Saturday's Child (24 page)

But his shrink felt it was time to think of the future and Get Serious, and Ron began talking engagement. My mother—who had maintained a vigilant hospitality similar to that she'd exercised with Petter—moved in at the speed of light. She needn't have bothered. I didn't want to marry Ron. I didn't want to marry, period. I wanted freedom, time, a room—an apartment—of my own. I wanted to find out if I could dare really write.

Ron Fieve later met and married someone else, built a family, and went on to become a well-regarded figure in his chosen field, as one of the pioneers of lithium treatment for bipolar disorder, back then called manic-depression. (Twenty or more years later, he would be helpful when I called him out of the blue, at Kate Millett's request, for help in getting Kate into a special treatment program more civilized than the “loonybin” treatments about which she has so courageously written.) So the Petter affair ended with a bang, and the Ron relationship with a whimper, subsiding with some tearfulness into a friendship, then into silence.

I missed the non-sex sex. I wanted desperately to rid myself of my virginity. But I also wanted the liberation to happen with “the right man,” as
they used to say in the Fifties, and I wanted him to be someone I would love. In the meantime, I could wait. The waiting didn't matter all that much, because two core elements of what constituted my internal reality were beginning to tremble under the surface of daily life, like tectonic plates beneath the earth's crust prior to a quake.

For one thing, I'd begun to write in earnest, and I was loving it. I lived for the workshops and classes at Columbia, and hung out in coffeehouses where I thought real poets might congregate, dreaming of being part of a literary circle. I sent out poems to little magazines, whence they came shooting back as if by return mail. The fights with Faith continued, but were now being waged on another field. She was refocusing from my acting career (which, she decided, was “adrift for a while”) to my writing.

She must have shifted emphasis as an act of will and, undoubtedly, an act of love. Once she finally realized I was sincere about wanting to write, it would have seemed perfectly natural to her that she would elbow her way in to help. “Literature” would have sounded high-minded and elite to her, the immigrants' daughter so fixated on self-improvement, and since she'd never been supported by her mother in any of her own youthful desires, she mightily overdid things in the other direction. Faith never understood that possibly the most important thing a parent can do is learn how to respond to a growing child by saying “goodbye,” with grace and celebration, in a thousand different ways.

I was alarmed at her interest. I wanted her blessing, but our history showed that whatever I invented she took over. I hadn't forgotten how my backstroke narrowly escaped Olympic training, how my piano playing had become another “talent” ripe for competition, how my romantic entanglements had dwindled to whispered diddle scenes with my mother on the other side of a thin wall. I knew she never meant to harm. Indeed, she never destroyed outright. Instead, she somehow cheapened what I did—then left me with it. When I made the fatal error of confiding I was trying to write poetry instead of stories, the next thing I knew, she'd made the acquaintance of some people at a vanity press and began plotting to bring out a first book of heavens-look-how-she's-grown-into-a-poet Robin Morgan.

But one day she overstepped herself. “For the good of your writing
career” (
what
writing career? I fumed to myself), she insisted we go to a soiree being thrown by a professor friend of her vanity press cronies. I'd already met the man, Livingston Welch, a pompous ass who fancied himself a sculptor and writer and was neither. But my mother was insistent.

“
Think
, darling, of the artists and writers you'll meet there! A whole new
universe
!”

She ground me down. We went. What neither of us knew was that at the soiree I would ignore everyone else once I started to talk with a young man who was leaning against a bookcase regarding the scene with obvious disdain. He knew blessedly nothing about me, hadn't seen me on TV, had only just learned from someone at the party that I was some kind of actress. He was twenty-eight (older than Petter or Ron), and he smoked a pipe (echo of Father Joe); he was lean and sandy-haired with pale, piercing blue eyes (echo of Doris Scheidecker); he was gay (echo of Judson Laire, my affectionate TV father); he unashamedly introduced me to his lover, a pianist and composer. By the end of our conversation, I'd learned that his ancestors had been in the United States since Colonial times, that he'd been born in Minnesota of a working-class family, and that the faint vitiligo mispigmentation on his hands was probably the result of mixed ancestry between pale-skinned forebears from Norway and the British Isles intermixing with black Americans who were slaves in the pre—Civil War South (echo of Johnny). So many elements came together in him that he was a living prescription for rebellion. But I wasn't thinking about rebellion that day.

