Those are some of my happiest memories of the 1950s.
It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just be.
Then in 1955, Marjorie got pregnant.
I’d always feared it was going to be me who ended up pregnant—the smart bet would have been on me, obviously—but poor Marjorie was the one who got hit.
The culprit was an old married art professor, with whom she’d been having an affair for years. (Although Marjorie would have said that the culprit was herself, for wasting so much of her life with a married man who kept promising that he would leave his wife for her, if only Marjorie would “stop acting so Jewish.”)
A bunch of us were on the rooftop one night when she told us the news.
“Are you sure?” asked Rowan, the gynecologist. “Do you want to come into my office for a test?”
“I don’t need a test,” said Marjorie. “My period is gone, gone, gone.”
“Gone, how long?” said Rowan.
“Well, I’ve never been regular, but maybe three months?”
There’s a tense silence that women fall into when they hear that one of their own has become accidentally pregnant. This is a matter of highest gravity. I could feel that none of us wanted to say another word until Marjorie had told us more. We wanted to know what her plan was, so that we could support it, whatever the plan may have been. But she just sat there in silence, after dropping this bomb, and added no further information.
Finally, I asked, “What does George have to say about this?” George, of course, being the anti-Semitic married art professor who apparently loved having sex with Jewish girls.
“Why do you assume it’s George?” she joked.
We all knew it was George. It was always George. Of course it was George. She had been infatuated with George since she was a wide-eyed student in his Sculpture of Modern Europe class, so many years earlier.
Then she said, “No, I haven’t told him. I think I won’t tell him. I just won’t see him anymore. I’ll cut it off from here. If nothing else, this is finally a good excuse to stop sleeping with George.”
Rowan cut right to the chase: “Have you considered a termination?”
“No. I wouldn’t do that. Or, rather, maybe I would do that. But it’s too late.”
She lit another cigarette and took another drink of wine—because that’s what pregnancy looked like in the 1950s.
She said, “I found out about a place in Canada. It’s sort of a home for unwed mothers, but more deluxe than the usual fare. You get your own room, and all that. My understanding is that the clientele is a bit older. Women with some money. I can go there toward the end, when I can’t hide it anymore. Tell people I’m on vacation—even though I’ve never taken a vacation in my life, so nobody will believe me, but that’s all I can do. They even said they could place the baby in a Jewish family—although where they aim to find a Jewish family in Canada, who knows? Anyway, I don’t care about religion, you all know that. As long as it’s a good home. It seems like a nice enough facility. Plenty expensive, but I can swing it. I’ll use the Paris money.”
It was typical of Marjorie to have solved a problem on her own before reaching out to her friends for help, and certainly her plan was sound. Still, my heart hurt. Marjorie didn’t want any of this. She and I had been saving our money for years, planning to take a trip to Paris together. As soon as we had enough cash gathered, our plan was to close the boutique for the entire month of August, get on the Queen Elizabeth, and sail to France. This was our shared dream. We were almost there with our savings, too. We had worked for years without so much as a weekend off. And now this.
I knew right then that I would go to Canada with her. We would close down L’Atelier for however long was necessary. Wherever she was going, I would go with her. I would stay with her through the birth of her baby. I would spend my share of the Paris money to buy a car. Whatever she needed.
I scooted my chair over next to Marjorie’s and took her hand. “That all sounds wise, honey,” I said. “I’ll be right there with you.”
“It does sound wise, doesn’t it?” Marjorie took another drag off her cigarette, and looked around at the circle of her friends. We all had the same loving, pitying, and somewhat panicked expressions on our faces.
Then the most unexpected thing happened. Suddenly Marjorie grinned at me, in a slightly crazed-looking, lopsided manner. She said, “Goddamn it to hell, but I don’t think I’ll go to Canada. Oh, Christ, Vivian, I must be out of my mind. But I just decided it right now. I have a better plan. No, not a better plan. But a different plan. I’ll keep it.”
