Parachutes and Kisses (25 page)

Mandy was not just a suckling infant; she had become a climate, a landscape, a planet. And Isadora now walked this planet, this planet called maternity, which was larger than her consciousness, larger than her writing, larger than her life.

Mary Hogg—with her excess avoirdupois, her wens, her warts, her wigs, her little gold granny glasses, and her polyester uniforms —was the physical embodiment of the change in Isadora's life. Not the baby. The baby was lovely, healthy, pink-cheeked—a joy, even when she woke up to feed at three in the morning. But the baby came with such impedimenta! Not only the nurse, but the playpen, the baby carrier, the diaper bag, the changes of clothes. It was no longer possible for Josh or Isadora to stir out of the house without looking like the Foreign Legion on the move, or a gypsy caravan in full regalia. Spontaneity was gone from their lives. They dared not go anywhere without the most elaborate plans. Everything was now so complicated. Where to put the baby in the car, what sort of baby seat to use, how the baby's schedule would be affected, what foods and blankets to take, which porta crib, which basket, which toys. The baby seemed dwarfed by all her equipment, all her attendants.

In addition to Mary Hogg, the redoutable baby nurse—whose tenure was, in the light of history, brief, but seemed at the time interminable—there was also an aged black cook named Lilyanne.

She had been hired by Josh while Isadora was in the hospital recuperating from her cesarean, and she had glowing, if tattered, references. She seemed at first the embodiment of all those motherly black servants played by Hattie McDaniel—every Jewish girl's dream: a black mammy out of a forties movie to mother her, as her own mother, her pallid white mother, never could, never would.

Lilyanne was old.
(How
old was not ascertainable.) She had worked for the great and the near-great. From Gypsy Rose Lee to a relation of the Rockefellers (
which
Rockefellers was also not ascertainable), to the judge who wrote the
Ulysses
decision. Her teeth were not quite her own, nor was her hair, but her eyes were kind and sparkling and she could still cook up a storm.

Storm
was also the word for the condition in which she left the kitchen—flour everywhere (as if a contingent of eighteenth-century dandies had powdered their wigs there), pots unwashed, onions and potatoes rolling along the floor, appliances spattered with sauce.

But oh, how that woman could cook! Poached salmon with dill sauce; filets of fish in white wine; divine fried chicken; baked potatoes taken out of their jackets, mixed with cheddar cheese and sour cream, and stuffed back in; trifles and soufflés for dessert.

“Is this all health food?” Josh would say as they sat down to an absolutely scrumptious meal.

“Yes, Mr. Ace,” Lilyanne would swear.

“Amazing ...” Josh would say. “The cakes are so light, and the fried chicken so crispy. I've never tasted such delicate cakes made with whole-wheat flour, and I've never had such great fried chicken.”

“It's my secret recipe,” Lilyanne would say coyly.

Lilyanne was a great cook, but she needed a pit crew to follow behind her, picking up pieces of kitchen equipment, mopping up, and even retrieving her wire-rimmed glasses when they flew off her nose.

For Lilyanne was terribly unsteady on her feet. She wore Minnie Mouse shoes that appeared to be three sizes too large, and her legs were pitifully thin and frail. Though she was a small woman, her legs still seemed insufficient to support her, and since Josh and Isadora's house was full of steps, half-steps, balconies, and decks, Lilyanne always seemed in mortal danger. She saw none too well, her shoes gaped, and her knees buckled. Many a time, Isadora came flying down from her attic studio (clutching her cesarean scar) because she heard pots crashing and glasses shattering in the kitchen.

“Now you take care of that belly of yours,” Lilyanne would say perfectly calmly, as she picked herself up from the floor and began sweeping up the rubble. She never broke anything important, but Isadora thought she might break her legs—for wherever Lilyanne was in the house great clashing and clattering followed. On one occasion she fell down a full flight of stairs with a breakfast tray, then miraculously, rose among the rubble, pronounced it “nothin‘,” and began sweeping up. Isadora loved her, but she finally had to let her go because she required an additional cleaning woman just to clean up the kitchen after her great gourmet achievements. One day Isadora came downstairs to the kitchen and saw Mary Hogg, Lilyanne, and Rowena (the cleaning lady) all eating together while the baby screamed from the English pram on the kitchen deck.

