The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  When I came in, she put down the pan she was holding and stopped everything—as she would have done in the office—to talk to me about what she was doing. She was very nice about my hair, which I had had cut; it made me look older and I liked it better. But blue smoke rose behind her as we talked. She did not notice it.

  No, it was not the way to cook a meal.

  I went back to my father.

  “I didn’t want to be in the way,” I said.

  “Extraordinary,” he said, looking at his watch. “I must just go and hurry Janey up.”

  He was astonished that a woman so brisk in an office should be languid and dependent in a house.

  “She is just bringing it in,” I said. “The potatoes are ready. They are on the table. I saw them.”

  “On the table?” he said. “Getting cold?”

  “On the kitchen table,” I said.

  “That doesn’t prevent them getting cold,” he said. My father was a sarcastic man.

  I walked about the room humming. My father’s exasperation did not last. It gave way to a new thing in his voice—resignation.

  “We will wait, if you do not mind,” he said to me. “Janey is slow. And by the way,” he said, lowering his voice a little, “I shouldn’t mention we passed the Leonards in the road when I brought you up from the station.”

  I was surprised. “Not the Leonards?” I said.

  “They were friends of your mother’s,” he said. “You are old enough to understand. One has to be sometimes a little tactful. Janey sometimes feels …”

  I looked at my father. He had altered in many ways. Giving me this secret, his small, brown eyes gave a brilliant flash, and I opened my blue eyes very wide and gravely to receive it. He had changed. His rough, black hair was clipped closer at the ears, and he had that too-young look that middle-aged men sometimes have, for by certain lines it can be seen that they are not as young as their faces. Marks like minutes on the face of a clock showed at the corners of his eyes, his nose, his mouth; he was much thinner; his face had hardened. He had often been angry and sarcastic, sulking and abrupt, when my mother was with us, but I had never seen him before, as he was now, blank-faced, ironical, and set in impatient boredom. After he spoke, he had actually been hissing a tune privately through his teeth at the corner of his mouth.

  At this moment, Janey came in smiling too much and said lunch was ready.

  “Oh,” I laughed when we got into the dining room, “it is like—it is like France.” Miss Richards—how she would sit in the house in her best clothes, like a visitor, expectant, forgetful, stunned by leisure, watchful, wronged and jealous to the point of tears.

  · · ·

  Perhaps if the builders had come, as they had promised, on the Monday, my stepmother’s story would have been different.

  “I am so sorry we are in such a mess,” she said to me that morning at breakfast. She had said it many times, as if she thought I regarded the ladder as her failure.

  “It’s fun,” I said. “It’s like being on a ship.”

  “You keep on saying that,” my stepmother said, looking at me in a very worried way, as if trying to work out the hidden meaning of my remark. “You’ve never been on a ship.”

  “To France,” I said. “When I was a child.”

  “Oh, yes,” said my stepmother.

  “I hate mess,” said my stepmother to both of us, getting up. In a prosaic person emotion looks grotesque, like clothes suddenly become too large.

  “Do leave us alone,” my father said.

  There was a small scene after this. My father did not mean by “us” himself and me, as she chose to think; he was simply speaking of himself and he had spoken very mildly. My stepmother marched out of the room. Presently, we heard her upstairs. She must have been very upset to have faced going up the ladder.

  “Come on,” said my father. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. I’ll get the car out. We will go to the builders’.”

  He called up to her that we were going and asked if she’d like to go with us.

  Oh, it was a terrible holiday. When I grew up and was myself married, my father said, “It was a very difficult summer. You didn’t realize. You were only a schoolgirl. It was a mistake.” And then he corrected himself. I mean that. My father was always making himself more correct; it was his chief vanity that he understood his own behavior.

  “I happened,” he said—this was the correction—“to make a very foolish mistake.” Whenever he used the phrase “I happened,” my father’s face seemed to dry up and become distant; he was congratulating himself. Not on the mistake, of course, but on being the first to put his finger on it. “I happen to know,” “I happen to have seen”—it was this incidental rightness, the footnote of inside knowledge on innumerable minor issues, and his fatal wrongness, in a large, obstinate, principled way, about anything important, that, I think, made my beautiful and dishonest mother leave him. She was a tall woman, taller than he, with the eyes of a cat, shrugging her shoulders, curving her long, graceful back to be stroked, and with a wide, champagne laugh.

  My father had a clipped-back, monkeyish appearance and that faint grin of the bounder one sees in the harder-looking monkeys that are without melancholy or sensibility; this had attracted my mother, but very soon his youthful bounce gave place to a kind of meddling honesty and she found him dull. And, of course, ruthless. The promptness of his second marriage, perhaps, was to teach her a lesson. I imagine him putting his divorce papers away one evening at his office and realizing, when Miss Richards came in to ask if “there is anything more tonight,” that here was a woman who was reliable, trained, and, like himself, “happened” to have a lot of inside knowledge.

  To get out of the house with my father, to be alone with him! My heart came alive. It seemed to me that this house was not my home any more. If only we could go away, he and I; the country outside seemed to me far more like home than this grotesque divorced house. I stood longing for her not to answer, dreading that she would come down.

