The Receptionist (21 page)

Wiped out, we returned to the Midwest, and Mother and Dad bought a one-pump general store and gasoline franchise in Moscow, Minnesota, thirty miles or so north of Saint Ansgar. When I was twelve and we were living in Moscow, nature closed in on me. I got my first period, and Mother gave me the lecture about the birds and the bees. In her version, good Christian men and women “like your Dad and me” never had sex before marriage, and after marriage only when they wanted to have a baby. Because of the age difference between my brother and me, I thought there must have been a lot of holding back somewhere in there. I was sure I had discovered the real secret behind Father’s alcohol addiction. He was sex starved, like George Brent in
Harriet Craig.
Or was it Wendell Corey?

In 1950 my parents sold the general store and bought a mom-and-pop grocery in nearby Austin, a town of twenty-six thousand. Austin was more or less owned by George A. Hormel and Company, whose main plant put out a number of tinned processed-meat products, the most famous of which was Spam. I hated Austin, hated the basketball-crazy Austin High School, hated the already established cliques that ran its social life. I longed even more for the day I could, like Gene Tierney in
Laura,
storm the canyons of New York. But at the time I was fourteen, fighting baby fat, pimples, and wallflower isolation at school dances. Suffering wave upon wave of self-doubt, I turned to my mother with a question the answer to which I dreaded and thought I already knew: “Mother, am I pretty?” After a careful pulling up to a stoplight—we were in the family Studebaker at the time—she said, “Why, honey, you’re plenty pretty enough. You just need to stop spending all your time reading and get out more and make more friends.” Mother was right. Still, I spent the next three years in an armchair with a book. I read
Th
omas Wolfe, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Mother let slip one day, unaware that it could hurt my feelings, her opinion that reading books was “pretty much a waste of time.”

I got the real story of her relations with Dad a couple of years after I’d moved to New York. I was on a visit back home and we had done our ritual shopping trip and lunch. Finally, after a rum Collins or two, Mother opened up and let it out that they had been “real sweethearts” to each other the whole of their married life. I gathered, by a little gentle probing, that this meant they had been sexually compatible and, well into their seventies, still enjoyed a before-sleep cuddle.

I found Mother’s story that she and Dad had had a completely fulfilling marriage tough to swallow. Can you imagine? After all that cussing and door banging. After twisting myself into a pretzel lest I become what I had thought of as her Joan Crawford withholding-bitch self. It was only a figment of my imagination. Well, fiction would be neater, but truth compels me to tell it like it was.

So much for who they were and where I’d come from. Time for a look at who I was.

A nice-enough-looking American girl. Twenty-nine, medium blond hair with not much curl to it. Too thick in the nose for refinement of feature. A little too round of chin. But pleasant faced and happily proportioned.
Th
ere were plenty of good reasons why I shouldn’t have been, yet I was dissatisfied.

I had remained in thrall to that little red mole on Daddy’s chest all my life. I was a daddy’s girl who, when I grew up, did not know how to deal with men, did not know how to be honest about my emotions toward them or myself. By the time I got to college my head was full of an indigestible swirl of role models. Part of me yearned to be a kind of female Albert Camus. I envisioned myself in a trench coat with tough existential principles, an impeccable writing style, and an aura of modern saintliness that would keep Sartre and all would-be mockers in check. My female ideals were an incoherent mix of Lauren Bacall singing huskily and playing piano through cigarette smoke, Joan Leslie wearing puffed sleeves on the farm, and Ingrid Bergman being impossibly brave. One thing they all seemed to have in common was being in love with Humphrey Bogart, a man old enough to be Lauren Bacall’s father—and mine. If I thought at all about who I was and who I wanted to be, I became resentful over the fact that the world didn’t give a damn: it was going to define me superficially in any case. Yep, a dumb blond.
Th
at conviction got all mixed up with the idea of seeing males who were my contemporaries as predators on lovely young blonds like me.
Th
ey were gauche, hot, ill-regulated, hormonally directed, vain creatures who would approach me relentlessly with no respect for my humanity, no ideas of love, romance, or marriage, but just the one thing on their minds. I dimly knew that men my own age had pimples, too, and were as hapless in their way as I, for which I found it difficult to forgive them.

In those first months when I lived in the city, I often “wandered lonely as a cloud”—with or without Wordsworth—in Central Park. I was, of course, hoping some man would approach and offer to cure me of my loneliness. But I never acknowledged that to myself, and when, over and over, a man would come up to me and make just such an offer, I was shocked and outraged. I remember one particularly nice-looking, slender lad, who said in halting English, “Excuse me. I am Yoel. I am an Israeli. And I would like to get to know you better. May I, please, know your phone number?” I had just been interviewed at CBS, where they had asked whether I could type, and lost interest when I said I could not, so, having it handy, I gave him the number of the Columbia Broadcasting System. Mean thing to do.

