Kitchen Privileges

by Mary Higgins Clark

  When Marilyn finally turned off the record, Mother rushed down the stairs, indignation etched in every line of her face. “Mary, what was that fellow doing talking French to you?” she demanded.

  I pointed out that Becker was married to a mortician and asked how I could possibly compete, given their shared interests. “Why just imagine how the two of them must bat the breeze at the end of the day,” I told her.

  But Paul Becker did come to cherish us, for a reason that had nothing to do with me personally. There were two funeral parlors in the area, his and a larger establishment. Shortly before Warren died, we had stopped in at a wake at the other one. When we got to the car, he said, “When my heart skips that fatal beat, not this place.” He said it felt as impersonal as the lobby of an empty building.

  Once again following his instructions, I made the necessary arrangements with Becker, who turned out to be the antithesis of the funeral directors profiled in the bestselling book of the time that exposed the dark side of that industry, The American Way of Death. If it is possible to say he made that terrible time easier for all of us, he did just that. After we had used his services, the tide changed. Other people began making their funeral arrangements with him, too. “Your tragedy was the turning point in my business career,” he later told me earnestly.

  I thought, but didn’t say, “Anything for a friend, Paul.” Some fifteen years later, the kids and I were having dinner on New Year’s Day at a favorite local restaurant. Paul was across the room. The waiter said that Mr. Becker wanted to offer us a drink.

  “Put mine on ice,” Warrie said.

  “Make mine a stiff one,” David ordered.

  I suggested they settle for Sambuca.

  Back to Mother’s vigilance. Another evening, about a month after Warren died, I met some friends for a late dinner a couple of towns away. I got home around midnight to find her sitting up, waiting for me. “Mary,” she said, “what are the neighbors going to think of a girl your age walking the streets until this hour of the night?”

  Mother had a stack of prayer cards for all her deceased friends and relatives. She was then seventy-six, and the list was long. It took her an hour to go through all of them each night before she went to bed. She liked to sit on a chair in the upstairs hall, where she claimed the light was better. It also was a good spot for her to overhear conversations taking place in the living room below.

  Thankfully, I was surrounded by wonderful family and friends. Irene and Ken, Agnes and George Partel, and Norman and Lois Clark (not related to us) often would come over around 9:30 to share a cup of tea or glass of wine and visit with me. Mother liked to tune in to what we were saying, especially on those days when I had gone into the Tavistock office or to the studio for a recording session.

  My friends and I would exchange eye signals, then one of them would ask if anything interesting was happening lately. I would start, “Well, actually, at the studio today, the most fascinating…” I’d then drop my voice.

  Mother did not realize that even though she was out of sight, when she leaned over the banister to catch what I was saying, her shadow became more and more noticeable on the living room carpet. Finally Norman said, “We’d better cut it out, or else Nora will do a Peter Pan and come flying through the air.”

  One thing a new widow needs to realize is that while friends are great, and they care and want to help you, they also have their own lives. You can’t and shouldn’t expect unlimited sympathy. As Annie Potters had told me, “I cried in my bed for my Bill, but people don’t want to hear that all the time. They called me the ‘Merry Widow.’”

  Well I wasn’t a “Merry Widow,” but I did try to follow her example and also that of my mother. Mother was always upbeat. Granted, it’s wrenching to have to go to the gatherings or parties alone, but it’s a lot better than not going to them at all. You have to get used to being the third, the fifth, the seventh, the ninth, or the eleventh at the table. The important thing is that you’re there. I made an arrangement with George Partel. If a group of us went out for dinner, when the check came, he would pay for me, then I’d settle with him later. It’s not fair to expect the others to carry you, even if they can afford it.

  Only once did someone try to hit on me. He was a guy in town whom I knew only casually. We happened to be at some big gathering, and he sidled over to me. “I know what you’re missing, Mary,” he murmured, adding a suggestive, “any time.”

  I stared at him.

  “What do you think?” He smiled knowingly.

  “I think Warren would not have insulted your widow,” I said, and went home.

  Sometimes the wives can consider a new widow a threat. I belonged to the community theater group. One night I was on the buffet line at one of their fund-raisers. A guy who was a colossal bore got on the line behind me and started yakking away. From across the room, a penetrating voice called, “Oh, Mary, dear, just remember, that’s my husband.”

  She should live so long that anyone else would want him, I thought.

