Like Dora, David Copperfield’s child-wife, I knew nothing about the flesh, blood, and bones of a home, or how to maintain their health, my rich, arch-feminist mother having warned me away from the kitchen and from doing any chore that didn’t require a college education. In effect, I was helpless and hadn’t the faintest idea what went into a stew or a cake, how to iron a blouse, or how to get rid of a stain. Paradoxically, I was helpless while continually waited on by what my mother called “the help”—governess, cook, maid, laundress, and sometimes butler. This was all very well when I lived at home, but as soon as I married and moved out of the big house on Sixty-third Street, and into Joe’s three-room apartment on East Thirty-seventh Street, my ignorance caught up with me. Dora didn’t seem to mind—or even to notice it; but I wasn’t at all sanguine about my incompetence. I felt stupid and didn’t like it that my husband knew more about keeping house than I did.
I don’t know how we would have managed—probably not as well as Dora—if Joe hadn’t been living alone for almost a decade before we met, in which time he had become adept at shopping, cooking, and cleaning up after himself. The day we started back to work he picked me up outside my Forty-seventh Street office at five o’clock and told me we were going to stop at the Grand Union on Third Avenue, where he would begin my lessons on how to buy and prepare food. Never had I felt so binary. By day (like the Green Hornet) I was the hotshot managing editor of a classy literary magazine; by evening, hesitating outside the Grand Union, I was a domestic illiterate.
My mother shopped for the family’s provisions while lying in bed and talking over the phone to the grocer and the butcher at Gristede’s around the corner on Third Avenue. She knew both their first names and chatted them up in a time-honored faux-flirtatious manner. “I’ll have eight of your lovely lamb chops, Stanley.” She had, as far as I knew, never set foot in a supermarket, those wonderfully convenient new grocery stores I’d been reading about, where you wheeled a steel-wire cart in front of you and plucked whatever you wanted or needed from shelves arrayed down several aisles. Too bad—she was the sort of person who would have enjoyed shopping at a supermarket, where impulse is far more fun and creative than a list.
David Copperfield was optimistic about his bride-to-be, Dora: “I showed her an old housekeeping book of my aunt’s, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case, and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with.”
Optimistic but dense: “the cookery book made Dora’s head ache, and the figures made her cry. They wouldn’t add up, she said; so she rubbed them out, and drew little nosegays, and likenesses of me and Jip, all over the tablets.”
“This,” Joe said, unwittingly imitating art “is the produce department. That means fresh fruits and vegetables.” I was determined to learn fast—for both our sakes. “This”—he picked up a green ball with leaves—“is a cabbage. And that,” he said, putting down the cabbage and pointing to a similar green ball, “is a head of lettuce.”
He took my hand and led me past pyramids of raw carrots, beans, peas in the pod, squashes, potatoes, and apples, pears, and oranges to a hip-high case of chunks of raw meat wrapped in clear plastic. He explained the difference between two so-called roasts by saying that you cooked one inside the stove and the other in a pot on top of it. “How do you know which is which?”
“You learn the names and remember them. And if you don’t remember, you can always look it up in one of our cookbooks.” As a wedding present we’d been given five cookbooks by a second cousin who had correctly guessed the shallowness of my homemaking skills. The books didn’t make my head ache, they merely baffled me.
The lessons continued. Still, I felt as if I had been shoved into a chemistry lab with nothing more than a sixth-grade education, and instructed to create an explosion. Who knew what would melt together, burn to a crisp, or implode? I was fearful, not trusting my instincts—for I had none when it came to the kitchen—or my ability to follow the directions in a cookbook. How many cups in a quart? What does blanch mean? What’s tbs; sauté; parboil; fold? I knew boil and stir and that was about it. My confidence was hardly bolstered when one of Joe’s relatives informed me that, were Joe’s mother still alive, “she would not have set foot in your kitchen,” meaning I had broken ancient Jewish law and had defiled my house by preparing meat and dairy products in the same vessel. I asked Joe if he thought his nosy cousin was right. “That’s silly,” he said. “Honest to God. That bitch.” She had stung me nevertheless and had started me wondering what it would be like to keep a kosher house and to focus on what is forbidden rather than on what I had now, namely an almost endless number of options. “Why does eating shrimp make you a bad Jew?” I asked my husband, who had been raised in a house where shellfish was considered a toxic substance. Joe said that wasn’t the point; the point was not the shrimp but obedience to the law. I could understand this but could not take that final step into belief that following an arbitrary law is any better for you—or for the world beyond the front door—than experimenting your way through life.
