The Receptionist

by Janet Groth

  Just then, a wedding party emerged from the hotel and passed across the terrace to the lawn, where they posed for photographs, a handsome couple. The blond bride’s white, full-skirted dress billowed out like a sail around her legs. It was a small party, only the two attendants, a set of parents, and a naughty young cousin in the group. The bride’s shoe came off and the groom teased her, withholding it, now behind his back, now over his head, until she gave him a kiss and he tapped her lightly with it on the tip of her nose, then fell on his knees with exaggerated gallantry to slip it on her foot.

  From the deserted dining room, the two of us watched all this in silence, absorbed in our own thoughts—perhaps a bit oppressed by our thoughts. Then, all at once, we pushed back our chairs and left the table and the hotel.

  As we rolled back into the driveway of the sensible little house in Niendorf, we saw a big gray Mercedes pulled over on the lawn.

  “Ach, wie schön,” said Herr Steffan-Freude, “Karl and Lotte are here.” This was Fritz’s brother and his wife. I guessed that they must have driven up from Heidelberg, where Karl worked at the Max Planck Institute. The hall and living room became a jolly confusion of greetings and hugs, of questions and answers that changed places in midair and ended with everyone getting only the information they already knew.

  Lotte and I were soon talking like long-lost friends. The two of us went upstairs to sort out baggage and closets and featherbeds. I crossed the hall to take a smaller upstairs room with more coat hangers. I let out a cry as I saw something gleam from between the covers of a book on the dresser: “Oh, but that’s mine. How can it be mine? But it is my bookmark!” I held out the gold clip for Lotte to see my initial there. She laughed. “That’s not so strange. Fritz was here for a day to pick up the boat. He must have left his things in this room.”

  Feeling a little faint at this discovery, I considered how I came to be in this little bedroom under the eaves in Niendorf, Germany, and how I came to be holding in my hand the copy of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady that I had last seen in my apartment in New York. Looking around the room more closely, I saw the gray-blue sweater, frayed at the elbows now, that I had given Fritz two Christmases ago, the first Christmas we were together. I saw the bronze and black striped tie I had given him on his birthday, and there were some familiar yellow fragments from his asthma pills, which followed him everywhere. The sound of voices downstairs stayed on the edge of my consciousness, but the sense of what was being said went past unheard as I stared at the pile of Fritz’s manuscripts, which seemed, even more than his clothes, even more than my bookmark, to bring his presence home.

  Then I was overtaken by the thoughts I had been shutting out ever since the moment of my arrival the day before. This was just the way it would have been. This was exactly the way it would have been if Fritz and I had come over for the wedding. Our wedding. The house full of people, the special fetes in my honor. The reception at the great hotel. The photographs on the lawn. The fatherly gallantry of Herr Steffan-Freude, the girlish confidences of Lotte in the upstairs bedroom. I would have recounted the family jokes I already knew, and they would have let me in on more. Fritz’s things would have spilled over into the bedroom across from mine; there would have been sounds of laughter floating up the narrow stair. It was all just the way I had imagined it a hundred times. But I was not here for a wedding. There wasn’t going to be any wedding. And Fritz was heading, it was thought, for Copenhagen.

  Where had I gotten the idea that we were going to be married? Just because, for months and months, and even years, we had been inseparable. I had thought, I had really thought, that when he protested against it, he was jesting. It was a joke between us that whenever he was particularly delighted by me, some piece of foolishness of mine, he would pull up short, his face still wreathed in smiles, hold up a finger, and growl, “but, I am not going to marry you.” It was the same joke, a variant reading, of his loving me and whispering, “Don’t get the idea into your head that I love you.” Or again, when we had been away from each other and I ran up to him, he would whirl me around until I came to rest under his chin, look down at me, and say, “Nevertheless, you are not to think I am going to marry you,” and plant a husbandly kiss on my forehead. I took all these things as certainties of their opposite. It was a fatal holdover of believing in popular songs. “If I loved you,” “Don’t throw bouquets at me,” “I’m not a bit in love,” the lovers would sing. Even Shakespeare lent weight to the argument “[The gentleman] doth protest too much, methinks.”

