Blind Faith

  “Oh, look,” she said to David. “How cute. Trick-or-treaters.”

  Later that night, when Chris came back to the house to get the keys to the boat so he could take some friends out on the bay, Rob, who earlier had given his approval, said he’d changed his mind. He thought it might be dangerous. Chris got angry. In fact, he got so angry that with both of his parents standing together, he yelled, “Hey, Dad. Why not tell Mom how you made us go to Mrs. Rosenberg’s before the prom.”

  Though, consciously at least, he didn’t even suspect an affair, he knew how much his mother disliked Felice and knew this would get her angry at his father. But he didn’t know, until now, how sensitive a nerve he must have struck. Now he knew why, when his father had come down to the rec room hours later (Chris never did get permission to use the boat), he was so upset, saying, “Why the hell did you have to tell your mother that?”

  He also remembered another night in early summer. Robin Rosenberg, Felice’s daughter, had just returned from her boarding school in France and had given Chris a sweater she’d bought for him in Europe.

  It was a cool night and Chris started out of the house with the sweater on. His parents were in the family room, playing Trivial Pursuit with the Rogerses and Burton and Ann Peck.

  “Don’t wear that sweater,” his mother had called. “Felice is a bitch. Who knows where she got the money to pay for it?”

  Chris was embarrassed. Such an outburst was so uncharacteristic. “Mom, I’m going to wear it,” he’d said. “It’s not from Mrs. Rosenberg, anyway. It’s from Robin.”

  “I don’t care!” Maria responded, angry now. “Take it off. You are not going out of this house wearing clothing given to you by the Rosenbergs.”

  “Hey, Mom, you’re really being a jerk. There’s nothing wrong with this sweater and I’m going to wear it.”

  “You’re not going to wear it! And I’m going to burn it!”

  “Forget it, Mom,” Chris said, and left the house before his father could get involved and start yelling at him for being disrespectful to his mother.

  But later, in fact, less than an hour later, over on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, he took it off, feeling sorry that he’d done something to make his mother so upset. Not until now, though, did he realize why she’d been upset.

  Now, on Saturday night, Chris said to Jennifer, “What if my father was involved? What if he had something to do with all this?” Oh, it was a terrible thing to say. A shameful thing even to think. But Chris was now plagued by it and he hoped Jennifer could drive it away.

  She said, of course, what he knew she would say, which was also what he wanted her to say. “Oh, no!” she said. “That couldn’t be. What a terrible thing to think. Chris, you’d better not say that to anyone else. It sounds awful.”

  He agreed. And so, of course, he didn’t mention it again to anyone. But still the ugly notion haunted him.

  Roby didn’t know how he had known that Felice was the woman with whom his father had been having an affair. He had just blurted out her name without thinking. Now, as he did think, he recalled the same sort of incidents as had Chris. In particular, he remembered the day after the prom, his mother telling him that no matter what his father said he was not to go to the Rosenbergs’ house.

  “I don’t want you to have anything to do with that woman,” Maria had said. “She’s poison. She’s fire.” But the notion of an affair with his father had never entered Roby’s mind.

  He also remembered how, over the summer, he had several times observed his mother listening at his father’s office door. He had even kidded her about it, telling her how insecure she was, and saying she’d better watch out, if Dad was in there talking about insurance she’d get so bored she’d fall asleep on her feet.

  But now he considered how secretive and mistrustful his father had seemed throughout the summer. Especially regarding the den. It was the first door one came to from the driveway and the boys had always used it as a shortcut to the rest of the house. Over the summer, however, his father had started locking the door and telling the boys that even if it were unlocked they should absolutely not walk through there when entering or leaving the house. No matter that they’d done it for years. It was to stop.

  Now Roby thought he understood why. It was because his father had been whispering sweet nothings to Felice on the telephone. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter now. The whole thing was so disgusting he couldn’t believe it. And how could his father seriously ask the boys to start thinking of Felice as a new friend, some sort of special fairy godmother? That bitch. If she ever came into the house again, he’d spit on her.

