Saturday's Child (32 page)

“When I got pregnant and then he broke the news about his fiancée waiting for him in England, I just didn't believe it. It was like a nightmare I couldn't wake up from. He said I had to have an abortion. But I'd known two girls—one from the lingerie shop and one before that, back in Atlanta—who'd died from abortions, and I was afraid. I knew how he talked about having sons, so I thought, well, what if it's a son? I thought, he'll dump his fiancee and marry me, that's what. We argued and fought, and then one day he moved out. Then Sally and Sophie and me,
we
argued and fought—to have the baby, not to have the baby. Sally and I insisted. So then we three decided Sally and I should go away, to Florida, to have it, so nobody in New York would know the details until after—because we all were sure he'd marry me in the end. That's why you were born in Lake Worth. I felt so sure you were going to be a boy that all your baby blankets were in blue, initialed RK—for Robin Kenneth. You were going to be named after my Papa Reuben, and I always liked the name Kenneth. Somebody told me once it meant ‘knowledge' or ‘wisdom' or something like that. Anyway, you were a girl—a gorgeous little girl. But I thought, she's so perfect her father will change his mind and want us after all. We came back north and arranged a meeting with him. It didn't go well. Sal and Soph took matters into their own hands. They said if he didn't marry me they'd make an anonymous report to the U.S. government that he was a spy. This was still wartime, remember, and though eventually he'd have been found not guilty, they'd have clapped him in prison for the duration and he'd have been damned uncomfortable, as well as probably denied a medical license forever. Sally said—I'll never forget it—she said, You're Austrian and educated and somehow
you
got away while all the other Jews got gassed? You think the U.S.A. is going to buy
that?'
Well, in the end, we
made a deal. He'd marry me, give you a name, then I'd get a divorce right away. Which is what happened. But then I decided I didn't want his damned name for me
or
you, so I went to court and changed it, like I told you. As for the year … well, this wonderful doctor, Dr. Grady Brantley in Lake Worth—he delivered you—he understood that things were backwards, that the wedding had happened after the birth. It wasn't all that unusual in wartime, Robin. He understood that changing one little number, 1941 to 1942, would make all the difference. It would make the birth
follow
the marriage and divorce. It would make you legitimate, save you from a lifelong stigma. So he issued another birth certificate, and that's the one we've lived by. It wasn't until you had a career that the extra year came in handy for reasons we'd never planned, making you seem even smarter than you were. By then I was sure it was God, laughing together with us—you and me, Sal and Soph—at Mates.”

Each revelation blasted open more deposits of mystery and melodrama. Altering legal documents. Medical collusion in a felonious action. Blackmail. Accusations of espionage. A shotgun marriage, an instant divorce. But
he
had said, “Your mother and I were never married”—so which of them was lying this time? Or didn't he consider a coerced brief marriage being married? But if
she
was lying, what other reasons could she have had for the falsified year? On the contrary, her story made sense—surreal sense, but sense. Then again, what if—

I gave up. It was a deliberate act of will. I drew a curtain over the mystery, feeling that the path of its pursuit wound through madness, and finally comprehending that no details in this saga would ever fall into a rational pattern with all versions in agreement. I didn't know then that most families have similar secrets, contradictory explanations, onion-skin layerings of truth, half-truth, untruth. I knew only that I was glad to have told my truth to my father, glad to have told the truth about meeting him to my mother, glad she had taken those truths in stride. I knew that beyond all our power struggles I loved this hurt and hurtful woman as strongly as a daughter could love a mother, and knew just as strongly that I was embarrassed and exhausted by the histrionic facts of my life. I wanted to be free from obsessing about them, to be born anew and entire, not Athena sprung whole from the forehead of Zeus, but myself sprung whole from my own brain and heart. I wanted to turn my back on their
past and face my future—and I wanted that future to be literature, in part because I knew that good literature means the employment of language in the service of truth.

