I kept the hood up on Margaret’s carriage, even in the supermarket, so strangers could not see her clearly. If they did, they asked what was the matter, should she be wearing a bonnet, was she getting enough sun?
A second doctor, the head of a hospital’s allergy department, kept losing Margaret’s records and confusing her with her other patients. She said she wanted to take blood from Margaret, reduce it to a serum, inject it into a paid, allergy-free donor, and test the donor for the baby’s allergies. “You mustn’t let her do it,” said a mat-mate (I never knew her name) at Kounovsky’s Gym, where, in leotard and tights, I tumbled, trapezed, and swung on the rings twice a week. “The blood loss is terrible.”
“Rosehip tea and beef broth cure everything,” an ex-ballet dancer said, making me hate her for her mindlessness.
“My son used to look like that,” the old Italian contractor who was painting 44 Jane Street said.
“How was he treated?” I asked.
“He died.”
In the office—I had gone back to work when Margaret was four weeks old—I could lose myself in work. I have always been able to lose myself in work. But if someone asked me how the baby was coming along, I grew nervous, desperate to leave my desk and go home. She won’t Me, I told myself, if I keep my eyes on her. If I close them for a second, though, she’ll slip away. (Years later, the old maternal griefs having returned, I stayed up all night with a sick kitten, believing that keeping my eyes on it as I had on Margaret was a way of pinning it to life.)
In the evening B. and I sat in the living room, Margaret sleeping on my lap, in a silence thick as heavy dust. How could we have spoken? All we had to talk about was his guilt and my rage. When we met he used to tell me how he felt, but he had stopped, because although I listened, I could not absorb. I, however, had rarely spoken of how I felt about anything. I did not want him to know, let alone anyone else to know, afraid that if I plunged into my head, I would come up with a forkful of worms. So we sat silent, Dr. Franklin once again dispensed with, Jerry moved away, and neither of us able to leap over the wall to the other.
At last we found the right doctor, the one who knew how to care for our baby. “She’s allergic to everything,” he said, “so right now I’d rather treat the symptoms than the source.” Margaret, slathered with cortisone cream, sluiced with tar baths, switched from my breast to soybean milk, grew curly black hair and cheeks like pink peonies. Once, when her doctor was lecturing to the class he taught at University Hospital, he used Margaret as his subject, pointing to her as she sat, fat, naked, and happy, on a table in the classroom. I stood in the corner beaming, as proud as if she had just won a contest for Most Beautiful Baby.
But as the eczema disappeared, asthma surfaced, and sometimes at night we heard her breathing turn to rales. Then B. would sit for hours in the bathroom, Margaret on his lap, the shower pounding and the room steaming and his eyes a misery. Meanwhile I pretended sleep and turned my back when, the baby no longer wheezing and back in her crib, I felt him sliding into bed.
It was too much. When the baroness, soon to leave Mademoiselle and devote herself to biography and opinionated gardening, asked me if I would consider working full-time, I said yes on the spot. I was flattered, of course, and proud to be earning my own money. But the real reason I leaped was that those months of standing over Margaret, watching and crying, had convinced me that I was not fit to deal with crises. Hoppy had returned, Hoppy who had slung Kate over her shoulder like a dishtowel and sung and whistled her into sleep, and my children would be safer with her than with me. But I am telling only half the truth. Maybe only a quarter of it. The rest of the truth is that I was unable to bear loving my children so much. Loving left me weak, skinless. Ideally I would have liked Katherine and Margaret sewn to my armpits, secured to me. Or, better yet, kicking and turning in my stomach, where I could keep them safe forever. I had to be away from my daughters because loving them was making me crazy.
B.’s being around—if together we had sat between the youth bed and the crib, as I did every night alone, singing “Rock-a-Bye, Baby”—might have eased my obsessiveness. But he had been offered a job in Boston a few months before Margaret was born. “See if they’ll let you be there part-time,” I said, and consigned him to a room in some club or other. I was not about to move anywhere, but especially not to Boston, which was too close to the permanent three-o’clock-in-the-afternoon that I imagined a life in Bristol would have been. Besides, I loved my job, not because it was engrossing—although it was usually amusing—but because it was all mine.
