by Gail Sheehy
One night when we had dinner at Audrey and John’s, she spilled scalding demitasse over my hands. What struck me was how it wasn’t our hosts, Audrey and her husband, who rushed to my aid. It was Audrey and my husband. They raced about together to find me some salve. Like guilty parents. After pulling off East River Drive my husband dropped his forehead onto the steering wheel and began to weep. He said he didn’t know if he loved me anymore. And so it began.
Sunday night after his first blurted confession, we lay on the white bed striped black with the fingers of a fire escape lit by a streetlight and trembled. What did I do wrong?—all we’ve worked for—ours is one of the best marriages—isn’t it?—let’s go away together—who is it?—no, don’t tell me—oh my God, the baby—can it be that deep?
It is not long, he tells me, but it is deep.
Cries came out of me that I had never heard before, brute sound, racking sobs. Terror overtook. We clung like children confronted with the shock of eternity. Darling, love, it will be all right, he breathed. I’ll make it all right. I did a terrible thing. Lying back, he squeezed from the last tears a promise. He could never leave me and Maura.
Don’t promise me anything, I said. You must take your time. Mercifully, the sap drained from both of us. We dozed. The phone rang. When I answered, the intruder was silent. “Who is it? Who is it in my house?”
She waited, then hung up. But I felt her. This house, this marriage, this little family would never again be whole.
A YEAR PASSED AFTER THAT TORTURED NIGHT, a walking-on-eggshells year, when he repeatedly assured me that it was over between him and Audrey. I wanted to believe him. He still had three years of residency ahead of him. He had exchanged a crisp lieutenant’s uniform for the pajamas of an intern. He was thirty years old and could not qualify for a credit card. We often joked with friends about our role reversal. He’d say, “My wife doesn’t make bread, she earns it.” Didn’t we sound hip? The burn of his resentment at being dependent on me came out in ways that only I would notice. Three times a week my name was in the paper. I would leave the paper on the kitchen table open to the women’s page, so when he came home late from the hospital, he would see it. He never said a word about my writing.
I CONTINUED WORKING FULL TIME at the Trib and hired one babysitter after another. I would come home to either a comedy or a horror show. The English nanny was a clean freak; she had probably never met a roach. She sprayed everything in the apartment with Lysol, including bedsheets, and she must have made Maura help her. I had to soak Maura in gardenia bubble bath before her father got home. The Caribbean girl who replaced the English nanny was so easygoing, I relaxed. One day I came home early and saw the white pimpmobile double-parked outside our building. I ran upstairs to find the sitter playing pinch and tickle on her boyfriend’s lap while Maura played with her platform heels. Her replacement was a Cuban church lady. At least Maura was getting international exposure. But the Cuban lady liked to cook and eat nonstop, so the roaches forgot the Lysol lady and returned with a vengeance. It took me a long time to pry out of Maura why the dead roaches were all lined up along one wall when I got home. The Cuban sitter had taught her a game: give the roaches a head start up the wall and then smack ’em dead with a pancake turner. And so they went, one impossible surrogate after another. It was agonizing.
I gave up my dream job. To keep our family together, I would remake myself into a full-time mom and devoted wife, put the career on hold, and somehow find a way to make a living as a freelance writer. My refuge was St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery.
A young minister was attracting an eclectic congregation of artists, writers, and theater people who were active supporters of the civil rights struggle in the South. I had written about their Easter Sunday solidarity parade and felt drawn to a new spiritual home. In college I had found fault with the religious tradition of my family, Christian Science, which denied obvious realities, like disease and accidents, and relied on prayer to heal the “error” in the world. I found in the progressive Episcopalian parish at St. Mark’s an openness to people of all colors, freethinkers, and homosexuals. Once I took instruction and was baptized an Episcopalian, every Sunday I found renewed strength from the socially conscious sermons and from Jesus’s words of refreshment: “Come to me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”
I begged Albert to take time off. We needed to go away, be close, disappear into the country, dance in the moonlight. He said interns couldn’t take vacations. So I cooked and froze his favorite meats and filled the refrigerator with tossed salads and backups of farm-stand lettuces and veggies. Then I plundered my meager savings and swooped up my two-year-old to escape for a month to a rented sugarhouse in Vermont. We lost ourselves playing in the woods and paddling in a lake and reading stories until we fell asleep under the fat tree where we were certain Pooh Bear lived. Albert came up for only one weekend. It didn’t take an interrogation to know that our marriage was over.
