Penny

Christened Mary Lois Pendleton (Mary after her mother), she hated that name, and always introduced herself as Penny, also the nickname of her father, the admiral.  At the start of our relationship she was startled to discover that my first wife, dead all of two months, had a monogram MPB (Mary Powers Beye); she was determined to change her name legally so as not to have that same set of initials.  She went to court to become Penelope Pendleton three weeks before our wedding, much to the anger of her parents, who characteristically sent her a telegram from New Hampshire to Cambridge, rather than pick up the phone and remonstrate with her.  She was resistive and combative by nature, although always quiet and repressed in her behavior, so if you did not know her, you might easily miss the steel in her.  I did not notice it at first, it was such a relief to be a partner of a quiet woman who seemed to take direction, after the five years of Mary's sense of high drama in the conjugal scene.  Penny had a twin brother who was always the adversary in her determination to succeed.  Males were so obviously preferred in the military culture of her family.  Brother was an engineer, she would become an architect, that is, something to do with structure, but with aesthetics, taste, and imagination.  Architecture in the fifties was very much a man's profession, stayed that way throughout her working life.  She spent her life pushing for parity with males.  Do you suppose that might have been part motive behind her choice of a gay male husband; she instinctively knew that he identified enough with her as a female, however much his behavior and thought patterns were traditionally masculine, that he would grant her a kind of psychic parity.  And, gay though he may well have been, they spent enough time making out in the early years of their marriage, to ensure that she never had the slightest sense that she was missing out on something, and she would know, since she had lost her virginity at sixteen, and was an active player thereafter. She told her daughters that she resented the sexual freedom of males. She could not, however, escape being a female.  She compromised her progress in architecture school, when her father lay seriously ill with phlebitis in Philadelphia, requiring the desperate amputation of his leg; she was the twin who made the journey to his bedside repeatedly, woman, daughter, the caregiver, if only figuratively.  The new wife, working her first professional job, soon was a mother, and with that her career came to a halt; mothers in the fifties stayed home, and on into the sixties as three siblings joined the first little darling. Ten years she lost to the wifely ideal, and then she was back into the race, with a husband picking up the slack, once the dirty work of parenting infants was over.  In her mother's last years she was in constant attendance on the weekends of a woman who had always been withholding; she was the good daughter.  Happily she had the satisfaction before she died of having made it in a major architecture firm.  Along the way the setbacks were horrendous, a major automobile accident which almost killed her, and then, when she was in her sixties, a ghastly fall from the upper floor of her family's barn which left her permanently crippled.  But she was never bitter, because she was always level headed enough to remember the fall was her own fault.  Her willingness to make that observation is evidence of her triumphant honesty, a kind of grim, plain, New England trait, so at variance with the theatrical smoke and mirrors style of her would be matinee idol of a husband.  As she told her children once in a moment of great candor, she would long since have taken them off and left him, if she had had the money.  At least she had the last thirty years of her life unencumbered up to her death May 8, 2005.