PRISS CROCKETT, WHO BROUGHT Stephen to play in Central Park every morning, was surprised one June day, when she arrived pushing the stroller and followed by Stephen, to see a familiar figure seated on a bench with a baby carriage. It was Norine Schmittlapp, wearing a smart pair of slacks and black sunglasses. The hood of the carriage was down, and on the carriage mattress, which was covered with a rubber sheet, lay a naked infant, male. Priss halted; it was “her” bench Norine was occupying. She was uncertain whether Norine would recognize her; it must be five years since they had met. Norine had changed; she had put on weight and her hair was blondined. “Hi,” said Norine, looking up briefly. “Join us. This is Ichabod.” She joggled the baby carriage. Her tinted gaze sought out Stephen, who was pulling an educational toy along the walk. “Is that yours?” Priss presented her young. “Say how do you do, Stephen, to the lady.” She did not know how to introduce Norine, who evidently had remarried. Norine shook Stephen’s hand. “Norine Rogers. Glad to know you.” On her engagement finger was a huge diamond in a platinum setting, and the baby carriage was an English model with a monogram. “Do you come here every day?” she asked Priss.
They were neighbors, it seemed. She had just moved into a brownstone, between Park and Madison, that she and her husband had bought; Priss’s apartment was on Lexington and Seventy-second. “But you’re lucky,” said Priss enviously. “You must have a back yard. You don’t need to come to the Park.” She herself found it quite a chore, mornings, to push the stroller all the way from Lexington and get back in time to put Stephen’s baked potato in the oven for a twelve o’clock lunch. Norine said that her back yard was still full of glass bricks and cement-mixers. They were doing the house over, putting in a ramp where the stairs had been and a wall of glass bricks on the street side. Priss realized that Norine’s house must be the one the whole neighborhood was discussing; she wondered what Rogers Norine could have married. “My husband’s a Jew,” Norine threw out. “His people changed the name from Rosenberg. Do you mind Jews? I’m mad for them myself.” Before Priss could answer, she continued, talking in the rapid-fire way Priss remembered, as if she were dictating a letter. “Freddy’s whole tribe converted. When they changed their name. He’s a confirmed Episcopalian. I was hellbent to have him go back to the old Orthodox faith. With a prayer shawl and phylacteries. The real Mosaic law. The Reformed rite is just a nineteenth-century compromise. But an Orthodox Jew can’t marry a shiksah.” Priss was surprised to hear this. Norine nodded. “They frown on exogamy. Like the Papists. The Episcopalians have a taboo on divorce; Freddy’s minister wouldn’t marry a divorced woman. So we got a Lutheran pastor in Yorkville. Freddy’s parents expected to see a framed picture of Hitler in the dominie’s parlor.” She laughed. “Are you interested in religion?” Priss confessed that she was more interested in politics. “I’m burned out on politics,” said Norine. “Since Munich. My passion’s comparative religion. Society is finished if it can’t find its way back to God. The problem for people like us is to rediscover faith. It’s easy for the masses; they never lost it. But for the elite it’s another story.”
Her eyes fixed on Stephen. “This your only offspring?” Priss explained that she had had a series of miscarriages, but she still hoped to have more children, for it would be sad for Stephen to grow up as an only child. “Adopt some,” said Norine. “It’s the only way. If the elite can’t breed, it has to graft new stock or face extinction. Do you know that the Vassar graduate has only 2.2 children?” Priss was aware of this statistic, which had caused concern in alumnae circles—Vassar women were barely replacing themselves while the rest of the population was multiplying. “What does your husband do?” Norine demanded. “He’s a pediatrician.” “Oh,” said Norine. “What school?” Priss began to tell her where Sloan had been trained. Norine cut her off. “What school of thought. Behaviorist? Gestalt? Steiner? Klein? Anna Freud?” Priss was ashamed to say that she did not know. “He’s a medical doctor,” she said apologetically. Then she essayed a personal question of her own.
“What does your husband do, Norine?” Norine chuckled. “He’s a banker. With Kuhn, Loeb. He comes from old moneylending stock. From Frankfort originally. But they had a Diaspora and they’re scattered all over the place. The black sheep of the family became a Zionist and went to Palestine. They never mention his name. Freddy’s parents were trying to pass,” she went on somberly. “Like so many rich German Jews. They sent him to Choate and Princeton, where he had a searing experience with one of the clubs. When the club found out ‘Rogers’ was ‘Rosenberg,’ he was asked to resign.” Priss made a clucking sound, to which Norine replied with a short laugh. It was as if this incident gave her a peculiar kind of relish.
Priss glanced at little Ichabod, who, she observed, had been circumcised, and felt guiltily glad that Stephen did not have a Jewish father. It struck her, awful as it sounded, that if you wanted to give your child the best start in life, you would not marry a Jew. But Norine, she supposed, was dauntless on his behalf; Priss felt in awe of a person who could fasten a name like that on a baby. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll be called ‘Icky’ in school?” she said impulsively. “He’ll have to learn to fight his battles early,” philosophized Norine. “Ichabod the Inglorious. That’s what the name means in Hebrew. ‘No glory.’” She rocked the carriage.
