Her big eyes filled with tears. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
In 1988, I began writing a biography of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who’d just had a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Several years later, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, would cancel an exhibit of his controversial work, ultimately leading to the 1991 obscenity trial in Cincinnati. Mapplethorpe’s subjects were flowers, portraits, and gay S&M sex. To be equally adept at taking pictures of lilies and of men hanging upside down in chains is a singular talent that gave him a unique edge. Mapplethorpe had AIDS, and in the seven months before he died, at forty-two, I spent hours interviewing him as well as practically everyone he knew. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more eclectic group, from art collectors and socialites to men who kept dungeons in their apartments and embraced every fetish imaginable.
Though Steffi had given birth to her daughter, Pamela, and was happier than I’d ever seen her, she still hadn’t lost any of her curiosity and still expected me to provide the answers.
“You’re telling me that people can have orgasms licking people’s toes?” she asked.
“It’s called a foot fetish,” I said, “and it’s not just licking people’s toes. Lots of men are into women’s shoes, the higher the better.”
One of Mapplethorpe’s models had worked as a call girl and told me that she frequently dealt with foot fetishists. Several of her regulars, including the president of a major U.S. corporation, would lick her shoes for hours at a time. She said it was so boring she grew to hate the man. I showed Steffi a Mapplethorpe photo of an African-American model about to put a patent-leather lime-green heel into his open mouth.
“That is really very weird,” she said.
“For some people, heels are symbols of cruelty and pain, and that’s a turn-on.”
“I bet women don’t have foot fetishes,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Just having to wear high heels is cruel and painful enough.”
We laughed and then played with Pamela, who had just come home from nursery school.
“I think you should have a baby,” Steffi said suddenly. “It would make you so happy.”
Once Lee and I finally got married, we tried to have a baby, but who knew that getting pregnant at forty would be difficult? Obviously, I did because I’d written about it, but stories about other people are exactly that: stories about other people.
I made an appointment with my gynecologist, whom I’d never really liked but who’d been my doctor when I’d had my breast biopsy. Since it turned out to be benign, I was too superstitious to leave him, though I always thought it weird that he kept a bronze figurine of two copulating tortoises on his desk. After I’d researched the mating habits of tortoises, I wasn’t sure what this said about his approach to sex, since the male tortoise bites, butts, rams, and shell-batters the female into submission.
After I complained that I was feeling depressed because it seemed that every man I met had AIDS, he wanted to know why I was dating men with AIDS. He hoped they wore condoms. As for getting pregnant, he advised me to relax and give it a year. Looking at the copulating tortoises, I thought, “Slow and steady wins the race.”
My book was proceeding slowly and steadily. I’d finished most of the interviews but wanted to see Mapplethorpe’s gravesite in Queens. Since I’d never driven in the city and had no idea how to get to Queens, I asked Steffi if she’d take me to the cemetery and then we could have lunch afterward. “We can go to the grave and then Sarabeth’s,” I said.
It was a cold, gray day, and it took us forever to find the gravesite. Mapplethorpe’s ashes had been placed next to his mother’s coffin, and the headstone bore his mother’s maiden name.
“So now what?” Steffi said.
“I guess we can drive back to the city and have lunch.”
At Sarabeth’s, I told her nothing was happening on the pregnancy front, and Steffi’s eyes immediately filled up with tears. I don’t cry easily but she got me started, and we both cried together. Her tears fell into a slice of chocolate cake, mine into a cappuccino. She suggested that maybe we should go shopping. In my current state, I told her I couldn’t possibly handle a sample sale, but she said, “Trust me, I know a good one.” So we drove to a decrepit warehouse in midtown, where I found the gray ostrich flats—in narrow. I viewed them as good luck charms and wore them practically every day. I’d read that Chinese women trying to conceive would take a shoe from the temple of the fertility goddess, and then after the child arrived, the mother would return the shoe. I’d made a bargain that if I got pregnant, I’d give away the ostrich flats. I also kept thinking of the nursery rhyme about the old woman who lived in a shoe and who had so many children she didn’t know what to do. In all the illustrations, she had gray hair and appeared to be in her eighties, so maybe there was hope for me.
Eventually, my gynecologist referred me to a fertility specialist, who suggested artificial insemination, along with the drug Pergonal. It had to be injected beneath your skin every day for three weeks. I hate needles and I’m very drug sensitive. The Pergonal made me a little crazy and I began to cry every time Lee administered the shot. When I returned to the specialist’s office with a vial of Lee’s sperm in my pocketbook, I put on a hospital gown, climbed atop the examining table, and placed my feet in the stirrups.
“Don’t you want to take off your shoes?” the nurse asked.
“No, they’re lucky.”
After the doctor completed the insemination, he told me that for the next thirty minutes, I should do nothing but think calming thoughts. I focused on the shoes, concluding that gray really is the perfect neutral. I counted the number of bumps on the ostrich skin. I wondered if ostriches built nests and where. I hoped an ostrich hadn’t been killed to make my shoes. I started feeling bad for ostriches, so I reached for one of the pamphlets on the wall rack. It was all about the benefits of cosmetic breast surgery. Doesn’t a woman who is trying to get pregnant have problems enough without worrying about her breast size?