It didn’t take me long to realize that my mother had not done me any favors by advising me to let someone else do the household chores—“that’s what they’re being paid for.” My mother was both rich and a feminist, which made it possible for her to act on her principles; she was like one of those 1930s American Communists who, on the Q.T., bought cheap land on Cape Cod or the Vineyard, trusting it to increase a hundredfold in value—which it did. If she hadn’t been so well off she would have done the scrubbing and cooking, the scut work, whether or not she believed housework to be demeaning. In my case there was no one else—except Joe and Georgia Edwards, the woman who had raised him after his mother and father died. Georgia showed up at 303 East Thirty-seventh Street once a week to do some serious cleaning. She also cooked for us when we had people over for dinner. Her repertoire consisted of three meals, which she wisely alternated. One was shrimp creole, one chicken fricassee, and the third pot roast. When she cooked dinner for us she always brought along a package of hermits, chewy squares of ginger and molasses cookie from Horn & Hardhart.
While most housework involves getting rid of something—dust, grease, cobwebs, stains, spills, odors, smears, footprints and handprints, streaks, scum, wrinkles, sand, cat poop, and general disorder—cooking is the opposite. You’ve got something palpable—and, if you’re lucky, even delicious—when you’re done. But instead of treating the act of preparing a meal as a lark, a challenge, I was daunted by the idea of turning a chunk of bloody meat and a couple of carrots into a pot roast that tasted like Georgia’s.
For the first three or four years of our marriage I trusted myself with preparing only one meal for company, certain that I would spoil, set on fire, or in some other horrible way render anything else inedible. This was an eye round roast, restuffed baked potatoes, “French-style” frozen beans, and a “bought dessert”—ice cream with some kind of gooey topping. The one time I tried a chocolate soufflé it ended up like a piece of blotting paper at the bottom of the casserole. This set me back another couple of years. Quite handy in the kitchen, Joe spent a lot of time there while I stood by his side.
We ate out about once a week; you could get a good meal for two, along with a glass of wine or beer, for around fifteen dollars. There was a steak house we liked on Third Avenue. It had green sawdust spread over the floor—God only knew what was underneath; the house specialty was mutton chops. The Three Crowns was a Swedish restaurant in the east fifties, with a smorgasbord arrayed on a round table that rotated; you selected your herring, cheese, potatoes, smoked eel, etc., as the dish moved toward you and made a grab for it before it whirled away. If you wanted to see friends in publishing, you went to P. J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue; there was always at least one person at the bar whom you knew well enough to go up to and start a conversation. The only thing to order at Clarke’s was a medium-rare hamburger. Neither Joe nor I liked the kind of restaurant featured in glossy magazines and the food columns of the Times, places like “21,” Le Pavillon, Chambord, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, pricey expense-account eateries favored also by out-of-towners and rich bachelors. Dinner for two—with wine—at one of these classy restaurants could set you back as much as thirty-five or forty dollars.
“Takeout”—with the exception of Chinese restaurants—had not yet embraced the urban imagination or appetite; you either cooked or ate out. One establishment brought precooked meals to the back doors of the rich, who ordered them over the phone. This was Casserole Kitchen, which delivered an entrée in a steaming earthenware container, picking up the empty next day. Casseroles were a streamlined way of getting your meat, vegetables, and starch in the same pot. In 1956 we bought, for $2.95, a cookbook entitled Casserole Cookery Complete, a revised edition of the original 1941 product. Its format was a ring-bound vertical that you stood up, like an easel, the easier to read and keep smear free. In her introduction, the bestselling book’s author, Marian Tracy, urged her readers to drink wine with a meal—“the world looks rosier”—and to buy only fresh herbs. Some of her recipes were startlingly original, although you had to be braver than I was to try them. Others in this category suggest wartime shortages. A random sampling includes: no. 125: Brussel Sprouts and Tongue in Cheese Sauce; no. 126: Creamed Tripe with Onions; no. 117: Kidney, Heart and Liver in Soubise Sauce; no. 167: Sweet Potatoes Stuffed with Birds—quail is recommended.
A.B. on Ninth Avenue, 1957.
The most celebrated food guru was Clementine Paddleford, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune, the only newspaper that rivaled the Times in clout, style, and substance. In 1960, Ms. Paddleford published How America Eats, a book that had taken her twelve years to research and write. “In New York City,” she wrote, “you eat around the clock.” But not, it turns out, all that variously. Paddleford’s journey across and through the United States made her appreciate regional cooking, but as for the city, she focused mainly on oysters, soup, lobster, and cheesecake. She also included Waldorf salad. Invented by a self-promoting maître d’, known as “Oscar of the Waldorf,” this salad was a medley of sliced apples, walnuts, mayo, and celery. One of Paddleford’s more imaginative recipes tells you how to make Leek and Pig Tail Soup—and begins “wash six pig tails.” Her Crown of Lobsters requires the cook to “parboil lobster for three minutes. Cool. Remove meat and run three times through fine grinder.” What you get when you’re finished is a kind of lobster mousse. Not one of Paddleford’s recipes calls for garlic, sesame seeds, or cilantro; many of them ask you to include generous amounts of cream.
