Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

by Kathleen Rooney

  Yet there I sat, at a vacant desk in the copy room on my last day of work at R.H. Macy’s, wearing a Butcher Boy but still looking unmistakably ready to burst.

  Max had come up from the rug department on the seventh floor and stood by my side, the picture of beaming paternal pride.

  Since we’d found out what was cooking, he’d been a paragon of consideration and attention. We joked that my new motto should be “Make hay while the muffin’s in the oven,” and that I looked darling sporting the halo he was so willing to set on my head.

  Even prior to the pregnancy I had become one of the women to whom, for years, I had been advertising—those in charge of their households, each buying for her man: his crackers and milk, his collars, his pants, his cod-liver oil, his brace of lamb chops. But I didn’t mind all that. I liked it. I did for him, and he did for me.

  I would catch myself staring at him at the oddest times, still smitten: him standing in the fridge light in his undershirt, looking for a midnight snack. I was so ferociously in love that conformity felt like rebellion. Before him, I’d thought myself singly blessed to be single. “Proud virginity” some newspaper profiles called it (although, although). These same profiles proclaimed that Max had “tamed” me, which grated, but to myself I said that I was going to be the exception that p’d the r.

  Max wanted a baby more than just about anything, and I wanted Max, so we’d embarked on a tear of trying. We married in 1935, but I produced no child for seven years. I was, as the doctors had it, of advanced maternal age—even more advanced than my charts reflected because of my lying by a year.

  I’d had three miscarriages—blood and violence indeed—before the being that eventually became Johnny took root. I half expected Max to blame me—for being too old, for not really wanting it, things I half-believed of myself—but he never angered, never wavered, never really doubted that I’d give him what he most yearned for.

  When Johnny seemed as though he would come to fruition, I’d been so reassured and excited that I’d wanted to tell everyone, but I didn’t.

  Max and I decided to keep this one—the one that would work—a secret for as long as possible, both because we were so afraid we might lose him, too, and because I wanted to keep my job until the very end. I wanted to continue earning the money because I liked having it, and I wanted to keep working because it was fun, and I was anxious and needed something else to think about.

  When I finally had to tell everyone, I made a point of fibbing. When friends and relatives asked when to expect the baby to arrive, I gave them a date two weeks beyond the one the doctor had given me. They still checked in ad nauseam—and in those days I was never far from nausea—but I was spared the final flurry that I’d seen almost all my friends caught up in, with mothers and mothers-in-law transformed into prosecuting attorneys: Is it or is it not true, young lady, that you ought to have pushed forth the screaming bundle of joy by now? The pressure I was under to produce felt more prying and presumptuous than any work deadline. When Johnny emerged a full fourteen days ahead of ostensible schedule, I was hailed as a hero. In the meantime, I just took in their advice with a grain of aspirin.

  Someone handed around slices of chocolate cake from the downstairs café. We ate it reminiscing about the ads I had written over the past fifteen years.

  Some of the girls who worked under me had made a few of them into a card, collaged and oversized, covered with copy on the front and signed inside by everyone in the department.

  “This one’s my favorite,” said Chester, my boss, reading a postcrash one from November 3, 1932 in the World Telegram: “‘Nature in the roar,’ it says, below a vintage Helen McGoldrick illustration of a crying baby. ‘This is a brand new baby, hot off the griddle and very determined.’ Still so funny, Lily.”

  “Not so funny that R.H. Macy’s could find it in their hearts to keep me,” I said.

  “Dammit, Lily,” said Chester. “I’m happy as hell for you two, but we’re sure going to miss you.”

  “Chip, dear,” I said, clutching both hands to my abdomen. “I know you’re a man overcome with emotion, but language, please. Little ears! Snooks in here is highly advanced.”

  “Lillian, you’re irreplaceable, you know that?” said Chester. “I’ll keep the freelance pipeline flowing.”

  As much of a prince as Chester was being, one could only sugarcoat the hemlock so much. My career as I knew it was dying. Dead as of that day. To be reborn in a different incarnation, perhaps, but not here on the thirteenth floor. R.H. Macy’s was kicking me out.