“How long has she been crying?” Isadora asked, breasts leaking at the sound.

“Oh, it's
good
for her to cry, Miz Ace,” Mary Hogg professed in her irritatingly nasal voice. And the other two
fressers
nodded in unison as they stuffed their faces.

With that, Isadora strode in the kitchen, slid open the glass door that led to the deck, seized Amanda in her arms, and stomped off to her own bedroom, kicking the door shut behind her. She was outraged at all these people who were feeding off her, living off her, while she wrote to support them, and her baby cried. Her heroine was dying in childbirth (she was in the midst of writing the very death scene), but she had survived into a more complex destiny: to be writing of a dying heroine while nursing a living child. She was angry at the “help” (misnomer though that was), but whenever she had the baby in her arms, she marveled: marveled at how the crying stopped with the warmth of her body, marveled at the efficiency with which Amanda sucked, sucked, sucked, as if sucking were all there was to do in the world, marveled at the shell-pink eyelids, the pink toes that had never touched the ground, the impenetrable sea-blue of the infant eyes.

Isadora was cruelly tugged between the book and baby: when she was with her baby, she wanted never to return to her book, and when she was with her book, she resented the baby's cry that made her breasts leak. And yet, with her daughter in her arms, she felt she was passing on a legacy of working women—all mothers are working women—who go from one sort of labor to another, with never enough time for either, and yet with undiminished goodwill toward their children.

Who can say which labor is more important? The two should be reciprocal—one to bring the next generation into the world and one to sustain it when it arrives. But society has arranged that both these labors be unduly hard for women because they are largely unrecognized and because this world is still arranged for the benefit of men, for the benefit of men's lives.

Isadora nursed Mandy, first at one breast, then at the other. While she nursed, she thought of Marietta Robusti, La Tintoretta, dying in childbirth upstairs on a yellow legal pad in her study. Breasts leaking with milk, alive with anger and with love, Isadora chronicled the death of another woman artist. She had to invent the scene totally—for only the barest of facts of La Tintoretta's life were known. Favorite of her father, considered as good a painter as Jacopo, she was so indispensable in his atelier (or else he was so in love with her) that the great Tintoretto allowed her to marry only upon the condition that she remain part of his household, not of her husband's. What a classic patriarch maneuver! To keep the married daughter castled in his studio, to keep the matron a virgin, to defeat the rival lover by holding close his beloved little girl.

But the ploy did not work. The worm got into Eden anyway—the worm in the form of an errant, wriggling sperm. Childbirth was a matter of life and death in sixteenth-century Venice—and death won. The story had everything: life, death, art, history, feminism, the oedipal myth—and Isadora seized the theme as her own, inventing the details where none were known. The best subjects for historical novels are those characters about whom just a little is known, but much remains to be invented, for then the imagination flies free.

Marietta lay dying. Amanda was sucking. Amanda literally took in with her mother's milk the fate of all women, of all women artists: from La Tintoretta to her own mother. If she knew any of this she did not say. She only closed those mauve eyelids in perfect satiation, fluttered the long auburn lashes on the shell-pink cheeks, gave a ferocious intestinal gurgle and released a hot wad of yellowish-green breast-fed baby shit into her infant-size Pamper. Isadora changed her, wiping the rosy little anus with oil and lotion, putting on a new Pamper, then letting her own mind wander back to the deathbed scene on her desk.

“Is the baby through yet?” came the nasal voice of Mary Hogg.

“She's fed and changed,” Isadora answered through the closed door.

Amanda slept. Isadora got up and carefully handed the bundle to Mary Hogg. Then she went back upstairs to complete Marietta's death.

