18

Sheaves of Oats

TO ME IT WAS LIKE visiting a distant culture to see the orange-robed monks and hear their chanting, which went on for hours. Interesting; but if I couldn’t find in myself what Charlotte Brontë called an “organ of veneration” that would let me practice the religion of my mother and aunt and their slaughtered family, there was certainly nothing in the droned mantras I couldn’t understand that had the power to draw me in. Binky, though, was ecstatic—about the Mount Shasta monastery, about Buddhism, about the changes she felt inside herself. She’d found a new passion. “The wise man thinks, ‘Here is suffering. Here is the cause of suffering. Here is the path that leads to the cessation of suffering.’” She quoted the monks with the same conviction my ancestors must have had when they quoted the tablets. For the weeks that remained of the summer, we drove north through the cool, wet green of Oregon and Washington and into Victoria, and as she talked on and on I thought about what I might do as assistant vice president for Academic Affairs in charge of Innovative Instruction. Sometimes I thought about how Binky and I were at an impasse, how there was nowhere for us to go together, that I couldn’t blame her for her new passion. And sometimes I thought about Phyllis’s hands on Zahita, the Arabian she liked best to ride, or the way her hands looked as they played Mozart’s D Minor Concerto.

 

When I returned to campus that fall, the vice president was gone. The rumor was, he’d had battles with the president over tenure issues, so when he was offered a job as chancellor at the Denver campus of the University of Colorado, he took it. The president replaced him with a business professor who’d been about to retire, a garrulous Polonius who wore bright white shoes in all seasons and didn’t have a clue about how to be a vice president except to do the president’s bidding. It was pretty clear that he’d never be my mentor, as I’d hoped his predecessor might, but he was affable enough, even though he didn’t seem to know that the Experimental College existed. This left me free to be as experimental as I wished: to organize cluster courses in new areas, such as conflict resolution, courses that ignored discipline boundaries—and courses in my major interest, gay studies.

I went down the short list of gay and lesbian professors I knew, but though the Stonewall riots had occurred four years earlier in New York, word of them hadn’t yet reached Fresno. “Would you consider teaching a gay studies course in the Experimental College?” I asked. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin to look for material,” one said. “What does ‘gay’ have to do with ‘studies’?” said another. “Are you kidding?” a third said.

“Please don’t use that word on campus,” one woman hissed into the receiver before she hung up on me.

“Why can’t you do it?” Phyllis asked when I complained over lunch in the cafeteria, my voice barely above a whisper when I used the G word.

I looked at her, this orderly, quietly dignified little woman. “Everyone knows what good friends we are,” I laughed. “If I come out, they’ll suspect you too. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No,” she said flatly.

“Well . . .” I was about to say I wouldn’t even know where to begin to look for material, yet that wasn’t true. I knew how to do research. What was there to stop me from learning how to teach gay studies?

 

Nicky called again that fall. She’d tracked me down in the assistant vice president’s office, but I didn’t even jump up to close the door this time, not even when she said, “I’ve been in jail, Lil.” I listened to her boy’s voice telling me the latest chapter in the bad novel that was her life. “The house got raided”—she laughed—“and we all got busted. I got carted off in a paddy wagon together with the hookers. It was no big deal. Really. Except for the lousy jail food and the lumpy pads you had to sleep on. The guys who owned the house sprung us loose after a few days. Now they want to set up in the Tenderloin and keep me as the manager. What do you think?”

Why was she calling me again? “I already told you what I think. That you’re not what you believe you are. That you have to stop.” But what did I know about her now, really? Red ogre eyes whirled in my head. She wasn’t still the eighteen-year-old with puppy feet whom I’d taught how to kiss, who liked to read This Is My Beloved because the beloved’s name was Lillian. But if she was calling, it must be because she wanted me to tell her something. “Nicky, you have to stop,” I repeated.

“To do what?” She laughed again, though I sensed she was really listening.

“Nicky, you wouldn’t be talking to me right now if what you’ve been into weren’t wearing thin. Isn’t that right? Let me help you get into college. You can do a lot with a diploma.” The Maury solution again. But it was all I knew . . . and why shouldn’t it work for her as it had for me?

“I’m up shit creek, Lil. We used to be in the same boat,” she laughed.

“Well, I found the oars. Let me paddle you out too.” The red ogre eyes whirled again, but I clicked them off. How else could she escape from her ongoing melodrama?

