Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  “It’s a boy!” the doctor shouted at my final push, at nine fifty-nine P.M., and I knew that Avrom was who I wanted and needed the baby to be all along.

  Fresno had two synagogues, and though I’d never been inside either one, when I was about six months pregnant I went to the one closest to my house, Beth Jacob, to ask the rabbi if he knew of a girl who could live in my home and take care of my baby while I worked.

  “My wife would like such a job,” Rabbi Schwartz, a little man not much taller than my aunt, said with an incongruous Cockney accent. “She wouldn’t live there, but she’d stay until you came home every day.”

  Bea Schwartz had the rabbi’s Cockney accent and wore a leopardskin coat. Her hair was dyed midnight black, and her red fingernails jutted out an inch beyond the tips of her fingers. She had a distracted expression, a look my mother had sometimes had when I was a child.

  I couldn’t sleep. “Those fingernails,” I wailed.

  “But they raised two kids,” Phyllis reminded me. “The rabbi said their son is a doctor.”

  The second day after Avrom was born, he and I came home. I hadn’t planned to take all the sixteen weeks’ sick leave due me, but now I loved the animal luxury of doing nothing but nestling my baby in my bed, nuzzling his rose-petal cheeks, watching over his sleep, adoring the perfecttion of the tiny pink nails on his fingers and toes. I knew nothing outside the wonder of him.

  But on the fourth day the vice president called. The University Budget Committee needed to see the plans I’d drawn up for the faculty retreat on innovative instruction. Where were they? Clearly an assistant academic vice president could not take weeks away from the university to be with a baby. “I’ll be in this afternoon,” I told him, and with a troubled heart I telephoned the Schwartzes.

  “Not to worry,” the rabbi said. “We’ll come right over.”

  Here are our days: I rise at seven, and I nurse Avrom and prepare baby formula for the hours I’ll be gone. Bea Schwartz and the rabbi arrive at seven forty-five, and I leave for the university. I call at nine o’clock, at ten, at eleven. Almost always it’s Rabbi Schwartz who answers the phone. (Won’t the congregation be angry that he’s taken other employment?) “He’s doing smashing,” the rabbi says. “Not to worry.”

  At noon, Phyllis and I hurry back to Harrison Street so I can nurse Avrom. Almost always, Rabbi Schwartz is walking the floor with my baby in his arms, crooning off-key British lullabies while Bea sits on the couch with a faraway look. Avrom bats his big eyes and smiles toothlessly up at the rabbi.

  Phyllis and I lunch on a hunk of bread and a chunk of cheese and hurry back to campus, where I spend the afternoon organizing the spring faculty retreat, thinking all the while of how the rabbi holds my son in his arms.

  At five o’clock I go home and nurse Avrom, and Phyllis rushes off to the ranch to feed the animals. But by six-thirty she’s back on Harrison Street, cooing over Avrom, carrying him everywhere in her arms while I fix our dinner. We eat it as he slumbers in his blue bassinet at the side of our table. Then I nurse him once more and dandle him, and Phyllis sings to him. Together we place him in his bassinet again before we tumble into my bed. At 2 A.M. he sings to us, sings us awake with his powerful lungs. Sometimes I get up to hold him in my arms and nurse him at my breast. Sometimes Phyllis gets up and goes into the kitchen to warm his bottle, then holds him in her arms and nurses him. The alarm buzzes at six-thirty and we tear away from each other. As I float in and out of a few more snatches of sleep, I hear the front door shut and her car start. She must drive back to the ranch to feed the animals before she goes off to work.

  “Let’s live together,” I tell Phyllis soon, because already we’re a family.

  “Do you know what my father just said?” She laughed after one of her weekly phone calls to San Diego. “He said that since we’re raising Avrom together, why can’t we call him Irwin too.”

  I’d worried since my son’s birth: If something were to happen to me, Rae would be too old to take care of him, and my mother and Albert were unthinkable. The indifferent state would ship him off to a place like the Vista Del Mar Home for Orphans, where poor Arthur Grossman was sent when we were kids. They wouldn’t care that Phyllis loved him. What could she use to prove her tie? “Yes, that’s his name from now on,” I said. “Avrom Irwin Faderman.”

  There are so many people who are glad my son has come into the world.

  When he started to talk, he called me Mommy and my partner Mama Phyllis. We couldn’t stop to think about how we looked to people outside because we were too busy living our lives, but now and then word got back to us: some lesbians in Visalia who asked an acquaintance if the “bizarre story” they heard, about “a professor who had herself artificially inseminated,” was really true; someone on campus who remarked to a colleague that Phyllis and I were “engaged in a social experiment.” How could they know the love among the three of us and the caring? Or that as life made me, the family I made was the only one I could live in? How could they know that Avrom made up for what Hitler and what Moishe took away, that I loved him with such tenderness and joy and wonder—as though I’d invented motherhood? How could they know he was to me the completion of a sacred mission?

