Clearly he was in a filthy mood. I pulled the envelope from my uniform bag and held it out. “I’ve got Bob Considine’s column,” I began timidly.
“Considine’s column!” he bellowed. He grabbed the phone, dialed, and barked, “Hold it. We’ve got Considine.” Then he looked at me. “You going back to Bermuda tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Tell Considine to get his column in on time.”
Suppose the stewardess has a journalist boyfriend who gives her a list of all the servicemen missing in Korea and the camps where they are being held? What if it’s stolen from her during the flight?
That “Suppose?…What-if?…Why?” story became “Milk Run.” Ironically, when eventually it was published, it was back to back in the magazine with an article by Bob Considine. If you only knew, I thought, as I mentally gave him a grateful tip of the hat.
Except for those two stories, I was writing the boy-meets-girl variety that were so popular in the women’s magazines of the day, of course using my flight background. “Million-Mile Stewardess,” “The Marriage Junket,” “Captain, Dear, Come Home with Me,” “Love Can Be a Hubbly-Bubbly,” “Reach High for Happiness”—these were some of the titles.
Eventually, I started to get not just form rejection slips, but slips with scrawled comments on the bottom, on the order of, “Not right for us, but try us again.” At least they know I’m alive, I thought exultantly. In those Madison Avenue offices where those rarefied godly creatures live, they’re becoming aware of me. They hear me knocking at the door.
No one could have been more supportive of my efforts than Warren. He willingly minded the kids the nights I went to the writers’ workshop, but in his mind, writing was a hobby, and his concern was that eventually I’d be crushed by all the rejections. “Look at it this way,” he would urge when yet another self-addressed envelope arrived. “It’s a hobby that gives you great pleasure. Some women play bridge. You write.”
Warr’s concern was genuine. He didn’t want me to be hurt, and I understood that. When budding writers start submitting manuscripts and begin getting rejections in return, their families often fall into one of two traps. They either say, “Honey, don’t break your heart. Give it up,” or “You’re the best writer in the world, and the reason these people aren’t publishing you is because they’re so busy publishing their friends.” Neither response, however well intentioned, is helpful. That’s the reason it’s great for budding writers to be in workshops. Their fellow members understand that a personal comment from an editor really may be significant.
Someone in our workshop sold a story to Collier’s magazine, then one of the leading weeklies, for the princely sum of one thousand dollars. We were all thrilled and began the custom of having a cake with a candle to celebrate when a member sold something. I, however, continued to get nothing but rejection slips and the occasional “Try us again” notes of encouragement.
Then one day I picked up the mail, opened my self-addressed envelope, and read the scrawled line at the bottom of the rejection slip: “Mrs. Clark, your stories are light, slight, and trite.”
Oh, pardon me while I pull out the knife, I thought. I was on my way to Hanscom’s bakery around the corner. To rev up business, Hanscom’s was running a contest in all its New York outlets. The wall behind the counter held large pictures of four cocktail dresses, a Givenchy, a Chanel, a Dior, and one by God knows what other designer. The dresses were the wasp waist, crinoline-lined, ankle-length creations so popular in the mid-1950s.
The entry blanks were on the counter. The instructions for the contest were to complete the following sentence in twenty-five words or less: I choose the (fill in name of designer) because ___________________________________.
While my three- and four-year-olds tried to fish Popsicles out of the ice-cream freezer, and the baby pulled my hair, the clerk held down the entry blank. I wrote:
I choose the Givenchy because I have three young children and it’s been a long time since I’ve felt irresistible. I’m sure in that gown, I could feel irresistible plus!
A week later the phone rang. I had won the contest! It was the first visible proof that I was a writer. I loved that dress and wore it to all the grand occasions, being careful whenever possible to drop in the information that I’d won it in a writing contest. When it went out of style, I packed it away carefully, tissue-wrapped, in a box. There it stayed until years later when Carol, age ten, came down from the attic one day wearing it. It was Halloween. She coupled it with a pointed hat and went trick-or-treating garbed as a witch. Her costume won a prize.