  And so I had gone on happily believing, all Fritz’s protestations to the contrary, until my remarks so openly betrayed my line of thinking that Fritz felt compelled to speak seriously to me. He had not taken that view of the course his life was to follow, he told me. He could not. He was a poet. That was gloomy, lonely work. His stance must be one of opposition. His stance must be that of a man alone. There was no place in that view for a passionate young bride. I pointed out to him that he had been a poet all the while we had been together and it had not prevented him from writing a play during that time.

  “Don’t you want to have children?” I asked.

  “You forget. I have a child, a daughter in Hamburg. And you see that I did not marry her mother. Nor did she wish to marry me. Women think differently about these things in Europe. We have a business arrangement. I pay for the expenses of the child. She goes on with her life.”

  Robbed of my last, best argument, I had pulled back then. Finally I had cried and shouted at him that he had ruined my life and that I never wanted to see him again. He had remained serious even in the face of my tears, something he had always refused to do. That was what had convinced me. He had said, “I am so sorry, Janet. I did not want to hurt you. You are such a wonderful girl.” And then he left.

  So what was I doing, standing in this bedroom in his father’s house? What in hell was I doing here?

  ONE FINE DAY ABOUT a month after my return from this debacle, I answered a knock on my door. Gina and Fritz were standing there. Gina, looking older and a thousand times more self-possessed than I, offered her hand in the European way of greeting.

  “We’ve come for my things,” Fritz said, handing over his set of keys.

  My face twisted into a shape I had read about called a grimace. A sort of strangled voice issued from my gargoyle mouth: “You break my heart into a million pieces and now you want to shatter it some more by coming in here with her”—here I looked daggers at Gina—“to pick up some miserable sweater or book or something?”

  Fritz stood his ground. “Well, yes.”

  I crumpled onto the top step of the hall staircase. Sweeping a backward hand, I croaked, “Go ahead then, but don’t expect me to help.”

  The two of them went in, and I could hear them moving about, filling the soft-sided canvas bag Fritz had brought along. Ten or fifteen minutes later they emerged, the canvas carrier round with contents, a filet bag of things swinging from Gina’s hand. I stood, pushing my back against the wall to let them pass. Gina murmured something that may have been “Sorry to trouble you.” Wronged and righteous, I said nothing. Their footsteps sounded loud on the stairs—small wonder, laden as they were. After a while I went into the apartment and looked around. Not a lot had been taken, but it felt like more.

  A WORLD AWRY

  I WAS IN THE DISCOUNT drugstore buying a carton of Kents on my lunch hour when I heard about President Kennedy’s being shot in Dallas. Hurrying back to the eighteenth-floor desk as to a bunker, I soon learned there had been no mistake. The sequence of events for the rest of that ghastly weekend is hazy, but I do remember that I had a date that Saturday night with a wonderful guy I knew from my church, Saint Peter’s. I will call him Stan Johnson. We came back to my apartment after a somber pizza somewhere in the Village. People all but embraced perfect strangers on the street, so hungry were we all for consolation. Up at my place, Stan asked me so sweetly to “let my hair down” that I did. Never happened before. But th
ere we were, me lying fully clothed on top of his chastely covered form, a foot-long swath of blond hair swinging all around us. He didn’t say a thing. Just ran his fingers through it over and over, a look of sheer rapture on his face. No, we did not go to bed, nor do any other thing. The next day, after church, I met him again, and he asked me up to his apartment so we could watch television (I did not own a set). We watched with disbelief as Ruby shot Oswald. I had to break away then, to go home and call my folks.

  At noon on Monday I joined a massive turnout at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian on Fifty-Fifth Street. The service ended with everybody saying the Lord’s Prayer in unison, and I found myself somehow more moved by the men whose faces streamed tears than by us females, who knew more about public displays of emotion. On my way home from work I purchased a small television so as to fully participate in what I knew was my first wartime experience. What war? Who was the enemy? I didn’t know, but I did know that my life as an American would never be the same.

