Eleven

Following Warren’s instructions to look gaunt after his death, I elected to wear black, at least until spring. It was not that I was locked into the old custom of wearing mourning attire, but he absolutely hated to see me dressed in black. By wearing it now, I felt I was fulfilling his admonition not to be a “blooming widow.”

And so it was that five days after the funeral, clad in a black suit, I went into what I will now refer to as the Gordon R. Tavistock office on East Fifty-fifth Street to sign an agreement to write sixty-five four-minute programs for the Portrait of a Patriot series to be aired in thirteen-week cycles.

The office occupied the back half of the third floor of a brownstone located midway between Madison and Park Avenues. My friend Liz worked there, and she filled me in on the fact that the front half of the floor was a residential apartment occupied by another lady of easy virtue who each day walked her toy poodle on Park Avenue and returned with a number of appointments from gentlemen who had stopped to chat with her.

There were only about seven people who actually worked in the brownstone office, including Liz, who was the head writer; Frank, head of sales; Barry, producer/director of the programs; Laurence, the office manager; an accountant whose name I forget; and a couple of typists. The other writers, freelance like me, were hired by the series and worked at home.

Liz had explained that Gordon R. Tavistock—“G.R.” as she called him—had made a bundle of money on a very popular television talent show and had conceived the idea of creating free-of-charge radio programming that would be distributed to radio stations but would have an essential difference from other so-called “filler” material. The stations would agree to schedule the Tavistock series at a specific time each day, and because the programs were hosted by a wellknown personality, the publicity messages built into the announcements were deemed acceptable.

I was told I would meet Bud Collier, the host of my series, at the first recording session. Liz assured me that I shouldn’t be nervous—Bud was a gem.

It was a while before I got to meet G.R. He hated living in New York, which he had decided was full of hippies. He was traveling around the country, looking for a suitable place to live. I immediately got the impression that G.R. was not as easygoing, as unflappable a boss as Sterling Hiles had been.

Laurence, the office manager, a thin, tall, pale, solemn man, who looked twenty years older than his actual age of forty-seven or eight, gave me sample scripts the former writer had done and asked me to submit a list of ten potential patriots for approval by the Grolier Company, the sponsor of the series. He said that I would be expected to be in the studio when the programs were recorded, in case alterations to the script were necessary. Finally, in a dirgelike voice, he welcomed me to the G. R. Tavistock family.

On the way out, I heard the lady of easy virtue in the front apartment arguing with the laundry delivery service. “I gave you sixteen sheets last week,” she was shrieking, “and you only brought back fifteen.”

I could tell I would now be traveling in a very sophisticated world.

It is not always how we act, but how we react that tells the story of our lives.…Laugh and the world laughs with you…God is in His Heaven, and if sometimes he seems not to be listening, it’s only because He’s saving something special for us….

No matter how you slice it, the first year after losing your husband can only be compared to walking barefoot through hell. And it’s just as bad for the children. The loss they have experienced is visible in their eyes.

Daily Mass helped get me through it. “I will go unto the altar of God, the God who gave joy to my youth.” Family and friends did their best to help. My brother-in-law Allan stopped in every evening on the way home from work. He was a rock for all of us. Mother was there 90 percent of the time, and while she was an enormous help, her presence also created an exasperating, but funny, problem.

Now that I was widowed, in her mind she wasn’t only minding my five children. She immediately resumed her role as guardian of another young girl—me.

A week after Warren’s death, Paul Becker, the funeral director, came in to drop off some Social Security application forms for me to fill out. When he arrived, Mother herded the boys upstairs. Patty and Carol were already in bed. In five minutes my visitor was gone, and Marilyn, who had just started her freshman year in high school, turned on her French-language records. For the next thirty minutes, a suave masculine voice asked such questions as “Voulez vous aller à la bibliothèque avec moi?”

When Marilyn finally turned off the record, Mother rushed down the stairs, indignation etched in every line of her face. “Mary, what was that fellow doing talking French to you?” she demanded.

I pointed out that Becker was married to a mortician and asked how I could possibly compete, given their shared interests. “Why just imagine how the two of them must bat the breeze at the end of the day,” I told her.

But Paul Becker did come to cherish us, for a reason that had nothing to do with me personally. There were two funeral parlors in the area, his and a larger establishment. Shortly before Warren died, we had stopped in at a wake at the other one. When we got to the car, he said, “When my heart skips that fatal beat, not this place.” He said it felt as impersonal as the lobby of an empty building.