 

In November the Fresno fog settles in for a long gray sleep, and the whole San Joaquin Valley seems somnolent and still. For days sometimes you can’t even see the stoplights in town until you’re almost on top of them. Most evenings after work I drove at a crawl to Phyllis’s ranch, and then at nine or nine-thirty back to my apartment in town. But one night after we’d said good-bye, I opened her front door and saw that the porch light had its own little envelope of haze around it, illuminating nothing. I couldn’t even make out the three steps that led from the porch to the paved walkway.

“How can you drive through that?” Phyllis said over my shoulder. The heavy white blanket of the fog was palpable even at the door. How would I avoid the ditch bank that bordered the ranch? “Look, this place has four bedrooms,” Phyllis said. “Stay.”

I came back to the bright light of the living room, chilled from my thirty seconds in the cold. “I’ve got an apple liqueur, Calvados,” she said, and went to get it.

Our fingers touched when I reached for the snifter. We looked at each other, saying nothing, though my mind was gyrating like a flywheel. If I do this, what will happen to Binky? If I do this, nothing will be the same again. Then the whirl stopped, and I put the snifter down on the coffee table, deliberately, carefully. I drew her into my arms.

“Ohhh,” we breathed together, as if we’d found some vital thing we’d mislaid years before.

And that night—as Radclyffe Hall wrote—we were not divided.

 

“What do you eat for breakfast?” Phyllis asked the first morning as I drifted into wakefulness and worry, and then delight. How lovely, how giving, she’d been.

She was dressed in her ranch uniform, blue jeans and the blue sweatshirt that picked up the blue of her eyes, and she’d already been out to feed the horses. She sat on my side of the bed and placed her fingers on my bare shoulder. “What do you eat for breakfast?” she asked again.

I rose to my knees and pulled the blue sweatshirt over her head. “No breakfast this morning,” I said.

 

On Friday evenings Phyllis drives me to the airport, parks the car as far as possible from the high aluminum lamp posts, and we hold each other for a few frantic minutes before I must break loose and run to catch the small plane that will take me to Los Angeles and Binky, who is waiting at the other end. There Binky and I hug, and I marvel that Phyllis doesn’t show on my face. Should I say it? But we’ve been together for seven years. How can I find the words to tell her?

On Monday mornings Phyllis is waiting again, to drive me to my office, to drive me later to the ranch, to have dinner and breakfast with me, to make love with me. How can I leave her on Friday afternoon? I’m a juggler with a clown’s mask, and soon the balls will come banging down on my head. I’m Lilly on the run, age eight, bounding from Mommy to My Rae to Mommy to My Rae.

 

One Monday in February, all the flights to Fresno were canceled. “Pea soup fog,” the clerk at the United Airlines desk said brightly. “Fresno’s been shut down since Saturday. I don’t think we’ll be landing anything there today.”

“Oh, no, I’ve got important meetings today,” I wailed.

“Well, I can get you on the nine forty-five to Merced,” the clerk offered. “That’ll get you closer.” But Merced was an hour away from Fresno, and if the fog was that bad, I probably couldn’t get a taxi to take me in.

Phyllis had just gotten to her office when I called, and when the plane landed in Merced, she was waiting at the gate. How many times already had I seen that neat form and silver hair waiting for me at an airport gate or looking after me as I was leaving? I drew her into my arms now, and we gripped each other as though I’d just returned from Mesopotamia.

Twenty miles out of Merced patches of blue were breaking through the gray sky, and a silvery perimeter peeped around a great cumulous cloud. I shouldn’t have bothered her to make this long drive, I thought, embarrassed now. The L.A. plane will probably land in Fresno before we get there. “I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse,” Phyllis broke the quiet to say. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long while, and on this morning’s drive, though I couldn’t see the road clearly, I saw everything I’m about to say like I was peering through crystal.” She recited the lines as though she’d been rehearsing them all the way to Merced. I watched the firm grip of her hands on the wheel and braced myself. It would be an ultimatum. How would I answer it?

“I’ve heard you talk for almost three years about how you want a baby and how you’re worried that if you keep putting it off it’ll be too late.” She slowed the car, looked at me squarely, reached for my hand before she looked back at the road. “I’m proposing. I know I’ll make a good other mother. Live with me and have the baby and we’ll raise it together.”

I gasped as though I’d been socked in the diaphragm.

