Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  “Even you. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” I said once, a dozen times. “John’s absolutely right. I’m not a very good mother. No woman is.”

  “With an attitude like that, it must be hard to get up in the morning.”

  “Yes,” I’d say, with the most relaxed smile I could muster, “but it’s perfectly easy to get up after noon. And that’s when fun usually starts.”

  “I want to go to Europe,” I told John. “You promised me.”

  “Did I?”

  “Three years ago.”

  Another day: “I’m tired of Long Island. I never chose to live here. You chose this cottage for us. I wanted to live in the city.”

  John was tired, too. Seven years in advertising under his belt. No higher rung to climb. Only more self-promotion, keeping his name on everyone’s lips, which benefited JWT and his on-the-side writing and public speaking, both.

  “They won’t stop talking to me,” I told him one day when we were strolling in the park, two women staring as we passed.

  “Rar, you’re imagining things.”

  “They recognize you from your picture in the paper. From that silly illustration in The New Yorker.”

  “They recognize me because we’re neighbors.”

  “They love us or they hate us. They thank us or they blame us. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  “They’ve bought the book and they’ll learn something from it. If I’d worried about every nervous Nellie or angry Maisie telling me I was wrong, I wouldn’t have had any kind of career.”

  “I don’t have any career.”

  “You’re my wife. That’s your career. That’s any worthwhile woman’s career.”

  “You didn’t used to think that. You used to support women who worked.”

  “A man learns as he ages, and a woman ages fast, so she’d better get her priorities straight. Anyway, the last printing is allowing us to invest money in our future.”

  “Well, invest it carefully. Even the ones who thank us seem ready to turn on us any day now. The tides always turn.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “And did you have to tell people about the time you made Billy jealous on purpose? Why did you have to tell people how disturbed he was, watching us fight? I could put that out of my mind if it wasn’t public knowledge.”

  “Rar, don’t let it bother you. Parents have done far worse, without a good reason. Everything we’ve ever done was for the best reason there is, which is helping other people avoid mistakes, whether or not they appreciate it.”

  “And wherever I bring Billy or Jimmy, there are always people watching, to see if they’re perfectly behaved or if we’ve made it all up.”

  “But that’s no problem. They’re well behaved enough.”

  “Not all the time, John. Not everyone can be well behaved all the time!”

  “Rar, you’re shouting. That’s the only reason people are staring.”

  His articles were always sharp, but it seemed to me that they got sharper in the years that immediately followed the writing of the baby book. “The Weakness of Women” for The Nation. “It’s Your Own Fault” for Collier’s. If you read American magazines at all, you couldn’t avoid his advice, or his stern and handsome face, which age and silver hair only kept improving: the first popular psychologist, warning, criticizing, and prescribing changes to the entire nation’s behavior.

  Later, he wrote “Business for Women? Rot!” in the New York Telegram. Even the woman reporter noted that this same Dr. Watson had once been a “staunch defender” and “warm admirer” of the working girl but now seemed to think women were good only for being stay-at-home wives. And they needn’t bother talking business with their men. Husbands wanted a comfortable home and a pretty and well-maintained wife, not someone to remind them about business. If she didn’t have enough to do during the day—and with all the new appliances of the modern age, why would she?—then she could use those empty daytime hours to sleep, “so that she will be fresh and radiant in the evening.”

  No wonder John hadn’t noticed, in the months leading up to my own mental break, how much I was napping, listlessly and melancholically. He’d labeled it “beauty rest” and chalked it up to good sense.

  First, the articles seemed aimed at selling books and pleasing editors. Later, perhaps they allowed John to feel the flush of controversy again, or to purge something that was building in him. Three years later, or four, as his ability to maintain an erection became more and more problematic, I could look back and see he’d been trying to make the most of a failing organ, and feeling great anxiety about his own diminishing virility. But it was always hard to distinguish lasting impotence from occasional bourbon-soaked failures.

  There was, as always, some truth in what he wrote during this period, but there was venom, too. That old line of his, “Men won’t marry fifty years from now,” became at last a headline in a June 1929 Cosmopolitan. There was good sense in his assertion that divorce should be as easy as marriage, as it was in Sweden. But then there were anecdotes that left me uneasy, even knowing what I knew about John’s love of hyperbole, his impish desire to irritate as many readers as he charmed. The average reader didn’t know John. They took his statements to heart. His attention-getting prose, accepted and quoted by others, was turning into gospel. I read the first draft carefully, withholding any comment. I looked over the finished, printed copy when it came home from the newsstand, and actually chuckled once or twice at John’s outrageous turns of phrase. But late at night, I read it again and felt a sudden sense of panic.

  “A woman who exercises and doesn’t eat too much is not physiologically old at thirty, yet she has lost that fresh charm of youth . . . Men, on the other hand, are at their prime between thirty and forty-five . . . They are wise; they are sophisticated. They are successful; they know how to do things; they have poise. Their wives look ten years older than they do, ten times tireder, ten times more lifeless, ten times fatter.”

