Behave

by Andromeda Romano-Lax

  Carrot soup and green salad. Trout amandine. Black coffee.

  Small talk, equal parts domestic and professional, about the difficulty of finding baby nurses and the latest advances in galvanic-response emotion studies. Anything else—fashion, art, real estate, travel, sports, musicals—was a dead end. But perhaps we were each parodying ourselves: Mary only able to engage in laboratory speak and worry about her darling Lesley, and me so very tired of those things, and wishing I could head home in time for a game of tennis.

  “Some days it’s just a relief to leave the baby at home, and other days I miss her so much I can’t bear it,” Mary was saying when I tuned back in. “Obviously, I do what I have to do. We all do. But I can’t imagine the future John talks about: a future of children raised completely apart from their parents, a future of baby farms. Surely you can’t imagine a baby farm, either?”

  Chin up or not, my head was refusing to lighten. Everything about Mary that day—her methodical slowness, her gestures, her return to overly familiar subjects—was wearing me down. And the last way to get my sympathy was by questioning John. Perhaps it wasn’t a trap, but it felt like one. And maybe I wasn’t a great scientist, or even a good mother, but I was a loyal wife at the very least. One leaves or one stays. I had stayed. John had compromised in some if not all ways, and there was no point in my badmouthing his work. The only way to get through a lunch like this was to half-listen, to nod dreamily, to wait it out and hope the talking would stop.

  “Rosalie?” Mary asked. “Hello?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “My gosh, have you heard a word I’ve said? Are you all right?” She tried again, “Surely, you can’t imagine a baby farm, either? Rosalie? Are you even listening?”

  “Of course I’m listening,” I said, lighting another cigarette.

  “And?”

  “And no, I can’t imagine it, Mary,” I said, finally. “But maybe that’s why we need men in this world. Sometimes they’re willing to imagine the unimaginable, for the good of us all.”

  The day was getting hotter. Light glinted off the chrome of cars as they passed. We’d been talking about getting a new car, John and I, even though he still didn’t drive. Mary and I didn’t finish our coffees.

  We turned down the waiter’s offer of dessert. When Mary asked, “Did you answer the last Vassar alumnae survey?” I shook my head, busy fishing a lipstick out of my purse.

  “I rarely answer those surveys. What would I say: that John is expanding his firm’s advertising accounts, or Billy adores his summer camp? Let them all just guess, I suppose.”

  And I laughed. It was something that required practice, laughing. It was one of the few things children did better than their parents, that you grew out of, rather than into. A woman had to practice or she’d forget how to smile, how to laugh, and then a younger woman would take her place, naturally.

  “I’m surprised you don’t mind not working in a lab,” Mary said. “I remember a time when you read about the field more than I did.” She leaned in close and pushed a small vase of flowers to one side, in order to look me in the eye. “You lived in the Vassar library, Rosalie.”

  “I was mousy and shy.”

  “You weren’t.”

  “Thank goodness that’s behind me.”

  “You were passionate. You once told me you couldn’t wait until you had an opportunity to make your own mistakes. Old Washburn said you’d go far, and you’d whisper to me, ‘I plan to go too far.’ Do you remember that?”

  “Not really,” I said, glancing around for the waiter.

  “I was worried about being wrong and you told me, ‘If you try new things, if you have any opinions at all, you’ll sometimes be wrong. There’s nothing wrong in it as long as you keep trying.’ You loved risk. You loved the promise of transformation. ‘The bubbling over of beakers, the shattering of glass.’”

  I looked away from her, out toward the park. “That’s a line from one of John’s articles.”

  She stopped short—only incredulous at first, and then honestly disturbed. “It isn’t, Rosalie. It’s something you said years before either of us had ever met or read anything by John Watson.”

  We must have sat another few minutes in silence, long enough even for the waiter to finally notice and bring the bill. He was just setting it in the center of the table with a flourish when Mary burst out again, recognizing that the lunch was coming to an end and trying to redeem it, still. “But Rosalie. You’re happy? You’re well?”

  I grabbed the slip of paper before there could be any haggling, and scrutinized the numbers, extending the silence. Then I handed the waiter more than enough cash and smiled until he finally smiled back. “Was that so hard? You’re much more handsome when you smile.” The waiter blushed.

  Just before we got up from the table, Mary said, “So, John’s going to Europe?”

  “Just for work—J. Walter Thompson accounts.”

  “Are you going with him?”

  “Not this trip,” I said, pushing back my chair. “Next time.”

  How many stifled arguments and sleepless nights compressed into those five words, my only protection from private conflict and public pity. Like a magic trick: making swords and scarves and women disappear. Creating doves from thin air.

  Chapter 30

  John came back from Europe, promising that we’d go together the next year or the one following. It was a long trip with the transatlantic crossing, and then all the required visits with colleagues, city by city by city. For every story he told me about dining regally on the company account with a tire magnate or a testimonial-providing princess, I countered with a story of the Long Island parties I’d attended, or the late-night dinners I’d had with my own friends, gender unspecified, at some cafeteria or Chinese restaurant on Times Square, or the new tennis lessons I’d started taking, to improve my serve.

