Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Through the thin nursery door, I could hear the stuttering lamb’s cry. Moments of silence that seemed like a reprieve, but weren’t true and lasting silence, only breathlessness.

  I lowered myself into the rocking chair for just a moment, looking around cautiously as if someone might be peeping through the window. Just out of curiosity, I pushed back and forth, and then lifted my feet from the floor, until the rocker slowly came to a stop again, and then pushed again, savoring the glide. The motion relaxed my cramped legs, lessening the ache in that torn hollow between my tailbone and my abdomen. But I could see the problem and the temptation. I could grow prematurely old in that chair, rocking away my own overattended miseries, rocking babies into feeble and dependent sleep. It had to be removed from the premises, the sooner the better. I would do this right or not at all—as if “not at all” were an option. I tried to laugh. It came out in one soft wheeze—as though someone had slapped me on the back. As if a mother had any choice, once the deed was done.

  The brief lull was followed by a renewed squall.

  Eleven fifty-seven. Eleven fifty-nine. Noon.

  “Fine. There. Are you happy?”

  The baby was in such a state when I finally pulled him, red and spasming, up from his bassinet, that I had to walk him around in circles just to quiet him into spacing out his cries, from breathless shriek into a more rhythmic and negotiable complaint. Then I sat down in the ugly armchair, put him to my breast, felt the milk let down, a little stab of needles followed by a softer warm pulse, drowsy-making for us both.

  One gray eye opened and looked up at me, with only a little interest. One part cow.

  To restore my sense of dignity and purpose, I remembered something else John had said. “No well-trained man or woman has ever watched the complete and daily development of a single child from its birth to its third year. Plants and animals we know about because we have studied them, but the child is a mystery.”

  I whispered to Billy now: “You are a mystery.”

  I wished I could put a name to the heaviness in my heart. Deep sadness feels that heavy, but so does deep, tormenting love.

  I was supposed to be better at this. I was supposed to be good at something. If I were meant to be a mother, I’d have more patience and more confidence. If I were meant to be a party girl, a real flapper, I’d have handed this child off to a nurse from day one, let my breasts dry up, bound them up tight, and gone out to dance, even while my knees were still wobbly. If I were meant to be a scientist, I’d have more curiosity and drive, and would have filled one notebook already with hour by hour observations: every sensation, every change in Billy’s reactions to external stimuli.

  John had always talked about three powerful drives: fear, love, rage. Rage was something I’d never yet felt in its fullest expression (time enough for that, in later years). Because all love was essentially erotic in origin, my new love for Billy was both suspect and complicated: a thread that got snipped and reknotted daily, a push and pull of acceptable and unacceptable urges and responses. But fear, steady as an undertow, with or without a name—I’d known that forever. Maybe my own malaise now was the same fear I’d always had. A fear of disappearing. From the world. From myself. And now, from John’s affections.

  I had to swim harder. I had to keep my head up. I had to be useful.

  As Billy nursed again—it might have been during that same late-morning session, or it might have been the next time, a few hours later—I made light noises at his ear. I spotted an old receipt pushed into the armchair cushion and pulled it out and tore it, seeing if it would make Billy startle or take notice in any way. I tapped with a closed fist on a bureau within reach. He was neither fearful nor particularly curious. Uncorrupted. The very best thing. A blank slate, so far—as John would have suggested.

  It would be a woman who would ruin him—a mother, a grandmother, a nurse or nanny. The trick was to ruin him as little as possible. Scientific parenting couldn’t advance quickly enough to save me, save my son, save a million other little boys like him. Consider my own thoughts that day: I’d already made excuses for Billy’s crying, even mustering scientific justification for the belief that newborns must indeed shriek for our attention. John never would have done that. He looked to the future. He knew we all had the power to change within us.

