Back Then

by Anne Bernays

  A lot of money changed hands in these transactions and the partners became even richer. (Dick Simon, who had a phobia about banks, was rumored to have kept Marshall Field’s million-dollar certified check in his pocket for several weeks before depositing it.) The psychology of the house and of the partners had changed from shoestring to big bucks, but Max kept his grip on the real and tangible: in his clothes closet at home he kept a milk bottle full of pennies. When Max and Ray left their duplex apartment in the former Pulitzer mansion on East Seventy-third Street for winter vacations in Florida or Europe, she worried about the Braque still life that hung in the drawing room. Max made sure his penny collection was safe.

  I let him down in many ways. Believing there was a book in the editor’s regular essays, he had taken out a subscription in my name to a one-horse weekly newspaper called The Carolina Israelite. I examined one backwoodsy-looking issue, threw it in my closet, and did the same with the issues that followed, not even removing the wrapper. Frequent queries arrived from Max: “What are you doing about the Carolina Israelite idea?” I assured him I was either “looking into it” or “still very interested” or “still trying to find a handle.” The reminders stopped coming, and sometime later I began to notice, at the top of the nonfiction best-seller lists month after month, a Doubleday book called Only in America by Harry Golden, a collection of his Carolina Israelite columns.

  For this delinquency alone, attributable to snobbery and stupidity on my part, I should have been fired. I wanted independence from Max, to be primarily an editor instead of his assistant, and this, together with my undisguised reluctance to baby-sit some of the house’s older authors like Will Durant (who continued to lay golden eggs), suggested disloyalty as well as negligence. Instead of being fired I found myself being moved farther and farther from Max’s office until finally I saw him only at editorial meetings. The lunches stopped altogether, except when required by business. I was also in trouble with Max’s wife for thoughtlessly balking when she asked me to write to his authors and friends and gather a bouquet of tributes as a surprise on his sixtieth birthday. She was angry with me again when she learned I was lobbying the editorial board to acquire Nabokov’s Lolita, then a pariah book published in Paris by the Olympia Press on the same list with titles like White Thighs and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe. She telephoned me to say, “I won’t allow you to turn my husband’s company into a publisher of dirty books.” Lolita went to Putnam. Years later I heard that Nabokov circulated a story that a young editor at Simon and Schuster had made him an offer for the book contingent on his turning Lolita into a boy.

  Max had assigned me to deal with Joseph E. Davies, F.D.R.’s wartime ambassador to the Soviet Union and author of the bestselling Mission to Moscow, a vivid but also notably gullible account of the Stalin regime during the show trials. (Davies’s footnote about Joe Barnes playing tennis in Moscow with an NKVD officer was a major source of Joe’s troubles.) Davies was embarked on a memoir, titled The Days of Their Power and Glory. Out of gratitude for the success of Mission to Moscow Max said we should make every effort to please Davies. His manuscript consisted largely of tributes to his favorite dictators, among them Generalissimo Franco and Portugal’s António Salazar, in addition to Stalin. Insisting on being addressed as Mr. Ambassador, the eighty-one-year-old Davies, in black homburg, fur-collared black overcoat, and carrying a silver-headed ebony walking stick, showed up on whim and without warning to be announced in diplomatic style and escorted to my tiny office, where we would discuss his book.

  I labored over the Davies manuscript, hoping to beat it into some sort of readiness so that we could at least publish it quietly—“privish it” as Max would say—and without too much embarrassment, like leaving a newborn on the orphan asylum doorstep. The book was already in type when Davies died in 1958, which was when I learned that several years earlier his daughters had declared him incompetent but allowed him to go through the farce of signing a contract and taking an advance: they had been using us since as occupational therapy, a diversion to keep him out of trouble and stroke his ego. His theatrical visits as Mr. Ambassador, real though they were to him, turned out to have been part of an extended make-believe. For a while there was some talk of handing over the Davies material to the family in exchange for the advance money, but this fell through. One day I took the boxes containing Davies’s manuscript, galleys, photographs, and correspondence and stuck them in an electric utility closet, and that was the end of The Days of Their Power and Glory.

