Saturday's Child (29 page)

“It's an odd feeling. To lose a year of my life. Just like that.”

“Your mother lied to you about this also? But why?”

How dare he.

Why indeed?

“No,” I answered. “No. She didn't lie. I think we both understood it
would be helpful in my career, to … shave off a year. As time went on I just … must have lost track myself.”

Not enough to have had my own radio program at age five; more precocious at age four. A whole year lived somewhere, somehow—doing what? Lost, gone forever. While a young woman tried to cover what she thought was her shame by doing the only thing she knew how to do—pretend the real into being, by pure will. And he dared speak of pride!
Nothing
about me is real, I thought, I am a figment of Malkah Teitlebaum's imagination, her
golem
.

“Would you like to have this?” he asked, holding out the birth certificate.

“Yes,” I said, “I would.”

“Keep it. I have no use for it. I kept it all these years in case … actually, I don't know why I saved it.”

He began to straighten out small items on his desk. It was time to exit before the room spun completely out of control.

“Well. Thank you, Mates. For seeing me. For telling me what you've told me. And, for this—” gesturing with the paper. “I—wish you well.”

“Thank you,” he replied formally. “I must ask, what you intend—”

“I won't bother you. I agree, our relationship is irrelevant.” I lifted my chin and smiled, both prides—my mother's and my father's—alive in that smile, but recognized by neither one nor, at the time, by their daughter. “I don't intend to tell Faith about this meeting. Not for a while, at least. It would only give her more pain. So. I'll be going.” I rose and went to the door, unlocking it, then turning to let my eyes sweep the room and record it a last time. “Oh. There is one thing more.”

“Yes?” he asked, and with a stubborn rush of longing I thought I heard an eagerness in his question.

“Mates. Why does the man who saw his child only once and never ‘followed up' still keep, ninetee—twenty years later, her baby photograph framed in silver by his desk?”

If it could have been said:
I exist. Look at me, tell me, let me know, speak it once and for all O my father, let free whatever syllable of love for me you might have strangled all these years
—if it could have been spoken, what shone in my eyes, what braced my body upright while my spine hummed like a tuning fork for his answer,
if
. If it was ever to be known, let it be learned now.

He looked at the picture. When he turned to me again, his expression was tinged with what once might have been grief, and something else I could perceive but not yet understand: the addictive self-contempt know-able only to a survivor.

“That photograph is not of you. That is my elder son, Danny, when he was a baby. He is twelve now. You see,” he turned around another frame, on his desk, one that had been facing him, “there they are. That is his brother, Gil. Both of my boys, taken last year.”

I said, “Thank you, Mates. Goodbye.”

You smile
, I directed myself. You exit with dignity. You thank Viga in passing, you do not break your stride, you grab your coat from the brass rack you get through this corridor and this stained-glass door and out to the street and you walk in the general direction the cab had come from toward the bus depot somehow you do it a bastard a year lost wiped clean out of your past
ya
she'd said on the phone how could you have assumed a child was you wishful hearing 1941 half-crushed insect a year the son he always wanted two in fact do two half-brothers make a whole one Faith was right no she lied he never loved her he lied he never wanted you she lied she never wanted you a son two he lied she lied the only real choice in life is a choice between lies. I am the child of lies. I am a living lie.

By the time the bus deposited me back in New York City, I had remembered there was one human being on the planet in whom I could confide these raw, bleeding truths. One person so scarred from his own bleak and violent family love that he would hear me, understand, be able to see something real in me. One person who knew if you could turn suffering into something of use—into art, into politics—yes naively try to save the whole lying blood-sick world with it, then you might do more than just survive it, calloused and sardonic. You might understand it, forgive it.
Not repeat it
.

I ran to the first booth I saw after getting off the bus. I was in luck, the phone wasn't broken. I dialed, whispering
Please let him be in, please
.

The familiar voice answered.

“Kenneth? Thank god you're there.”

“Oh, hi, Robin. What's the matter? You okay?”

