by Gail Sheehy
The anesthesia of fear has robbed from my memory where exactly we went, except there was no back alley, just a normal doctor’s office. Of the procedure, I remember nothing. What I will never forget is my mother’s voice, singing to me in the backseat of the car as she cradled my head in her lap on the way home . . . Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s going to sing you a lullaby . . . her soft hand stroking my forehead, dabbing at my tears, mothering me. Hush little baby . . .
THE DEAN WAS NOT HARSH. She told me I could return to the University of Vermont but only if all of my professors agreed. I called them, one by one, and apologized for my reckless behavior. My English professor confessed that she had thought of eloping herself but was saved when her boyfriend’s junk car broke down; she and I would become friends. I took a Greyhound back and walked up the long hill from the bus station and the half mile to the women’s campus, longing for the very confinement that I had sought to escape. My roommate and I squealed with delight to be back in our private girl-world together.
McCarthy called my dorm night after night. My dorm mates knew to put him off. Over that Christmas vacation he drove by my house to tell me, no, threaten me, that if I didn’t come back to him, he was going to marry someone else. I feigned disappointment. I never saw him again.
This is what is important: I vowed to revirginate myself. Not until I married would I ever allow myself to go “all the way” again. I kept that vow. In my junior year, however, my southern boyfriend in the Kappa Sig house next door to my sorority house made a grandstand play. We were in his car, enjoying a light makeout session, when music on the radio was interrupted for an emergency broadcast. The Soviet Union had sent something called Sputnik into orbit, the first artificial satellite in history. All the commentators sounded unnerved. This meant the evil rival could attack us from space. My boyfriend put his lips to my ear.
“We could be blown away tomorrow. This may be our last chance to know real love. Let’s do it.”
“Nice try,” I said.
Countless Sputnik babies were conceived that night. I was proud not to be included in those statistics.
THINGS BEGAN LOOKING UP ONCE I graduated from UVM in 1958. I had interviewed for a job at the Manhattan headquarters of J. C. Penney on West Thirty-Fourth Street. My friends snickered when I came back to school from spring vacation and told them how excited I was to have a job at J. C. Penney. “What, selling long johns to old ladies?” That’s what the stores in rural America were known for, of course, but I had done some research and found out that Penney’s had a consumer service department, forerunner of the public relations bonanza, and it published two consumer magazines.
“No, actually,” I told my friends. “I was interviewed by Mr. James Cash Penney himself.”
The legendary entrepreneur from Missouri was then in his eighties and had a bushy white mustache that wagged when he smiled. He had Golden Rule written all over his face (indeed, his first stores were called Golden Rule stores). I had learned from reading about him that he always called his employees “associates.” Men became manager-partners in new stores and shared in the profits. Penney’s goal was not to build a chain of stores but to assemble a chain of “good men.”
“What do you want to be in five years?” Mr. Penney inquired. A writer, I said, or maybe a buyer. He asked if I’d like to start in their management training program. “Do you train girls as managers, too?” I asked. He said they were just starting. “Do you pay girls the same as boys?” I dared to ask. He looked surprised. He smiled, puffed up a little, and pulled on his suspenders. “We certainly should.” And so he did.
That was 1958. Unbeknownst to me, I had struck a faint blow for equal opportunity employment, which would not become a national issue for another decade. That job allowed me to travel America in a hat and gloves to put on educational fashion shows at college home economics departments, displaying Penney’s fabrics. Oshkosh, Appleton, Kansas City—it was an education in small-town American values that never left me. I was also able to write for the company’s magazines and work with Madison Avenue ad agencies to make informational filmstrips. This was so much more exciting than the lives of my girlfriends who had graduated with engagement rings or fraternity pins padlocked over their bras. They seemed to be time traveling straight into middle age.
I made an ironclad pact with myself: I would not marry anyone, not even Prince Charming, for at least two years after college. I wasn’t going to be trapped like my mother. I just made it to age twenty-three. My suitor was a charming imposter who found me at Manhattan’s White Horse Tavern on a Sunday afternoon. My roommate and I were waiting for the paint to dry in our one-room bachelorette pad a block away.
“Squadron Leader Greville Bell, RAF.” He introduced himself in an impeccable British accent. “Fair lady, would you be so kind as to help out a stranger to your city?” I was a pushover for men in uniform, although now that I recall, this man was wearing a raincoat. But he was good-looking and so very polite and obviously helpless. He needed assistance in counting out change for a tip. “This is the pub made famous by Dylan Thomas, is it not?” he asked.
“The very one.”
“‘If I were tickled by the rub of love, I would not fear the apple nor the flood,’” he recited.
“‘Nor the bad blood of spring,’” I chimed in. It wasn’t every day that a man recited poetry to me. I could be smitten by this Englishman. Squadron Leader Greville Bell was adorably sincere and worth another chance. Over the next few weeks, he called several times for dates but I was always busy. In a final attempt, he trotted out his true identity. The accent flattened suddenly to the nasality of a nice Irish Catholic boy from Connecticut.