As I thought back on the confusion and lack of self-understanding that had pursued me my whole life, I could see that it had begun a long time before, back in Saint Ansgar with Mother and Daddy. We weren’t big on self-understanding out there in Saint A. But I began to see, too, that I bore more than a little responsibility for the bad behavior visited on me by men, that my relationship to men had been seductive but not acknowledged to be so.

While I was at it, I might as well open my eyes to see that my relations with women had been dishonest, too. Beginning with Mother, they had been tacitly competitive, but also feckless. To be competitive in a healthy and effective way, you have to know what you want, and how to fight for it. I had never learned how to do that. Mother was not a good teacher there. But I was a big girl now, and it was up to me to learn the rules of the game.

Th
ere was something bracing about getting this far down to the bitter truth.

I had enjoyed the company I’d kept this day, on this unknown Greek isle, including, for the first time in years, my own. I knew now that I didn’t want to be the girl in whose face matches were lit and to whom the pronouncement “First class, absolutely first class” was given. I didn’t want to be driven back to my hotel of the moment to spend a quarter hour explaining why I was not making it my driver’s hotel of the moment also. I didn’t want to be asked to view any sunrises or take any whiskey and sodas with no charge. In short, I did not any longer want to accept others’ judgments about me, or about women in general as sex objects.

It was time to step forward and say,
Th
is is me
—
a wide-eyed child in the body of a woman. Serious, religious, puritanical moralist in horrified transit through the secular, amoral world.

True, I had found some relief in travel. Moving alone through unfamiliar landscapes, surrounded by strangers speaking a language I didn’t understand, was a way of granting myself a parole ticket, of being able to say,
You see, it is quite natural not to understand what people are saying to me, not to know what is expected of me or how I should respond. I am, after all, a person from another country.
In just that way, bolstered fore and aft by comfortable circumlocutions, I had stood, two days earlier, on the deck of the SS
Carina,
bound for Piraeus.

Now, realizing with a start that it was almost four o’clock, I brought my Greek journey to an end.

C
HANGING

I
CAME BACK TO MY
desk at the magazine in September of ’65 ready to undertake the effort of living with a new, more authentic self. It didn’t take me long to find out that
Th
e New Yorker,
too, was undergoing significant changes. Back in April, Mr. Shawn’s second decade underwent a big shake-up, thanks to the bomblet tossed over the transom by the Talk reporter Constance Feeley’s friend Tom Wolfe in the form of a two-part
Herald Tribune
profile of the magazine. “Tiny Mummies!
Th
e True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” depicted
Th
e New Yorker
as a “mausoleum” and its editor as “the iron mouse.” It was, in many ways, a cruel and unfair depiction, but it did have some salutary consequences.
Th
ough he said it was a coincidence, Mr. Shawn was prompted to introduce some lively new elements. He hired fresh-minted Harvard hotshots Jake Brackman, Terrence Malick, and Hendrick Hertzberg. He bought a piece by Edward J. Epstein on press mess-ups and herd journalism during the Black Panther coverage. Readers were treated to Ian Frazier casuals about dating his mom. Jamaica Kincaid wrote about her Caribbean childhood, and when Jamaica teamed up with George Trow, the hippest reporter of them all, Talk stories about Roller Derbies began to appear.

Jane Mankiewicz, one of the ever-changing stream of young trainees who did a turn at reception, was emblematic of the new breed. She was a gorgeous young thing, with lustrous black hair down to her shoulders. (“It’s Pantene!” she’d say, holding a shiny lock up to the light.) She had the tweed jacket, jeans, and white shirt look down pat. But she was far from vain about her beauty and told me there had been bulimic episodes in her college years when she strove to keep her weight down. I couldn’t imagine why, since now she was no more than a size 4. She called herself “a Jewish Princess from Long Island,” but that was only one part of her multifaceted and, to me, fascinating life, which included a summer doing voter registration in the Deep South.

Her mother, I learned, was an unabashed supporter of radical causes, and Jane thought it probable that people they knew in these circles had even offered safe houses to Weathermen. I was both admiring and a little scared by all this. Jane delighted in running through the star-studded roster of her paternal lineage: her grandfather Herman, who worked with Orson Welles on
Citizen Kane;
her uncle Joseph, who wrote and directed
All About Eve;
her father, Don, who conceived the television series
Marcus Welby, M.D.
“I
gave
him the Welby part,” she told me. “We were kidding around, kicking around the possibilities, you know—Dr. Sawbones, Dr. Getweller, Dr. Bewell. And then it hit me. Dr.
Welby
! I knew right away that was
it.
” A couple of cousins were making their mark, and Jane herself was more than capable of manifesting the family gifts. She wrote and published a poem and a short story that went into the magazine before she left for undetermined pursuits in Florida.

Fresh and freshly enthusiastic while interning at my desk, she gave me a window into the life of the intellectual Left. Never one for half measures, she threw her arms wide and drew me into her circle, and for a while, anyway, in it I was. She introduced me to her boyfriend of the time, a paraplegic writer. Dwayne, as I shall call him, rolled into her apartment, one night when we were all to have dinner together, with a grace and aplomb beyond anything I could have imagined. Jane insisted that her attraction to him had everything to do with his sex appeal. I had made the mistake, when she first told me about the disability, of saying something about its having to be a platonic relationship. “Oh, no,” she corrected me, “it’s totally sexual. Omigod, that’s my main thing.” She lapsed into Valley Girl–speak, as she did on occasion when she wished to be especially emphatic.

