“Why do they even bother?” John asked, outside the theater. “Hoover’s not going to help them. They won’t last until the turnaround. If there’s a turnaround.”
“There’s always a turnaround,” I’d said. I’d made some progress from my own darkest days, at least, to be able to make a statement like that.
“What do you know about the stock market?”
“Not a whit,” I laughed. It was an authentic laugh, not meant for anyone else, but only because I was beginning to feel better—much better than I’d felt in years—even while my husband, frightened by what he’d seen in my eyes and perhaps what he’d allowed himself to feel in his own tired head and heart, lagged a step behind.
John wrote a letter to a hundred of his friends and colleagues asking them if they’d ever considered suicide. Every one of them took the question seriously. Every single one of them—I felt gratitude for this expression of kindness and respect—wrote back. Some gave reasons for wanting to live. Others admitted they didn’t have very good reasons but didn’t have the courage to end it, either. John considered suicide a rational choice. He spent a long time writing that article, but the magazine for which it was intended, Cosmopolitan, finally rejected it. Too depressing.
•••
“Open your eyes,” John said after he’d led me inside the Connecticut farmhouse.
The great room was spacious: white walls, exposed dark beams, a fireplace.
“That’s where we’ll hang a family portrait,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, and for the first time in a long time, we were in perfect agreement.
“Fifty-five miles from New York City,” he said, and then, seeing my concerned frown, “but only eight miles to Westport, and from there, I’d take the train.”
“Does it need much work?”
“Not a lot. Some.” He had a light in his eyes I hadn’t seen for months.
“A few outbuildings to work on. I’d like to put a new roof on the barn. And I’d like to build a stone wall, the old kind, without mortar. The boys can help me with that. They can raise animals, too. There will be room for all kinds of guests. Polly, and your sister and her daughter, if they want to come. They’ll all love it here.”
It was the thing he’d been missing for years: the chance to work with his hands. And it was true to what he’d said all along: that children should do things, have real work and responsibilities, grow things and build things and prove themselves capable. But it wouldn’t be just some rustic, utopian farm. It was an estate, and soon enough we’d be playing tennis and swimming laps in the pool, clipping roses tended by our gardener, and eating meals, made by our hired cook, at a long wooden table. Forty acres, and all the comforts. Whip-Poor-Will Farm. Here, it almost seemed that the Depression wasn’t happening—that the last few years of the 1920s hadn’t happened, either, and that was just as important. Every marriage has its hardest spells, and we’d made our way through ours.
•••
Some men just aren’t comfortable with babies. Now that Billy and Jimmy were older boys, eager to dig and carry stones for their father, to learn carpentry at his side, to feed the family cow and the family horse, they all got along much better. Jimmy, like Billy, had grown up with some persistent and mysterious tummy troubles, but they lessened at the farm. I found my old spark. Though John still believed in coming home at the end of a long working day to a quiet house, boys already fed and, depending on the hour, sometimes already sleeping, I found ways to do things differently. I’d drive my car to the train station to pick him up, boys in the back seat. “They love the car,” I’d remind him, when he stepped out of the station. “And they love watching the train come in. Maybe one of them will take a shine to engineering.” As long as the boys’ company was in line with some occupational or educational rationale, it was less objectionable to him. He still never hugged or kissed them, but a hair ruffling wasn’t entirely out of the question.
In late 1930, I’d published my own article in Parents magazine, “I am the Mother of a Behaviorist’s Sons,” about my own views of John’s theories. With his support—and his ad man’s confidence that anything I wrote with humor and verve would help sell our 1928 baby book, regardless of the views expressed—I felt free not to agree on every point with the nationally acclaimed Dr. Watson. I admitted I was a bad mother, as John still liked to tease when he gave lectures, to remind people of why they should not judge his theories by his sons’ behaviors. But I also said that I couldn’t help but resist following scientific parenting in every detail.
Especially now that the most sensitive periods of their young lives were safely behind us, I wanted to be a little more affectionate with my sons. Secretly (or not-so-secretly—I was admitting this in a magazine article, after all) I hoped they’d enjoy just a little bit of coddling. I also hoped they’d grow up with a taste for poetry and the drama of life and the “throb of romance” as I put it in the article, speaking directly to those women readers whom I could count on for softhearted sympathy—no matter that John cared nothing for poetry or drama and was more comfortable talking with the boys about sex than romance. I let American readers know that my sons were mischievous, and I encouraged them to be. We tied up their father’s pajamas in knots. We occasionally left hairbrushes under people’s blankets. We jumped out from behind doors to scare one another. We liked to giggle. But in the end, John’s and my hopes for Billy and Jimmy were the same: to grow up as healthy young men, able to work, love, and be happy. That all seemed within reach.
If I could say all that in a public forum, what else could I say? Perhaps anything. I didn’t need the shell I’d been carrying along for the last many years. The bitterness was breaking up slowly and washing away, cleansed by the country rains and the passage of time. It had been so very good to get away from the city, and perhaps even good to hit rock bottom, to let go of so much, to make room for something new.