“You’re going to keep the baby?” Karen asked, in open shock.
“What about George?” Anita asked.
Marjorie stuck her chin up in the air like the tough little bantamweight fighter she’d always been. “I don’t need stinkin’ George. Vivian and I are gonna raise this kid ourselves. Aren’t we, Vivian?”
I gave it only a moment’s thought. I knew my friend. Once she had decided something, that was it. She would somehow make it work. And I would make it work with her, like always.
So once again I said to Marjorie Lowtsky: “Sure. Let’s do it.”
And once again, my life completely changed.
So that’s what we did, Angela.
We had a kid.
And that kid was our beautiful, difficult, tender little Nathan.
Everything about it was hard.
Her pregnancy wasn’t so bad, but the delivery itself was something from a horror movie. They ended up doing a cesarian, but not before she’d suffered through eighteen hours of labor. They really hacked her up during the procedure, too. Then she didn’t stop bleeding, and there was a concern they would lose her. They nicked the baby’s face with the scalpel during the cesarian, and very nearly took out his eye. Then Marjorie got an infection and was in the hospital for almost four weeks.
I still maintain that all this carelessness at the hospital was due to the fact that Nathan was what they called a “non-marital infant” (politely sinister 1950s terminology for “bastard”). As a result, the doctors weren’t especially attentive to Marjorie during her labor, and the nurses weren’t particularly kind, either.
It was Marjorie’s and my girlfriends who took care of her when she was recovering. Marjorie’s family—for the same reason as the nurses—didn’t want much to do with her and the baby. That may sound extremely unkind (and it was), but you can’t imagine what a stigma it was for a woman at that time to bear a child out of wedlock—even in liberal New York. Even for a mature woman like Marjorie, who ran her own business and owned her own building, undergoing a pregnancy without a husband attached was disgraceful.
So she was brave, is what I’m driving at. And she was on her own. Thus it came down to our circle of friends to take care of Marjorie and Nathan as best we could. It was good that we had so much backup. I couldn’t be with Marjorie all the time at the hospital, because I was the one taking care of the baby while she was recovering. This was like its own horror movie as I had no idea what I was doing. I hadn’t grown up with babies, nor had I ever longed for a child myself. I had no instinct or aptitude for it. Moreover, I hadn’t bothered to learn much about babies while Marjorie was pregnant. I didn’t even really know what they ate. The plan had never been that Nathan would be my baby, anyhow; the plan had been that he would be Marjorie’s baby, and that I would work doubly hard to support all three of us. But for that first month, he was my baby, and he was not in the most expert hands, I’m sorry to say.
Moreover, Nathan was not easy. He was colicky and underweight, and it was a struggle to get him to take the bottle. He had rampant cradle cap and diaper rash (“catastrophes at both ends,” as Marjorie said) and I couldn’t seem to get any of it to go away. Our assistants at L’Atelier managed the boutique as best they could, but it was June—we
dding season—and I had to be at work at least sometimes or the business wouldn’t function at all. I had to do Marjorie’s work for her, as well, while she was absent. But every time I set Nathan down so I could attend to my duties, he would scream until I picked him back up again.
The mother of one of my brides-to-be saw me struggling with the infant one morning, and gave me the name of an older Italian woman who had helped out her own daughter, when her twin grandchildren were born. That older nursemaid’s name was Palma, and she turned out to be St. Michael and all the angels. We kept Palma on as Nathan’s nanny for years, and she truly saved us—especially during that brutal first year. But Palma was expensive. In fact, everything about Nathan was expensive. He was a sickly baby, and then he was a sickly toddler, and then he was a sickly little boy. I swear he spent more time in the doctor’s office during those first five years of his life than he did at home. If there was anything a child could come down with, he came down with it. He always had trouble with his breathing, and he was constantly on penicillin, which upset his stomach, and then you couldn’t feed him—which led to its own problems.
Marjorie and I had to work harder than ever to pay the bills, now that there were three of us—and one of us was always sick. So work harder, we did.