  It wasn’t personal. Every woman who got pregnant met the same fate. Maternity leave was unheard of; having one’s job held was not an option, and the assumption was that a mother couldn’t work anyway—not to mention that she shouldn’t, what with having a man, her baby’s father, to support the little family.

  What else could I say but, “Thank you, Chester. And good-bye for now.”

  The end, now that it had arrived, threw new light on what had come before. All the reminders I had received over the past fifteen years that I was remarkable—the highest-paid advertising woman in America, et cetera—were now swept away by this final reminder that I was not. I had loved this place, and I had succeeded here, but my successes had done nothing to change it in any real way, no more than Clever Hans the counting horse had opened up opportunities for equine bookkeepers. All the articles that I had clipped and mailed home to my mother to prove that I was right and she was wrong now seemed to be saying something different: that I was a novelty, not a paragon. A freak. The exception that p’d the r, all right.

  Max carried the box out, down to Thirty-Fourth Street, and I felt grateful for the falling snow because the flakes on my face made it less apparent that I was crying again.

  * * *

  If we’d had a girl, I’d have papered the room as pink as a Turner sunset. As it was, we had a boy, and went with blue—though when he was brand new I wrote him a two-line poem, “To a Baby One Day Old”: “It seems a sweet absurdity / to call so small a morsel he.”

  He was born on January 25, 1942: little Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo, Jr. He was the second person on this earth with whom I fell, in spite of myself, into love at first sight.

  We decided not to call him Max—too confusing—but to focus on the Gianluca component. And so in those early days he was Johnny, sometimes, and sometimes he was Gianino, and sometimes he was our Little John. He was fiercely and always ever after our son.

  When they sent us home from the hospital with him, it felt like we were actors, the leads in a heist film. Like we couldn’t be getting away with such outrageous treasure.

  The first morning after our first night back in our Murray Hill apartment all together, Max and I sat up in bed, propped against pillows, staring down at Johnny, asleep in my arms.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said to the baby’s closed eyelids, which seemed impossibly thin, delicately veined. “This is … a person.”

  “You’re doing great, Lils,” Max said. “Think of it this way: In a lot of regards, this is no different than learning to swim—terrifying at first, but ultimately a matter of confidence. Jump in. You’re doing it.”

  “I suppose,” I said, and he put his arm around me as the snow fell outside.

  We’d been afraid that Tallulah, an old cat by now, a grizzling ten, would resent the baby. But that first morning she hopped on the bed and sniffed him curiously before curling into a furred heap in Max’s lap, joining us in watching the infant sleep. She seemed determined to steady all the nerves that needed steadying, which was to say every nerve of mine.

  I was happy, of course, that Johnny was there. But childbirth had left me jagged, ripped. It was physically the worst experience that I had ever endured, and I had less than no desire to endure it again.

  Max, on the other hand, was over the moon.

  “I don’t want to rush things, Lils,” he said, stroking a finger down sleeping Johnny’s cheek. “But you and
I need to make more of these guys. They’re great!”

  At that point, with Johnny just days old, there was no need to fight about adding to our menagerie, so in my mind I said no way, no how, and outside I said nothing. I just kissed Max on the lips and turned back to the baby.

  I came to like it, sort of, motherhood. And I instantly loved Gianluca, Gianino, Little John, Johnny. So much so that I could admit to myself that all my simpering girlfriends and workmates had been right: I’d never felt a stronger emotion.

  But the other thing I felt—that no one had ever told me I might—was that as much as I loved him, I could never be totally sure that I wanted him around forever. I did not know if my life was categorically “better” for having him here.

  * * *

  Our days fell into a routine that was an unprecedented mix of the banal and the hectic.

  The pregnancy had added volume to my statuesque figure, of course, but I lost the weight in no time—in sterilizing bottles and making the formula, in bathing him, little acrobat as he was, and in feeding him and not myself. Six ounces in twenty minutes? Never. He took forever to eat. Took the occasional after-breakfast snooze, the 1:30 rest.

