Kitchen Privileges

by Mary Higgins Clark

  And I was aching, yearning, burning to write. I wanted to learn how to tell a story. I compare the experience of learning the craft of writing to that of a singer who has genuine talent but who needs to go to a conservatory to be taught to use her voice properly.

  As soon as we returned from our honeymoon, I walked down to New York University and signed up for a course in short-story writing. William Byron Mowery, the teacher of the course I took, was an elfin-sized man who wore a tie so long that it gave the visual illusion of scraping the tops of his shoes. His talents as a teacher, however, were huge, and he set my feet firmly on the path that I had been seeking all my life.

  “Write about what you know,” he advised the class, then pointed to me. “You’ve been a Pan American stewardess. The magazines are getting stories from the pilot’s point of view. Nobody’s writing in the voice of the hostess. You should.”

  He continued the lecture. “I’ve heard it from all of you. You know you can write. You’re sure you can write. But you don’t know what to write. Now listen, because I’m going to solve that problem for you. Take a dramatic situation, something that sticks in your mind, something that happened to you or to someone you know, maybe something that you read in the paper that intrigued you. Ask yourself two questions, ‘Suppose?’ and ‘What if?’ and turn that situation into fiction.”

  His was advice that I’m still following, although I’ve added one more question: “Why?” In suspense/mystery, there’s got to be a believable motive for the crime. If there are five people who might have committed a murder, only one of them would have been vengeful enough, jealous enough, psychotic enough to go over the line and take a life.

  Bill Mowery taught us the basics of slick-magazine short-story writing: the compelling opening paragraph, the problem, the secondary but related problem, the three downward steps, the climax, the denouement. “Start thinking about writing your first short story,” he warned. “That assignment is coming up soon.”

  So was something else. Six weeks after we were married, I, who love coffee, complained that for some reason the coffee didn’t taste good anymore.

  “Oh, it can’t be getting any worse,” Warren said. “Promise me that.”

  “Very funny,” I said. “It’s the coffee, not the chef.”

  Marilyn, our firstborn, was on her way. I was to learn with all five pregnancies that the coffee tasting “off” was a signal that there was going to be another little stranger coming into our lives. The nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, where I had my next four babies, became so aware of that fact that when I came down from the delivery room, they’d have a cup of coffee waiting. The minute the baby was born, coffee tasted wonderful again.

  I became friendly with half a dozen other students in the class, and we decided to form a workshop, a move Professor Mowery heartily endorsed. We made up basic rules: meet once a week, there would be two readers an evening, who would read for up to twenty minutes each; a rotating chairperson would strictly enforce the time limit, allowing only an extra minute or two for the reader to complete a chapter or the last few pages of a short story.

  Clockwise from the reader, each member of the group would comment for three minutes on what they had just heard. Not, “I love it, it’s wonderful,” but more on the order of, “I like your main character, but don’t believe it is consistent for her to…”

  After the first go-round, the listeners were entitled to add a quick additional thought, to agree or disagree with another member’s comment; then it was the reader’s turn to speak. He or she was not to justify but to respond to some of the points that had been raised, or, if appropriate, explain, “When I had the character make that statement, I was intending to fore-shadow…” and so forth. After about five minutes of general discussion on the manuscript, it was the second reader’s turn.

  We all lived in Manhattan, and each Wednesday evening, we met in a different home. Our five members became twelve almost overnight. Several members had already been published in magazines, and one senior member even had six novels to her credit.

  Mowery gave us our first major assignment: each of us was to write a short story. Following his advice, I decided my main character would be a stewardess. But what was the most dramatic situation I had encountered while I worked at Pan Am? I asked myself.

  Determining that took a nanosecond. It was that round-trip flight from London to Prague and back, just when the Soviet forces were closing Prague to Westerners. We carried no passengers on the first lap. When we arrived at the airport in Prague, we found that the Soviets were having a military air show, and there were thousands of spectators in the surrounding area. When they spotted our plane, they turned as one from watching the aerial spectacle and waved and clapped and cheered. It was a stunning and heartfelt reception.