Once again following his instructions, I made the necessary arrangements with Becker, who turned out to be the antithesis of the funeral directors profiled in the bestselling book of the time that exposed the dark side of that industry, The American Way of Death. If it is possible to say he made that terrible time easier for all of us, he did just that. After we had used his services, the tide changed. Other people began making their funeral arrangements with him, too. “Your tragedy was the turning point in my business career,” he later told me earnestly.

I thought, but didn’t say, “Anything for a friend, Paul.” Some fifteen years later, the kids and I were having dinner on New Year’s Day at a favorite local restaurant. Paul was across the room. The waiter said that Mr. Becker wanted to offer us a drink.

“Put mine on ice,” Warrie said.

“Make mine a stiff one,” David ordered.

I suggested they settle for Sambuca.

Back to Mother’s vigilance. Another evening, about a month after Warren died, I met some friends for a late dinner a couple of towns away. I got home around midnight to find her sitting up, waiting for me. “Mary,” she said, “what are the neighbors going to think of a girl your age walking the streets until this hour of the night?”

Mother had a stack of prayer cards for all her deceased friends and relatives. She was then seventy-six, and the list was long. It took her an hour to go through all of them each night before she went to bed. She liked to sit on a chair in the upstairs hall, where she claimed the light was better. It also was a good spot for her to overhear conversations taking place in the living room below.

Thankfully, I was surrounded by wonderful family and friends. Irene and Ken, Agnes and George Partel, and Norman and Lois Clark (not related to us) often would come over around 9:30 to share a cup of tea or glass of wine and visit with me. Mother liked to tune in to what we were saying, especially on those days when I had gone into the Tavistock office or to the studio for a recording session.

My friends and I would exchange eye signals, then one of them would ask if anything interesting was happening lately. I would start, “Well, actually, at the studio today, the most fascinating…” I’d then drop my voice.

Mother did not realize that even though she was out of sight, when she leaned over the banister to catch what I was saying, her shadow became more and more noticeable on the living room carpet. Finally Norman said, “We’d better cut it out, or else Nora will do a Peter Pan and come flying through the air.”

One thing a new widow needs to realize is that while friends are great, and they care and want to help you, they also have their own lives. You can’t and shouldn’t expect unlimited sympathy. As Annie Potters had told me, “I cried in my bed for my Bill, but people don’t want to hear that all the time. They called me the ‘Merry Widow.’”

Well I wasn’t a “Merry Widow,” but I did try to follow her example and also that of my mother. Mother was always upbeat. Granted, it’s wrenching to have to go to the gatherings or parties alone, but it’s a lot better than not going to them at all. You have to get used to being the third, the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, or the eleventh at the table. The important thing is that you’re there. I made an arrangement with George Partel. If a group of us went out for dinner, when the check came, he would pay for me, then I’d settle with him later. It’s not fair to expect the others to carry you, even if they can afford it.

Only once did someone try to hit on me. He was a guy in town whom I knew only casually. We happened to be at some big gathering, and he sidled over to me. “I know what you’re missing, Mary,” he murmured, adding a suggestive, “any time.”

I stared at him.

“What do you think?” He smiled knowingly.

“I think Warren would not have insulted your widow,” I said, and went home.

Sometimes the wives can consider a new widow a threat. I belonged to the community theater group. One night I was on the buffet line at one of their fund-raisers. A guy who was a colossal bore got on the line behind me and started yakking away. From across the room, a penetrating voice called, “Oh, Mary, dear, just remember, that’s my husband.”

She should live so long that anyone else would want him, I thought.

There is nothing like a large family to keep you from having time for self-pity. In that first year, I made a total of thirteen trips to the emergency room of the local hospital with one or the other of my offspring. The nurses joked that they kept my Blue Cross number taped on the desk at the entrance. I rushed the kids in with cuts and bruises and broken arms and legs. Since almost all of the accidents occurred outside the house—on the ball field, or roller skating, or ice skating, or bike riding—at least no one could accuse me of being an abusive mother.

We got through the first Thanksgiving by having it with June and Allan and their kids. To ease the emotional wrench of Christmas, I decided I’d buy my children anything on their lists, short of a trip to the moon. I have a picture of the six of us standing in front of the tree, surrounded by games and dolls, bicycles and ice skates, a new television set. We all know you can’t buy happiness. If anything is proof of that, it’s that picture. The expression in everyone’s eyes made Dave’s “Give until it hurts” ad for United Way a comedy act.