As before, we rarely dined with our sons, but now John’s first set of children were old enough to visit—as long as they made arrangements with John’s secretary, Ruth Lieb, back at JWT—and though Little John mostly stayed away, Polly came out on occasion and we all had a swell time. Our ages weren’t so very far apart. A young teenager when John and I had first started our relationship, she was in her twenties now, and a good tennis player, and a terrific flirt. When we had large parties with handsome men in attendance, we’d make the rounds together. She was equal parts grown daughter and younger sister, and there seemed to be no residual antagonism between us, though it saddened me to see her still uncomfortable around her father, alternately trying to win his attentions or spurn them. She drank a fair bit, too, and didn’t always hold her liquor well. The men she seemed most interested in were often duplicates for John: active, older, domineering types. But time would heal, I felt sure. That’s what we had now: space, and time.
•••
Jimmy ran into the den, panting. “Dad needs a glass of water.”
“Well you know where to get it,” I said, smiling. They were out on a sunny spring day working on the stone wall together, a project long in the planning and bound to be long in the doing. It was hot out there, and with the windows all thrown open, I could smell the manure and the green of the fields, and I could hear Gigi barking off in the distance. As quiet as she was sleek, Gigi almost never barked.
“Well, all right,” Jimmy said, looking at his dirty hands. He had scrapes on his knees and arms from carrying sharp rocks, and a bruise where his brother had swung a mallet too hard the weekend before, knocking Jimmy in the leg. But they’d had all sorts of adventures: learning to ride our new horse, Moonshine. Chasing after a calf. Falling out of trees. And that was just the previous summer. A few winters earlier, Billy had gotten lost in a Connecticut snowstorm, and our handyman and Jimmy had gone looking for him. They found him hours later, turned around and half frozen—to the joy of local reporters, who never f
ailed to report on any Watson who got into trouble. The town’s rescue squad had come out to join the search, but John had stayed at work in the city, insistent that his firstborn son had enough independence and common sense to find his own way home.
“He told me to get you,” Jimmy repeated now.
“I’ll come in a minute. You bring him the water, first. It must be hot out there. Your father doesn’t ask for water very often. You’re sure he didn’t ask for something stronger?”
I was just starting to work on another article. I’d written one the previous year that had been controversial enough that the editor had printed an overlay commentary, explaining that he didn’t endorse the negative things I’d said about the overstated joys of mothering, but only wanted to let varied voices speak and get readers’ views in response. Maybe I was finally getting a taste of the thrill John had gotten when he’d written something that made a reader gasp. It was good to make people think, to say the things they felt couldn’t be said.
But now that I had been interrupted, I stopped typing and leaned forward to listen. The yap of the dog again. The sound of a cabinet door slamming in the kitchen, and footsteps running back outside. Billy was still out there, and I heard him calling to Jimmy. “Hurry on up, he says!”
That morning, John had received another call from Elsie Bregman, a psychologist—at least the third so far—who had tried replicating the Albert experiment, without success. Various psychologists were evaluating John’s parenting advice as well, praising him for some aspects, like his emphasis on establishing routines and his disavowal of corporal punishment, but flogging him for his thwarting of all affection. One highly vocal critic had pointed out that withholding affection would inhibit children from growing and thriving; he pointed to neglected orphans with problems both physical and psychological, owing to the lack of attention they’d received in institutional settings. Just a few weeks ago, John had turned to me in bed and said, “We should have waited a few more years before writing that book. It was premature. We didn’t know enough.”
I’d frozen in place, waiting to see if he’d say anything more. John Watson—admit not knowing enough?
John had once thrived on debate, but things were changing. He was beginning to think about where he’d stand in the annals of psychology and he didn’t like to be deemed irrelevant. He’d done his work and he wanted it to stand, uncontested—even when I reminded him gently that science didn’t work that way, that it was okay for them to question, and even okay for him to question. Science did not remain unchallenged for long. Part of him knew it was true. But when a younger, eager psychologist reached out to him personally, it irritated him, and this particular morning, it had enraged him. I’d heard him call Ruth Lieb even though it was a Saturday and chastise her for giving out his home telephone number too readily.
After the morning calls with Bregman and Ruth Lieb, I’d heard John ask Ray for help bringing down some boxes of files, and an hour later, I saw him pacing the house with an unfamiliar purple folder in hand. I was busy at my typewriter, fighting the forces of distraction, but I could feel him stewing.
When I called out to him and asked which boxes he was digging through, he’d answered only, “Hopkins files.”
“What are you looking for?”
In typical John fashion, he refused to answer. “It’s a fire hazard up there, you know.”
Even all these years later, I still recalled much from our Johns Hopkins days, but this folder rang no bells. Not something from the Phipps side. Maybe something from the Harriet Lane side—the baby-ward files, but ones I’d handled less often. Some other kind of record? Medical? That must be it. I was going to press the point further, but the boys came running into the house, full tilt, voices too loud, colliding in the hallway just outside my bedroom door. John barked at them, and when he turned the corner into the bedroom, to growl at me, I gave him a long, cool look. “Didn’t you all have some kind of project planned today, in the healthy outdoors?”
