Saturday's Child (43 page)

To the more mainstream groups fell the unglamorous but crucial job of tackling legislative reforms, helping women integrate male preserves and nontraditional jobs, bettering the lot of employed women in general and professional women (assumed to have already made it) in particular, attempting to absorb and organize the literally hundreds of women who every day clamored to locate and join the Women's Movement, and trying to encompass each new issue as it arose. That could mean fighting discrimination against females as sportscasters or ministers one day and as firefighters or orchestra musicians the next. This wing had the foresight to urge more women to run for public office and to create support systems for those candidates, such groups as the bipartisan National Women's Political Caucus. Generally, at least from the 1960s through the late 1970s, many of these moderate groups shied away from what they then considered controversial or alienating “sexual politics”: lesbian custody rights, for instance, or the outright repeal of abortion laws (as opposed to reforming them), or confronting the industries of pornography and prostitution, or in some cases even challenging laws on battery (considered a “domestic” problem). But what they may have lacked in impudence or vision they compensated for in organizational skills: most of the institutions these women forged
lasted
. Moreover, their impact has grown and, fortunately, so has their political inclusiveness.

The same could
not
be said of us, the more sensational revolutionaries who bravely risked and regularly endured tear gas, beatings, and jail—but were apparently unwilling to risk any kind of coherence. We were nothing if not fluid. Many of our groups formed, split, reformed, disbanded, and resurrected themselves within weeks, making it difficult for movement newcomers even to
find
us. However, we were the women who ambitiously unearthed and confronted issues broadside, despite being divided ourselves into those two camps of “politico” or “socialist feminist” (who had a residual overriding loyalty to male-defined Leftist priorities) and “radical feminist” (who made
women's
needs, condition, and organizing
the priority). After September 1968, we were on the map, whether Hanisch and Amatniek were ready for us to be there or not. So separately or together, both politico and feminist twigs of the “revolutionary branch” created a high-energy frictional heat of activism: C-R groups, demonstrations,
and
“zap” actions. Groups proliferated nationwide, from, of, and for particular constituencies of race or sexuality or focus: the Combahee River Collective, the Lavender Menace, Older Women's Liberation (OWL), Cell 16, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), La Mujer Chicana Group, Radicalesbians, Asian Women United, First Mothers Native Americans—it seemed there was a group being born every day.

I felt right at home, because we never stopped. We marched against the Vietnam War as the “Jeanette Rankin Brigade,” so named in honor of the first elected congresswoman, who had also voted against U.S. participation in both world wars. We demonstrated against forced sterilization of poor women and women of color—while also providing underground abortion referrals when both the procedure and counseling it were illegal. We participated in seizures and occupations protesting advertising's objectified images of women.
¹⁰
We helped organize women's groups at all major newspapers and television and radio stations. We staged speakouts and speakups and began conceiving such terms as “battered woman,” “sexual harassment,” and “date rape.” We hardly ever sat still, too much awhirl setting up storefront women's centers, childcare groups, women's health and self-help clinics; producing the first women's studies programs and self-defense courses; creating what would be called a “women's culture” in music, visual and performing arts, literature, even spirituality. We founded festivals, galleries, theater groups, record companies … we meant to leave no battle unjoined.

Our branch did, however, mostly shy away from legislative reforms and from the push for more women in public office or in positions of corporate, media, or “establishment” power. Furthermore, self-righteous political
purity frequently infected us with contempt for those groups “working inside the system”—as if anyone could manage to work totally outside it. (This more-radical-than-thou scorn would turn in on itself, with periods of infighting: between those radical feminists who considered themselves “separatist”—which had at least ten different definitions—and those who didn't, between mothers and childless/child-free women, and expectably along the already vulnerable fault lines of race, class, and sexual-preference differences.) The larger estrangement went both ways: the exasperation felt by radicals toward moderates was tartly reciprocated—with the moderate women (their wing suffering its own schisms meanwhile) characterizing us as hairy-legged, wild-eyed, and unpragmatic.