I loved writing the scripts for Portrait of a Patriot. I’d always been a history buff and found the research fascinating. It was my job to write the four-minute vignettes by starting with a question and then giving clues. It went like this:

(Bud Collier narrating.) “He was the tailor from Tennessee who became president of the United States. Do you know who he is?”

(Blast of music—dadadah!)

“This is Bud Collier with today’s edition of Portrait of a Patriot. Our program is furnished by Grolier, publishers of Encyclopedia Americana, the encyclopedia that belongs in every American home.

“Our subject was born in a shack in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808…”

At midpoint in the script, Collier asked the question, “Have you guessed who he is yet? No? Well here are more clues.”

The script would end with a sentence like, “The first president to be impeached because of his defense of the constitution, he was acquitted by one vote. Our patriot today, the seventeenth president of the United States, Andrew Johnson.”

(Blast of music—dadadahhh!)

“Our program has been furnished by Grolier…” etc., etc.

Other examples: “She was given the family tree when she was fourteen and said, ‘I am nearer to the throne than I realized.’ Do you know who she is?”

That was Queen Victoria.

“Crushed in the hopeless struggle, he said, ‘I will fight again never, no more.’ Do you know who he is?”

That was Tecumseh, the legendary chief of the Shawnee tribe.

At a recording session, I told Bud Collier that now when I went to cocktail parties, I no longer had to make small talk about the weather, that I could come up with little gems like, “Wasn’t Tecumseh the one, though?” His response was that I probably wouldn’t be invited to too many cocktail parties with that kind of ice breaker.

The programs had to be exactly four minutes in length. In the beginning, I didn’t realize that it was very easy to snip a sentence or two off if they ran over, or add an extra beat of music if they ran a trifle short. Barry, the director, did not enlighten me. When I fearfully asked him if my programs had timed out, he would stare at me. “The first was ten seconds over. The fourth was six seconds under.”

I told Liz I was sure I’d be replaced as the writer. She assured me that Barry enjoyed making people squirm.

As I was to learn, so did G. R. Tavistock.

Friends invited me to join them at the inauguration of President Lyndon Johnson in January 1965. We’d be away in Washington for just a few days. Mother urged me to go. She said it would be a nice change for me, and I knew I could use the break. I agreed but wondered if this might not be my chance to break into writing articles for The Westwood Local, our community newspaper. I called and offered to write a report on the inaugural. With my newfound status as a writer of historical programs, I thought they might agree that I was exactly the person to enlighten their readers with my particular insights into the event. The editor hemmed and hawed, but then when I said that of course I wouldn’t expect to be paid, he practically jumped through the phone to accept.

He promptly pulled strings to get me press passes to the various functions. Whoever dispensed them must have confused The Westwood Local with The New York Times because at the inaugural ceremony, I was seated in a prime spot and was given tickets to various events such as the most coveted Inaugural Ball. It was my first taste of “being there,” which is what I called the article I wrote.

It was the first time I’d been present at an inauguration, and because everyone had expected to see John Kennedy sworn in for his second term in office, there was a palpable sadness in the air. I overheard someone say that Bobby Kennedy had made three trips to Arlington Cemetery that day. Still, Lyndon Johnson was an impressive figure as he took the oath of office and promised to launch a “Great Society.” But that promise was made as protests against the Vietnam War could be heard in the distance.

I spoke to Mother every evening for those few days I was in Washington. Everything was fine, she assured me, but when I phoned to say we were getting in the car and would be home by late afternoon, I could tell that something was wrong.

I insisted she tell me what it was, pointing out that it couldn’t be worse than anything I would imagine: Dave had fallen through the ice and had to be rescued, I thought, a feat he’d managed when Warren and I were in Hawaii on the Fab-sponsored vacation. Or perhaps Patty is balking again about going to school. In the first weeks after Warren died, the nuns practically had to peel her off me in the schoolyard. She was afraid to let me out of her sight, and now I’d been away for three days.

But actually I couldn’t have imagined what Mother told me: Allan, only forty-three years old and always in perfect health, had suffered a burst aneurism in his brain.

He died two weeks later, and once again we stood in stark disbelief at the family grave in Gate of Heaven cemetery and watched as his coffin was placed between those of his mother and Warren. Now there were eight fatherless Clark children, ages six to fourteen, and Ken, at thirty-three, had lost his mother and two brothers in the space of only four months.

June, Allan’s widow, and I became each other’s dates. We attended all the various school functions for the kids for the next twelve years until Patty, the youngest, was out of high school. We called ourselves the Dolly Sisters, after Rosie and Jenny Dolly, the showgirl sisters of the 1920s.

