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I AM NOT really sure what it was that drove me back to work, although I think loneliness was part of it. Except for when I was talking to Katherine—“That’s a good girl” and “Let Mommy button up Katie’s sweater”—I kept a Trappist’s silence. Mostly, though, it was probably pragmatism, pragmatism and a need to own New York as surely as I had owned the town in which I was raised.
I had not spent all those days in classrooms and all those nights with John Donne so that I could spend my time washing Kate’s little shirts and nightgowns and hanging them on the bathroom shower rail, separating B.’s shirts (they went to the cleaner at the corner) from the sheets and towels (they went to a big pick-up-and-deliver commercial laundry), and waiting for the diaper service man. Of course not. Somebody else could do that stuff. Why should I?
Besides, I knew a man who would do the heavy cleaning. And Nanny Schaefer, who babysat for us, was tired of working out of an agency and was happy to have a regular morning job. Maybe if it had not been so easy to walk out the door, I might have stayed at home. But if I had, I would have been unhappy, and not simply because a college education was going down a drain. To live in New York, to be part of New York, I had to work.
In Bristol, I had joined the Girl Scouts and sold their cookies door to door. I had stood in our high school gymnasium wearing a blue bloomer suit and waving Indian clubs at the crowd in the bleachers. But not because I believed in the truth of scouting or the virtue of exercise. It was because I wanted to weave my life with the town’s life. Traveling, I have spent more time in street markets and butcher shops than I have in museums and churches, and have imagined myself behind every closed door I have ever seen. Home with, say, a cold, I watch the five o’clock news and regret that I have not been out on the street that day to see the traffic jam at Times Square, the arrest at Grand Central. I had to work, because to someone who comes from out of town, that is what New York is for, and what it is. No matter how late at night I open my window, I can hear the streets and the sky and the buildings emitting a dull, constant drone. The hive, whatever the hour, is always buzzing.
But what should I do? I envy those for whom the world holds infinite potential, who are as flexible as whips. Except for a few weeks or so when I was ten and wanted to be an archaeologist (a few thrusts with a spade, I believed, were all it took to bring up glory), I have never wanted to be anyplace but around words. My father’s cousin was a critic for the Providence Journal; her house burst with books piled on tables, sitting two rows deep on shelves, lining the staircase to the second floor. Papa and I thought she lived at the heart of light.
The reading I did in the chaise longue, though, was as near as I wanted to come to book publishing, and a part-time job at the Washington Square Bookstore—sweet little lending library, nice customers, lots of time for browsing—would not pay Nanny Schaefer’s salary So, fearful lest she remember that three years before I had left Vogue in disgrace, I made an appointment with the former gym teacher who was personnel director at Conde Nast.
“Welcome home,” she caroled when I went in the door. No matter that I had walked out without giving notice, no matter at all. Half the people who had worked for Allene, she implied, had done the same. But that was what you had to deal with when you dealt with the creative. They had . . . quirks. The gym teacher smiled, serene in the knowledge that she had no quirks whatsoever.
“Now, Mary,” she asked. “What have you been up to?”
“Well, I have a baby. Katherine. She’s eighteen months old now, and I’ve been thinking that maybe there was something here I could do part-time.”
“As a matter of fact, there is,” she said. “Do you think you could do your old job at Mademoiselle in half the time?”
Of course I could, and at half the pay, too.
Among the women I worked with on fashion magazines when I was young, there must have been one who was shrewd about her salary. But I never knew her. We took it for granted that the people who worked in the art department had higher starting salaries than the rest of us, because they, having gone to art school, were presumed to have skills. We also took it for granted that the women who worked in merchandising and the men who were space salesmen made more money than we did. A successful store promotion or a few new advertising pages were evidence of their worth. But there was no way we traffickers in taste could prove our value, so most of us didn’t even try. “We never match salaries to keep people who get another offer,” the former gym teacher would say to someone who proposed to jump ship for, say, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and—although she didn’t say this bit aloud—“we never take them back.”
Mademoiselle, which had been bought by Conde Nast, had not yet moved its offices to the Graybar Building, so I met C.A.’s successor, the ex-Hungarian baroness, at 575 Madison. Nothing had changed. B.T.B. was still holding court in her boudoir, the fashion editors were still wearing Italian shoes, the writers in the college and career department were still peppy. There were a few new faces—the editors from Charm who had succeeded in edging the editors from Mlle, off their chairs—and some of the old faces looked up from their desks and waved as I passed by. Before I was ten paces down the corridor, somebody told me the baroness didn’t wear underwear. Somebody on a phone in the fashion department was telling one of the photographers—they were all out on college campuses photographing the August issue—that it wasn’t possible that everybody at Wheaton had acne. Somebody else was telling Leo Lerman, in his lair and surrounded by the usual acolytes, that Mr. Capote was on the line. I was indeed home.
“There’s just one thing,” I told the baroness after she said she would be only too happy to have me join the copy department. “I have to go to Paris first.”
