Chapter Eight

From the moment she saw New York, Rose was stunned and enamored. In the fresh and crystalline air the tall buildings rose, sharply etched in the pure light; their streets were shadowed canyons. A block or two away, in this city of progress and contrasts, were small, old, and gracious homes, many like the town house where she lived with Ben. Farther downtown, beyond the Arch in Washington Square, were twisting little streets, crowded slums, immigrants, life and noise. There were Italians, Germans, Irish, and Jews, making a lively old-world street life, but it didn’t seem strange to her because the town where she had grown up had also been home to many different nationalities.

And the noise in this city! Something new was always being built, and the sounds of jackhammers and trucks and the honking horns of cars and taxis in traffic jams were sometimes unbearable. The new El had just been put up on Sixth Avenue, linking the Village to the rest of the city, and there was another train line under construction, farther east, opening her formerly quiet little enclave to tourists who wanted to see the Bohemian life a few blocks from where Rose lived her normal one.

There were almost seventy theaters in New York, showing over two hundred plays a year. She begged Ben, who was sometimes more old-fashioned than she wanted him to be, to take her to see Mae West in Sex, the hit show on Broadway, and he finally did. “Is that a pistol in your pocket?” Mae West asked a man, “or are you just glad to see me?” Ben looked over to see if Rose was blushing, but she wasn’t.

Clara Bow was the “It” girl, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote proudly of burning her candle at both ends, Woodbury Soap advertised “the skin you love to touch.” This new world, it seemed to Rose, who had recently discovered sex, was obsessed with the pleasures of the body, and she refused to be embarrassed. When she read in the newspaper that a doctor they called Goat Gland Brinkley was implanting goat’s sex glands into men to make them more virile she only shook her head and smiled.

She was glad to entertain Ben’s clients in their new home, as he had requested in his marriage proposal, and sometimes they went out—to restaurants, or to tea rooms, which were only a disguised way of saying speakeasies, where bootleg liquor or wine could be had, served in coffee cups. Rose herself had never much liked alcohol, particularly that disgusting bathtub gin, but she liked discovering this new city. Uptown in Harlem, where most of the black people lived, was the Cotton Club, where a client of Ben’s took them to hear jazz and blues. The exotic part of Greenwich Village, only two blocks below their house, was full of winding little streets, and the ubiquitous tea rooms, and nightclubs. There were strange people in plain view in the clubs and even on the streets: long-haired men who looked like women, and short-haired women who looked like men. That made her a little uncomfortable, but she didn’t dwell on it. She learned to dance: the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop, and the Turkey Trot, the Grizzly Bear, the Fox Trot, and the Monkey Glide. “Is this a club or a zoo?” she asked Ben, laughing. There was such a spirit of fun in New York.

Women smoked here. Everyone wanted a tan. They discussed weight, calories, and vitamins. After Rose and Ben returned from their belated honeymoon, to humid and exotically scented Florida, where they spent all day lying on the beach, she bought the recently patented Detecto home scale, and weighed herself every day like everybody else did, glad that food was not very important to her even now when she was happy, and so she was as slim as any flapper wanted to be. She couldn’t think of herself as a matron, even though she was married and settled. Perhaps when she had a child she would, but not now. She felt she had wasted a great part of her youth in mourning, and now she had regained it. In New York a woman in her mid-twenties was not considered old.

Margaret Sanger, whom Maude had mentioned when she told Rose the facts of life, had opened a birth control clinic not far from where Rose lived, where poor immigrant married women with too many children could obtain information and contraceptives. Birth control was still illegal, birth control information branded “obscene,” and the police were still giving Mrs. Sanger great trouble. Rose’s own private doctor, while grudgingly giving her the messy, gooey, and not very trustworthy supplies she needed, told her, “The diaphragm that woman is trying to have imported from Europe will give a woman cancer.”

Was this true? It seemed, now that she was a sexually functioning woman, that everything either went in or went out. It had been bad enough when she only had the curse to bother her. All those secretions, those potions, what Ben put into her and she tried to get rid of, the worry, the counting. When the Bohemian women in the Village bragged in public about the pleasures of free love, Rose thought they must have a lot more energy than she did.

Ben was affectionate, sometimes even passionate, but there was still a sort of formality about him that had never changed. Marriage and sex had not changed it, their honeymoon had not changed it, and Rose wondered if it was because he knew she was not “in love” with him. But she couldn’t imagine another companion, or one she would prefer. They were lucky they got along so well. She knew couples who were very unhappy, some of whom didn’t even know they were unhappy. The Bohemians got divorced as often as they wished, but people of her background did not. If it didn’t work, you put up with it.