  It was this sort of thing that had begun to erode my exhilaration at Max’s “creative adventure” in book publishing. Even without the Davies farce my dealings with Kimon Friar, and by mail with Nikos Kazantzakis, always slyly politicking for the Nobel literature prize, and then his even more exigent widow, would have been enough to wear anyone down. I had also made the terrible mistake of signing up a supposed Civil War expert to write a book about the attack on Fort Sumter. The expert had been recommended by an editor at another house. What was operative here, I learned, was the principle of the bad penny passing from one editorial hand to another—I would have done better to sign up a monkey. This author, either drunk or in tears whenever we talked about his book, wasn’t even able to get the distance right from the Battery at Charleston to Fort Sumter or keep track of who was going back and forth between the two places to negotiate a surrender—sometimes, inexplicably, five Secessionist negotiators left Sumter in a rowboat that arrived in Charleston an hour later with seven aboard. One evening, exasperated by an ongoing phone conversation with him over similar examples of incompetence, I drove a pencil through a pad of paper. The book was duly published, to my shame, despite heroic freelance rewriting by Annie, whom I had recruited to bail me out.

  For about a year my mood at work, and at home, subsided into melancholy touched with ennui and a sense of failure and dread: my phone rarely rang, the mail room boys had little to deliver to me. My gloom was somewhat dissipated by the hope that “perhaps some day,” in Vergil’s line, “it will be pleasant to remember even this”: an experience that, although not altogether happy, was indelible and too bizarre to have been missed.

  PART V

  CHAPTER 15

  I had quit my job at Houghton Mifflin, using pregnancy as my excuse. I had done a writing job for Joe, trying to make an incomprehensible book by one of his authors about the firing on Fort Sumter minimally comprehensible. In the final stages of my pregnancy, we had moved to 175 Riverside Drive. As soon as Susanna was born I began to write short stories.

  Awash in motherhood, I decided I needed help, someone to come in once a week and liberate me for half a day. It never occurred to me to ask my parents to baby-sit for Susanna, nor did they ask, except for one bright day when my father took two-year-old Susanna to Riverside Park for an hour or two. I happened to be looking out of the window just as they crossed Riverside Drive from the park, noticing, with a catch in my throat—probably because I couldn’t pull up a single memory of his doing that for me—how gently he seemed to be holding her hand and how slowly he walked so that she could keep up with him.

  I had never interviewed anyone for a job, and whatever questions—“Where have you worked before?” “Where do you live?”—I asked the mostly middle-aged women who came around to apply for the job didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, namely did they really like small children? Enough to risk their life for them? How was their eyesight, their short-term memory? Did they drink on the job? I had to go with my instincts (even I knew that references invariably mess around with the truth) but had no more reason to trust my instincts than I would have Susanna’s. I hired May, who seemed both warm and smart. It turned out that I was right about her but had failed to notice (or deliberately hid from myself) that she wasn’t too quick on her feet, and so I couldn’t blame her when, on one of May’s afternoons, the corner of a steel swing caught Susanna just above her left eye, leaving a gash that needed five stitches to close. Trembling and in a fierce pan
ic, we took her to a surgeon who had reconfigured the faces of some of the women and girls living in Hiroshima when we dropped the first of two atom bombs.

  A.B. and Susanna, Riverside Park, 1959.

