Saturday's Child (33 page)

The next time I saw Ken, I told him, assuming he'd be sympathetic, after the fact, about this close call. He was furious. How could I have
considered
an abortion? How could I have even
thought
of doing such a thing? How could I have not told him? I was baffled, but touched by his concern for me—until he added other outraged questions. Didn't I realize it was his child? How dare I destroy his child? We had a huge fight, during which I distinctly remember that I felt on shaky ethical grounds for daring to express such an unheard-of idea that what took place in my body was my concern and how to deal with it my choice. Ken and I didn't speak for about a week. Then, I vaguely recall due to Barbara's intervention, we patched it up. Many, many menstrual cycles later, in the early 1970s, the young feminist movement assembled signatures under a now famous statement: “I have had an illegal abortion.” It was signed by hundreds of courageous women, well-known and lesser-known. I never signed it, because I was one of the luckier ones who had been “let off with a scare.”

While I was nervously watching the calendar, the situation with my mother was in stasis. She was the last person in whom I would have confided, but the problem was solved anyway by noncommunication. Faith had refused to speak to me since I'd moved, hanging up the phone whenever I called for over a month. I stubbornly persisted. One day she relented, and we began to speak tentatively. Finally, to her credit, she accepted my invitation to dinner at my apartment. How insane it must have seemed to the woman, as she laboriously climbed those ninety-six steep steps, hauling with her, naturally, inappropriately de luxe house-warming gifts. A Wedgwood bowl. Irish linen dishtowels. Steak knives. I couldn't afford steak, but I remember that once she had recovered, grey-faced and gasping, from the trek upward, I cooked her chicken breasts with rosemary, garlic, and olive oil. She sat on my one rickety chair (I perched on another ever useful milk crate) and she tried to enthuse over “what interesting things could be done with the place.” When she left, I walked her down to the street and saw her to a taxi. She hugged me, and we both teared up. Then I left base camp to mount the north face again.

That summer passed quickly. I loved to stroll around my new neighborhood, basking in almost anonymity, rarely being recognized except as a
familiar customer at the laundromat, the A&P, the all-night deli, the Korean produce stand that sold cheap cut flowers. This is as good a place as any to confess to a lifelong, self-indulgent weakness for fresh flowers. I've gone without food on certain occasions in order to buy flowers or plants. One of the joys of now having a garden of my own is wandering through it early in the morning, steaming coffee mug in hand, while the dawn chorus is still celebrating its alleluias. That's the best time to notice what's begun to bud, what's blossomed overnight, what can be plucked from the cutting garden. As I write this, one of the last roses of summer, a homegrown Michele Meilland, drowses its garnet head languidly over the rim of a bud vase on my desk. Back during that summer of 1962, when I received the unexpected windfall of a ten-dollar check from a magazine accepting two of my poems, did I use it sensibly toward purchasing any one of the fifty items I so needed for my apartment? Of course not. The Korean stand had anemones on sale. I bought them all: two armfuls, fragrant splashes of black-centered red, purple, and blue petals nodding on slender loopy stems. I filled—damned right—the Wedgwood bowl with them, and spent all evening sitting looking at this spectacle of color, moving my one chair around for differing viewpoints, while I dined on five Saltine crackers.

It was a good summer. On July 4, Kenneth, Bob, a musician pal of Bob's named Franco Renzulli, Thatcher, and I all went to Coney Island, part of a sea of lemming-humanity trying to swim, bask, and watch fireworks. I noticed rather quickly (not that it was difficult to see) that Ken had a crush on Thatcher, who was possessed of a classic well-exercised dancer's body unfortunately accompanied by a classic under-exercised dancer's brain. But Thatcher claimed he was straight and Bob accepted Ken's affair with me, so hey, who was I to complain? I was more interested in being in touch with my freedom than with my feelings. Anyway, we were all being cronies together. Bob had to go out of town on some musical gig for a week and suggested I spend time “playing house” in his and Ken's apartment. Welcome to Bloomsbury, I thought!