By the time we reached the campus, the sky was a clear and cloudless blue such as I’d seen in Fresno only on days in late spring.

 

I open my purse and there’s a small packet of seeds inside, though I don’t remember buying them. The picture on the envelope shows graceful sheaves of some sort of grain. I’m a city girl who can’t tell one grain from another, but the sheaves look golden. Lovely. So desirable. More precious by far than golden apples. “We must get the seeds in the ground immediately,” I rush to tell Binky.

She’s reading a big book, and I strain to see the title. The Influence of Zen on American Literature, I make out the words on the cover. Or does it say Zen and the Art of Archery? Or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? No matter. I can barely see the top of Binky’s head, which now she raises so that her eyes are visible. “Go plant them,” she says sweetly, and waves her hand toward the back of the house, toward the bare little square of land in front of the empty Writing Cottage. “There’s plenty of room to plant whatever you want there.” She gestures expansively with both hands. Then the hands disappear and she lowers her eyes and then her head again, and I can see nothing but The Upanishads. Binky has vanished.

“But who’ll help me harvest?” I shout toward the book.

“They’re oat sheaves,” Phyllis whispers in the wind.

 

I wanted to say it at the L.A. airport, but the words wouldn’t come. Nor would they come on the way to Dottie’s house for dinner, where I pushed the food around on my plate and pretended to listen to Betty’s funny Hollywood stories and felt my cheeks stiffen from the phony little smile I kept plastered on my face. As Binky slept, I stared into the dark for a hundred lonely years and then watched the gray light slowly fill our bedroom. I could see her long, graceful hands, thrown over her head now, palms up, in peaceful surrender to sleep. She stirred; I crept noiselessly from the bed, like a thief. I’d take a shower first.

Binky was still in bed when I returned, her face to the wall now. I’d already gotten my clothes on. Though she didn’t move and her breath was regular, I knew she wasn’t sleeping.

“Binky,” I bent to whisper, and she turned over and stared at me. “We have to talk.”

She sat up quickly. “Don’t tell me. They’ve made you president! Right?” She laughed without mirth.

“I’m having an affair with Phyllis Irwin.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed. For an instant I wished I could take back my words. Then I didn’t. “Get out,” she said evenly. She leaped from the bed, towered over me. “You’ve never really lived here anyway,” she yelled, “so now get out!”

From the Topsy room I called Yellow Cab. Binky slammed the bedroom door behind her when she heard me on the phone. As I waited, alone, I looked out the window to the backyard, to the abandoned, rickety cottage in which I never wrote a single word.

 

The taxi drove me to the Greyhound bus station in Hollywood, where, for the third time in my life, I bought a one-way ticket. Then I leaned against a wall, staring into space for a couple of hours, until a canned voice announced over a loudspeaker: “The Bakersfield–Fresno bus will depart in fifteen minutes.”

The very pregnant blond woman next to me on the bus tried to scoot over when I sat down, and we both smiled at how little space she could make. Then she closed her eyes and kept them shut through most of the trip, which was fine because I needed time to think.

How could two people who start out in such easy tandem pull so far apart? Once wed finished our book, nothing between us had gone right, but what wed shared the first couple of years had seemed so wonderful that it kept us hobbled together for the next five or six, even when we knew that it wasn’t working, that we’d be better off going in opposite directions. Finally we were like ball-and-chain convicts—snarling, resentful, but stuck with each other. I was sick about it now. The tiresome discord we’d made ourselves live through. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for love relationships.

The bus crawled over the mountains and zoomed toward the Valley and the pregnant woman dozed, her fingers laced over her aquamarine polyester stretch pants, sheltering her belly protectively. She wore no ring on her left hand, and whatever she was dreaming made a little smile play around her lips. Her face looked young and relaxed in sleep. What had been so shameful and brutally hard for a woman in 1940 seemed a lot simpler in the 1970s.

By the time the bus left Bakersfield I’d made a plan. I’d find a doctor who did artificial insemination. Then I’d send my mother the picture that Roger and I had taken at Dottie’s party three years earlier. I’d make a copy for Rae. He’s gotten a job as a sociology professor in Pittsburgh, but we’re in love, so we got married, I’d tell them, because although the world had changed, they hadn’t. Then I’d buy a house, a nest for me and my baby, and I’d hire a girl to care for her while I worked. If the young woman next to me could take a six-hour bus trip though she looked ready to deliver momentarily, why couldn’t I sit behind a desk until the last minute? They couldn’t fire me. I was a tenured full professor. And in this day and age they’d be ashamed to fire a pregnant lady anyhow.