“My real name is Albert Francis Sheehy.” He confessed that he was the son of a police captain and presently living in “reduced circumstances” while pursuing the noble aspiration of becoming a physician. I wound up laughing. Albert said if I could find it in my heart to forgive him, he would really like to take me out on a date. He courted me for a year, mostly long distance, since he was a first-year medical student at the University of Rochester.
I was happy being single and free to travel in my white-gloved job, but Albert was nothing if not persistent. He wrote to me in poetry. He could talk to me about Dostoyevsky and laugh with me over Portnoy’s Complaint. He was five years older and horny. But even when he came to New York over vacations, I held fast to my pledge of revirgination. I must have driven him to a frenzy of frustration. He had done four years in the air force as an officer attached to the RAF and he was impatient to get on with his life. He wanted a wife.
I loved him. And I admired his noble aspiration. He was sincerely committed to serving mankind, despite a lack of family money and loading himself with debt. My desire to be a writer paled into selfishness. No, worse, it smacked of ambition, and in a woman, ambition was abhorrent.
COPS NAB POET IN COFFEE HOUSE was the headline on the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle the day in 1960 we returned to Rochester as a married couple. We laughed. In Rochester, poets were the enemy. It was only 350 miles from Manhattan, but I could have sworn it was an iceberg broken off from somewhere in the upper Midwest that floated through the Great Lakes and grounded itself in the snowbelt of western New York State. It was always cold. The other medical school wives were even colder. Most had money somewhere in their families and were rehearsing to run Junior Leagues and silent auctions to benefit the halt and the lame. They wore cashmere sweater sets and often played bridge and drank in the afternoon. I didn’t. I worked. My career aspirations were perceived as unbecoming for the wife of a future physician, even subversive.
I applied for my first newspaper job at the Democrat & Chronicle, a decent Gannett paper. The editor of the women’s page, George Jewell, ignored the samples of my writing and went after my age and gender.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“And married,” he said suspiciously, studying my application. “How lon
g?”
“Just a year. I want to make a career.”
“Not a family?”
“Well, yes, eventually.”
This was a classic example of the either-or boxes into which most females were slotted at the time: either holy mother or frigid career girl.
“So, since you’ve waited so long, you’ll probably want to get pregnant pretty soon.”
“I didn’t expect this to be a maternity exam.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sheehy.”
“Gail.”
“But I don’t want another girl reporter who’s going to learn the ropes here and go get pregnant on me.”
As I gathered up my writing samples, Mr. Jewell threw me a lifeline. “I’m going to ask our editor in chief to see you.” His name was straight out of Front Page—Red Vag—a bantam rooster of a man with a cockscomb of red Irish hair. He liked that I was Irish, too.
“Mr. Vag, I’m married to a medical student. They make about a dollar ninety-eight an hour. I want to work. I need to work.”
“What do you like to write?”
“What’s going on under people’s noses that they don’t see—between men and women, white people and black people, stuff like that.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “You give George three fashion stories a week to make him happy. You give me a Sunday feature on ‘stuff like that.’”
“Really, Mr. Vag?”
“I can’t promise they’ll let me publish it, but let’s you and I kick up some dust around here.”
There was plenty to kick up in a town that could afford to drowse under the benevolent paternalism of Kodak. On lunch hour I would devour The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin’s confession and sermon on racism. “You must put yourself in the skin of a black man . . .” he wrote. Try as I might, I could not begin to imagine myself into the daily blows of degradation that I had read about. My husband and I often crossed into Rochester’s “colored” section to go to a jazz club, and there we felt the tremors of discontent. I wrote stories about the proud, brave, hurting people I met there. Mr. Vag didn’t publish them.
My tropism had always leaned toward New York City. Now I knew why. The turbulence of those times made me feel it was my calling to be a journalist.
CHAPTER 4
Deceptions
“HI, COOKIE!” His voice over the phone sounded boyish.
“Daddy?”
“How’s my girl?”
First thought: I wasn’t his girl anymore. I was a working newspaperwoman with two years behind me at the Democrat & Chronicle, thrilled to be sent to New York to write about Fashion Week. “It’s been so long,” I said.
“Sorry, Cookie, you’ve been on my mind.”
“Really? Not really.”
“Albert told me you’re in New York. I’m coming into town to take you to lunch. How’s that? The Oyster Bar. You always liked that.”
It was his charming con man voice. He was an adman, after all.
“Can’t, Daddy. I’m working. I’m down here for the paper with a five o’ clock deadline to file my story.”
“A real reporter now.”
“They call me the fashion editor.”
“How about that! A lunch break will do you good. Meet you at Grand Central.”
“Wait! I have no time for lunch.”
“Then I’ll come straight to your hotel. I have something important to tell you.”
The way he said it made my stomach clench. When he appeared at my hotel-room door, holding a street peddler’s bouquet of mums wrapped in butcher paper, I was struck by how young and insouciant he looked: like a frat boy in his camel’s hair coat and casually flipped scarf, not a fleck of gray in his thick hair, a cunning half smile on his lips.
“I’m starting a new life.”
