Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “There,” Harold Jones agreed. “She’s said it.”

  Most troubling to recall is the look on my mother’s face when John confirmed the reason behind Mary’s bizarre dash, and her plan for the letters. After two days, I summoned the courage to sit down with Mother and finally answer the questions that had been batting against her worried brain like june bugs against a screen door. It was as if she’d lost two daughters, or a daughter and a very dear new friend, in one fell swoop. It took her a while to absorb it all and to travel mentally backward, dinner by shopping trip by Sunday drive, and realize that Mary had never meant to be friends. Even more shocking—I could see her eyes slam down like shutters against a storm when the subject came up, when she even tried to think about it—that I’d been having some sort of intimate relations, and worse yet, with someone she knew, with the man who had sat in their house on multiple occasions with his very own wife, breaking bread with all of us, or—at the end of Passover, since we’d had no bread in the house, breaking matzo. Unthinkable.

  “Well, there’s simply no question,” she’d said during that midweek evening tête-à-tête, in her own boudoir off her bedroom, all doors closed, even our servants no longer trusted—no one trusted now, for the moment. She sat on a padded ottoman pulled up next to her dressing table, facing me, while I stood. She patted the seat, but I just couldn’t. I didn’t want the feel of her soft warm hip and arm next to mine, as if we were both sitting on a train together, facing the same direction, looking off into some shared future.

  “You’ll get far away from him, as far as possible,” she said. “And they’ll simply have to sort it out. And shame on him—on them—for bringing us into it.”

  She chose her words carefully. “And Rosalie, you know there are other fish in the sea. You don’t think we’re expecting you to date and marry someone from our own circles, do you? Other parents try to push that sort of thing. We don’t.”

  In her mind, because she and Father were so open-minded and didn’t expect me to marry within the Jewish faith or select a person of any particular occupation, the choices were dizzying. In what other era did a young woman truly have choices at all?

  “You’re pretty. You’re smart. You can’t begin to imagine the number of men who will come knocking.”

  “John’s different,” I said.

  She turned around, facing the dressing table, and occupied herself with clearing its surface. She opened a drawer in order to put away a bottle of lotion, then pulled out two tangled necklace chains and started trying to unknot them, clumsily. “It’s useless, isn’t it? Trying to talk to someone who’s in love?” She was making the knot worse with her tugging, but she didn’t want to stop or look up, couldn’t bear to look at me. Her voice walked a taut line, with unruly emotions seething below. “It’ll wear off, you’ll see. It’ll wear off.”

  “Here, Mother. You’re just making it worse,” I said, trying to untangle the chains before giving up and dropping them back into the drawer.

  She looked up. “And what about children?”

  I took a breath, I considered the best course, and I lied. I told her that we simply couldn’t think about children yet, that it wasn’t even appropriate to think about that, which wasn’t true. I wasn’t ready to think about it—that part was true. Spending every day with babies didn’t make them more appealing; for me, they were simply test subjects, things that arrived on gurneys and entered bright eyed or yawning and exited crying and red faced and wet.

  John, on the other hand, had already thought about it. As usual, he had a better sense of the future than I did. He’d said that his two current children were more than enough.

  Mother took a deep breath and tried one last time. “I know you won’t listen. I fear you won’t, and that you’ll only resent me for saying it. But I just have to ask: Can’t you see what he’s done to you? Don’t you even want to see?” Her neck was red, where she’d been raking at it absentmindedly with her nails. Hairs had come loose from her upswept bun. “How could two smart people be so horribly stupid?”

  “Is that what you think, Mother? That I’m stupid? That I’m horrible?”

  “No, no.” She was looking at me, in the mirror. I could see us both, and how we were hurting each other. “You were perfect before he came along.”

  “But now I’m ruined.” I blamed her for saying it, but it’s what I thought, too. It’s what I saw in my own reflection.

  I waited for her to correct me, but she didn’t. And that only drove me back into the arms of the one man who knew how to make things better, the one person who still loved me, the one person who believed that people and futures could be fixed, that fortunes—like behaviors—could always be changed, even if it took a while to figure out how, even if it took aligning oneself against nearly everything and everyone.

  “Getting away” was a common, repeating theme. Distance meant more in those days. Split the lovers apart. Separate the warring parties. But who would go and who would stay?

  When I met John later that spring in Baltimore, on a campus park bench (his lunching-out budget being more strained than ever), he handed me the published journal with our Albert paper, to reassure me that he had indeed shared billing—John B. Watson & Rosalie Rayner—for this historically significant report that was bound to stir up great interest, generate further infant studies, and strike a blow against those who used terms like “instinct” carelessly. (Yes, yes, I thought, as he gabbled, but what about us and our families and everyone we’d hurt and everything we desperately wanted, right now?)

  Then he explained his latest plan. Before the day of the purloined letters, he’d been trying to send his wife away. Now, he’d decided it was my duty—no, my opportunity—to go. I would be the one sent to Europe for an unspecified time period, to stop the gossips’ tongues from wagging and to redirect the Hopkins administrators’ attentions back toward John’s plans for fall research. (Had they even noticed my sudden departure, or simply assumed that women were fickle and easily uprooted in springtime, when semesters could naturally be cut short?)