When the doctor returned and asked if I’d had a “nice rest,” I waved the brochure at him. “This is an insult to women,” I said.
The double insult?
I didn’t get pregnant.
I went to another fertility doctor for more shots of Pergonal, only to develop a bad case of pneumonia. When I recovered, I went to yet another fertility doctor to see about doing in vitro. It wasn’t as advanced as it is now, so I was a little apprehensive. After he reviewed several months of blood tests, he told me the bad news: I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting pregnant because my follicle-stimulating hormone, which is released by the pituitary gland, was so high I was heading into menopause.
“But I’ve never missed a period,” I explained, baffled.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I guarantee that in a month or two, you’ll be in menopause.”
“But my mother didn’t go into menopause until she was fifty-four,” I insisted. “Isn’t there a correlation?”
“Often there is,” he said. “But in your case, no.”
I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. Not only was there no baby in my future, but I was going into menopause at forty-one. I immediately called Steffi. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You’re so physically sensitive that you’d be the first person to know if you were heading into menopause.”
She was right. Just like my mother, I didn’t reach menopause until I was fifty-four.
But that still doesn’t mean I got pregnant.
In typical Steffi fashion, one morning she called to ask my advice on clowns.
“Why would you think I’d know about clowns?” I asked.
“You always have the answers to things, and I was thinking that maybe you’d written a story about a circus and had met a clown.”
She then launch
ed into Pamela’s “clown problem.” Apparently, they petrified her. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but Steffi reminded me that clowns appeared regularly at kids’ birthday parties. Also, one of Steffi’s relatives wore so much makeup she looked like a clown, and Pamela didn’t want to see her. Steffi asked if I’d discuss Pamela’s clown issue with my therapist, who explained that fear of clowns was in fact a real psychological problem. It even had a name—coulrophobia. She suggested that Steffi take Pamela to see someone, but the clown phobia went away, or else the relative did. I can’t remember.
At some point, I suggested to Steffi that she should see a therapist because dealing with the ups and downs of her Crohn’s disease was taking its toll. It never occurred to Steffi that she’d actually have to talk to the therapist. She was more interested in listening to him. “He wants me to bring him dreams,” she said. “I don’t remember any. Can you tell me some of yours?”
“That would defeat the purpose,” I explained.
“So maybe you could give me a few examples?”
After I described several of my dreams, she told me her therapist thought she might be having some sexual issues.
“Like what?” I asked.
“He wonders why all this S&M imagery keeps cropping up.”
“That’s because you’ve been listening to me talk about Mapplethorpe.”
“And because I’ve been using your dreams as mine,” she confessed.
“Steffi, you can’t do that. You need your own dreams.”
But she had hers—Pamela. She’d recite a poem Pamela had written or tell me something funny Pamela had said. She worried that it might make me feel bad, but it didn’t. I totally shared in her joy.
On February 23, 1994, Warren called me early in the morning. Warren never called early. We usually spoke at lunchtime. “Are you sitting down?” he said. That’s a sentence you never want to hear because it implies that the news you are about to hear is so awful it might cause you to collapse.
“Steffi’s gone,” he said.
“What do you mean? I spoke to her last night.”
He explained in a flat voice that she’d been taken to the hospital, where she’d died of septic shock, a rare complication of Crohn’s disease. He’d just accompanied a devastated Ira to the morgue to identify the body. Steffi was only forty-three; Pamela had just turned eight. The funeral service was so wrenchingly sad, it pains me to look back on it. Ira was in total shock. Pamela, all dressed up, a grief-stricken little doll, sat next to him. No one could believe Steffi was dead. I remember wearing the ostrich shoes. I also remember that I never wore them again.
I recently had dinner with Pamela, who is now twenty-nine and who looks a lot like her mother. They have the same big brown eyes that tear easily. She reminds me of Steffi in other ways too. She’s kind and sensitive and a good listener. She has a successful career and recently became engaged to a wonderful man. They’ve set the wedding date for next fall, and of course I’ll buy new shoes. Warren, Woody, and all my friends, except one, will be there. I know I’ll laugh. I know I’ll cry, and I know at some point I’ll hear Steffi’s voice whisper, “Really? How can that be?” And this time I won’t have an answer.
13
Go-Go Boots
Lee and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary in London. He said I could pick out any present (within reason) and I selected a pair of brown leather lace-up ankle boots at Emma Hope, in Notting Hill. Hope designed Keira Knightley’s shoes for Pride and Prejudice and her tagline—“regalia for feet”—conjures up a festive regency ball. Though my boots weren’t silk or velvet, or embellished with tassels or appliqués, with their small tapered heel and elongated toe, they had a distinct Victorian charm that meant the world to me.
Hope, who opened her first shop when she was only twenty-five, fell in love with vintage pieces, scouring flea markets for items she could revive and rework. She’s often said that she finds her inspiration in “granny’s closet,” a phrase that resonated with me because, even though both my grandmothers died before I was born, I’ve often drawn inspiration from them too.