I’d thought the work of building a traditional fieldstone wall at the edge of our property would do him good. It was methodical. It required muscle. He could do it in a silent mood, pointing to the various piles he’d made with the boys’ help: stones collected in a way that pleased all three of them, and divided by size and shape, so that you’d have just the stone you needed when the time came.
Or he could do it in a loquacious mood—and I’d come out to watch a few times and knew what an earful any onlooker would get—explaining to the boys how the winter freezes and thaws pushed the rocks up to the soil and Connecticut farmers had to dig them out before plowing, and that’s why you’d see piles of rocks here and there in neighbors’ fields, and old finished fieldstone walls dating back a century, where the stones had been put to good use marking out boundaries. He could make a math lesson out of it, instructing Billy and Jimmy that even if their wall was only two and a half feet high and only twenty-five feet long, it could take five tons of rock, and how many pounds was that, and how many rocks total if each rock weighed so much?
You didn’t start a project like that unless you were prepared to sweat, to know the right way to do certain things, like lifting carefully, and most of all, boys, you had to ignore naysayers. There would always be naysayers, in every good and important and true thing one chose to attempt. Also: change. The nature of the earth was to move and what looked solid would just keep moving, the frozen ground come winter and the thawing ground come spring, but still, they’d better believe it, even without mortar, this wall would stand. The boys didn’t know, but I did: John was talking about his entire academic career when he was pretending to talk to them about simple matters of stone.
I sat back in my chair, my own typing and work thoughts interrupted, picturing John instructing Billy and Jimmy on choosing just the right stone, fitting it into place. I’d once imagined my life as a speeding streetcar or roadster which I was all too eager to catch, no matter where it was going. Now I saw life more like this farm, more like John’s stone walls: you did what you could to do things good and right, to make things last. You tried to build solid foundations.
Gigi was barking again. More noise in five minutes than she’d made all year, and I didn’t like her being outside when it was too hot or cold. When she came in, I’d wipe her with a cloth and make her curl up under my desk, where I could keep a better eye on her.
Jimmy ran in a second time, eyes wide, hair all in a messy shock around his sweaty face. “Mom? He’s sitting on the ground.”
“Who is?”
“Dad. He can’t get up and he can’t wait. He keeps calling for you.”
John refused to go to the hospital. He let me support his weight, half-dragging him back into the house, and into the bedroom, where he told me to draw the curtains. When I opened the door later that afternoon, he snapped, “How’s a man supposed to sleep?” But I didn’t want to leave him alone. Why did he have to hate doctors so much? Well—he hated the notion of getting old, of course. Any doctor would tell him to stop hauling rocks, stop working twelve-hour days, maybe lighten up on the cigarettes and cigars and the heavy foods, and above all, stop drinking so damn much. I picked up the telephone from the den and, by God, he had sharp ears when he needed them, and he picked up the extra receiver in the bedroom and said, “You’d better be calling your mother. I don’t want Doc Fielding coming around here.”
When I tucked the boys into their beds, Jimmy said, “Dad got tired.”
“He works hard,” I said. “And those rocks were heavy.”
Jimmy pulled the sheets up to his chin, a sleepy smile on his face, while from the twin bed opposite, I could feel Billy staring watchfully—old enough to know better, never as easily appeased. He’d be the one to carry grudges, if either of them did. A chip on his shoulder and a wary look in his eye, all these years later, and I knew why.
Jimmy said, “Dad said he built a wall at Stoney Lake o
nce, but the other kids didn’t want to help. He said we were better helpers than Aunt Polly.”
“She isn’t our aunt,” Billy said, rolling over to face away from us. Calling her “sister” only confused Jimmy, since Polly looked so old to him.
“Well maybe Polly just didn’t like carrying rocks,” I said. “That’s a woman’s prerogative.”
“What’s a prerogative?”
“Go to sleep now, and we’ll look it up in the dictionary tomorrow morning.”
I peeked into our bedroom again. A paperback sat on John’s chest, the spine broken and the cover torn off. Every weekday, he spent well over two hours on the train, and he read on his commutes, and didn’t want anyone to know what he was reading. It was none of their business. He spent his days trying to have an effect on other people’s habits—pocketbooks, too—but they had no right to be messing around with his.
I looked hard, to see whether the paperback was rising and falling. I stood by his side and held my own breath, hoping to see a fidget or a twitch. The rubber boots he’d kicked off in a huff were leaning at angles near the foot of the bed. I could see the caked dirt that had fallen from the soles’ wavy treads, making a mess on the floor, which he’d complain about even though he’d made it himself. He’d unhooked his work overalls but hadn’t allowed me to pull them off, and now the bib hung down, the shoulder straps trailing, and underneath was his broad chest under a clean white sport shirt, motionless. He was ivory haired and handsome, but aged too by his high living, his lack of sleep and his heavy drinking. He’d lived two full lives—he’d certainly had two families, and two careers, and who knows how many lovers. Fifty-five full years.
“John,” I whispered. “John.”
He stirred, and his arm flopped up and his hand rested on his chest. Stubborn old fool.
“John,” I said again.
On his dresser, between a hairbrush and a bottle of cologne, a stack of weathered brown folders threatened to topple. The purple one was somewhere else now, but clearly he’d been actively rummaging.
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