That spring, June and I decided to take our broods to Washington over the Easter holiday. Neither one of us was up to coloring Easter eggs or pretending that the Easter bunny was going to hip-hop merrily into our homes. Someone had suggested an apartment rental there. “You’ll love it. So comfortable. Just like home.”

I don’t know whose home he had in mind. We took one look at the dreary rental and paid three times the amount for rooms at the Intercontinental Hotel, which three nights later caught on fire.

We’d spent that last day sightseeing, including a visit to the White House. On the street outside, the anti–Vietnam protesters were marching and chanting. We got back to the hotel in time to let the kids have a swim in the indoor pool. Warrie, age thirteen, had just suffered three of the thirteen accidents that were visited on the family. He’d broken his wrist while roller skating, and just as that healed, he broke his arm in a fall from his bike. Dave had inadvertently sat on the arm cast while backing up from adjusting the television. Warrie had thrown a punch at him, and Dave raised his knee to protect himself.

The result was that Warrie broke his knuckles against Dave’s bony knee. Since he’d have been helpless with two casts, the doctor wrapped the knuckles in thick protective bandages. The next day was April Fool’s Day. When his eighth-grade teacher saw him come in with the cast on his left arm and a thick bandage on his right hand, she’d sternly told him to take the bandages off. There would be no April Fool’s Day nonsense in her classroom. Warrie tried to explain, but she didn’t believe him. Then when he unwrapped the bandage and she saw his swollen knuckles, the poor woman burst into tears.

Since the injured knuckles were purely his own fault, I was getting beyond sympathy. Now they were pretty well healed, and the arm cast would be coming off in another ten days. He wanted to go swimming with the others. I finally relented, provided he agreed to stand by the side of the pool, in water only up to his waist and with his arm out of the water. For insurance, I pinned plastic around the cast. Needless to say, he got the cast wet, and it dissolved. I don’t like to believe what the kids tell me I said to him—“I don’t give a damn if your arm grows in crooked”—but I probably did.

That evening we watched the 6:30 national news together and saw ourselves featured in it. They had photographed the demonstrators in front of the White House, and we happened to be on the line to enter the mansion while the cameras were rolling. June and I agreed it was a good thing we weren’t in Washington with hot dates. Not that we wanted them nor they us. If there’s one thing that I can assure you, it is that very few men are interested in young working widows with a gang of kids to support.

That night about 3:00 A.M., a clang-clang-clang sound boomed through the hotel. I woke up. “What??????” Then thought, FIRE!

I opened the door. Smoke was filling the hallway. No one seemed to be there. We were in a two-bedroom suite. The kids and I were all good sleepers. I wondered how long the alarm had been sounding before I woke up. I rushed to phone June, who was on the other side of the third floor. There was no answer.

I shook the kids awake and herded my little flock to the elevator. When I pushed the button, Warrie raised his now castless arm and pointed to the stairs. “You never take an elevator when there’s a fire.”From the mouths of babes… We rushed down the stairs. Firemen and equipment were everywhere. We found June and her three in a section of the lobby that extended beyond the building and had been deemed safe. We sat there shivering for the next hour or better, joking about our getaway vacation, until we were told to go back to the rooms.

The fire had been in a utility closet and was now out. No harm done. Everything was fine.

We were barely settled back in bed when “clang-clang-clang” again roared through the hotel. Now I was really worried. The fire was probably in the walls, I decided. I can’t believe I actually pushed the elevator button again and once more had to be rereminded by number-one son that you always use the stairs when evacuating.

This time we weren’t in the lobby long. The fire trucks, sirens blasting, returned, but in a few minutes we were assured that someone had tripped the alarm by accident. “Go to bed. Get a good night’s sleep,” they told us.

Right!

When we checked out the next morning, I was on line behind a man who was arguing that he didn’t think he should pay for an expensive room when he’d spent most of the night shivering in the lobby or sniffing for smoke.

Ever ready to save a buck myself, I was thinking, “Go for it, pal,” and praying he’d prevail.

“And it took a guest to call the fire department,” the guy argued. “You people were trying to put it out on your own.”

I waited for the clerk to tear up the bill. Instead, he leaned forward and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Sir, I’m going to share something with you. I worked in a hotel in Boston where three floors were in flames before the management sent for the fire department.”

That was such a stunning lie that the guy gave up arguing. He paid. I paid. June paid. You can’t win ’em all.

They used to say about President Herbert Hoover that he had so keen a memory for names and faces that he could kiss a baby and thirty years later shake the hand of the voter and address him by name.