  My absence would allow Mary time to come to her senses, to plot a slower course toward divorce, one based on objective logic instead of rash emotions, and one that wouldn’t leave him as impoverished and publicly shamed. He’d even had the nerve to contact my own father and meet with him privately, to review the plan—and the costs for the plan, which of course, my father would be expected to bear. My father had also noted, John now informed me, that there were excellent educational opportunities in Germany for an American—even for an American woman. I could read some psychology there, among top names in the field, improve my command of the continental languages, and look up a few old relatives.

  No, I told John.

  “But, you’d have a good time in Europe.”

  “No. John, I said no.”

  And no, I told my father later that night, reinstalled in my childhood bedroom again for a weekend—as I would also be for some unknown number of months that summer and fall, until I charted my own post-Hopkins future.

  No, I told Mary Cover and Harold Jones when I returned to the city the next Monday, where I would continue to sleep on their couch, commuting to Columbia together on those days I helped her teach, sometimes for a change of pace sleeping at Bee’s and sometimes at Hilda’s—our love refuge. My legs were marked with bruises along the outside of each calf, where my suitcase banged as I hauled it from one tiny apartment to another, up staircases in buildings with broken elevators and across subway platforms, building up my courage to ask my father for money so that I might rent my own apartment, but not ready to beg quite yet, for I knew he had other plans for me.

  I would not wear the scarlet letter. I would not be sent away, even temporarily. I would not let John and Mary return to their marriage of convenience, and get comfortable together again—disloyally, hypocritically comfortable. I was angry at John and yet trying
to save him from himself, even then. I wanted him to be a better person, living by his stated principles, and in pursuit of that end, I was willing to make us all desperately unhappy. To be right and to win, one simply had to be the most unbending: either I’d learned that from John, or we’d been drawn together by that shared trait, which could make a person the most virtuous in the world, or the most self-deluded.

  At Mary Cover’s, I felt most like the interloper, because unlike my other city friends, she was not a dedicated bachelorette. Both she and Harold were finishing their master’s degrees, both to be awarded that late spring, and they had set the date of their wedding as September 1, which also happened to be Mary’s birthday. In the fall, they’d both begin their doctorates, which surprised me, because a married couple would almost certainly not be hired at the same university and probably couldn’t thrive even in the same field. If a professional woman wanted to help her husband, she might be allowed to shadow him, unpaid, a two-for-one. But Mary and Harold still seemed under the impression they would have equally serious careers, investigating the very same issues and subjects that most fascinated John: behaviorism, conditioning and deconditioning, fear responses, infants and children. If anyone could manage working together, I figured John and I would, because I did not have the ambition of equaling him in status or accomplishments, and if that seems a reversal from how I’d imagined myself on college graduation day, perhaps it was only because John was so ambitious and so influential that I couldn’t imagine any student of his expecting equal billing.

  I listened from the bedroom one night as Mary and Harold made dinner together, banging pots and pans and cupboard doors as they discussed first their wedding, a casual affair that would take place on a Wednesday, and what kind of cake they should order—lemon yellow or white—and adding up the expenses, down to the last cent, because they were frugal and practical people. And next, without a pause, Harold was asking her what she thought about galvanometers—electricity-measuring devices—that might record subtle fear responses of babies, completely objectively, without disturbing the baby in any way. Models had been tested in Paris on children from three months to four years, with good results. Mary asked how they worked, and Harold described, in numbing detail but with an admirable lack of pedantry, how they measured minute amounts of perspiration gathering in pores, via two tiny silver plates placed on the ankle and on the sole of the shoe.

  I reclined on the bed, rubbing the sore spot on my calf mindlessly, listening to her excitement rising as they both developed ideas for experiments—not only Harold’s ideas, for he had access to test subjects thanks to his new position at the city children’s hospital, but Mary’s as well, including experiments that she was more than capable of doing independently. She asked about measuring blood pressure, as another nonintrusive means. And I thought of John, recording the most obvious of signs in Albert—shuddering, tears—and also John wielding the hammer, and pushing the rat with its small sharp claws toward Albert’s legs.

  “No,” Harold said on the other side of the door, talking with his mouth full of something Mary and he were cooking together, the smell of oregano and tomatoes—slightly burnt again—wafting into the bedroom. “Even a blood pressure cuff would be too disruptive. The child should continue playing, completely unaware.”

  I sat up, wanting to join the discussion, and equally not wanting to, feeling defensive and contrary. Response measurement aside, the item stimulating fear or being introduced as a substitute, whether noise or rat or rabbit, would still be disruptive, I told myself, the mute member of this three-person conversation. There was simply no way not to distress children in such experiments, whether significantly or mildly. I had to believe so. After all, my name was on that “Conditioned Emotional Reactions” paper. Uneducated people might have questioned our experimental design, but no one at Hopkins had objections, that I could recall. I had sat in that room, eager for a strong reaction, urging John to freshen it, and watching Albert nod his head in a strange, repetitive shuddering rhythm we hadn’t seen before, legs kicking out against the rabbit and the dog.