  In place of concealment, there were playful provocations and assertions of independence, his “Maria of Bourbon” in counterpoint to my “doubles” and “sweet-and-sour.” He told me I’d never looked more beautiful, but he noticed only when another man was flirting with me. That was the stimulus he needed to recognize me as desirable, and I complied, because I wanted to be desirable. That was the natural state of things. It fit with biology and psychology, and it fit just as well with everything else that decade: the culture of the theater and the street. I winced to remember my awkwardness accepting the tryst with that silly liquor-delivery boy at the house, a year or two earlier. I hadn’t known what to say, how to act. But one practices. One learns.

  Together, John and I were dining at more restaurants and attending more and more musicals and seeing more movies, at my insistence (John fell asleep during the slow parts), and I couldn’t help noticing that our banter—the banter of our entire generation—seemed to be learning its cues from the stage and screen. Flirtation and mild hostility were hard to distinguish, and a couple exchanging witty barbs or angry jealous glances was a couple in love, and the worst thing you could say about anyone was that he was too dull even to know how to make a scene. At parties, I saw beautiful women throw drunken, weak-armed punches, and I saw men sitting on stoops, sobbing, and an hour later, the woman would be kissing someone and the man would be laughing and gay. We were a highly emotional bunch, but we were chic. And best of all: nothing like our parents. On the weekends, I invariably slept late, eye mask and damp washcloth nearby, and both of the boys knew not to wake me. John would kiss me on the cheek before he left (he never stopped kissing me)—off to go boating, in seasonable weather; to do who knows what when the weather was foul—and come back in the early afternoon to work.

  Except for the work, we would have been like all the other young, sophisticated, socially active couples we knew—half of them, like the Turners and the Reynoldses and the Bellefield-Wilsons, so praised for their mutual suitability, and having such a good time dashing b
etween Long Island and sometimes the Greek Isles or the Riviera that they’d scarcely notice they were divorcing three or five years later.

  It was one of our final purely collaborative and mostly harmonious time periods, those years of 1927 and 1928. John needed me and I needed to be needed, more than ever if that was possible, and we needed the cash because it kept flowing, slick as mercury, through our hands. We wrote up a half-dozen articles for McCall’s, the foundation for the baby book that John had always wanted to write, and then the baby book itself, which he’d predicted would shore up our finances and change generations to come. From a sample size of two closely observed boys—though John always claimed hundreds, referring to the infant subjects we’d worked with at Hopkins—we told America how to raise its children. On a Sunday afternoon, we’d put our heads together, sitting in the den with a plate of sandwiches and celery or olives and pickles and a bottle of bourbon, and it was almost like old times. Door closed, the sound of Billy and Jimmy and that day’s caregiver outside—God forgive them if they even thought to knock at the sacred door between 2 and 5 p.m.—he’d type with me looking over his shoulder, or more often, he’d pace and lecture and I’d type his words, because he thought best on his feet. Last time, the press had called him as wise as Darwin. What could they call him now?

  As outrageous as John liked to be, he was walking a well-established path. H. L. Mencken, writing under a pen name, had already lambasted women, grandmothers especially, for germ-infesting and love-smothering their babies, and Dr. Holt, throughout his dozen editions and seventy-five printings, had advocated for years against coddling and in favor of very early potty training. John Watson just said it more memorably and with the added gloss of the latest scientific terminology, plus some twentieth-century frankness about discussing sex openly with young children, for example.

  “If it were up to me,” John had said one evening, “we’d bring a prostitute directly into the house and let them experience sex with an expert, first, before there’s any time for misinformation and humiliation.”

  “Agreed,” I’d said. “But they’re still only seven and four. Perhaps it can wait just a few years.” My sarcasm was audible, but John didn’t mind. Women were supposed to be sharp-tongued.

  Psychological Care of Infant and Child was published. To good reviews, mostly, especially from the male scientists and book-column critics; some squeamish comments from various housewives’ organizations and so on. The most important thing was the booming sales. Every generation needs its parenting manual, just as John had said, and not since Holt’s turn-of-the-century guide had one been as authoritative as this. The publisher was thrilled to have an author who was comfortable with radio, willing to write articles on the side, and man enough to take on the chin a rather snide but ultimately beneficial profile in The New Yorker, a rehash of all past scandals: John’s U of Chicago days, blinding rats, and his firing from Hopkins and ignominious divorce. They even spelled out how much he was paid per week at his advertising firm, which could only attract the latest round of female admirers. “Dr. Watson says” was on everyone’s lips.

  In the summer of ’28, Father and Mother took a trip to Europe, during which Father felt unwell. A few months later, back home, he passed away. All the thoughts that attend a parent’s passing bedeviled me as well: we had done wrong by him, and by the family name. Or he had done wrong by us. He was the world’s best father. Or he was too soft and sentimental, the very traits John was arguing against in his and our writing. One night in bed I broke down weeping, and John put his arms around me and said, “Stay busy. That’s the cure for everything.”