  A woman who had a child out of wedlock in 1975 could not become a college president. I wasn’t unaware when I chose to get pregnant that it might abort my career as an administrator, but now I knew for sure. My administrative colleagues never said a word about Avrom after he was born—any more than they did before he was born. As far as they were concerned, it was as though the funny protrusion around my abdomen had just magically deflated. Of course they thought me odd. No matter what administrative skills I might have, I would never really be one of them.

  But did I want to be, or was it blind ambition that had made me dream of becoming a college president, just as I’d dreamt once of becoming a movie star? I truly missed the classroom. The next school year, I decided, would be my last one in administration. After Avrom’s 2 A.M. feedings stopped, my reading started again. I pored over books that would one day prepare me to teach lesbian and gay literature. The books absorbed me and claimed me, as always, in ways that organizing the next faculty symposium never could. What luxury it was: to sit in the den after we put Avrom to bed and lose myself in the written word—especially now in words about love between women, which had changed so much from the days when I found the lugubrious Twilight Lovers or Odd Girl Out on the paperback book racks in drugstores. But I wished that some historian would place it all in context for me—trace it from the earliest images, trace what it must have been like for women who made their lives together a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, women who loved each other as Phyllis and I did now.

  “Why don’t you do it?” Phyllis asked.

  I laughed at her musician’s naiveté. “It takes scholarly skills I don’t have. I’m not a historian.”

  “What skills don’t you have?” Phyllis said. “Become a movie actress,” my mother had said.

  I dismissed it that evening, but I couldn’t dismiss it permanently. There was no such field as “lesbian history.” With whatever scholarly skills I did possess, why couldn’t I try to help create it? Who else in the whole country was in as perfect a position as I? I’d done enough work for my dissertation and my two textbooks to have some notion about research. I was a tenured full professor with absolute job security, and whatever my colleagues might think privately, they couldn’t punish me for being a homosexual historian any more than they could punish me for being an unwed mother. I had a family that kept me at home, a partner to share responsibilities with me, and when I wasn’t at school I had time to work while my infant son slept. Why shouldn’t I do it?

  “Do it,” Phyllis urged again. “You can do it.”

  My writing too was a sheaf of oats.

  My mother and Albert and Rae come to visit. Albert carries Avrom all over the living room, calling him “Yankeleh.” “Maybe I better ta
ke him for a while, Dad,” I say after he tries for half an hour to teach the baby to say “Good morning, how are you?” in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. But then my mother wants to hold him, and I place him in her open arms. She sits with him on her lap, touches his little fingers with a delicate pinkie, gazes at him with a dreamy look. Is it me she sees? Is it Hirschel? “Avremeleh,” she calls him. We let him sleep in his bassinet for a while, then my aunt goes to get him, to hold him, to sing “Raisins and Almonds” to him in her foghorn voice. “Under Avremeleh’s little cradle,” she blares in Yiddish, “stands a pure white goat…” He looks up at her with huge love eyes.

  Though my aunt has asked me numerous times during the visit why Roger doesn’t come and see his son, before she gets into the back seat of Albert’s car for the drive home, she turns to Phyllis to instruct her: “Take care on Lilly and the baby.”

  “I will,” Phyllis promises solemnly. “I’ll take very good care of them,” and her blue eyes lock with My Rae’s.

  19. EPILOGUE

  1979

  PHYLLIS WENT BACK to her department too. They elected her chair because they thought she was the only one who could keep the string professors from strangling one another with catgut, the woodwind professors from soaking one another’s reeds in strychnine. She did bring about something of a truce before we went off on sabbatical—to San Diego, where we’d be near Granma and Grampa Irwin. She’d write a music fundamentals text, and I’d expand my lesbian history articles into a book I’d call Surpassing the Love of Men.

  If I’d been an academic historian, I would have known how difficult it would be to trace love between women from the Renaissance to the present—over two continents and five countries. But I didn’t know it. Maybe the editors at Random House and William Morrow didn’t know it either, because they both bid on the book as soon as they saw my outline. “I’m going to be published by a New York publisher!” I shouted to my mother over the phone. “Two big publishers love my book!”

  “Oh, Lilly,” my mother cried, “I’m so proud of you.” But then we said no more about it. What could my mother understand about “Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present” or about New York publishers?

  I laughed at myself when I hung up. My ecstatic squeal echoed still in my ears. “Two big publishers love my book!” It had been me, a ten-year-old kid, shouting to Mommy: “RKO and MGM both wanna give me a contract!”

  At the end of that sabbatical year, my mother came to San Diego by bus, a last visit. Driving her home to Los Angeles we stopped at Knott’s Berry Farm, where she and I had gone a few times with Rae and Mr. Bergman when I was a child. Knott’s Berry Farm had been a corny tourist attraction made up mostly of two-dimensional or papier-mâché imitation Hollywood sets—cowboy saloons and gold miners’ cabins and hoosegows in which you could have your picture taken as a jailbird. FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY, the billboards between San Diego and L.A. announced, and in recent years Knott’s had installed elaborate rides for the kids in order to compete with Disneyland, down the road.