  Through the violence that marked the years between Dallas and our final departure from Vietnam, the magazine and my protected spot at it began to feel less and less protected. There was theft on the editorial floors. Sam the shoeshine man was no longer able to get access and offer in situ shines. The sandwich cart from the lobby shop was barred. My desk was moved from its spot near the back staircase to a closed and windowed booth out by the elevators. All people with business on eighteen, and even those with offices there, had to be cleared and buzzed through locked doors by me.

  Everywhere in the country, from the stage at Carnegie Hall to the streets of Selma, exploded with new and violent sights and sounds. Pop culture, too, reflected upheaval. The pulse of rock and roll was being felt, even by the likes of me. I was given a comp ticket to Bob Dylan’s first concert at Carnegie Hall. I thought that he was a nasal-voiced screecher with a harmonica in his mouth, that he looked as if he was in need of a bath, and that the fuss being made over him was a joke at the expense of the over-thirty crowd. But I had to admit that when he sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” he was onto something. And when he screamed, “But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?” I could relate.

  Meanwhile, back at the office, I began to realize that my own political views were on occasion beginning to diverge from those of the leftists around the magazine. I had mixed feelings about abortion, for example. I had no quarrel with “a woman’s right to choose,” or with the idea that a woman should have sovereignty over her own body (never mind that I had ceded my own to Marco, the doctor). What was bothering me was the indifference I thought radical feminists displayed to the moral consequences of abortion as a form of birth control. It seemed to me they gave little or no thought to the hardening effect on poor minority women being forced to use it that way. Weren’t they the very members of society the Far Right would condemn to giving birth to “welfare and crack babies”? Surely sex ed and planned parenthood was the better way to go. I once tried to argue this over lunch with the feminist rock critic for The New Yorker, Ellen Willis. Maybe I’d have gained some credibility if I’d come clean about my own past. As it was, I could see she didn’t pay me much mind. And having put my case so badly and so dishonestly, I couldn’t blame her.

  Largely apolitical in the years with Harold Ross, the magazine had taken on a definite liberal bias under William Shawn, most of which I could applaud. On environmental issues, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring first appeared in its pages, as did articles of concern about the health hazards of tobacco and asbestos and about nuclear waste. The complete separation of the business and editorial departments placed The New Yorker above some of the pressures felt by other magazines, which feared the loss of advertising revenue. Actually, Monsanto did withdraw its advertising after the Carson piece ran, and the magazine itself began to refuse cigarette ads in 1964. On a less lofty note, a policy of no ads for “foundation garments” or underwear of any sort had gone into effect the year before. Still, one could see plenty of ads for luxury items like high-end clothing and jewelry. Such ads, running alongside James Baldwin’s fiery essay on racial oppression “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” struck some readers, as well as some of us in the editorial department, as a case of strange bedfellows. The Rovere Letter from Washington, too, regularly pissed off Republican readers, who may have had to decide between Senator Joe McCarthy, whom Rovere nailed early as a demagogue, and their fondness for New Yorker cartoons.

  In spite of this distinctly liberal editorial slant, The New Yorker’s only overt editorial opinion was confined to the front of the Talk of the Town section under Notes and Comment, where political opinion ran heavily in favor of Democrats, the Kennedy presidency, and the civil rights legislation of Lyndon Johnson. That changed as the column tilted against LBJ’s ill-fated support of the war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon, who had already gotten into the editors’ bad books when he went after a longtime friend of the magazine, Alger Hiss, came in for harsh criticism, particularly when he ordered the incursion into Laos. Jonathan Schell, a reporter new on the roster, whose “Village of Ben Suc” savaged the “we had to destroy the village to save it” mentality of the hawks, became Mr. Shawn’s writer of choice for the antiwar Comment pieces. Jonathan came down and worked in a vacant office on eighteen, where Mr. Shawn often joined him to go over the copy as Friday night deadlines neared.