  Whenever May took the children to Riverside Park I treated myself to the movies. It didn’t matter what was playing—The Bridge on the River Kwai, Separate Tables, The Three Faces of Eve. I went to be alone, silent, passive, and, above all, unavailable. Swallowed by the dark, I was nearly always surrounded by empty seats; almost no one but perverts went to the movies on a weekday afternoon. One day, at the Trans-Lux Theater on Madison and Eighty-fifth Street, I had to go to the bathroom. I walked down a wide staircase that looked as if it belonged in a museum, through a stygian underground area used for God knows what, and into a badly lit, deserted bathroom at its far end. I was peeing when I noticed a man’s head close to my right foot, his eyes looking up at me. Terrified, I stupidly screamed, “What do you want?” I must have scared him, for he withdrew his head and barged out of the bathroom. The question now was should I try to cross the large room, where he might be waiting to pounce, or should I wait until someone came in to save me? This might be hours. So I took the chance that he had fled and made it safely back to my seat where I watched the rest of the movie, trembling with leftover terror. When I was old enough to go to the movies by myself, my mother had instructed me to take a sharpened pencil with me, so that if a man got “fresh” I could stab him in the balls with it.

  Once a week I found myself drawn wholly into the lives of the characters on the screen and cut off from a reality I both loved and feared, for I was sure that I had been given more trust—in the form of an adorable child—than I deserved.

  I never had enough time to see both movies of a double feature, but one was enough; I came back to our apartment as restored as if I’d spent a week being massaged and mud-bathed at Main Chance, Elizabeth Arden’s luxury spa.

  The camel’s back gave way one hot afternoon when, probably for the hundredth time, it took ten separate maneuvers to jack-ass Hester’s baby carriage into the elevator at 175 Riverside Drive. It was like trying to parallel park a car almost too large to fit into its space. This petty annoyance characterized what was no longer working for us in New York City: it represented the ultimate in trivial obstacles to living a well-oiled and productive life. Stuck in an apartment house elevator for five minutes—multiply this by a hundred or more and it’s obvious that no one but an idiot would choose to spend their time this way. Having a choice made it a lot easier to chafe at life’s minor frustrations than if, like so many New Yorkers, I’d been stuck in a fourth-floor walk-up.

  Although outwardly quite different in temperament, Joe and I took the same view of decisions: make them quickly, with a minimum of fretting, hope for the best, and get on with other business. Although this is a risky way to maneuver past the traps in a life, it worked out for us more often than not. Eyes closed, we would head in a direction that could, had the circumstances been even a little different, have landed us in a foul swamp. The day I balked in the elevator of 175 Riverside Drive was not long after Joe quit his well-perked, well-paying editor’s job at Simon and Schuster in order to start a biography of Mark Twain. By this time I had decided to leave the short story; it was too confining, both in terms of plot and emotional range. A short story is a drop of oil, self-contained. Every word in it has to count. A novel is a large splash of paint, and in it you can do almost anything—except be boring—and get away with it. It can be messy, loose ends need not always be secured in a tight knot, and it can stretch over one day or many years. For a writer who fought the control imposed by the short story, a novel was a better—and paradoxically, less demanding—form. I began to write Short Pleasures, a novel based on a one-inch story I had read in the New York Times about a young woman who ran away from a conventional marriage. The Times called her an heiress—thus the attention paid her story—but they were wrong—she was merely the daughter of an upper-level business executive. I thought I knew this woman, she was my Brearley and Wellesley classmates. I could hear her talk and read her mind, her appetites, and her taste for pretty clothes. She spoke to me in a somewhat querulous voice, wishing she had the nerve to step out of a role carved out for her even before she was born. The real-life woman changed her mind and went ahead and married the guy; the girl in my novel escaped.

  For a week or two we considered our options. Since Joe needed a research library, the choice of where to move narrowed us down to three cities besides New York: Berkeley, Washington, D.C., and Cambridge. Berkeley sounded seductive, but neither of us knew anyone there and we were afraid of being swallowed or lost. We never seriously considered Washington, a company town of no particular appeal. Joe had spent seven years in Cambridge, first as a Harvard undergraduate and then as a graduate student in English, pulling everything he read into his spooky memory and storing it there.

  If we chose Cambridge, it would be a step backward in the creative chain, as Cambridge was the place where ideas are born and nourished; when they reach maturity, they’re off, most often in a flash, to New York, Washington, Los Angeles. You need quiet to think; excitement to persuade others to believe in you.