Since literature seemed incarnate in a particular man, whose name was to have been my own middle name, it seemed almost fated. When I told Kenneth Faith's story, he shared my sense of awe, as if this were an eerie sign that the universe had a sense of humor and a sense of wordplay. Those two halves of one name helped us to understand that we really did love one another.

So it came to pass that on a soft May evening in 1962, after a party at the loft of one of Kenneth's friends, a ballet dancer named Thatcher, Kenneth swept out the last of the partygoers—the boozy bikers and stoned, hallucinating Joffrey dancers and Rockettes—waved goodbye to Bob, who was departing entwined with an actor he'd picked up, sent Thatcher away from his own home, lit every votive candle in the place, put Dvořák's “New World” Symphony on the phonograph, and became my First.

Afterward, we emerged into the grey spring dawn, walking for hours through the still city, winding up on a bench in Stuyvesant Park, near Kenneth and Bob's place. There we sat, talking, as morning billowed into full light. All the street trees—including the puffy white callery pears—were in bloom. I remember that a beggar came shuffling by, and Kenneth, normally frugal with every cent, emptied his pockets and poured all his loose change, largesse, into the beggar's cupped hands.

“Here. And here, and here,” he laughed. “I'm so rich today, I don't need money.” He smiled at me. “You have such an air of
possibility
about you, Robin. It makes me believe
any
thing can happen.”

“And you're a great writer. So we
can
make anything happen,” I smiled back.

It was decidedly the road less taken. At the time, we didn't know that those two statements would define our behavior for the following two decades. Neither of us thought it would be more than an affair leading, hopefully, to a lifelong friendship. But the pace of events was about to quicken again.

Claiming that “I was just out for a long walk and to think” wouldn't cut it with my mother anymore than it had a year or so earlier regarding that late night out with Johnny; worse, this was
all
night and well into the day.
So I didn't even try. I told her the truth. Then I ducked in time for her solid brass bed-table clock to dent the wall instead of my skull. It was the first time she had ever acted to harm me physically.

“Go have your little shudder in bed then!” she screamed, her face swollen with crying at my betrayal. “Repeat the pattern. Ruin your life.
Ruin
it. I've done my best to save us, done everything I could. I failed. The rest is up to you.”

She was correct in that at least. It was up to me.

Being liberated from my virginity seemed to have a galvanizing effect. Less than three weeks later, I found an apartment—a sixth-floor walk-up at 516 East 78th Street—plonked down the first month's rent and security, borrowed fifty dollars from Kenneth and Bob to tide me over until payday, and, sobbing as loudly as Faith, moved. All she would let me take as I staggered past our goggle-eyed elevator man and doorman was one shopping bag of clothes and toiletries, my portable typewriter, and a small bag of books. I borrowed a pot, a pan, some cutlery and dishes, one set of sheets, two towels, and a washcloth from my secretaries' circle buddies at work. Carl Stepney, one of that circle, had a sewing machine and stitched me up curtains. Jim Shue, another secretary, offered to give me an extra (three-quarter size) mattress he had. But he lived way over on the West Side so, balancing it on a little red wagon borrowed from one of
his
friends, Jim and I trundled it across town and through Central Park, convulsing passersby with the periodic collapses of mattress, wagon, and movers. We then lugged, panted, paused, and again lugged it up all six flights. It took us an entire Saturday. Ronnie Welsh, my one ex-kid-actor friend, helped me beg or steal wooden milk crates from neighborhood grocery stores; these became my bookshelves, stools, tables, and, with the addition of a plank found on the street, “desk.” Kenneth, Bob, and the workshop poets instructed me in New York scavenge techniques: how to pick up good stuff that's been discarded on the street. First you had to find out which morning in your area the sanitation department accepted bulk items and furniture; then you knew that the previous night was when people would leave their old paraphernalia out on the sidewalk—everything from sofas to dish racks to air conditioners. There were basic rules.
Don't
take in anything upholstered (it can be alarmingly alive inside).
Do
pick up
lamps (you can learn to rewire them), chairs (who cares about a missing rung?), and anything decent made of wood even if painted (you can strip it down to the grain).
Do
go foraging late, preferably with a friend to help carry.
Don't
be tempted by records; they're probably scratched beyond use.
Do
realize that file cabinets with drawers that still work are the best find of all. And so forth. With such advice and help, I made myself a home.