That day I saw a man of extraordinary intelligence, dressed in simple khakis and a white cotton T-shirt, puffing his pipe and peering at me through narrowed eyes across a cloud of fragrant smoke. He was safe to have for a friend: he was gay, after all. I'd grown up around gay men in show business (the women had to be much more closeted), and I trusted them. But neither was he campy; he was serious, even brooding. I liked him.

But the revelation was yet to come. When the party settled down, a few people began reading their poetry. Despite my mother's prodding, I refused. I knew I was writing rot, and I was not about to embarrass myself. When it came his turn, he also declined. Only after a chorus of urgings
and a whisper from his lover did he agree, sweeping the room with a scornful glance that recognized he was clearly not among literary equals. Then he read some of his poems.

“A whole new universe” indeed. They were dark, lyrical, audacious, executed with technical brilliance and frightening intensity. His language sang, his images seared; the story embedded in each poem was memorable as an entire novel. This poetry reminded me of Yeats's work, even of Donne's. Then, with the casual insolence of someone recently named one of the finest poets in the U.S. under the age of forty, he suggested playing his favorite parlor game: the one-minute, spontaneous sonnet.

Thunderstruck, I watched as people called out a subject, image, or first word—“Shakespearean, Spenserian, or Petrarchan preference?” he would coolly ask—watched him scribble on the back of an envelope in one minute flat an accomplished sonnet. Five times.

At the end of the evening, my mother had to drag me away. But he and I exchanged phone numbers, while I gratefully wondered why in hell he would possibly want to know me.

Faith was delighted. She planned to ask “those two nice gay boys, the poet and the musician,” to dinner soon. “See?
See
, darling, didn't I
tell
you that you'd meet important writers and artists?”

She had no idea that we were living on top of a major fault line, beneath which that night one tectonic plate had begun to slide toward a fated overlap with another. She had no idea, nor did I, who it was I'd met.

His name was Kenneth Pitchford.

He was the man I would marry, the man who would father my son.

Meanwhile, the other tectonic plate was rising and grinding forward. It had been on the move for a long time.

I described it in the last entry of my adolescent journal.

JOURNAL ENTRY
(
age seventeen)
:

I can't avoid it any longer. I'm going to write it down. Even though all my searching has so far led nowhere, still I have to tell it
some
where or explode. Even though neither of us have spoken about it since I was thirteen. She acts as if it never happened, but it haunts me. Maybe if I write about it here—though if she ever found this journal she'd view that as yet another betrayal—I can get free of it. I can't
remember exactly when it started. I know I'd already been accumulating clues here and there, and a previous visit of Aunt Sophie's had yielded up some juicy ones to an expert eavesdropper like me. (Train an actress, and you
get
an actress. I can walk in my sox across a parquet floor to eavesdrop without a single creak of the floorboards. I can detect the difference between the shifting of her weight in a kitchen chair and the other kind of shifting, prior to rising, so I can scurry soundlessly back to bed with no discovery.)

But this time I almost forgot my technique, given the shock of overhearing, through their mix of English and Yiddish, the
present
tense. When the rising weightshift creaked from the chair, I barely made it back to the bedroom in time. My heart was pounding so loudly I was afraid it would heave through my “sleeping” body when she peeked in.

How long after that did it take me to build up the courage, to wait for the perfect moment? A few months, I think. But eventually I must have felt the time was right. Which was a mistake. It was during one of those mirage oases of her comprehension—the ones that turn out to be quicksand. We were lying in our twin beds in the dark, having the close conversation we seldom have anymore—the kind that goes rancid in my mouth when I hear her tell a reporter “We're real
girl
friends who can tell each other
any
thing with total honesty!” What a joke. But the mood
seemed
right.

