…
“Well, what do you think I ought to do first?” My new secretary, who has just arrived from Vogue, where mostly she answered the sportswear editor’s phone, is standing in the doorway. “Maybe I should go through the files.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
She laughs. I laugh. At lunch I tell a chum from the copy department that I just love my new secretary’s face. “No wonder,” the chum says. “She looks just like you.” Back from lunch, I stare at this girl who has buried herself in the file drawers and is turning them upside down. She could be my niece, or a much younger sister. This resemblance, I figure, is a good omen.
Everyone in the office is forever looking for omens, good or bad. We read the horoscope column in Elle; several of us, including myself, toss the I Ching every morning; and one of us is studying numerology. Nobody takes any of this seriously, but we love having a couple of tools with which to grasp life’s vagaries. That B.T.B. and I are so unexpectedly harmonious, for instance, is laid by the office seers to our both being Tauruses.
When I tell B. that evening of what my secretary had found in the file drawers—manuscripts going back through two of my predecessors, often accompanied by angry letters from their authors demanding to know when they would run—he says, “Get rid of them.”
“But they must have paid thousands for this stuff.”
“Don’t worry about it. The worst thing you can do is publish something that doesn’t represent your idea of what this magazine should be.”
Something else was bothersome. There was a certain fuzziness around the edges of the letters with which articles were commissioned. The terms were never quite spelled out.
“What you should do,” B. said, “is state the kill fee very clearly. Since you people pay miserably, make it half.”
His were the only two lessons I ever got in managing editorship, and all I really needed, because the world was shoving subjects in my face.
Mademoiselle’s readers bought it because it was a fashion magazine. Anything else, the fiction as well, was lagniappe. Since we didn’t have to use the features to sell an issue—if we had, we couldn’t have run much beyond articles on sex and diets, because only they made surefire cover lines—we could commission whatever interested us. What interested us was eventually codified as “popular culture,” “the counterculture,” and “feminism.” But we never used those terms; we never even knew them. Instead we said, “I heard about this commune in the Berkshires that’s led by a kid who’s the reincarnation of Saint Peter, so I thought I might go up there for a weekend. . . . ” or “How about we use rock stars on the fashion pages? Grace Slick is pretty, so we could use her for a beauty shot, and if Aretha Franklin wants to model something, we could always stick her behind a tree.” Which we did.
We ran articles on what we called the Women’s Movement, and when Ms. was born, we yawned and compared it to Papular Science at the same time that we were angry because of all the press it got. Why wasn’t anybody looking at us? Why hadn’t anyone noticed that we ran articles with titles like “No More Ms. Nice Girl” and writers like Rebecca West, not to mention a passel of very young writers on rock, most of whom could not write well but who for a brief time had cornered the market because nobody else knew anything about the subject? We grouched, we complained, and eventually we relaxed. We were true amateurs, and what we did, we did for love.
Here is Roger, come to my office with his morning coffee, brewed by a black woman named Cora, whose job it is to stand in the hallway behind the coffee urn from nine to ten and greet us white warriors. Roger has transferred his coffee into his big pewter cup and is settling down for our daily chat.
Between us, Roger and I have seen almost every bad movie made between 1935 and maybe 1960, and they form the substructure of our every conversation, especially when we are in the art department. “Don’t you find her just a teeny bit reminiscent of the unforgettable Vera Hruba Ralston?” I say, peering through the magnifying glass at the Ektachromes spread on the light table. He looks through his glass at the blond model. “I don’t know,” he answers. “I would have said Marie Windsor.” Were we not to see each other again for thirty years, his first words on meeting me would be something like “Seen any good Faith Domergue movies lately?”
Later today he and I and B.T.B. will be looking at the cover tries. B.T.B.’s response is predictable. “She’s got a mutt face,” she’ll say of the pug-nosed and strong-chinned. Our response is predictable, too. If the sitter is a crop-haired girl much beloved by the fashion department but not by us, we will once more point out her resemblance to Flora Robson. “God, you people are cruel,” one of the editors in the college and career department always says when she hears us talking. But we are not cruel. It’s just that people whose business is fashion look at models with the same eyes with which they look at a bust dart (“Godawful”) or a Rudi Gernreich (“divine!”). One way or another, everything is merch.
There is a clatter in the corridor. Leo, wearing the shaggy coat (it looks like a bearskin) he bought on sale at Saks, has arrived, scattering bon mots as he goes. “Tell all,” he commands as Roger and I walk in his door.
I spend a lot of time with Leo. His career, and indeed his identity, depend on keeping up with what’s going on. Nobody’s going to catch Leo napping! No sir! Mention a new group, a new book, or a new art gallery and Leo’s heard it/read it/seen it first.
It is to keep up that Leo climbed endless steps to the balcony of a Lower East Side Loews where Tim Leary, barefoot in white pajamas, told us to turn on and tune out or something like that while a girl in a leotard attempted Martha Graham movements behind a backlighted scrim. Later we went to Ratner’s for farina pudding.