For years my father kept a small sepia photograph of his mother on his bureau. I’d always admired it. She has lovely blue eyes, a straight nose, and thick brown hair piled on top of her head in the “Gibson girl” style. He rarely speaks about her, and even though I’ve spent my life posing questions to strangers, I intuited from an early age that she was off-limits. She died too young, and it was simply too painful, and yet I see my father in her eyes and I see myself in them too.
My maternal grandmother, Bumpa’s wife, lived until her late sixties, yet she was even more of a mystery. My mother didn’t have much to say about her, and I can only chalk it up to my mother’s reluctance to ask questions. Her curiosity mainly extended to pets. She was crazy about them and knew the names of all the neighbors’ animals. Her greatest hope was that I’d write a children’s book about dogs or cats, though she was leaning toward cats.
“You’re so imaginative,” she said. “It’s too bad you’re wasting your time with all this other stuff.”
The “other stuff” was a successful journalism career, but I’d learned not to take her comments personally. “I think you could write a wonderful story about a group of magical cats with human characteristics,” she’d once advised.
I told her that was a ridiculous idea, and then Cats came along and my mother said she couldn’t listen to Betty Buckley sing “Memories” without thinking of all the royalties we could have split.
Every time I tried to steer her away from four-legged creatures toward my two-legged grandmother, she’d draw a total blank. “I wasn’t nosy like you,” she said. “In those days, we were brought up to be polite.”
“So you can’t even describe her?”
“She was an excellent seamstress.”
“And?”
“A devout Catholic.”
“That’s it?”
“Oh, and she had thinning hair and wore what they used to call a rat to plump it up.”
“You paint such a fascinating portrait.”
“I’m sorry, but we all can’t live your fascinating life.”
The only problem with my mother’s vague description was that at one point, my grandmother did indeed live a fascinating life. On the top shelf of Bumpa’s closet, I discovered three frayed photo albums that provided a rich if cryptic visual biography. My grandmother brought them to New York from her native London, where, in 1903, she’d embarked on a seven-year journey around the world. For someone who’d once considered Cape Cod the Phuket of Greater Boston, I treated the albums as if they were tales from The Arabian Nights. Only there weren’t any tales—just pictures of my grandmother, a tall, dark-haired woman with a penchant for big hats and a collection of fabulous shoes. One pair was particularly gorgeous: white Louis-heeled court shoes with little bows. Her shoe collection took her everywhere—India, Egypt, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Burma, Thailand, the Caribbean, Washington, New York, Newport, and, finally, Andover. She traveled by ocean liner, horse, camel, and oxcart, posing next to Japanese geishas, the Great Buddha in Kamakura, near battleships in Vancouver, the Palace of the Winds in Jaipur, the Great Sphinx in Giza. For years I made up my own story about her life. Depending on what I was reading, she was an adventuress like Gertrude Bell, a maharajah’s mistress, a British spy, the grand duchess Anastasia. Some pictures had been ripped out of the albums, but since they’d been glued onto the page, the perpetrator had left behind remnants. From what I could tell, the pictures had been of a man. A lover? A first husband?
Somehow en route to New York, my grandmother lost her steamer trunk and arrived at Ellis Island with only the things she carried with her. Among them was a gold trinket in the shape of a shoe. Victorians often exchanged miniature shoes in leather or pottery. It was a symbol of a contented, prosperous life. Did she view it as a good luck
charm? A fertility symbol? Or a reminder that she loved shoes? My mother kept it in a small curio cabinet in the basement, next to a Ping-Pong table nobody ever used. She was very possessive of the few things in it, though she rarely looked at them. One day I slipped the shoe trinket into my pocket and brought it back with me to New York, where I placed it on a delicate gold chain. It symbolized all the places I’d been and the ones I still wanted to see.
With my new Emma Hope boots, I began to wander like a tourist through my grandmother’s life. Lee had several meetings, so I used the time to do a little digging at various research centers in London. Since I already knew her childhood address from the Ellis Island website, I took the tube to Great Titchfield Street, in Marylebone. So this is where your grand adventure began, I thought, walking past rows of redbrick Victorian houses. When I reached her block, there were no more charming houses, just a hideous modern building. My grandmother’s address was now the Winchester Club, where a sign advertised a MEMBERS ONLY party: SUMMER SNACKS, BLACKJACK, AND THE MALIBU GIRLS GROOVING THE NIGHT AWAY.
A man came out and saw me taking notes. “Looking for someone?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “My grandmother.”
He looked skeptical. “In here?”
After more research, I discovered that my grandmother had been a lady’s maid to several socially prominent women whose husbands were in politics, both in England and the United States. My grandmother’s career as a domestic was the last thing my mother wanted to hear and she told me that if I’d stuck to cats, none of this would have come to light. Still, I persisted and discovered something I hoped she’d find interesting: In addition to being Irish and English, we were also part French.
“Your great-grandmother’s name was Eugénie Sherrier,” I announced proudly. “She married Alphonse Rousset, and they had a daughter named Lucie—your grandmother.”
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