by Marge Piercy
He laughed. “Then it’s not my fault, is it? I have always been true to you in my fashion, and that’s what’s real. You’re the only wife I want.”
“I was always true to you, Oscar, but did you think I would sit for the next forty years being true to a man who left me? I’m true still—but not to you. I am not about to be unfaithful to the man in my life with you—or anybody else. I don’t break my own rules.”
Oscar wasn’t smiling now. His eyes closed to slits. His skin got redder. He spoke in a silky soft voice. “And who is this lucky man? You’re not making this kind of fuss about that wizened little prick, Dennis Winterbottom? You can’t be faithful to a lapdog.”
She had actually got through to him. Now she felt good. She felt like giggling. “No, I am not talking about Dennis Winterhaven.”
“Who is it?”
“None of your business, Oscar.”
“How do I know it wasn’t this man who got Kay pregnant?”
“Oscar, don’t be vile. Kay doesn’t know him, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh. You’re supposed to be involved with this jerk, and he doesn’t even care enough about you to deal with problems in your life?”
“Why should he, when you don’t, and Kay is your flesh and blood daughter?”
Oscar knelt at the liquor cabinet rooting around, came out with a bottle of bourbon—which he never drank—and poured a healthy splash into his wineglass. He asked, as if conversationally, “An old friend of ours, no doubt? Half the men we know would have done anything to get you into bed. Fred Bauer. I bet it’s Fred. He was always trying to get his hands on you. He used to kiss you hello, he used to kiss you good-bye. I used to wonder how he could bear to go off to the john without kissing you.”
“Oscar, remember all the lectures you gave me about jealousy, how ignoble and unnecessary and primitive an emotion it is?”
“Damn it, Louie, I never asked you to live like a nun. But I want you. So you’ve had an affair. So it’s not finished. Neither are we finished.”
“No, because we have unfinished business, the daughter we made.”
“Charley! It’s your agent Charley. He’s been in love with you for ten years.”
“Oscar! Charley is homosexual. You don’t know my friend. Now listen! Kay has to have an abortion, but she’s evolved a romantic masochistic fantasy in which she brings the baby into the world and the father is dead—while in truth she may not be sure which of several men is the father—and she suffers gloriously in her own melodrama, without thinking she actually then has to raise the child for the next eighteen to twenty-two years.”
“I’ll talk to her. Tonight when she comes home from the movies, I’ll deal with it. I can arrange it with a doctor who’s very good.”
“He’ll use an anesthetic? I couldn’t bear for her to go through that pain.” She had thought Oscar would know a good abortionist.
“I’ll go with her if she wants me to. Are you sure I don’t know the man?”
“Will you really do that? She won’t listen to me. Somehow I got off on the wrong foot with her when I found it out. I was shocked. I dealt with my shock by becoming very practical, and I accidentally oversold her on the difficulties and gave her that intoxicating whiff of martyrdom.”
“Kay’s at a difficult age, Louie, and nothing you do with her comes out right. This too will pass. She’ll love you again, because we both know you’ve been a good mother.”
Louise felt tears briefly heat the inside of her eyes. “I don’t know that, really. I keep thinking of things I did badly.”
Oscar knelt in front of her, taking her hands in his. “We both did many things well and many things badly. But the worst thing we ever did was to let go.”
“What’s past is gone, Oscar. I’m sorry through and through that you didn’t think this way three years ago, but our lives have diverged.”
“He must not live in New York, if he’s never met Kay.”
“Oscar, there’s something I have to tell you. He has some connections left that reach into France. I asked him to find out about Gloria.”
“Is she all right?”
“She’s on their country estate. Her husband, the baron, is doing business with the Nazis. So long as he doesn’t divorce her, she’s probably safe, but it’s not a comfortable situation.”
“That mildewed weasel. What’s he doing?”