So I maneuvered the conversation around to get her discussing the time before I was born, her girlhood and adolescence and the war—all of which I'd heard before anyway. But sometimes a new nugget drops, you never know. Then, softly, I asked,

“Mommie?” (she hates me to call her Faith), “Mommie, tell me more about him.”

“Him?” she said into the room between us.

“You know. My father.”

“I've already told you, Robin. You know what a clever man he was, what a fine doctor. The languages he spoke, how well-educated he was. We loved each other so much. We could have been so happy. It was tragic when the war killed him.”

“The war killed him, Mommie?”

“But you know that, honey. I thought I'd die of grief. I would have, if it hadn't been for you. You kept me going.”

I could hear her smile through that last sentence. I remember calculatingly putting into my own voice all the tenderness it could communicate, with every vocal skill I'd acquired in my thirteen years, whispering gently,

“Mommie? … Mommie … he's alive, isn't he? He's still alive.”

There was such a silence in the room that for a second it felt as if I were there alone.

“Mommie, it's all
right
. I love
you
. Nothing can ever change that. But, Mommie? I know. I know he's—alive?”

The bedtable lamp clicked on, the room sprang into light, and her face seemed to fill all of it.

“Spy!” she hissed. “Traitor! How did you find out? Who in hell do you think you are to dare—”

“Mommie, darlingest little Mommie—” even now I can taste my panic as I ran from my bed and tried to get into hers, under the covers, the way I used to fall asleep when I was little.

She wouldn't let me in. She was sitting up in bed staring at me as if I was an intruder, burglar, murderer. I burst into tears and tried to sit on the edge of her bed, but she stuck out a foot and kicked at me. So I stood there in my pajamas, crying.

“Honest, it's
okay!
I still love you more than anything or anyone! I always will,
always!
I just want to
know
, don't you see? Mommie, please—”

“What. What do you want to know,” she asked, but it came out as a statement. Her tone was flat, like that of somebody who'd been dreading this moment, for years, living under a delayed sentence of death.

“Anything, Mommie. Everything. Whatever you want to tell me. Please?”

“Anything,” she repeated dully. “Everything.” Then she looked at me, sharp and deep.

I could hardly breathe.

“Then I
will
tell you, Robin. Sit down.”

So I sat at the foot of her bed. I waited. I didn't dare hurry her.

“Everything you already know is true. But what I never told you … well, I always intended to, when you were older, better equipped to handle it. You're a highstrung child, you know. Sensitive, fragile. That goes with your talent, but still … what I would have told you when you were older, if you hadn't turned
spy
on your own
mother”—
the hiss in her voice rose again, then receded as if reined in—“is that he changed. I'll never know why. Maybe he wasn't ready for the responsibility of being a father after what he'd been through. He'd escaped from the Nazis, he'd lost every single human being he'd ever loved. That must have been it. Because, Robin—since you want the truth—he deserted his wife and child. He abandoned us.”

“He—abandoned us?”

“Totally. He disappeared. At first I tried to have him traced. I thought something had happened to him, maybe an accident. But as time went by, I started remembering how cold he'd grown while I was pregnant with you, how remote. Then one day I got a letter from him—no return address—somewhere in New Jersey. He said it was finished. Over. I was devastated. But I knew how futile it would be to try and find a man who had managed to cover his tracks all across Europe—false papers, false names—with the Gestapo on his trail. This man knew how to hide.”

“Was he—Couldn't you look up Matthew Morgan, Mommie? Or Mates Morgan? I mean, in the telephone book? Or ask information? Couldn't you just look up Morgan?”

“Morgan?” she laughed strangely. “His name wasn't Morgan. It was Morgenstern. Mates Morgenstern.”

“Not Morgan? But Mommie—”

“Why should me and my child bear the name of the sonofabitch who abandoned us? I had to recover. I had to survive. I got a divorce on the grounds of abandonment. Then I went to court and had our name changed. Legally. To Morgan.”