Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  That first evening, at a dinner that was scarcely touched, my mother invented her own theories about journalistic protocol, including her firm belief that no newspaperman worth his salt would publish the name of a girl alleged to be involved in an affair, without proof, or even—she stammered here—with proof. The married man’s name yes, but not the girl’s. The divorce proceedings were scheduled for November—which is why the newspapers were chasing every lead—but the court had been discreet. They had not released my name. One could hope, my mother surmised, they never would.

  The phone rang several times that first day, and the second, but I was never called to the phone and hadn’t the heart to ask if any of the calls had been from John.

  It began to seem like sitting shivah, that seven-day Jewish period of mourning, with its rituals of remaining in the house with bodies and hair unwashed, clothing torn as a sign of grief, mirrors covered. The difference is that, during shivah, loved ones all gather with food and condolence. In this case, the few who gathered, my mother couldn’t bear to see, and many others turned away, pretending not to know, their sensitivities offended.

  The second night, in the parlor once again—my mother commented, “I’m just glad Isidor already passed.” My uncle, the senator, who had died in 1912, would have been dragged through the mud on account of this, an occasion of frivolous joy for his enemies.

  “He was only the fourth Jewish senator, you know,” my father said—which of course, I did know. And he was Maryland attorney general, and chairman of the Titanic hearings, and a great many other things. “He was asked to run for vice president. Twice. But he didn’t. The only time he mentioned his Jewish heritage . . .”

  I knew the rest of the story as well as I knew about Washington’s cherry tree and Lincoln’s log cabin. The only time my uncle had mentioned his Jewish heritage in a political setting was when he was fighting an amendment that would have disenfranchised colored voters in Maryland. He said that if such legal wording had been adopted earlier, his very own father from Bavaria would have been denied the vote.

  I still remembered the first thing I’d ever told my father about John that had earned his respect. He had admired John for not believing in eugenics, for not damning a person or assuming inherent weaknesses because of supposed “innate” differences due to ethnicity, religion, or race. That was all still true. They were not the most common popular positions in those days or for many years to come, and to eject from professional scholarship a man who was willing to stand up for them, vocally and tirelessly—even obnoxiously—was to risk changing a fine balance in the world of science, which because it was the field that spoke for progress, overlapped the world of politics. John’s views in this regard very much matched my father’s. But my father wouldn’t be able to stand hearing the name John Watson for a very long time.

  Father finished telling the story of Isidor’s famous political stand. Recalling this moment of political honesty, his voice trembling, my own eyes began to fill, and the harder my father labored to finish the story, the more my own lips began to quiver, my own nose to redden and run. I was so sorry for what I’d done—but only to my parents and the good memory of Uncle Isidor, that rabble-rouser. Only to them.

  After what had seemed an endless wait but was, in truth, only a matter of days, Frank came back with the final edition of the Washington Times. He stood in the doorway, hands behind his back, and we waited for him to say the routine line, “Nothing yet, Mr. Rayner.” But he didn’t. He just rocked back and forth slightly until my father lost his patience and said, “Delay won’t make things any better. Bring it here, then.”

  Above the newspaper’s banner title, the large headline ran: blue-eyed mystery co-respondent is rosalie rayner. And further down: dc beauty is named in suit.

  My father got the first look. After all, it was his name: Rayner, son of William Solomon Rayner, son of William from Oberelsbach, a simple schoolteacher, who had come to America and worked as a dry-goods merchant in Fells Point until he could afford to send for his children and sweetheart, Amalie.

  “So there it is,” Father said. “One name, one reputation. That’s what we get in life.”

  How old-fashioned he seemed at that moment, but what he said felt true. I never wanted to leave my house again.

  Still, somehow in my ignorance, with that first journalistic exposure, I thought the worst was over, not realizing that press only begets more press, and that now every newspaper wanted to run the same story, with or without its own supplementary details and color. The attention lasted a full month, fueled by Mary Ickes, who had invited a reporter into her living room in her new home in New York City. She pretended that it had been her intention to keep my identity secret all along. But now that the word was out, she felt compelled to explain, adding the color and drama she knew newshounds fall over themselves to get: that I refused to hide away in Europe, that John’s attitude toward a mistress like me was “out of sight, out of mind,” in her gentle opinion. She came off sounding like the tired wife who had put up with much and was still willing to put up with more, if only her husband would mend his ways. I was the one painted in the bleakest colors by her one-sided portrait. I came off not as a glamorous hussy, but only as a young, dim-witted, marriage-wrecking fool.

  Reporters came to our door, confusing the servants, and baffling Father, who had never had to turn anyone away. On one of the first occasions, a reporter came while we were eating dinner, and he was allowed in and invited to sit on a bench in the hallway while we finished. After choking down a last few spoiled bites, Father called his lawyer, then went back out to the hallway and told the reporter to leave. After the door closed, he muttered to Mother, “I’m not a criminal. I don’t know what’s expected or required in these circumstances.”

  “Well of course you don’t, Albert,” she said, and looked at me.

