Read Online Innocent Spouse by Carol Ross Joynt - Free Book Online
Authors: Carol Ross Joynt
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striped shirt, with a tennis sweater tied casually around his shoulders, a Kent hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon in his hand. Howard was a master of the grand gesture, and my mother ate it up. She had an instant crush.
“Let’s have some champagne, Olga,” Howard said, the bottle still in his hand—he cocked his head in my direction—“and ignore her.”
My parents lived in Warrenton, Virginia, a small country town an hour outside Washington where my father, Richard Ross, after time in the military and a stint as a dean at George Washington University, ran the Airlie Foundation, a think tank used by the federal government, Washington-based corporations, and academia. The job came with a lovely yellow stucco four-bedroom house, a pool, a pond, gardens, and bucolic views. From almost the moment we met, Howard and I would spend weekends there with my family. It wasn’t unusual for me to go to bed, only to wake in the wee hours to find Howard and my mother still at the kitchen table, drinking, smoking, debating politics, discussing history, and gossiping about movie stars. My mother had moved to Hollywood as a girl; her role models were movie stars.
Before the move to rural Virginia, the Ross family’s usually happy suburban home life had become increasingly emotionally chaotic. My parents fought a lot over money—the lack of it—and over my older sister, who had had too many run-ins with the law because of drugs and other misbehavior. The chaos was the main reason I moved out at age eighteen. But with the job at Airlie, which was a virtual fresh start, my parents and younger brothers regained a sense of calm, and the spirit of fun and affection prevailed. When I was growing up, my father, a native of Minnesota, was a Barry Goldwater Republican, an Episcopalian, and traditional to the core; my mother, the immigrant, was a Eugene McCarthy Democrat, raised a strict Catholic but with the soul of a gypsy. She had few boundaries and didn’t care about possessions except, perhaps, animals. I think she was happiest when Dad had new assignments and we camped in hotels or some kind of temporary housing. She taught us how to travel with very little baggage.
She was wedded to the notion of ghosts and we routinely had to visit houses thought to be haunted. We were raised on goulash and chicken paprikash. Her philosophy of raising my sister, brothers, and me was “Water you and you will grow.”
My parents met on a Friday in Los Angeles, when my father, an Army Air Force pilot who dropped paratroopers over Normandy on D-day, had exactly one week’s leave in the United States. They married at the end of that week. In the early years of their marriage, and while my brothers, sister, and I were little, my dad continued his air force career, ending up a full-bird colonel. We lived part of the time in the United States and part of the time in Europe, chiefly Wiesbaden, Germany, where he worked on the postwar cleanup. Our assigned housing in a nineteenth-century hotel had been Hermann Göring’s personal quarters when he was in Wiesbaden. The rooms went on forever, with high ceilings, gilded moldings, and beautiful crystal chandeliers. I loved to twirl on the parquet floors in the ballroom. Still, Mother made our spaghetti dinners on a hot plate. Hotels felt like home. We would bounce on the beds, go to the lounge and get fruit drinks with paper parasols, and generally charm or terrorize the staff. We traveled to Berlin a lot, which was among the more exciting aspects of living abroad. It was before the Wall went up, and my father would take us by car to tour reconstructed sections of East Berlin. It seemed like a movie set—a row of restored buildings and behind them acres of rubble.
Back in the States we moved a lot—Ohio, Maryland, Virginia—and that was before I turned fourteen. Furniture came and went, nothing stayed the same. We were always in debt, about to fly off the rails.
“Let’s have some champagne, Olga,” Howard said, the bottle still in his hand—he cocked his head in my direction—“and ignore her.”
My parents lived in Warrenton, Virginia, a small country town an hour outside Washington where my father, Richard Ross, after time in the military and a stint as a dean at George Washington University, ran the Airlie Foundation, a think tank used by the federal government, Washington-based corporations, and academia. The job came with a lovely yellow stucco four-bedroom house, a pool, a pond, gardens, and bucolic views. From almost the moment we met, Howard and I would spend weekends there with my family. It wasn’t unusual for me to go to bed, only to wake in the wee hours to find Howard and my mother still at the kitchen table, drinking, smoking, debating politics, discussing history, and gossiping about movie stars. My mother had moved to Hollywood as a girl; her role models were movie stars.
Before the move to rural Virginia, the Ross family’s usually happy suburban home life had become increasingly emotionally chaotic. My parents fought a lot over money—the lack of it—and over my older sister, who had had too many run-ins with the law because of drugs and other misbehavior. The chaos was the main reason I moved out at age eighteen. But with the job at Airlie, which was a virtual fresh start, my parents and younger brothers regained a sense of calm, and the spirit of fun and affection prevailed. When I was growing up, my father, a native of Minnesota, was a Barry Goldwater Republican, an Episcopalian, and traditional to the core; my mother, the immigrant, was a Eugene McCarthy Democrat, raised a strict Catholic but with the soul of a gypsy. She had few boundaries and didn’t care about possessions except, perhaps, animals. I think she was happiest when Dad had new assignments and we camped in hotels or some kind of temporary housing. She taught us how to travel with very little baggage.
She was wedded to the notion of ghosts and we routinely had to visit houses thought to be haunted. We were raised on goulash and chicken paprikash. Her philosophy of raising my sister, brothers, and me was “Water you and you will grow.”
My parents met on a Friday in Los Angeles, when my father, an Army Air Force pilot who dropped paratroopers over Normandy on D-day, had exactly one week’s leave in the United States. They married at the end of that week. In the early years of their marriage, and while my brothers, sister, and I were little, my dad continued his air force career, ending up a full-bird colonel. We lived part of the time in the United States and part of the time in Europe, chiefly Wiesbaden, Germany, where he worked on the postwar cleanup. Our assigned housing in a nineteenth-century hotel had been Hermann Göring’s personal quarters when he was in Wiesbaden. The rooms went on forever, with high ceilings, gilded moldings, and beautiful crystal chandeliers. I loved to twirl on the parquet floors in the ballroom. Still, Mother made our spaghetti dinners on a hot plate. Hotels felt like home. We would bounce on the beds, go to the lounge and get fruit drinks with paper parasols, and generally charm or terrorize the staff. We traveled to Berlin a lot, which was among the more exciting aspects of living abroad. It was before the Wall went up, and my father would take us by car to tour reconstructed sections of East Berlin. It seemed like a movie set—a row of restored buildings and behind them acres of rubble.
Back in the States we moved a lot—Ohio, Maryland, Virginia—and that was before I turned fourteen. Furniture came and went, nothing stayed the same. We were always in debt, about to fly off the rails.
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