So he was gone from Tuesday at dawn through Thursday at sunset, and when he came home on Thursday nights I was rattled, resentful of an intruder into my beautiful circle of work and children. By the weekend I was glad he was in the house; I’d gotten used to him again. But when Tuesday arrived he was gone once more, and then I would reenter the magic place, all females, two of them babies, and all of them smelling sweet.
“Mary,” a friend asked, “aren’t you nervous? Didn’t you see Captain’s Paradise?”
I laughed, not yet having acquired imagination. My husband and my father were the only men I had ever known well, and Papa was faithless only in dying. Since B. had taken over where Papa left off, he would be no different. He was not the same man, I knew that. And yet, in a way, he was.
I do not know now how I discovered that I should have been nervous. All I remember is a civilized conversation in the living room, my hand shaking whenever I lifted a cigarette to my mouth and B.’s eyes opaque behind a pipe which kept going out. “How could a woman with children,” I am asking him, “do that to another woman with children?” What had I ever done to deserve such treatment from a perfect stranger?
I absolved him, poor man alone in Boston because his wife refused to move. But not her, not that traitor to her own gender. Nor me, the wife who hadn’t packed up her children and chattels and left town with her husband. And if I had? Best not to think of the boredom and, I suspect, the drinking that would have ensued. But something my father had often said when my sister and I left for parties and proms started sounding in my ears again. “Always come home with the man what brung ya,” he had charged, and I had disobeyed.
Margaret got well, Katie got beautiful, the girlfriend was discarded—how and when I never knew, being too courteous to ask—and Boston dissolved into the past. It was no place for someone as fast-paced as B. or, for that matter, for a Jew. When his boss heard that I had come from coastal Rhode Island, he said, “Oh! She’s maritime.” That was his way of saying, “She’s okay.” B., I knew, because a childhood spent next to New England’s old money had thinned my skin almost to transparency, would never be okay.
No, B. was better off in New York, which is infinitely capacious, and better off as a literary agent wheeling and dealing and caviling and cajoling and doing it all with seamless charm. One of his colleagues called him “the Master.”
Deep into the evening, flopped on the chaise longue, he took call after call from writers who depended on their agents like patients do on their psychiatrists. Their wives, too. Writers’ husbands I knew little about—there seemed so few of them—but they struck me as docile. Writers’ wives were not. They were martyrs to literature, all of them, and God forbid you shouldn’t know it.
One night the ultimate martyr phoned. During an argument her husband had chased her through the room with a hammer or a chain or an axe or some other piece of heavy equipment. Somehow she had diverted him out the front door and locked it, and he was now circling the house, weapon in hand, feet occasionally entangled in pachysandra. Calling the police never entered her mind. Instead she called his agent, who lived one thousand miles away. “This,” I barked, “is the limit!”
The husband was coaxed inside, weaponless, with the promise that his agent, the Great Healer, was on the phone, and B. lured him to tranquillity with his Thorazine voice. I, distracted from my book, my beautiful bedroom, my beautiful life, said I was sorry the write
r and his wife hadn’t shot it out, thus leaving us in peace.
In truth, this particular writer’s wife was one of the few I really liked. I liked her because she was frightened, because she always expected the marriage to slip out from under her, because she knew about the abyss. Other wives, most wives, I disliked. They had, it seemed to me, certain tools I would never possess, the marital equivalent of street smarts. They could wheedle, they could pounce, they could own. I, who would have made some lucky woman a fine husband, didn’t know how to do any of those things. My father’s daughter, I had been a gentleman all my life.
