Mrs. Beneker, by Violet Weingarten (1967)

Depending on your perspective, Violet Weingarten’s debut novel, Mrs. Beneker (1967) is outdated or timeless. Mr. and Mrs. Beneker could live next door to half of John Cheever’s characters or across the street from Rob and Laura Petrie. She picks up Mr. Beneker from the 6:23PM train to Westchester, takes an adult education class on comparative religions, worries about her son at Harvard and her daughter, pregnant and off to Egypt with her aid-organizer husband, and wishes she could land one of those highly-coveted volunteer jobs teaching reading to youngsters in Harlem. She did work, back in the late 1930s, when she was single, radical, and infatuated with her newspaper’s dashing red-headed star reporter, but now she is in something of a limbo, no longer in daily demand as a mother and too young to retire to Florida like her parents.

She spends much of her time watching and weighing the world around her–both refining her public persona and wondering at its ludicrousness:

She reached over and patted Mr. Beneker’s hand, perfectly aware she was doing so for the benefit of two women at an adjacent table who had been staring at them from the moment they sat down. Mrs. Beneker loathed them. Obviously they got their exercise circulating petitions against liberal school-board members. They rode in open cars in Memorial Day parades, paper poppies on their breasts and overseas caps spiked to their iron-grey heads with bobby pins.

What a devoted pair we must seem, thought Mrs. Beneker, adding a winning smile to her performance. The lobsters came, and Mr. Beneker, as usual, reached over and cracked her claws for her. And are, she concluded.

Oh so it seems under she picks up the phone one evening and hears her husband say, “Nothing. I just wanted to hear the sound of your voice.”

Left on her own while he flies off to California on business, she has the chance to exercise her role as a woman scorned to the fullest. “Coals of fire, she thought. Let him writhe under them.” She imagines prying a hefty settlement from Mr. Beneker and moving into a “new, bright, ultramodern” apartment overlooking the East River. But the more she thinks of the apartment, the more it “echoes with emptiness,” and the more she thinks of Mr. Beneker, the harder she finds it to accept this new identity of his: the adulterer. In the end, reality is more muddled and less stark, and a good healthy slap goes a long way toward clearing the air.

And this is typical of the crises in Mrs. Beneker’s life over the course of the year depicting in the book. Dangers seem most fearsome when they hover in the near future, her wits sharper and character stronger in the heat of contact. And her sense of humor intact. “Eskimos have the right idea,” she often jokes at the prospect of aging. “The only thing to do with old people is to abandon them on ice floes.”

Mrs. Beneker was the first of four novels Violet Weingarten published between 1967 and 1977, when she died of cancer at the age of sixty-one–an experience she recorded in a journal later published as Intimations of Mortality (1978). All are about women of roughly her own age, economic, and social status, liberal in outlook, well-educated, mothers of grown children, living in or around New York City. All of her novels received respectful reviews and sold well enough to come out in book club and paperback editions, and here and there around the Internet, you can find readers who remember them with fondness.

Are they outdated or timeless? Mrs. Beneker is certainly a work of its particular time and place, yet I often found myself finding scenes and comments that were still relevant. I began to form a theory that these four books by Violet Weingarten were, in their way, every bit as timeless as any of the Jeeves books by P. G. Wodehouse. I will have to read on to put that theory to test.

Mrs. Beneker, by Violet Weingarten
New York City: Simon and Schuster, 1967