Saturday's Child (34 page)

Being disowned and poor didn't help. It meant that “the bride's side” could pay for nothing. That was humiliating, since I knew I was hardly marrying into money, and especially since my childhood earnings were
still paying rent for Faith at the posh East 57th Street apartment. But Ken's largesse-to-the-beggar-in-the-park impulse revived, and he not only footed the bill for the blood tests, license, ceremony, and flowers but volunteered to spring for a bash of a party afterward, back at his apartment, complete with champagne punch. He even offered to buy me a new dress for the wedding. But the one I wanted I couldn't tell him about, as it would have cost him a quarter of a year's salary teaching. I had spied it in the window of Bergdorf Goodman's: a burnt-sienna crushed-velvet evening gown with medieval slashed sleeves of deep bronze satin and a short, flared train. I envisioned myself in it, a walking resplendence of earth colors: my brown eyes glowing, autumnal flowers—burgundy mums, tawny asters, wheat stalks—twined in my sable greengold hair and bundled as a sheaf in my arms … Persephone on her triumphal procession toward winter. I settled instead for a dress I already owned—a knee-length, sleeveless, teal-blue velvet. But the flowers came true; we bought heaps for the party, and I assembled my bouquet from the same batch. I've kept a stalk of the wheat all these years.

Dickinson's “bustle in the house” takes place not only on the morning after death. Somehow, I missed only one day at work during all this frenzy, needing to call in sick after a flattening three-hour phone battle with Faith the previous night. Otherwise, I functioned. I weathered Ronnie Welsh's Noel Cowardice suicide attempt (he swallowed three bottles of aspirin, then immediately phoned me), rejected Anne Tedesco's apologies, asked Irene Petrovich to be my maid of honor instead of Anne, and reassured Edith Haggard (who had by now heard the rumors) that no, I didn't intend to take a honeymoon but yes, having the day off after the wedding
would
be pleasant, thank you very much. I still had so few furnishings at 78th Street that packing would be a minimal task. But I did insist on real wedding announcements, engraved on thick cream paper stock. I can't remember why. Was it because words on paper seemed solid, trustworthy, alone capable of making things real? Or was it a practical reason? Given my poverty and the depleted household into which I was moving, I know I was brazenly hoping for wedding gifts. Whatever the motivation, I managed to order the announcements, pay for them myself, address them, and send them out to everybody Ken and I knew—thanks to Curtis Brown's postal meter, not quite
de rigueur
for elegance but most helpful in the circumstances.
Since there were no proud parents of the bride announcing anything, the text read,

MISS ROBIN MORGAN AND MR. KENNETH PITCHFORD

ARE HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE

THAT THEY ARE AT HOME

AS

MR. AND MRS. KENNETH PITCHFORD

109 THIRD AVENUE

NEW YORK 3, NEW YORK

Somewhere in the midst of all the rushing about, one night, alone in my short-lived apartment, I made time to write a letter to myself. I no longer kept a journal, but needed at such a moment to turn to the sanctuary of the page, for me the one reliable place of honesty, insight, peace. This letter fascinates me, for all it reveals about what I knew, and didn't know—and didn't know I knew. Do any of us ever really
hear
ourselves? My words were both prophetic and naive.

12 September 1962

So I am, after all, going to marry K. And for my own benefit, I want to put into words below what that—and the very living of my life entirely, which only really begins now—will entail:

I will learn to love him even as he loves me, from knowledge and not abstraction. I will use him to find more of myself, and be at his hand for the same purpose. I will not lie to him, nor deceive him, no matter what the cost. I will insist on mutual honesty between us, whatever it discloses. I will not be subject to his life or work, be beset upon by him or any other; neither will I ask that of him. I will assert my selfness, my work, my desires and hours, not at the cost of his but to bring about between us a separate wholeness, threatening neither, reinforcing both. I will not play the girl-child to his father, nor will I patronize him, emphasizing his impracticalities or awkwardness in the technicalities of this world. I will work toward becoming a woman rather than a wife, knowing that the latter need not include the former, but rather the former can with ease and a
whole graciousness bring about the latter. I will remain me. I will fight all images that sprout between us of unconscious making. I will find the strength to be with him, or without him, as the case may be. I will try never to hurt him, within the bonds of loving or awareness. I will try to make him love me more each day, surprising his own limitations. I will not be overly dependent upon him, his potential as an artist, or his opinions—nor allow him to be tricked into leaning overly much on me. I will respect his actions all, his motives all, his ideas all, reserving that individual right of persons to differ.