  My mother sat on a long bench with four or five other grandparents and exhausted parents, and Phyllis and I stood at a mesh gate, watching our son go round and round a phony lake on a big plastic swan. For no reason at all I glanced back at my mother. The brilliant Southern California sunshine seemed to illuminate just her and none of the others on the bench; she seemed inches taller than all of them. Her eyes were half-closed. She was basking in the warmth and watching her grandson. I’d never seen her like that, so calm, so self-possessed and content, so queenly. Where had the coat of her craziness gone? the old veil of her tragedy that almost always covered her face? I gazed and gazed. This picture of her, just this, is what I want to hold on to forever.

  She called a few days later, when we were back in Fresno, but the majestic figure in the sunlight had vanished. “The doctor found a big lump,” the old hysterical voice screeched into the phone. “A big lump, Lilly! What do you think it is?”

  How could it be, when I’d just seen her looking happier than she ever had? “You’ll be okay, Mommy. Don’t worry now.” It was the voice of a ten-year-old—a child trying to sound calm and controlled in front an adult who wasn’t. “I’m coming, right away.”

  When I arrived, my mother was pacing up and down Curson Avenue, the familiar look back on her face, the familiar dishevelment back in her hair and clothes. This time, though, it wasn’t my mortality that she was worried about but her own. “What do you think it is, Lilly?” she cried again, though I knew she didn’t want to hear the terrible word.

  My son is four years old. Is this all she’ll get to see of him? The thought comes with despair, rage, then a warp in time: I’m the one who’s four years old; my mother is abandoning me. “I’ll make us a cup of coffee,” I told my mother lightly. I went to her kitchen and stuck my head deep into the cupboard where she kept the Instant Folgers so she wouldn’t see my face screwed up in a four-year-old’s panic.

  At the hospital we sat together in an office, and the doctor, dressed in a natty light-colored suit and a dark shirt, gave my mother a form to sign. “You need to read it first,” he said brusquely, and busied himself looking for something in a drawer. I stood at her side and read the words to myself as she held the paper. “What does it mean?” she asked me in Yiddish, her eyes blinking, out of control, as though the fine print on the official-looking paper signified doom.

  I couldn’t say the words because I wanted to protect her from them. “It just says they’ll put you to sleep for a little while,” I answered in English, “and then they’ll do a test.”

  “That’s only part of what it says.” The doctor threw me a disdainful look. He grabbed the paper from my mother’s hand and with a finger inexorable as death pointed to the clause he wanted her to see. “Look, here. It says that if I find a malignancy when we’re doing the biopsy, you’ve given your consent for a mastectomy.”

  “What does he mean?” she asked again in Yiddish, and now I had to say it.

  We’d gone to have Thanksgiving dinner with friends in Three Rivers, and I could hear the phone ringing into the dark when we pulled up to our garage. “Lee-lee, the ambulance came for your mother. She’s in the hospital very sick, very very sick,” Albert yelled into the phone. It was pneumonia, he said. She’d had three months of chemotherapy.

  “We’ll come with you,” Phyllis cried.

  “No. Please. I need to be alone with her,” I said. “Stay here and take care of our boy.”

  ***

  My mother is hooked up everywhere to complicated yards of tubes and wires. She tries to tell me something, her hands waving indecipherable messages, her lips moving around the clear tube in her mouth that reaches down to her lungs. “What, Mom? What?” I can’t understand. “Tell me later, when they take the tube out of your mouth.” But she won’t stop. Now she points to her lips, pulls my chin to her, pulls me close to her face. It frightens me. What does she want from me? “I don’t understand,” I cry, frustrated. It had always been so hard for me to understand her. But she won’t rest. She points to my lips now, pulls my chin to her. “My face?” I’m desperate. “What about my face?”

  Then I get it. So simple. “You want me to kiss you?” I hear my aunt, who’s standing behind me, make a muffled sound. My mother nods and sighs deeply, and her body seems to relax for the first time. I kiss her face over and over and call her “my darling.” When I leave the room for a minute, Rae runs behind me. “Wash your mouth good with soap,” she whispers loudly. “Pneumonia is catching.”

  I go into the bathroom and scrub my lips as Rae directed, but then I’m sorry I did it, and my lips hurt from the disinfectant soap. All that day I kiss my mother over and over and call her “my darling.” I won’t scrub my lips anymore. I stand by her side and hold her hand. What can I tell her? “I sent my editor Part One of my manuscript, and she says it’s going to be a very important book.” “Avrom’s kindergarten teacher say
s he’s reading at a third-grade level.”

  She squeezes my hand, and her lips seem to smile around the tube before we lapse into silence, then I kiss her again. There isn’t any more to say. But there doesn’t need to be.

  As a child I had little to say to my mother that I thought she could understand, yet I had a million kisses for her. When I grew up I was usually too angry to give her kisses. I couldn’t bear to witness her pain anymore, I couldn’t bear that she’d been always a victim. Why hadn’t she known how to make a decent life for herself? But it comforts me now, it comforts her too, I can see, when I kiss her again and again as I used to.

  Have I really told her everything I need to? “It’ll be all right, Mommy,” I say now. Not you’ll be all right. I can’t lie to her.

  “It’ll be all right,” I say again after a few minutes, and she nods her head yes.