Now that was the kind of excuse a former baroness and former editor of Harper’s Bazaar found acceptable for almost anything. “My dear,” she said in her whiskey baritone, “of course you do.” Happy day! Happy Mary! Back in the lobby, the same lobby in which eight years before I had stood clutching my mother’s old handbag, I said to myself, “I will never leave this again.” I did not mean Mademoiselle. I meant work.
But if I had lived in Paris? Oh, if I had lived in Paris, I would have sat all day in cafés drinking citrons pressés and staring at passersby. I would have walked up and down those pearl-gray streets, stopping only to lean my elbows on the parapet of the occasional bridge and watch the bâteaux mouches slide by. On a night when B. and I were standing on the Pont Neuf, one slid by empty of passengers and sounding of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from, I suppose, a record player. How I remember that night, that encapsulation of everything I loved most about this world: that there was a city like Paris and a composer like Bach and that I had been lucky enough to have married someone who had introduced me to both.
We all went to Paris, all the time, B. and I and our friends, clutching the clips of Craig Claiborne’s most recent tour of France and lists of boutiques and the addresses of Baccarat’s factory salesroom and the best perfume discounter. I could not write about New York if I were not to write about Paris as well, because Paris was what we, our crowd, wanted New York to be. If we longed for sidewalk cafes, it was because we’d sat in them in Paris, and if we were forever lugging boughs of mountain laurel from the florist down on Greenwich Avenue to our walk-ups, it was because they were the closest thing to the bouquets we had found on every Paris corner and lugged to our hotels. We dared the nasty salesladies at Guerlain, and we bought copper pots at Les Halles, and whenever we returned home, it was with the name of a new shop or a new restaurant to pass on.
“There’s this place,” we’d say, “Chez l’Ami Louis. It’s in an area with a lot of laundries, stuff like that, and you have to call a cab before you leave, because you’ll never find one otherwise. They do this little leg of lamb. . . . ” Or “Go to the Monoprix, or maybe it’s the Prisunic. Anyway, it’s on the Boul Mich. They have these knives and forks with plastic handles in wonderful colors. . . . ”
“Don’t you think we ought to quit while we’re ahead?” he said, as cautious as those acquaintances—invariably Jews streaked with pessimism—who had warned me that in knitting little sweaters and assembling a layette before Katherine was born, I was thumbing my nose at the Fates. Then he warmed to the romance of it all. We would be able to tell our next child that she had come into being in the city of Notre-Dame and the Sorbonne and La Tour d’Argent.
When our first child, our Katherine, was born, we took her to Bristol to introduce her to my grandmother. Ganny was sitting on her porch, I remember, and held out her arms for her great-grandchild. She examined her closely, running her fat little hands over Katie’s honey-colored hair, poking a finger into one of her deep dimples. Then she turned the baby so that her profile was on a line with the railing.
“What on earth are you doing?” I asked.
“I just wanted to see her nose.”
“What made you think she’d have a big nose?” I said, pretending I couldn’t guess.
“Because,” Ganny said soberly, “that’s the mark the Lord set on them.”
My grandmother wasn’t anti-Semitic, I knew that. But I also knew that she saw all children as compendiums of those who had gone before them. I had my father’s hands; my sister had my mother’s; my aunt was the dead spit, she told me, of an aunt on Ganny’s side, just as my mother was the dead spit of Aunt Mame, on Gampa’s side. Those were the marks -—an ancestor’s cheekbones, the narrow Cantwell foot—the Lord set on us. But the Lord had stamped my daughter not with a beak but with a button, and now I would have another button-nose, to relieve me of the strain of loving the first one so much. Having to stretch love to cover two children would, I thought, thin it out, make it bearable.
So we went to Paris, to a room on the top floor of the Hotel Bisson, which we had read about in Liebling or Wechsberg or whoever it was that we and our fellow Francophiles were passing around those days. B. was excited by my new sexual sophistication, or, rather, carelessness: the swagger with which I had tossed out my diaphragm, my no-nonsense, knees-up, pelvis-tipped style in bed. Sex was okay now, because now I knew what it was for.
I did not get pregnant in Paris. “Next month,” I said to B., having proof in Katherine that we were capable of launching legions on the world. “Both of us had rotten colds, and we had to climb four flights of stairs to our room! What can you expect?”
A few weeks later, in New York, the colds cured themselves, the egg dropped, the sperm swam, and off I went to my new job. No matter that in nine months I would have to take a few weeks off for childbirth. A pregnant editor was a commonplace at Mademoiselle, trundling her belly in and out of meetings, saving up her vacation days so she would get paid for the few weeks she was home with a newborn. The “office babies,” we called our progeny, and today, when some of them are parents themselves, some are disappointments, and several are tragedies, we still do.
The sportswear editor, a thin young woman with a narrow fox face, is going through a rack. “It’ll be shipped shorter than it is here, and it comes in a myriad of colors.” That is the invariable ending of her presentation of the pick of her market: “It comes in a myriad of colors.”
“Would you look at those buttons!” screeches the fabric editor, whose hair is a kind of Seven Sisters pageboy (though she herself dropped out of someplace on Long Island) moored with a silver barrette. “Those buttons are impossible!”
“Listen, it’s the best thing on the line, and I think it’ll photograph okay.” The dress editor is using a code which all of us understand. We have to show something from this manufacturer because he advertises, and this is his most inoffensive garment.