“I’ve seen better high masses,” I said airily.
“But that, our Mary, is what this was all about.”
He had nothing to say, however, when I dragged him to the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Ike talked dirty, Tina humped the mike, and Leo sat impassive. “I am,” he told me once, “a Jewish puritan. Whereas you, our Mary, are a Catholic prig.”
Returned from movies, he gave us capsule reviews. The cast of Ship of Fools, for instance, he described as “everyone who was not otherwise employed.” Staying in London, he sent us letters to be read aloud. “I can’t go into details now but you must remind me to tell you about Cecil Beaton’s party for Audrey Hepburn where I had a long talk with Princess Margaret. . . . ” Yes, we would remind him. We would hang on his every word.
Tonight Leo is taking me to a screening. What is nice about a screening, apart from the facts that it is free and that the seats are as comfortable as club chairs, is the sense it gives the audience of belonging to a fraternity. I am not at screenings often enough to recognize anyone, but I can recognize the tie that binds. The viewers loll in their chairs, they exchange few words in the elevator going down, but no matter how long they have done this, no matter how boring the film is, they have experienced the exquisite pleasure of seeing it first. First! God, how tired I will get of that word—and that obsession—one day!
Around noontime I am taking a writer out for lunch at a restaurant in the East Forties called Cheval Blanc. Cheval Blanc has the kind of French food that reminds me of the days when our crowd, B.’s and mine, had innocent mouths, when we found any páté, however cold and dry, exciting and always ordered crème caramel for the joy of giving the proper Yiddish-sounding, soon-to-spit “khr” to “crème.” The woman who runs Cheval Blanc is strict about men wearing jackets and keeps a spare for those who do not. Once she forced it on our rock columnist, a very short young man whose fingertips barely emerged from its gorilla-length sleeves. But at least she does not forbid women in pantsuits a table, like some of the restaurateurs farther uptown, although she did frown the day our sex columnist showed up in rayon lounging pajamas. The exterminator had arrived unexpectedly, the columnist announced in her piercing Australian chirp, and she couldn’t get to her closet for the bug bombs.
There! That’s settled. The photographer, a fashion editor, and two models will leave for Miami at the end of the week, along with a stack of swimsuits packed in a long box called the coffin. B.T.B. reaches for her lipstick. So do I. So do the fashion editors: they’re on their way to the market. Our perfumes—Diorissimo and Madame Rochas and Femme and my Vent Vert—meet and mingle; the sun hits B.T.B.’s Georgian chandelier; B.T.B. slides a tortured foot out of her Delman pump, then slides it back in again. “Women!” she says fondly. “We are a silly sex.”
B.T.B. was punctilious about my hours. On the rare evenings I worked late, I could put a cab on petty cash, first having fought with the feral boys who lined up outside the Lexington Avenue entrance of Grand Central, grabbing taxis and demanding ransom in the shape of a tip before they would take their hands off the door handles. But most of the time I could leave the office at rush hour, swept up with half the city toward the subways and the buses.
The lobby of the Graybar Building debouched directly into Grand Central Terminal, so there was no need to go outdoors to get home. Instead I descended a dark, broad staircase near the Lexington Avenue entrance, walked the equivalent of a city block or two, then went down a narrow staircase to the shuttle. My father used to talk about “hopping the shuttle,” and now I was hopping it, to careen across town to Times Square.
At Times Square, I press my shoulder bag to my side with my right arm, grasp it with my left hand, and, holding my breath against the stink of urine, walk quickly to the IRT-Seventh Avenue line.
Across the way, on the uptown platform, people are packed as densely as sardines, and when a subway arrives they will move in one mindless surge toward its doors. Getting on an uptown train at rush hour is both a game and a shoving match: you can either get into the spirit of the mob or be enraged by the crush and, all too often, the feel of a stiffening penis against your back. To live downtown, however, is to be always going against the traffic, until Thirty-fourth Street, where the Macy’s shoppers arrive, lugging their shopping bags and—many of them—composing their souls for the long haul to Brooklyn. They settle their shopping bags along the floor, stare dully at the ads for hemorrhoid cures and cigarettes. The youngest of them bring out paperbacks; the scattering of men lean forward, their elbows on their knees, and study the morning’s tabloids.
Fourteenth Street! I rise, skirt the shopping bags and the occasional extended leg, and leave the car. Straight ahead is the Twelfth Street exit, my exit, and the entrance to another world.
At my left is a big community garden, built on the site of the old Loew’s Sheridan, from whose balcony I saw Rock Around the Clock and The Rains of Ranchipur and Them! At my right is the Maritime Trades Building, its porthole windows dark and empty. Ahead is the Greenwich Theater and a thin line of ticket buyers, and beyond it West Twelfth Street, which, in just one short block, has a huge garage, several decaying tenements, and a string of nineteenth-century houses. The only sound is that of my heels on the cement sidewalk.