 

The fertility specialist I found was a thin-lipped, serious man. On his office wall was a large portrait of a smiling wife and three teenage daughters, all with sleek, long blond hair. “If you want a child, why don’t you just get married?” he asked as I sat opposite him in his office, but he seemed more curious than disapproving.

I’d rehearsed the right answer the week before as the bus was pulling into Fresno. Now I looked Dr. Rich directly in the eye—a guileless professional woman who had no inkling about men, who unwittingly scared off all potential suitors—and I answered with unadorned fact: “If you’re thirty-three years old and have a Ph.D. and you’re an assistant vice president at a university, it’s not easy to find a husband.”

Dr. Rich understood what men liked and didn’t like in 1974. “Yes, I see,” he nodded, then ushered me into the examination room. My feet in stirrups, nervous and vulnerable, I stared at the ceiling while he probed my body. What if I’ve waited too long? I would be the end of the line. I was a prisoner, helpless in a matter that was life-or-death to me now, awaiting the judge’s verdict. Would the verdict be death?

“Everything looks fine,” Dr. Rich finally said from between my feet, “but since you’re already thirty-three, I think we’ll do an endometrial biopsy to be sure you’re ovulating regularly. And if you’re not, we’ll help nature along a little by giving you a fertility drug, Clomid.”

His promise drew the air from my lungs. I was doing it. It would happen!

“We’ll need to chart your temperature,” he said after I’d dressed in an ecstasy of relief. I hadn’t waited too long! “And when we have it all figured out we’ll do the insemination three times—at the start of your cycle, then in the middle, then at the end.” They would live, into the next generation.

Phyllis presented me with two new state-of-the-art thermometers, “in case one breaks,” she said. Every morning before I left the bed she brought me one, waited by my side, scrutinized the numbers, passed the thermometer back to me to scrutinize, and we noted on the chart the minute variations from 97.8 to 98.9, that secret code to longed-for treasure.

“I match the sperm donor’s profile with the patient’s,” Dr. Rich explained at my cycle’s beginning the next month. “For you I’ve got a donor from the East with a medical degree, mesomorphic type, light complexion, Jewish,” he said, reading from a file after comparing its number with the one on a small tube he took from a small refrigerator. “Hold this while I get things ready,” he said, his thin lips forming his only smile of our brief association.

Inside the tube he’d handed me was white viscous fluid. I held the cold glass in my palm carefully, lovingly, overwhelmed with gratitude to it, to what the mesomorphic, light-complected, Jewish doctor from the East was giving me.

My feet in the stirrups again, I started when I felt Dr. Rich insert something cold and metallic in me. I stared up at the ceiling and held my breath. “It’s best to keep still for a few minutes,” he advised before leaving me alone in the room.

I knew for certain I was pregnant several weeks later as I sat in a meeting of the deans and the vice president and a sharp ray of heat radiated from my nipple outward to my breast, like a bright white star. I glanced over at Phyllis, who’d been watching me from the other side of the room. My face must have revealed that something had happened, because now I could see it on her face, as though she’d felt it in her breast too.

 

“Come live with me on the ranch now,” Phyllis said when we left Dr. Rich’s office. The tests confirmed what I already knew. The wonder of it! “Come, please,” she said again, pulling me back from my euphoria. Live with her. How could I live with her? Three times I’d tried to make a life with someone, and each time it had ended in my boarding a Greyhound bus alone. “We’ll be a family,” she said.

“I can’t,” I told her gently. I couldn’t spend the energy I’d need for my child on another love affair that would last a few years and then fail. “If it doesn’t work, it would hurt not just you and me but the baby too.” She was loving and present and ardent, but so had Mark been in the beginning. So had D’Or and Binky been. What I felt now for her, I had once felt for them too. Oh, where do they go, lost loves and lost passions? Into what forlorn graveyard do they sink? “I can’t,” I said again.

“I’m really grateful for everything you’ve done,” I told her when she dropped me off at my apartment, and I kissed her cheek. “I hope you know that.”

“I’m not going to stop,” she said, smiling.

I closed the apartment door behind me and laced my fingers around my belly, protecting what was inside. I was going to have a baby! I’d done it. For myself and for them. I’d be like that woman on the bus from L.A., alone, with the baby inside her, strong.