In 1956 Joe and I lived in an apartment at 242 East Nineteenth Street, on the corner of Second Avenue. All the other buildings on the block between Third and Second, both sides of the street, were the homes of Puerto Rican families. These were mostly brownstones, once lovely, now flaking, their stoops askew. For no reason other than strangeness, I was frightened of my neighbors when we first moved there; later, they seemed friendly if somewhat distant as I walked home from work. On Sunday mornings the street would sparkle with the glass of bottles tossed from windows during the night before in a frenzy of celebration.
Along Second Avenue homeless men lay curled up in doorways trying to generate enough strength to get themselves to Bellevue Hospital in order to sell their blood for a few dollars. A common night sound was the wail of an ambulance siren, not quite loud enough to wake you but which penetrated sleep and burrowed into dreams.
Our building had a doorman and an elevator man who delivered the mail every morning; the place was decently but sparely maintained—no frills. Our apartment consisted of a tiny one-and-a-half-person kitchen open at both ends, and a dining room that gave onto an alley. The middle-aged couple across this alley engaged in nightly afterdinner battles during which they screamed imprecations at each other and threw things. Married less than two years, I couldn’t imagine what would bring a man and a woman to the point of such rage. The living room was long and thin and had three tall windows overlooking a skimpy garden, more brown than green. In the back was our bedroom, a bathroom, and an extra room Joe had put dibs on for a study. Pregnant with our first child, I figured that sooner or later he’d have to give it over to the baby.
We furnished the place with some of Joe’s things but mainly with new pieces we bought on Saturday afternoons with the help of a painter friend, Alvin Ross, who had somehow wangled a pass to decorators’ showrooms—an understuffed, hard-edged couch covered in pink velveteen, several Scandinavian chairs, a round, marble-topped table, objects of functional economy; this was our 1950s rejection of superfluous detail and design.
Even though Joe had been touted as a superhost, as a couple we didn’t entertain much. Both basically shy people, I suppose that deep down we were afraid that if we sent out invitations no one would show up. We didn’t have an event to trigger the party we decided to give at last, not birthday anniversary, holiday, or promotion. It could have been that our impulse to celebrate arose from a sense that, even if neither of us had pulled off a noticeable success at work, at least we weren’t going backward; and also the dim awareness that, after the baby came, our partying life would be reduced to a very small item.
We invited our guests, about two dozen of them—among them my Barnard friend Francine du Plessix, editors Jason and Barbara Epstein, New Yorker writer Anthony Bailey—by sending out cards—“After 8.” We hired a bartender, laid out a ham we had baked, some cold cuts and cheeses, and worried that no one would show up. On the day of the party, Jean Stein, a woman about my age with whom I had been producing a series of spoken word records for MGM Records, phoned me. Jean was the daughter of Jules Stein, said to be the most powerful entertainment agent on either coast. Jean knew all her father’s stellar clients—movie stars, writers, musicians, publishers—but had retained a curiously girlish manner. When she spoke you had to get right up next to her to hear what she was saying, and she often asked questions that suggested a barrier between her and the facts of life. My alliance with Jean was characterized by her dependence on me—specifically for what she believed to be my vast knowledge of books and literature but which was, in fact, only vast compared with hers. I did most of the editing for selections that were read by Carson McCullers and William Faulkner. The other records in this series had Alec Guinness reading from Gulliver’s Travels and Ralph Richardson doing some Joseph Conrad. The series was too highbrow to sell well; but it had “class” written all over it.
Jean seemed to be in need of basic sex ed. One day when we were having lunch together she said, “I know it sounds stupid but would you please tell me where babies come out.” Without missing a beat, I said: “They come out the same place they went in.”
Over the phone on the day of the party Jean asked if she could bring a friend with her. Of course, I told her. “Do I know him?”
“It’s Bill,” she said. “Bill Faulkner. He’s in town working with his editor.” This was Albert Erskine, a lean southerner who had been briefly married to Katherine Anne Porter and who was famous all over town for his social polish, his old-fashioned manners.
“It’s all right if I bring him, isn’t it?” Jean said in her breathy, little-girl voice.
“I guess so,” I said. “Sure, that’s fine. Does he know where we live?” I knew Jean was Faulkner’s New York girlfriend, I had heard this in the kind of whisper that gossip often uses to transmit delicate messages, though I could not remember who the messenger was.
“What difference does that make?” she said.
The idea of William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize, walking into our apartment and shooting the breeze with our friends, mostly junior people in publishing, many of them wet behind the ears and brash, was as daunting as if I were the village priest informed the pope was about to show up for dinner and all I had in the house was cabbage stew and black bread.
The bartender—a graduate student not much younger than we were—arrived and set up the bar in Joe’s study. I brought out trays of cheese and crackers in a heightened state of nerves; I had some trouble holding the trays steady. Guests appeared and dumped their coats on our bed. By a little after nine Jean and her friend had still not arrived and I began to think that they would not come at all, had found another party at a better address, or had decided to keep the party a private duet.