“How old is he?” “Three months.” Priss wished Norine would raise the hood of the carriage; she feared the mid-morning sun was too strong for his little head, which had scarcely any hair yet. “Isn’t he awfully young for a sun bath?” Norine scouted the thought; she had been exposing him to the sun daily since she had brought him home from Mount Sinai. Nevertheless, she slightly raised the hood, so that his face was in the shade. “It’s O.K. here,” she observed contentedly. “No nursemaids or English nannies. The place I was yesterday, they made an awful stink because he was nude. They were afraid their starchy girls would get ideas from his little prick—weren’t they, Ichabod?” Her big hand patted his penis, which stiffened. Priss swallowed several times; she glanced uneasily in the direction of Stephen, who, happily, was chasing his ball in the grass. She was always terrified of arousing Stephen; she hated retracting his foreskin when washing him, though Sloan said she should, for hygienic reasons. But she would almost rather he was dirty than have him get an Oedipus complex from her handling him. Lately, without telling Sloan, she had been omitting this step from his bath.
“Have you got a watch?” Norine asked, yawning. Priss told her the time. “Are you nursing?” she asked, stealing an envious look at Norine’s massive breasts. “My milk ran out,” said Norine. “So did mine!” cried Priss. “As soon as I left the hospital. How long did you nurse?” “Four weeks. Then Freddy slept with the girl we had looking after Ichabod, and my milk went on strike.” Priss gulped; the story she had been about to relate, of how her milk had run out as soon as they gave Stephen a supplementary bottle, was hastily vetoed on her lips. “I ought to have seen it coming,” Norine went on, lighting a cigarette. “We hadn’t had real sex together for a coon’s age. You know how it is. At the end of your pregnancy it’s verboten and it’s verboten for a month after the kid’s born. Freddy got very randy. And he felt he had a rival in Ichabod. Then we hired this Irish slut. Straight off the boat. She was a cousin of Freddy’s mother’s waitress. A real Mick. Eyes put in with a sooty finger and no sexual morals. In the old sod, she’d been sleeping with her uncle; she told me that. Naturally Freddy couldn’t keep his hands off her. She had a room next to the nursery, where Freddy slept on a cot; I kept Ichabod in bed with me at night—it bushed me to get up for those 2:00 A.M. feedings—and Freddy said he disturbed him.” Priss was sorely tempted to put in a word of guidance—did Norine not know that under no circumstances, not even in a crowded slum home, should a baby be permitted to sleep with an adult? But her shyness and fear of stammering impeded her. “Freddy,” Norine continued, “was sneaking into her room. I found out when I was making her bed. There was Freddy’s semen on the sheet. What got me was that she hadn’t had the grace to use a towel. I pulled the sheet off the bed and confronted Freddy with it while he was eating his breakfast and reading the Wall Street Journal. He said it was partly my fault. Instead of treating her like a servant, I’d waited on her hand and foot, so that she felt she had a right to sleep with the master: she was just as good as me. Making her bed, for instance. It was up to her to make her own bed. He’s right; I’m no good with labor. He had to put her out of the house himself. While he did, I washed the sheet in the washing machine; he said I should have left it for the laundress. We quarreled, and it affected my milk.”
“They say a shock can do that,” said Priss. “But at least Ichabod got his immunities.” Norine agreed; the damage, she said absently, would be psychic. She reached into the carriage and found a rubber pacifier, which she thrust into his mouth. Priss gazed at this article, nonplused. “Is that to keep him from sucking his thumb?” she asked. “You know, Norine, pediatricians today think it’s better to let them suck their thumbs than try to break them of the habit. What I did with Stephen was distract him gently every time he put his thumb in his mouth. But that p-p-pacifier”—the word seemed to stick in her throat—“is awfully unsanitary. And it can change the shape of his mouth. You really ought to throw it away. Sloan would be shocked if he saw it. It can be just as habit-forming as thumb-sucking.” She spoke earnestly, amazed to see a girl of Norine’s education so ignorant. Norine listened patiently. “If a kid sucks his thumb,” she said, “it’s because he’s been deprived of oral gratification. He needs his daily quota of sucking time, and he can’t get it from the bottle. So you give him a rubber tit. Don’t you, Ichabod?” She smiled tenderly at Ichabod, who indeed wore a look of bliss as he drew on the rubber teat. Priss tried to avert her eyes from the spectacle. For a child to find heaven in a dummy breast was the worst thing she could think of—worse than self-abuse. She felt there ought to be a law against the manufacture of such devices.
Stephen approached the carriage. “Wass sat?” he asked curiously. His hand went out to touch the pacifier in the baby’s mouth. Priss snatched his hand away. He continued to stare eagerly, evidently interested by the noises of content Ichabod was making. “Wass sat?” he repeated. Norine removed the pacifier from the baby’s mouth. “You want to try it?” she said kindly. She wiped it with a clean diaper and offered it to Stephen. Priss swiftly intervened. She reached into the stroller and drew out a lollipop wrapped in waxed paper. “Here!” she said. “That ‘pop’ belongs to the baby. Give it back to Mrs. Rogers. This is yours.” Stephen accepted the lollipop. Priss had discovered that a system of exchange worked very well with him; he would docilely trade a “bad” thing, like a safety pin, for a “good” thing, like a picture book, and often seemed to be unaware that a substitution had taken place.