  The publicizing of our baby book was a balm to my grief and a way to ensure that my husband spent every Sunday afternoon with me. If Mary Ickes Watson had had the sense to co-author and promote a book with John, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to talk him into lunches at Baltimore hotels and weekends in New York City. When newspapers asked if they could interview and photograph Billy and Jimmy, wearing short pants and riding in their wagon—with their healthy bodies and carefree smiles, proof of good parenting—John agreed immediately, but I demurred. The press would stay after them, too. Any story about a Watson boy getting into mischief would make good press, even if it was just about trying to sell used newspapers without a license out on the sidewalk.

  But the hardest part of finishing and publishing a book, especially a long-imagined one, is the emptiness that comes afterward. Postpartum depression of a sort—which I had experienced with Billy, though I hadn’t known what to call it at the time. Oh sure, John could just keep writing one article after another, pushing the book sales, ten thousand copies at a time, over a hundred thousand copies in just the first years, which made technical or academic writing seem more pointless and esoteric than ever. But our work together was done; our lab work, our making and raising of babies through their most fertile and “interesting” periods, and our writing of the book inspired by those babies.

  All this was behind us now: John had taken them canoeing, but mainly to see if they were afraid of water. John had taken them to the Bronx Zoo, but mainly to see if they had any particular fear of certain animals. The rest of the time, the boys were with me and Cora or Jeannette or some other rotating cook or nurse or babysitter. Soon we wouldn’t matter, because there’d be school, already for Billy, and soon for Jimmy, too. Camp, and school, and to bed before father came home. So why don’t we go to Europe, then, if we spend so little time with the boys anyway? John had gone to Europe on business, more than once, and Mother and Father had gone to Europe. When would John and I go together to Europe? Oh yes, and also: I’d turned thirty. “Too old” for John at twenty, I was practically a crone now, and felt it, no matter how fast I drove, no matter how many new dresses or purses or pairs of shoes I bought.

  John asked me sometime in 1929, working on one of several articles about marriage, what I thought of this latest statistic he’d read: “Fifteen percent of couples divorce. I think it’s higher. I’d say twenty-five.”

  I replied, “Seems like half of all the couples we know.”

  “And here: look at this. Forty-two percent of married women have affairs. Most of them are so unhappy, I don’t understand why more of them aren’t cheating.”

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  I knew exactly why. If by cheating John meant sex, the answer is that it wasn’t usually worth it. Maybe men got immediate pleasure from penetrating women they barely knew, but when it came to the reverse, a meddlesome amount of training was involved. Tennis, swimming, and dancing were all more fun. I’d had a half-dozen consummated affairs after tiring of John’s New School shenanigans in 1926. During the last minutes of the final one, in an upstairs room at a friend’s party, I had turned to my sexual partner, who had just rolled off me, hand pressed against his lower back, wincing from some spasm caused by our contortions on a narrow couch.

  “We aren’t finished,” I’d said to the forgettable chump.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t climaxed.”

  His face, already splotchy from his efforts, went a darker shade of red, and he tucked an already weak chin into his pale chest. “Good God, woman, you have a mouth on you.”

  “Well, yes, and other parts, too. Including some you seem not to be well acquainted with.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Oh, never mind,” I’d said, reaching for my discarded dress. “If you have to ask, we don’t have a hope. Just get out.”

  John was too good a biologist, and too much of a perfectionist, to be such a selfish and incompetent lover as that. We’d had our own first few false starts prior to marriage but once we’d learned our way around each other, I’d had no complaints. I was shocked during my stabs at infidelity to realize how many men didn’t share his skills—and that’s not even counting the men who drank so heavily that they couldn’t achieve their own climaxes.

 
“Forty-two percent?” I said to John as he continued to puzzle over the affair statistics. “That seems about right.”

  •••

  At least once a week, a stranger approached me in public, whether in the grocery store, at a hat shop, or at some private party or shore-club affair where someone pointed me out as the wife of John Watson and the co-author of his bestselling psychological baby guide. The ones who had the nerve to approach thanked me.

  “I could have ruined little Charlie.”

  “I finally have a book to show my own mother that everything she did was wrong.”

  “I finally learned to ignore the crying.”

  “I’ll never let them sit on my lap again.”

  “My little boy’s a gentleman now. He understands a handshake is good enough.”

  “Every time I start to doubt, I go back and read it again.”

  “One just can’t listen to the older generation. They’d produce a nation of morons if they could.”

  “Everything my mother did was wrong.”

  “Everything my father did was wrong.”

  “He still isn’t potty trained, but it must be my fault.”

  “He still cries, but it must be my fault.”

  “I stopped talking to my mother after reading your book.”

  “I ruined the first, but we’re trying again.”

  “I haven’t kissed my baby once and now she’s two years old and easy as pie.”

  “Charlie is so quiet now. He never cries. He barely speaks. He’s a little adult. We don’t see him often but our nurse says he is better behaved than any boy she’s ever known.”

  Only very rarely would a woman, usually older, approach me with a hand on her hip and a smirk on her lips: “What made you an expert, anyway? Fine, your husband then. What made him the expert?”

  And then there were people who made comments about the dedication: “To the first mother who brings up a happy child.” Which meant there’d never been such a mother, yet.