Just as this thought occurred to me, bringing with it both disappointment and relief—because I really didn’t want to deal with this daunting visit—they came in. Jean was wearing a blue taffeta dress, the skirt puffed out below the waist like a bell, her black hair brushed and shining. She was beautiful in a Liz Taylor sort of way. And, a step or two behind her, Himself, in a thick, impeccably tailored tweed suit, a slight man not more than five foot eight, with delicate features, a furry gray mustache, and melancholy eyes. With my heart pounding noisily against the back of my throat and my legs gone soft, I went over to greet them.
“This is Bill Faulkner, Anne. I just picked him up at the airport.” They gazed at each other with hungry eyes. I said something about how nice it was that they could come. Faulkner bowed slightly and said it was a pleasure. I escorted them to the bar and left. I went back to that room only once during the evening, terrified that I might have to talk to him. But there was more to it than shyness. It was his aura, his scale—too large and bright, not the man himself, who was shy, to the point of reticence, but what he had done with his life. Our celebrated guest, I learned later, had backed up against a wall and talked rather formally and in a near whisper with those who were braver than I was. One of them pointed to a tiny rosette in his lapel and asked what it was. “That’s the French Legion of Honor,” he said, withdrawing a white handkerchief from his sleeve and patting his lips with it. “For service during the First World War. I was a pilot, you know.”
Exceedingly famous people upset the psychic balance of a gathering—unless everyone there is equally famous—making waves, creating a kind of draft. It may be thrilling to realize that the man standing next to you is a writer from Olympus, but the psychic space between you is as wide as if you had four legs and fur and he two and feathers. You can see nothing “natural” about William Faulkner or Laurence Olivier or T. S. Eliot, for it’s almost impossible to get past the luminescence of the enormously gifted.
A few days later I had a lunch date with Marc Jaffe, an editor at New American Library. We met shortly after noon in an East Side restaurant with a French name and a clientele of publishing executives, literary agents, and a smattering of tourists—a place in which it didn’t hurt you to be seen. The prime-cut customers were sent upstairs to the second floor; Marc was prime-cut. As we reached the top of the staircase I saw William Faulkner sitting at a table for four, a bottle of wine in a cooler his only companion. He had a plate of food in front of him and seemed quite content to be alone. When he saw us, he got up and, still holding his napkin, walked over to us. Bowing slightly from the waist, he said “How do you do, Mizz Kaplan.” Trembling, I introduced him to Marc.
After we sat down at our table Marc said, “So that’s William Faulkner. I’m surprised how shy he is.”
I realized that this would be one of those frozen moments and that I would unashamedly think of it as “memorable” for the rest of my life. I transmuted Faulkner’s unremarkable greeting into prose as indelible as his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
“He is shy, isn’t he?” I said and stopped myself from telling Marc he’d been at our house, since we hadn’t invited Marc to our party. “And isn’t he gorgeous?”
“Well I don’t know about that,” Marc said. “And I’ve heard he has something of a drinking problem.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” I said.
In the 1950s, as in times long gone, the notion of “doctor” inspired reverent submission. The medical practitioner was viewed as part high-ranking army officer, part school principal, and the remainder, shaman. When you went to see him [sic] you asked no questions, neither about what he was doing to you—especially when you couldn’t see what it was—nor what your chances for improvement were. By remaining beyond the obligation to report, he kept you emotionally at arm’s length and conveniently out of his hair. Office visits were snappy and to the point. A tap here, a poke there, a tweak, an X ray, a swabbing, the shining of strong lights in small places, the hint of pain and humiliation enhancing the diagnostic process. The prescription he handed you didn’t tell you much either, not even the drug’s name or probable side effects (vomiting? purple spots on your belly? blinding headache?). You were afraid of bothering the doctor, and he liked it that way. In other words, what your doctor did to and for you was none of your business.
Incredibly, from the moment we met, Joe and I had not once talked about having children, the idea never having occurred—at least consciously—to either of us. This was our partnership: one and one make one—forever.
And then, along about our second year of marriage, everything changed, and I wanted a baby so badly the desire felt like a wound. Surprised at how, without any awareness, I’d made a 180-degree turn, I was a newcomer to the sort of profound transformation a person can undergo more or less overnight. The woman who drives you crazy in November becomes your best friend in December. You may think this is because she’s changed but it’s more likely you who has been able to see her through a cleaner window. From I never want children to a baby is the only thing in the world I need—this happened almost overnight. Although he didn’t share my enthusiasm, Joe, a generous man, was willing to go along with it. I had no trouble conceiving—it took three months—but for no reason other than superstitious fear, I wasn’t sure that it would ever happen.
Babies had played no part in Joe’s life; he had never even held one.