  Billy’s small fist had gotten tangled in my hair. He tugged at it, and the gentle, rhythmic tug on my scalp was soothing. The flow of milk through my breasts, the milk itself pooling over the nipples and drying there and softening the scabs, was soothing, too, like having a knot worked out of a cramped muscle. I wanted to sleep in that chair. I must have slept.

  What felt like mere moments later, I heard the slam of the door and John’s innocent words—“Dinner ready?”—before his recoil of surprise at the slothful sight of the baby and me, pressed together and drooling. Making mistakes already.

  Chapter 23

  It’s hard to believe we found much time at all together that year. I was learning to take care of Billy—in a professional rather than maternal way, whenever possible. And John, meanwhile, was doing three or four times as much: making contributions at the ad agency, lecturing occasionally at the New School on evenings to earn his way back into academic respectability, and talking with some Rockefeller people with deep pockets, about some new baby research to be conducted under his supervision at Columbia—with our old friend Mary Cover Jones, in fact—even if he could assist only tangentially, by advising and signing off on protocol forms and grant paperwork, since his days were well spoken-for now. He would remain an ad man, first and foremost, but for many years, he still pined to be let back into the academic club.

  My own days had gotten, if not easy, a little more manageable. I remember walking in the coastal park near our house: a bright winter Sunday, and Billy asleep in the buggy, his head covered in a crocheted cap, his tiny button nose red with the cold, eyes closed and long lashes fluttering when the buggy jounced up and over paving stones or got briefly stuck in an icy rut where the park path was not entirely clear. John was navigating the buggy, and my mittened hands were completely, wonderfully free—one hand snugged into my coat pocket, and the other pushed into the crook of John’s elbow. Like someone recovering from illness, I was grateful for simple fresh air and easy movement and tender companionship, my senses tuned up to better appreciate the diamond sparkle of sunlight on water and to note how the piercing blue of the winter sky lifted an anvil-like weight off my head.

  “Look at that,” John said, and I thought he must also be appreciating the glinting water or the delicate arch of a snow-covered tree bough alongside the park’s curving paths. Instead he was studying two women who had parked their own baby buggy in front of a bench, ahead of us. The older of the two, a stout woman with iron-colored curls under a black cloche hat, was lifting the child out. The baby, swaddled in a checkered blanket, looked about two or three months older than Billy. John slowed our walk, to stay within sight of them.

  “There she goes,” he whispered into my cheek. “Four, five, six.”

  That’s how many times the grandmother had kissed the baby, one cheek and then the next, twisting him back and forth to get full access to his rosy skin. Settling onto the bench, she dandled the baby on her knee, facing her—“seven, eight”—so she could push her face into the crook of his neck and plant her lips on his cheeks again.

  We were almost immobile now, creeping along, just far enough away to be out of earshot. I tugged on John’s arm a little, but it was no good. It was a Sunday, and even so, John couldn’t stop working, making a behavioral observation—a criticism—that might later prove useful in a speech or article.

  “Why do women do that?” he asked. “You’re not the perfect mother, Rar, but you’re better and more sensible than that.”

  “Thanks for the small compliment,” I said, jerking his arm playfully.

  “The only honest kind.�
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  John wouldn’t have noticed that I had weighed Billy just that morning, gone to enter it into the chart, and then—noticing I had missed the last three days—back-filled the spaces with some credible, invented figures. It was just as easy to record, post hoc, an entire week’s worth of bowel movements and nap durations, if I’d let those recordings slide; sort of like telling someone you had your first highball at 5:00 when it was really at 3:15. Did it really matter so much? Even I could manage to forget my lapses as both scientist and mother if I didn’t have blank lines staring me back in the face.

  “You should be the one writing articles for parenting magazines,” John said, and I felt a little surge of warmth at the vote of confidence, quickly offset by what he said next. “Of course, it’s a shame we didn’t manage to get you a PhD. Then you could really fire from two barrels, like Mary Cover Jones.”

  “She’ll only have the PhD,” I objected, not getting his point. “One barrel, to use your metaphor.”

