Dry Your Smile

by Morgan, Robin;

  She reached out her hand for mine now. I took it gratefully.

  “Julian? Baby? You’re thirteen now. You’re a big girl with a wonderful career and life ahead of her. There’s no stopping us. What’s the point of mooning after some scum who never wanted you? Even if you could find him—and you can’t and he’s moved on by now and he might be dead for all I know—believe me, Julian, he wouldn’t see you. He’d throw you out on the street. I won’t have you hurt like that. I love you. I love you more than anything in the world.”

  I looked up at her and when I saw that she was crying too, it burst inside me and I hurled myself into her arms. This time she took me under the covers, inside next to her, where it was warm and safe.

  I must have cried and cried. I remember her crying, too, and her hand stroking my hair and the softness of her breasts under her nightgown, the cloth all wet with my tears, and her murmuring,

  “Some kind of inhuman monster, the war must have made of him. That he could be so loving. Marry me. Father you. Then vanish. Goodbye, farewell, auf weidersehn, that’s it. Some kind of creature …”

  The last thing I remember, before we must have cried ourselves to sleep in each other’s arms, was my whispering, trying to comfort her in turn,

  “Like Zeus in the myths. Huh Momma? He appeared as a swan or a rain of gold coins or a bull, and then—”

  And her crying, saying softly,

  “Yes, my baby. Like Zeus in the myths. Just like that. Just like in the myths.”

  After that night we never spoke of it again.

  But it didn’t leave me. The knowledge that he might be out there somewhere has been with me every minute since.

  At first, I was just so grateful to her—for having wanted me, kept me—and for telling me the truth.

  Then the anger started, snake in the garden. Why had she lied to me all those years? Why did she imply I was “fragile” and unstable? Why had she been so mean when it turned out that I knew? Then the guilt started. Hello, guilt. Because she was the one who had raised me. Then the feeling, growing like a tumor, that I owed her so much I could never get away from her. And through it all still loving her. For having survived. For having loved me.

  So here I am, age seventeen, locked in battle with her all this time later. Still obsessed.

  With the phantom of him, the reality of her, the unreality of me.

  I feel only one authentic thing. Writing the secret down has proven it. I’m going to be a writer. Some kind of weight got removed from me just by putting it on paper. Catharsis and all that—which Barbara warned you had to be careful about. Catharsis isn’t enough. You have to transform it to make it art.

  But then, I’m young. As Barbara said, “Have a little compassion on yourself.” I’ll try, Barbara, wherever you are. I’ll try, Father, wherever you are.

  I’ll try, Julian, wherever you are.

  Oh dear god I don’t believe in, please never let her look through this history notebook.

  Oh my beloved mother, we will lose each other, you and I, just-us-against-the-world—and against each other. I lose you every time I find you. And I’ll go on losing you, over and over.

  Because your fierce will is mine, too, little Momma. Given into my hands by you yourself.

  And I just might write more of it down.

  And I just might lose Julian. And find me.

  *I didn’t tell even Bram the most sacred secret of all, what I’ve put together piece by piece for years now, about in my case parents plural. I wonder if I dare trust that to this journal. Better think about that first, Julian.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Spring, 1982

  Athena, Ltd., was a wonderful place to visit, but Julian had never wanted to live there. Athena was a successful feminist publishing house—a contradiction in terms unless one scrutinized the terms.

  “Successful” in this case meant the firm had pioneered its way into existence to begin with and managed to stay there for nine years, sometimes teetering on the rim of bankruptcy but continuing to acquire, print, and distribute books by and about women. “Feminist,” of course, had as many definitions as there were women to define them. Feminism could mean saving the world or your own soul, or both. Athena, Ltd., was less ambitious in its definition. Its founders—a group of five intrepid women weary of laboring for years in publishing industry vineyards—had conceived the idea of a house they would control, one which would publish books on every aspect of the women’s movement and of women’s lives, for a general, even mass, audience. They would name it after Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and because adding “Incorporated” sounded capitalistic and patriarchal, they opted for the more elegant British term “Limited.”

