Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

by Kathleen Rooney

  He was quick but not reckless, controlled but not deliberate. He was decisive—a man who didn’t doubt himself. His prowess came from grace as much as brawn; he had a boxer’s build, not a strongman’s. His doffed shirt revealed at his chest and armpits what I judged to be an entirely reasonable quantity of hair.

  He saw me looking; he meant for me to watch him, and I didn’t turn away. I just bided my time with a few mildly provocative and entirely unnecessary adjustments to my makeup and wardrobe, returning the favor by giving him something to look at—and reminding him that while it might have been his rug, it was still my apartment.

  “There we are,” he said, looking down at his handiwork. “Rolled out flat in no time flat. Want me to put the furniture back?”

  “Sure,” I said, preferring an orderly room to a disorderly one, and also preferring to watch his muscular arms moving the pieces into their places rather than doing it myself. “I’ve always written ads about R.H. Macy’s’ outstanding customer service, but I had no idea how right I was.”

  Afterwards he took me out for Italian food in Little Italy. He knew a place. Of course he knew a place—all our time together he knew a place for everything, and I adored that about him.

  I told him what I wanted and he did the ordering.

  As we ate pasta and drank red wine, I thought of the etiquette book I was writing and had to remind myself of my own advice to love-struck misses: “Do not gush or drape yourself about his neck. Do not engage in an excess of rosy diffidence and delicate reserve, but also do not engage in too brash or suggestive a deportment.”

  His parents were from Milan, he said, but he was born in New Jersey. After finishing at the Park School in Rutherford, he graduated from the University of Florence in 1924 and the University of Switzerland in 1926. He had been with R.H. Macy’s for eight years, entering the rug department of the Manhattan store three-and-a-half years ago, having previously been in charge of the firm’s foreign buying offices in Italy. Unbidden, my mind did the arithmetic and found that I was seven years older than he: thirty-four to his twenty-seven.

  It may sound gauche, but one reason I liked him so much was because so many people would think him a little beneath me. I was constantly being approached by men who were securely set in the world: soon-to-be titans of industry, and famous actors. I would deign to pull you up to my level, hardworking girl, was a theme they all played in one key or another. I always had a complete revulsion for that.

  What was so appealing about imagining a future with Max was that I stood to do as much for him, if not more, than he stood to do for me—at least financially. We could live well in the city and take trips and have a summer home, and he would not only let but quite likely need me to keep working, and I would revel in that.

  And I had been imagining a future with him, even as he’d worked shirtlessly in my apartment. I suppose it was something I’d done before with other men, but never so readily. It was as if his very unlikeliness as a match—young, striving, freshly American—made it easier to contemplate: less of a trap, more of a game. What would Mother think? It was delicious.

  “My dad’s in the import business, too,” said Max, wiping his lips with a napkin. “Owner of Caputo Company, Inc., over on Hudson Street. Dad would really like your selling style, I think. The way you’re so funny.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said. “Do you want to know the trick? This is a trade secret, so I hope you can be trusted. The trick is that you can’t joke about merchandize indiscriminately. Inexpensive items can be treated with a tongue placed more freely in the cheek than expensive ones can. It’s all right to say something smart about a nice homey shower curtain, while it wouldn’t seem quite decent to joke about a Chippendale chair. You don’t see banks waxing whimsical about trust funds, or Tiffany growing elfin on the subject of emerald rings. But a double boiler is something else again. Or a package of prunes. Or a baby’s undershirt.”

  He folded his napkin on the table and laughed.

  “Lillian, you’re too much,” he said. “I could listen to you talk all night.”

  “Oh, let’s don’t do that,” I said. “Enough about work. Shall we go?”

  On the way home we stopped and picked up some gin.

  We took the elevator back up to my floor.

  I knew what I wanted to have happen, but I didn’t know if it would.

  “Kiss me quick before I close the door,” I said.

  And he did.

  “I don’t want to leave yet, Lillian,” he said.

  “Well then, come in,” I said.

  And in he came.