You wouldn’t believe the number of wedding gowns we churned out during those years. Thank God people were getting married in higher numbers than ever.
Neither of us talked about going to Paris anymore.
Time passed and Nathan grew older but not much bigger. He was such a squirt of a thing—so dear in his affections, so tenderhearted and gentle, but also so nervous and easily frightened. And always sick.
We loved him so. It was impossible not to love him; he was such a sweetheart. You never met a more kind little person. He never got into trouble, or was disobedient. The problem was only that he was so fragile. Maybe we babied him too much. Almost certainly we babied him too much. Let’s be clear: this child grew up in a bridal boutique surrounded by hordes of women (customers and employees alike) who were more than willing to indulge his fears and his clinginess. (“Oh, God, Vivian, he’s gonna be such a queer,” Marjorie said to me once, when she saw her son twirling in a wedding veil in front of a mirror. That may sound harsh, but to be fair to Marjorie, it was difficult to imagine how Nathan could grow up to be anything else. We used to joke that Olive was the only masculine figure in his life.)
As Nathan approached the age of five, we realized that we could not possibly enroll this kid in public school. He weighed in at about twenty-five pounds dripping wet, and the presence of other children alarmed him. He wasn’t a stickball-playing, tree-climbing, rock-throwing, knee-skinning sort of boy. He liked puzzles. He liked to look at books, but nothing too scary. (Swiss Family Robinson: too scary. Snow White: too scary. Make Way for Ducklings: just about right.) Nathan was the kind of child who would have been brutalized at a public school in New York City. We pictured him being pounded like bread dough by tough city bullies, and we couldn’t bear the thought. So we enrolled him in Friends Seminary (at two thousand dollars a year tuition, thank you very much) so that the gentle Quakers could take all our hard-earned money and teach our boy how to be non-violent, which was never going to be a problem anyhow.
When the other children asked Nathan where his daddy was, we taught him to say, “My daddy was killed in the war”—which didn’t even make sense, because Nathan was born in 1956. But we figured kindergartners were too dumb to do the math, so his answer would keep them at bay for a while. As Nathan got older, we’d come up with a better story.
One bright winter’s day, when Nathan was around six years old, Marjorie and I were sitting in Gramercy Park with him. I was doing beadwork on a bodice and Marjorie was trying to read The New York Review of Books, despite the wind that kept whipping at her pages. Marjorie was wearing a poncho (in a puzzling plaid of violet and mustard) and some kind of crazy Turkish shoes with curled-up toes. Wrapped around her head was a white silk pilot’s scarf. She looked like a medieval guildsman with a toothache.
At one point, we both paused what we were doing to watch Nathan. He was carefully drawing stick figures in chalk on the pathway. But then he became scared of some pigeons—some very innocuous pigeons, which were minding their own business and pecking at the ground a few feet away from where Nathan sat. He stopped drawing and froze. We watched as the boy grew wide-eyed with terror at the sight of the birds.
Under her breath, Marjorie said, “Look at him. He’s afraid of everything.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, because it was true. He really was.
She said, “I can’t even give him a bath without him thinking I’m trying to drown him. Where did he even hear of mothers drowning their children? Why would that idea even be in his head? You never tried to drown him in the bath, did you, Vivian?”
“I’m almost certain I didn’t. But you know how I get when I’m angry. . . .”
I was trying to make her laugh but it didn’t work.
“I don’t know about this child,” she said, her face overcome by worry. “He’s even afraid of his red hat. I think it’s the color. I tried to put it on him this morning, and he burst into tears. I had to let him have the blue one. Do you know something, Vivian? He has utterly ruined my life.”
“Oh, Marjorie, don’t say that,” I said, laughing.
“No, it’s true, Vivian. He’s ruined everything. Let’s just admit it. I should’ve gone to Canada and given him up for adoption. Then we would still have money, and I would have some freedom. I’d be able to sleep through the night, without listening for his coughing. I wouldn’t be seen as a fallen woman with a bastard child. I wouldn’t be so tired. Maybe I would have time to paint. I would still have a figure. Maybe I could even have a boyfriend. Let’s just call a spade a spade: I never should’ve had this kid.”