  Angry, troubled, grieving, stunned, torn by what now seemed almost conflicting loyalties—to his newly dead mother and to his living but newly unmasked father—Roby closed the door to his room and let himself cry.

  What all three of them wanted, the only thing they wanted, was the one thing they’d never have again: their mother, to hug them, to soothe them, to understand their pain.

  It had been more than twenty-four hours since they had lost her. And now, on top of that, was this horrible new awareness that in a sense they’d also lost at least a part of the father they’d always known. He wasn’t who they thought he had been. By having the affair, he’d hurt their mother, and he’d been about to hurt her worse—to hurt all of them worse—by leaving her.

  And so, all three of them, Roby, Chris and John, lay awake through the darkest hours of the night.

  6

  Their father, Robert Oakley Marshall, had been born on December 16, 1939, in the borough of Queens, in New York City, to Howard Marshall of New York, and Oakleigh Valentine Weeks of Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose parents had lost everything in the Depression.

  Howard Marshall had dropped out of St. John’s University in New York after two years and was employed as a sporting goods salesman at the Wanamaker’s department store in Manhattan. In his spare time, he gave tennis lessons to earn extra money.

  Rob’s first years were spent in a rented house in the Elmhurst section of Queens. Then, so abruptly that they could not even rent a house or apartment but had to live in a less-than-luxurious hotel, the family moved to Chicago. Two years later, they moved to Kiel, Wisconsin. Then there were other towns, in Wisconsin and Michigan and throughout the Midwest. Always, they lived in rented houses. Howard Marshall died without ever having owned a home, which—or so went the joke among friends and family—caused Rob to grow up wanting to own everything he saw.

  One might have said that Rob’s father was a traveling salesman who actually traveled. The truth was, he was an alcoholic, which was why none of his jobs lasted long. Oakleigh prayed every day that her husband, a non-Catholic, would convert. Instead, he drank. But not only did her religion prevent her from leaving him, it prevented her from not having children. She wound up with five, of whom Rob was the oldest.

  By the time Rob was a teenager, the family was living in Thomaston, Connecticut, where his father was employed by the Seth Thomas clock company. After that job was lost, they moved to Havertown, Pennsylvania, where Rob (who, like the other children, was being raised as a Catholic) was enrolled in Monsignor Bonner High School.

  He’d always felt like an outsider wherever he’d lived. By the age of sixteen, he felt like an outsider even at home (this new home, at least the tenth of his life). He spent a lot of time in the basement of the rented house in Havertown, playing the drums and feeling superior to his parents. Soon, he put up partitions and brought down a cot and created his own basement apartment, in which he lived, except for meals.

  In school, he had problems. English was the worst. He flunked it his junior year and had to go to summer school. But that turned out to be fortuitous. He made friends with a boy who was forming a dance band. Rob volunteered to play drums. Another member of the band had an older brother who was leaving home to join the Air Force. The dance band played at the going-away party, which was how Rob met Maria. She was a cousin of the friend of the fr
iend’s.

  Maria: a doctor’s daughter with blond hair so long and beautiful that if you were her father you would want to lock her in a tower. What better way to prove yourself superior to the rest of your family than to acquire a girlfriend like that?

  She went to St. Adalbert’s, a Polish Catholic school in the city. With her long blond hair, her lovely singing voice (especially when she sang hymns) and her sweet and tender disposition, Maria was an overwheming favorite among the nuns. Also, being a doctor’s daughter didn’t hurt.

  The terrible thing about a child like that, of course, is you cannot really lock her in a tower. You cannot even keep her a child. You can keep her out of Flying Jennies on Roosevelt Boulevard, but you cannot stop her from growing up. Boys, being boys, will come around. Even so, in the Puszynski home they were not welcomed.

  Maria was only fifteen when she first met Rob and began (secretly) to date him. But she waited until she was in college before she discussed him at home. By then, Rob was in college, too—a Catholic college—and she hoped this would make him more acceptable to her parents.

