The Receptionist (23 page)

Learning to listen to the inner me and to respond with emotional honesty was only one of the things Al taught me. He also gave me new perspective on what I thought of as my problems. I remember coming back from dinner at the old Jaeger House in Yorkville one spring night. We were crossing Eighty-Fifth Street and threading our way through puddles after a heavy rain. I had been holding forth on the subject of the stereotype I felt trapped and belittled and stymied me, the perception of me as a dumb blond.

“You don’t know what real stereotypes are,” Al said in that blunt, authoritative voice that carried all the weight in the world. “Negroes or blacks or African Americans by whatever name are still trapped in the racial stereotypes that date back to the eighteenth century at least. Maybe even to biblical times.” He paused to help me jump a puddle. “You should have been born a Jew. Or black, or something with real hardship attached to it. As it is, you just—I’m sorry if it sounds unsympathetic—but you just don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I think one of the reasons Al could say these blunt things without offense was the self-deprecating humor he practiced. He’d listen to the outcome of an election he’d predicted would be won by the man or woman who lost, the ball game he’d placed a bad bet on, the real estate deal that fell through, and say, “Wrong again.”
Th
ere was a definite dark streak to his sense of comedy that reminded me of Joe Mitchell. Al loved to tell a variation of the old law-school poser he heard from Bill de Kooning. “Bill’s version has the guy jumping off a twenty-story building to commit suicide. As he passes the tenth floor, a wag in the open window shouts, ‘How’s it going?’ And the guy answers, ‘So far, so good.’ ” Al always laughed when he told that one.

Watching Al on the tennis courts—staying on the back court, placing his shots, and running his younger opponents ragged—taught me all I didn’t know and, not having played sports, had never learned about the way to compete gracefully in the world. “Girls don’t play sports,” my mother said, writing a health excuse for me to skip gym. “Boys play sports.
Th
at’s the way it should be.” But she didn’t practice what she preached. Mother’s competition of choice was in the field of games, not sports, but there she was a wicked competitor. A demon cardplayer, she excelled at whist and contract bridge (Goren rules) and, in her eighties, regularly outfoxed her neighbors in the assisted-living complex by tracking and accessing the best cards on bingo night. I never learned any games, at the card table or on the athletic field. I never learned the most common sports, like swimming or bicycle riding.
Th
ose things were not important for girls, especially smart career girls like me. So spoke my mother out of her lying mouth.

Al, however, made the point again and again. He himself played on the town courts in Vineyard Haven, swam daily from July to October, and followed professional tennis, baseball, basketball, and football on TV. He was full of sage responses as he watched individual plays. “It’s a mental game, always,” he’d say, “even beyond the willingness to practice your ass off. It’s a matter of confidence.
Th
at’s what I try, more than anything else, to give my boys.
Th
e athlete or the team—or the horse and jockey—that has it is the one with the competitive edge.” For most of my life, until I worked with Dr. K. and knew Al, what I lacked most and tried to learn from them was confidence.

Because it was a way of speaking that he detested, my darling Al refused to, as he put it, “talk about relationships.” Yet the only terms he would accept in our relating to one another were, I now see, precisely those of Buber’s I-
Th
ou. Whenever I would lay down a distance of withdrawal from him, he pointed it out to me and called me back. I love him for many things, but most of all I love him for that.

MY BRIEF PERIOD OF
sexual acting out brought me closer than I’d ever been to the hopelessness that verges on despair. Perhaps that is why tawdry seduction scenes have become emblematic for me of nothingness—the void devoid of meaning that I call the yawning abyss. Sometimes in the bad old days, when I and one of my Daddy substitutes were sitting in a bar somewhere, working our way through the tired old scenario of seduction as if it were brand new and its outcome still a mystery, I would flash on the deep pit opening before me—the world without meaning, without hope.
Th
en some sharp ching of silverware against glass, or the clatter of dishes from the kitchen as a waiter passed through the swinging door, would bring me back to the moment. But the knowledge of that abyss was always with me. It always is with anyone who has been there. I am aware of that. No shortage in this world of despair, and no pretending that mine was preceded by any great shakes as far as human suffering goes. But one thing I
have
learned is to see it as a piece of the larger truth, the tragic view of the world all enlightened folk from Aristotle and Christ to Shakespeare and Chekhov and Joan Didion and Philip Roth have seen, and to respect it.