* * *
When we started househunting, we made the usual rounds: Westchester, Connecticut, Long Island, New Jersey. Warren’s brother Allan and his wife, June, had moved to the Township of Washington in northern New Jersey. When we visited them, we decided we liked the area very much. New Jersey is a historic state, steeped in the history of the Revolution, and it is also beautiful. It has mountains and lakes and one of the longest shorelines along the Atlantic of any state on the East Coast. At the time, it also had an unattractive stretch on the New Jersey Turnpike by which, unfortunately, most visitors judged it. That area has been pretty well cleaned up now, but comedians still like to give the Garden State a kick when they can’t come up with fresh material.
It has always amused me that I’ve had to defend the two places where I’ve spent most of my life, the Bronx and New Jersey. When I hear either one of them belittled, I think of an expression Warren’s mother used. “When you know better, you’ll do better.” I also point out that there are only three major locations in the world that are preceded by “The”: The Vatican, The Hague, and The Bronx.
Our first house was a typical starter home, designed in the Cape Cod style; it consisted of a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen with dining area, and one bath. It also had an unfinished attic for future expansion. We decided to take the plunge and spend the extra sixteen hundred dollars to have the builder finish the two upstairs bedrooms and bath immediately, but to be economical we decided to paint and wall-paper them ourselves.
There was only one problem. Neither Warren nor I had the least aptitude for this kind of endeavor. He started painting the upstairs bedrooms, knocked over the can, and walked downstairs to get a rag to mop up the mess, leaving bright yellow footprints on the new carpet. Then he poured the leftover paint down the sink. The Roto-Rooter man eventually managed to reopen the drains. With equal ineptitude, I wall-papered the upstairs bathroom but hung the paper upside down. The pattern was fish swimming through a tropical sea. Upside-down, the fish took on a malevolent, eerie look that actually was an icebreaker when we had parties. “Do you realize…?” Or “Did you do that on purpose? How interesting.”
A dozen years later, when Warren Jr. and David were in high school, they came home one day looking tremendously pleased with themselves. “Dad would be so proud of us, Mom,” they reported. “In mechanical ability, we both came out untrainable.”
It’s genetic on both sides. My father’s sole household chore had been to shake down the ashes and shovel coal onto the fire before he left for work. Upstairs, we would hold our breath waiting for his plaintive wail from the basement, “Dammit, Nora, I have put the fire out.” It happened regularly, but he always sounded surprised.
Then, four months after we moved into the new house, the morning came when the mail included a letter from Extension magazine. I had “Stowaway” in submission there. Was it possible? I wondered. It was my peaceful post-breakfast, cup-of-tea half-hour. Warren was off at work, Marilyn was in kindergarten, the boys were in the next room playing and not yet fighting. I was seven months pregnant, hence tea rather than coffee.
I propped the unopened envelope against the sugar bowl. Was it possible? Could it really be possible? Had I finally sold a story?
No, I told myself. My subscription to Extension has run out. They want me to renew.
But, on the other hand, they don’t type the renewal notices
individually or use such good-quality paper.
Maybe it’s a nicer way for them to say, “Try us again.”
On the other hand, they didn’t return the manuscript.
It was time to learn my fate. I slit the envelope open and read the encosed letter. Extension magazine offered to purchase my story “Stowaway” for one hundred dollars!
I’ve received some pretty dazzling contract offers over the years, but never, ever, ever, have I been so thrilled as I was to learn that I had sold that first short story. The letter of acceptance is framed in my study.
The name of the protagonist in “Stowaway” was Carol. Two months later we gave that name to our newborn baby girl. Today, she points out that it’s a good thing the main character’s name wasn’t Hepzibah, because if it had been, that’s undoubtedly the name she’d have been stuck with. She also believes that she must have felt the excitement of that sale in the womb because she’s the only one of my children who grew up to be a bestselling suspense writer herself.