I was afraid of wives—I saw them as smug, smooth-feathered hens—and the wives I feared most were astronauts’ wives. There they were in Life magazine, with names like Joan and Annie: stalwart and true, and the first ones to be phoned after their hubbies had spoken to the president. Why do I think they all had sons named Chip? What was their secret? What did they know? What was the sorority grip, and why was I never taught it?
B., gregarious as well as deeply involved in his work, stayed out late at dinners and at parties. I, being neither, stayed home with the babies and the books. My husband, overworked and high-strung, would vomit late at night. I, who tend to conduct my illnesses as do dying dogs—sitting alone, staring into corners—did not realize that grownups as well as children need to have their heads held as they bend over the toilet bowl, and left him to his retching.
Work exhausted me, too, but not intellectually. How could it? I was, after all, sitting at a desk writing “Pink brocade, its skirt plumped with layers of petticoats.” But it was difficult for me to talk to too many people for too long, or to listen to the endless nattering on the Graybar Building’s elevators. What I wanted from marriage, apart from the children and the pleasure of knowing that I was not out there on the street alone, with the wind lifting my skirt and the mud speckling the backs of my legs, was a clean, well-lighted tomb in which I could spend the evening restoring myself for the next day. I was tired, too. When at last I finally drifted into sleep, I could feel the bed falling into the center of the earth.
2
EVERY JANUARY, B.T.B. went to Paris for the collections, installing herself in a suite in the Plaza Athénée and hiding her liquor on a ledge inside the living room fireplace. “Why tempt the help?” she used to say. Then, companioned by Mademoiselle’s Paris editor, a taut, thin Frenchwoman who was aunt to Leslie Caron, she did Dior and Chanel and everybody else worth covering that season. Mrs. B. had been going to Paris for years—her first trip was on the Berengaria— and although she never learned to speak French, she loved the tag lines. “Merci millefois,” she would say in thanks, “A bientot” in leaving.
In July the head of the fashion department made the same trip. Both sent sketches, by a man named MoMo, and notes for copy and captions back by overnight flight to New York. We—the art director and two copywriters—then worked all the next night to squeeze them into the next issue. The result, four pages of undistinguished drawings and telegraphese, was invariably ugly. But not to B.T.B. and the rest of the fashion department. Mademoiselle, like Vogue and Bazaar, had reported Paris!
Our second winter at 44 Jane Street, I suggested an article that would track a young designer for the two weeks leading up to his first show. The baroness’s replacement, a middle-aged woman with famous friends, who always put on lipstick before answering the phone if told the caller was a man, liked the idea. “Now let me see,” she mused. “Who do I know who’s in Paris right now?”
“But I want to do it,” I said, surprising myself as much as I surprised her. Never before had I said “I want” about anything that had to do with work. “Yours,” a friend had pontificated, “is a passive personality.”
I had been afraid to fly—“Which one of us is going to be on the ill-fated plane?” B. would ask about the tortuous travel plans that would assure that our children did not lose both parents in a crash—and afraid to write, and now both fears had evaporated in the face of that furious “I want.”
The night before the flight, I lay in bed beside my husband as frightened as if it had been execution eve. I do not understand why I thought I was taking an irreversible step. I had no goal beyond writing that one article, no ideas for others, and little interest in advancing what I would have been embarrassed to call a career. The term was pretentious, even low-class—the kind of word used by the kind of people who called a college economics class “econ” rather than the Ivy League-preferred “eck.” So when I cried and apologized to B. for leaving him, and said over and over again that I was sorry I had to go, I can only assume it was because my gut was telling me something about myself that my head was not ready to hear.
B. was proud of his wife: at last she was living up to her potential. I must not forget to call on Alice, must not forget some tinned truffles at Fauchon, must not forget his sandalwood soap. He had written to so-and-so, so there was at least one good dinner on tap; and surely so-and-so would be free for lunch one day; and no, I must not worry that people would not like me, because of course they would. I left the next morning, blessed with my husband’s good will and competent child care and possessed by a sadness that has grayed a portion of every day I have lived since. Why did I have to make that trip, when all I had ever wanted (or so I still tell myself) was to be a good wife and a perfect mother and to sleep in peace?