“Promoting the new German culture, the New Europe. Everything masculine, heroic, squared off, men are men and women stay home pregnant, and Jews are dogs. He puts on displays of muscle-bound sculpture and patriotic paintings. He’s become a cultural impresario.”
Oscar rose, paced. He drank off his bourbon and paced more. “I wonder if there’s any way to get her out?”
“I don’t see how. Probably she’s in little danger, unless the baron chooses to get rid of her.”
“He married her because she’s beautiful and was notorious in that little beau monde. Now she’s a liability. I don’t trust him to hang on. After all, she doesn’t have her own money.” He strode from one end of the living room to the other, absently running his hand along the back of the couch they had selected together when they moved here, when he got the job at Columbia in 1935. “I hate to think of her vulnerable.”
“Do you want me to try to find out more?”
“Is he in OSS too?”
“No. He’s connected with OWI—”
“As you are.”
“Not officially. They want me to take on a more active role. I’ve been working on the writers’ board, but they want me actually producing propaganda, and I have to brood on that longer—”
“Why would someone in OWI have links into France?”
“I said he was connected with OWI, not that he works for them. He has connections in French intelligence. De Gaulle’s people, I suspect.”
“He’s French, uh?” Oscar frowned, for the first time a little daunted.
“Oscar, what is the point of this? It’s no secret, but I haven’t been running around making a fuss about it mostly for Kay’s sake.”
“I’m worried about Gloria,” Oscar said, coming to stand before her with melting eyes and soft anxious voice.
“Oscar, if you try to use your concern over Gloria to move me, I’ll break a lamp over your head, I’m not kidding. I do not fool around. You will not, will not seduce me. I’m a woman of principle, remember?”
“The reason you write those damned gooey stories so successfully is because you really do believe in all that romantic stuff, deep down, Louise. As a left-wing Socialist, aren’t you ashamed not to be more liberated?”
“No,” Louise said. “Now I am going to bed and I am locking my door and I am leaving you to wait for Kay. And damn it, you better do something to save her, or I’ll never forgive you as long as I live.”
Oscar did arrange for Kay’s abortion, but it was Louise who went with her the following Thursday. Louise’s own period started in the doctor’s office, with fierce cramps that she could not remember having since her own troubled adolescence. Please don’t let it hurt her, please, she begged the air. Hurt me instead. Why didn’t I get pregnant, instead of her? I could survive another abortion.
Afterward she brought Kay home in a taxi and put her to bed. Louise found herself shaking. Kay looked wan, drained, an injured child. She held Kay as long as her daughter would let herself be held. Soon Kay pushed her away, turning to the wall. “Now nobody will ever want me. Now I’ll never be able to have a baby. That’s what happens.”
She tried to take Kay’s hand, nervously plucking at the sheet. “That’s not true, baby. It’s only the end of this trouble.”
“That’s horseshit, Mother. I know the score.”
“Kay, when I was your age, I had an abortion. I had been raped. I went to a woman who did it for me. Afterward I got very ill, I ran a fever and almost died. That won’t happen to you. But I had a life afterward. I had you. I wanted you, and I had you.”
“You had an abort
ion when you were seventeen?”
Louise nodded.
“Does Daddy know?”
“Of course he knows.”
“Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He probably didn’t think of it. He was worried about you, kitten. Why would he tell you old stories about me?”
“Because it matters.”
“How does it matter?”
“Why did you make me feel so bad when you did it too?” Kay began to sob.
“I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” She stroked Kay’s dark hair back from her damp forehead. “You frightened me. Your life has been out of control. You’ve been self-destructive.”
“Only because I got caught,” Kay said sullenly. “Now leave me alone. I’m tired, I hurt, and I want to sleep.”
While no miracles of communication occurred, it was as if a fever had reached crisis and abated. Kay would talk to her now. Kay acted like a convalescent, unwilling to hurry back to her classes, her friends. The school had been given a doctor’s excuse about pneumonia. Kay was doing schoolwork at home, tutored regularly. Louise was determined to be patient and not to rush her back into her school life.
