But on this night, I struggled to stay awake long enough for the soft footsteps and the feel of the sinking mattress as he climbed into bed next to me.
“If it’s about Billy,” I said, feeling the tug of blankets, “I know his first reactions to Jimmy weren’t what you expected.”
John rolled toward me and put a hand on my cheek. Even now, with my body stretched and sore, I still appreciated his touch, and found him enormously attractive. I hoped that he felt the same toward me, or would, once I shed this latest baby weight and smartened myself up again.
When he didn’t reply, I continued, “Isn’t it a good thing that he isn’t jealous this early? It demonstrates what you’re always saying: that so few behaviors are inborn.”
“True,” he said, kissing the tip of my nose. “But the introduction of a new sibling is how we would expect jealousy to begin.”
“Maybe he simply isn’t the jealous type.”
Another pause in the half dark, John busy thinking as he rubbed a hand lightly up and down my arm. The first touch had been sweet, the kiss gentle, and even this rubbing felt good—an immediate answer to my question, a sign that he did in fact still find me appealing. But I hoped it wasn’t a sign that he was expecting anything more. I had a lot of healing to do. John loved speed, but some things had to proceed at their own pace.
“Oh, John,” I said, feeling the caul of exhaustion slipping over my head, knowing we’d made our way through one tiring infancy and we’d do the same again. “I love you.”
“To understand a behavior,” he mused, his own thought stream unbroken by my declaration, “we need to see how it’s initially conditioned, how it becomes generalized to other situations.”
He didn’t have to explain. I’d been there during the Albert trials, stimulating a fear response in a baby who’d been initially unafraid. I couldn’t tell whether John was reviewing obvious facts, or really puzzling, or only treading carefully, preparing to counter objections.
“Did you hear me? I said, ‘I love you.’”
“Of course, Rar. I love you, too.” With effort, he paused. “But don’t you see? Catching things at the beginning has always been a challenge for psychologists. The worst of them count on what adults recall on their own, as if memory is the same as third-party observation. Of course it isn’t. Look at your own memories. Anyone’s memories. Worthless.”
Well, not worthless, I thought to myself, feeling the urge to guard the chambers of my own heart. Maybe it was having children that did that: showed you how fast things changed, how quickly the past receded. I wanted to save and store and treasure. I was married to a man concerned only about the future, and as a young, tired mother, I was very much wedded to the present, but I could see a day soon when I’d want to look back and find comfort and even pleasure in the past.
He continued, “It may need a little push to get started.”
“What do you mean, push?”
“The first stimulated behavior. How else to show clearly the before and the after?”
“I’m not sure we want to trigger a negative behavior in our son. If it starts to show itself naturally, that’s one thing, and then we can try to decondition it, but . . .”
“You’re sounding like Mary now.”
They were on such familiar terms with each other, my husband and the old college friend I almost never saw. But he didn’t always praise her. Publicly, yes, but privately, he occasionally questioned her methods.
John’s caressing had stopped. I tugged the blankets higher, trying to draw a little extra padding around me, feeling protective.
“Whether you’re endorsing or disapproving, you do talk about her work an awful lot,” I said. “Mary this, and Harold that. Columbia this, and Rockefeller that. On balance, she seems to be advancing the field. What’s wrong with emphasizing deconditioning? What’s wrong with using a little caution?”
“And going slowly,” he said. “And publishing a tenth of what someone in our field needs to publish in order to put a finger in the dike.”
“What dike?”
“The ignorance and mumbo jumbo, the antiscientific rhetoric and political opportunism that’s threatening to turn the clock back to the 1800s. She does good work, but she’d rather study one child for three years, or even thirty, than three hundred children for . . . oh never mind. It was Billy we were talking about.”
“Exactly. It was Billy. Our child. Not some random subject. Not little Albert.”
He rolled away from me, and I heard the sound of the nightstand drawer. Rummaging for a cigarette. And if he didn’t find one, he’d go into the living room, light up, pour another bourbon, and probably be up half the night, writing another letter to Russell or Mencken, another exchange in their gleeful tirade about the stupidity of Freud—Freud, who had identified the Oedipal complex to begin with, and wasn’t that what John had been expecting our dear firstborn to demonstrate?
I wanted John to stay next to me, to comfort me with his strong, warm body. I wanted him to leave work at work, to leave our own family out of it.
But I wasn’t being fair or honest, was I? Because at the same time, I wanted him to bring work home, so I wouldn’t be bored to tears, so that I could stay caught up with his latest thinking and feel I was making a contribution as well. I hated when he slept at his office. I hated not understanding the latest Rockefeller funding and whether Mary had deconditioned a girl to be less afraid of a dog, a boy to be less afraid of a rabbit. I didn’t even like it when John’s JWT secretary helped type a clean draft of some psychology article he’d written on the side. The JWT girls were supposed to help him with his advertising projects. I was supposed to help him with his after-hours psychology work. But John had always managed—the nurses at Johns Hopkins being just one example—to persuade people to take on extra duties.