  It was no wonder, Dr. John Watson told Cosmopolitan readers, that the average married man would “take his wife’s young friend to the kitchen with him to help crack ice for the evening highball. He, if he is inexperienced, may start a bit of innocent flirting, may even try just a bit of “first-degree” petting . . . He finds himself in pretty deep.”

  I thought back to parties I’d thrown, and times John had disappeared, with some helpful neighbor woman following close behind, into our kitchen, not to reappear with a tray of highballs for a frightfully long time. I’d never look at our ice trays the same way again. Where had my own recently cultivated attempts at sophistication gone? Out the window and down the drain.

  John advised women not to have their first child until the age of thirty, in order to preserve the more beautiful decade for catching and keeping a husband. He truly believed in that advice and made his daughter Polly promise to delay childbearing as long as possible. I wished he would have shown the same wisdom in helping to keep us from having children too early. But then again, we needed experimental subjects close at hand, what with John’s inability to stay hired in academia. If I hadn’t put my foot down, he’d be experimenting on them still.

  The poor man who is trying to stay faithful to his wife, Dr. Watson lamented in Cosmopolitan, is hunted by the “20,000,000-odd married women who are not successfully married” and hunted by the “1,250,000 flappers who reach the age of eighteen every year.”

  I did not doubt that he had been counting those young flappers as they stepped across the threshold into adulthood, and welcoming all women into his objective arms, young huntresses and middle-aged vixens and sexually frustrated older dames alike.

  One weeknight late, I woke to find the bed empty next to me. In the kitchen, staring at the clock on the wall, I started to pour a drink. The sound of the shattering glass as it hit the floor woke Billy,
who came into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes.

  “Mom. Your foot.”

  “It’s just wet.”

  “It’s red.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Go back to bed. No, wait.”

  “Mom.”

  “Pay attention, please. Wake your brother.”

  Two hours later, I showed up at the Resors’ apartment, having left the car down on the avenue idling, the boys wrapped up in blankets and sleeping in the backseat.

  Stanley opened the door, with Helen standing behind him, hair piled atop her head and robe tied at her throat.

  Breathless, I panted, “Is John here?”

  “Of course he isn’t here.”

  “He isn’t home. He isn’t at the office. I tried telephoning.”

  “Telephoning? It’s three in the morning.”

  Helen edged her way in front of Stanley. “Rosalie, go home. Go to bed. John will show up soon. He’s probably just out on the town.”

  “I’m worried about him, Stanley.”

  “Worried about John?” Stanley put his hand on Helen’s shoulder, and now they stood side by side, both studying me. “He’s a night owl, Rosalie. A tomcat.”

  “Oh, Stanley,” Helen chided.

  “But he thinks the world of you, Rosalie,” Stanley said. “He can’t say enough good things. You’re the exception, he always says.”

  “He’s probably home now,” I said, starting to laugh. “We might have passed on the bridge. Imagine what he’ll think coming home to an empty house!”

  “That’s right. Go home now,” Stanley said.

  “Oh, I feel terrible for waking you. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Rosalie,” Helen said. “Where are the boys?”

  “Sorry, Helen. Stanley, I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” Stanley said. “Just drive carefully and go to bed.”

  Helen said, “Do you need someone to drive you? One of us could get dressed.”

  “But are you sure?”

  “Sure that one of us is willing to drive you? Of course we are.”

  “No, Helen, are you sure?”

  “Am I sure what?”

  “That John isn’t here? That you don’t know where he is?”

  Helen said, “Rosalie. Darling. Go home.”

  Chapter 31

  You might have said I was being fashionable. Ahead of fashion, actually. The crash, about two sleepless weeks after that pathetic visit to the Resors’ place. A little one before the big one. I even made the newspapers. The headline in all caps: mrs. rosalie watson patient at hopkins. Subhead: “Wife of John B. Watson, Former Professor at University, Is Entered There.” Under that, caps again: has gone under observation. And under that: “Miss Rayner, She Was Once Co-Respondent in Divorce Action Against Present Husband.”

  Ridiculous that they didn’t have more to cover. With all the political scandals and what was to happen soon, with the stocks, perhaps they should have been paying more attention to things other than the mental health of an insignificant woman. There wasn’t much more to say, though the reporter tried. “Many persons come to the institution, it was stated, merely for observation after experiencing ‘physical upset,’ or being in a general rundown condition.”

  “You scared me, Rar,” John said, a week after I’d been checked into Phipps Clinic. He trusted the clinic because he still had colleagues there, including his former boss, Adolf Meyer. Even so, he disliked hospitals in general and wanted me home. He shrugged and tucked his chin into his collar, muttering. “I want to make you better. Just tell me.”

  John could be unsympathetic about illness—he’d been that way before, with his first wife and with Billy. But he knew this breakdown was serious. He’d had his own nervous breakdown in college, after a long spell of working too hard, and didn’t like to talk about it, but the experience had worn a groove of sympathy matched to a precious few situations and symptoms.