  Unfortunately or fortunately, words have a mystical power of their own, bearing within themselves like a coded RNA the capacity for reproduction, duplication, evolution—and mutancy. Or, as philosophers have guessed and poets muttered for centuries, be careful what you say: it might mean something. None of the five founders had given much thought to Athena’s mythic origins: that she was the sole goddess not born of woman but sprung from the brain of Zeus—that thunderbolt-heaving, arch-capitalistic arch-patriarch. Or that Athena, tipping the scales with her decision that Orestes go unpunished after matricide, did so because she deliberately sided with the boys. Nor had they dwelt overlong on the ironic capacities inherent in the word “limited.” They had no time for semantic luxuries. They worked hard. They meant well. They wanted power.

  Now, almost a decade after its founding, Athena’s growth showed features both of its zeusean ancestry and its limitations. Julian had related to Athena with a supportiveness that increased its vigilance in direct proportion to her growing dependence on them for work. She had seen the list expand steadily from five books the first year to ten each season. Athena now produced its own paperbacks as well as hardcovers. It had won a few prizes. Some of its authors had been translated into foreign editions. It had begun spin-off lines—in anti-sexist children’s books, in health; finally, to Julian’s alarm, in fashion and cookbooks. It still published some works by and about a wider constituency: older women, radical women, lesbian women, black and Hispanic, Asian-American and Native Indian women. But these had begun, around the fifth year, to be “now and thens” produced from a peevish threefold sense of principle, unavoidability, and keeping at bay the relentless criticism the women’s movement reserves for its own.

  Athena managed commercially on three authors. One was Elsa Levin, a humorist who wrote not-quite best-sellers with such titles as How to Bore Your Rapist Off You and The Housewives’ Survival Manual. The second was Oleander Ongatari, who had been born and raised in Westport, Connecticut, and educated at Vassar, but who had learned the hard way—after unsuccessfully peddling a novel based on the life of Anna Magdalena Bach—to adopt an African name and turban before publishing her subsequent smash short-story collection: Up Side Yo’ Haid and Down in Mah Heart What’s a Woman to Do Wid a Baaad Man. The third was Fiona Trax, who wrote erotic science-fiction novels in which women in a futurist society had so much power they could afford to wear miniskirts made of silver lamé and walk around with no tops (they all had perfect, sprightly breasts) and no man dared take it wrong. Athena had recently celebrated a new triumph. They had acquired Maxine Duncan Brewer, who had never published more than one book at each of her previous six publishers, and who had left behind her a trail of broken contracts with haggard editors now prone to alcoholic nervous breakdowns, yet who sold extraordinarily well: You Can Make It to the Top, Sister!, How to Play and Win by Men’s Rules, and Supergal, Go for It! had been her greatest successes.

  Nonetheless, Athena still existed precariously, squeaking by in chronic debt and gamely enduring ridicule from both big corporate publishers and more-radical-than-thou feminist collectives which produced three mimeographed chapbooks of Heavy Theory a year. Its founders sometimes wondered why they had abandoned what in retrospect seemed like secure careers for the tightrope on which they now
swayed. Periodically, the Athenas envied their imitators and the luxuries afforded them by geographical placement or single-issue orientation: Virago in England, Frauenoffensive in West Germany—these could afford to publish more serious works of fiction and even of feminist philosophy, because their audiences had not suffered American educations and still read for enlightenment as well as pleasure. Back home, such women’s movement publishers as the Feminist Press generally restricted themselves to reprinting classic works by foremothers in the suffrage movement or publishing texts for women’s studies. At other times, however, the Athenians would congratulate themselves on their Golden Mean, that they were not singularly academic, neither too radical nor sold out, that they were, in fact, performing a vital service to “feminist men and women.”

  Aware of Athena’s behind-the-scenes difficulties, Julian sympathized with their predicament, but still found herself at loggerheads with some of their politics. Every time she went to the cheerful chaos of their offices, she felt guilty about her ambivalence and ambivalent about her guilt. She had worked there regularly as an in-house editor for a year, during one period when Larry and she were particularly desperate for the bail-out only a steady job could provide, without the occupational anxieties of free-lancing. But working in a hierarchy of women who had public nonhierarchical principles produced anxieties all its own for her. On the other hand, free-lancing for Athena could be a pleasure.