  I did like it when people came over to see him, although during his nap I wouldn’t wake him for friends or even for relatives, not when he was all cozied in with his quilts and sweaters and booties, knitted by the hands of loved ones more domestic than I.

  “He’s not a diorama at the Natural History Museum,” I’d tell them. “You can wait.”

  He cried a lot—a lot. The city sanitation crews would wake him, bouncing the metal trash cans on the concrete, infuriating him, and he, in turn, would infuriate the neighbors.

  He was exhausting, unable to avoid and seeming to seek danger. If one gave him a stuffed animal with large-headed pins for eyes—common in those days—he’d yank them out and make to devour them.

  Max loved Johnny, and me for producing him. But he, like his fellow fathers, had only the most perfunctory interest in the baby at the bassinet stage, leaving me to change and feed and nap and burp and quiet his screaming.

  Before I had a baby, I obliged lady friends who insisted that I race from the office to see their darling offspring: There he was, asplash in his prebedtime tub, and there I was, being regaled with all his vital statistics, height and weight and pooping propensities. No conversation to be had when Baby was in the room. And I would grin through gritted teeth and compliment them: on baby’s skin, smooth as a pale cherry blossom; or baby’s precocity in the vocabulary department, demonstrable by such word pairs as “toidy seat.” I pushed back my rising gorge at their feeble minds, unimpressed that their child’s fondest wish seemed to be beating the backside of a frying pan with some chromium utensil.

  After I had a baby, I was gifted with epiphanic understanding of where they’d all been coming from. Suddenly all my clothes were washable, and my sharply pointed jewelry had been retired; the only prickling was in my eyes from lack of sleep.

  I understood, too, the competitive comparisons leveraged by motherhood. Was my baby as heavy as the baby next door? Did he get his teeth soon enough? What of speaking? This animal love turned even the most mundane events into monuments.

  I worked from home and tried to glamour up by six, when Max got back from the rug department: powder and lipstick to paint myself the Fairy Queen of the Nursery, like in a storybook—but I’d as often be wearing, too, prune pulp and farina. At least little Gianluca always looked good: the handsome crabapple of his parents’ eyes. I did find some dresses with buttons down the front that I could dive into without looking like I’d taken a stick of dynamite to my hair. I could never bring myself to let the baby yell while I made up my face, though, so many were the nights I was mostly undone.

  I wouldn’t say I was jealous, exactly. But I was intensely wistful every morning when Max would leave to go to R.H. Macy’s, and when he would return home from there every night.

  * * *

  Wishing for something never made it so, and I never wished for Max to lose his berth at R.H. Macy’s as I had lost mine. But inevitably the war came for us, as it had been coming for everyone.

  Max was drafted and, like that, he was gone.

  For a little over a year he had been deferred on account of our baby, but by the end of 1942 Uncle Sam could no longer do without him. He had to go to Italy because he spoke Italian.

  So from early 1943 until late 1945 it was just Gianino and me, experiencing those formative years as an unstable duo. I spent all the time I wasn’t raising Johnny freelancing and writing many more letters to Max than I received. Enduring darkness and blackouts both literal and metaphoric.

  I felt like a different person without Max around. A worse one.

  I was still doing the same job, ostensibly, as I’d always been doing: influencing people with kids and families. I was supposed to be pulling their strings with my skills. I knew that most ad writers followed a simple formula: If you have a worry, then they have a product; buy the product, banish the worry. I had never worked that way, and I wasn’t about to start. But I understood it. More so now than ever.

  With Max thousands of miles across the sea, maddeningly unreachable and maybe in danger, I felt myself vulnerable in ways I never thought possible. As if I’d spent every day for a long time at the shooting range but had always been secure, safe behind the barrier. Now I was walking amidst the targets, and I didn’t like it. That analogy came up a lot in my mind as the war dragged on, inspired by one of Max’s earliest letters from basic training about marksmanship practice.

  He ended up in a noncombat position, thank god, as an American officer in the Allied Control Commission for Italy—executive director of the economic section.

  That still put him largely beyond my reach. Our correspondence remained wildly uneven.