The traffic is light on Eighth Avenue, and there is none whatsoever on Jane Street. No strollers either. It is a little early for the gang at the No-Name Bar to gather, and the fat man who runs the delicatessen at the corner is looking at an empty store. I lift the latch on the iron gate that leads to the areaway of 44 Jane, unlock the metal grille that is the outer door, relock it, and unlock the wooden inner door. Nobody shouts, “Mommy’s home!” Snow White and Rose Red, bathed, fed, and bath-robed, are sitting in the kitchen with Ann, the housekeeper who arrived when Hoppy retired, watching an I Love Lucy rerun.
It is not that they are not glad to see me, because they are, and they will be especially glad when, later on tonight, I read them Eloise or tell them once again the gripping story of Mary Lee Cantwell, Lost in the Hurricane. But since nine o’clock this morning, they have lived a life to which I have no access. Parents have limited access to their children’s lives anyway, but my exclusion is absolute. I am not around.
Rose Red, however, tries very hard to keep me informed. Snow White is old enough to be a charming companion to her father, and on the Saturdays when he is around he takes her out to lunch or to a matinee. She Loves Me is her favorite show; she will sing “A Trip to the Library” at the drop of a hint.
Mag, though, is too young for theater. When she and I and her sister went to a revival of On the Town (they squealed when they heard “Christopher Street, Christopher Street/Right in the heart of Greenwich Village”), she sat politely on her upfolded seat, the only way she could see over the heads in front of her, kicking her bored legs up and down, up and down. So we spend our Saturday afternoons on long walks, retracing her week.
“This,” she says, pausing at a house on West Fourth Street, “is where Ann stopped to tie my shoe.” We move along to West Eleventh. “This is where I lost my ball.” We enter a variety store for a new one. “They know me here!” she crows.
At Abingdon Square, a dusty triangle with a sandpit, several struggling trees, and some faded benches, I lift her into one of the metal swings and pull down the safety bar. “Have you ever seen the squirrels that live here?” she asks. No, I have not.
When their school reports from St. Luke’s arrive, I read about the red skirt that Katie likes to put on during dress-up hour and that she tells her teacher is beautiful. She likes to cook at the play stove in the kitchen corner, too, and pretend to put on makeup from the bag of make-believe cosmetics I gave her for her birthday. Mag, I read, sleeps very soundly at naptime. But I have never been there when Katie rushed home from school to talk about what she cooked on the cardboard stove, nor have I ever seen Margaret flushed and sleepy after an hour on her little cot. I do not even know which blanket she took from home to cram in her cubby. I am stuffed with memories, so many memories that today they spill over into my dreams and strike me—right across the face—when I am not expecting them. But I do not have these.
I doubt that those two little girls who are watching Lucy and Ethel fill their faces with chocolates, who are soon to be tucked into what I—and my mother, and indeed all mothers—call “your own little bed,” have spent a day that was darkened by my absence. Although we will never know this for certain, the day may even have been the brighter for it. But tonight, when they drift off to sleep and into a place where no one can follow them, they will take with them bits and pieces of lives in which, almost from the beginning, I, their mother, have played no part.
4
THERE WAS QUIET, and there was no sex. And a marriage without sex, I realized at last, is a desert.
I had always liked sleeping alone in monkish little beds. Their narrowness helped exclude everyone who had brushed up against me during the day. Once B. had objected to my dark and silent steals, pillow under arm, clock in hand, to the small bed in the small room next to the children. He did not object any longer. When I did sleep in our bed, no hand came out and touched my belly. I asked if there was another woman. Yes, yes, those very words; there are no new ones. He said no.
In February, B. went to Guadalupe for “a rest,” and to “lie in the sun.” There was, as he knew, no question of my going. I have my father’s pale Irish skin, and a beach is a skillet to me.
The day he was due back, a storm came and shut down the airports, and I, not knowing whether he had left the island, called his hotel. The desk clerk spoke an incomprehensible patois, so I called B.’s office and asked for his secretary, a plump young girl who often babysat for us and about whose weight he fretted. Certain that the problem was glandular, he had even sent her
to our doctor. When I, who had written reams of copy about diets, said idly that almost all excess weight was due to overeating, he barked, “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” then closed his mouth in a thin, mean line.
His secretary, I was told, was in Florida.
I did not know who was where, did not know for sure for years, and in any case it does not matter now. But I can still feel the cold that iced me, the cold that Emily Dickinson called “zero at the bone.”
I can still feel the cold on Hudson Street, too, and the way the wind was whipping up off the river, and the tunnels of snow through which I walked all the way down to St. Luke’s Place, trying to exercise away something my body knew long before the message reached my brain.
When, a few hours later, the key turned in the lock of the front door, I jumped up from the kitchen table, where Kate and Mag and I were having supper, ran into the hall, and hugged him. His eyes were opaque. Years before he had gone to Jamaica with friends, and sung “Take me to Jamaica where de rum come from” for the children and me, and done a little dance, and spoken hilariously, happily, of lizards and beaches and mysterious insects. I asked about Guadalupe. “You wouldn’t have liked it,” he said.
Manhattan, When I Was Young Page 17