“Kenneth. I need to talk to you. And Kenneth, can we walk across Brooklyn Bridge? You said we might someday. I've still never been.”

“Uh, yeah, sure. Wait a minute, you mean right
now?
But it'll be freezing! It's
Janua
—”

“Right now, yes. Right now. If that's humanly possible. Please. There's stuff I've got to tell somebody. Meet me in fifteen minutes at the Manhattan side of the bridge?
Please?
”

And he said he would. And he wasn't lying. He did.

NINE

A Doom of One's Own

Actress
, also
actrice
. Middle English. 1. A female doer or actor (one who acts, takes part in an action)
, 1569.
2
.
A female player on the stage, 1700
.

—O
XFORD
E
NGLISH
D
ICTIONARY

Nothing, short of falling in love or learning you have a terminal disease, so invests life with concentrated intensity as discovering you've just lost an entire year of it.

Acutely aware of each moment yet in a daze, I reeled through that first week after meeting my father feeling literally,
spatially
off balance, cut adrift from my past, unable to imagine my future. I didn't know then that for the rest of my life I'd be a fraction of a second late in replying (while mentally double-checking) whenever I was asked my age, and that by noting the year as well as the age, so as to be certain (e.g., when you're forty-nine, you're in your fiftieth year), I would somehow infect those close to me with the same confusion, so now it's become a running joke that friends and lovers are comparably unsure of how old
they
are, too.

Back then, the one thing I knew was that I couldn't yet tell my mother I'd met him and learned I was a year older than she'd always said I was. Confronting Faith with
that
would be a watershed moment, and I had to
prepare against it. Meanwhile, beneath the mourning over that year's loss, relief and anger were bubbling, as every day another new realization popped up into place, a domino effect in reverse. So I'd been precocious but
not
freakish, after all; so my first period
wasn't
all that abnormally early; so I
hadn't
been too impossibly young to have gone to college. But what I still couldn't work out was why she and Sally had shaved off that year; I was certain those two had conspired but unsure whether Sophie had been part of it. Still, the emotional vertigo caused by such instant aging felt oddly like a symptom of health. Even though only two people—Kenneth and myself—knew it, I was twenty now, not nineteen.
Twenty
. It sounded powerful, adult. I clung to that twenty as if it were a life jacket. Twenty meant that in only a year I would reach my legal majority. Twenty-one meant Faith could do nothing to stop me from being or doing whatever I chose.

But what would that be? I needed to be ready. I needed to reinvent my life according to my own terms—whatever those were. I kept reminding myself that if I didn't know what in hell I was doing, it was all right because everybody else was secretly making it up as they went along, too. I remember feeling as if the days were passing in such slow motion that I might have been sleepwalking under water, yet in retrospect I'm impressed at the speed with which that young woman flew into action. Within three months I was in an onerous weekly poetry workshop with Kenneth and his friends; I was taking my writing seriously, had found myself a job, was working as a secretary at a literary agency, and had begun hunting for my own apartment.

Such changes had not come about smoothly, openly, or truthfully. “When in Rome, lie as the Romans do,” I muttered to myself. Apartment hunting was my dark secret; I'd no idea how long it might take me to find one, or even to save enough money for the first two months' advance rent. As it turned out, I wouldn't be able to move away from my mother until June of the following year, and the intervening thirteen months found us not always on the coziest of roommate terms. In the meantime, I'd convinced Faith that my search for an office job was sort of a lark and only temporary, until I could (a) win the transitional role that would establish me as an adult actress and/or (b) write her a best-seller. Naturally, she saw no contradiction between the two.

Actually
landing
a job was another matter. Like millions of wanna-be writers, I hoped to work “in publishing somewhere.” But I had no office skills other than an acquaintance with the alphabet that would qualify me for the post of file clerk. I knew no shorthand and although I could type accurately and rapidly I had never learned touch-typing, so my technique required glances at the keyboard and a weirdly Wanda Landowskan style of pianistic hand crossovers. I didn't lie to the employment agencies about this lack of skills, figuring I'd be found out anyway. But more than that was discovered at the first placement agency with which I registered. A seedy man named Louie interviewed me and recognized my face and my name.

