The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) (13 page)

I suddenly heard myself sounding rather cross. ‘Thank you for reducing me to the level of female cliche.’

He was taken aback by my tone. ‘Hell, I was just talking out of the side of my mouth.’

‘Of course you were.’

‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

‘No offence taken,
Mr McGuire.’

‘Sounds like you’re pretty damn angry to me.’

‘Not angry. I just don’t like to be pigeonholed as some predatory female.’

‘But you are one tough cookie.’

‘Aren’t cookies meant to be tough?’ I said lightly, shooting him a sarcastically sweet smile.

‘Your brand certainly comes that way. Remind me never to ask you out for a night on the town.’

‘I don’t date married men.’

‘You don’t take any prisoners either. Your boyfriend must have a fireproof brain.’

‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

‘Surprise, surprise.’

The reason I didn’t have a boyfriend was a simple one: at that juncture in my life, I was simply too busy. I had my job. I had my first apartment: a small studio, on a beautiful leafy corner of Greenwich Village called Bedford Street. Most of all, I had New York - and that was the best romance imaginable. Though I’d visited it regularly over the years, living there was another matter altogether - and there were times when I literally thought I had landed in a playground for adults. To someone raised within the sedate, conservative, meddlesome confines of Hartford, Connecticut, Manhattan was a heady revelation. To begin with, it was so amazingly anonymous. You could become quite invisible, and never feel as if anyone was looking over your shoulder in disapproving judgment (a favorite Hartford pastime). You could stay out all night. Or spend half a Saturday losing yourself in the eight miles’ worth of books at the Strand Bookshop. Or hear Ezio Pinza sing the title role of
Don Giovanni
at the Met for fifty cents (if you were willing to stand). Or grab dinner at Lindy’s at three a.m. Or get up at dawn on a Sunday, stroll over to the Lower East Side, buy fresh pickles from the barrel on Delancey Street, then fall into Katz’s deli for the sort of pastrami-on-rye that bordered on a religious experience.

Or you could just walk - which I did endlessly, obsessively. Huge walks - from my apartment on Bedford Street all the way north to Columbia University. Or across the Manhattan Bridge and up Flatbush Avenue to Park Slope. What I discovered during these walks was that New York was like a massive Victorian novel which forced you to work your way through its broad canvas and complicated sub-plots. Being an impatient sort of reader I found myself compulsively caught up in its narrative, wondering where it would bring me next.

The sense of freedom was extraordinary. I was no longer under parental supervision. I was paying my own way in life. I answered to nobody. And thanks to my brother Eric I had a direct entree into Manhattan’s more esoteric underside. He seemed to know every arcane resident of the city. Czech translators of medieval poetry. All-night jazz disc jockeys. Emigre German sculptors. Would-be composers who were writing atonal operas about Gawain … in short, the sort of people you would never meet in Hartford, Connecticut. There were also a lot of political types … most of whom were either teaching at assorted colleges around town, or writing for small left-wing journals, or running little charities that supplied clothes and food to ‘our fraternal Soviet comrades, valiantly fighting the forces of fascism’ … or words to that effect.

Naturally, Eric tried to get me interested in his brand of left-wing politics. But I simply wasn’t interested. Do understand - I did respect Eric’s passion for his cause. Just as I also respected (and agreed with) his hatred of social injustice, and economic inequality. But what I didn’t agree with was the way his political friends treated their beliefs as a sort of lay religion - of which they were the high priests. Thank God he left the Party in ‘41. I’d met a few of his ‘comrades’ when I’d visited him in Manhattan during college - and, my God, talk about dogmatic people! They really thought that theirs was the true way, the only way … and they would not broach any dissenting views. Which is one of the many reasons why Eric got fed up with them and left.

At least none of his political friends ever asked me out … which was something of a relief. Because, by and large, they were such a grim, glum bunch.

‘Don’t you know
any funny
Communists?’ I asked him one Sunday over a late lunch at Katz’s deli.

‘A “funny Communist” is an oxymoron,’ he said,

‘You’re a funny Communist.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ he whispered.

‘I really don’t think J. Edgar Hoover has agents stationed in Katz’s.’

‘You never know. Anyway, I am an
ex
-Communist.’

‘But you’re still pretty hard left.’

‘Left of center. A Henry Wallace Democrat.’

‘Well, I promise you this: I’d never go out with a Communist.’

‘On patriotic grounds?’

‘No - on the grounds that he wouldn’t be able to make me laugh.’

‘Did Horace Cowett make you laugh?’

‘Sometimes, yes.’

‘How could anyone with the name of Horace Cowett make
anybody
laugh?’

Eric had a point - though, at least, Horace didn’t look as preposterous as his name. He was tall and gangly, with thick black hair and horn-rimmed glasses. He favored tweed jackets and knit ties. At twenty he already resembled a tenured professor. He was quiet, bordering on shy, but intensely bright, and a terrific talker once he was comfortable with you. We met at a Haverford/Bryn Mawr mixer, and went out for all my senior year. My parents really thought he was a splendid catch - I had my doubts, although Horace had his virtues, especially when it came to talking about novels by Henry James or portraits by John Singer Sargent (his favorite writer, his favorite painter). Though he didn’t exactly exude joie de vivre, I did like him … though not enough to let him take me to bed. Then again, Horace never tried very hard on that front. We’d both been brought up far too well.

But he still proposed marriage a month before graduation. When I broke it off with him a week later, he said,

‘I hope you’re not ending it because you simply don’t want to commit to marriage now. Maybe, in a year or so, you’ll change your mind.’

