was the Atlantic ocean lit by the hotel lights.

To the extent I had a “type,” Eda was not it. Her hair was a mass of curls and her features were more sharp than symmetrical, more edged than rounded. But she carried herself with a posture of confidence. She had a toned body that won her jobs modelling underwear for newspaper department store ads.

Eda became my girlfriend and I was happy. That winter and spring following the Breakers, I would travel from Penn to visit her for long weekends at Boston University. That summer we travelled to Europe.

I had been susceptible to Eda’s attentions. She was the first girl to pursue me in over three years. The last one had been my high school girlfriend Heidi. ⁵

During the long romantic interregnum of my first few college years, after Heidi and before Eda, I had tried to date a few girls. But at the first sign of a girl’s hesitation I’d retreat because I feared rejection. I equated rejection with humiliation and I equated humiliation with a catastrophe that terrified me.

The nature of that catastrophe I’d have been unable to describe. It was simply a blank brick wall my mind ran into.

I have no doubt now that my mother’s extraordinary force of personality, her will, was a major factor in my fear of girls. An amorphous, irrational fear of how a girl might reject me in a way that devastated my ego.

My Mother and Eda

My mother’s instincts that Eda had marriage designs on me were true. Early on, Eda had told me that she was following the advice of her mother; her virginity would remain out of reach for me or any boy until she was engaged. It was an old-fashioned inducement to marriage, one with historical precedent. Ann Boleyn had used it to become Henry VIII’s Queen.

Eda had devised two inexplicable nicknames for me––“Petey” and “Jellybean.” Eda pronounced these nicknames with a high pitched elongation of the “ee’s” in “Peeety” and “Jellybeeen.” This provided irresistible material for my younger brothers, both expert mimics. Their mirthful mockery of Eda’s accent must have grated horribly on my mother’s sensibilities.

That summer, I spent time with Eda’s closeknit family in Woodmere, the largest of the five towns. I liked her family a great deal. And I admired the way Eda was devoted to and praised her parents, her siblings, and her other relatives. There was a great deal of warmth in her home.

At my home, my mother was cold to Eda who noticed it right away and told me. I lied and said that’s how my mother had been with all my girlfriends. A double lie since I’d had no other girlfriend than Heidi, and my mother had treated Heidi well.

My mother’s hostile vibe made Eda try harder to gain my mother’s approval. Whenever she anticipated seeing my mother, Eda dressed up. She wore white gloves edged with pearls, her best dresses, and a lot of makeup.

She complimented my mother at every opportunity. At the beauty of our apartment and the beauty of my mother’s house robes. The floor-length, silver and gold brocaded robes my mother wore were elegant. To me they looked like nothing so much as suits of armor.

Eda’s attempts to flatter and impress my mother misfired badly and only confirmed my mother’s view that Eda was a parvenu interested only in material things.

My mother takes action

Back then, my mother was 45 years-old, an unhappy woman searching for some purpose. A heat-seeking missile looking for anything against which she could deploy her energies and passions. Two decades later, she found a purpose that transformed her into a different, wonderful, better person. That’s the mother I recall best and the mother I miss.⁶

But in 1983, Eda was her target.

After one of Eda’s visits that summer, my mother told me she hated Eda and would no longer permit her to come to the apartment. I protested. My mother said, “David, is the sex really that good?”

At that, I had no response. This was the first time my mother had ever mentioned sex to me, giving it extra shock value. With just a few words, she had disparaged Eda and reduced our romance to something sordid.

In that moment, I truly, deeply despised my mother. I stalked away and didn’t speak to my mother, and she didn’t speak to me for a time that seems like a year in my memory but was probably only a few weeks.

It was easy enough to avoid each other; that’s a downside of a large home.

I tried to sustain the relationship with Eda, but it was hopeless. She had great spirit, was cheerful, and held herself and her family in great esteem. I had no right to expect her to stay my girlfriend, and she didn’t.

Once again I was alone and lonely. All I had was my work as an investment banking analyst.

Instead of Sunday night dread, I had Friday night dread and began working seven days a week. On the weekends, I’d bring home my dot matrix printer and my 23-pound luggable Compaq computer so I would have something to do.

Why I didn’t rebel

My older sister was an adolescent rebel, and I saw my mother react to my sister with outbursts of uncontrolled temper and wrath. Awful words uttered with bitter contempt. My sister’s face dissolving in tears.

My mother’s outbursts seemed random and sudden, unconnected to any specific action by my sister. So I feared that any conflict with my mother, any action on my part, however innocent, might trigger my mother to tell me she hated me. Or something worse. I didn’t think I could bear that.  

So in self-defense and in contrast to my sister, I became the “good child.” As cautious as I could be. I was helped by my natural talent for school and an innate shyness. I tried to be perfect in my mother’s eyes.

My mother’s will about Eda prevailed. I sacrificed a portion of my self-respect and my fondness for Eda to implicitly obey my mother. And behind my obedience was a submission to my mother’s opinions, stated always with absolute confidence.

A year or so after Eda broke up with me, I met my wife Debbie.⁷ Seven months after we met, Debbie accepted my marriage proposal. Debbie called her parents that night, I called my parents the next day.

I’d like to think that the love I had with Debbie would have been strong enough to withstand any parental objections, but since there were none, we never had a chance to find out.

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Question for The Comments: What has been your experience with snobbery?

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1. I was waiting  for my best friend Steve to graduate after the normal four years, and then we would share an apartment.

2. The five towns were known then and perhaps now for being the center of the Jewish American Princess universe. See YouTube clip below for an explicit but warm hearted treatment of “JAPs” from the TV show “My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”

3. Differences in accents are one of the most potent “tells” of background. Britain is perhaps best known for class sorting based on accents, but I suspect it’s prevalent to some extent in most countries.

4. Scene of many a fight between me and my wife Debbie, who was anti- Breakers. One such fight was the subject of this post.

5. The Heidi relationship was covered in last week’s post. “I Was A Nerd, She Was Popular: My Improbable High School Romance” Audio is now included.

6. My mother found her calling as a founder and philanthropist of two centers at Weill Cornell: The Jill Roberts Center for Inflammatory Bowel Disease and a sister Research  Institute. These were full time jobs for my mother. Her centers helped thousands of patients and are still going strong.

She was an example of a “late bloomer,” what

Henry Oliver

wrote about in his book “Second Act,” a particularly encouraging book for someone like me who has taken up writing as a second vocation in his sixties.

7. I wrote about the miracle of my meeting Debbie in this post. “You Had Me At A Glance”