Norine observed this little drama. “You’ve got him trained,” she said finally, with a laconic smile. “I suppose he’s trained to the toilet too.” “I’m afraid not,” said Priss, embarrassed. She lowered her voice. “I’m at my wits’ end, honestly. Of course, I’ve never punished him, the way our mothers and nurses did, when he has an ‘accident.’ But I almost wish I could spank him. Instead, I’ve done everything you’re supposed to. You know. ‘Observe the time of day when he has his movement and then gently put him on the toidey-seat at that time every morning. If he doesn’t do it, take him off, without any sign of displeasure. If he does do it, smile and clap your hands.’”
Norine had touched on her most sensitive point. As the wife of a pediatrician, she was bitterly ashamed that Stephen, at the age of two and a half, was not able to control his bowels. He not only made evil-smelling messes in his bed, at naptime, but he sometimes soiled his pants here in the Park, which was why she sought out this isolated bench, rather than take him to the playground. Or he did it—like last weekend—in his bathing trunks on the beach at the Oyster Bay clubhouse, in front of the whole summer colony, who were sunning and having cocktails. Sloan, even though he was a doctor, was extremely annoyed whenever Stephen did it in public, but he would never help Priss clean Stephen up or do anything to relieve her embarrassment. Last weekend, for instance, it was her young sister Linda who had come to her rescue when Stephen had got away from her and capered down the beach with his full bathing trunks. Linda had captured him and carried him into the clubhouse, where she helped Priss by washing out his pants while Priss washed him. Meanwhile Sloan had sat under an umbrella ignoring the whole episode.
Afterward he had told her that she and her sister had made an unnecessary hullabaloo. Yet it was the only sphere where he could say she had failed with Stephen. He did not wet his bed any more; he ate his vegetables and junkets; he was obedient; he hardly ever cried now, and at night he went to sleep at his appointed time, surrounded by his stuffed animals. She could not see where she had erred in training him. Neither could her mother. Together, they had retraced the whole history, from the first mornings she had set him on the new toidey-seat strapped to the regular toilet. Immediately, he had changed the time of his movement. It jumped from nine o’clock to ten to seven and all around the clock, with Priss and the young girl she had had helping her chasing it in vain. Whenever they judged, from his expression, that he needed to “go,” they would clap him on the toidey, so that he would associate the two ideas. But no matter how long they lay in ambush for him or how patiently they waited once he was on the seat, usually he disappointed them. Often, as soon as they took him off, he would do it in his crib.
When he was smaller, Priss had tried to think that he did not understand what was wanted of him, and Sloan had authorized her to grunt and make pushing grimaces, to encourage him to imitate her. But her grunts produced no results except to make her feel foolish. She tried leaving him on the toidey alone, so that he would not suppose it was a game the two of them were playing. She tried leaving him there longer, but Sloan said five minutes was enough. On the rare occasions when—by pure chance, it seemed to Priss—he “performed,” she moderated her pantomime of approval, so that he would not sense it as a punishment when she did not smile or clap.
Sloan’s belief was that Priss’s nervousness was to blame, just as it had been with her nursing. “He senses your tension when you put him on the toilet. Relax.” Yet Sloan himself would have been far from relaxed if he had had to clean up Stephen’s bed when he had fouled his toys and stuffed animals. Sloan always said that the right way was to avoid even the appearance of censure when that occurred. “Just be matter-of-fact. Act as though nothing had happened.” But that would be a lie. By this time, Stephen must know, though she had never reproached him by word or sign, that she did not really like him to do Number Two in his bed. In fact, it had become clear to her that not only did he know but enjoyed the knowledge. Particularly on a day when she would lead guests to his room after a luncheon party and find that “it” had happened. Seeing the ladies flee from the scene of the crime, he responded with gurgles and crows. Priss suspected there was a streak of rebellion tucked away in Stephen, which expressed itself by thwarting her in this particular way. As if he had read a handbook on pediatrics and knew that this was one naughty action for which he could not be punished; instead, he could punish her.
This thought was too morbid to be discussed, even with her mother. Could a two-and-a-half-old plot and carry out a scheme of revenge? And for what? Alas, in her darkest moments, Priss feared she knew. For the bottle he had got too late, for the schedule he had been held to, on the minute: six, ten, two, six, ten, two. Perhaps even for this “sucking” Norine talked about that he had missed. For never having been picked up when he cried, except to have his diaper changed or be given a drink of water. For the fact, in short, that his father was a pediatrician. Everyone, including Mrs. Hartshorn, who had begun as a skeptic, now exclaimed over how well the new regime had worked; they had never seen a two-year-old so strong, so big, so well behaved and self-sufficient. Priss’s friends, when they came to dinner, were amazed to observe that Stephen went to bed without any discussion. Priss sang to him; he had his arrowroot cookie, his drink of water, and his kiss. Then he was tucked in, and out went his light. He did not call out to have it turned on again or ask for his door to be left open. “He was trained as an infant,” Sloan would say, passing the hors d’oeuvres. “Priss never went in to him, once he’d been stowed away for the night. And we accustomed him to noise. He’s never had a pillow.” Not one of Priss’s friends could match that; they had tried to follow the broad principles, but they had weakened on some detail, with the result that their young disturbed the parents’ cocktail hour with pleas for drinks of water, light, attention generally; they were afraid of the dark or had food crotchets or refused to take naps. The point, Sloan said, was to have the force of character to stick to the system absolutely, except in cases of illness or on trips. Stephen had got a good start in life because Priss had never compromised. This was what Priss endeavored to think herself, encouraged by her friends’ admiration. Yet at times she furtively wondered whether when Stephen made messes in his pants he was not getting his own back for being alive at all.