In the beginning, during Jane’s first appearances down on “my” floor, I didn’t know what hit me.
Th
e first day, I returned from lunch to find the top drawer of my desk cleaned out—not robbed, but set into impeccable order from the jumbled mishmash that was its natural state.

Th
e second day, the books in the corner bookcase were lined up exactly one inch from the edge and arranged in alphabetical order according to author.

Th
e third day, I returned to find that she had been xeroxing her face on the copy machine, with the result that a lurid Jane, with tongue sticking out, was waving from a thumbtack on the bulletin board.

Th
e fourth day, I came back from lunch to find Jane literally wringing her hands. Seeing me, she jumped up and began to wring my hand instead, saying, “You have to find something for me to do. I’m going crazy!”

Th
is absence of assigned activities had never bothered me. I was moving methodically, if slowly, toward a doctorate by taking one course at a time at NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. So I had long ago perfected the art of serious reading while performing my duties. But Jane was as hyper about reading as about everything else she touched. I understood that something else was going on, that this was not a simple case of boredom induced by idleness. But never having known anyone on amphetamines or other forms of uppers, or simply in a manic state, I was not prepared for anything like the sheer energy that spewed like electrical impulses out of Jane’s every pore.

Th
at day she sat me down and said something like this: “Look, in July [it was now early October], my favorite aunt, Josie, was going out for groceries in the Village with her eleven-year-old son, Tim, leaving her nine-year-old son, Nicholas, at home with Peter.
Th
at’s her husband, Tim and Nick’s father, Peter Davis, a filmmaker who was home editing his documentary on Vietnam at the time. You may have seen it—
Hearts and Minds
? It won an Academy Award. Anyway, my aunt Josie stepped off the curb less than a block from her house and was hit by a cab. She never regained consciousness. Josie was like a second mom to me, or maybe more like an older sister. She was seeing me through. I don’t know how to understand her death. I can’t process it. I need you to be my Josie. You’ve got to step in here! You’re so like her. You even look like her—all wholesome and blond and Waspy while my entire tribe is unmistakably Jewish. You float serene in a world of acceptance while we fight, fight, fight and act like crazy artist mavericks. You
will
step in, won’t you? Can I come over to your place for dinner tonight?”

Without waiting for me to answer, Jane went on. “I know a great recipe for chicken. You don’t have to do a thing to it but dump in a jar of Smucker’s orange marmalade and a package of Lipton’s onion soup mix.
Th
en you put it in the oven, and by the time you’ve had your gin and tonics, it’s all done!” I think I nodded weakly at this point. A Smucker’s-smothered chicken dinner that night at my house seemed like a done deal.

But Jane was not finished arranging my life. She went on to insist that I spend the rest of the afternoon giving her the lowdown on each of the charges on “my floor.”

“You’ve been here a thousand years. You must know plenty,” she speculated. It was seventeen years at that point, but who’s counting?

I was not about to tell Jane—or anyone—about the day I found a hooker coming out of one of the writers’ offices. Or the day the
Saturday Night Live
crowd (Michael O’Donaghue prominent among their number) came en masse to visit one of the younger Talk reporters. In a short while, the corridor outside that office was filled with wisps of smoke and smelling as sweet as a country meadow.

I did throw Jane a crumb, though, as one of the fact writers went past the reception desk. “See that fellow?” I asked her. “He has absolutely no idea that his wife—also a writer for the magazine—is carrying on with one of the cartoonists down that hall over there.”

“Ooh,” she cried, clapping her hands, “more, more!”

So I ran down for Jane’s benefit the list of evolving relationships that accounted for a string of exchanged editorial females-cum-wives: I told her how Carol Rogge, formerly a secretary in the fiction department, became the second Mrs. Roger Angell; Janet Malcolm, formerly the wife of the theater critic Donald Malcolm, became the second Mrs. Gardner Botsford; Nancy Kraemer, formerly an editorial assistant, became the second Mrs. Whitney Balliett; and Lis Shabecoff (like Richard Harris’s second wife, a member of the magazine’s editorial staff) became the third Mrs. Richard Harris. I went on to mention that Kennedy Fraser, who succeeded Lois Long in fashion, became the fourth Mrs. Richard Harris, and that Harris himself, by then in love with somebody else, plunged to his death from a twelfth-story window on the Upper West Side in 1987. While it did not become a case of divorce and remarriage, I told Jane that the double life led by William Shawn and Lillian Ross probably belonged at the head of this list.

Finding that I had dawdled until closing time, I exhaled a discreet sigh of relief as we shut the desk up for the night.
Th
en it was off to Yorkville with Jane in tow.

ONE POSTSCRIPT:
THE CHICKEN
wasn’t half-bad.