  Dinner had been such a din of jokes and easy rapport that I could hardly eat for just wanting to talk to and listen to and look at him. He let me be funny, let me be a poet, and he didn’t try to overexplain my own interests to me.

  He was the same as we sat on the davenport, drinking our drinks: martinis he’d made, meticulously mixed.

  Harmonium still sat on the coffee table, and he picked it up and flipped through.

  “Huh. ‘Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,’” he read aloud. “I can see why you’d like this guy. He’s serious about what he’s doing, but he can kid around.”

  “I love that one,” I said. “I’m only partway through, but I also really like ‘Metaphors of a Magnifico.’”

  And I reached over to show him, and he put his arm around me.

  “Strange coincidence,” he said, “but my father’s named after a poet. Dante.”

  “I think I’ve heard of that guy,” I said. Then we looked into each other’s eyes, and I dropped the book atop the newly laid rug, and we kissed some more.

  I felt intoxicated—drugged by his presence. We went to bed. An infant moon, an evening start. A night as throbbing as any metropolis. He was magnificent.

  My clothes on the floor had never looked so right as the morning after he spent the night: chiffons and crepes mixed with his soft gray trousers and navy socks.

  The outdoors beyond the window had never been more polished: a mackerel sky over a misty dawn. Even my cat Tallulah liked him, and she didn’t like anybody but me.

  We passed the entire weekend that way, only saying good-bye after lunch on Sunday.

  Nothing felt the same after that, nor did I want it to.

  * * *

  Before I met Max, it had begun to feel like the heretofore gentle maw of work had grown little mandibles and begun to gnaw at me. But afterwards, the teeth dulled and then fell out completely, and I was fresh and happy all over again.

  Before I met Max—though I wouldn’t admit it to myself—every morning when I punched the time clock, and every evening when I crept out to smack it another feeble blow, I’d get to coveting a different life, maybe, than the one I had. A motto of mine had long been, “When the heart isn’t in it, all zest in the job is destroyed,” but I could not acknowledge that perhaps my zest had diminished. How could I, when I had to keep working? Had to keep hiring all these new Little Bright-Eyes, the way I used to be, for whom life was just one potentially enriching experience hot on the heels of the last?

  Before I met Max, I had still been working. Not tirelessly—you bet your baby I was tired—but unceasingly, even as everyone around me ceased, at least from time to time. They went abroad, they wed, they spawned, they got appendicitis. But me, I never stopped.

  And there’d be days when, as I came home from work in the drizzle, even the food stalls on Third Avenue looked weary: limp parsley, worn cabbage, forlorn spinach. I’d think of sandwiches—rye with a spot of mustard—and how I’d give my left eye to eat them under a sunny rural sky in the company of someone fascinating.

  Hence my new apartment. But that alone would not be enough to revive me—so I had begun to realize, now that I had met Max.

  He had come along at just the right instant and revivified me without ever being patronizing. He was manly—maybe even the type some would describe as a man’s man, if they didn’t really know him—but also awake to the world in a way th
at few men were: childlike without being childish.

  Before I met Max, I’d been giving my time to undependable and hence absurdly charming men. But Max proved to be both charming and dependable.

  We didn’t keep our relationship a secret. Couldn’t: Though R.H. Macy’s was the Largest Store in the World, it was quite like a small town when it came to gossip. But Max was unfailingly discreet and refined.

  * * *

  Waiting for him on our second date, when I had him over for dinner, I still felt those proverbial butterflies, close as we’d grown that previous weekend. I polished the silver and laid out the savory tart, very smart, from a bakery I liked down the street. Opened the strawberry jam, plumped the cushions, powdered my nose and powdered it again. Still felt utterly uncomposed. Then the shrilling of the doorbell. Then Max, looking like an old-fashioned Valentine with his little box of candy tucked under his arm. Other times it would be sherry. Or brandy.

  Peppermint patties and twelve-year-old Scotch—high and low, that was Max.

  We played and replayed this scene many times through that late summer and fall.