  “I didn’t mention? She’s expecting this fall. Just told me at the last Spellman grant meeting.”

  “Expecting? Well I’d like to see her finish a dissertation with a baby underfoot.”

  He shrugged. “I think she’ll manage. She always seems to.”

  I expected him to say something funny, or sharp—that Harold wasn’t much of a man’s man, that Mary worked hard but didn’t have much charm. When he didn’t add anything, I put on my best smile. “We’ll have to have a baby shower for her.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She and Harold have plenty of friends and family to do that sort of thing.”

  “Plenty of friends. More than we have, you mean.”

  John screwed up his face. “What are you talking about? I don’t keep track of Mary and Harold’s social life.”

  I hadn’t meant to irritate him or let the morning’s good feelings slip away. “We’ll have our own social life again, once we have some help. Won’t we?”

  The wind had whipped up, turning the channel from sparkling to gray. I tried to turn John’s attention to something we’d discussed at breakfast. We’d had a local girl around to help—Louisa, seventeen years old, from midmorning to 4 p.m.—but we’d let her go after two weeks. She’d come from a large family, but we’d neglected to ask about birth order, and it turned out she was the baby herself. She’d had no experience raising younger siblings and was more comfortable cleaning the dishes and making beds. When she tried to lift Billy out of my arms, or tend him while I was in any part of the house, he fussed—and more problematically, she gave in to his fussing, and handed him back over. I’d wanted to keep her services until we found a replacement. Clean dishes were something, after all. But John was easily bothered about wasted expense and let her go.

  On Friday, I’d interviewed two replacement baby nurses. Neither had reassured me.

  I tried to hold his attention. “As I was saying this morning—about the Hoboken woman, Mae. At least she has a sister to live with nearby. The others expect accommodations.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Exactly right. We don’t have the room, unless you count the den.”

  “No good in having a nurse for the baby if you can’t close a door and get something done,” he said, and I moved closer to him with gratitude. How many husbands would have understood in an instant that a wife at home still planned to study, or write, or do something? It almost made up for him reminding me about Mary and her impossible list of successes.

  “And,” he added, squeezing my arm affectionately under his, “I don’t plan on dressing for any nurse. Whether it’s an old hag or an innocent waif, if she wants to come early, she may catch a look at more than she bargained for.”

  It needn’t have been said. There was a reason I’d told young and impressionable Louisa never to show up before 9:30. A robe would have solved the problem, but this was John’s house, a very small house, and if he wanted to saunter to the bathtub nude and shave with the door open, he’d do it.

  How different things were from my own childhood, in a large house with rooms and privacy for all, with hired help who were much more than that, really a part of the family, and given a kind of autonomy that wouldn’t be permissible now. Besides that, my own father never would have walked around in his underclothes, never mind nude. I couldn’t even remember the last time I hadn’t seen him with collar and tie. And my mother was content not to get much of anything done, and could be interrupted by servants at any time. It made her feel needed as house manager.

  John would howl at an Irish immigrant nanny intent on raising a baby any way she saw fit, given that he insisted upon scientific parenting but wasn’t around to actually do it. And Billy was all too quickly getting used to being held by only one familiar set of arms—mine—when that was the very opposite of John’s ideal situation. Back when no dream was too big, he’d wanted to create a baby farm, after all—a place where children were raised away from their parents altogether.

  In trying to invent a new type of family in a modern new age, we’d not managed to create anything new at all yet. We’d only given ourselves cramps trying. Perhaps it had been the same just after the Civil War, when the slaves had been set free: a bunch of confused ladies who didn’t know how to care for their children and their china. Perhaps this was how our modern weddings and funerals would seem to old-time true believers: a graceless kind of fraudulent bungling, trying to keep rituals alive after religion was dead. It must be the same during any kind of major social change. Messy and illogical at first. Easy to lampoon. Hardest on an uncelebrated or foolhardy few.