  “I’ve got a new apartment picked out,” he said. “Park Avenue. We can sell the Malba place. The boys will love the city. You will, too.”

  I was groggy that day, high on something they’d given me.

  “And we’ll go to Europe,” he said. “Next summer. Would you like that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, so softly that he had to come closer, leaning over the bed to hear me.

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That was the most frightening thing. After years of intense want and frustration capped in the last two weeks by a frantic state in which my own head roared with alarms, I felt dead calm, but also without any desire.

  “I love you, Rar. You scared me. Don’t do that again. I’ll always love you.”

  I give him credit for not worrying about what the newspapers would say, what his critics would think of a psychologist whose own wife was in the loony bin. But then again, he’d never been afraid of public criticism. And he’d never claimed we were the perfect family. If he had been able to construct a world of his own choosing, then we would be perfect—or his children would be, anyway—but as an environmentalist, he could blame other factors. He wouldn’t bother, because he didn’t give a damn about explaining. I was the one who lived in fear of public criticism. I was the one who wanted to shield him from knowing how imperfect we all were.

  He put his hand, dry and cool, across my forehead. The touch of him made tears stream out, into my ears, down my earlobes and neck, dampening my pillow.

  “What hurts, baby?” he asked.

  “Everything.”

  Psychologist or not, he would have been relieved to blame some specific body part. His way of knowing the world provided little illumination or prescription for a state of general malaise, except to say that I wasn’t behaving like myself. I wasn’t behaving.

  Thank goodness I had my break when I did. The treatment involved some hot and cold baths, sedation, and long discussions with the psychologists, who were interested in my everyday activities and reactions. Five years later, I might have ended up in the hands of that decade’s eager lobotomists, who thought there was no easier and cheaper fix for melancholia than a quick slice into the old gray matter.

  “I love you,” he said.

  He waited for my response as long as he could. Then he asked, “Do you love me, too?”

  What was love? A tickle of certain sensitive erogenous spots? A conditioning to want more of such tickling and stroking? Fear, yes; rage, yes. But maybe we’d all been wrong about love. Maybe it didn’t exist in the real world. Maybe it was only a false sentiment, a routine of practiced pretend feelings.

  My body was numb. My mind—whatever that meant—was numb, like a foot fallen asleep, and I didn’t look forward to the moment it woke up, the return of needling pain. There was nothing and no one, really, who needed me. John would find another wife easily. The boys would do as well with anyone, because we’d labored to ensure their lack of attachment and dependence. My mother was used to loss. She’d lost me once, a decade ago, and we’d never had an honest conversation since. Father was gone, too. What difference did it make?

  As for me, I had no work, no real interests. Everything I did was just to pass the time, to make cocktail hour and the weekend arrive more quickly. I had a picture in my mind of pulling a foot out of the stream of life; the water would fill in quickly. There’d be no mark and no empty spot, any more than a hospital bed or a chair in a theater or a restaurant stays empty. Make way; make room. The least I could do was make more room. People everywhere, and not enough beds and chairs. And even out in the countryside, the stream keeps running. If I put the boys out of my mind, if I just closed my eyes, I could imagine the relief of falling asleep and never waking up. It wouldn’t be a terrible thing.

  John said, “Do you really think so?”

  I hadn’t realized I’d been s
peaking out loud. I shouldn’t have said any of it. I should have kept it to myself.

  “You’d rather end it all?

  I apologized. I said I was being irrational. I had sent out a tiny spore, spreading an infection on the tail of a thought I hadn’t even meant to verbalize, which I couldn’t take back.

  Chapter 32

  I had gained some perspective during those dark days. After I was discharged and feeling more like my normal self again, I could sympathize more fully with the way John made everything into an experiment. I’d been his experiment. Billy and Jimmy were his experiments as well. But his life was too, really, and he shied away from very little (only the subject of his own childhood, perhaps), investigating every kind of observed behavior. John had stayed admirably strong during my institutionalization and continued to do so during the swift and multiple life changes that followed—a move to Park Avenue and a trip to Europe without the boys, just as he’d promised. Our family’s income proved to be surprisingly Depression-proof compared to many others’. But once I was on the mend, all that strength wore out, and his own moods darkened.

  The number of suicides following the stock market crash of fall 1929 was exaggerated in the press, but the general moroseness was real, and talk of suicide became less taboo as the entire nation put its head between its knees. It was like the end of any party, really. We’d all gone overboard during the 1920s and the hangover was bound to be rotten. “Hair of the dog” simply wasn’t available for most people who had lost their money, and we started to feel that all of us—everyone in our own social set, especially—had lost our youthful vigor.

  “How did an entire nation get so ugly overnight,” John said during one of the last times I dragged him to a theater, watching the couples come out into the congested hallway: heavyset women in dark, out-of-fashion clothes, men with trembling jowls and shadows under their eyes. And those were the ones who could afford the tickets. Out on the streets were beggars wearing sandwich-board signs, asking for handouts.