“I’m looking for a three-bedroom house in a good school district,” I called a real estate agent to say. Phyllis and I could see each other from time to time, but mostly I’d be a mother and an assistant vice president for Academic Affairs.

I bought a house in a manicured area of Fresno, with a graceful backyard that looked like a park designed by a Japanese landscape architect. Behind a discreet fence was a small orchard of gigantic oranges and bright yellow globes of grapefruit. Inside the house you could fit ten of Fanny’s furnished rooms. Maybe twenty. Property in Fresno cost a fraction of what it did in Los Angeles.

 

“Lilly, a palace!” my mother exclaimed at my dwelling, worthy in her mind of Duke Boyer.

“Dr. Leelee, where do you get so much money to buy such a house?” Albert asked, his ingenuous old eyes big beneath his horn-rimmed glasses.

“All alone with a baby coming, in so many rooms,” Rae complained, wandering through the maze of my mansion. “You’re not afraid?”

“A baby! A baby!” my mother said for the hundredth time. “Albert, you hear? Lilly’s going to have a baby!”

“Mazel tov!” he shouted again.

“Mazel tov!” Rae shouted too. “When is your husband coming back?”

I took them to Phyllis’s ranch for dinner so they’d see what nice friends I had in Fresno, so they’d know that the baby and I wouldn’t be all alone, even if “Roger” never returned. Just as I steered my car onto her long gravel driveway, Phyllis came from the barn in her jodhpurs. Rae, sitting beside me, peered over the big mauve plastic purse she held on her lap. “Oy!” She adjusted her glasses. “She looks just like that Binky. Where do you get them?”

“Like Binky?” I laughed. Phyllis was six inches shorter and forty pounds lighter than Binky. Then I understood. Of course. All gentiles looked alike to my aunt. “No, My Rae, my darling. She looks just like you,” I said.

My aunt spanked my fingers. “Don’t be silly,” she cackled. “I don’t look like a shiksa.”

But Phyllis spoke Viennese phrases to them that sounded like Yiddish. She cooked a salmon so that Albert wouldn’t have to eat anything trayf, unkosher. She popped up to fill water glasses and coffee cups the instant they were emptied. She was charming, darling.

“Oh, I forgot something,” I announced after I settled Rae and my mother and Albert into my car at the end of the evening. I ran back to thank Phyllis in private, to kiss her and tell her I’d miss her terribly that night.

“Such a nice lady,” my mother said on the drive back to my home. “The shiksa doesn’t worry to live all alone in such a big house?” my aunt asked.

 

Nicky called again, when I was about five months pregnant. “Did you mean it?” she said, as though we’d talked just the day before.

“Mean what?”

“About school. About what I am.”

“I meant it.” She wouldn’t be calling me if she had anyone else to call, I knew. “You’ll breeze through the high school equivalency exam,” I told her. “Then we’ll get you into Fresno State. Come, Nicky. Now I can help you.”

“I already shipped my stuff,” she said.

“Okay,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She came, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and a genderless permed hairdo, like a lot of college students in the 1970s. She was almost a generation older than most of them, but so were many others. Drugs and jail time and everything else she’d lived through were etched on her craggy, tough-woman face. She was certainly not the coed I’d seen in the varsity movies of the early 1950s or when I arrived at Fresno State in 1967, but that vapid look was mostly history anyhow. More and more of our students were working class, and hard times showed on their faces. Even those who didn’t have rough lives now eschewed the college girl look.

“That woman’s going after a lot of counseling,” the associate executive vice president smirked to Phyllis when he saw Nicky in my office every day. “I hope she’s getting some good advice.”

She must have; she graduated cum laude in two and a half years. She wrote too, John Rechy–type stories about a peripatetic butch who lives in the underbelly of lesbian life, stories that continued where “Walk With the Wind” left off.

“Is the world ready for stuff like this from a woman?” we asked each other.

It would take twenty more years, but “Walk With the Wind” would sit in bookstore windows as A Crystal Diary. She still calls me Lil.

 

By October my belly was a nice round watermelon, but I’d said nothing to anyone in the Thomas Administration Building. Did they think I’d just gotten fat?

By November it was no longer possible to ignore, but how could they believe what their eyes were seeing? It was easy to get the Pill. Hardly anyone got pregnant by accident anymore. And if they did, abortions were legal. Was it conceivable that an unmarried assistant vice president for Academic Affairs would carry a baby inside that huge abdominal protrusion? No one asked me. When we talked, they kept their eyes trained on my face, on the wall, on the air, anywhere but down.