I wanted to go back to childhood and start over. Instead, I prepared myself to take on a strange new identity for women of my generation. Single mother.
I DREADED THE HANDOVERS. The empty hours, the late Sunday afternoons waiting for the appointed return time, crouched on the top step with knees against my fluttering heart, jackknifing up from a pretense of reading the paper each time the downstairs buzzer rang or the stairs squeaked. Finally seeing Maura in her father’s arms, where she belonged but could not fully belong, her head bobbing beside his chin as they rounded the banister leading to the fourth floor, singing together, Merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along, a song we had taught her. I chimed in from above. For instants we were a family again, merrily we roll along, then face-to-face, hearing the whimper start the second her father unclasped his hug. She knew this moment but she had no comprehension of its sudden cruelty, from safe and warm, brushing against the familiar scratchiness of her father’s chin, to being suspended across a gulf wide as a river, an ocean, child overboard, legs helplessly dangling without support, arms clinging to her father, mother’s arms outstretched—but she was never ready to surrender one for the other—and then, the innocent question, the question that had no answer: Why can’t Daddy come home?
Her question told us that we needed to make a clear separation in order for Maura to understand how her world was altered. I had to fight against the feeling that I was at fault for the failure of my marriage. My ex-husband contributed only child support. It would have been easy to claim alimony, but I wanted no part of dependence on him. My task now was to find a way to support us and bring some delight into our new world. The greatest consolation was knowing that Albert was an attentive father.
CHAPTER 5
Seduction at the Algonquin
IT WAS A SATURDAY when Clay Felker took me out to lunch for the first time. He chose the Algonquin, I assume to give me illusions of literary grandeur. The Rose Room, scene of the famous Round Table, still held a musty glamour imparted by the savage contests of wit between Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, et al.
I couldn’t eat a thing. I watched Clay devour a mound of raw chopped beef. Actually, I didn’t see him eat it. It was there on the plate, then it was gone. He was much more interested in talking than eating, and to my surprise, in talking to me. I had written several stories for him at the Trib but nothing so far in 1966. What was I writing these days? he wanted to know.
My pale Irish skin was aflame with sunburn and freckles. If I blushed with emotion, it wouldn’t have shown. It was midsummer and I had just returned with Maura from the month’s retreat in Vermont. Pouches under my eyes were filled with stale tears. He pried out of me that I was noodling in a journal to keep myself sane while my marriage was coming apart.
“Can I ask why?” he said.
“No good reason.”
Clay’s right eyebrow lifted, suggesting a perceptible level of interest. He wanted to hear the whole backstory. Only much lat
er did he divulge his secret: his way of seducing writers was to get inside their heads by interviewing them, more like a shrink than an editor. He probed for your obsession, the subject you couldn’t shake, the mind chatter that goes on in your head at four hundred words a minute—your holy hang-up! Then he would know how to match you with one of hundreds of ideas floating around in his brain.
The current state of marriage seemed of inordinate interest to him. I told him that I had come home from Vermont to find the note.
“What note?”
The note to my husband’s girlfriend. He had left it carelessly, or conspicuously, near the phone. The year of his deceit and my denial was over. Fresh tears began filling my eyes. “I don’t want to talk about this. Anymore.”
Clay put his hand over mine. “I’m sorry, Gail.” It was the first time he’d spoken my name tenderly, and he spoke it like a father figure. I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room and finish my little cry in private. When I reemerged, the atmosphere had changed. Clay leaned in closer. He no longer seemed in such a hurry.