Obviously, that’s an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that some of us never forget a name or face, while others are genetically hopeless at either. I belong to the second group. I’ve always maintained that if I met my mother in a place where I didn’t expect to find her, and she was wearing a new hat, I’d introduce myself to her. Now that I was going into New York regularly and meeting a host of new people, I was determined to remedy that deficit.

June had a different problem to overcome. She was terribly shy about speaking in public, but she loved politics, was active in the Republican party, and knew that she wanted to run for office someday. Obviously, in order to do that, she needed to be able to overcome her shyness.

We both noticed an ad in the paper for the Dale Carnegie course in self-improvement, meeting one night a week for fourteen weeks. Dale Carnegie, a motivational lecturer and author, had written one of the bestselling books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People. According to the ad, by signing up for the course, we would become more outgoing and more successful. The course also promised to improve our memories so that we would almost never again forget someone’s name. That promise turned me on.

June and I elected to go for it and with some trepidation attended the first session. There were about fifteen of us in the class. The instructor introduced himself. “My name is Fred Vest,” he said, smiling. “Now I want you all to introduce yourselves to me, and then I will demonstrate to you how really easy it is to commit names to memory.”

We dutifully obeyed. He repeated our names, paused, and then greeted us by name, without a moment’s hesitation. “Your names have been committed to my memory,” he said. “I will never forget any of you. Now let me explain how easy it is for you to be proficient in the same way.”

He cleared his throat. “You notice how I repeated each of your names when you introduced yourselves. You must always do that. Then, looking directly at the other person, you must repeat his name twice, picturing it written in bronze across the sky. At the same time, you must associate the name of the person you are meeting with something about him or her that will become your word association that will trigger your memory when you meet him again. For example, my name is Vest. Fred Vest. I am vested with authority in this class. As you write my name in bronze across the sky, keep the thought that I am vested with authority.”

Vest, I thought. He’s vested with authority. I had his name down pat. I was sure of it. Frank Vest. For the next thirteen weeks I called him Frank and either he didn’t notice or didn’t care.

There was a distinct emphasis in the course on learning to raise the tone level of our voice, and therefore raising the tone level of the people around us. The idea was that when you woke up in the morning, even if things weren’t going right, if you were worried about anything or upset about anything, if you got out of bed moody or grouchy or depressed, you would undoubtedly pass those vibes on to everyone you contacted. Your husband or your wife and kids, or the guy at the newspaper stand, or your fellow employees—you could lower their tone levels through your woebegone demeanor or curt greeting.

On the other hand, if you acted cheerful and optimistic and smiling, and had a spring in your step, you’d be passing around good vibrations that would influence everyone you greeted. In turn, they would respond in a cheery way to you, and then they would be influencing the people they greeted, buoyed as they had been by your sunny demeanor.

It made sense to me. All through twelve years of Catholic school, I had been taught to follow the example of St. Francis, and to be an instrument of peace. One sweet elderly nun had warned us that sometime someone might be very rude or unkind to us but that we should never respond in kind. She explained that maybe that poor, dear person had just received terrible news, perhaps about the grave illness of someone he or she loved very much, and had never intended to offend us. Then, too, there was the possibility that the poor, troubled soul who had unwittingly offended us had done so because he or she wasn’t feeling well, or maybe was even very ill and about to die. Wouldn’t it be a terrible burden for our conscience if that person suffered a heart attack a moment after we had lashed out at him or her, leaving us to know that our unkind words were the last words that sweet, troubled soul ever heard on this earth?

That possibility had always worried me. I’m sure my father’s sudden death had a lot to do with it, but I have always had a hard time even telling someone that his big, fat foot was resting on my sore toe. To me, the advice about cheering up the world was simply an extension of everything I’d been taught, but at the Dale Carnegie course, they added a new wrinkle on how to go about it.

The trick, we were told, was that upon awakening, we should sit up in bed, throw out our arms, and shout, “Good morning, day!” Up would go our tone level. Guaranteed. We practiced in class.

The following Saturday, I decided to give it a whirl. Warren had been gone for nine months, and I woke up feeling snake low. Weekends always were harder, because all the men in the neighborhood were around, and their presence emphasized the fact that Warren was gone and that I was alone. I sat up, threw out my arms, and bellowed, “Good morning, day!”

My hand hit something. That something was the tray with a pot of coffee, orange juice, and an English muffin that the kids had laid on the bed. On Saturday mornings, they would do that, then get their own juice or cocoa, come back upstairs and get into bed with me. I called it our “souls at sea” get-together. Pat and Carol would be propped against the head-board to my left and right, while the other three sat cross-legged at my feet. The whole effect kind of resembled a crowded lifeboat.

