Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Is it so terrible, being nice?”

  “You’d help a man like that find his way in the world, and one morning you’d wake up and realize how small a world you’d both decided to live in and that most people want so damn little that they’re nearly dead at age twenty-two.”

  “Benny’s already twenty-three,” I said, pretending to miss the point.

  “Don’t be afraid of wanting the wrong things, Rosalie. It’s better than wanting too little.”

  “And what do you want?”

  I didn’t say it with kindness. I expected him to answer with more talk about psychology and ending wars, and I was tired of all that for the moment: the abstract future, and pretending to be sure about big ideas or anything at all.

  Instead he said, “I want what I can’t have. I want to make love to you more expertly than any college boy, slowly and passionately. I think you might want that, too. But I don’t think you’re willing to pay for it.”

  Chapter 9

  There was no one I could tell. Because here was the thing—I wasn’t sure what exactly had happened, or whether I had myself to blame. What messages had I sent him with my actions? How seriously should I take his provocative words?

  Later, when I told him I was leaving for the night, he looked up from his desk—unusually chaotic, with stacks of papers that represented his best attempt to avoid going home anytime soon—and said, “There are certain traits I have, that many men and some women have. Natural traits. Better suited to a world that doesn’t yet exist.”

  Perhaps he heard himself stacking up the bricks of a would-be argument, and realized the rising wall was only obscuring the view of the very person he was trying to address. He looked down at the papers, the empty glass sitting in the shadow just outside the pool of light cast by his metal desk lamp. “I should be plainer, Rosalie. I made a mess of things today, and I said things I shouldn’t have said. I’d hate to chase away my best assistant. Tell me I haven’t done that.”

  “You haven’t.”

  “All right,” he said. “Then we’ll never have to speak of it again.”

  I nodded.

  “Good. Now find yourself a nice boyfriend this holiday break, won’t you? Someone more interesting than the soda-shop boy.”

  “Benny,” I said. “His name is Benny, and he’s an engineer.”

  “My apologies. Go find yourself ten Bennies. It can’t be hard for a girl as pretty and smart as you.”

  That evening, my mother met me in the hall, just as I opened the front door, seven o’clock, not yet late for dinner, which we often ate late on Fridays. The smell of roast chicken, potatoes, and rosemary in the air.

  “Rosalie.” My mother’s hands were folded together, ligaments raised on the white knuckles of her clenched hands. “This can’t continue.”

  My throat was so tight I couldn’t swallow. I focused, wide-eyed, on her hands. If I so much as looked at her face, I might fall apart. How could she know? Did my own face give everything away?

  “You simply must talk to him,” she said. “It’s become downright embarrassing.”

  I’d been distracted—at times moping, at times dreamy. And the sleeplessness had etched dark circles under my eyes. Of course she knew—not the details, but something. A mother’s intuition.

  I turned away, shrugging out of my overcoat, looking around for a place to set my purse in order to avoid seeing her eyes. “Mother, do we have to talk about this?”

  “Yes, we certainly do.” She blocked my way into the hall, insistent upon settling this here and now, without letting it enter the front parlor, spoil the dinner, or ruin the entire weekend.

  “What do you expect me to say?”

  “I expect you to get a straight answer.”

  From him, about us—to her, or to me? To our entire family?

  Thank goodness for my exhaustion, which slowed my reaction time, because next she said, “Two months I’ve been issuing invitations. Nearly three. We can’t just keep inviting them, Rosalie. We can’t pretend, when we finally meet Dr. Watson and his wife, that we never did invite them to dinner.”

  It had been eating her up all day, this chess game beyond her control. I could breathe again. I could almost laugh at my own momentary terror.

  “And now I realize—of course—that I should have been more formal,” she continued. “I should have sent Mrs. Watson a note, not let you take care of it through him, word of mouth. It’s like I’ve forgotten every last manner I ever learned. Who knows if he’s relayed anything at all? And if he hasn’t, whose fault is that? It’s my fault. It would have been better if nothing had ever been said.”