“I hope you’ll be luckier than I’ve been,” she said sadly to Norine. “Have you started toilet training yet? Sloan has a theory that we waited too long. If you begin early enough, he says, there’s no reason a baby should be harder to train than an animal.” Norine shook her head. She did not plan to train Ichabod. He needed the fun of playing with his own excrement, just as he needed sucking. “When he’s ready to use the toilet, he’ll ask for it. Probably when he starts nursery school. The pressure of the group will encourage him to give up his anal pleasures. You’ll find, when you put yours in nursery school, that he’ll make the great renunciation.” She did not plan to wean Ichabod either—that is, from the bottle. He would wean himself when he was Stephen’s age, and, if he did not, tant pis.
“Where in the world did you get such ideas?” Not, Priss was certain, from a reputable pediatrician; Norine must have got hold of some quack. They were based on anthropology, Norine explained. Scientists had been watching the habits of primitive peoples and drawing valuable conclusions. The Pueblo Indians, for instance, who were the crème de la crème of the Indian world, did not wean their children till they were two or three years old. Most primitive peoples did not bother about toilet training at all. “But they have no toilets,” said Priss. Norine nodded. “That’s the price of our culture. If you have a flush toilet, you make a fetish of it. Have you read Margaret Mead? A great woman, that.”
Needless to say, Ichabod was not on a schedule. He created his own schedule. He was picked up whenever he cried and was fed “on demand.” “What about baby foods? Are you going to give him baby foods?” Norine did not know. But she was against feeding a baby a restricted diet. “Babies are tough,” she said. “They’ll choose their own diet if you offer them a variety of foods.” Priss said that she thought girls today were perhaps making it too easy for themselves by opening a jar of baby food, instead of pureéring fresh vegetables at home and pressing beef in the ricer for beef juice. The question did not appear to interest Norine. Indeed, the discussions that raged in pediatric circles—how soon to start orange juice, evaporated milk versus Borden’s, bottled baby foods versus homemade, enemas versus glycerine suppositories, the merits of Pablum, the new three-hour feeding schedule for hungry babies (Priss and Sloan had pioneered that!)—seemed never to have reached her ears. Ichabod, she repeated, would make his own decisions; already he had shown a taste for Italian spaghetti—she made a practice of offering him scraps of food from her plate. She did not possess a baby scales or a bathinet. He was bathed in the washbasin. She stared reflectively at Stephen. “How old is he? Three?” “Two and a half next Saturday.” Norine pondered. “In his day, of course, you were still hipped on scales and clocks and thermometers. The age of measurement. God, it seems a long time ago!” She yawned and stretched her big frame. “We had a late night last night. Some Jesuits for dinner. And somebody playing the drums. Then Ichabod burned the candle at both ends.”
Priss girded her loins for combat; it was plain to her that Norine was talking through her hat. “The age of measurement is just beginning,” she said doughtily. “For the first time we’re establishing norms. In all fields. You ought to keep up with the latest developments. Have you heard about Gesell’s studies at Yale? Finally we’re going to have a scientific picture of the child. Gesell shows us what to expect in terms of achievement of a one-year-old, a two-year-old, a three-year-old. When he publishes his findings in p-p-popular form, every mother will have a y-yardstick.”
This time Norine smothered her yawn. “I know Gesell’s work. He’s a fossil relic of behaviorism. His daughter was ’35.” “What does that prove?” demanded Priss. Norine declined to argue. “You still believe in progress,” she said kindly. “I’d forgotten there were people who did. It’s your substitute for religion. Your tribal totem is the yardstick. But we’ve transcended all that. No first-rate mind can accept the concept of progress any more.” “You used to be such a radical,” protested Priss. “Don’t you admire some of what Roosevelt is doing? TVA, rural electrification, the Farm Resettlement Administration, crop control, Wages and Hours. Granting that he’s made some mistakes—” “I still am a radical,” interrupted Norine. “But now I fathom what it means—going back to the roots. The New Deal is rootless—superficial. It doesn’t even have the dynamism of fascism.”
“Does your husband agree with your ideas?” “Does yours?” retorted Norine. “No,” Priss had to admit. “Not about politics. We’re at daggers drawn.” Right now, they were quarreling about Danzig; Sloan did not care if Hitler gobbled up the whole of Europe—he was for America first. “The old Vassar story,” commented Norine. “I leave politics to Freddy. Being a Jew and upper crust, he’s profoundly torn between interventionism abroad and laissez faire at home. Freddy isn’t an intellectual. But before we were married, we had an understanding that he should read Kafka and Joyce and Toynbee and the cultural anthropologists. Some of the basic books. So that semantically we can have the same referents.” Priss wondered that Norine should have left out Freud. “Most of Freud’s out of date,” Norine declared. “He was too narrowly a man of his place and time. The old Austrian Empire, with its folkways, he took for a universal culture. Jung has more to say to me. And some of the younger post-Freudians. Not that I don’t owe a lot to Freud.”