After that initial breakthrough, the short-story sales began to happen with increasing regularity. Extension also bought “Milk Run,” the story inspired by my goofing up the delivery of Bob Considine’s column. McCall’s bought “The Marriage Junket.” Smaller regional magazines started picking me up regularly. When I reported that first sale to Extension to the workshop, one of our new members, a woman who had published eight novels, told her agent, Patricia Schartle Myrer, about me. Pat invited me to come in to her office. When I arrived, she announced she had decided to represent me. She was a young agent. I was a young writer. Being taken on by her proved to be the kindness of the gods. Pat had been a senior editor before becoming an agent, and when I turned in a story to her, she made me rewrite and rewrite until she felt I had it in shape. That process continued for nearly twenty years, until Pat retired. Our last child is named Patricia Mary after a winning combination.
My mother never quite forgave us for moving to New Jersey. Warren urged her to live with us and avoid the endless bus trips back and forth, but even though we gave her carte blanche to come with all her beloved furniture, there was never the faintest chance she’d move. You only had to drive her halfway across the George Washington Bridge to have her start sniffing the air and remarking on the heavenly breezes that originated in the Bronx.
She delighted in being a grandmother. She had a deep horror of my leaving the children with a young baby-sitter and thought nothing of taking the two-hour, three-bus trip to New Jersey to mind them.
From the time any of the children could toddle half a block without falling, my mother was whisking them on the Circle Line Tour, or taking them to the Central Park Zoo, to the Statue of Liberty, and to parades and to beaches. She especially adored amusement parks. In 1939, the summer my father died, she took Joe and John and me to the World’s Fair. I can still see her long mourning veil trailing wraithlike behind her as we plunged down on the parachute jump. A quarter of a century later, when she was seventy-six, she was taking my five offspring on the steeplechase at Coney Island.
Long years of making one dollar do the work of ten couldn’t be unlearned, and if the kids had any complaint, it was that Nanny made them share a soda or divide a sandwich in the Automat. She once promised my then five-year-old that she’d take him up to the top of the Empire State Building. Upon realizing that she had to pay for the tickets to the Observation Tower, she whisked him up on the business elevator to the eighty-sixth floor, stood him at a window, and said brightly, “Here we are at the top. Isn’t this fun?”
Mother was adamant that the children not miss out on any important excursions. One day, her voice distressed, she came out with, “Warren, do you realize your children have never been to Bear Mountain?”
To which he replied with a smile, “Mrs. Higgins, I think they’ll survive.”
Her caring for the children encompassed Warren and me. She adored Warr, and to her, “himself” was the grandest husband any girl could have. “The disposition of a saint,” she’d say with a sigh. “I hope you know how lucky you are, Mary.” The only times she wavered in her devotion to him was during my pregnancies, when, totally unconsciously, and to our great amusement, Mother would refer to Warren as “that fellow.”
Those first years in that first house were filled with promise. Warren was working for Northwest Orient Airlines. I was selling short stories. If there was one cloud in our sky, it was that I began to be uneasy about Warren’s health. It seemed to me that for a man just turning forty, especially one who’d been a splendid athlete, he could tire too easily and looked drained and pale at the end of the day.
Something he had said when we were engaged kept replaying in my mind. He had told me that when he was about twelve years old, a certainty had come over him that he was not going to live a long life. At the time I’d said something like, “Every kid gets that feeling at that age,” but even then I’d had a foreboding that for him it was different.
Labor Day 1959 dawned picture perfect. In just about every backyard, families were barbecuing and visiting back and forth. Our neighbor across the street had decided to pull down a dead tree. He was having a hard time, and the men from the surrounding houses, Warren included, went over to give him a hand. “One, two, three, heave.” It turned out to be a difficult job. The wives watched with an indulgent “boys will be boys” smile as the guys pulled and strained to weaken the roots of the tree.