“Would you like something to drink, a glass of wine? Scotch?”
“Scotch,” I said. “On the rocks.” He ordered two Balvenie single malts, soda on the side. When our drinks came, we both sipped and sat quietly for a while. Why, he kept pondering, why is everyone’s marriage breaking up?
“Everyone’s?” I said.
“Mine, too.”
I glimpsed in his soft brown eyes the wounded man behind his larger-than-life persona. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“But why? What’s going on?” he pressed. Clay was most interested in the why of things that happened.
“It’s something in the air,” I said. “Women getting tired of being background noise. Or betrayed.”
“My wife’s an actress,” he said. “She’s always off somewhere, like Italy, making a picture.” He looked terribly sad.
“How did she hurt you?” I asked. That opened a vein. He told me he had flown to Rome to surprise her with a long weekend holiday in Venice. He found her with a married man. “A flaming Italian communist!” It wasn’t clear whether the man’s philandering or his politics was the more offensive. Clay had decked him. That had only made things worse.
“Sure, but didn’t it feel really good at the time—POWWW!” I laughed.
“POWWW!” He punched the air. He laughed.
Now it was my turn to interview him. I assumed, given his nasal uptown New York honk, that he’d grown up in Manhattan. Way off, he said. “Webster Groves.”
“Webster Groves! It sounds like Grover’s Corners.”
“It’s Midwest. Missouri. A suburb of St. Louis.”
“So you were baked in a solid midwestern point of view?” I ventured.
“You know the story Tom Wolfe tells about me?” Tom pretended that he went out to Webster Groves to research its imprint on Clay. Nothing, nada, no influence on Clay whatsoever. What’s more, he claimed that his sister had told him that Baby Clay’s first complete sentence was “What do you mean, you don’t have my reservation!”
“That’s Tom’s gift for satire,” Clay said, chuckling.
“What kind of a name is ‘Felker’?” I asked.
His grandfather, Henry Clay Felker, came from a liberal German aristocratic family who fled Germany after the 1848 conservative takeover. The family changed its name from von Fredrikstein to “Volker,” meaning “of the people,” which was later Anglicized to Felker. His grandmother’s side was Scottish, he said.
My mother’s family, too, was Scottish, I said, well, Scotch-Irish, imported by the English landowners to populate the Ulster Plantation. “After the British let the Irish farmers starve in the potato famine,” I added with vehemence.
“You sound very Irish,” he said. “You’ve internalized their sense of grievance.”
“My mother is a proud Irish American,” I said, “but my father”—I sighed—“he wouldn’t let her out of the cage to sing.”
Clay was proud to say that both his mother and his grandmother had attended the University of Missouri School of Journalism, as had his father and grandfather. Journalism was a given in their family. Carl Felker, his father, worked six and a half days a week as managing editor of the weekly newspaper the Sporting News, and was editor of the Sporting Good Dealer. His mother, Cora Tyree Felker, was women’s editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She gave it up once she had children.
“So I was acquainted early with the discontent of an ambitious, educated woman,” Clay said. “Maybe like you.”
This was a revelation. The fact that Clay had some concept of the discontent of women like me made him unique among the men of my acquaintance.
“Did you always want to be an editor?” I asked.
All he’d ever wanted, he said, was to have his own publication. He was around eight or nine when he printed his first broadsheet on a hexagraph in his basement, the Greely Street News. He hawked it up and down his neighborhood for five cents.
He told me he grew up reading the magazines to which his parents subscribed, The New Yorker, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Esquire, the magazine that taught young men how to become gentlemen. He imagined the editors of Esquire all coming to work in black tie so they’d be ready to sail off to dinner at 21 with beautiful women on their arms. “When I actually went to work at Esquire,” he said, “I realized the world it created in its pages had come out of the imagination of its original editor, Arnold Gingrich. He eventually became part of that world. I wanted to become part of that world, too.”