  Rob’s goal had been Annapolis. On his eighteenth birthday he joined the Naval Reserve and then spent an entire year of post–high school prep boning up for the SATs. Still, he did very poorly. Not only did he not make Annapolis, he barely managed acceptance at Villanova, which, particularly in those days, was not one of the country’s more rigorous academic institutions. But at least it was college. And Rob was Navy ROTC.

  And so, when at last he presented himself in Port Richmond, he felt it was with proper credentials. Dr. Puszynski, however, was less than charmed. Maybe it would have been the same with any suitor, but he didn’t like Rob and he liked him even less after he’d met the rest of the Marshall family. A no-class outfit if he’d ever seen one, the doctor grumbled later to his wife. “A bunch of gypsies,” he said. “First one up in the morning is best dressed for the day in that house.”

  At the same time, they struck him as phony, putting on airs, pretending to be better than they were. “A deficit spender,” he said of Rob’s father. “Just like the government.” From Dr. Puszynski, these were not words of praise. And when he looked at Rob he saw an apple falling close to the tree.

  Life would have been simpler if Rob had failed to graduate from Villanova, as almost happened. After three and a half years, he had only a 1.9 grade point average, with a 2.0 required for graduation. If he fell short, he would not receive his commission as a naval officer, he would not be accepted for flight school, he would not be permitted to marry Maria.

  When he got a second-semester D in marketing, all seemed lost (or won, from Dr. Puszynski’s point of view). Instead, that was when Rob discovered the one true talent he possessed: salesmanship. He persuaded his instructor to change the grade to a C, and in June of 1963, just barely, Rob graduated. Now there were no grounds on which Dr. Puszynski could base further opposition to the marriage of Rob and Maria.

  Rob went to Pensacola for Navy flight training, completing the course on November 22, 1963, the day of the first Kennedy assassination. Then, having been accepted for helicopter training, he returned to Philadelphia in triumph to claim his bride.

  They were married three days after Christmas, but no more reluctant father than Vincent Puszynski had ever walked more stiffly or slowly up the aisle of St. Adalbert’s to give a daughter away.

  And such a daughter! No bridal magazine had ever had a better cover girl than the beautiful, blond, sweet Maria on her wedding day. And Rob, of course, tall and handsome, eyes piercing, jaw jutting—all the clichés. He was resplendent in his dress uniform, a regular recruiting poster of a man.

  On the wedding invitation, next to his name, he’d insisted on gold wings and an embossed U.S.N., indicating he was already a Navy pilot, though in reality he was still a trainee. This was somewhat improper, but Rob had a tendency not to let propriety stand in the way of appearances. The gold wings were just part of the image. He had escaped from his own private ghetto. He had acquired the possession he’d wanted most. The doctor’s daughter, the beautiful blonde, was now his wife.

  After a year spent in Florida and overseas, Rob was assigned to the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey, and got his first look at Toms River. He liked what he saw. Houses were cheap and available. The town was near the base and near the beach. And just the right distance from Philadelphia to assure that his wife could have access to her parents but that they would not be in his hair all the time.

  But there was something else: some flickering nerve deep within the unconscious that enabled Rob Marshall to recognize that Toms River was his kind of town.

  He and Maria moved into their ranch house two months before Roby was born. A year after Roby came Chris. By then, Rob was no longer in the Navy. He was a homeowner, the father of two, the husband of a beautiful wife. All around him, a boomtown was springing up. New neighborhoods were being born overnight, filled with new people, just like him, just starting out in life, from backgrounds that did not include wealth, but now with their own families and first homes, and all of them wanting to be prudent and responsible.

  Rob Marshall did the obvious thing. He became a life insurance salesman. He sold the policies of Provident Mutual Life of Philadelphia. In his first year he sold more than two million dollars’ worth, which made him one of the company’s top fifty salesmen in the country. The next year he did it again. The Marshalls moved to a bigger house, three blocks away. Their third son, John, was born in 1971.