I will survive my mother's hurt and horror, until such time as she can know me—and him—again. I will never stop a barrage of love toward her that must someday break her hatred and despair, and bring her to me. I will watch her always and be there when she needs me. I will find the strength and humor to cope with friends and acquaintances and their shock or disapproval. I will not let them touch me deeply, where I dwell, but will retain compassion, with action, toward those I care for. I will not be ashamed of what I am doing, but will compel acceptance on my own terms. I will not justify, excuse, explain, or plead. I am what I am, in pride and excitement.

I will follow him into any paths he chooses, however alien or dark, or blinding, and at the same time seek my own paths. I will respect myself and my work, alone and to his face. I will strive to enjoy his bed truthfully, his work critically, and our life, with all the endurance, passion, and honesty I, as a separate me, can bring to them.

And I will love him enough, and more. And that will make everything possible.

R.M.

The alarms raised by that vigilant twenty-one-year-old were startlingly on the mark. Her assumed earth-mother capacity for making everything possible through love was another matter altogether.

In any event, on the rainy, chilly Wednesday afternoon of September 19, 1962, I married Kenneth Pitchford in a nondenominational chapel way uptown at Riverside Church. Irene was my maid of honor, Bob was Kenneth's best man, and Ronnie insisted on coming along (to Kenneth's
irritation), in hopes I might suddenly change my mind and require an escort to go someplace else. At the last minute, it seemed proper that I wear something on my head (a chapel, after all), but the only dressy head covering I owned was a lacey net square kerchief. Its inappropriate color made Bob jittery, but made me smile. Persephone was wed wearing a black veil.

We returned to Ken's (and for the time being still Bob's) apartment, where about forty friends—almost all
theirs
—were gathered for the party, hell-bent on making the best of a bad thing with style. I would be vacuuming up grains of rice for months to come, but there
were
wedding gifts, and toasts, and dancing to live piano music. Frank, deliriously happy at inheriting Bob, played for hours on end, and fortunately he had a repertoire that, unlike Bob's, wasn't snobbishly limited to “serious” music. Then Kenneth and I lugged flowers and leftover champagne back up to my apartment, where we'd set up camp for the next week or so, while Bob moved the last of his things out. Finally, during the first week of October, we moved back downtown and I entered my new home.

The apartment was one of those New York “finds” over which people gasp. I counted myself wildly fortunate that Frank hadn't wanted to live there with Bob, who had dibs on the place because he'd been the one who'd actually found it; luckily, Frank couldn't bear feeling he'd be the new partner moving into Manderley. But I—already an experienced enough Manhattan-apartment hunter to recognize a fabulous thing when I saw it—had no qualms about running into Rebecca's ghost or Mrs. Danforth's revenge. The rent was staggeringly low—$150 a month, gradually rising to the august sum of $300 over the next two decades—and the space was enormous. It was on lower Third Avenue between 13th and 14th streets—not quite the Bowery but almost—and the neighborhood, pre-gentrification, was fairly squalid. Across the street from Ken's building, the old vaudeville Variety Theater still flashed its original neon marquee, but had fallen on bad times and offered porn flicks; next door to it, the Faith and Hope Mission promised salvation and soup. The building itself was an early nineteenth-century two-window-wide row house now bereft of its row-mates, squeezed between taller, latter-day tenements. On the street floor was (still is, at this writing) an idiosyncratic herbal shop, later to become popular for its worldwide mail-order business: Kiehl's
Pharmacy, owned by the ancient, tottery Mr. Morse, who also owned the building. The second floor, pungent with dried herbs, was used by the pharmacy for storing inventory, although eventually we would colonize and rent it, too. The third and fourth floors constituted the apartment, a
duplex
of two full floor-throughs, each approximately sixty feet long by twenty feet wide. There were working fireplaces, exposed-brick walls, original wide-planked wood floors, and dormer windows peeking out from the eaves on the top floor. Part of the anguish of my mother and aunts was based on my moving to “a tenement slum” on lower Third Avenue—but if moving from Sutton Place to the Lower East Side was regarded as a step down by them, moving to this space from my six-flight walk-up concrete-floored cell was, to me, quite a coup.