During that week, I experienced firsthand what Bob referred to as Kenneth's “bull in the china-shops of the world tendencies”: a refusal or inability to learn the most basic hypocrisies of polite social congress, and an absent-minded-professor air that caused Kenneth with running-joke
regularity to drop vases, spill drinks, misplace tools, and lose eyeglasses, keys, and wallet—all the while insightfully holding forth on anything literary from “Beowulf” to Berryman. But none of that mattered. On the contrary, such awkwardness struck me as attractive: a working-class, boyish vulnerability that balanced out his ferocity on other fronts, a sort of Heathcliffean “unmannerly stableboy.”

We had fun that summer. We knew enough artists and performers to cadge free tickets to concerts, poetry readings, Ailey and Joffrey ballets. We went to museums and to Shakespeare in Central Park, argued about literature, painting, sculpture, music. We drove across the Brooklyn Bridge in someone's borrowed convertible: top down, jug wine, hair in the wind, the works. Once, after Ken stayed over at my apartment, he walked me all the way to my office building, and we stood at the corner of Madison and 57th not wanting to separate even for a few hours; I was wearing a sleeveless blue linen shift, and he said I was beautiful. That summer I wrote lots of poems, made diligent love with Kenneth, and reconciled with Faith, who released more of my clothing and books to me. I went to work every weekday, but I didn't attend a single audition. I even learned to drive and got my license—with the real birthdate on it. I felt self-possessed, poised to start my life.

Then, one day in September, Kenneth phoned me at work. He was breathing rapidly. I remember I was standing by my desk, looking at my green-and-white-striped spider plant and absently pulling off a brown edge or two as we talked.

“Are you all right?” I said. “You sound breathless. What's the matter?”

“If I come uptown can you get off for a quick cup of coffee?”

“Well—yeah, sure, I guess so. I didn't take any lunchtime today, so—But what's up? Give me a clue, at least. Is something wrong?”

“It's—it's that… Bob just told me he's involved with somebody else. A conductor, who's also a pianist. You've met him. Franco Renzulli.”

“Yes, but—you and Bob. I mean, you two are hardly exclusive or monogamous or … I mean, what's the—”

“This is different. It's not a fling. He says he loves Frank. He wants to live with him. He wants to spend their lives making music together as a duo-pianist team. He wants to compose work for Frank to conduct.”

“Well, but—”

“He's in
love
with him. They have it all worked out. Bob wants to leave me. Don't you see?”

“Oh. Oh Kenneth. Oh, I'm so sorry. I—”

“So, I thought—what I mean is—what I wanted to ask you is—Robin, will you marry me?”

The woman I am now finds it an absolute astonishment that this conversation went the way it did.

But the woman I was then replied instantly, with no uncertainty, no hesitation, no backward glance.

“Yes. Unequivocally,” I said.

¹
Van Doren did take a liking to me, reading and commenting on about thirty poems of mine. But I suspect his interest was influenced less by my work than by my having silently brought him a single red rose the day after his son Charles had been all over the news for having cheated on Barry and Enright's TV show
The $64,000 Question
. Van Doren would have had no way of knowing that my sympathy for his paternal embarrassment included an element of special pity for all victims corrupted by Barry and Enright. That day (the day of the rose), Van Doren surprised the class by summarily announcing he would not be giving his planned address, on
Macbeth
and ambition. Instead, he delivered an unforgettable, extemporaneous lecture on
Lear
, analyzing the play as a failure of fatherhood without once mentioning the headlines.

Part Two

TEN

Alice in Bloomsbury

And whilst our souls negotiate there
,

we like sepulchral statues lay; …

Love's mysteries in souls do grow
,

but yet the body is his book
.

—J
OHN
D
ONNE
, “T
HE
E
CSTACY
”

Nine days after he proposed, Kenneth and I were married.

Those were a busy nine days. Everyone we knew disapproved of this match, except of course for Bob, whose heart had its own reasons. All of Kenneth's gay friends, all his artist friends, all the radical intellectuals and bohemian types, flipped at the notion that he would (a) marry at all, (b) marry a woman, and (c) marry an only recently virginal former child actress ten years his junior. (Well, we
were
an odd couple.) In my circles, the assembly of forces arrayed against this marriage ranged from the workshop poets through my actor buddy Ronnie Welsh to my friends at work. Then there was my mother.