  “Of course, we’d study only the fears the child came with. And the moment we detected any fears, we would attempt their removal,” Mary said to Harold, and I could practically see her pushing her glasses back up her nose, and pursing her lips, looking serious and noble. “That’s really the point of it all, isn’t it? Anyone can make a child afraid. How to make a child unafraid is the important and more interesting question.”

  And off they went, brainstorming the possibilities, from distraction and verbal appeal to direct reconditioning—all those things we hadn’t done with Albert, all those things we hadn’t made time for, and that, frankly, seemed to interest John a good deal less.

  I packed my suitcases and left again the next morning, thanking them sincerely, not burning my bridges because I might very well need to stay with them again. And after they’d both said their goodbyes and then stood there, smiling at me, this guest who said she was leaving but still hadn’t quite left, when they were both busy in a corner, oohing and aahing over some tender seedlings that had just burst from a little planting tray Harold had set up two weeks earlier, I walked past the window sill, nabbed one of the paired lighthouse shakers, and dropped it into my cardigan pocket. I don’t know why I did. I wasn’t thinking, and how could I be, when thoughts may not even exist? I just did, and that’s all that matters.

  John discovered, if he hadn’t known before, that I had a stubborn streak. I discovered that John, though he enjoyed argumentative epistolary relationships with fellow researchers and seemed to invite controversy at every turn, had a surprisingly low tolerance for social friction. He’d leave the room if pressed into a difficult conversation. He’d go for a walk. Or he’d give in—as Mary knew. Which is why my own future with him felt beyond my control.

  By July, I had tired of New York City sofas, bread-and-butter sandwiches, and life on the cheap in general. I returned to my parents’ house, which had become, in the heat of summer and in the wake of all that had happened, an even more unnaturally quiet place. The parquet flooring squeaked under my step, as I avoided rooms in which my mother sat reading or embroidering, as I tiptoed out whenever Agnus or Annie or Bertha or Frank stepped in, dusting or fixing something. Reading even light novels felt too hard; I stopped in the middle of a page, realizing my eyes had been tracking without taking in any of the words. Walks were short: I did not want activity, and I imagined the eyes of every stranger on me. When my mother brought me some new plants for the back garden, I was too rough with the roots and too negligent with the watering, and ended up with dead brown sticks.

  For a while that summer, despite all my previous feelings, I still had moments when my frustration with John, and my own sense of futility became so great that I considered going to Europe. Never mind Germany—I would go to Paris, or Rome. I would go, alone, to nightclubs, and I would go to art museums and cathedrals, and I would eat at sidewalk cafés where no one recognized me, or knew my parents’ name, or John’s. I would begin my own life over again, and no one would tell me what to do or think. I might even turn my back on centuries of progress and decide I had a soul! (Well, I probably wouldn’t go that far.)

  Except that I still needed him. I still loved him. I wanted to have him whispering in my ear again, forcing my knees to buckle. I wanted his hand on my leg as I drove toward the city, his fingers pressing and walking, one inch at a time, higher up my thigh, as he pretended to look off at an angle toward the passenger-side ditch, identifying nonexistent birds using invented names, “brown bunkeroo, variegated titty-tit finch,” as I tried to breathe deep from my diaphragm, my vision fuzzing, his hand buried in my skirts, skillfully manipulating my reactions, and his own voice growing husky with his own arousal, with his own sense of pride and gratitude for all we’d manage to seize for ourselves by ignoring everyone else’s outmoded rules and inhibitions.

  Chapter 17

&
nbsp; When I received the news that John and Mary had finally and legally separated, I packed a bag and picked him up from the lab in my Bearcat, and we drove, not to New York City this time, for a new frugality had set in, but just outside town heading north, to a hotel, or rather, boarding house, if it would have merited even that nice a name. We parked and I approached slowly, a step behind John, one of my hands clasped in one of his, and my arm lifting as I trailed behind. He dragged me a little, wanting to be inside, where the fun would begin. It wasn’t the sex I was hesitant about, of course, it was the look of the place: wood so weathered it glinted silver, a flash of some tailed critter slipping under the porch ahead of us, and on the front porch itself, gaping planks that grabbed on to the heel of my shoe, so that it twisted off entirely, and I was caught balanced precariously there, one shoe in my hand, when the sullen landlady opened the door.

  John knew a man who lived in the house and had told him everything about it—the weekly rates, the daily rates, and even the hourly rates in the upstairs rooms: in each, one bed and not a lick of any other kind of furniture, not even a dresser. The shared bathroom was down the hall. Downstairs, there was a kitchen with a round table in the middle, where bachelors fried up plates of salami and eggs for dinner, and drank bourbon and played cards. We joined them on occasion, after our two or four or at the very most eight hours in the upstairs room had expired, and we shared whatever food and drink we’d brought, if John’s own bourbon bottle hadn’t already been emptied on the drive up and during our first minutes of undressing, up in the room. More and more, we sipped from others’ flasks and bottles and didn’t provide much in return, though I tried to bring extra cigarettes at least, a little embarrassed by how we took more than we gave, from such sad, down-on-their-luck men, no less.