  I would send, for example, a typical letter that read something like this:

  Dearest Puppa:

  I’ve been sending you V-mail letters every day and others, too, but they fill up so fast. So I have been jotting down things Gianino says that are new and funny and sweet, which I know you would want to hear.

  This A.M. the first thing he said when I went in because he was shaking the crib apart was “Daddee, mail!” How he had that on his mind I don’t know because all I’ve said about mail is that I’m writing Daddee and he can put a kiss in the letter. Anyway, now all incoming and outgoing mail must be kissed.

  Tonight when I was feeding him dinner, he said, “Mommee, is Daddee all right?” just like that. And I said Daddee was fine and he put his darling little arms around me and his face against my cheek and said “Mommee so sweet. I love Mommee.” What an intuitive little party! When I have made a point of being full of good cheer, he still knows he’s got to pinch-hit for the greatest guy in the world.

  I miss you more than it’s possible to say. I’m hoping we’ll both get a letter from you soon.

  Love,

  Mumma

  In reply, I might get a love letter on an airmail sheet: Just a quickie as I am leaving soon—I loved your letters. They are always wonderful. You are wonderful in every way. Will write you and phone you when I can, but it may be some time. I LUVE MY MUMMA.

  If he was feeling effusive, there might be a drawing of a heart.

  Often, I might get no more than an official receipt telling me he had received from me at his APO:

  1. Life magazine

  2. Time magazine

  3. One carton Philip Morris cigarettes and one carton Pall Mall

  That was the maximum amount of smokes a soldier could receive every two weeks. Max didn’t smoke them all, but rather traded them around the country, he said, for various needs.

  At any rate, this was a meager diet of love for me to live on for three long years, especially when I’d been so accustomed to a nonstop feast.

  Max returned not long after V-E Day, arriving home in June of 1945.

  It was a relief to have him back, but things were ne
ver the same.

  It was not an abrupt or a radical change, just a different texture in the weave of our lives.

  R.H. Macy’s had not held his job, and so he began working for the government—a long-term contract, doing the kind of economic development tasks he’d been doing in Italy, only here in the States. This meant long train rides back and forth between Manhattan and D.C. Which meant fewer excuses—now that he was going there often, and I was lancing freely, and we had a child whom everyone in my family wanted to see—to avoid my family.

  How I came to miss the relative privacy—not to mention the privacy from relatives—that I routinely enjoyed while breadwinning, even in my bustling and clamorous office, where I could shut the door and tell the receptionist to lie: “She’s not in.”

  No one quite believed that freelancing and being a mother qualified as actual work.

  Friends dropped by, thinking they were helping, but often they’d only take up the time I’d set aside to read or write. They thought I was lonely without Max. And I did miss him greatly, but that was not the same as being lonely.

  “Gather ye hot dogs while ye may,” I said to the few single girls left among them when they’d stop in.

  Oh, they’d reply, we’re tired of the man chase. Tired of the rat race. We envy the pace of your relaxing life.

  That would make me long to caress them with an axe.

  I never ceased in my attempts to spin the straw of drudgery into the gold of fun. I came to feel gratified at having a scrap of time large enough to write a letter or to pay the phone bill. To put a baked potato slurried with beef juice in Johnny’s bowl, and a martini in my glass.

  After Johnny was born, I was pulled by a tension between resistance and acceptance: wanting to hide the playpen sometimes, somehow, to pretend there was no infant on the premises. Why?

  As ever, it was Helen who had the most sensible solution. She sent reporters from her women’s magazines over to profile me and my happy little family.

  In 1946, for instance, we were written up—Max and Johnny and me, all three—in Woman’s Day. “The toddler pictured here is a strapping young gentleman of this decade’s bumper crop of babies. As you probably know, Mrs. Caputo is Lillian Boxfish in public life, famous for her light verse and one of the best-liked contributors to this very magazine. It is still too early to predict Johnny’s future, but if he shows a tendency to clutch a pencil and put marks on paper with an inspirational light in his eyes, we will keep you posted.”