  Four days before Christmas, my mother took me to New York, the city shimmering in white lights, bauble-decked trees in plazas and parks, the traffic at a near standstill, everyone in the world gathered into canyonlike, glittering streets—everyone except for the one person I couldn’t stop thinking about.

  “All you do lately is that lab work, all those experiments,” Mother said. “What you need is amusement. Be merry, Rosalie.”

  The previous winter, the influenza epidemic had put a damper on most crowd-attracting activities, and my own mother had done most of her gift ordering by catalog, requesting a few items to be sent to orphanages directly from the department stores. We made up for that sober year now by stopping at a plaza in front of a children’s choir, performing in front of a Christmas tree decked in gold and green globes. Mother clapped together her rabbit-fur-trimmed gloves: “Marvelous!” She did not sing any carols herself, nor did we have a Christmas tree in our Baltimore house—one had to draw a line somewhere—and even that word, merry, came to her lips a little awkwardly. But still she loved it all, and wanted me to love it alongside her. I dutifully stared at the red cheeks and taut, oval-shaped mouths, the words of cheer meaningless to me as I recalled John’s description of Christmas: “murder.”

  For me, too. I wouldn’t see him for two more weeks.

  We pushed our way in and out of department stores, fought our way toward perfume, jewelry, and glove counters, stood in long lines to make purchases, carried overloaded shopping bags until our shoulders and wrists ached, and tried in vain to register for a table in the department-store restaurant, but the wait was too long.

  At a toiletries counter, Mother asked a salesgirl about something for the shadows under my eyes. I’d always been inclined to shadows, but my overwork and sleepless nights all through December had made them more pronounced. I acquiesced to the gentle patting and smoothing of expert fingers.

  “Better?” I asked my mother.

  “Better.”

  “How about something for my lips?”

  “Oh,” my mother laughed. “I don’t think we have to go that far.”

  I was still a girl to her, an appropriately natural and healthy girl. Noticeable makeup was reserved for actresses, eccentrics, or tarts. Rouges and tinted powders were becoming more commonplace, but to really get made up, you had to visit some special Helena Rubinstein or Elizabeth Arden salon—and prepare to pay a bundle and listen to long lectures about skin care and the new beauty culture, which was no longer for those kind of women but for everyone.

  With Mother? Never.

  “I’d give anything to sit down,” my mother said, looking at the long lines queuing for the elevators. Bobbing heads and shoulders packed every doorway and aisle, swarming the display tables, puzzling over the store directory. It was the men I noticed most, in their black wool coats, scarves trailing from their lapels, enlisting the help of shopgirls in picking out appropriate gifts for their wives. A man with hair as thick and dark as John’s bent low in front of a display case, directing a slim girl toward a display of bracelets, his smile faintly reflected in the glass as she pulled out a series of velvet-lined trays until he was satisfied with one particular item which she held up, glinting and twisting, like a jeweled snake.r />
  He touched a finger to the shopgirl’s wrist as she modeled the bracelet, demonstrating its clasp. The girl laughed a silvery laugh and brought her face closer to the man’s, both of them intently focused on her narrow, blue-veined wrist and the beautiful object he was thinking—or perhaps not really thinking—of buying. She’d learned something I’d never mastered despite being on my way to a second university degree: How to read a man’s intentions. How to flirt. How to go just far enough without going too far. Or how to go far and simply enjoy it—to be one of those people (men and a few women) endowed with certain “natural” if not yet socially acceptable traits—without falling apart.

  My mother remembered suddenly. “Oh no—your salon appointment!”

  It had been her idea to do this together, to get my hair bobbed, something I’d been asking to do since graduation.

  “We could do it another time.”

  “No, no,” she said, shifting her weight, no doubt suffering from swollen feet. “I insist.”