  Chapter 18

  Which left only the divorce itself, just weeks away. One year from the time John first kissed me on the cheek, one year from the beginning of our research with Albert, the court proceedings began. John had made it clear he would contest nothing, and he’d already agreed to the settlement, which granted full custody to Mary and would reduce his income to a third. I was not called to testify, and the only witnesses who were called in were not our close friends—not Leslie or William on John’s side, not Mary Cover on mine, and no one at all from the lab, thank goodness.

  It was bad enough that, outside of a court, John had started to hear that lab colleagues and friends were speaking about him in disloyal, demeaning ways. They’d said to his face that he was the most brilliant psychologist of his day, second in influence only to Freud, and now they were saying that his experimental design was faulty and his research record not very deep. Most of them would be ready to take it all back whenever John managed to reclaim his professional glory, but still. I’d never felt closer to him than when I saw his vast circle grow smaller and smaller, his enemies emboldened by the rising swell of snide comments, his so-called friends weakening in their resolve to defend him.

  John reenacted the trial details for me only later, in William’s Thirty-Fourth Street apartment, after the proceedings had concluded. William, who had heard it all once already, got up and left the room, leaving a bottle of bourbon and two glasses on the table.

  The judge—John explained to me now, voice caustic and slurred—asked Mary how she knew. We’d been seen, “at various lunch rooms, and in her machine at all hours of the day.”

  William MacGruder was brought to the stand. He was the boarder with whom we’d shared laughs and drinks at the flophouse. The judge asked: “Do you know the cause of the separation?”

  “Yes I do.”

  “Can you state what it was?”

  “A brown-hair girl with blue eyes, was the cause of the separation.”

  Why on earth had he been so coy? It was like he was quoting from the headlines.

&nb
sp; The judge asked, “Do you know her first name?”

  “Rosalie.”

  “Do you know what the relations were between the Defendant in this case and the girl named Rosalie?”

  “I know that they were intimate from all appearances.”

  He’d seen us in the flophouse, MacGruder told the judge, “many times. A great many times. I hate like thunder to say it.”

  Then there was Feeny, who had been a tenant in Dr. Thomas’s house, this very same house. He, like MacGruder, had seen me coming and going from a bedroom, wearing a man’s bathrobe.

  The pièce de résistance, the part that all the newspapers had been waiting for, was more details about the love letters, thirteen or fourteen of them, which had already been leaked in part. These were John’s words, immortalized in the public record now, not in my own possession anymore as keepsakes: “Could you kiss me for two hours right now without getting weary?”

  And: “My total reactions are positive and toward you. So likewise each and every heart reaction. I can’t be any more yours than I am even if a surgical operation made us one.”

  All those wonderful, silly notes, about the North Pole and our cells and his reactions and our love. Only evidence now, thanks to the newspapers, which had reproduced them in bits and pieces, converted into jokes for dinner parties happening in DC, Baltimore, and New York.

  The fact that it was all over didn’t make it any less aversive. What had John written about the lasting effects of Albert’s fear conditioning? That the effects were likely to “persist indefinitely.”

  “I don’t know what you’re willing to pay,” John had said to me last December, that first teasing encounter. Now I could answer: This. We had lost the good faith of our families and some of our friends, and we had lost our professions and our reputations and our right to privacy, together.

  I reminded myself that people have fled a great many things worse than what we had suffered. I had to remember and be gay. It was up to us, now, to create our own life of luck and fun. John has always maintained—and I hoped now it was so simple—that it was Mary’s sourness, in addition to her lack of interest in sex, that had pushed the final wedge between them. We would have the last laugh only by laughing. And—John would remind me—by succeeding.

  John had been writing letters, making phone calls, and squeezing every last faithful friend and colleague for letters of reference to find a new job. Some were willing to vouch for him. One academic colleague wrote a letter emphasizing John’s integrity, though even he conceded that John could be immature and impulsive. But then again, we were in the Jazz Age now. Some kinds of self-control were old-fashioned, and there was nothing more dangerous, if you were trying to make a name for yourself in 1920, than being called old-fashioned.

  In December, after the trial but before the divorce was completely finalized, John finally found something. His friend, William Thomas, had made the connection and secured him the all-important interview. It was not the path I’d envisioned for him, but John was determined and strangely eager. He was going to work in a skyscraper on Lexington Avenue. If he lasted the rigorous training period, they promised to pay him many times what he’d earned as an academic, which was essential, since the divorce meant he kept so little of it, and Manhattan living wasn’t cheap. He was going to have power and money, and most important, influence. He was going to be an ad man.

  It wasn’t enough, of course, that he’d get a desk job in the city, writing up copy, as so many people begin—as I, frankly, would have been happy to begin. I hadn’t heard back from many of my applications or interviews. Sometimes I wondered if John even remembered that I’d interviewed for an advertising job before he did—if he even remembered his early admiration for my professional ambitions. This wasn’t the time to remind him. Despite his bold intentions, his ego was more fragile than I’d ever seen it, and he countered that fragility by being more vocal and more audacious in his claims for his own as-yet-unproven corporate abilities.