John’s new book, Behaviorism—the first for a truly lay audience—would be published in just a few months, and I’d spent much of my pregnancy with Jimmy in our bedroom, typewriter on a nightstand, cleaning up his drafts, sorting through editorial notes from the publisher, condensing and expanding, all while preserving John’s authoritative, acerbic voice in the text. I could do a good job parroting him after five years together.
And so I knew, even as he left the bedroom and went to sit in his armchair alone, what he would have said to me next on the subject of jealousy, if I’d pushed. He would have said, “The future will be no better than the past until we understand these behaviors in the present.” He would have said, “No one can master scientific parenting, because no one asks the hard questions. No one takes the risks.” He would have said, “All I’m suggesting is that we create a controlled situation in which to observe and record more carefully. Billy’s bound to get jealous soon, whether we try to make him that way or not. Everyone becomes jealous, at some point. After all, aren’t you?”
Perhaps it was that late night conversation that convinced me to stifle any behaviors of my own that I may have been exhibiting in moments of weakness: asking too many questions, protesting John’s absences, noting strange postmarks on letters delivered to the house. When I’d first met him, he’d been fascinated by fear, and he’d staked his career on investigating that emotion. Now, as he developed an equal or greater interest in jealousy, I didn’t want to feed it, even if I did wonder: Why this, why now?
Was it really just because we now had two children, and one might logically become jealous of the other? Was it because John was in fact jealous of my relationship with the children, even though I tried to keep our marriage top priority, and tried my best to follow his principles of nonattachment? Was it because John had noticed, ever since our marriage, that I was in fact a little more jealous, a little more suspicious? Or was it because he was actively doing something, out of my view, that should cause me to be very jealous indeed? That would have been an irony of Watsonian proportions—and unfortunately, entir
ely credible—if John’s own infidelities were shaping his scientific hypotheses, regardless of any behavior that Billy, Jimmy, or I exhibited.
But John was too busy to actively pursue his scientific interest in jealousy that spring. He had been made a vice president at JWT. It was what he had predicted back in 1921, when no one else had been willing to hire him, and he’d had to pay his dues at the Macy’s counter and going door-to-door selling coffee in the South. In three years, he’d climbed his way from the bottom of the nation’s largest advertising agency to the very top. And then, proving that he was still a psychology pioneer, his popular book Behaviorism (with a dedication to Stanley Resor—smart move) was published to astonishing reviews. They rolled out over several summer months, and John read each one aloud to me at our quiet, 8 p.m.-or-later dinners. Cora was gone for the day and the boys were asleep, blond heads resting on their pillows, so that John could bask in the order and serenity of our home. (No need to tell him that Jimmy still had fits of colic, or that Billy kept getting those morning stomachaches, making a mockery of our earliest attempts to perfectly train his bowels.)
The Atlantic called John “more revolutionary than Darwin, bolder than Nietzsche.” The New York Times credited him for launching “a new epoch in the intellectual history of man.”
A new epoch. Goodness.
“It’s to your credit as well,” he said once. “I could be as certain and opinionated as I wanted, knowing you’d check me if I went a step too far.”
“Oh, that isn’t true. When I told you that you were standing too close to the edge, you went a step further.”
“Because you were my net. I could risk having a few more enemies with a lover as loyal as you are.”
“You always enjoyed having enemies, even before I came along,” I said that night, teasing him back, but feeling at the moment warm and safe, confident in his appreciation for our partnership.
More reviews. More congratulations. And surprisingly few objections to John’s knocking of William James, of the “older, introspective psychology,” and of religion, which perhaps had its prehistoric origins in the “general laziness of mankind,” attributing to those individuals too indolent to go out and hunt the discovery that they could make a role for themselves, using fear to control their fellow primitives. Those primitive days were behind us now. Old psychology and even older religion were behind us now. There was no reason to wallow in useless emotions. Behaviors could be trained into people—and out of them.
On another night, John read aloud to me another review. “It’s a little hyperbolic, but listen to just this one line.”
“I’m listening.”
“‘One stands for an instant blinded with a great hope.’”
“Well,” I said.
“I always hoped people would listen to reason, but this is more than listening.”
“That’s marvelous,” I said, filling both of our glasses, and then taking a moment to go to the kitchen, to stand there alone, freezer door open, slowly getting more ice.
Blinded with a great hope—was that the right phrase to use in response to John’s work? I too had been blinded with something—perhaps only my new-wife, new-mother inadequacies. Because I hadn’t expected such an effusive public reaction to my very own husband’s work. I thought the book was good, the principles and messages—the rationale for studying behaviors instead of mental states, the lack of evidence for human instincts, the basis and conditioning of emotions, a recap of the Albert and other experiments, with several anecdotes from our own boys’ childhoods thrown in—all in line with John’s previous writings and lectures.