My mother and father were doctor snobs. While a lot of non-Jews resort, when they’re really hurting or fearful, to a Jewish doctor, figuring he or she is not only smarter but softer of heart, my parents consulted mainly WASP doctors, those trained at Columbia or Harvard, with offices on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
As soon as I had missed one period, and, cavalierly, not having visited a gynecologist since Anatole had dispatched me, four years earlier, to get myself fitted with a diaphragm, unconsciously repeating, almost verbatim, the line in Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group: “Get yourself a pessary,” I phoned my mother to ask for the name of her doctor. The nature of our watery bond made it far easier for both of us to connect when there was something specific to talk about; I was, I suppose, using my request to try to warm up to my mother. There was a shadow across her that she almost never—no doubt because she didn’t really know how—invited me to step in and share, and this phone call seemed to please her. “His name is Equinn Munnell,” she said. “He’s very handsome; all his patients are in love with him.” I told her he sounded like horses and money. She assured me of his brilliance.
Women did not invite their husbands to come along to their medical appointments, and if they had, the likely answer would have been: “Are you kidding?” A man was expected to show up for work no matter what was happening outside the job; many bosses didn’t know—and didn’t want to know—when an employee’s child was sick or his dog run over.
So I arrived, solo, at Dr. Munnell’s Park Avenue office ten minutes ahead of time. There were seven or eight comfortable chairs in Dr. M.’s waiting room, and all but one were occupied by women reading up-to-date magazines like Holiday, Town and Country, Yachting. For most private doctors and dentists this let-thepatients-wait-forever policy was standard; they scheduled more patients than they had hours to see them in. What happened to those at the end of the line? Did the doctor stick his head into the room and say, “Sorry, folks, we’re closing shop. Come back tomorrow”? Even when you showed up on time you often waited several hours to be seen—and these were not clinics where you would expect to sit on a hard bench all morning or afternoon; these were Park Avenue, top-of-the-line specialists.
Mom was right. Dr. M. was darkly good-looking, with sleek brown hair and a smile one notch below seductive. He wore a long white coat, open to expose an expensive three-piece suit beneath. The backs of his hands were very hairy. During a short interview I told him I thought I was pregnant. “Lets just take a look-see,” he said, motioning for his crisp, middle-aged nurse to escort me to the examining room. She handed me a cotton johnny and told me to remove everything I was wearing, and then get up on the table. Briskly, Dr. M. inserted a speculum that felt as if it had been stored in a freezer and poked around while the nurse stood off to the side, staring at the wall. Back in his consulting room he told me he thought I was a month or so into pregnancy but they would test my urine on a rabbit to make sure. The rabbit test was positive.
Soon I was showing up once a month at Dr. M.’s office, setting aside a three-hour block of time for each visit. His affability factor was high, but I sensed that below it lay a chunk of ice not much subject to melting.
Dr. Munnell apparently liked his women thin. He instructed me to gain no more than seventeen pounds. This seemed like very little weight to me, but he assured me it would be best for me and for my baby. Unquestioning, I put myself on a punishing diet and for nine months was always ravenous. Meanwhile, from the fifth month on, the baby—gender unknown—moved about in its quarters almost constantly, kicking and twisting even at night while I lay in bed, too excited to sleep more than a few hours at a time.
Until just a few years after the war, women starting out in labor were doped to the ears or knocked out altogether, the idea being that they would find the pain of childbirth intolerable. Just in time, a new notion about giving birth took hold of the imagination of a lot of women who thought it would be invigorating to give birth the way peasants do, laying down their scythes when birth was imminent and having the kid at the side of the field, then going back to work for the afternoon shift. This was known as natural childbirth, without anesthetic, mechanical assistance, or episiotomy. It included a course of workshops where you and your husband, along with a dozen other couples, crouched on exercise pads in a gym while an instructor told you how to respond physically and psychologically to each of the three stages of labor and how to lessen the “discomfort” by panting and/or taking deep breaths. The instructor also showed you gruesome pictures and explained the risks to the unborn of any sort of anesthesia. When I told Dr. M. that I wanted to try giving birth by this new method, no drugs or painkillers, he was skeptical—“Well, Anne, if that’s what you want. . . .”
There was no way of telling my baby’s gender, so I thought of it as “it.” On May 10, the day before it was officially due, I looked as if I had a watermelon inside my belly. My navel had popped out like a cork. Labor, however, had not begun, and my water hadn’t broken, but Dr. Munnell had planned for this baby to arrive on the eleventh. My private room at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, on 168th Street, overlooking the Hudson River, had been reserved. “Come on in,” he told me over the phone, “we’ll induce you.” He explained in his white voice that they would start dripping Pitocin into a vein in my arm by IV. Before the procedure, a young resident came into my room to take my history. He pulled up a chair and sat by my bed, a folder on his lap. There wasn’t much to tell him—I was twenty seven and almost never sick. A medical frown accompanied his rebuke: “Why have you waited so long to have a baby?” he asked.