  At the third-floor salon, we made our excuses, and they hurried me off to the sinks in the back while my mother lingered, trading questions and suggestions with the barber. But at the first harsh rasp of the scissors, she turned away with an anxious giggle. When a single, dark lock fell to the floor, she leapt backward to avoid it, and turned back toward the waiting room. “I prefer to be surprised,” she said, scurrying away.

  Mother was lost in the pages of a Saturday Evening Post when I emerged. I stood waiting for her to notice me, feeling the strange lightness of my shorter hairstyle, swinging just above my faintly damp shoulders. Relieved of weight, the ends curled up naturally. My neck felt longer, more elegant. When I cleared my throat, my mother looked up. She was silent for a moment before breaking out into a single, plaintive sob.

  I hurried to her. “Mother!”

  She shook her head, struggling to stifle the downpour, laughing between choking little inhalations. “I guess you just look too grown-up to me now.” She wiped an eye and then wrapped her arms around me. “How embarrassing.”

  Yes, for both of us.

  There was still time, I thought for the briefest of moments, to be more honest with her than I’d been, to tell her about the mess I’d made falling in love with a married man, to create a new and more mature relationship to go with my new appearance. I reached inside of myself for the ounce of strength and character it would take—and came up empty.

  Without any warning, I found myself crying in tandem, drenching her shoulder with hiccupping sobs.

  “Oh darling,” she said, patting me on the back. Then she pushed away, holding me by the shoulders so that she could look into my face, gaining control of herself while I lost the struggle, made all the worse by her concerned expression. Her hand reached up to touch my hair. “You don’t like it?”

  “No,” I tried to say. “It’s fine.”

  But she didn’t believe me. And her complete willingness to imagine I was crying over nothing more than a haircut, to become the stoic consoler, provided the excuse for me to continue indulging my own confused melancholia. Each choking little gasp cleared some air inside my chest, purging the tight ache, but only temporarily. The next swell of breath seemed to dredge up an even deeper sob from someplace deep within.

  “Let’s make it better,” she said, hurrying to pay the bill. “We’ll invite someone to join us for dinner. We’ll pay a visit to one of your school friends. What were their names—Eleanor? Hilda? The other one you liked so much. Mary?”

  “Oh no.” Not Mary. There could be nothing worse.

  Because in fact, I had already sent a note to Mary, telling her I might visit the city over the holidays, and should we perhaps get together for lunch or tea? And she had written right back with exciting news: she—Mary, unsentimental, scholarly, unglamorous, nearsighted Mary—had fallen in love. Appropriate, uncomplicated love. To a good man named Harry, whom she’d met in a history course. He was also attending Columbia, also devoted to psychology. He was very smart (of course) and very kind (of course), and though Mary did not expect me to believe it until I met him (You will have to meet him soon, please!), he was completely enlightened and had no wish to disrupt Mary’s graduate work and later career. In fact, it was possible that they might someday do research together.

  I was still crying as we tried to exit the salon. A female voice called us back. We’d forgotten our packages, stored behind the counter. Loaded down a moment later, Mother pulled me closer to her as we wobbled together. “It really looks very charming! And it will grow back, of course it will grow.”

  “I know,” I said, rubbing my face in my sleeve, and feeling bad not just about John now, but about the encompassing nature of my deceptions.

  “Well, we certainly made a mistake,” Mother said. “But at least it’s one you’ll outgrow.”

  “Yes,” I said. And I really did hope so.

  Chapter 10

  I offered to feed Curt’s rats so that I had an excuse to come back to the lab even before the holidays were over, even before the next series of experiments was to begin. But that did not make John return any sooner, of course, and when he did, he seemed to be in a strange, agitated state: anxious, volatile, rambunctious.

  Maybe it was surviving Christmas, or some new truce that had been reached with his wife. Maybe it was the new year. The new decade.