  But I couldn’t say that to John. He thought we were doing admirably, which is how it must have seemed when you left the house every day early, came home late, knocked back a few drinks, and drifted into sleep, dreaming about the next day’s campaigns, meetings, and three-cocktail lunches.

  I was still mulling as John walked more and more slowly, gait stiff, lips thinned in concentration, still watching the two women. Instead of enjoying her moment of freedom from baby tending, the younger woman was leaning over the infant, bringing her face close to his, and making raspberry sounds, which made the baby squirm and giggle.

  “Ten kisses so far,” he said. “But look: it’s only made them hungrier. They don’t even care that they’re making him fuss. He’d rather be sleeping in the buggy. Grandma’s turn now. Eleven, twelve, and why not one more? Thirteen.”

  I knew why the grandmother was getting under his skin, even more so on this particular outing. My parents were coming to visit for the first time that afternoon, and John was not looking forward to the delayed inspection. At home, the roast was in the oven, surrounded by parsnips, carrots, and potatoes, the entire house aromatic with rosemary and thyme. The house was more or less clean, if a bit chilly from the airing we’d done all morning, every window thrown open to bring the winter freshness into every dark corner. The only thing we could have done better was to have arranged for help already, so that we might show off our household in its fully operational form. I wasn’t sure how I’d handle last-minute sauce and side-dish preparation, never my strong suit, and serving and baby tending, even with a husband’s help, all under the eyes of two parents who had reason to find fault with us both.

  But I was nervous enough without talking about it. The stakes had been climbing since we’d come home from the hospital, in November. Already, my father had canceled twice on successive Sundays—supposedly because he had a cold and didn’t want to pass it to the grandchild he’d never met.

  As if thinking about my father at the same moment, John said, “And people bother to wonder why babies get sick, with so many adults spitting on their faces all the time. A cold wouldn’t have mattered anyway, if your father would promise to keep his hands to himself.”

  “Anyway, Alboo says he doesn’t have a cold, now.”

  “He really wants us to call him Alboo?”

 
My father had informed me of the nickname by letter just after Billy was born. He didn’t want to go by Grandfather or Grandpa or Papaw or anything else. Mr. Albert Rayner felt he was too young to have grandchildren. Which meant, of course, that I had chosen to have my own progeny far too young. He saw himself as a still-virile man. If only he and John got along better; they both prized their virility so much!

  “Yes,” I said, trying to sound both firm and charmed. “He’s decided on Alboo. I think it’ll catch on.”

  Shifting back to more neutral territory, I said, “Mae has good references—not as a nurse, exactly. But at least she’s already been around children, and won’t be as timid as Louisa was. The other one, Lizette, has much more experience, but the letter from her last employer was lukewarm.”

  “Lukewarm,” he said, still frowning at the women on the bench. “Well, lukewarm can be better, in some cases. We should run an ad: ‘Neglectful Nurse Wanted.’ Subhead: ‘Must be averse to spoiling, the bane of our age.’ Then maybe we’d find some competent help.”

  He shook off his surliness, turning at last away from the bench scene that had offended him, and pushed the buggy forward with a jolt. When I leaned my cheek against his shoulder, he leaned back, and turned to kiss me—just a peck at first, but one that slowed and softened, extending nearly to indecency. Just as we had been watching the mother and granny, I’m sure now they were watching us: a man and his wife still affectionate with each other, our sensual needs fulfilled as they should be: by each other. Still lucky and in love and trying desperately hard to do everything right.

  John and I had discussed the ideal schedule to which we had nearly managed to train Billy already. The same schedule we’d explain to my mother and Alboo, if they pressed for details.

  Just as he had for most of the last two months, and as he would for the rest of his childhood, Billy was expected to wake at 6:30 to have a sip of milk (at a later age, orange juice), and be set on the pot, for urinating only. Back to bed to play quietly, without supervision. Quiet breakfast an hour later.