  We landed and went inside the nearly deserted terminal to be greeted by Soviet guards carrying submachine guns. The passengers who were scheduled to fly with us to London—seven American men—were huddled together in a corner. I went over to them.

  “No one would dare to see us off,” one of them confided. “It is not wise to advertise your American connections.”

  The Captain came over. “Mary, don’t wander off,” he advised. “We’re going to fuel up and get out. I don’t like it here.”

  When we took off, all the spectators again turned away from the military formations. Below I saw a sea of faces looking up, but this time no one cheered or clapped. We had arrived to a tumultous welcome. We departed in eerie silence.

  One of our passengers was weeping. He pointed down. “There is no one in that crowd who wouldn’t give half of the rest of his life to be in this plane,” he told me.

  Suppose? What if?

  Suppose the flight hostess was the first to return to the plane. Suppose she found an eighteen-year-old member of the underground resistance, trying to hide on the plane? Suppose the Soviet military police are searching the field for him, and she knows they are heading toward her plane? Suppose the would-be stowaway pleads, “Help me. Help me.”

  I decided it was a good premise. I called my fictitious stowaway Joe and gave him my brother’s shock of blond hair and blue eyes. It wasn’t hard to emotionalize the need Carol, the fictitious hostess, felt to try to save him.

  With Warren, on our honeymoon.

  I turned in the story, and the next week Mowery called me aside. “You have written a professional story,” he told me. “I absolutely guarantee you this is a story that will sell.”

  It did—six years and forty rejection slips later.

  On the mornings of the fifteenth, and again on the last day of the month, all through Stuyvesant Town a clinking sound could be heard. Most of us were paid biweekly and usually by payday morning had literally run out of cash. On those days, the men on their way to work scraped together bus fare and lunch money by returning deposit bottles.

  That was why on November 14, when Warren came home from work, and I told him I thought we’d better get to the hospital, our combined resources amounted to thirty-four cents. There were neither credit cards nor bank withdrawal facilities in 1950. The money we were saving for a house was in the bank, and the bank was closed. Mrs. Clark, who now lived in Manhattan, wasn’t home. The labor pains were coming thick and fast. It was definitely time to get to the hospital, and the one at which my doctor practiced was in Westchester County, nearly an hour’s drive away.

  The quickest way was via the Triborough Bridge into the Bronx, but that cost a quarter in tolls. Somehow it didn’t seem appropriate to arrive at the hospital for the birth of our first-born with only nine cents to our names. We crossed our fingers and took the Willis Avenue Bridge, which was free. We got as far as Yonkers, and the pains stopped. Just plain stopped. I hadn’t eaten a thing all day, and I suddenly realized I was starving.

  The doctor had told me in no uncertain terms that once the pains started I was to check in at the hospital as soon as possible. “A first baby may take a lot of time, or it may come
fast,” he’d cautioned. I knew there wasn’t a chance in the world that once I got to the hospital, they’d give me something to eat.

  “Let’s stop at a diner,” I suggested.

  Even in those days, thirty-four cents did not buy a meal fit for a king. We sat at the counter, studied the menu, and then ordered a bowl of cream of mushroom soup and two spoons because Warr was hungry, too. That meant twenty cents for the soup, plus a nickle tip, so even though we had taken the Willis Avenue Bridge, we still arrived at the hospital with only nine cents between the two of us.

  Our firstborn took twenty-five hours of hard labor before she made her debut. In those days, the husband was told to kiss his wife good-bye and go home and have a good night’s sleep. All through the next day, I could hear Warren’s phone calls from the office and the nurse’s chirpy reply: “Mrs. Clark is in active labor and progressing nicely.”