“My mother was thirty-nine when she had me,” I said. “Mother and child are still doing fine.”
The frown persisted. He made me feel as if I’d broken some rule no one had told me about. Before they wheeled me to the labor room, they made me take off my earrings and my wedding ring.
Designed to bring on the muscular contractions of labor, Pitocin packed a wallop: I went from zero to sixty-five in less than half an hour. I groaned politely. “Are you sure you don’t want something for the pain?” Dr. M. asked, as he withdrew his head from between my legs. “Well, maybe a little something,” I said. “But no Scopolamine.” This was a painkiller we had been warned about in the childbirth class; it was a so-called truth drug that would make its victim say anything that came into her head and then, after it wore off, not remember a thing. We were also told that it was commonly used by torturers to loosen men’s tongues. When we settled on a small fix of Demerol, I felt I had betrayed my sisters in the natural childbirth movement.
Sitting beside me, Joe insisted on reading to me from a book of S. J. Perelman pieces he’d brought with him. I could understand single words but sentences were beyond me. “Isn’t that funny?” Joe asked. I told him to shut up. The pain was ferocious, worse than anything I had ever experienced. It felt as if my insides were being ripped from their container. High-pitched shrieking in the hall outside didn’t help. “Some women,” Dr. M. said, with eyebrows raised significantly, “seem to need to express themselves more than others.” Joe rubbed my back the way he had been taught by our instructor. That didn’t help either. Did I see on Dr. M.’s face a look saying he’d told me so?
They didn’t ask Joe to join me in the delivery room when Dr. M. announced that the last stage of labor had started, but sent him out to a fathers’ waiting room to chew on his nails. Once on the table, my legs hoisted on steel troughs like two pieces of dead meat, I pushed so hard that I broke hundreds of tiny blood vessels in my neck and shoulders. Dr. M. announced that he was about to perform an episiotomy. “A little cut in your perineum. To make room for the baby.” I didn’t protest and felt it as he sliced into the tissue. “There,” he said, like a seamstress pleased with a neat hemstitch. “The head’s crowning.” Drained of every sensation but the need to get this hideous business over with, I said “Thank God.” “It’s a girl,” Dr. M. announced. “She’s got very large hands and feet.” “Susanna,” I said. She was just under six pounds.
I tried to nurse Susanna, but my milk was slow in coming, and she refused to suck, twisting her mouth away from my nipple while her body went rigid. I begged our pediatrician—the same man who had taken care of me from the time I was an infant until I went away to college—to let me try a little longer. But by day three he decided that Susanna needed food and had her put her on the bottle. From that moment she was hooked on the easier way and I gave up, crying for a week after I got home, and scrambling to see the bright side of things.
Two years later to the month our second child was due to be born. On my last office visit to Dr. M., he had said, “Better not have it this weekend; I’m going sailing.”
Did he know something he wasn’t telling me? My water broke over my feet after dinner—a turkey leg at the Tip Toe Inn, a delicatessen around the corner on Broadway—on Friday night. I called Dr. M.’s office and was told by his answering service that he was away for the weekend and couldn’t be reached. Dr. Wilson was attending to his patients. Who was Dr. Wilson? I’d never heard of him. Choice-less, I met Dr. Wilson when he came into the labor room to see how far along I was. He was so generic, his manner so impersonal and earnest, that I could not have described him two minutes after he left the room. During labor’s second stage he showed up again. Saying that he wanted to make me “more comfortable,” he asked me to turn onto my side and, without a word about what he was doing, inserted a needle into my spinal column and started injecting a painkiller that numbed everything below my waist. This dispatched the pain within minutes, for which I was properly grateful. It was only afterward that I realized that Dr. Wilson, like Dr. Munnell, was no fan of natural childbirth. If a patient had rights, they were locked away in a safe in the bowels of the hospital.
Hester was born a few hours later. On Monday, a tanned Dr. Munnell breezed into my private room and sat himself down, beaming at me. “I hope you’re not going to wait too long to try for a boy,” he said.
By the end of year five in our marriage—I had stopped working at a job shortly before Susanna was born—I was a whiz at mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs, hot dogs, pancakes, Shake ’n Bake, and Junket. From time to time I still burned the toast. I heard about shallots on a radio cooking show, and one day as we walked up Broadway—we had by this time moved to a six-room apartment at 175 Riverside Drive—I stopped at one of those fruit and vegetable shops seductively spilling onto the sidewalk and asked the proprietor if he had any shallots. “Lady,” he said, “I got enough trouble without shallots.” Another time I asked the same man, “Are these eggs fresh?” He turned away, refusing to answer. Joe thought I’d hurt the man’s feelings.