W
HAT
THE
R
ECEPTIONIST
R
ECEIVED

I
N 1976
TH
E NEW
Yorker
underwent a period of inner strife as Mr. Shawn struggled with an employee rebellion and a bid from the Newspaper Guild to unionize. Without moving a muscle I became a bone of contention. I was both held up as the poster child for gender discrimination and reviled as an Uncle Tom.

If my twenty-one years there is to have any clarity, I will have to confront those disparate views, beginning with the question, why did the magazine never find a better job for me?

As far as I know, with the exception of the brief mismatch of me and the art department, I was never seriously considered for promotion to any other job or floor. Oh, once, in 1964 or so, Dorothy Morrison from Goings On About Town came down to ask me if I thought I would be happy checking movie schedules and theater openings from a two-person office tucked away in the back corridors of the nineteenth floor. When I said I was afraid I would find it repetitive and isolated, she agreed and said I’d made the right choice turning it down.

In 1965 I asked Lou Forster to consider me for a fact-checking job. He said that I was too pretty to bury my light under that bushel—that I should probably consider modeling. In 1975, when I had begun to publish book reviews in
Commonweal,
I asked Edith Oliver to consider me for reviewer in the Briefly Noted section of the books department. She said the Briefly Noted slots were entirely filled by writers already under contract.

In 1976, when I was finishing my course work toward a PhD in twentieth-century British and American literature at NYU and beginning work on my dissertation subject, the
New Yorker
writer Edmund Wilson, I asked Roger Angell, who was head of the fiction department, to consider me as a first reader. He said I was disqualified for the job by my overfamiliarity with the type of fiction
Th
e
New Yorker
had been publishing in the nineteen years I’d been there. He said they were through being constricted by a reputation for buying and printing only “
New Yorker
type” short stories.
Th
ey wanted a fresh eye and a multilinguist, ready to find authors from places like Lithuania, and I would be all wrong for that.

For some time I was tempted to regard my failure to advance as a reflection of nepotism at the top. Roger Angell, for example, was the son of the fiction editor Katharine S. White and the stepson of E. B. White.
Th
e senior editor Gardner Botsford was the stepson of one of the owners of the magazine.
Th
e Talk reporter Susan Lardner was the granddaughter of Ring.
Th
e head of maintenance, John O’Brian, was the nephew of the office manager, Sheila McGrath. Renata Adler was engaged to Edmund Wilson’s son Reuel, Janet Malcolm was the wife of the theater critic Donald Malcolm, and so on. If the family member was not directly associated with the magazine, a famous relative turned up with disconcerting regularity on the editorial rolls: Leonard Bernstein’s brother, Burton; William Murray, the son of Janet Flanner’s inamorata Natalia Murray; Henry Cooper, the great-great-grandnephew of James Fenimore Cooper; and Tony Hiss, the son of Alger Hiss, all worked at the magazine for varying periods of time. Less a matter of bloodlines but equally compelling were the ties that bound certain figures on the editorial roster to certain eastern Ivy campuses. Calvin Trillin, Henry Cooper, and Gerald Jonas were the Yalies; Ved Mehta, George Trow, Tony Hiss, Bill Wertenbaker, and Rick Hertzberg were the Harvard boys. Not that I was keeping track!

But of course the nepotism and Ivy League theories break down when one takes into account the many others who had left their trainee status at my desk and gone on to become contributors.
Th
ey had done so by the simple expedient of submitting—and having had published—poetry, Talk stories, and short fiction.

What of my manuscripts? What of my submissions? Few. Few, and far between. I believe the sum total of my submissions in those twenty-one years was three: A poem, which reaped for me a sweet personal rejection note, promptly sent by Howard Moss, who certainly had not fashioned it to discourage me from submitting more. A caption for the end-of-column typos called newsbreaks, which was likewise rejected kindly and in short order by Burt Bernstein, who took over that department when Mr. White announced he’d done it long enough.

Last was a Talk story of a timely nature, which I submitted to Mr. Shawn. When weeks went by and I heard nothing, I contacted Mr. Shawn’s secretary, Mary Painter, who got back to me rather sheepishly later that day and said that unfortunately my manuscript had been lost on the bottom of a pile of papers on his desk and was, in any case, no longer timely. I have to say I did resent that a little.