“How long did it take you?” I asked.
His half smile had shyness in it, the perpetual awe of the outsider. “I’m still working on it.”
Clay suddenly changed the subject. “I have an idea. Write that story for me.”
“What story?”
“About a young marriage that breaks up for no good reason.”
“It’s not a story. It’s life. Incomprehensible.”
“That’s what will make it special—being inside the writer’s head while you struggle to make sense of it.”
“But it’s personal.”
“Don’t worry. You can change the names. I’ll run it as a roman à clef. Fictionalized reality.”
Clay had seduced me. I wrote the story for him. After the Trib folded, it appeared in the stillborn World-Journal Tribune: “Lovesounds of a Wife.”
For the first time a man I looked up to had read my work. And published it. Was it possible that he believed in me?
CHAPTER 6
Love and Death in the Year America Came Apart
“HE WANTS COMIN’ GUP, a fancy man.”
The voice belonged to the Ukrainian seamstress on the ground floor. A survivor of Stalin’s genocide, she had appointed herself security guard of our rent-controlled former rooming house on the Lower East Side. Years earlier, Albert and I had moved there to accommodate the new baby in cheap digs, $139 a month.
“What’s his name?” I asked over the intercom.
“He say Clay, you will know.”
“Clay Felker? On the Lower East Side?”
“Look like movie star.”
I burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. Out the front window I could see a sleek black town car. It must have been dropping off Clay. Tonight was the debut party of his new magazine at the Four Seasons. I wished I could have gone.
My block, East Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues, was not accustomed to chauffeured town cars. This was a little Ukrainian village of immigrants who filled the streets with the smells of pierogi and kielbasa. These God-fearing immigrants shared the space with the new demimonde of the Lower East Side—proto-yuppies and promising artists with hair like the manes of wild animals who were happy to sacrifice safety and living space to pursue writing, acting, art, photography, or just joy, love. The most conspicuous new element in the neighborhood was the large influx of hippies, young fugitives from middle-class suburban privilege. They injected the dangerous e
lement of speed (amphetamines). Accounts of stabbings, muggings, and robberies were becoming frequent.
I wore beatnik sandals and occasionally love beads, and I treasured the album Rolling Stones: Now. But with a four-year-old child, I was too responsible to spend any time being stoned.
Could it really be Clay Felker crossing the great social divide? His was the glamorous world of the Upper East Side—cocktails and canapés and charity balls for socially prominent diseases for which chic women spent the afternoon at Kenneth’s getting bouffant hairdos that were perfect facsimiles of the style worn by former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.
“I tell him come up?”
“Give me a minute. I’m just putting Maura down.”
“Okay, he’s comin’ gup—a fancy man!”
It was mid-April 1968. Clay had just launched New York as an independent weekly. The first issue wasn’t off the newsstands yet and already the man was on the prowl for his next stories. I could hear him climbing the four flights of stairs, saddle-curved from a hundred years of cheap shoes, past the door of the playwright/pot dealer on two and the retired cop on three with the trigger-happy son who watched TV with the old man’s service revolver on his knee. The rattle clink as I opened my three locks must have made him nervous. He burst into my apartment, pulling off his formal black tie as he peered down the long dark hall.
“Are you searching for hippies?” I teased. “There are probably some in the kitchen baking pot into brownies.”
“How do you live here all alone, Gail? It’s not safe.”
“I bite.”
He laughed.
“Can I take your coat?”
As he wriggled out of a black Chesterfield, I noticed again how unusual he was: a king-size man propped on incongruously small, princely, high-arched feet. His body seemed locked in perpetual forward motion. His hungry eyes darted about the surroundings like a house detective taking mental notes on every detail. The apartment was probably not as slummy as he had imagined: a floor-through with a real dining room, a baby’s room filled with books and mobiles, and even a sitting room overlooking the street where I banged out freelance articles on my secondhand electric typewriter and often pulled all-nighters (with a little help from speed).
