Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship

by Isabel Vincent

At first they welcomed us to their parties and barbecues because my husband was of Serbian origin and I had covered the Balkans as a foreign correspondent before we moved to New York. After my husband informed them of our separation, I might as well have had a huge scarlet “D” for divorcée affixed to my back. I no longer received invitations to parties and some of the men of the community even refused to acknowledge me when I bumped into them on Main Street. The coup de grâce came when one of the mothers—a fifty-something homemaker fond of track suits—refused to allow her nine-year-old to have a play date with my daughter at our apartment. It might not have been seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, but I had been formally expelled from the Serbian ghetto. Roosevelt Island became even more of a prison for me.