My room was on the Left Bank, on the top floor of the Hotel Pont-Royal, and its ceiling slanted like a garret’s. It was small, too, just big enough for me and a typewriter and a tiny portable radio, which I stuck in a wooden bureau drawer so the sound would be better. Because it was January I had packed warm flannel nightgowns, and laughed every night on seeing that the chambermaid who turned down the bed and laid a nightgown athwart its pillows invariably pinched in its waist. Sexy granny gowns! Too funny! “You brought flannel nightgowns to Paris, Mary?” B.T.B., who arrived a week later, said. “Suppose something unexpected should arise?”
I was flattered that B.T.B. thought me capable of racy conduct, thereby admitting me to the company of the dashing, but the idea of sharing my bed was incredible. There was no one in the world, no movie star even, for whom I would have sacrificed the pleasure of sleeping alone in that room with its view over the rooftops and its scent of disinfectant and Gauloises and Jolie Madame.
I had never been alone before, unless not having a roommate in college counts, and I kept discovering new things about myself. The pleasure of my own company, for one, and the curiosity that sent me bravely out into the streets with bad French and no sense of direction. But I never got lost, not once, and I began to acquire a trust, still with me, in my feet’s wisdom. My body was becoming my house. I ambulated as securely as a turtle.
And I was happy, so happy I was afraid to acknowledge the feeling lest, once named, it would fly away. Sitting one noon in a restaurant near the Madeleine with my omelet and my packet of Disque Bleus, wearing my fun fur and my Pucci dress and my I. Miller shoes, I said to myself, “Now you’ve got everything Papa and B. ever wanted for you.”
So what if I had run my entire life on my husband’s and father’s engines? Who is to say that my own engine, assuming it ever existed or was distinguishable from theirs, would have been preferable? Not I.
Some evenings I spent in my room, bent over a bowl of soup, my notes, and the phone. The article had to be finished before I left Paris, and since the only criticism I trusted or would abide by was B.’s, I spent a fortune calling New York and reading him the day’s work. If he said it was okay, it was. Anyone else’s opinion was unimportant. The reading over, we would chat about the children and what he was doing and what the weather was in New York (it was gray and rainy in Paris), and then I would do something I had not done since we were in college and he had called me every night on the dorm phone. “You hang up first,” I would say. “No, you hang up first,” he would say, and then, unwilling to be the first to cut the connection, we would arrange to put our receivers back in their cra
dles at precisely the same time.
In college, once I had hung up the phone, I would feel as though I had lost an arm. But not now. Now I felt whole again, because of the bliss of returning to a silence broken only by the typewriter’s hesitant staccato and an occasional whoop-whoop-whoop from a passing police car. I was concentrating at last, and all my bits and pieces were coalescing into one self-sufficient self.
Other evenings I dined with B.’s friends, or with new friends I had met while following the couturier around. They liked me, they asked me out again and again, they thought I was amusing. Maybe I was, but mostly I was a new face, a new audience for the old act. No matter. I was working without a net—my husband—and I was not falling down.
There was one man, Philippe (I cannot even remember his last name, and in any case it was never important), a few years younger than I, who took me dancing. He wore Cardin suits and came from Provence, was small-boned, elegant, and faintly reminiscent of Colette’s Chéri. More than that I cannot say, because I knew no more of him than that, only what my imagination made of him. It turned him into France, and Paris, my Paris, in particular.
In Paris it was the month of the Beatles. They were performing at the Olympia and were reliably reported to have just left every discothèque one had just entered. “The Beatles were here only a minute ago,” I heard in every dim, smoky room. “You just missed them.”
I can’t remember ever smoking or drinking in any of those discos, only dancing and looking back at my little round table to see if my quilted Chanel bag was still there. Actually, every little round table bore a quilted Chanel bag. They were membership cards.
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 15