She had made a new best friend here in New York, the sweet-faced young woman who lived next door with her businessman husband and two small children. Her friend’s name was Elsie, the same as that of her long-dead friend from childhood. The moment Rose met this new Elsie, Elsie Wilder, she had exclaimed, “This is destiny!” If they had not been the same age and of similar background they would have been friends anyway. As it was, they visited each other every day, just dropping in, and sometimes, even though she had no children of her own, Rose went to the park with Elsie when she took her children there.

They sat on benches with the other young matrons, in the shadow of the Arch, and talked. Right now the hot topic under discussion was the Monkey Trial, where a teacher named Scopes had been trying to teach Darwin’s theory of evolution to his schoolchildren in Dayton, Tennessee, and had been arrested. It was the first trial ever to be broadcast live on the radio, and Rose and Elsie were fascinated.

“Of course men are descended from monkeys,” Elsie said. “Just look at my husband.”

“Oh, how could you!” Rose said, and they both laughed, because her husband, if truth be told, did look like a very clean, well-dressed, member of that under species.

“I can’t wait until he’s older and his hairline recedes,” Elsie mused. “Of course, it might not! Now, you mustn’t tell him what I said.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Was Elsie “in love” with her husband? Or was she like Rose? They never discussed it.

Every Sunday Rose telephoned her family. She worried about her father, who sometimes complained of aches and pains and shortness of breath; but that had been going on for a long time and the doctor said he was strong as an ox, Celia reassured her. “I’ll tell you if anything happens,” Celia said. “Don’t worry. Enjoy your new life.” If Rose didn’t know better she would think that Celia was trying to get rid of her.

Celia, of course, was well. Daisy and Harriette had recently become boy crazy. Poor Maude had suffered a miscarriage and was very upset. Too many children too quickly, Rose thought, but said nothing. Why couldn’t Maude just enjoy the children she had? Large families were so old-fashioned.

Hugh had refused to apply to law school, which had greatly disappointed Papa and given Celia new ammunition to use against him. His marks were not good enough for him to have been accepted anyway. He had not yet decided on a career. Rose could sense the tension when she spoke to any of them. In his family’s eyes he was a disappointment, but never in hers. She loved him, she wanted to protect him, and she worried about him.

He had completed his final year at college. His exams were over, and he announced that he was finally coming to visit Rose in New York during the free time he had before graduation. He would be the first member of the family to come. She was overjoyed, because, for one thing, since she and Ben had missed Christmas in Bristol because of their honeymoon, and Easter because Ben had insisted she see the famous Easter Parade, she had been feeling a little nostalgic and neglected.

“I’ll stay for a week,” Hugh said. “Can you stand me for a week?”

“For longer,” Rose said. “Stay forever.”

“Don’t say that so lightly, because I might.”

When he came she took him everywhere, showing him this city she loved. He loved it too. He looked like someone who had awakened from a bad dream and was relieved to find he was safe in his own bed again. He was a tireless tourist, and wore her out. At night, after he had eaten dinner with her and Ben at home, he would go out alone to explore, and even if they had all been to a restaurant or a club, Hugh was too restless to go back home with them.

“I’ll just take a walk,” he would say. “Don’t wait up for me.”

“Oh, to be young,” Ben said. They both knew Hugh sometimes stayed out all night.

The day he was to leave Rose decided it was time to have a talk with her brother about his life. She took him to Washington Square Park and they sat on a bench in the sun. “If you could do anything you wanted, anything that suited you,” she said, “not what suited other people, but just you, what would it be?”

His eyes filled with tears, and then he composed himself and smiled. “Anything I want?”

“Yes.”

“I would move to New York the moment I graduated, and live with you if you’ll let me, and I would work in Greenwich Village in an antique store.”

An antique store? “All right,” Rose said, trying not to seem surprised. “Is there a living in that?”

“Of course. I’ve already found the place. They said they would hire me as soon as I get back here. And I’d contribute to the household expenses, of course. Rose, I can’t live with Celia and Papa anymore. She hates me. She always has.”

“Oh no, she doesn’t hate you.”

“She does,” Hugh said. “She can’t wait to get me out of there so she can redecorate again.”

When Rose thought about Hugh living here with them she realized how happy it made her. It was customary for an unmarried sibling to live with a married one if it was not possible to live with one’s parents, and she knew Ben wouldn’t object. They would have a real family again, the family of her childhood. And their house was large enough so that Hugh could live in the guest suite on the first floor, away from them, enabling everyone to have enough privacy.

“I’ve changed my life,” she said. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the same chance.”

How his face lit up when she said that! It was almost as if she had rescued him, although she could not imagine from what.