  Moving is reputed to be among the most stressful of life changes, just below death of a loved one and getting fired. Our move from New York City to Cambridge was remarkably free of the horrors. Having lived for almost thirty years in a city with the world’s fastest pulse, I was ready for a change, for a place whose dazzle resided in its slow heart rate. Streets and neighborhoods its residents regarded as urban seemed to me positively rural. There was a tree with great splashes of green leaf outside the bedroom window. There were weeds in the backyard! Instead of garbage trucks banging and crashing at dawn, little birdies sweetly sang in the maples and lindens. You could walk along the banks of the Charles with no fence between you and the water. A fifteen-minute drive out Route 2 took you deep into the country. If I wanted the children to get some fresh air I stuck them in the backyard. We acquired a beagle. Mr. Patchiavos came around in a beat-up truck once a week, parked outside our front door, and invited us to climb inside the truck where he took our order for fresh fruits and vegetables he had bought at Haymarket that morning before dawn. A woman we called Mrs. Chicken-lady delivered farm-raised chickens to us every week. We ate a lot of chicken.

  I found all this almost intolerably exciting, not realizing that novelty can be mistaken for improvement. William Dean Howells liked living in Cambridge, he said, because he was so little distracted there; the most sensational thing he saw all during one winter was a cat crossing the street. Edmund Wilson, when he lived there, was excited by the weekly garbage pickup. And that’s how it was. Cambridge was a hard nut to crack. It took seven years before any of our neighbors invited us for dinner.

  If we hadn’t had children we probably would have stayed in New York, the city of cities, the home of all you love and all you despise, the place of temptation and its opposite, namely the imposition of self-discipline—because if that isn’t operating, forget about working toward anything concrete. A twenty-four-hour-a-day festival of shimmering light and frenzied dusk. Were we too cautious to raise our children where we ourselves were raised?

  I was an experienced jaywalker by the age of ten. I could negotiate the underground transit system with my eyes half-closed. I knew how to get away from a predatory male with a single glance or a single word. What came to be called “street smarts” are built into a New York City child as soon as she’s let off the parental leash. I knew where the best jazz was being played, how to stand on line—never in line—at the Paramount theater for three hours or more, waiting to hear Gene Krupa (bring along a friend, something to read, something to eat, and plenty of patience). I knew what to wear where, to bring along an extra pair of white gloves when I rode the bus or subway, knew how to waltz and do the fox-trot and the lindy hop. I knew what to order at Longchamps and Schrafft’s—a mixed grill and a Napoleon at the former, a butter
scotch sundae at the latter; knew to avoid pigeons and outdoor water fountains, the specter of infantile paralysis a shadow that stayed with you constantly. I knew how much to tip a waiter, a cabdriver, a hairdresser.

  I was wise to the well-separated layers of New York “society,” starting at the top with descendants of Dutch settlers who bought Manhattan for a pittance (these were the people Edith Wharton dissected and devoured). Then down a notch to the white-shoe crowd, mostly professionals, graduates of the Ivy League, then down once more to that postwar phenomenon known as “café society,” men and women, often entertainers but also the newly rich, whose lives depended on being spotted and photographed at the Stork Club and similar watering holes. After that, well, it didn’t matter much, a vast middle class, then the Irish, then the Jews, followed by people who looked different from you and me in one way or another. I could tell, after being with a person for just a few minutes, which rung of the ladder they had been born on. New York society before 1960 was richer than a wedding cake—and just as fragile.

  I soon discovered that Cambridge—one of two ends of a mustache, according to Elizabeth Hardwick, the other end being Boston—was so much simpler, it was going back to the second grade at school. There were the Brahmins and then there was the rest of us. A couple of parallel stories I heard soon after we moved made this leafy New England area sound more like Antarctica than Eden. Someone asks an old-time Brahmin why she never leaves Boston. “Why should I go anywhere?” she says, “I’m already there.” This same woman wears only one hat, day after day. When asked why she doesn’t buy herself a new one, she says, “What for? I already have a hat.” Bostonians, it seemed, didn’t like to spend money on anything less trivial than investments.