Following the advice of an article I’d read, I’d changed the décor of the bedroom to give it a different look, my room not our room. Now orange juice and coffee and melted butter were dripping down the sides of the new bedspread and onto the new carpet.

With Carol, in one of our modeling shots.

I ran for a towel, began to sop up the mess, and had a lot of words to mutter under my breath, no three of which were “Good morning, day.”

Actually, June and I were apt Dale Carnegie students and both won awards at the graduation ceremony. The award was a pencil with the reason for the honor printed on the side. June’s pencil read, “First in personal experience,” honoring her final speech at the course. Mine read, “First in human relations.” I absolutely forget what speech I gave to deserve that singular honor, but one night in the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, I was jotting down a phone number, and a guy a few feet away began smiling suggestively at me.

I couldn’t figure him out until I realized that I was using my Dale Carnegie pencil, which announced that I’d won first prize in human relations. Maybe he thought I was advertising.

It was on graduation night that I realized I’d been calling the instructor by the wrong name and humbly accepted the fact that I wasn’t going to become a second Herbert Hoover in the memory department. On the other hand, June went on to become a very effective speaker and was elected a freeholder in Bergen County, a position she held for years.

My first bona-fide date was with a fellow student from the course. He was on temporary assignment in the area with his company, and I think he signed up for the course simply to pass the time. Alas, I don’t remember his name. He was a pleasant-looking, quiet guy in his early fifties, and when he invited me to have dinner with him the following Friday night, I thought, Why not? It would be a welcome change from always being the extra woman at the table.

I’d been at the Tavistock office all that day. I got caught in traffic, and when I arrived home, I was only ten minutes ahead of the time he was expected. The kids had already eaten, and before I rushed upstairs to shower and change, I reminded them I was having dinner with a friend, that they should invite him in when he arrived and make him feel welcome.

They hadn’t really paid attention to the fact that I was going out, but now I was peppered with questions: “Who is he?”

“Do we know him?”

“Is Aunt June going with you?”

It was obvious they were not happy with the thought that I was going out by myself with a strange man.

Marilyn, now fourteen, came upstairs about fifteen minutes later as I was putting on makeup. “Your father’s here,” she announced. “He’s very big on hurricanes. That’s all he’s been talking about since he walked in the door.”

When I got downstairs, my fellow Dale Carnegie student was sitting in the wing chair, across from the couch. My five offspring were lined up and gazing at him, their expressions polite, but bored.

“But it wasn’t as bad as the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico ten years ago,” he was saying.

He knew I had children. Knowing about them and seeing them in the flesh, however, were two different matters. Anyhow, if the Dale Carnegie course had helped him to develop a winning personality, I couldn’t find it that evening, nor did he notice mine. When he dropped me off at home at ten o’clock, the kids were in the den watching television.

They looked up to see my reaction to my date. I realized that maybe they’d been worried about it. I said, “The hurricane in Puerto Rico didn’t hold a candle to the one in Timbuktu.”

“What a jerk,” was their relieved comment.

That very nice man wasn’t a jerk, but they didn’t want any man to become part of their lives and neither did I. If there was one thing I was absolutely certain wouldn’t happen, it was that I’d get involved with anyone. There were two good reasons for that certainty. The first was that it’s hard enough for the natural parent to raise children. You would willingly give your life for them, but on the other hand there are times you want to send one or the other of them into orbit.

I knew immediately that I’d never take the chance of having my children in the position of having a stepfather who might not get along with all of them. I was certain that it would be better for them to grow up with the memory of a father they knew had loved them dearly and equally.

The second reason was that I wanted to give them a good education. I wanted them to go to fine colleges and to graduate school if they were so inclined. To achieve that goal, I had to work. I didn’t want any man to be in the position of dictating where my children would be educated.

Suppose someone had come along who was reasonably successful and wanted me to be available to be a stay-at-home wife? That would make me totally dependent on someone else’s generosity, and I wasn’t about to be placed in that position.

That doesn’t mean that even in that first year I didn’t hope that someday when the kids were grown up I’d meet someone I could care about. I missed being married. I missed the companionship, the closeness, the friendship that is the essence of a good marriage. In my diary I wrote, “The world goes two by two.”

Warrie graduated from the eighth grade in June. There was a party for the graduates, and he invited one of the girls in his class. He asked me to drive them. When we got in the car, he climbed into the backseat. “When we pick her up, don’t say anything, Mom, just drive, okay?”