I had done my own part to sand down its rough edges, which weren’t many. My main contribution was, perhaps, in talking John into revisiting issues he had oversimplified for many years. He seemed to be groping, at last, for more nuanced explanations—especially about that most difficult subject, the human mind. He had elaborated more carefully this time around, about thought and language, sounding less adamant, less severe. He had always been good at lecturing, and in his best writings, he simply wrote as he talked, like someone you wouldn’t mind having to dinner—as long as you didn’t mind a few feisty debates—with frequent direct addresses to the reader, and an authoritative and friendly use of we to describe the scientists doing the good work of behaviorism.
But I had underestimated the impact of this latest publication. I had perhaps miscalculated the impact of my husband’s work, period, even after all these years helping him, defending and promoting him. Now, I felt like a traitor. And I questioned my own contrariness.
John called out from around the corner, “Are you coming, Rar? I have another one to read to you.”
“Of course, I’m coming,” I said, twisting the trays, holding one cube at a time, feeling the burn on my fingers. The reviews should have made me happy. Why didn’t they?
Every one of those reviews should have been a balm for the sting of 1920, our shared annus horribilis. I think that even John, accustomed to some notoriety and always ready for a fight, was pushed off-kilter by the gush of praise. It was as if he’d gotten used to leaning hard into a river current that he’d been rowing against most of his life, and then the river had suddenly switched direction.
“So now that you’re a JWT VP . . .” I said one night at dinner, having planned my small speech all day: that perhaps after Jimmy’s second birthday, or third at the latest, I might like to get another crack at the advertising world, which still seemed both glamorous and intellectually satisfying to me. It wouldn’t be all that hard to bring me on board now. I could write copy. I could poll customers on their preferences for testimonial A (older, trustworthy suffragette) versus testimonial B (Eastern European princess). I could run blindfold tests on cola drinkers, cracker eaters, hair-cream users. I could prepare the final graphs and tables to convince clients that our research would benefit their product.
The success of Behaviorism had overshadowed the promotion, at least for the moment. At JWT, John couldn’t climb much higher. But as a popular author and a scientific spokesperson, there were endless opportunities ahead, beneficial to his reputation as ad man and scientist, both. Too bad he couldn’t duplicate himself.
“I need your help here,” he said. “Now more than ever.”
Here—with the children. Here—with the typewriter and the files and the half-finished articles and the outlines for future books.
He’d said it so clearly, and he’d used that word, need. There was little reason for further discussion. The children wouldn’t be small indefinitely. The days were long, but the years were short. Part of me fantasized about the time when our sons would be young men, happy and handsome, tall and strong. I could see myself dancing with them, finally able to embrace them without anxiety or censure, because we’d all be adults and their healthy psychological development would no longer be in question. The other part of me knew that day would come all too soon and feared I had missed too much of their precious babyhoods already, so why was I looking for time to pass more quickly? Why had I started having that ridiculous ad-job fantasy again? Why couldn’t I appreciate, also, how rare it was for a husband to truly need his wife? I was lucky. We were all so very lucky.
“Of course.”
“Really?” he asked with that pleading, grateful look I’d once seen in the lab and in the bedroom, and now saw only rarely.
“Really,” I said. “We’re partners, aren’t we?”
In place of answering, he quoted the critic again. “‘More revolutionary than Darwin.’ Can you believe that?”
It was going to his head. It was going to mine, too, in a different way. I felt so bad about my first contrary reaction to the reviews that I was determined to make up for it now. And never mind my own disloyal reaction. The reviews themselves convinced me of John’s greater wisdom. The success of Behaviorism worked against my impulse to question, to purge some of the stri
ct behaviorism from our home, delaying my own slowly reemerging independent streak. Yes, I would still be a little softer with the boys when John was not around, but not as soft as I might have been. It was not only John telling me his views were right; it was the whole world now, and if I’d ever questioned him, even a little—about any of the infant tests, about little Albert, about the way we were raising our own children—I only felt grateful that I’d kept most of those doubts to myself. Imagine being the wife or mother of Darwin, telling him not to sail aboard the Beagle.
Meanwhile, the ever increasing attention was creating more demands on John’s time. Every publication wanted him to write an article.
“These magazines thrive on repetition, and you always know what I’m trying to say, Rosalie. In fact, you say what I want to say, even better. Are you sure you can’t get Cora to stay later? Maybe we could hire someone to handle the boys’ evening routine, so you can write until I get home. I’ll rough out the outline, and if you can start filling it in . . .”
But what touched him most, I think, was the praise from the fellow intellectuals he admired, particularly when they referenced John’s views on early childhood.
“Look at all this, Rosalie,” he said later that summer, reading me the tenth glowing review, or the twelfth, and bringing out an even bigger stack of requests from magazines, whose continuing publication of John’s articles would help the book sell a respectable number of copies, despite its technical nature. “The next book has to be a parenting guide. Do you realize how many printings those baby books go through? A self-replenishing market, year after year. Even Mencken ghostwrote one.”
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