In bed together, Phyllis and I speculated about how the campus telephone lines must crackle and sizzle, what circumlocutions Polonius must have devised to proclaim it to the president, how the deans must buzz and chatter until they hear our steps at the meeting room door, then scurry to their seats like naughty schoolchildren.

One night Phyllis and I were asleep in her bed when the phone rang. The luminous hands of the clock said 1:10. Phyllis reached for the phone. It was our old vice president, calling from San Francisco, where some national association of university chancellors was holding an annual meeting. “Phyllis?” he slurred. I could hear him all the way over on my pillow. “I heard the craziest thing tonight about Lillian Faderman.” Word had gotten out around the country.

“You should have passed the phone over to me,” I murmured when she spooned herself around me again and we floated off on one boat to sweet dreams.

But their silly curiosity is of no consequence. What matters is the precious creature forming inside me. I can see it as clearly as though I’ve placed a periscope in the navel that once attached me to my own mother. I can see its perfect little fingers and toes, its scrunched-up face that soon will unscrunch and be beautiful, its magical little collarbone and ribs and elbows and knees.

“I hope it’ll be musical,” Phyllis says one evening as we dream together about who this little being will be.

“If musicality is genetic, she won’t be,” I confess. “I’m practically tone deaf.”

“Early training’s the key,” my music professor insists, and every night she croons to my naked belly, sends her fine contralto right through my navel into the delicate seashell ears inside me. It’s a charming old British folk song that she sings. My Jewish child is bound to adore it.

 

She wanted me to go with her to her parents’ home in San Diego for Thanksgiving. “I’ve told them all about you and the baby,” she said.

A silver-haired, blue-eyed family. Her mother was dainty and sheltered-looking, and the house was filled with delicate heirlooms. Her father was kindly, gentle beneath a curmudgeonly exterior, a retired lieutenant colonel who still met every month with the officers with whom he’d helped liberate France thirty years earlier.

“I think it’s wonderful about the baby,” Phyllis’s mother said in her high, sweet voice as we washed the Thanksgiving dishes together. “Just wonderful,” and she patted my soapy hand with hers.

On Saturday the MacDougalls came to play bridge with the Irwins, and Phyllis and I got ready to go and see a Woody Allen film. Mr. MacDougall had been in France with Fred Irwin, and he’d kept his poker-stiff military bearing. As I was putting on my lipstick in the guest bathroom, I heard Fred defend me to his old army buddy: “She didn’t want a husband, for God’s sake; she wanted a baby, and that’s her right.”

 

When I’d thought of having a baby, for years it had been for the sake of my mother and Rae: I longed to give them this little entity who would bring new hope and some joy into their lives. I longed to rescue them from the fate Hitler had prepared for their kind—for our kind—by calling a Sarah or an Avrom back into existence and nourishing it so that it might someday, in its turn, add others to our tiny, decimated tribe. But now when I thought of having the baby, my whole body was charged with a powerful feeling for it and it alone. There was almost no minute I spent by myself when I didn’t protect with fingers laced and strong as steel the belly that sheltered it, this small, unknown being inside me whom I loved already so fiercely and unconditionally, as I’d learned to love from my mother and My Rae.

 

I go to natural childbirth classes because I want to be awake for that instant when my child takes its first mouthful of air into its lungs. We meet in a large, mirrored room: a long-haired, Earth Mother teacher; eleven pregnant women; and eleven partners who will coach us through labor—ten husbands and Phyllis. The partners learn to take hard Lamaze breaths along with us pregnant women, to push as we will have to push. They sit behind us on the floor, their hands wrapped around our abdomens. In the mirror I see Phyllis’s hands around my big stomach, laced as I’ve often laced my own fingers, cherishing what’s inside me. I love what I see.

We didn’t go to the campus on the last Monday in January because it was a university holiday, but I hadn’t missed a day of work throughout the pregnancy. In all my thirty-four years I’d never been as hardy—not a single cough or sneeze all fall or winter. Not one tiny headache. Not even a broken nail. Now I’d spent the voluptuously free day reading on Phyllis’s couch, walking on the ditch bank and watching a fat muskrat build its house, going to the barn with Phyllis to feed a foal who had a burnished gold coat and comically long legs. After dinner we watched the news, and just as MacNeil or Lehrer said his last word, a butterfly began to beat tiny wings against the walls of my womb, wingbeats so soft they almost tickled.