  J. Walter Thompson was a prestigious agency that had been bought a few years earlier by a man named Stanley Resor, who had already conceived of the idea of a research division, and specifically, of finding scientists interested in investigating the “psychology of appeal.” John’s friend William, though he had personally helped John get a foot in the door, was intrigued but skeptical, wary of this use of behaviorist principles. There was no such skepticism on John’s part. He was going to transform the entire business, using everything he’d learned about behavior in the service of selling products. John had been trying to change the world one way. Now he was on the rebound, completely convinced he would change it just as much, only from a different angle.

  After failing to hear back from the advertising agency that I had been sure was interested in hiring me, I attended a final interview that month as well. This second agency was smaller, at a less impressive address. I walked up a dusty stairwell to a third-floor personnel office, and with no secretary showing me the way, rapped on the pebbled glass door of a room at the end of the hall. Inside, an old fan was blowing with such vigor, failing to stir the overheated air, that I had to strain to listen to the tired words, “It’s open.”

  From behind his desk, a man ushered me in, pointed to the less damaged of two ancient leather club chairs, and squinted at my résumé. “Rayner. That sounds familiar.”

  “My grandfather helped found Har Sinai Congregation, in Baltimore.”

  “No, that isn’t it. Rayner. Rayner.”

  “My father is in real estate.”

  “No. So let’s see. You were last working at . . .”

  I’d already pulled out a pocket steno pad and an envelope containing several transcripts and letters of recommendation.

  “Johns Hopkins. Rosalie Rayner? Of DC?”

  “I don’t know why they claimed I was from DC,” I said. I might as well have said, I don’t know why the newspapers claimed I was a beauty. Even he looked disappointed, ogling me for one long, lousy minute until I stood up. I held out my envelope of papers, but he didn’t reach out to take them. I slid my papers back into my purse and leaned far over his desk, reaching out a hand to shake—to insist on shaking, as if this were just one stop in a very busy schedule, and I had to be going.

  “Thank you, anyway, for your time,” I said, though a mischievous and distinctly unfriendly smile had formed on his face. “I’ll show myself out.”

  The divorce came through on Christmas Eve, timed so that John’s wife and children would never forget it. Christmas was murder, John had always said. Well, now all of the Ickes-Watsons, including little Polly, who had refused to go back to school that fall, would think so, too.

  We waited a week and married on December 31. Finally, 1920 and all its bad memories would be behind us. The New Year, 1921, would be ours. Just as we raised our glasses to toast the uncounted hours we’d soon be spending together—in our very own home, together at last in New York City, a domestic honeymoon but all that I needed—I was informed of a slight hitch.

  “There’s a traveling requirement, a sort of probationary period, at least for the first two or three months,” John told me, turning away to refill his glass.

  “Together?” I asked hopefully, just as willing to swap domestic bliss for a working honeymoon. I always liked to be around John when he was working. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine him spending much time not working.

  “Not together,” he said. “Regrettably.”

  He hid his expression behind a lifted glass, but once he put it down, I could still see, from his squint, that he was worried how I’d take it. I determined to take it in stride.

  “The more challenges they throw at you, the faster you’ll rise,” I said.

  “But how about you?”

  He might as well have been throwing me a ball again, as he’d done that day back at the New School lecture, seeing whether I’d wince or fumble or
show any fear. John was always willing to reach. That’s what excused his tendency for overstatement and excess. That’s what I loved best about him. I had to reach just as far, and sometimes blindly.

  “I’ll be busy making us a home,” I said, trying to sound unbothered. “I’ll be busy proving what people seem so inclined to doubt. That we’re in it for the long run. That we’re not just man and wife, but true partners.”

  The love and pride in his eyes at that moment was undeniable—a force to see us through gossip or scandal, and any kind of public or private opposition, months apart if necessary. I might have convinced myself I was glad for this additional challenge, if only to prove my faith in him and in us.

  He came close and took me in his arms. “And if people don’t believe?”

  “They’ll just have to believe. You’ll be the first to tell them.”

  Part II

  Dr. Watson Says

  Under sex excitement the male may go to any length to capture a willing female. Once sex activity has been completed the restless seeking movements disappear. The female no longer stimulates the male to sex activity.

  —John Watson, Behaviorism, 1930

  The young married woman today brought up on the poetry of motherhood written for another era has a rude awakening when she becomes pregnant.

  —Rosalie Rayner Watson,

  “What Future Has Motherhood?” 1932

  Chapter 19

  “It’s rich and tasty, you have my word. Would you consider . . .” John said, just as the door slammed in his face. “Son of a bitch. I’m not here to violate your daughters. I’m just here to give you a complimentary sample.”

  He was “Yubanning it,” as he liked to say, through towns of Tennessee so small they didn’t appear on most maps. Reading his postcards, my imagination would take flight and I’d envision long, footsore days of muddy backroads, twitching curtains, barking coonhounds, and old women with stumps for teeth pausing their rockers only long enough to say, “Listen, feller, I don’t know what Yuban is but I don’t want any.”