  He went to Adolf Meyer, demanded a raise, and got it. Every institution in America wanted Dr. John B. Watson, and if Johns Hopkins planned to keep him, well!—he said it still wasn’t enough, and he planned to ask for another raise soon, he reassured me, as if I were a proxy for his wife, shopping list and threatening note from the landlord (yes, they rented), in hand. He deserved more money. “Don’t I, Rosalie?”

  Money wasn’t a thing I’d been raised to worry about—and perhaps he found that extra attractive in me, the lack of nagging, the lack of that particular kind of knowledge or concern. What did a professional man need to earn? What did a professional woman deserve to earn? Even after reading Sinclair Lewis, I had no idea. But I knew what he wanted to hear.

  “Of course you deserve more,” I said.

  He had several advanced classes to teach that semester, one held at the lab itself, others over at Homewood, but he did all he could to minimize the requirements, to oversee and delegate to other lecturers or cancel classes, to prioritize research and the development of new institutional partnerships. He assigned me some other simple infant tests I could do by myself, or with a single nurse’s help, depriving me of his company unless I actively sought him out. I had come to recognize his footsteps, his particular gait, and my pulse would pick up whenever I heard him pass outside the testing-room door: the old Pavlovian response. First, the smell of him; then the sound of him. Eagerly anticipating something my body understood better than my brain.

  But I didn’t see much of him during that frantic January, because he was already hurrying off. To Homewood Campus. Over to the baby ward. Another lunch. Another meeting. Preparations for an upcoming conference.

  And then, there was a diphtheria breakout in the baby ward. We canceled the baby tests and stayed secluded on our side of the clinic, out of contagion’s reach. When the alarm passed, we got more bad news. Albert had contracted measles. He went through an outbreak, it worsened, we waited. Finally, on January 29, his temperature seemed normal again. We’d had our reference point for his behavior—unafraid of furry animals and so on, responsive to the clanging metal sound and therefore potentially fearful, but only of the sound, not of any of the other items we introduced. But he was maturing. We needed to get the experiment going while he was still essentially the same baby, and more important, while he was still on the ward, before his mother’s wet-nurse contract ended.

  On February 12, two weeks after his recovery from measles, we asked the nurses to bring Albert to us. He was eleven months old, with only a few more wisps of light
hair, a shiny double chin, and a perennially spittle-dampened neck.

  “Can’t get much fatter,” Essie said, carrying him on her hip into the room, now that he was too big for the infant carts.

  “Picture of health,” John replied.

  Someone asked about the baby’s mother, about whether she’d been at Hopkins long, and John made a crack about wet nurses: “One part cow, nine parts devil.”

  Essie smiled back, dimples flashing. “I do believe I’ve heard that one before. But I don’t think you should be the one talking about devils, Dr. Watson.”

  There was a new nurse in the room, Rebecca—I’d never come to know her well, but I’d later remember that name because it was also my mother’s—and I watched her bland face grow stony at the first comment, and even more at Essie’s retort.

  Now in the small, dark-walled lab room, Albert’s head swiveled and his gaze seemed to locate me. But then it moved on, like a lighthouse beacon, a dutiful shaft of light passing over water and rock, without any innate intelligence. But of course, there was a lot of distraction in that room, and more than the typical number of people gathered: two nurses, Essie and Rebecca, and a stenographer, and Scottie, the filming technician. Now, the real work would begin. Now, too, I would get to see more of John.

  Most of the observers and assistants gathered alongside the wall. In the middle of the room, several thin, striped mattresses were stacked. The camera, with its limited supply of film, was expensively rolling. Seated just inches above the ground with my legs tucked up under me, I presented Albert with a white rat. He’d gained better control of his hands over the last few months and was more eager than ever to reach out slowly, with a clumsy scooping motion. The rat scrambled toward him and Albert leaned forward, fingers grazing the stubby white fur, all his attention focused, a line of drool falling from his lower lip to the mattress as he concentrated and watched the rat scurry away.