  In my own way I was trying to sort through the new scene brought about not only by the abortion discussion but by the arrival of the pill and the sexual revolution itself. In this I welcomed the views of one of the cartoonists on my floor. Warren Miller was a tall, jovial midwesterner whose cheery visage didn’t fool me. I was a midwesterner myself, and I knew that the face we feel it necessary to show the world can hide a bushel of unease. In Warren’s case, I suspected, it was the knowledge that he, as a graduate of Beloit College in Wisconsin, was not going to cut much ice in the snooty land of slick eastern Ivies. Yet the guys in the art meeting all seemed to appreciate the wry cartoons Warren turned out. They were done in bold india-ink brushstrokes of a skill and craft that didn’t seem shy at all. Warren and I shared a brief season of friendly dating. We found it relaxing, over dry martinis and bloody steaks at cool Village spots, to admit to each other that the singles bar scene scared us silly.

  One Friday after work, Warren and I were having a drink in the back room of an Eighth Avenue bar known to be a press hangout. We ran across Thomas Meehan, who waved us over to his booth to meet his date. Tom had recently scored a big hit with a piece that ran in the magazine as a “casual,” the preferred name for the short, humorous pieces that are today called Shouts and Murmurs. It was a hilarious riff on people in public life whose first names were made up of two syllables, two or more vowels, and a consonant—Abba Eban, Uta Hagen, Yma Sumac, and so forth. Tom posited a delightful fantasy cocktail party at which he was expected to perform the introductions. “Abba, Eva, Eva, Abba, Eva, Uta, Uta, Eva, Eva, Yma”—you get the picture. It set his career on fire. Soon he was to leave the magazine to write for the television show That Was the Week That Was. He went on to become a Broadway Tony winner, writing, among other hit shows, the books for Annie and The Producers. Tom’s date, a smiling brunette, was having her own success as a result of passing herself off for ninety days as a Playboy Bunny and writing about it for the glossy new magazine Show. That publication died an early death, but Ms., the feminist magazine she started, had better luck and a longer run. Gloria Steinem was her name.

  About this time I got invited to a rally for Bobby Kennedy at the Roosevelt Hotel. The candidate himself was introduced by Rose Kennedy, who got huge laughs by quipping about the toilet-training habits of Bobby as a toddler. When he took the mike from her, the soon-to-be senator from New York scored laughs almost as big by thanking his mother for her “shy and tender” introduction.

  All in all, there was little doubt which side the majority of us voted with, but still a semblance of political neutrality was encouraged at The New Yorker. This did not
prevent a bunch of us from attending another campaign event in 1968. Rick Hertzberg, Tony Hiss, George W. S. Trow, and Jake Brackman—in other words, the young Turks—announced they were all going over to snicker at George Wallace from a press table to which they’d finagled passes at the fund raiser Wallace was holding at the Hilton. Rick invited me to come along. Once there, I felt comfortable enough with this pack of “kid brothers” from the magazine, but less so when we were joined by Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin. I remember no other woman at the table, and I sought a low profile by slouching in my seat and summoning a second drink to hide my confusion. Mailer, Breslin, and a majority of the others were soon way ahead of me, drinkwise and otherwise, and serenely untroubled by the skirt in their midst. Snickers and zingers flew around in fine fashion but were destined never to see the light of print, as the next day in Maryland some nut with a gun shot at the governor, and his bullets put the candidate in a wheelchair for life.

  A NEW ROOMMATE

  ANDY LOGAN WAS RESPONSIBLE for my one intimate experience with a person of color. Andy was the magazine’s reporter on city hall. She was held in such respect in the pressroom downtown that it almost rose to fear on the part of the other newsmen and -women. (There were far fewer of the latter—Andy was as singular a figure there as Rosalind Russell was in His Girl Friday.) In the office, she was a down-to-earth presence, a small woman with short brown hair and straight bangs. In addition to writing a column in The New Yorker’s back pages nearly every week, Andy was a wife and mother. How she did all this, and juggled two households—an apartment in town and a house on Fire Island—I cannot imagine. A Swarthmore graduate and a die-hard liberal, Andy was always looking out for the underdog. She was keen on winning recognition for the magazine’s Talk of the Town reporters. Through the end of William Shawn’s tenure, their pieces always appeared unsigned. Andy would find their identities (wrested from a reluctant production department) and post the Talk galleys—writers’ names added in Andy’s bold hand—on the editorial office bulletin boards. It was a measure of her clout that this gesture of protest was never interfered with.