  No glass-and-chrome sweep of offices in Publishers’ Row, not for Athena. First, it would be a bad image. Second, movement purists might picket it. Third, Athena couldn’t afford it anyway. So the company was ensconced in Manhattan’s jewelry district, a brazen contradiction to its surroundings, where Hassidic men clogged the streets, wearing long black coats and black hats from which their sidecurls dangled like exotic earrings, carrying bulging black briefcases with double locks, never smiling, arguing animatedly with one another in Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, and English about the quality, weight, and cut of diamonds, the price of gold, the latest robbery of Isaac Yeshudel’s ultra-secure safe. Rising in the elevator of Athena’s building was a lesson in the humility of encountering other human beings’ passionate engagements with issues crucial in their lives and utterly irrelevant in one’s own:

  “So, Moishe. Whaddya think of the blues?”

  “Ach. The rough Johannesburg sends us. Moses could strike with his rod and even he couldn’t get more than a carat a cut.”

  “Three times as much. I pay for platinum three times more pennyweight than gold. So you look on the world market? On the world market it costs the same identical. Three times more for me only? What is? I’m a leper?”

  “Lissen. I remember when you got factory men who were workers. Ya know how I mean? Craftsmen. Geniuses. Dedicated. They loved their work, they didn’t care about salaries. Now you have? Spies. Not even Spanish from Spain. Schwarzes, darkies. And Germans. Nazis I got working for me. Whaddya wonder? It’s a surprise workmanship’s down? All they care from is money.”

  Sometimes, if Julian entered a crowded elevator and was seen to press the button for the fifteenth floor, silence would descend on the passengers as they ascended. Or a man would scowl, with a mournful shake of his earcurls,

  “Building changing. Going down in quality. Those people on fifteen don’t know from women. Men in pants with discontent they are, not women.”

  This would be followed by a low chorus of assent in what Julian took to be a Yiddish version of ‘God preserve us from such Jezebels.’ None of the riders looked at one another, but all studied the fake wood-paneled elevator doors before them with the intensity of insurgents awaiting the opening of the Jericho gates. When the doors released Julian onto the fifteenth floor, it felt like coming home. Good old Athena, she thought, relief being like respect relative. “Those people” on fifteen had managed to upset their neighbors on other floors by daring to chat with other firms’ secretaries on occasion, and had given some free copies of books to a few mildly interested women. For this, a formal complaint had been registered with the building owners that Athena was infiltrating floor by floor and organizing workers to rise up against their employers in a Masada-like besiegement. Good old Athena, Julian thought, everything in context.

  She passed through the reception area with a wave; Manuela was at the switchboard and knew her. The clamor unique to Athena in the publishing world greeted Julian as she moved through the corridors toward the editorial section. She passed the front office of Georgina Fraser, Georgi for short, a founder and the editor in chief of Athena. Through her open door Julian could see a characteristic Athena encounter taking place. Jeremy, the three-year-old son of the art director, had wheeled himself into Georgi’s office on the resident battered plastic tricycle as he made his rounds.

  “Whachya doin’?” he demanded.

  Georgi had stopped in the middle of dialing, phone receiver in hand, ever-present cheroot still clenched between her teeth, stack of papers sliding off her lap where she sat at her book-piled coffeetable, comfortably ignoring the desk behind her.

  “I’m working, Jer. How are you today?”

  “Why?”

  “Why am I working?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “’Cause I have to. ’Cause I like it, too.”

  “Why?”

  “I have to ’cause this stuff has to be done today. But I like to because, well, this is the way I have fun.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is. We make good books here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we want to. Because people like our books. You’ve seen our books, Jeremy. Remember, the big picture book about the princess who fought the dragons?”

  “Why?”

  “Because she had to rescue the prince, remember? Your mother herself drew the pictures for that one.”

  “Why?”

  Georgi glanced up and saw Julian in the doorway. She smiled with relief. Not only was this neither a stockholder nor a Hassid, this was a grownup.