  We bought each other gifts. I’d seen an ad in an Altman window, for instance, over and over, on my walks at lunchtime: “He’ll be a perfect panorama in silk pajamas.” I got them for Max to keep at my place.

  Max knew better than to get me only flowers and went instead to a Fifth Avenue florist run by a Mr. Schling who sold potted four-leaf clovers. Never a man unable to emote, Max had said, “Because the day I met you was the luckiest of my life, Lils” as he handed them to me.

  “You’re more fun than anyone in the world,” was the best compliment he ever gave me.

  When he would stay over—which was every weekend—I’d think of the etiquette manual I was writing. “A lady is wise to leave her host’s apartment long before cockcrow,” I advised, which was certainly true, and advice that I myself had always followed with other men, never staying the entire night—honestly never wanting to. But Max lived in Rutherford, so that was not an issue, and he could stay at my place as long as he liked. I relaxed better beside him than I ever did alone.

  Max would prove—years hence, at the bitter end—not to be addicted to monogamy. I might have known it even back then, but I did not care—or I failed to predict how much I’d come to.

  He’d come over for cocktails, and we’d have cocktails, often Manhattans, which taste best when one is in Manhattan. Sometimes we’d go out to places I knew, places Max loved—places that my residency in the city had helped me discover, in the neighborhood, or uptown to Fifty-Second Street, or far uptown to Lenox Avenue—but more often than not we’d stay in. The stars would fling themselves across the sapphire sky, and below our voices would run the rumble of cars on Fifth Avenue. The air would be humid with hints of the sea, and somewhere from the floors below, Armenian cooking smells would creep their way in.

  “You love me a lot,” I said to him one Saturday morning in early October when we were still in bed. “But I love you more than you love me.”

  He laughed and denied it, but I said it again, for I knew I was right. It was the sort of statement that might, if spoken within my earshot by one of the office girls, have caused me to grimace and retreat to my desk and shake my head at the varieties of silliness to which modern womanhood subjected itself. But now the concern seemed reasonable and necessary: Who loved whom more? How much of myself I could expect to lose?

  We’d have a breakfast of toast and ginger ale, coffee and tea, and go back to bed, and then out again, for lunch down the street. Hungry from exertion. We’d be so tired in those days from staying up late, but I didn’t mind. Sleep no longer rated.

  His laugh was a merry roar, and his sartorial excellence was unmatched. Later, much later, after we’d been married for a time, I’d even come to like the cool, astringent style with which he put me in my place during fights.

  We found we traveled well together when we took a late-autumn weekend in the country, in Maine: a rural dell well full of truculent birds, a rented farmhouse. Fresh and tasty lungsful of air. I was not much of a bird-watcher, though I did prize the simple birds I could recognize: doves, sparrows. Max knew them all, both by call and by plumage.

  And that is how we passed those months.

  Then, just after the New Year, January of 1935, when I’d returned from a holiday visit to my family in D.C., Max came over to my apartment and proposed.

  Tallulah rubbed her auburn cat head against his ankle territorially as he went down on one knee.

  “From 1935 on, Lils,” he said. “If you say yes, this’ll be my happiest New Year. I don’t want another twelve months to go by where I’m not married to you.”

  I said yes without question and felt stupid with happiness.

  * * *

  Once our engagement was announced, of course, others did question it, so at odds was this turn of events with my heretofore strident bachelor-girl pride.

  Why, the papers asked, why would I get married when I stood alone as the undisputed queen of the world—for even then Manhattan had taken to calling itself “the world”—when all impediments had been removed, and everything was wonderful?

  “Sneerer at Love Engaged to Wed,” said the headline in the New York World-Telegram, followed by the subhead, “Lillian Boxfish, Poet, to Marry Rug Buyer.” The lede read, “Man bites dog—or, even more incredible, love bites Lillian Boxfish. The young lady who writes books of verses putting the sneer on the tender emotion has got herself engaged. Miss Boxfish has another set of poems all ready for publication. It should be titled Eating My Words.”