Still, there was no getting around the facts: My paltry offerings flew in the face of plain evidence all around me that such submissions—far more frequent and focused on creative work—would be vital to realizing my dream. And vital to the question of why I stayed at
Th
e New Yorker
for twenty-one years and never wrote a word for it.

But was there a reason the magazine never found a better job for me?

Perhaps I do have the answer after all. I had it when my Talk story got lost, when a falsehood was told me about no openings in book reviewing, and when I was cut out of a job as first reader by a trumped-up story about Eastern European fiction. By then I had long since come to realize—or should have—that mothering, nurturing, providing a discreet and loyal personification of continuity on the writer’s floor, was exactly the position in which the editors wanted me or indeed felt they had any use for me.

Did that make me a victim? Or a beneficiary? It seems to me a two-way street. When the Newspaper Guild reps looked at my salary record ($80 a week to start and $163 to finish), they were incensed, and much was said about the way the magazine was exploiting me. However, as I look back on the eight trips to Europe the magazine underwrote (by way of lengthy vacations in the summers, two of which stretched to eight weeks away or more, four of them with pay); my twelve years of graduate school; ten years of expensive psychoanalysis with a top Manhattan analyst (if the magazine chose to exploit my passive dependency, they paid handsomely to rid me of it); coverage of my desk to permit a
Th
ursday-Friday trip up to Poughkeepsie to teach a course at Vassar; as well as the many intangibles that came to me in the way of invitations to share the cultural, social, and literary life of the city and, by extension, the wider world, it is not clear to me who was exploiting whom.

One very attractive aspect of the union movement for me was its emphasis on solidarity. I loved the discussions held over wine and cheese with just
New Yorker
people present as we met in off-site locations to hash out the pros and cons of joining the Newspaper Guild. John Bennet led the first of these—I think it was in Dan Menaker’s West Side apartment. Nat Hentoff, the jazz columnist for many years on
Th
e
Village Voice,
sat in as an advocate in the meeting Ruth Rogin held at her place downtown.

Full of community spirit, I, too, held one of the early meetings at my place in Yorkville. It was before the editors and drawing-account writers were exempted—they were defined as belonging to management, which must have dismayed them. So all the checkers and Fred Shapiro (ex-newspaperman and strong critic of the Guild) and a number of the writers and editors were there. At that meeting I realized that the existential angst I once allowed to trouble me—was I or was I not “one of them?”—had faded into nothingness.
Th
at night there was a palpable feeling of solidarity in the air and I was never more certain I belonged.

Ultimately, the attempt to unionize
Th
e New Yorker
was voted down. An in-house bargaining unit was formed. Quite apart from any formal bargain, the magazine and I arrived at our own peace. With the full support of editorial management, I made plans to move on. Everything I needed to complete the work toward my doctorate—paid leave, time off, early departure to make class—was cheerfully granted. All of which left me, one spring a couple of years later, with a job to go to at the University of Cincinnati and a dissertation on Edmund Wilson under way.

It was only natural, of course, that my feelings about leaving the magazine after so many years should be mixed. On the plus side I had a much firmer grasp on my identity. I was no longer dependent upon the
New Yorker
mantle of borrowed fame to find a sense of my own worth. My analysis, my doctorate, and my conquest of Al were much healthier sources of self-respect (though I was not immune to feeling some ego gratification at walking off with an alpha male like Al). And certainly I had no question that it was time—I was more than ready to move onward and upward. But the thought of separation was also bittersweet. In the end, I had to leave the safety of that long-familiar cocoon to find the self I’d sought on that turnaround trip to Greece.

In May 1978, when word got around that the next Friday would be my last day on the reception desk, somebody—I don’t know who, but it was sure to have been one of the women—organized a farewell of sorts. Too informal to be called a party, it was typical of the kind of gesture that accompanied birthdays or leave-takings at the magazine. It was held at about four o’clock in the lounge by the back stairs. People came out of their offices and ate a slice of “Good Luck, Jan!” cake off paper plates and drank champagne from plastic flutes.
Th
en Mr. Shawn came down, which wasn’t typical. Someone handed him a single red rose, which he presented to me.

I SUPPOSE YOU COULD
say it was the end of an era.