Priss, who had always been planning to read Freud some day when she had the time, felt relieved and disappointed to hear that it was no longer necessary. Norine, she presumed, knew about such things. She sounded almost as if Freud were dead. Priss had a flutter of anxiety that she might have missed reading his obituaries in the papers; she seemed to have missed so much. “Of course,” Norine was saying, “between Freddy and me there’s a deep cultural conflict. Our Vassar education made it tough for me to accept my womanly role. While Freddy, as a Jew, instinctively adopts the matriarchal principle. He wants me to reign in the home while he goes to the counting-house. That’s great, as far as Ichabod goes; he doesn’t interfere with my program and he keeps his mother muzzled. Freddy’s philoprogenitive; he’s interested in founding a dynasty. So long as I can breed, I’m a sacred cow to him. Bed’s very important to Freddy; he’s a sensualist, like Solomon. Collects erotica. He worships me because I’m a goy. Besides, like so many rich Jews, he’s a snob. He likes to have interesting people in the house, and I can give him that.” She broke off and gave vent to a sigh. “The trouble is—The trouble is—” She dropped her voice and looked around her. “Christ, I can say it to you. You probably have the same problem.” Priss swallowed nervously; she feared Norine was going to talk about sex, which was still Priss’s bête noire.
“The trouble is my brains,” said Norine. “I was formed as an intellectual by Lockwood and those other gals. Freddy doesn’t mind that I can think rings around him; he likes it. But I’m conscious of a yawning abyss. And he expects me to be a Hausfrau at the same time. A hostess, he calls it. I’ve got to dress well and set a good table. He thinks it ought to be easy because we have servants. But I can’t handle servants. It’s a relic, I guess, of my political period. Freddy’s taken to hiring them himself, but I demoralize them, he says, as soon as they get in the house. They take a cue from my cerebralism. They start drinking and padding the bills and forgetting to polish the silver. Freddy goes all to pieces if he gets served warmed-over coffee in a tarnished pot—he’s a sybarite. Or if the table linen’s dirty. He made the butler change it last night just as we were sitting down to dinner. I never noticed it myself; I was too busy discussing Natural Law with those Jesuits.”
“You can go over the linen and the silver in the morning,” Priss pointed out. “Before you have a dinner party. Take out everything you’re going to use and check it.” Though a Phi Beta Kappa, she had never had any trouble with her part-time maids, who usually came to her through her mother. Brains, she thought, were supposed to help you organize your life efficiently; besides, she had never heard that Norine had shone as a student. “I know,” answered Norine. “I’ve been trying to turn over a new leaf, now that we have a new house. I start out with a woman who comes to massage me and give me exercises to relax. But before I know it, I’m discussing the Monophysites or the Athanasian Creed or Maimonides. The weirdest types come to work for me; I seem to magnetize them. The butler we have now is an Anthroposophist. Last night he started doing eurhythmies.” She laughed.
“You really feel our education was a mistake?” Priss asked anxiously. Sloan had often expressed the same view, but that was because it had given her ideas he disagreed with. “Oh, completely,” said Norine. “I’ve been crippled for life.” She stretched. Priss looked at her watch. It was time for her and Stephen to leave. Norine rose too. “Ichabod and I’ll keep you company.” She pinned a diaper on her offspring and covered him with a monogrammed blanket. “Pour les convenances,” she said. Together they crossed Fifth Avenue and walked along Seventy-second Street, wheeling their children. The conversation became desultory. “When did I see you last?” Norine wondered. “Was it at Kay’s?” said Priss. “The year after college?” “That’s right,” said Norine. There was a silence. “Poor Kay,” said Priss, dodging a grocery cart from Gristede’s.
“Do you ever hear from her?” asked Norine. “Not for a long time,” said Priss. “Not since she went out West. It must be over a year.” Mutely, Priss reproached herself for not having written. “I see Harald sometimes,” Norine volunteered in her uninflected tones. “Oh. What is he doing?” “The same. He’s back on his feet again. He took Kay’s breakdown and their separation pretty hard. God, how that man suffered!”
Priss hesitated. “But was it really a breakdown? Polly Ridgeley—Polly Andrews; you remember her—always says it wasn’t. That she got worse in the hospital.” “Did you see her there?” asked Norine somberly. Priss had not. “I did,” said Norine. “The doctors sent for me right away. To get a line on her. I was supposed to be her best friend. When I went to her room, she was completely withdrawn. Told me to go away. She had persecution delusions that focused on me. The doctors felt there was some Lesbian attachment. It’s a funny thing about paranoids; they always feel they’re being persecuted by a member of their own sex. Who’s really their love-object. When I finally got her to talk, it turned out she felt I’d betrayed her by discussing her with the psychiatrists. She didn’t seem to bear any grudge against Harald, though he went there practically every day for an interview. He was lacerated with guilt because he’d treated her like hell toward the end, not understanding that her aberrations were clinical. The layman never realizes that about a person he’s close to.”