  Truth be told, I had branded myself as the scoffer at love—but the expectation that I scoff vocally at love every time some society-page scribbler buttonholed me at a function had grown oppressive. As had trying to explain that the love I scoffed at was not the genuine article—the visceral and untidy relations between adult humans—but rather the flat simulacrum thereof deployed by advertisers less imaginative than I to sell things that nobody needs. Worst of all was a suspicion, one I could neither dismiss nor explain, that my scoffing had done nothing to check the stupid sentimentality that it took as its target, but had actually strengthened it somehow, amounting in the public eye to a few rounds of witty banter prior to the taming of the shrew. I had been typecast in a bad role; my best option was to break character. Paradoxically, I figured, I would be more free to live and work and write the way I chose if I did so while married to someone I truly loved.

  For I truly loved Max. And I would continue to do so for decades, even after we were no longer a couple.

  The spring leading up to our wedding, the spring of 1935, proved that the life of a self-styled poet sophisticate and crack ad copywriter about to marry is not a tranquil one.

  There was the telephone jangling all day with queries from friends who wanted to know “What about that sunny spinster’s life now?”

  Even Helen, though supportive, was stunned when I told her. She kidded around, throwing a hand to her lovely high forehead, pretending to feel faint and asking for a chair to collapse in as she absorbed the shock.

  I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, actually—no one in the press, that is—but Helen wisely persuaded me to give some interviews, if only because the society columnists were going to go crazy at the news regardless.

  Even as “How dare they?” became the mental counterpoint to all my activities in the days that followed our engagement announcement, outwardly I went along with the reporters’ questions, sweet and buttery as a lamb, because in the end: Live by the sword, die by the sword.

  The strangest profile of all ended up being the one in the L.A. Times. “This beguiling young lady is going to be married,” it said. “So her picture is printed for that and various other reasons. First, she is a remarkably intelligent young woman, in addition to being beautiful. She writes real poetry and sells it for real money. Not every poet can do that. In addition, this remarkable young person can and does write a
dvertising, a talent that makes her at least twice as rich every year as two members of the United States cabinet combined.”

  I might have been gratified, once, at this piece’s emphasis on my earning capabilities. And I did get a small frisson from thinking of Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, who earned $15,000 per year when I was pulling down over $30,000.

  But the stories about it had begun to seem vulgar.

  I won’t even quote the article about the engagement that ran in my hometown paper, in Washington, D.C., under the disgusting headline of “Love, Women’s Greatest Role.”

  Indeed, it was my mother who really sent me over the edge. I read that clipping because she mailed it to me, of course. In doing so, she was the only one in that ecstatic, albeit beleaguered, time who set me to sobbing. It happened one night after getting off the telephone with her, alone in my apartment, reading over old drafts of antilove poems, thinking: You know you have done something horribly wrong if your mother is saying, “I knew it. I told you so.”

  I had been so sure when I told Max yes, but the public uproar had shaken me more than I thought it might, causing me—just slightly—to doubt.

  Should I do this? Why was I doing this?

  But then Max would come over, and I’d know why.

  So I did it. And for a few years, I was as happy as I had ever been—as happy, it turns out, as I would ever be again.

  Even after our divorce, twenty years later, he’d still sign the notes he sent with his child support checks “love.”

  14

  Mulligan

  The golden Ds on the scarlet awnings—surrounded by laurel wreaths in heraldic style—seem to stand not merely for “Delmonico’s” but also for “do over.”

  The restaurant lofts steak smells over the intersection of William and Beaver, and as they waft toward me, I feel, finally, famished. I should be, I suppose, after a three-and-a-half-mile walk.

  During our marriage, whenever Max was away on business, which was often, I missed him terribly. What I did not miss were my evening dates with pots and pans. I rejoiced in rest from rump and roast, from spuds and the suds of dishes washed. Max taught me to cook, but it brought me no joy without him, so I kept the food simple when I just made it for me, for me and Johnny: fragrant coffee, honest stew.