The next day Warr began to have chest pains. He kept insisting it was just a pulled muscle, but a couple of weeks later, he finally went to the doctor. Tests followed. He was told that the arteries leading to his heart were almost totally clogged; that the pains he was experiencing were caused by severe and advanced angina; that it was a miracle he hadn’t had a fatal seizure when he strained to pull down the tree; that down the road there might be surgery for his condition, but for now he must consider himself a likely candidate for a heart attack. Always have nitroglycerin tablets in your pocket, he was instructed. Never run for a bus. Don’t carry a heavy suitcase. Don’t roughhouse with the children.
I, too, went to see his doctor that day, and I heard the same diagnosis. On the way home, I stopped at church, where I prayed, “Please let him live.” The answer I heard was, “Come, take up your cross and follow Me.”
That night, when Warren came home from work, the kids jumped all over him, the baby crawled to him, and I held out the cocktail I had waiting. We toasted each other. Whatever time we had left, we’d make it great.
He had three heart attacks in the next five years, but his sense of humor never dimished. “I don’t worry about you,” he’d say when we’d talk about the future. “You could be in rags in Detroit at midnight, and by sunup be well-dressed, with a hundred bucks in your pocket, and have done it honestly. Do me just one favor. Don’t be a blooming widow. I mean, try to look gaunt for a while after I die.”
No one loved life more than he did, and no one left it more gracefully. When that final attack took Warren from us, a part of my being went dark and did not brighten again for thirty-two years, not until I met and married John Conheeney, my second spouse extraordinaire.
At home with Warren and the kids, 1961.
Ten
Our world had begun to turn upside down even before Warren died. He had the first major heart attack in 1962. The night he was discharged from the hospital, we received a phone call. John’s third child, my godchild, fifteen-month-old Laura Mary Higgins, had been killed in a fall from the fifth floor window of their apartment building. Soon after that, John and his wife, Maureen, separated. There was too much grief to hold under one roof.
In August 1964, Warren had his second heart attack. When he was finally released from the hospital on September nineteenth, it was obvious that his condition was deteriorating rapidly. He was suffering constant angina pains and taking countless nitroglycerin pills.
I had a good friend, Liz Pierce, who wrote syndicated radio programs, four-minute vignettes that were broadcast f
rom Monday through Friday over three to five hundred stations. Her series was essentially a publicity promotion vehicle for Life magazine. She would get advance copy of future articles, features, the kind that aren’t immediate news and condense them for broadcast. Several times when Liz was on vacation, I had been asked to fill in for her, and as a result I had been offered a series of my own by her company. I declined. Writing five scripts a week was a heavy schedule, and I knew it would leave me with no time for the short stories.
But on September twenty-sixth, I called Liz and told her that if a new radio series came up, I would take it on if they’d have me. I told her that I was sure Warren did not have more than a year to live and that he was far too sick ever to work again.
Liz and Warr were great buddies. Only that morning a package she had sent him arrived in the mail. The note said, “Dear Warr, I hear you’re going to be laid up for a while so tried to find A History of Orgies to entertain you. However, couldn’t find one so hope this will make an acceptable substitute.” She had sent Florence Aadland’s book about her daughter, Beverly, the fifteen-year-old who was Errol Flynn’s companion when he died.
The book has one of the best opening lines I’ve ever read: “I don’t care what anyone says, my baby was a virgin when she met Errol Flynn.” Warren loved it.
Liz told me that one of the writers at her company, a journalist, was moving to the west coast, and his series, Portrait of a Patriot, vignettes about wellknown people who had in some way made significant contributions through government, medicine, science, or the arts, was available. I told her that if they’d have me, I’d take it on.
It turned out Warren didn’t have a year or even six months. He died that evening. His mother was visiting. It’s funny, I always called her “Mom,” but when I speak or write about her now, I refer to her as “Mrs. Clark.” She was a dream mother-in-law, kind and generous. As a young girl, I had admired her from afar when I’d see her at the 12:15 Mass. There was something about her majestic carriage and stately appearance that commanded instant respect. When Warren and I got together, I quickly came to love her dearly.
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