It's taken thirty years of contemporary feminist activism for the movement to outgrow these rancorous categorizations. The bad news is that it took that long and that some people never outgrew anything but their birkenstock sandals or, in the other camp, their mink coats. But the good news is that there were more of us able and willing to work with each other across all barriers, ego games, and deflections.

In part, the splits paralleled comparable fractures in the nineteenth-century women's suffrage movement; herstory repeats itself, too. There were also generational schisms—daughters fighting against, with, and sometimes for their mothers and mother surrogates, and the reverse. That was a battle I knew in my bones.

The Personal Is
Personal
, Coo

Like many people in their late twenties, I was during this time still trying to resolve my ambivalence about my parents, all the while claiming that such struggles no longer had any hold over me. Ever since our wedding, my mother had refused my phone calls and returned my letters unopened. We didn't speak for almost four years, and then fitfully. It seemed that anything could set off another bout of phone hang-ups, and often did.

Perhaps in recompense, and with Kenneth's support, I began thinking about my father again. I'd given up on him once before, but that had been when I was in a state of shock after the meeting, and besides, I told myself, things were different now. I was a wife. I was an activist. I was a
grown-up. So I phoned and told him I was married, and invited him and his wife to dinner. I thus initiated a series of manufactured social occasions where people who have absolutely nothing in common except some strands of DNA congregate and pretend to be civil. Most families endure such periods annually, calling them “holidays.”

First, Viga Morgenstern came into Manhattan from New Jersey to test me out with a woman-to-woman lunch, in order to protect her menfolk. I must have passed muster, because then she and Mates accepted our invitation to dinner. I can't remember what I cooked, but I recall it took days, so it must have been elaborate. They were both sniffy about our neighborhood, commenting on the empty glassine envelopes strewn by the junkie sleeping on our doorstep. But once inside they were startled at the size and beauty of the apartment, by now a standard reaction. The evening went passably, in a strained sort of way, until they requited the gesture by actually inviting us to dinner at
their
home.

I was euphoric—until Mates and Viga made it clear that when I met their sons, I was to be presented as “the daughter of an old friend,” not as their half-sister. Viga obviously knew of the liaison with my mother, but the boys—then in their teens—had not been told. What's more, they
wouldn't
be. Kenneth rose to my defense, since with a glance he'd gathered I was unable to. He asked when, if ever, Mates intended to tell them who I really was.

“Ahh, later. Much, much later. Perhaps when they turn twenty-one, perhaps even … it's important that they not lose respect for their father,” was his reply, with Viga chiming her little
moue
of agreement. Given my own experiences of retroactive family information, I did manage to pipe up, “You don't think that suddenly getting this news at age twenty-one is worse?” But the question might as well have been rhetorical.

I was hurt, but didn't want to seem intolerant. Besides, I thought in time things would change, sooner rather than later. And oh, how I was curious. So one icy February day in 1965, Kenneth and I trooped to the Port Authority Terminal to catch the same bus for New Brunswick, New Jersey, that I'd taken four years earlier. We stopped at the newsstand to pick up a paper, jolted by the headlines: Malcolm X had been assassinated the night before. We spent the bus ride talking and crying, and were still
declaring our sorrow and anxiety when we arrived at the Morgensterns'—where we were met with the diametrically opposed view that “the world was a better place without this terrorist Negro.”

Not a good beginning. The ensuing argument was played out in full hearing of the Morgensterns' African-American maid, who scurried in and out with drinks, readjusting her uniform and glancing sidewise at Kenneth and me—while the words “Oh, her, she's just like one of the family” actually issued from Viga's mouth.