“But what was really the matter?” said Priss. “I understood that she went there through some sort of mix-up and stayed because it was a rest home where she could work things out, away from Harald. I gathered he was pretty much at fault.” “That was the cover story,” said Norine. “They never settled on a final diagnosis. But a lot of basic things were the matter. Sex. Competitiveness with men. An underlying Lesbian drive that was too firmly repressed. Thwarted social strivings. She made it at Vassar with you people in the South Tower. But she never could make it again. So she transferred all her ambitions to Harald, and the insensate pressure of that was too much for him. She was killing the goose that ought to have laid the golden eggs. And all the time she was driving him to make money, she was ruthlessly undercutting him because of her penis-envy. Plus a determination to punish him for not giving her a vicarious success. Harald saw it all better himself after a couple of sessions with the doctors. I cleared up a few points for them and I got Put, my ex-husband, to go around and talk to them too. He was brilliant on the subject of Kay’s spending money. He gave an unforgettable picture of her delusions of wealth. Comparing the way she lived with the way we lived, though Put was working and Harald was practically on the dole.”
“Don’t you think,” said Priss, “that the depression had something to do with it? If she’d married Harald when the economy was normal, he would have had work, and their standard of living would have corresponded with their income. Kay’s false p-p-premise was assuming that Harald would have full employment. So she contracted debts. But that was a common pattern. And the theatre was slow to feel the effects of Recovery. If they’d married a little later, there would have been the Federal Theatre. But the idea of a works program for the arts didn’t come till ’35, unfortunately. Roosevelt was very late recognizing the need for job security for artists and performers.”
“So you see it as an economic tragedy.” “Yes. The high divorce rate in our class—” “With the New Deal as the deus ex machina,” interrupted Norine. “Arriving too late to supply the happy ending.” She chuckled. “You may have a point. As a matter of fact, Harald’s working with the Federal Theatre now. If Congress doesn’t kill it. Just when he’s got his chance as a director.” Priss’s brow wrinkled. “I’m afraid Congress will kill it, Norine. Poor Harald! He does have bad luck. It’s uncanny.” She shivered in her seersucker frock. Norine agreed. “Potentially, he’s a great man, Harald.” They had reached the corner of Seventy-second and Park. “Poor Kay!” sighed Priss again, resolved to write to her this afternoon while Stephen was napping. “It was medieval of Macy’s to fire her because she’d had a breakdown. It ought to have been treated as ordinary sick leave. And then to be dispossessed from their apartment, on top of that.” “Macy’s gave her severance pay,” observed Norine. Priss shook her head sorrowfully, putting herself in Kay’s place. No wonder, she thought, Kay had yielded and gone back to Utah when her father came to get her; everything in the East had failed her. “Her whole house of cards …” she muttered, staring down Park Avenue.
“Why don’t you come home with me?” Norine suddenly proposed. “We’ll have some coffee.” “I have to get Stephen’s lunch,” explained Priss. “We’ll feed him,” said Norine hospitably. “We’ve got a lamb chop around somewhere and some lettuce. Can he eat that?” Priss was tempted. At home she too had a lamb chop and fresh spinach and his potato waiting to be cooked, and she had made him tapioca this morning with fluffy egg white. But she was flattered to discover that she had not bored Norine and a little tired of the monotony of her life. Since she had given up her job, before Stephen was born, she seldom saw anyone “different.” “We have three cats,” Norine said to Stephen. “And a basket full of kittens.” This decided Priss; animals, she felt, were important to a child, and Sloan would not let them keep one in the apartment because of allergies.
Norine’s house had a red door. Workmen were still finishing the wall of glass brick. Inside, a ramp, freshly painted, ran up to the upper floors. A gaunt manservant in shirt sleeves appeared to wheel the carriage, with Ichabod in it, upstairs. This arrangement seemed to Priss very practical: bumping a carriage up and down stairs was a nuisance and to leave it blocking the entry was a nuisance too; then too when Ichabod was bigger he could not fall down a ramp. She was impressed by the house, which struck her as comfortable; it only looked strange from the street, and you could say that the other houses were out of step, not Norine’s. The thing that surprised her was that Norine could have a house like this and be against progress at the same time. But Norine explained that it was “classical modern.”
In the living room, which was on the second floor, two walls were painted dark red; the glass bricks from the street let in a filtered light, and a short inside wall of glass bricks half shut off a bar, which was trimmed with chromium. There were round glass tables with chromium trim and big cream-colored fleecy sofas. Great glass bowls were filled with dogwood, which proved, on closer examination, to have paper flowers stuck on the branches. In the library there was a big phonograph, a set of drums, and a white piano, like in a night club. Large balloon brandy glasses, containing the dregs of brandy, still stood on the piano. The rooms were lit by indirect lighting, hidden in troughs, and the floors were covered from wall to wall with very thick cream-colored carpeting. Everything was expensive and in what Priss recognized as “good taste.” It was only that to Priss, who was small, all the furniture seemed very large—giants’ furniture. When Norine settled her at one end of a deep sofa in the living room, she felt like Goldilocks in the biggest of the three bears’ beds.