Our apartment was on the twelfth floor and if you stuck your head far out the bedroom window and looked north, you could see the George Washington Bridge spanning the Hudson River. Almost everything was done for you: Mail and newspapers were delivered to your door. Elevators took you quietly to your floor; garbage disappeared down a chute in the hall. Snow was cleared from off the sidewalk. The super arrived the same day you called him to take care of leaks and stoppages. Joe and I knew only one or two families who lived on the West Side. It was considered not quite up to snuff, somewhat seedy, giving off too strong an odor of the Old World; the opposite of the Upper East Side. On evenings and weekends, we spent a good deal of time walking, with Susanna in her English-made baby carriage, staring at the sky. The Broadway that Isaac Bashevis Singer writes about with inhuman accuracy and affection seemed to me the very center of an energetic cosmos, and the New York that made Singer skeptical—he said it had “all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk”—might have been there, lurking, but I didn’t see it; my glasses were tinged with the pink of living where life’s pulse and throb were on the surface, not buried under layers of rectitude and caution.
On a bitterly cold Sunday in November 1957, with the wind whipping around us as at the top of Mount Washington, Joe and I, with Susanna in her carriage, were walking in Riverside Park when a girl about six or seven emerged from the bushes waving a large pistol. Not pausing to figure out whether or not it was a smart thing to do, I went over to her and said, “Little girl, let me have that gun please.” She obviously didn’t want to, but my tone persuaded her. Having handed it over, she disappeared back into the shrubbery. What followed was a typical urban tale: we called the police from the nearest call box. Two cops showed up in a squad car and whisked Joe off to the local station where they made him sit for two hours in a kind of cage before releasing him with the neat send-off: “I guess you’re legitimate,” and as a coda, “Next time you find a gun, mister, toss it in the river.”
“It apparently never occurred to them,” Joe said later, “that only a lunatic would commit a crime and then call the police to announce he’d found a gun. All I need is to be seen throwing a gun in the river.”
At a party soon after we were married I was asked by a woman devoutly and unhumorously feminist which one of us, I or Joe, made the family’s “administrative decisions.” Unprepared for this challenge, I couldn’t answer. “Who,” she wanted to know, “stops working when one of your children is sick?” “I do,” I said. “I have softer breasts.” She didn’t like this answer and got up from where we both had been sitting and walked off to find someone more compatible to talk to.
Administrative decisions within a family struck me as a pretentious notion. Nevertheless, I was discovering that completing domestic tasks was a complicated business. In 1955 my mother published a book called A Wife Is Many Women in which she nailed it: we will play as many roles as we let society thrust upon us. It was assumed—even by my husband—a statistical freak by virtue of his doing any of the housework at all—that I would be in charge of the laundry, both clothes and linens; I became known as the laundry fairy. If the rug or floor needed vacuuming, I did it. Strict division: Joe became the garbage fairy. Decisions about the children’s health and well-being were largely mine, although we were equally ignorant about caring for infants and toddlers.
Someone responsible should probably have overseen our child care. Within two years Susanna was hit above the eye by a swing, fell off a slide in the playground, giving herself a severe concussion, sucked on a camphor ball she found in a drawer of sweaters, and bit into a tiny flashlight bulb from God knows where. She also opened a floor-level cabinet door, found a bottle of vodka there, took off the top, and lifted it to her mouth just as I came ’round the bend. Any one of these “accidents,” had they been upped one notch, could have killed her. I was so ignorant I thought they were normal mishaps of childhood, that every baby experienced something similar, and I emerged after each one shaken but inculpable, convinced that small children were less fragile than I could have imagined. One of my friends assured me that Susanna was accident-prone. Maybe she was, but by the time Hester arrived two years later, we no longer left camphor balls around to be mistaken for candy.
Every afternoon if it wasn’t raining or snowing I wheeled Susanna in her carriage across Riverside Drive and down several blocks to the playground, where I sat on a bench talking to Maggie, a woman I had struck up a friendship with after seeing her every day for over a month without exchanging more than a cool smile. Maggie was a midwesterner whose principal trait was openness and sweetness, two qualities I wasn’t all that used to. We talked only about babies and food and about how living in New York was so exciting and so hard at the same time; I heard from her that she and her husband were having a tough time adjusting to the city after Des Moines, a place so exotic to me that it might have been Des Moon. Maggie and I had almost no way of calibrating each other except as wife and mother; the only thing we had in common was two children approximately the same age who lived in the same neighborhood. As a basis for genuine affection it seemed as tenuous and unexpected as the fact that I had begun, more or less out of the blue, to write.
I was eight years old before I could extract any meaning from the marks on a page which, when combined, form words. Before this, my mother, alarmed because she seemed to have produced a dummy, took me to be tested for some physical explanation of my slowness. These tests came up negative except they did indicate that I was not only left-handed (surprise!) but severely left-eyed as well; they made me wear a black eye patch over my left eye for nearly a year. My mother, hoping to make me feel less miserable, told me I looked like a pirate, but I knew I looked like a cripple. When I was no closer to reading, she had me tested for mental capacity, the results of which reassured her but not me. I knew I was a dummy.