In due time, both Mary Hogg and Lilyanne were fired—the former without, the latter with, regrets. When Lilyanne went, Josh and Isadora themselves cleaned the kitchen from top to bottom. In the pantry closet they found, secreted behind the whole-wheat flour and safflower oil and bran, boxes of Swansdown cake flour, confectioners' sugar, and cans of Crisco.

“I'll be damned,” Josh said. “No wonder the ‘health food' tasted so good.”

The little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world again in the bigger world of adult life. Naturally, this is not a conscious, intellectual process.

—C. G. JUNG

A child's among you takin' notes, And faith he'll prent it.

—
On the late Capt. Grose's Peregrinations through Scotland 1793

THE current nanny was Alva Libbey, also known as Nurse Librium—she was that slow. Before her there had been Rae-from-Santa-Fe, a vague vegetarian, and before her Cicely from Stoke-on-Trent, the insufferably bossy English girl who had run over Isadora's beloved Chekarf, and then run off with the carpenter who'd built Isadora's new studio. Before that, there had been dolorous Olive (who hated her name and consequently asked that she be called Livi).

Olive was a ruddy-faced, sullen, overgrown adolescent of twenty-eight or so whose fondest wish was to earn enough money to be “audited” by the Church of Scientology so that she could become a “clear.” While Isadora was away on a book tour (Mandy was then two), Olive fell in love (by telephone) with Isadora's one and only totally deranged fan—a woman Isadora had been eluding for years because of her conviction that she was Isadora's long-lost daughter (born when Isadora was fourteen). Somehow, this woman—who previously had only written long, rambling letters —managed to secure Isadora's unlisted phone number. (This fan was, in fact, the reason Isadora no longer answered “crazy mail.”) Not only did Olive talk to her, but she encouraged her to the point of seduction, so that soon the two women were fantasizing together and engaging in mutual masturbation by telephone.

Josh and Isadora were in Chicago one night when Isadora called home to ask how the baby was.

“The baby's fine,” Olive said, “but I'm in love.”

“Oh, that's nice,” said Isadora. “With whom?”

“With Beryl Springer, your daughter.”

“Oh god—” Isadora said, “how did she ever
find
you?”

“She just called one night, desperate for her mother—and since you weren't here, I thought I'd talk to her. She was terribly lonely. Well, one thing led to another and we fell in love. We've consummated it by telephone. Isadora, it's something you haven't written about in any of your books—but it
is
possible.”

“Spare me the details. Just take care of the baby until I get home.”

Olive, of course, had to be fired. The phone line had to be changed—and Beryl, a
bona fide
psychotic who had somehow managed to find out everything about Isadora's life—including her credit-card numbers—went on a shopping spree and charged thousands of dollars of merchandise and hotel bills to Isadora's American Express number. Had Olive given her the number as a token of love? The whole situation was so bizarre that you couldn't even use it in a novel, Isadora thought—but it was true, truth being, as everyone knows, stranger than fiction.

Before Olive, there had been Bertha-Belle, an elderly black lady from Georgia who was not only taking care of Amanda but all of South Norwalk, and who managed to inflate the food bills to triple the usual, although there was never anything to eat in the house. Bertha-Belle was loving with the baby though, and she was motherly and protective toward Isadora. Or did Isadora keep her only because she claimed she had the power to pray books up the best-seller list? Writers are strange creatures who will put up with almost any interruption in their lives if the promise of a great character or magic in helping them write are also proffered. And Bertha-Belle was a great character who promised such magic. A hefty
café au lait
lady who wore white turbans and white polyester uniforms, Bertha-Belle was by her own admission a former numbers runner and a drunk who had been converted to the Way of the Lord.

She rocked that baby in her powerful arms—and she was a fount of misinformation on health matters. She'd grease Amanda when her nose was stuffed because she averred that “colds hate grease.” She warned of drinking too much grapefruit juice because “grapefruit thin de blood.” Her favorite food, she said—with no antisemitism whatever—was “Jew food,” by which she meant the greasiest of chopped liver, and Nova Scotia on bagels absolutely encrusted with cream cheese.