  “Hi, Georgi. Just on my way in to Charlotte to deliver a manuscript. Couldn’t resist listening in on your Grand Inquisitor scene, though. Impressive. Now I know where you get the patience to deal with distributors.”

  “You discovered my secret. I practice on Jeremy.” Spoiled by the momentary adult exchange, she turned back to the small cyclist. “Okay, Zen master, time to scram. Go visit Bess. You know she always has lollypops.” His curiosity instantly surfeited at the mention of lollypops, Jeremy spun around and pedaled furiously toward the door. Julian got out of his way just in time, barely avoiding the ignominy of being run over by a plastic tricycle.

  “Check with your mother first! About the lollypop!” Georgi yelled after him before resuming her dialing. Julian called goodbye to her and followed the small cyclist down the hall. Past the foreign and serial rights departments, their walls bedecked with feminist posters in German, Spanish, French, Italian. Past the art department, where the wall taste ran more to Judy Chicago. Past publicity and promotion, with huge blowups of Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Lily Tomlin. Past sales and marketing, where there were carpets on the floor and where charts and calenders replaced politics on the walls (stockholders visited here). Into editorial, and its cacophony of women’s voices. Here, the posters cubicle after cubicle proclaimed individuality within the parameters of solidarity: Billie Jean King and Althea Gibson vied for prominence in the health and fitness editor’s cubicle; Tina Turner, Beverly Sills, and Cicely Tyson exulted above the desk of Leonora, the arts and entertainment editor; Gloria Steinem shared a wall with Bella Abzug and Angela Davis in the nest of Laura, the political editor; Bess, the juvenile editor, had a corkboard glittering with a button collection that proclaimed Mothers Are People Too, Children’s Rights, Boys Can Cry, Girls Are Strong, and Free Abortion On Demand (here was the expectable lollypop connection).

  The partitions were as articulate in their varied messages as Chinese wall posters. They certainly defied any viewer to cling to a be
lief that Athena, Ltd.—or the women’s movement—was monolithic, dull, lacking in a sense of the absurd, or finished. It was perilous to get too interested in the walls, however, because not to watch one’s step meant tripping over a large stuffed tiger or a roller skate, bumping into a Pisan tower of transfile boxes labeled Take to Storage Please Soon! It could also mean bashing into and being scalded by one of the many coffee/tea/instant soup and other noshes islands throughout the corridors, where electric pots bubbled as continuously as crumbs accumulated. Julian stopped for a moment to disengage a discarded lollypop remnant stuck to the sole of her shoe, and was greeted with hello’s and waves from women looking up from telephone conversations and women hunched over the new word processors, determined not to let tech anxiety get the better of them.

  No question, this was a “humanized workplace.” Its victory was that despite the cynical smiles in Publishers’ Row interior-designer offices, Athena met its deadlines, mollified its stockholders, pacified its authors, and got books out. Julian’s Athena ambivalence lurched toward the warmth-admiration end of the spectrum. Feeling shamefaced at her own capacity for judgmentalism, she finally made it through to Charlotte Kirsch’s office.

  As a co-founder and director of the press, Charlotte had an actual office, not a cubicle. Yet unlike the suites of her peers in other publishing houses, her sole window looked out onto a brick wall, the worn carpet retained sheddings from her two small defiantly unclipped apricot poodles who now lay sleeping nose to nose in the middle of it, there were no flashy buttons on her one-line telephone, and a portable radio on her desk tinkled a harpsichordist playing a selection from “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Charlotte’s walls sported a touchingly eclectic mix: a poster of Virginia Woolf, five of the latest Athena book jackets, a petition (suggestively tacked near the door) for saving the whales, the production schedule for this season’s list, a graph of sales broken down by region, a painting she had done of her husband Zachary, a cluster of three-by-five cards with sayings she liked scrawled on them (by Alice Walker, Teilhard de Chardin, Mae West), various framed scrolls and plaques (Athena’s awards), and a hand-lettered sign reading Do Not Panic DoNotPanic DONOTPANIC.