It didn’t take long for him to spill the story, as if he thought that I’d be as excited as he was that he wouldn’t have to commute anymore; he was leaving New York, leaving my mother, marrying a young woman he was sure I’d be crazy about—in fact, she was downstairs, just dying to meet me.
I wished she was already dead.
In that moment, our roles flipped. My father was the adolescent, bolting out of the family, deserting the nest, already in half flight, no catching him now. I turned into the scolding mother.
“What are you thinking? Mom has been your handmaiden for how long? You’re going to dump her now?”
“Your mother has her own friends now. She’s in AA.”
His tone was cruelly condescending. This was the first I knew that my mother had acknowledged her alcoholism. All those years her “sinus attacks” had been the cover story for the disease of despair she had battled alone. I felt the crush of guilt.
My father got up and went to the minibar. “Do you have any ginger ale?”
“What about Trish?” I said. “Remember? You have another daughter; she’s only just graduated from high school.” He was flipping channels on the TV looking for business news.
“Your sister has lots of friends; she’ll be fine.”
My sister and I had grown up in different families. The year I escaped to college, our parents moved to a sterile exurb in southern Connecticut where men like my father commuted to Manhattan in the predawn of the Mad Men era and competed to be top dog in their ad agencies. Dad was a Don Draper precursor, with zipper-tight lips, precisely barbered dark hair, square-framed aviator sunglasses, a sliver of white pocket handkerchief peeking from the breast pocket of his gray flannel suit. The mother who had been left home with my much younger sister had been a ghost mother. Trapped in her forties in the exurbs, with neither the skills nor experience to start a career, Mother had seen herself like most first wives of her era, as little more than a convenience, like a frozen dinner or a new garbage disposal. Years later, my sister told me that during her high school years, Mom had given up trying. She mostly sat around the kitchen drinking with the plumber from next door. Trish had to tell her when she needed a training bra.
My father came home in the bar car of the Metro North Railroad, flirting with secretaries who scavenged for the low-hanging fruit of frustrated marriages. A popular local politician, he had an excuse to be out almost every weeknight. His weekends were lived on the golf course. I assumed that his new girlfriend was one of those belles of the bar car and had probably taken up the role of “golf friend” when it was vacated by Bernice.
That day in the hotel room, I confronted my father: “Who’s looking after Trish? Is anyone taking her around to look at colleges?”
He said he thought Mom was working on getting her into the University of Hartford. Trish was an afterthought. What my father really wanted to talk about was his own new dream, about his bride-to-be, how they had everything in common. (Really? His girlfriend was barely twenty-one.) About the branch office he was opening in San Francisco and the prize for which he had waited twenty-five years as the slavishly loyal number two—leadership of the company when the founder retired.
“Dad,” I said, “you’re fifty-two years old. How do you get to be the kid?”
He said he had never felt younger. “Sonny Boy” did look preternaturally coltish. I was the one who felt suddenly old. I asked my father to promise that he would fulfill his responsibility to pay for my sister’s college expenses until she graduated. He gave me the doublespeak learned in the ad game. I had a sickening feeling that his allegiance had already been withdrawn from our family. He was a man caught up in a midlife fantasy of escape from a frustrating career and a dead marriage into a start-over life with a girl younger than his daughter.
I agreed to meet his new lady, but only if he would keep his promise to put Trish through college. He agreed. Before he left that day, I knew he would break his promise.
When I found Albert at the hospital that evening, his voice over the phone was soothing. “Your father’s a fool. How could a man walk away from his family?” I was consoled. We were happily married. I was safe.
THE LOVE OF A HUSBAND
seeps into the senses like perfume. So slowly does it diffuse, the absence of its essence can become imperceptible. I did not suspect. Two years after the encounter with my father, Albert and I were glad to be back in New York after his graduation from medical school and now living in the East Village. He was either at St. Vincent’s Hospital being an intern six days a week or on call during the seventh day. I hardly saw him. But I was preoccupied taking care of our infant daughter, shopping, cooking, working, and trying to find a few consecutive hours to sleep. I began mulling over the sociological experiment we represented, a dual-career couple with a young child. We were in the professional avant-garde, and I was proud that we were doing everything right.
But were we?
In those days, I was expected to work right up until labor pains began, which I had. The two weeks I was allowed to bond with my baby were intense and joyful, but also strained by the concern that I couldn’t wean Maura soon enough to keep my job. Modern breast pumps were not in existence. And I was the primary breadwinner. I stuck it out working daily from 10 A.M. until 6 or 7 P.M. at the newspaper. On the bus to the office, I would hide behind my newspapers and try to swallow the sobs in my throat. I knew that the untrained nannies I could afford were no substitute for the bonding with a blood mother. It was torture. I remember the effort it took to cauterize the emotional wound before I stepped into the elevator to the Women’s Department, stung by the irony that my young colleagues and I had left our own babies at home and would be writing to other women about how to improve their lives.
I remember telling my friend Audrey about a string of sudden divorces back in my hometown. Audrey and her husband, John, were doctors in training with Albert, and we often went out for pizza as couples. “One can never tell about any marriage, anywhere,” Audrey said, with a diagnostician’s matter-of-factness.