“Marjorie! Stop it. You don’t mean that.”
But she wasn’t done. “No, I do mean it, Vivian. He was the worst decision I ever made in my life. You can’t deny that. Nobody could deny that.”
I was starting to get terribly worried, but then she said, “The only problem is, I love him so much, I can’t even bear it. I mean—look at him.”
And there he was. There was that touching little broken figurine of a boy, trying to get as far away as possible from any and all pigeons (which is not easy in a New York City park). There was our little Nathan, in his snowsuit, with his chapped lips and his cheeks all red with eczema. There was his sweet, peaked face—glancing around in panic for somebody to protect him from some nine-ounce birds who were completely ignoring him. He was perfect. He was made of spun glass. He was a reedy little disaster and I adored him.
I glanced over at Marjorie, and could see that she was now crying. This was significant because Marjorie never cried. (That had always been my department.) I’d never seen her looking so rueful and so tired.
Marjorie said, “Do you think Nathan’s father might claim him someday, if he ever stops acting so Jewish?”
I punched her in the arm. “Stop it, Marjorie!”
“I’m just so weary, Vivian. But I love this kid so much, sometimes I think it will break me in half. Is that the dirty trick? Is this how they get mothers to ruin their lives for their children? By tricking them into loving them so much?”
“Maybe. It’s not a bad strategy.”
We watched Nathan for a while longer, as he braved the specter of the harmless, oblivious, retreating pigeons.
“Hey, don’t forget that my son ruined your life, too,” Marjorie said, after a long silence.
I shrugged. “A little bit, sure. But I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not as though I had anything more important to attend to.”
The years passed.
The city continued to change. Midtown Manhattan became wilted and moldy and sinister and vile. We never went near Times Square anymore. It was a latrine.
In 1963, Walter Winchell lost his newspaper column.
Death started to pick at my community.
In 1964, Uncle Billy died in Hollywood of a sudden heart attack while dining with a starlet at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We all had to admit that this was just exactly the death Billy Buell would’ve wanted. (“He floated away on a river of champagne” was Peg’s take.)
Only ten months later, my father died. His was not such a peaceful death, I’m afraid. Driving home from the country club one afternoon, he hit black ice and crashed into a tree. He lived for a few days, but succumbed to complications after emergency spine surgery.
My father died an angry man. He was no longer a captain of industry—hadn’t been one for years. He had lost his hematite mine after the war. He got into such a ferocious battle against union activists that he drove the company into the ground—spending nearly all his fortune on legal battles against his workers. His had become a scorched-earth policy of negotiation: If I cannot control this business, then nobody can. He died never having forgiven the American government for having taken his son in the war, or the unions for having taken his business, or the modern world itself for having chipped away over the decades at every last one of his cherished, narrow, old-fashioned beliefs.
We all drove up to Clinton for the funeral: me, Peg, Olive, Marjorie, and Nathan. My mother was silently appalled by the spectacle of my friend Marjorie in her strange clothes with her strange child. My mother had become a deeply unhappy woman over the years, and she responded to no gestures of kindness from anyone. She didn’t want us there.
We stayed only one night, and hustled back to the city just as fast as we could.
Home was New York City now, anyway. It had been for years.
More time passed.
After a certain age, Angela, time just drizzles down upon your head like rain in the month of March: you’re always surprised at how much of it can accumulate, and how fast.
One night in 1964, I was watching Jack Paar on television. I was only halfway paying attention, as I was working on disassembling an old Belgian wedding gown without destroying its ancient fibers in the process. Then the ads came on, and I heard a familiar female voice—gruff, tough, and sarcastic. The cigarette-roughened voice of a real old New York City broad. Before I could even register it in my mind, that voice set off a depth charge in my gut.
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