  In fact, Mrs. Clark was ready to take the gas pipe. By the time I was wheeled into the delivery room, I couldn’t wait for the anesthesia. The concept of natural childbirth was nonexistent. At the moment of delivery, it was, “Bye-bye, Mother,” and a cone was clamped over my face. Husbands never got near the delivery room. They were the well-rested creatures who stayed at home and received the call to come to the hospital and admire their offspring.

  I’ve had five children and never consciously experienced a birth, a fact I’ve always regretted. But I clearly remember the first time each one of my children was put in my arms—five absolutely magical moments when I felt that I had touched the wondrous hand of God.

  Unfortunately, that first time, I was sharing a room with Ruth somebody or other. Her brother-in-law, she proudly bragged, was the biggest bookie in Westchester County and was coming to visit. He arrived, a short, bull-shaped man in a striped suit, clenching a cigar between his teeth; he was accompanied by his bodyguard.

  He took the cigar out for a moment. “The kid’s cute, Ruth,” he grunted.

  “Yeah, cute,” the bodyguard echoed.

  I turned my head and closed my eyes, hoping they’d think I was asleep. After the difficult labor, I was running a fever, a shock reaction that would wear off in a few days, the doctor had assured me. Ruth let the brother-in-law know that the hospital was going to cost a fortune, got his promise to pick up the tab, then lowered her voice to a stage whisper that could have been heard in the next county: “Her name is Mary Clark. She’s got milk fever because she’s nursing the baby.”

  Milk fever? I’d heard about it before, but where? When Ruth’s elite visitors had departed, I asked her about it. “Milk fever happens when the milk backs up and hits your brain,” she explained. “You go cuckoo. That’s what’s happening to you. When you leave the hospital, you won’t go home. They’ll take you directly to the nut house.”

  I remembered hearing Mother’s story that when she was young, her friend had spent time in the asylum on Welfare Island, then a dreary spot in the East River adjacent to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. “Poor thing, it was right after the baby was born,” was the way Mother and her cousins summed up the sad event. Later I learned that the lady had been suffering from acute postpartum depression and was hospitalized for only a short time, but listening to the medical expert in the other bed, I was sure that my mother’s friend must have had milk fever and that now I had it, too, and my next stop was the asylum.

  Unasked, Ruth confirmed that fear. “Welfare Island is where they take people like you. And don’t ask your husband, because he won’t tell you the truth,” she cautioned. “He’ll lie and tell you you’re fine. Just the way the doctor is lying to you now. You’re not fine. Anyone who has a fever after childbirth is going nuts.”

  The usual maternity stay was a week. I spent the entire time in total fear. Even though my fever began to recede, I was constantly assured by Ruth that the damage had already been done to my brain: “Your husband probably has made all the arrangements. I guess your mother will take care of the baby.”

  Wreathed with smiles, Warren arrived to pick up the baby and me. He was beaming, and he assured me he wasn’t nervous, but I pointed out that his shoes didn’t match—the right one was black, the left one brown. Could he look this happy if he was about to sign me into a mental hospital? I wondered.

  This time we paid the quarter, drove over the Triborough Bridge, and started down the East Side Drive. I felt my heart pounding as we approached the turnoff to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and Welfare Island. Sixty-fifth, fourth, third, second, first, Street! I waited. The turn signal did not go on. Five minutes later, we were pulling into a parking space outside our Stuyvesant Town apartment building.

  “I’m so glad to be here!” I said, with a big sigh of relief.

  Warren stared at me. “Did you think you were going to the movies?”

  I told him the “milk fever” story.

  Four months later the coffee started to taste rotten again. Warren and I agreed that this time, after the baby was born, I’d be in a private room.

  Warren and me with our family on Easter Sunday 1959. From the left: Marilyn, Patty, Warren Jr., Carol, and David.

  Nine

  Pitter, patter, pitter, patter. Warren Francis Clark, Jr., arrived thirteen months after Marilyn. I brought him home on Christmas Eve, which was also my twenty-fourth birthday. Two days later, Warren and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary. Our thirteen-month-old was teething, our infant colicky. We each held a wailing offspring as we clinked champagne glasses.