“Well,” one or two or three of us say, because this is the prescribed response to the ghastly, “it’s a look.”
The room is windowless, the table is littered with packs of Cheez Doodles, the smoke from a dozen or so cigarettes rises to the ceiling. The fashion department is holding its monthly meeting, and I, being a copywriter, am sitting in. B.T.B. is sitting in, too, but only for an hour or so. Other duties call, among them her punctilious red-penciled reading of copy and manuscripts (she is quite possibly the world’s greatest copy editor) and the correspondence entailed by her membership in the Women’s Republican Club.
The sportswear editor holds up a silver evening sweater. Everybody likes it. “Group order,” somebody says. “Group order, group order!” Ten or so of us are going to get it wholesale, that’s what that means. But not me. I couldn’t pull that sweater over my bulge. No matter. I will participate in plenty of group orders before my time is up at Mlle., or “Millie!” as B.T.B. is forever sighing. “Such a silly name.”
The first editor-in-chief of this magazine lasted only a few months; by the time B.T.B. is retired, she will have lasted nearly forty years. “Dearly Beloved Family” is how she addresses the staff in the long letters she writes to us during her annual holiday in the Grand Caymans. The morning after her beet-faced, Old New York husband’s sudden death, she came to the office and sat at her desk, a red pencil in her hand. Nobody interrupted her: we knew she was holding a wake in what was more surely her home than the big apartment on upper Fifth Avenue in which, we still believed, her housekeeper ironed her stockings every morning.
I have been in this meeting long enough for my eyes to water and my feet to fall asleep. Soon after B.T.B. leaves, I leave, too, for the shoebox I share with a woman who is even more pregnant than I. Short and fat, her eyes gray behind big glasses, she is a poet and playwright. Like half the people at Mademoiselle, she aspires to other things.
“Do you believe those ruffles? And would you check out those buttons?” The fabric editor is at it again; the laughter and “a myriad of colors” are crossing the hall and seeping into my office. The baroness’s assistant sticks her head in my door. “I may go mad,” she says, and withdraws it.
Now there is no C.A. to order the troops, and B.T.B., whose faith in her staff is beyond sublime, asks only that we stay out of jail. Leo Lerman is in the doorway. Do I have time for Schrafft’s before going home? It is drizzling slightly, so as we leave the Graybar he knots the four corners of his handkerchief and places it on his bald head. Down the street we go, Leo either oblivious to or shrewdly aware of—1 have never quite decided which—the sight he is making. I am laughing; I am always laughing. This is the season of my content.
A night in April. We are dressing for a dinner party, I in a black skirt with a porthole over which I have dropped an empire-waisted blue schmatte. Schmatte, along with “merch” for merchandise and “matchy-matchy,” as in “That sweater and skirt are too matchy-matchy,” is among the words I have picked up at Mlle. I have resisted pronouncing beige “behj” and kimono “kimina,” but on the whole I am beginning to sound like a fashion maven. My transformation, however, is not yet complete. It is years before I discover that “maven” is Yiddish.
The dinner party is on the Upper West Side, and it is safe to say we will be eating boeuf bourguignon. It is also safe to say that after coffee, somebody will put Chubby Checker on the record player and everyone will start twisting. Everyone, that is, but me, who has learned how—“Make believe,” I was instructed, “that you’re drying your backside with a towel”—but who is considered (though not by me) to be hors de combat on account of pregnancy.
This is all anybody does after dinner parties anymore: twist. Conversation among the literati (I, of course, am not one, but B. is) has been suspended for the next two year
s.
To the right of the kitchen sink in the house in which I live now is a menu, slightly stained, in a narrow brown frame. “A la Halte de l’Eperon,” it says at the top, beside a drawing of a duck on a platter staring fearfully at a carving knife. It’s the menu for “10 mai 1962” at a restaurant called Chez Allard, and by now it has hung on the walls of four apartments. May 10 was my birthday, my second child was two months from being born, and once more we were in Paris, where, too pregnant to wander alone through Venice, as I had first planned, I was making believe I lived by taking cooking lessons from Julia Child’s coauthors, Mesdames Bertholle and Beck. Every morning I took a bus up to just beyond L’Etoile, climbed a flight of stairs, tied on an apron, and, standing in a small, simple kitchen, realized the dreams of everyone who had ever read Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
As usual, our stay in Paris would in memory have mythic proportions, because we would have spent time with Alice B. Toklas. Alice was very real to us, especially to B., but she was also someone who had another reality, in the pages of a book. At this point the two Alices seemed one, but I have always wondered whether the Alice we knew was not the Alice Gertrude had known but the Alice Gertrude had invented.
B. wanted Alice to write her own autobiography, and a few years earlier, before I had had Kate, she had granted him an audience. She lived on the rue Christine then, in a house behind a tall wooden door that was approached through a shabby courtyard. “G. Stein, ecrivain” was the name above the doorbell, although Gertrude Stein had been dead for at least ten years (I seem to remember that she was still listed in the Paris phonebook, too), but there was no answer when we pushed that bell or the one beside the door to her flat.
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 13