  Every Sunday you would see them at St. Joseph’s Church. Rob, by then, had a new red Cadillac convertible with a white top and he would park it directly in front of the church, as if that special place had been reserved for him.

  Then the family would march straight up the center aisle to the front pew, as if that had been reserved for them also. Rob, stern, unsmiling, intense; Maria beaming warmly at everyone, so elegantly dressed, her long blond hair flowing; the boys dressed in neckties and suits, their hair freshly cut: such fine little men, so clean-cut and well scrubbed; just like their mother.

  It was almost as if Rob and Maria were royalty: a young king and queen on a visit to a remote outpost of the empire. This was not the sort of attitude that Toms River had seen much of before and there were some who found it slightly unsettling. But after all, Rob had been a naval officer. And Maria, so everyone said, was from a very wealthy Main Line family. And really, the fact that people like that would have chosen to settle in Toms River at all was, in its way, a very nice compliment to the town.

  So Toms River tended to admire the Marshalls, and even to envy them a bit: their good looks, their lovely children, the fact that Rob was so obviously successful, the fact that they were always buying something new.

  They moved to Brookside in 1973, to a brand-new house which Rob had hired an architect to design. They joined the country club. Rob played tennis. The boys swam. Maria was invited to join the Laurel Twigs, an organization whose ostensible purpose was to raise money for the hospital, but whose real function seemed to be to provide a goal toward which a Toms River housewife with an interest in social climbing could aspire.

  Those were the boom years, in which a life insurance salesman found himself surrounded by hundreds of new potential clients every week. In order to prosper, all you had to do was get out of bed in the morning and answer the phone when it rang. But Rob Marshall did a lot more than that.

  He was, to put it bluntly, the most aggressive salesman Toms River had ever seen. If he viewed you as a prospect (and unless you’d just had your second coronary or were suffering from an obvious malignancy, Rob Marshall viewed you as a prospect), he’d come at you with all the social grace of a wolverine. Buying a policy from him was the only way to get him out of your hair, if not your life. Finally, you gave in and did it. Finally, it seemed, everyone in Toms River gave in and did it.

  Rob became a very successful businessman, and because he was successful—and because he made it so obvious he was su
ccessful—he became a big man in town. A power in the Rotary Club (though he quit in a fit of pique and founded a competing organization when he was passed over for president), a leader of United Way, men’s singles tennis champion (and doubles partner of both Ray DiOrio and David Rosenberg) at the country club.

  And, as he made it glaringly apparent, a figure to be reckoned with at the Atlantic City gambling casinos. The deference shown him at the fifty- and one-hundred-dollar blackjack tables was something Rob seemed to take a great deal of pride in and something he spent a lot of time talking about.

  What he seemed to take the most pride in, however, and spend the most time talking about, was his wife, Maria; or, as he consistently referred to her, “the beautiful Maria.” He talked about how much he loved her, how good to her he was, how proud he was to be married to such a fine-looking woman who always knew just where to go to buy the best clothes and then how to wear them so well.

  “Look at her,” he’d say, practically every Saturday night at the club (or, in her final years, at a lavish casino restaurant in Atlantic City), “isn’t she gorgeous? Isn’t she just absolutely beautiful?” He seemed even more proud of her than of his Cadillac, and she, it must be said, appeared quite flattered to be treated as an ornament.

  Actually, even for Toms River, Rob and Maria were extreme. Around the country club they were referred to (in their absence) as Ken and Barbie. But it wasn’t until later—until too late—that people looked back and realized that maybe she’d become a slave to his vision of her and to the image she was trying to project. That her obsession with appearances might have cost her her life.

  Until then, in a town where one’s possessions were viewed as a mirror of one’s soul, Rob Marshall seemed to have it all and Maria seemed his ultimate possession. Not a sex object, despite her attractiveness, but something which, in Toms River, was even more to be cherished: a status object.