Kay opted to spend Christmas with her father in Washington. Louise visited Claude in California, perturbed beforehand because she imagined the company of glamorous empty-headed actresses. Claude, however, lived in little France, a community of directors, writers, intellectuals who had wangled jobs at UCLA or one of the smaller colleges, all passionately involved in exile politics and living for the day they would go home.
From there she took a train north to cover Henry Kaiser’s four-day building of a Liberty ship at Richmond, California. It began at midnight Saturday in an empty way and twenty-four hours later a complete hull stood there. Louise had been commissioned to write on the romance of shipbuilding and the miracles of prefabricated technology for The New York Times Magazine, and a piece on women who were swarming to work in the shipyards for Redbook. The government wanted as many articles and stories about women working as could be ground out, for they had made a decision not to go to the English system of drafting women for essential jobs, but to rely on advertising, propaganda, the magazines. Women were to be depicted enjoying work, taking on new roles, becoming stronger and more confident in blue-collar jobs.
The ways bristled with scaffolding above the concrete foundations with a raised speakers’ platform where the ship’s prow faced the yard. Louise was sitting with perhaps a hundred reporters, many of whom she was beginning to know as they turned up at various staged occasions such as this one. Workers swarmed over the crossbeams. On either side of the way two sets of railroad tracks ran down to the water, the narrow set for railroad cars and the wider set for the spider cranes high as six-story buildings squatting over the cars to reach out their long arms into the bowels of the growing ship. Three cranes poked into the ship, bells jangling as they eased by on their high wheels. Riveters, welders, shipfitters, riggers, chippers and caulkers, burners and shipwrights ran busy as ants over the hull.
The flat keel, the bottom of the ship, had been laid first, let down in sections onto the keel blocks. Then the outer hull plating began to be fitted in, starting at the keel. Tanks were dropped into place. Then the frames of both sides began to shape. She watched the bow swing into place as The Times photographer snapped away. She could not help feeling pride in the spectacle. It was not that the ship was gorgeous, for the Liberty ships were slow clumsy cargo tubs, but the hard work, the efficiency, the solid workmanship involved in turning out ships as standardized as Chevys or Fords pleased her. A well-paid unionized work force that knew it was getting value back for its work and was motivated could do incredible wonders: that was what she would like to stress, but could not.
Kay came home from Washington ready to return to school. She announced, “Daddy’s having an affair with that Abra who works for him. She’s twenty-four. That’s young, isn’t it? For Daddy? How old is Daddy, anyway?”
“He’s forty. No, forty-one. Yes, I would say there’s a little discrepancy in their ages.” At least she had not succumbed to Oscar’s blandishments at Thanksgiving. How stung she would feel if she had believed him.
“Aren’t you jealous?”
“Not particularly. If he were living down the block and I saw them together or feared I might run into them, I might be jealous. But, Kay, he’s in Washington, and by the time he moves back here after the war, he’ll be with someone else.”
“Do you think Daddy is a rat?”
“No. He’s attractive to women, and he doesn’t see why he should resist. You ought to know that that was one of the big issues between your father and me.”
“If you aren’t jealous now about him having an affair with that twenty-four-year-old Abra, why couldn’t you put up with whoever he was shacked up with when you were married?”
“He isn’t mine now, so nothing is being taken from me. Right?”
“If you think so,” Kay said sullenly and slammed out of the room. Nevertheless, Louise rejoiced, because now they talked of matters Kay considered important, however unsatisfactory might be the outcome of individual chats.
Kay’s adoration of Oscar annoyed Louise because Oscar had been a rather indifferent father. He loved Kay. He was a deeply affectionate man, warm, charming, giving, but much of the time he was off being warm, charming and giving to somebody else’s nubile daughter or winsome mother. He found paternity boring. He always said Kay would find her own way, rationalizing his lack of direct involvement as modern childraising. It was not fair for Kay to idolize the father who had smiled at her often and worried about her little, and to struggle so unendingly with the mother to whom she had been precious daily and hourly, whose care had surrounded her like a shimmering net of extra sensors wherever she went.