Stephen had been led away by the manservant, to see the kittens, who lived in the laundry on the ground floor. “Coffee will be here in a minute,” said Norine, planting herself at the opposite end of the sofa. “Unless you can’t stand it reheated.” She placed a big glass ashtray, like a tub, between them, opened a cigarette box, took off her sunglasses and shoes. “They’ll keep Stephen downstairs,” she said. “Now we can talk.” She crossed her legs under her in the black linen slacks. “Maybe you’ll be surprised to hear that I was madly in love with Harald. For four years. I never let it interfere with my relation with Kay. I married Freddy when I saw it was hopeless. It had always been hopeless, but I kidded myself.” She spoke in a dry voice, smoking rapidly, and rocking herself back and forth on her haunches; her lethargy had vanished. “We had a few rolls in the hay years ago—nothing much. Then for him it was over: Harald is like that. But he kept coming around, as a friend; he made me his confidante, told me all about his other women. Did you know he had other women?” Priss nodded. “Did he ever make a pass at you?” “No. But he did at Dottie. After she was married. He tried to make an assignation with her.” “Women were necessary to him,” Norine said. “But I thought I was special. I figured he was laying off me because of Kay, because he respected our relationship. Every now and then, he used to undress me and study my body. Then he’d slap my flank and go home. Or off to some other woman. Afterward, he’d tell me about it. Whenever he slept with a woman, he told me. What he didn’t tell me, though, was about the women he didn’t sleep with. I wasn’t the only one, I found out. He went around town undressing his old flames and then leaving them. Just to know they were available. Like somebody checking stock. And all his old mistresses were in love with him. At least all the ones I knew. Harald has great charisma. He could have been a monk.”
The gaunt butler came in with a tray on which were two outsized coffee cups, a tarnished silver pot, and a cream and sugar service. The sugar was wrapped in paper marked “Schrafft’s.” “I can’t get used to being rich,” Norine sighed. “I always take the sugar they give you home with me when I have a cup of coffee at Schrafft’s counter. But the help can’t be bothered to unwrap them. Freddy is mortified.” The butler withdrew. “Perkins!” Norine called after him. “Empty this ashtray, will you?” He took the big tub and brought a fresh one. “I have to keep after him about that,” Norine said. “Freddy’s hell on emptying ashtrays. It’s funny, anything he’s touched he wants to have taken away and washed.”
Priss had become conscious, during this conversation, that the back of her skirt was damp and getting damper. She moved from one buttock to the other, shifting her weight. Then she touched the cream-colored cushion. It was distinctly wet. At the same moment Norine explored the seat of her linen slacks. “Oh, God!” she said. “They’ve done it again. They must have washed these cushions with soapsuds while I was out. Freddy’s giving everybody here a washing complex.” She laughed. “Freddy’s father got an attack of rheumatism the other night from the damp slip cover he sat on in the dining room.” Priss stood up; her skirt had a great wet stain. “Perkins!” Norine went to the door and called downstairs. “Bring us a couple of bath towels, will you?” The butler came in with two huge monogrammed towels and spread them at either end of the sofa for the two young women to sit down on. “Thanks,” said Norine. Perkins left. “Tell me”—she turned to Priss—“do you say ‘thank you’ to a servant? Freddy says you’re not supposed to thank them; waiting on you is their duty.” “You don’t thank them when they serve you at table,” said Priss. “But if they do some special errand for you, like bringing those towels, you do. And you usually say ‘please,’” she added discreetly, “if you ask them for something special. I mean, you might say, ‘Will you serve Mr. Rogers the roast again?’ But if you asked a maid to bring you a handkerchief or your pocketbook, you’d say ‘please.’” “That’s what I thought,” said Norine. “Freddy’s wrong. I guess I’ll have to get Emily Post. At my grandmother’s, I remember, we always said ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ but they were German—my father’s people. The help was like part of the family. I don’t know the rules of New York society like you.”
Priss was embarrassed; she was sure that Freddy knew as much as she did. It was just that Norine had failed to understand the fine points. The butler reappeared. He murmured something in Norine’s ear. “Oh, O.K.,” she said, glancing in Priss’s direction. “Do something about it. Please.” “What did he say?” asked Priss, feeling that it had to do with her. Perkins waited. “Stephen shat,” Norine said casually. Priss leapt to her feet, turning all the colors. “I’m coming,” she said to the butler. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” “Perkins can tend to it,” said Norine, firmly reseating Priss on the sofa. “Or Ichabod’s nurse’ll do it. Just have his pants washed out and put a diaper on him,” she said to the man. Too willingly, Priss gave in. Stephen’s disgrace and the strange past tense of that word, which she had never heard used before in regular conversation, even in the present (let alone by a woman and before a servant!), had left her giddy. Could that be the right form, she asked herself curiously. It sounded like “begat” in the Bible—archaic. Her mind, blushing for itself, tried out other possible past forms.
“Where was I?” said Norine. “Oh, Harald. Well, I was mad about him. But he was fixated on Kay. I never could grasp that, exactly. All the psychiatrists at the hospital would say was that was a ‘certain bond.’ ‘Mutual dependency.’ Harald always talked about her vitality. He thought her aggressive drives were connected with the Life Force—he’s never outgrown Shaw. Do you think she’s more vital than I am?” Priss did not want to answer this question. “Kay has a great deal of energy,” she said. “And she had a great belief in Harald. Don’t you think that was the principal thing? And then—I don’t want to be unkind, but Kay was the family breadwinner.” “Harald could have had a dozen rich women,” declared Norine. “And I would have scrubbed floors for him myself. Or worked as a waitress or a taxi-dance girl. It was no sacrifice for Kay to punch the time clock at Macy’s. She liked it. While I was ready to sacrifice everything.”