“It’s time,” I told Phyllis.

“It’s January twenty-seventh,” she said. “Mozart’s birthday.”

Twenty minutes later, before we reached Fresno Community Hospital, the butterfly had become a biting, burning panther. I opened the car window and drew great drafts of cooling January air into my lungs. But he didn’t let me suffer long.

“It’s a boy!” the doctor shouted at my final push, at nine fifty-nine P.M., and I knew that Avrom was who I wanted and needed the baby to be all along.

 

Fresno had two synagogues, and though I’d never been inside either one, when I was about six months pregnant I went to the one closest to my house, Beth Jacob, to ask the rabbi if he knew of a girl who could live in my home and take care of my baby while I worked.

“My wife would like such a job,” Rabbi Schwartz, a little man not much taller than my aunt, said with an incongruous Cockney accent. “She wouldn’t live there, but she’d stay until you came home every day.”

Bea Schwartz had the rabbi’s Cockney accent and wore a leopardskin coat. Her hair was dyed midnight black, and her red fingernails jutted out an inch beyond the tips of her fingers. She had a distracted expression, a look my mother had sometimes had when I was a child.

I couldn’t sleep. “Those fingernails,” I wailed.

“But they raised two kids,” Phyllis reminded me. “The rabbi said their son is a doctor.”

The second day after Avrom was born, he and I came home. I hadn’t planned to take all the sixteen weeks’ sick leave due me, but now I loved the animal luxury of doing nothing but nestling my baby in my bed, nuzzling his rose-petal cheeks, watching over his sleep, adoring the perfecttion of the tiny pink nails on his fingers and toes. I knew nothing outside the wonder of him.

But on the fourth day the vice president called. The University Budget Committee needed to see the plans I’d drawn up for the faculty retreat on innovative instruction. Where were they? Clearly an assistant academic vice president could not take weeks away from the university to be with a baby. “I’ll be in this afternoon,” I told him, and with a troubled heart I telephoned the Schwartzes.

“Not to worry,” the rabbi said. “We’ll come right over.”

 

Here are our days: I rise at seven, and I nurse Avrom and prepare baby formula for the hours I’ll be gone. Bea Schwartz and the rabbi arrive at seven forty-five, and I leave for the university. I call at nine o’clock, at ten, at eleven. Almost always it’s Rabbi Schwartz who answers the phone. (Won’t the congregation be angry that he’s taken other employment?) “He’s doing smashing,” the rabbi says. “Not to worry.”

At noon, Phyllis and I hurry back to Harrison Street so I can nurse Avrom. Almost always, Rabbi Schwartz is walking the floor with my baby in his arms, crooning off-key British lullabies while Bea sits on the couch with a faraway look. Avrom bats his big eyes and smiles toothlessly up at the rabbi.

Phyllis and I lunch on a hunk of bread and a chunk of cheese and hurry back to campus, where I spend the afternoon organizing the spring faculty retreat, thinking all the while of how the rabbi holds my son in his arms.

At five o’clock I go home and nurse Avrom, and Phyllis rushes off to the ranch to feed the animals. But by six-thirty she’s back on Harrison Street, cooing over Avrom, carrying him everywhere in her arms while I fix our dinner. We eat it as he slumbers in his blue bassinet at the side of our table. Then I nurse him once more and dandle him, and Phyllis sings to him. Together we place him in his bassinet again before we tumble into my bed. At 2 A.M. he sings to us, sings us awake with his powerful lungs. Sometimes I get up to hold him in my arms and nurse him at my breast. Sometimes Phyllis gets up and goes into the kitchen to warm his bottle, then holds him in her arms and nurses him. The alarm buzzes at six-thirty and we tear away from each other. As I float in and out of a few more snatches of sleep, I hear the front door shut and her car start. She must drive back to the ranch to feed the animals before she goes off to work.

“Let’s live together,” I tell Phyllis soon, because already we’re a family.

 

“Do you know what my father just said?” She laughed after one of her weekly phone calls to San Diego. “He said that since we’re raising Avrom together, why can’t we call him Irwin too.”