The last week of January, Claude came for the opening of his new picture, Angels of Glory, which he described as straight Air Corps propaganda. He would be staying at the Plaza for a week. Having a big romantic affair was quite different from being married to someone she loved passionately. Louise studied it personally and as grist for Annette. There was more anxiety involved in an affair, because each time might be the last if things did not go—not smoothly, so much as excitingly. On the other hand, during the long intervals between meetings, she had her apartment, her work, her daughter, her mind to herself. She did not expect help that did not prove forthcoming.
Louise worried about losing Claude because she felt she had become involved with a man perhaps a shade too sophisticated, too worldly, for her, but the week went well—so well that the week after Claude left, Louise came down with what her gynecologist leeringly told her was honeymoon cystitis, so that whenever she urinated, her urethra burned until she doubled over. She had to drink two gallons of acidulated water every day.
Still, she was content. Claude had brought her a dozen pairs of nylons, an antique emerald ring and enough eating and drinking and lovemaking to last her awhile. She had resisted entrapment in Oscar’s old patterns and she had continued to create her own new ones. Claude thought of her when he was away from her, wrote her, called at least twice a week, brought presents to please her and gradually, gradually, took over her sexual imagination so that now when she created heroes for her heroines, they had Claude’s nervous agility, his speed of reaction, his tight neat wiry body, his full slightly pouting mouth, his seawater eyes.
The steely taboos of the magazines she wrote for were such that she had to pack all the energy of lovemaking, all the knowledge of passionately moving and intersected bodies, all the ecstasy of orgasm into descriptions of kisses, as Claude for the American market must suggest as much from a movie embrace. But under the fervid steamy descriptions of kisses mouth on mouth, Claude’s sexual sensibility was active in her fiction as in her own imagination. She was, as she had told Oscar, faithful to the man she was with. That man had finally ceased even in her dreams to be Oscar.
Thus Louise worried about losing Kay and worried abou
t losing Claude, but the one she lost was Mrs. Shaunessy, who took a job at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island and moved in with her daughter.
“But, Mrs. Shaunessy, we’ve always thought of you as family.”
“Thirty-five dollars a week I’ll be starting at, and that’s without overtime. My own family can use the help.”
Louise found herself without a housekeeper, and the disturbance in her life was at least as great as when Oscar had moved in with Madeleine. Louise called all her friends. “I need a housekeeper!”
“Who doesn’t?” her friends replied.
To Kay she said, “You’ll just have to pitch in. We’re both going to have to manage everything Mrs. Shaunessy did.”
They made lists. Sweeping, dusting, shopping, laundry, ironing, cooking, dishes, bathrooms. Kay was appalled. “You should have paid her more.”
“I paid her what the job goes for, Kay.”
“You should have paid her more.”
To herself Louise said, I don’t need a lover, I don’t need a husband. In fact, I couldn’t manage at all if I had to deal with a live-in man as well. If I can’t have a housekeeper, what I need is a wife.
JACQUELINE 5
Of Common Wives and Thoroughbred Horses
29 mai 1943
Daniela and I are in hiding, out in the suburbs in Maisons-Laffitte. We are staying in servants’ quarters over stables, where there are actually a number of sleek and well-fed horses, better fed than most people nowadays. When the groom comes to feed or water the horses, we have to be absolutely still. We do not speak or move. Fortunately most of the day the horses are outside being exercised. The woman who is hiding us says that we should never wear our shoes upstairs, but remove them at the bottom of the steps. My last pair of leather shoes wore out this spring, just before we had to run for it, and now both Daniela and I are wearing the wooden shoes that have become so common.