  My father was not a man to beg her to change her mind. He went out to the garage. My fear of her coming made me stay for a moment. And then (I do not know how the thought came into my head) I went to the ladder and I lifted it away. It was easy to move a short distance, but it began to swing when I tried to lay it down, and I was afraid it would crash. I could not put it on the floor, so I turned it over and over against the other wall, out of reach. Breathlessly, I left the house.

  “You’ve got white on your tunic,” said my father as we drove off. “What have you been doing?”

  “I rubbed against something,” I said.

  “Oh, how I love motoring.” I laughed beside my father.

  “Oh, look at those lovely little rabbits,” I said.

  “Their little white tails.” I laughed.

  We passed some hurdles in a field.

  “Jumps.” I laughed. “I wish I had a pony.”

  “What would you do?” asked my father.

  “Jump,” I said to my father.

  And then my terrible dreams came back to me. I was frightened. I tried to think of something else, but I could not. I could only see my stepmother on the edge of the landing. I could only hear her giving a scream and going over headfirst. We got into the town and I felt sick. We arrived at the builders’ and my father stopped there. Only a girl was in the office, and I heard my father say in his coldest voice, “I happen to have an appointment.”

  My father came out and we drove off. He was cross.

  “Where are we going?” I said when I saw we were not going home.

  “To Longwood,” he said. “They’re working over there.”

  I thought I would faint. “I—I—” I began.

  “What?” my father said.

  I could not speak. I began to get red and hot. And then I remembered. I could pray.

  It is seven miles to Longwood. My father was a man who enjoyed talking to builders; he planned and replanned with them, built imaginary
houses, talked about people. Builders have a large acquaintance with the way people live; my father liked inside knowledge, as I have said. Well, I thought, she is over. She is dead by now. I saw visits to the hospital. I saw my trial.

  “She is like you,” said the builder, nodding to me. All my life I shall remember his mustache.

  “She is like my wife,” said my father. “My first wife. I happen to have married twice.” He liked puzzling and embarrassing people. “Do you happen to know a tea place near here?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t feel hungry.”

  But we had tea at Gilling. The river is across the road from the teashop and we stood afterward on the bridge. I surprised my father by climbing the parapet.

  “If you jumped,” I said to my father, “would you hurt?”

  “You’d break your legs,” said my father.

  Her “nicest thing”!

  I shall not describe our drive back to the house, but my father did say, “Janey will be worried. We’ve been nearly three hours. I’ll put the car in afterward.”

  · · ·

  When we got back, my father jumped out and went down the path. I got out slowly. I could hardly walk down the path. It is a long path leading across a small lawn, then between two lime trees; there are a few steps down into where the roses are, and across another piece of grass you are at the door. I stopped to listen to the bees in the limes, but I could not wait any longer. I went into the house.

  There was my stepmother standing on the landing above the hall. Her face was dark red, her eyes were long and violent, her dress was dusty, and her hands were black with dust. She had just finished screaming something at my father, and her mouth had stayed open after her scream. I thought I could smell her anger and her fear the moment I came into the house, but it was really the smell of a burned-out saucepan coming from the kitchen.

  “You moved the ladder! Six hours I’ve been up here. The telephone has been ringing, something has burned on the stove. I might have burned to death. Get me down, get me down! I might have killed myself. Get me down!” She came to the gap where the ladder ought to have been.

  “Don’t be silly, Janey,” said my father. “I didn’t move the ladder. Don’t be such a fool. You’re still alive.”

  “Get me down!” Janey cried out. “You liar, you liar, you liar! You did move it!”

  My father lifted the ladder, and as he did so, he said, “The builder must have been.”

  “No one has been!” screamed my stepmother. “I’ve been alone! Up here!”

  “Daddy isn’t a liar,” I said, taking my father’s arm.

  “Come down,” said my father when he had got the ladder in place. “I’m holding it.”

  And he went up a step or two toward her.

  “No!” shrieked Janey.

  “Now, come on. Calm yourself,” said my father.

  “No, no, I tell you!” said Janey.

  “All right, you must stay,” said my father, and stepped down.

  That brought her, of course.

  “I moved the ladder,” I said when she had come down.

  “Oh,” said Janey, swinging her arm to hit me, but she fainted instead.

  · · ·

  That night, my father came to my room when I was in bed. I had moved my mother’s photograph to the bedside table. He was not angry. He was tired out.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked.

  I did not answer.

  “Did you know she was upstairs?” he asked.

  I did not reply.

  “Stop playing with the sheet,” he said. “Look at me. Did you know she was upstairs?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You little cat!” he said.

  I smiled.

  “It was very wrong,” he said.

  I smiled. Presently he smiled. I laughed.

  “It is nothing to laugh at,” he said. And suddenly he could not stop himself; he laughed. The door opened and my stepmother looked in while we were both shaking with laughter. My father laughed as if he were laughing for the first time in many years; his bounderish look, sly and bumptious and so delicious, came back to him. The door closed.

  He stopped laughing.

  “She might have been killed,” he said, severe again. And then he remembered what I had asked him on the bridge at Gilling.

  I lowered my head.

  “You wanted—” he said.