It was hardly homey. That apartment—a studio—had a tiny kitchen, a tinier bathroom, and one window overlooking a back court. It did have a ledge that passed for a balcony, on which I put out crumbs to seduce pigeons for company, until they began attacking my windows at night as if they were extras on leave from a Hitchcock set. The floor was unpolished concrete painted black, which meant that no matter how many times I mopped it, it showed every footprint. The neighborhood, just off the East River, was a bit unsavory but not unsafe. I didn't know that I wouldn't be spending a long time in this apartment, that I'd be there for only three months, in fact. But during that time I learned some crucial lessons.

I learned what I could do without. Because I'd left precipitately and still hadn't saved enough money to equip a home with fundamentals, I survived on a miserly budget. To save bus fare, I walked almost thirty blocks to work each day, then walked home again. I brought lunch to work, went without a visit to the morning coffee wagon, and regretfully declined lunches or drinks with the gang. I made as many phone calls as possible from the office, not from home. I pilfered toilet paper, paper towels, and bar soap from the ladies' room; stole pencils, pads, paper, and typewriter ribbons from the supply room. I confess I reveled in discovering I could do all this.

I also learned the value of planning ahead, learned in fact to become an inveterate maker of lists. The motivation was clear: once you got downstairs from that apartment to the street, you did
not
dash up again. Each flight was a cruel sixteen steps, with a brief landing in between. So you made damned sure you had the requisite sweater or umbrella
before
walking out your door. If you were proceeding on somewhere after work, you made certain you had with you whatever would be needed later—change of clothes, ticket, address—because there'd be no popping home blithely to change. On the return trip every day, you bought not groceries, but
a
grocery or two.
Only
one or two, because doing a full shopping was out of the question—for money reasons but also because with even two moderately heavy shopping bags the ascent required Sherpas.

Last, I learned I was capable of doing something I was sure I never would. I'd been sophomorically impressed by Albert Schweitzer's phrase “reverence for life”—and no doubt subliminally influenced by my mother's stories—so I had always been sure
I'd
never have an abortion. But I also harbored the fear that I'd repeat my mother's life and become pregnant with an unplanned child. So I'd taken care that the de-virginizing intercourse had occurred while I was having my period, under the misapprehension that this meant I'd be safe from conception. (It's amazing how little anybody knew—or would say—about women's bodies, only a scant three decades ago.) A few days after the loft night, I'd hied myself to a gynecologist recommended by one of the women at work, to get fitted for a diaphragm. Then, suddenly, once I moved to 78th Street, my usually clockwork period was late. Three days late. Five. A week late. I told no one. I spent one Sunday afternoon running up and down the stairs to my apartment twelve times, until I thought I'd pass out on my concrete floor, trying to bring on the period. Later, I took a long walk by myself along the river and stood leaning on the railing, watching the lights wink on across the water in Queens. Faced with Schweitzer plus reverence on the one hand and Faith's life plus reality on the other, I heard myself softly announce to the dusk, “If it turns out I'm pregnant, I'll have an abortion. I'll find out where and who.
Somehow
.”

It was another of those defining moments that take on such importance in retrospect, more so because there was no support in those days for reaching such a decision. I did confide in one of my pals at work, Anne Tedesco, who had found me the gynecologist, hoping she might also know of someone who could do such a procedure. (I'd already called the gynecologist, who had promptly hung up on me for having even asked her.) Anne was horrified, partly because of her Catholic background but also because she, like virtually every woman of that time, knew of somebody who had died on the table of a back-alley illegal abortionist, or died of complications thereafter. But I was not to be deterred. Finally, I managed (through show business, of course: a contact twice-removed via Ronnie Welsh) to obtain a phone number in Pennsylvania. The piece of paper sat
for two days on my milk-crate nighttable, until I finally resolved to call the following morning. That night, like a reprieve, my period began.