Marabel Morgan comes in color. There’s no black and white version. An upper middle class Hausfrau, the kind you see polishing furniture in Pledge commercials. Marabel is vivid, lovely, not beautiful. If you inventoried her face, feature by feature, you might find some disproportion. But her astonished innocence and her intensity discourage analysis. Dinah Shore does or did the same thing with roughly the same facial equipment, and without the innocence. This isn’t Susan Sontag or Margaret Mead or Kate Millett. Not an intellectual. Yet, possibly for that reason, Marabel has had a more profound effect on American family life than any woman of our time.
Out my way a male black widow spider has better odds of survival in marriage. I can count eight couples uncoupled or uncoupling in 1974, about a third of our acquaintance. When they visit us by halves, we sterilize the glasses afterward. It’s a virus, I think: gauze . masks are recommended. One local priest has given up. “They drop by to tell me as they head for a lawyer’s office. Usually they leave the motor running.” Encounter therapy has been popular of late, yet its base average is just mediocre. Twenty-five per cent destroyed by too much honesty, 25 per cent improved, 50 per cent unchanged (though noticeably more talkative). It isn’t surprising in a do-your-own-thing society that gives no moral support to the nuclear family and its traditional roles. For six years with Charlie, her now famous husband, Marabel faced a similar problem. Buboes had appeared in the vital gland of her marriage.
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