On the way to his friend’s house, I felt a sudden sense of panic. I realized a new chapter was beginning. I was dealing with a son who was growing up fast, who was on his first date. How do you raise adolescent boys without a father? Would he put his arm around the girl? Would he kiss her good night? What about the facts of life? How much did he know?

Warrie interrupted my reverie. “It’s this house.” He got out of the car. “Now, remember, just drive, okay?”

“Sure.”

A moment later he returned, escorting a pretty thirteen year old with bouncy golden hair and a great figure. She nodded to me shyly. I nodded back, keeping my promise to say nothing. They got into the backseat.

“You know what?” she asked Warrie.

She sounded seductive. I strained to hear what she was about to tell him.

“What?” Warrie asked.

“My dog threw up today.”

“Oh, gee, that’s too bad.”

I relaxed. If that was the level of conversation, for the present, at least, I didn’t have to worry about budding teenage romances.

It wasn’t hard to keep busy. I was given a second radio series to write, The Alcoa News Calendar. The format was current events–type news followed by a safety hint from the FBI. The Alcoa company was one of the sponsors of the then popular television series The FBI, and the safety hint served as a daily plug for the series.

I based what I wrote on information sent to me by an FBI agent, who had to approve every word before it was aired. The safety hints went like this:

“If you’re going shopping and the parking area is crowded, be sure to park your car in a well-lighted area. However, if you ever feel you’re being followed, run to the nearest well-lighted house and ring the bell. If on the other hand, you feel you are going to be cornered, take off your shoe, hold it by the toe, and aim the heel at the bridge of the nose of your attacker.”

Another one began, “If you’re alone in the house and hear footsteps on the stairs…”

I’d always honestly claimed that I’d never been nervous anywhere, but after I’d been writing that series for a while, I found my eyes darting for a potential predator as I got in my car, soaked in my tub, or awakened to a strange sound in the night.

I took on a third series, The Art of Gift-Giving, furnished by S&H Green Stamps. S&H had a slogan for the stamps: “For all your gift-giving needs, even for the gift you want just for yourself.”

The format was for me to write about famous gifts in history, poignant gifts, funny gifts, gifts that changed the course of a life, gifts that led to another career. Bess Myerson was the celebrity narrator for this series. Like the Portrait of a Patriot series, it began with a question. Example: “Do you know about the gift that was turned against the giver?”

That program was about George III, America’s last king. Upon learning that his American colonists were getting restive, he sent over a statue of himself on horseback as a gift. When the Revolution broke out, the colonists melted it down and used it for bullets.

Or: “Do you know about the gift Queen Victoria gave her grandson?”

Victoria wrote in her diary that her grandson, Willie, the future Kaiser Wilhelm, was a tiresome little boy, but when he turned twenty-one, her birthday present to him was Mount Kilimanjaro.

I enjoyed doing the research necessary for all the series, but the days began to feel as though there weren’t enough hours in them.

The goal at the G. R. Tavistock office was to keep the series on the air. The longer they ran, the more profitable they were, because the start-up costs were being amortized. That was why whenever a series was up for renewal, it was crisis time. Everyone was dedicated to making that renewal happen. When a series was canceled, the wrath of G.R. descended upon the office.

Gordon Tavistock was a strikingly handsome man with a powerful personality. If you didn’t work for him, you’d find him charming. Working for him, however, was another kettle of fish. That first year I was a freelance writer, and as long as my scripts were good and on time, all was well. But then he sent word that I was needed in the office to have regular client contact and to go out on sales calls to advertising agencies and sponsors. He said that I could continue to write my current three series on the side.

The change in duties meant commuting into New York every morning and not getting home until 6:30 at night. Mother was absolutely against the idea. “Stay home and mind your children, Mary,” she urged. But I really didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t make even half the money somewhere else, and I didn’t want my children to be “gee whiz” kids who couldn’t attend the schools their friends were attending, or who couldn’t even consider going on school trips because there wouldn’t be money to send them. Being present in the office also meant that I could have a chance to be the writer of a new series if any of the ones I was working on were canceled, and that was terribly important.

I was aware that churning out the scripts was helping me to become a better all-around writer. When you have to tell a story in four minutes less product credit lines, you learn to write succinctly. I didn’t realize at the time that I was in training to be a suspense writer, in a genre where every word has to move the action forward.