  David checked in two years later. The city marked his debut by beginning alternate side of the street parking regulations, something we had failed to pay attention to. When it was time to go to the hospital we found that the car had been towed away. Fortunately we no longer had to drive out to Westchester; St. Vincent’s Hospital was only a five-minute cab ride from home.

  We had quickly outgrown the one-bedroom apartment. Now we outgrew the two-bedroom unit as well. During the day, the living room looked like a day-care center. Our three offspring were bunkered in the second bedroom, which was never intended to accommodate two cribs and a youth bed.

  One day I couldn’t get the whole bunch of us into the elevator. Marilyn was pushing her doll stroller, Warrie was riding his fire engine, Dave was in the carriage, I was dragging a shopping cart, and I was pregnant again.

  Warr and I both loved living in Manhattan, but we had to have more room. That night I said, “Dear heart, do not plan to play golf on Saturday. We are going house hunting.”

  By then I had eleven short stories in the mail. The one Professor Mowery had said would surely sell was making its way through every publishing house listed in Writer’s Market. In those days, I was so dumb I thought that being a subscriber to the magazine might just tip the balance in my favor. Therefore my usual letter began something like this:

  Dear Editor Smith-Jones,

  I am enclosing a short story entitled “Stowaway,” circa 3,500 words, which I thought might be appropriate for your fine magazine to which I have a subscription. It concerns the attempts of a flight hostess to stow a young member of the underground aboard her flight and bring him safely to freedom….

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  I did hear from Smith-Jones and all the other editors, usually by return mail. The arrival of my self-addressed and stamped eight-and-a-half-by-eleven envelopes, each containing a scorned literary effort and the editor’s printed rejection slip, was a regular event in my life. I could picture all of the editors, laughing maniacally as they dropped my offerings into their out boxes. Wait and see, I vowed. Wait and see.

  Meanwhile, on the floor beneath our tiny slot of a mailbox in the lobby of the apartment building, a pile of weekly and monthly magazines was steadily growing. After all, in good conscience I couldn’t claim to have a subscription to a magazine if I didn’t actually have a subscription, could I? Tell the truth and shame the devil.

  For the first eight or ten stories, I continued to use the flight-hostess background. Odd
ly enough, the first two, “Stowaway” and “Milk Run,” were suspense stories. “Milk Run” came about because for two weeks during my Pan Am days I flew the so-called “honeymoon express” to Bermuda. That involved taking off from LaGuardia at eight in the morning, arriving in Bermuda at noon, hanging around the airport there, then returning in the late afternoon.

  We all considered that assignment a pain in the neck. In the morning, we had to serve breakfast to rapturous newlyweds who were linking arms, holding hands, or smooching so much that it was impossible to find a spot between or around them to place a tray. In the afternoon, we brought back the returning lovey-dovies, who toasted each other with champagne by entwining their arms and sipping from each other’s glasses.

  Bob Considine, a famous journalist, was on assignment in Bermuda and had an agreement with Pan Am that the flight hostess would carry his nationally syndicated column on the return flight to New York and give it to a courier who would be waiting at the airport. One day it was my turn to make the delivery. When my plane landed, Warren picked me up at LaGuardia, and we drove to a diner in the Bronx for a snack. Over our second cup of coffee, I chatted about the day and then realized to my horror that I had totally forgotten about meeting the courier and still had the column in my flight bag.

  Fortunately the address of the Daily Mirror, 405 West Forty-second Street, was on the envelope. We raced down to Manhattan and stopped in front of the tired-looking building that housed the newspaper. A sleepy guard opened his eyes long enough to tell me where to go, and I took a rickety elevator to the editorial floor.

  It was empty except for a man hunched over a desk and wearing a green eyeshade. He looked up at me. “What do you want, girlie?”