When I first tried to tell her, stammering as I led up to the announcement of my plans, she interrupted me.

“Honey,
what?
Are you sick? Are you pregnant? Were you robbed or mugged? Were you raped?”

“No, Mother, no. I'm fine. But—”

“If it's none of those things, then don't worry. Whatever it is, Snibbin, we'll see it through together.”

Oh, how I knew this was something we would not see through together. Sure enough, once I managed to get the news out, the ensuing scene was so debilitating that it was all I could do to hold the discussion at Stage One (“Kenneth and I plan to get married”) while cravenly avoiding Stage Two (“Imminently”).

I hadn't yet made up my mind how or when to tell her
that
, though I did want her to be at the wedding. The truth is that I was still grappling with the concept of getting married, and so soon, since an engagement wasn't even discussed as an option. I apparently lacked the common sense to question why the schedule was being driven by the double urgencies of Bob's and Frank's desire to live together and Kenneth's desire not to live alone. Somehow, with every passing day, more decisions got made. We discussed eloping to Maryland, but opted instead to find someplace in New York with a pleasant setting but a civil or nondenominational ceremony (not as easy in 1962 as it is now). We went for blood tests, went to get the license, actually set a date. Then, just as I was about to break it to Faith, the matter was taken out of my hands by Anne Tedesco from my office. She'd met my mother once and liked her, so she called her to tattle on me, in hopes of stopping the onrushing ceremony. I was outraged at this betrayal of confidence by someone I'd regarded as my friend, livid that my mother's reach could stretch into the realm of my work relationships, and infuriated at yet another person's doing what she considered was best for me without consulting me. But I barely had time for indignation because the firework theatricals that burst forth from my mother concentrated the mind, as they say, wonderfully.

In tears, moans, and shouts, she and I Had At It—sometimes in whispered, hissed phone conversations from my office, as Faith was no respecter of workspace when her daughter's future was at stake. She roused both of my aunts, my agent, my managers, distant acquaintances, even former cast members from
Mama
to call me and denounce this marriage, all of them asking, “
What
are you
doing
to your
mother
, Robin?”

I ignored them. I attempted to convince her this was not about
her
but about
me
. Fatuously, I tried logic, reminding her of the days following my
announcement about having gone to bed with Kenneth that past spring. I reminded her that she had threatened to throw him into jail for corrupting the morals of a minor—until I'd pointed out I could now prove I was no longer a minor; reminded her that she'd actually brought forth a dainty pearl-handled revolver and, to my horror, had begun brandishing it, threatening that he would damned well
marry
me or die. I reminded her that I hadn't
wanted
to get married
then
, although now was different. (I was on slippery footing here, a mere three months later, but she never paused long enough to notice.) I begged her to attend the wedding and be happy for me. But when she found she would not be able to stop me, denying me her presence was the one thing she could control. And probably, in her rage and grief, she felt that if she didn't witness it, the ceremony wouldn't really have taken place.

Meanwhile, Bob made plans to move in with Frank, and his shared household with Kenneth entered the property-division stage. Since they'd come to New York from Seattle together and had lived as a couple for seven years, this was not simple: grand piano to leave with Bob, upright piano to stay with Ken; scores leaving with Bob, books staying with Ken; dishes, linens, cookware, and cats in contention—while everyone strove to appear magnanimous and sensible. In the meantime, their friends came and went, and people were bursting into tears, embracing in corners, wiping their eyes, shaking their heads, and muttering, “I don't know. I just don't know…”

This was hardly the atmosphere I'd thought would surround my impending wedding. On the one hand, unlike most young women, I'd harbored no particular fantasies about the Day, the Dress, or the Ceremony, and had contentedly decided I didn't want to marry for a while or maybe never. On the other hand, I wasn't the only one who'd heard “
unequivocally
” issue from my lips with the knell-like absolutism of a prophecy by the Delphic oracle. I did feel that none of us quite knew what any of us were doing or why, but I also thought—after a lifetime of being told what to do and having to do it—that such uncertainty couldn't be worse and might be an improvement.