If the good news about 109 Third Avenue—or as we called it for short, “109”—was the cheap rent, the bad news was that Mr. Morse did nothing whatsoever as a landlord except collect it. He'd originally rented the space to Bob and Ken because he hadn't wanted to bother fixing it up and he'd heard that “gay boys did that sort of thing well.” He wasn't wrong. Over the years, they'd gradually supplied what basics had been lacking—replaced broken windows, installed radiators, repaired antiquated plumbing and wiring. But they'd divided up the space with each man having his own floor plus a shared space, so now—entering this status called Married Life—I was informed there was apparently more work to be done. Cheerfully game about it since I had absolutely no idea what renovations might entail, I stood ready to help with my clean blue jeans, T-shirt, new work gloves, and headscarf. Then, one Saturday soon after I'd moved in, Kenneth went up to the attic above the top floor, stomped his foot repeatedly through the plaster, and brought down the ceiling.

It was the beginning of what would be years of tearing out walls and ceilings one by one (then, in time,
building
other walls and ceilings), chipping plaster off the huge wood beams and then shellacking them to a glow, building more bookshelves, exposing more brick, opening yet another fireplace, building closets, and learning how to make one floor cozy whenever the other contained enough plaster rubble to qualify as bombed-out Berlin after World War II. I was never very good at any of this, except for being able to locate where Ken had last put down his hammer or screwdriver. But I was useful with the daily clean-up part, though my pulse would race
when we had to make midnight forays to street trashcans at least three blocks distant, to dispose illegally of bags of rubble, since we couldn't afford cartage. Yet we managed somehow, returning home from our jobs every day and transforming ourselves into construction workers—by each evening's end a prematurely aged couple, muscles aching and hair and eyebrows white from plaster dust.

Kenneth had decided the previous winter to quit teaching at NYU, since otherwise he'd have had to pursue the loathsome doctorate more assiduously than he was willing to do, and he'd taken a job at Funk & Wagnalls, the publishing firm that produced dictionaries, synonymies, and other reference books. I was to continue for another year or so at Curtis Brown until Edith retired, at which point I would take up freelance work, as a manuscript reader for literary agents and publishing houses and, later, as a proofreader and copyeditor. Meanwhile, we settled into marriage.

As might have been anticipated, our version of matrimony was not your garden-variety wedded life. We had a vision of ourselves as modern-day Webbs—Sidney and Beatrice, the literary couple—“two typewriters clacking as one.” Indeed, the first thing Kenneth built was a desk for me—a sanded and shellacked door laid across filing cabinets rescued from the street. I cherished my first real desk, but I wrote little during that first year or two, because right there in the middle of the literary world where I'd wanted so to be, I was busy turning myself into the Ideal American Wife.

I could try now to excuse my rush to domesticity in various ways. Not counting the three-month temporary residence, this was my first real home away from my mother, so I was flexing independence muscles. Furthermore, I “nest” by temperament. It was also apparent early on that the division of labor between Bob and Ken had not been so untraditional after all: Bob did most of the cooking and was always complaining about the infrequency or superficiality of Ken's housework, so that was an area I could slide right into with proprietary confidence—which Kenneth certainly didn't require but definitely didn't resist. Beyond those reasons, though, I suspect two others. I was a product of the 1950s, after all, bar-raged while growing up with images that defined any adult woman as a person wearing an apron—and I really,
really
longed to feel adult. It's also true that Wife was a new part, a challenging role to play well and at which to overachieve. For all these reasons, I threw myself into housewifery with
energetic insistence. Although the two men had employed a weekly cleaning woman, I took that work over myself. I scrubbed and soaked, polished, mopped, and waxed so hard you'd have thought I must be scouring away all vestiges of previous occupants. With my new kitchen utensils, now liberated from my one-pan-only recipes of 78th Street, I dove into cooking as if the Aunt Sophie gene had suddenly become activated. (But not sewing—never sewing: that was Faith's terrain.) I'm talking heavy-duty cooking here. Coq au vin. Crown racks of lamb. Seafood crepes. Roast Cornish hens stuffed with wild rice. Mandarin-orange and chocolate souffles. Home-churned granita de cafe. And that was just for
us
. When we entertained friends at dinner, I did something
really
fancy.