Tears came into her tawny eyes. “Oh, don’t say that, Norine!” begged Priss, touched by these tears almost to the point of confidence herself. She did not recommend sacrifice, having meekly given up her job and her social ideals for Sloan’s sake. It was now too late, because of Stephen, but she was convinced she had made a mistake. Sloan would be far happier himself if she were where she longed to be—in Washington, as a humble cog in the New Deal, which he hated—and he could boast of “my Bolshevik wife.” He had been proud of her when she was with the N.R.A., because she had had gumption, and now even that was gone.
“Yes!” said Norine, with conviction. “And I’d still sacrifice everything. All Freddy’s shekels.” She looked bleakly around at her possessions. “You don’t mean everything,” said Priss firmly. “What about Ichabod?” Norine lit a cigarette. “Christ, I’d forgotten Ichabod. No. You’re right. I’ve given hostages to fortune. A hostage. Harald would never take on another man’s kid.” She gave a hoarse cough. “And he’s not partial to the Chosen People. To him, Ichabod is a little Yid.” Priss was shocked by Norine’s language; perhaps it was different when you were married to a Jew; perhaps that gave you a sort of license, the way Negroes could call each other “nigger.” But it made Priss highly uncomfortable. She set her coffee cup down. Norine smoked in silence, evidently despondent. Priss regretted having come home with her; the invitation, she now recognized, had just been a pretext to talk about Harald. Like all acts of self-indulgence, it had left Norine now, probably, wishing she hadn’t. Responsively, Priss’s own conscience stirred; she felt she ought not to have brought Stephen to this strange house. Sloan would disapprove. The Lord knew what they would be giving Stephen to eat downstairs—something bad for him, no doubt. And he would be late getting home for his rest.
“I wonder,” she said politely, “if we could take a peek at Stephen. He’s not used to strangers.” Her conscience smote her again for having let these people clean him up. What if they had told him “Bad boy!” as so many ignorant servants did with children? Yet a few minutes ago she had been almost hoping they had. Norine got up promptly. “Sure,” she said. “Tell me one thing first, though.” Her cigarette cough rattled. Priss could not imagine what was coming. Norine stared down into her eyes. “Do you think Ichabod looks Jewish?”
Again Priss did not know how to answer. Ichabod was too young to have a hooked nose; his eyes were still the color of all babies’ eyes—a dark slate blue; his skin was dark, but that might be from his sun baths. It was true that he seemed somehow different from other babies. He was unusually long, Priss had observed, and this gave him a look of melancholy, like an exhausted reed. There were circles under his eyes, and his little features were slightly drawn. There was no doubt that he appeared to be a child marked for a special destiny, as they said of the Jewish people. His nakedness also gave him a kind of pathos, as though he were not just a baby but a small forked zoo specimen of the human race. But the fact that he bore no resemblance to Stephen at his age did not supply an answer to Norine’s question, even had Priss been willing to give it. The real thing was, she was not sure what Norine wanted to hear.
“He doesn’t look like you,” she said truthfully. “Perhaps he’s like his father.” Norine produced a large framed photograph of a dark, curly-haired, rather handsome, slightly plump man. Ichabod did not look like Freddy. “He looks like himself, I guess,” Norine summed up. They went down the ramp. In the kitchen, they found Stephen, wearing a diaper, the butler, a cook, three big Angora cats and a basket of kittens. Stephen had finished his lunch, except for a slab of chocolate cake, which he had left on his plate. “He doesn’t seem to want it, ma’am,” the cook said to Norine. They were all gazing at Stephen in astonishment. Priss apologized. “He doesn’t know what it is. He only knows graham crackers and animal crackers and arrowroot cookies.” “Cookie,” said Stephen. “Animal cacka.” Just then, in the doorway appeared a very pretty blonde young woman in a low-cut thin blouse that showed her breasts; she wore a pleated pastel skirt and high-heeled shoes. “Hi, Cecilia,” said Norine. She turned to Priss. “This is Ichabod’s nurse.” The girl was carrying Stephen’s underpants and yellow sunsuit. “The pants are still damp,” she said. “But I’ve ironed the sunsuit dry, Norine. Do you want me to put it on him?” “I’ll do it,” said Priss hastily. When the girl had bent down to help him, Stephen had put a hand out to touch her breast. He still eyed her as his mother dressed him. “Wass sat?” he said, pointing. Everyone but the butler and Priss laughed. “He’s precocious,” said the girl, hugging him, which gave Stephen the chance he wanted. He plunged his hand into the neck of her dress. “Watch out,” chuckled Norine. “Cecilia’s a virgin and a Papist.” Priss removed his hand. She looked around for something to give him, lest he start to cry. There was nothing but the slab of cake; the stroller was upstairs. She broke off a piece of cake and divided it in two. One piece she put in her mouth. “Look! It’s good,” she said, chewing. Reluctantly, he drew his eyes from the bold nursemaid and imitated his mother. Soon he was greedily eating chocolate cake, from a Jewish bakery, with fudge frosting.