When the first anniversary of Warren’s death came around, a new phase of my life began—carpooling into New York with my brother-in-law Ken and Clem Weber, whose wife, Rose, was one of my closest friends. When you’re commuting to business with men, it’s not like going out for a leisurely lunch with the girls. You have to be precisely on time when the car pulls into the driveway to pick you up.

Mornings became a scramble. The rushed routine went something as follows: Wake the kids up at quarter of seven. Get breakfast on the table. Skinny as the boys were, they were hearty breakfast eaters. Carol had a hard time waking up. I practically had to dress her, then shake her awake at the table. Patty, still loath to go to school, claimed to have a stomachache every day.

“You’re going to school,” I’d say firmly.

“My stomach really hurts.”

“You’re going to school, Pat.”

Marilyn, now a sophomore in high school, seemed always to be looking for her homework or lunch bag as her carpool waited outside.

By twenty of eight, they were on their way. At quarter of eight, Clem, with Ken next to him in the front seat, pulled into my driveway, and I ran to the car. As often as not, my hair was still up, my makeup and jewelry at the bottom of my purse, and sometimes my stockings still needed to be pulled on. The guys said it was indecent to look into the backseat until we reached the George Washington Bridge because I was still dressing. Clem’s wife, Rose, said, “It’s a good thing I know you so well, Mary. Otherwise I’d be wondering why I sometimes find a pink curler or a lipstick in the back of my husband’s car.”

Portrait of a Patriot was my first and favorite series. Naturally it was necessary to do at least one program each on all the presidents. I had deliberately put off writing about George Washington because I considered him abysmally dull. The idiotic stories I had heard about him, such as “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree,” had given me the impression that he was a world-class nerd. I had read also that he had been in love with his best friend’s wife, and married Martha, an older, wealthy woman, for her money. The picture of the two of them, obviously mature, with young children at their feet, reinforced that nerdy impression. Then, too, he appeared so grim in all the portraits. Did he ever smile? I wondered.

Nonetheless, I had to write about him for the series, so I began to do research on him. The more I read, the more I realized how badly I had misjudged him. Washington was a towering and fascinating figure. Over six feet three at a time when most men were five feet seven or less, he stood literally head and shoulders above his peers. To my astonishment, I learned that he was considered the best dancer in the colony of Virginia. He also was a superb rider, so much so that the Indians paid him their highest compliment: “He walks and rides his horse like an Indian.” At twenty-six, he became a hero of the French and Indian War. At age sixteen, he had developed a huge crush on the so-called love of his life, eighteen-year-old Sally Carey Fairfax. They remained lifelong friends, but Martha was the true love of his life. Yes, she was older, but only eight months older—twenty-seven to his twenty-six—when they married.

Like Lady Bird Johnson, Martha was never called by her given name. When she was little, her father had decreed that Martha was much too formidable a name for such a tiny girl and nicknamed her Patsy. George called her “My dearest Patsy.” She went through the British lines to join him in Boston. She spent the winter in Valley Forge with him.

I wrote a number of scripts about George and Martha Washington, and as I did, an idea began to form in my head. I missed the printed word. I enjoyed writing the radio programs, but they vanished after they’d been aired. On the other hand, I could pick up a magazine that was eight or nine years old and still see my story in print. I wanted to be in print again.

My agent, Pat Myrer, had been urging me to write a novel. “There’s no market for short stories,” she reminded me.

I started thinking about writing a novel about George Washington, one in which the facts and events would be historically accurate, one that would be written from his viewpoint. The seed began to grow. But when would I find the time to do it? There was only one answer: I’d have to get up at five o’clock and work until quarter of seven, when I got the kids up for school.

The first few mornings of the new routine were tough. When the alarm went off, my inclination was to slap my finger on it and close my eyes. But it wasn’t that hard to get used to rising early. And once I was at the kitchen table with the typewriter in place and a cup of coffee at my elbow, it was sheer bliss to be able to work, knowing that the phone wasn’t going to ring, that one of the children wouldn’t need something immediately.

I started to outline the book. I made a couple of flying trips to Mount Vernon. I immersed myself in nonfiction books about G.W. I began the first chapter. I bumped into Pat Myrer on Park Avenue. “Write,” she urged me.

“I’m writing a novel,” I said happily.

“Marvelous. What about?”

“George Washington.”

Seeing Pat’s stunned expression, I forged ahead, gushing about the great love story I would tell about George and Martha.

Pat interrupted me. “Love story between those two? Mary, with those wooden teeth, the only thing George ever gave Martha was splinters.”

But it was an itch I had to scratch. I had to write that book. I knew I was on my way to becoming a novelist.