As an analog to this delay in reading, I was late to start writing. I had been an editor for years, but it never occurred to me that I could do it; writing seemed to me as remote, risky, and difficult an enterprise as taking Victoria Falls inside a barrel.
Writing was an activity that only writers engaged in. You couldn’t expect just anyone to sit down at a typewriter and turn out a readable, let alone a publishable, piece of work. Like glassblowing or conducting an orchestra, writing involved an arcane initiation as well as exquisite, possibly painful, training. How did you make the turn from scribbling fragments in a notebook to having your words set in type for other people to read? What did you have to do to make it happen?
One day, shortly before our first child, was born, I ran into Ellinor, a Brearley School friend, whom I hadn’t seen in several years. Asking her the obligatory—where did she live, what was she doing these days, how were her children—I soon found out that she was taking a fiction writing class at Columbia. As I walked home in a mood now turned sour, I was uneasily aware that Ellinor had triggered a spasm of envy. If she was writing, why couldn’t I, who had been circling words for years? And so, shamelessly prompted by envy, I began the very next day to write a short story on a Royal portable typewriter set up on the dining room table. This was the first time since Barnard, where I had taken a one-semester writing class more or less as a lark, that I was trying to create something out of nothing, but bits and pieces of life, memory, radio programs, books, and movies stored somewhere far below the surface of my daily existence. Up until the day I ran into Ellinor, I had never dared to predict for myself anything as difficult or exhilarating as writing fiction. I had worked at a so-called literary job; now I thought that all I wanted was to be a wife and mother, like most of my Brearley, Wellesley, and Barnard classmates. Justin, tuned into my moods and shifting attitudes, let me know that he wanted for me what I did. That there might be something other than envy, that there might actually be a writer under the mother/wife skin, didn’t occur to me at the time. I just had these stories in my head I had to write down.
The cover that Dr. Kronold, my therapist, had clamped down tight over the container flew off, spewing sensations, connections, and words that I quickly captured like butterflies in a net, and pinned on the page before they could escape. Words poured out of me. They came faster than I could type, faster even than I could think. Starting from scratch, my fiction was light on plot and imagination, heavy on feelings, sensations, nuances; overly dependent on metaphor, I was hesitant about leaving my own house for material—what did I know about anything but a soft life cut off from 99 percent of the world’s population and its concerns? I was a hothouse flower, never having faced hunger, an empty purse, or genuine danger. So I stuck to my own life, as I suppose most beginning writers do, feeling their way, barefoot, across a lawn studded with broken glass. I was terrified and aroused at the same time, almost forgetting to eat. I managed to plow clumsily through to the end of a first story, then began a second.
Susanna’s birth, in May 1957, wiped out any interest I had in producing another story, but after six weeks the pressure to write returned. My heroines—Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, Mavis Gallant, Katherine Mansfield—all were either unmarried, childless, or unconventionally domesticated. The underlying message of this self-denial was not lost on me: it was unwise to try to be wife, mother, and writer simultaneously. The pressure, building daily until it became a distraction, proved irresistible. Each day I waited until Susanna fell asleep for her morning nap, shoved the telephone inside a drawer, and stuffing a couple of pillows on top of it, began to write. I turned out ten stories in one year, none of them any good, although one was sold by an altruistic agent, John Schaffner, whom I knew from my days on discovery. He sold it to a magazine called Audience. The story, “A Better Place,” was about a young woman visibly pregnant with her first child. One day an old boyfriend whom she stopped going out with—high on pretension, low on sense of humor—sees her on the street and pauses to talk. After a few minutes of banal chitchat, he says, “What are you doing to make the world a better place?” This ticks off our heroine, whose defenses are galvanized—because she isn’t doing anything at all except having this baby. She applies to her husband for comfort. He dismisses the man and his challenge as not worth thinking about, and then what’s really worrying her erupts: she’s terrified of childbirth. Knowing how small the cervix is, she wonders aloud how a baby can possibly squeeze through such a tiny opening. As I was writing this story I wasn’t aware of how frightened I had been of giving birth and, subsequently, of being responsible for an infant. Only when I finished it did I realize how close I’d come to my own anxieties. The fiction writer is lucky if she’s in touch with what’s simmering inside her. My first published story was too long for its slender plot and clotted with meandering, self-consciously “literary” prose. Still, it was a start, my first published fiction. Once someone has bought something you have written you can call yourself a writer—but not before. This is the reality: a writer writes not for himself or herself but to be read by others—the more the better.
It never occurred to me that I was “juggling” anything. The feminist movement—at least this particular phase of it—was too soft to be heard and I considered myself incredibly lucky to be able to do the two things I most wanted to do, namely to write fiction and have children.