I’d worried since my son’s birth: If something were to happen to me, Rae would be too old to take care of him, and my mother and Albert were unthinkable. The indifferent state would ship him off to a place like the Vista Del Mar Home for Orphans, where poor Arthur Grossman was sent when we were kids. They wouldn’t care that Phyllis loved him. What could she use to prove her tie? “Yes, that’s his name from now on,” I said. “Avrom Irwin Faderman.”

There are so many people who are glad my son has come into the world.

 

When he started to talk, he called me Mommy and my partner Mama Phyllis. We couldn’t stop to think about how we looked to people outside because we were too busy living our lives, but now and then word got back to us: some lesbians in Visalia who asked an acquaintance if the “bizarre story” they heard, about “a professor who had herself artificially inseminated,” was really true; someone on campus who remarked to a colleague that Phyllis and I were “engaged in a social experiment.” How could they know the love among the three of us and the caring? Or that as life made me, the family I made was the only one I could live in? How could they know that Avrom made up for what Hitler and what Moishe took away, that I loved him with such tenderness and joy and wonder—as though I’d invented motherhood? How could they know he was to me the completion of a sacred mission?

 

A woman who had a child out of wedlock in 1975 could not become a college president. I wasn’t unaware when I chose to get pregnant that it might abort my career as an administrator, but now I knew for sure. My administrative colleagues never said a word about Avrom after he was born—any more than they did before he was born. As far as they were concerned, it was as though the funny protrusion around my abdomen had just magically deflated. Of course they thought me odd. No matter what administrative skills I might have, I would never really be one of them.

But did I want to be, or was it blind ambition that had made me dream of becoming a college president, just as I’d dreamt once of becoming a movie star? I truly missed the classroom. The next school year, I decided, would be my last one in administration. After Avrom’s 2 A.M. feedings stopped, my reading started again. I pored over books that would one day prepare me to teach lesbian and gay literature. The books absorbed me and claimed me, as always, in ways that organizing the next faculty symposium never could. What luxury it was: to sit in the den after we put Avrom to bed and lose myself in the written word—especially now in words about love between women, which had changed so much from the days when I found the lugubrious Twilight Lovers or Odd Girl Out on the paperback book racks in drugstores. But I wished that some historian would place it all in context for me—trace it from the earliest images, trace what it must have been like for women who made their lives together a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, women who loved each other as Phyllis and I did now.

“Why don’t you do it?” Phyllis asked.

I laughed at her musician’s naiveté. “It takes scholarly skills I don’t have. I’m not a historian.”

“What skills don’t you have?” Phyllis said. “Become a movie actress,” my mother had said.

I dismissed it that evening, but I couldn’t dismiss it permanently. There was no such field as “lesbian history.” With whatever scholarly skills I did possess, why couldn’t I try to help create it? Who else in the whole country was in as perfect a position as I? I’d done enough work for my dissertation and my two textbooks to have some notion about research. I was a tenured full professor with absolute job security, and whatever my colleagues might think privately, they couldn’t punish me for being a homosexual historian any more than they could punish me for being an unwed mother. I had a family that kept me at home, a partner to share responsibilities with me, and when I wasn’t at school I had time to work while my infant son slept. Why shouldn’t I do it?

“Do it,” Phyllis urged again. “You can do it.”

My writing too was a sheaf of oats.

 

Lillian, Albert, Avrom, and Mother

 

Avrom and Grampa Albert Gordin

 

Avrom and Grampa Fred Irwin

 

My mother and Albert and Rae come to visit. Albert carries Avrom all over the living room, calling him “Yankeleh.” “Maybe I better take him for a while, Dad,” I say after he tries for half an hour to teach the baby to say “Good morning, how are you?” in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. But then my mother wants to hold him, and I place him in her open arms. She sits with him on her lap, touches his little fingers with a delicate pinkie, gazes at him with a dreamy look. Is it me she sees? Is it Hirschel? “Avremeleh,” she calls him. We let him sleep in his bassinet for a while, then my aunt goes to get him, to hold him, to sing “Raisins and Almonds” to him in her foghorn voice. “Under Avremeleh’s little cradle,” she blares in Yiddish, “stands a pure white goat . . .” He looks up at her with huge love eyes.

Though my aunt has asked me numerous times during the visit why Roger doesn’t come and see his son, before she gets into the back seat of Albert’s car for the drive home, she turns to Phyllis to instruct her: “Take care on Lilly and the baby.”

“I will,” Phyllis promises solemnly. “I’ll take very good care of them,” and her blue eyes lock with My Rae’s.