  “No, no, no!” I cried, and tears came to my eyes. He put his arm around me.

  My mother was a cat, they said, a wicked woman, leaving us like that. I longed for my mother.

  Three days later, I went to camp. I apologized to my stepmother and she forgave me. I never saw her again.

  November 5, 1949

  All hands were on deck for this volume. Good thing, too. It was some deck—and those were some hands. They represented a wide span of generations and sensibilities. Some lived through the forties; others were happy to live through the ones who lived through the forties. Special thanks go to Roger Angell, Katia Bachko, Robert P. Baird, Madeleine Baverstam, Pete Canby, Chris Curry, Noah Eaker, Rob Fischer, Sameen Gauhar, Hannah Goldfield, Ann Goldstein, Mary Hawthorne, Neima Jahromi, Susan Kamil, Carolyn Korman, Taylor Lewis, Ruth Margalit, Pam McCarthy, Caitlin McKenna, Wyatt Mitchell, Lynn Oberlander, Erin Overby, Beth Pearson, Tom Perry, Joshua Rothman, Eric Simonoff, Simon M. Sullivan, and Susan Turner. And, of course, to all the worthies whose bylines appear in these pages.

  JOAN ACOCELLA has written for The New Yorker since 1992 and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. Her books include Mark Morris (1993), Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism (2000), and Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints (2007).

  CONRAD AIKEN (1889–1973) was a London correspondent for The New Yorker in the 1930s. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for his Selected Poems and a National Book Award in 1954 for his Collected Poems.

  HILTON ALS became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1994 and a theatre critic in 2002. He is the author of The Women (1996) and White Girls (2013).

  W. H. AUDEN (1907–1973) was born in York, England, was educated at Oxford University, and achieved fame as a poet in the 1930s. In 1939 he immigrated to the United States and published his first poem in The New Yorker. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety and a National Book Award in 1956 for The Shield of Achilles.

  S. N. BEHRMAN (1893–1973), a playwright, screenwriter, and biographer, first appeared in The New Yorker in 1929 and continued to contribute to the magazine for nearly half a century.

  ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979) published her first poem in The New Yorker in 1940. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1956 for Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976.

  LOUISE BOGAN (1897–1970) was the poetry editor of The New Yorker for nearly forty years. In 1945, she became the first woman to serve as the United States poet laureate. Her books include Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), and The Sleeping Fury (1937).

  RICHARD O. BOYER (1903–1973) was an American journalist who began contributing to The New Yorker in 1931. His books include Labor’s Untold Story (1955) and The Legend of John Brown (1973).

  JOHN CHEEVER (1912–1982) sold his first story to The New Yorker in 1935 and was a regular contributor of fiction to the magazine until his death. His books include The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), The Wapshot Scandal (1964), and Falconer (1977).

  DAN CHIASSON is an associate professor of English at Wellesley College and has written about poetry for The New Yorker since 2008. His books include the poetry collections Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon (2010) and Bicentennial (2014), and a book of essays, One Kind of Everything (2007).

  ROBERT M. COATES (1897–1973) joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1929. He coined the term “Abstract Expressionism,” in a piece for the magazine in 1946. His books include The Eater of Darkness (1926) and The Outlaw Years (1930).

  MALCOLM COWLEY (1898–1989) was a nove
list, poet, and literary critic. He published his first poem in The New Yorker in 1941. His books include Blue Juniata (1929) and Exile’s Return (1934).

  DAVID DENBY has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998. He is the author of Great Books (1996), American Sucker (2004), Snark (2009), and Do the Movies Have a Future? (2012).

  CLIFTON FADIMAN (1904–1999) joined The New Yorker in 1933 as a books editor. He was a judge for the Book of the Month Club and hosted Information Please, a popular radio quiz show. His books include Party of One (1955), Any Number Can Play (1957), and Enter Conversing (1962).

  JANET FLANNER (1892–1978) became The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent in 1925 and wrote the Letter from Paris column until she retired in 1975. She is the author of The Cubical City (1926), Conversation Pieces (1942), and Paris Was Yesterday (1972).

  WOLCOTT GIBBS (1902–1958) joined The New Yorker in 1927 as a writer and editor. In 1940, he became the magazine’s drama critic, and in 1950 his play Season in the Sun (adapted from his earlier book about Fire Island bohemianism) became a Broadway hit.

  PHILIP HAMBURGER (1914–2004) was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1939 until his death. He published eight collections of his work, including Friends Talking in the Night (1999) and Matters of State (2000), and was one of the few staff writers to work for all five of the magazine’s editors.

  GEOFFREY T. HELLMAN (1907–1977) began reporting for The Talk of the Town in 1929. His books include How to Disappear for an Hour (1947), Mrs. de Peyster’s Parties (1963), The Smithsonian: Octopus on the Mall (1966), and Bankers, Bones and Beetles (1969).

  JOHN HERSEY (1914–1993) sold his first article to The New Yorker in 1944 and published some two dozen nonfiction pieces over the next half century. “Hiroshima,” his account of six people during the first atomic attack, was the sole article to ever fill the entire editorial space of a single issue. In 1945 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Bell for Adano.