After Frederick Pohl died, I Googled his name and came across this essay. The man he is writing about was L. Jerome Stanton. Jay was a nickname he acquired when there were several Jeromes in a tech writing company he worked for, so he was dubbed with an initial. He was my husband from 1956 to 1993 when he died. Fred mentions that Jay was unusually accepting of the fact that Carol liked to hang out at Village bars and talk to the musicians … he characterized that as indicative of a marriage in trouble. Yes, it was, and Carol left because they were both unhappy, but Jay let her define the moment.

So this is Fred’s account.

During World War II, Jay Stanton signed on as radioman with several convoys on the Murmansk run. This was one of the most dangerous jobs there were but Stanton survived. After the war he settled for some years in the largely sf community in Manhattan.

I didn’t really discriminate Jay from others in the community until he married a tall, blonde, very good-looking woman named Carol Metcalf Ulf. (At the time I admit I thought Jay might be running a little luckier than he deserved.) The two settled down in a small apartment in Chelsea. Jay took a job as an assistant to John Campbell on the stumbling science magazine Air Trails and Science Frontiers, and began showing up in evening sessions with his guitar, accompanying anybody who wanted to be accompanied in anything they wanted to sing. Often his wife, Carol, was singing with him; she had an untrained but quite good soprano voice. However, what she preferred to do, most evenings, was walk over to the Village and sit in one of the bars for a few hours, listening to music and chatting with the musicians.

The most outstanding character of Jay Stanton, you need to realize at once, is that in some ways he was an almost pathologically kind and generous man. Many a husband would prefer to have his bride stay home at night instead of inhabiting Greenwich gin mills without him. Jay apparently accepted it with calm. If this woman he wanted to make happy preferred the gin mills he let it be so. Of course, most people would begin to suspect that this sort of thing was warning of a marriage in trouble.
Most people would be right, too.

I wasn’t very surprised when one night I came home to Red Bank (NJ) — Judy (he is here referring to Judith Merrill, a prominent sci fi writer herself) hadn’t thrown me out of the house yet — and discovered 386 West Front Street had a new boarder. Apparently Carol had applied to Judy for shelter and Judy had been generous. It did have one, I believe, unanticipated result, though. Carol and I became friends. It started, if I remember, one morning when Judy wasn’t around and I was out on that grand porch singing to the river, and the next thing I knew we were singing duets. Singing them pretty well, too.

And it went on from there. It went on sufficiently well that, a few months later, when Judy did at last kick me out and I moved into a tiny flat in New York’s East Village, Carol moved with me.

That was not the most amazing thing, though. The most amazing thing was that Jay accepted the changed circumstances with good grace, and, actually, tangible help in moving into and furnishing the flat. Does that strike you as odd? Most people would say yes, for abandoned husbands do not commonly behave as amiably and kindly as Jay was wont to do, But Jay was a far kinder organism than the rest of homo sapiens. If there were any areas of greed, or rage, or regret anywhere in his soul I never saw them betray themselves in acts.

End of Fred’s remarks

I will add that I was gratified and surprised to have this evidence of Fred’s understanding that was so identical to what I thought of Jay. No greed, rage, regret, no vengeance – a beautiful soul in every way.

Incidentally, Carol and Fred also divorced. I guess romance has its limits.

xx, Teal