It was like discovering Hell as the crossroads between Mississippi and the Ringstrasse. The atmosphere was formal. The two stiffly polite boys wore shorts and knee socks in the European style, and you suspected they'd never heard of Elvis. The older one, Danny, struck me as being overly young for a sixteen-year-old. His future was announced by his parents while he stared vacantly into the middle distance: he was being tracked to follow his father's footsteps into medicine. The younger, Gil, at eleven and a half, was sharper, apparently a bit of a prodigy violinist; parental pride was voiced at the certainty of his eventual concert career. Dinner was, to say the least, uncomfortable, made more so by arch comments about that old friend whose daughter I was. At one point, Gil leaned across the table and said to me, with a pointed wink that stopped my heart, “Children know more than grown-ups think they know,” making me wonder if he and I shared a familial talent for eavesdropping.

But it was hopeless. The charade made me feel slimed, as if I'd been asked to deny my mother, asked to collaborate in my own erasure all over again. I got through the evening but knew I couldn't repeat the pretense. The long road to my phantom father had led to a cul-de-sac presided over by a man terrified the truth about my existence would upset the carefully constructed lie of his. I could sympathize with his fear, but not with his cowardice. I
was
drawn to building a relationship with this family, however slowly, now more to be in touch with the mysterious promise of my half-brothers than with the boring, suburban, Prussian Mates had turned out to be. But there seemed no way to accomplish that relationship without further compromising my already tattered sense of integrity. I explained this, as courteously as possible, in a follow-up phone call, and Kenneth and I proffered no further invitations. On their side, Mates and Viga were clearly relieved to let things drift into silence.

But did I
really
stop, this time? Well, hardly. I resurfaced from invisibility on three more occasions.

Almost four years later, after Blake was born, I phoned to tell Mates the news; after all, it was his first grandchild and (I was thinking strategically) it was a grand
son
. Viga answered, congratulated me, and said she'd give my father the message. But he neither called back nor sent a gift, not even a tin spoon, much less a silver one. For a while I told myself Viga might not have given him the message. But I knew better.

Still, obstinate as one of those weighted balloon dolls that pop back upright each time they're knocked flat, I called again in 1983, when Faith lay dying—and I actually got Mates on the phone. I said the doctors had told me my mother had only a few days left and if he wanted to see her or say anything to her, I felt I should offer him the chance. What obtuse, tenacious yearnings were still rooted in me! What foolish longings—for him to want to see her, ask forgiveness, lay the ghosts to rest, once and forever heal it, end it! No, he said, he had nothing to say to her.

The final attempt came a few weeks later. I phoned my then sole living parent to give him the particulars about when and where Faith's memorial service would take place, in case perhaps he … No, he answered stiffly, he saw no need for such information. He offered formal condolences. And that, finally, was the end of it.

For years, on and off, I wondered about the boys. There have been times when I considered looking them up, the younger one especially, since he seemed capable of a rebellious spark. But an emotional lassitude set in regarding them. It spoke to my soul in a wearied voice, reminding me that there's just so much rejection any sane person cares to risk. Eventually, I was just too busy doing other things. I feel fairly certain my father and his wife never told my brothers about my existence at all—but that's because I find it hard to imagine being one of them, having that information, and not seeking
me
out. Which is probably one of the most naive projections I've come up with, in a lifetime filled with them. I do wish I had more information about that side of my genetic inheritance, even if just to fill in the blank half of my medical history. But time, in the end, is the best tutor of indifference.

I turned back to the family I knew. I recommitted myself to mending my relationship with Faith. I recommitted myself to Kenneth and to the
marriage that, whatever its conscious or unconscious lacks for each of us, was never bereft of intimacy, tenderness, humor. And poetry.

We'd begun writing more openly political poems, though fortunately we were both vigilant about not descending into socialist realist art. These new poems may have intensified the political heat, but they took some of the psychological heat off writing about our own lives. After all, no matter how many times we had quoted Donne's “The Canonization” (“For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love …”) to others in defending our marriage, there's a limit to the number of times we could effectively quote it to ourselves. We had by then fairly exhausted the inward analytical landscape of our relationship—or at least we'd done so within certain parameters, ones that seemed brave at the time but now strike me as sophomorically Freudian.
¹¹
Poems affected by the epiphany of
feminist
politics were yet to come.