“Hey, you were a kid star. TV. Big stuff,” he chewed the words past his mustache and into his cigar. “So Miss Big Stuff, what's a millionaire like you who got rich from doing nothing but be cute want with an office job, huh? Huh, Baby?” I bit back my humiliation and explained to him that all that was long ago and I wasn't a millionaire and wanted a job.

“How come? Spent all your dough on caviar lollipops? Don't think you can play
me
for a patsy, Baby. What are you, researching some role you're gonna play? There's gals really
need
these jobs, ya know, Cutie.”

I told Louie the truth, that my mother controlled all my money and had stated I wouldn't get a penny if I moved out, and that I was desperate to gain my independence. I begged. Louie refused to send me out on interviews.

“Because I have no skills?” I asked. “But I swear I can learn very fast and I'm willing to do any—”

“Nah. Skills shmills. Just on accounta' you're
you
, Baby.”

I slunk away to other agencies. But after days of pavement pounding and being told to go to secretarial school (which Faith had refused to pay for: “Secretarial skills for a genius like you?!”), or else being told, “Get some on-the-job experience first” (
how?
), I'd gained the painful insight that my attempts to “live the real,” as I put it, were false starts. So I returned to Louie's 42nd Street office, filled out a new card, and sat again in front of his desk.

But this time my own skills were being practiced. Louie glanced at a card listing my accomplishments as typing sixty words per minute, rapid-write shorthand, fluent French and German, previous experience three years in executive-assistant positions with convincing-sounding small
businesses abroad. The signature at the bottom of the card was Roberta Moran. Louie was impressed. Louie looked up to see a young woman wearing glasses, earrings, bright red lipstick, and an aqua chiffon scarf wound in a turban covering her hair. She smiled winningly at him. He never stood a chance—especially when she began to respond to his questions in her boarding-school voice with the faintly British high pitch, acquired from all that time working abroad. He began to riffle his files for something “worthy” of her, since she was “one classy broad.” Together they chose Curtis Brown, Ltd., an established literary agency—the post of executive assistant to the head of the periodicals department. Louie told her whom to call in the personnel department and how to approach them. It was only after she'd thanked him and turned to go—job address and contact's name secure in her purse beyond reclamation—that poor Louie wished her well, making the temptation to respond too strong.

“So, Baby, lotsa luck. If you land it, you'll buy me a drink, huh? And lissen, if it don't work out, you sashay right back here and I'll find you something else. Something sterling, Cutie.”

Which permitted his classy broad the supreme moment of turning, whipping off the glasses and scarf, and smiling, “Call me Robin Morgan.
You
remember. Don't call me Cutie. And
never
call me Baby.”

I swept grandly out of his office—not yet having learned that while such a triumph may warm the victor with a temporary satisfaction, it leaves ashes of doubt that one has not only failed to educate the person one was trying to impress but has in fact confirmed his prejudice. Nevertheless, I got the job.

I'd gambled correctly—that Louie would be too embarrassed to call and denounce as an imposter someone he himself had sent over. Nor, to be on the safe side, did I cite him as a reference. I claimed I'd heard about the job opening from a (nameless) friend at another agency, thus saving both Curtis Brown and myself from paying commissions. It had been surprisingly simple. I'd called for an appointment and gone to the Curtis Brown offices, on Madison Avenue just off 57th Street, looking like myself and using my own name, but inventing my office skills and references, which, it turned out, weren't even checked. Nor did anyone do a double take at my name or my face; either people in the publishing world hadn't watched much television or they had short memories. I was hugely
relieved—and blissful when asked to start the following Monday. Even Faith shared some of my excitement (“while it lasts” it would help my “writing career”), though she expressed reservations about my ability to adjust to a nine-to-five, five-day-workweek schedule. I proved her wrong.