‘I do know how I will feel about this matter a year from now. The same way I am feeling now. Because, quite simply, I don’t want to marry you.’

He pursed his lips, and tried not to look wounded. He didn’t succeed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I finally said.

‘No need.’

‘I didn’t want to be so blunt.’

‘You weren’t.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘No, really - you were just being … informative.’

‘Informative?
Direct
is more like it.’

‘I’d say …
instructive.’

‘Candid. Explicit. Frank. It doesn’t really matter, does it?’

‘Well, semantically speaking …’

Before this exchange, I’d had a few nervous little qualms about rejecting Horace’s marriage proposal. After this exchange, all lingering doubts had been killed off. To my parents - and to many of my friends at Bryn Mawr - I had bucked convention by rejecting his offer. After all, he was such a safe bet. But I was certain I could meet someone with a little more sparkle and passion. And, at the age of twenty-two, I didn’t want to buy myself a one-way ticket to
wifehood
without stopping to think about other options along the way.

And so, when I reached New York, the idea of finding a boyfriend was low on my list of priorities. Especially as I had so much to grapple with during that first year.

The family house was sold by Christmas - but almost all the proceeds went on Mother’s medical bills and residential care. Eric and I greeted 1944 in a grubby hotel in Hartford, having rushed back on New Year’s Eve afternoon when the nursing home called, saying that Mother had contracted a chest infection which had suddenly mutated into pneumonia. It was touch and go whether or not she’d pull through. By the time we’d reached Hartford, the doctors had stabilized her. We spent an hour at her bedside. She was deeply comatose, and stared up at her two children blankly. We both kissed her goodbye. As we’d missed the last train back to Manhattan, we checked into this slum of a hotel near the railway station. We spent the rest of the evening in the hotel bar, drinking bad Manhattans. At midnight, we sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ with the bartender and a few forlorn traveling salesmen.

It was a grim start to the year. It got grimmer - as the next morning, just when we were checking out, a call came from the nursing home. I took it. It was from a staff doctor, on call that morning.

‘Miss Smythe, I regret to inform you that your mother passed away half-an-hour ago.’

Oddly enough, I didn’t feel an overwhelming rush of grief (that came a few days later). More a sense of numbness, as the thought sank in: my family now is Eric.

He was also caught off guard by the news. We took a cab to the nursing home. En route, he started to sob. I put my arms around him.

‘She always hated New Year’s Day,’ he finally said.

The funeral was the next morning. Two neighbors and our father’s secretary showed up at the church. After the cemetery, we took a taxi back to the railway station. On the train back to New York, Eric said, ‘I’m certain that’s the last time I’ll ever set foot in Hartford.’

There wasn’t much of an estate - just two insurance policies. We ended up with around five thousand dollars each - quite a bit of money in those days. Eric instantly quit his Theater Guild job, and took off for a year to Mexico and South America. His portable Remington came with him - as he was planning to spend twelve months writing a major new play and maybe gathering material for a
journal de voyage
about travels in Latin America. He said he wanted me to come along - but I certainly wasn’t going to quit my job at
Life
after just seven months.

‘But if you come with me, you’ll be able to concentrate on writing fiction for a year,’ he said.

‘I’m learning a great deal at
Life.’

‘Learning what? How to write five-hundred-word articles about the Broadway premiere of
Bloomer Girl
or why chokers are this year’s fashion accessory.’

‘I was rather proud of those two pieces,’ I said, ‘even if they didn’t give me a byline.’

‘My point exactly. As that editor guy told you, you’ll never be assigned the big stories - because they all go to the senior male writers on the staff. You want to write fiction. So, what’s stopping you? You have the money and the freedom. We could rent a hacienda in Mexico with the money we have between us … and both write all day, unencumbered.’

‘It’s a lovely dream,’ I said, ‘but I’m not going to leave New York having just arrived here. I’m not ready to be a full-time writer yet. I need to find my way first. And the job at
Life
will also give me some necessary seasoning.’

‘God, you’re far too sensible. And I suppose you’re planning to do something ultra-practical with your five thousand dollars.’

‘Government bonds.’

‘S,
really.
You’ve turned into Little Miss Prudent.’

‘Guilty as charged.’

So Eric disappeared south of the border, and I stayed on in Manhattan, working at
Life
by day and trying to write short stories by night. But the pressures of the day job - and the vicarious pleasures of Manhattan - kept me away from the Remington typewriter in my studio apartment. Every time I sat down at home to work, I found myself thinking:
I really don’t have much to say, do I?
Or that same doubting voice in the back of my head would whisper:
There’s a great double-feature at the RKO 58th Street:
Five Graves to Cairo
and
Air Force. Or a girlfriend would ring up, suggesting Saturday lunch at Schrafft’s. Or I’d have to finish a story for
Life.
Or the bathroom needed cleaning. Or … I’d find one of the million excuses that would-be writers always find to dodge the tyranny of the desk.

Eventually I decided to stop fooling myself. So I moved my Remington off the dining table and into the closet. Then I wrote Eric a long letter, explaining why I was putting my writing ambitions on hold:

I’ve never traveled. I’ve never seen anywhere south of Washington, DC … let alone the world. I’ve never been in mortal danger. I’ve never known anyone who’s gone to prison, or has been indicted by a federal grand jury. I’ve never worked in the slums, or in a soup kitchen. I’ve never hiked the Appalachian Trail, or climbed Mt Kathadin, or paddled across Saranac Lake in a canoe. I could have volunteered for the Red Cross and gone to war. I could have joined the WPA and taught school in the Dust Bowl. I could have done around a thousand more interesting things than I’m doing now - and, in the process, found something to write about.