  There is nothing like a large family to keep you from having time for self-pity. In that first year, I made a total of thirteen trips to the emergency room of the local hospital with one or the other of my offspring. The nurses joked that they kept my Blue Cross number taped on the desk at the entrance. I rushed the kids in with cuts and bruises and broken arms and legs. Since almost all of the accidents occurred outside the house—on the ball field, or roller skating, or ice skating, or bike riding—at least no one could accuse me of being an abusive mother.

  We got through the first Thanksgiving by having it with June and Allan and their kids. To ease the emotional wrench of Christmas, I decided I’d buy my children anything on their lists, short of a trip to the moon. I have a picture of the six of us standing in front of the tree, surrounded by games and dolls, bicycles and ice skates, a new television set. We all know you can’t buy happiness. If anything is proof of that, it’s that picture. The expression in everyone’s eyes made Dave’s “Give until it hurts” ad for United Way a comedy act.

  I loved writing the scripts for Portrait of a Patriot. I’d always been a history buff and found the research fascinating. It was my job to write the four-minute vignettes by starting with a question and then giving clues. It went like this:

  (Bud Collier narrating.) “He was the tailor from Tennessee who became president of the United States. Do you know who he is?”

  (Blast of music—dadadah!)

  “This is Bud Collier with today’s edition of Portrait of a Patriot. Our program is furnished by Grolier, publishers of Encyclopedia Americana, the encyclopedia that belongs in every American home.

  “Our subject was born in a shack in Raleigh, North Carolina, on December 29, 1808…”

  At midpoint in the script, Collier asked the question, “Have you guessed who he is yet? No? Well here are more clues.”

  The script would end with a sentence like, “The first president to be impeached because of his defense of the constitution, he was acquitted by one vote. Our patriot today, the seventeenth president of the United States, Andrew Johnson.”

  (Blast of music—dadadahhh!)

  “Our program has been furnished by Grolier…” etc., etc.

  Other examples: “She was given the family tree when she was fourteen and said, ‘I am nearer to the throne than I realized.’ Do you know who she is?”

  That was Queen Victoria.

  “Crushed in the hopeless struggle, he said, ‘I will fight again never, no more.’ Do you know who he is?”

  That was Tecumseh, the legendary chief of the Shawnee tribe.

  At a recording session, I told Bud Collier that now when I went to cocktail parties, I no longer had to make small talk about the weather, that I could come up with little gems like, “Wasn’t Tecumseh the one, though?” His response was that I probably wouldn’t be invited to too many cocktail parties with that kind of ice breaker.

  The programs had to be exactly four minutes in length. In the
beginning, I didn’t realize that it was very easy to snip a sentence or two off if they ran over, or add an extra beat of music if they ran a trifle short. Barry, the director, did not enlighten me. When I fearfully asked him if my programs had timed out, he would stare at me. “The first was ten seconds over. The fourth was six seconds under.”

  I told Liz I was sure I’d be replaced as the writer. She assured me that Barry enjoyed making people squirm.

  As I was to learn, so did G. R. Tavistock.

  Friends invited me to join them at the inauguration of President Lyndon Johnson in January 1965. We’d be away in Washington for just a few days. Mother urged me to go. She said it would be a nice change for me, and I knew I could use the break. I agreed but wondered if this might not be my chance to break into writing articles for The Westwood Local, our community newspaper. I called and offered to write a report on the inaugural. With my newfound status as a writer of historical programs, I thought they might agree that I was exactly the person to enlighten their readers with my particular insights into the event. The editor hemmed and hawed, but then when I said that of course I wouldn’t expect to be paid, he practically jumped through the phone to accept.

  He promptly pulled strings to get me press passes to the various functions. Whoever dispensed them must have confused The Westwood Local with The New York Times because at the inaugural ceremony, I was seated in a prime spot and was given tickets to various events such as the most coveted Inaugural Ball. It was my first taste of “being there,” which is what I called the article I wrote.

  It was the first time I’d been present at an inauguration, and because everyone had expected to see John Kennedy sworn in for his second term in office, there was a palpable sadness in the air. I overheard someone say that Bobby Kennedy had made three trips to Arlington Cemetery that day. Still, Lyndon Johnson was an impressive figure as he took the oath of office and promised to launch a “Great Society.” But that promise was made as protests against the Vietnam War could be heard in the distance.

  I spoke to Mother every evening for those few days I was in Washington. Everything was fine, she assured me, but when I phoned to say we were getting in the car and would be home by late afternoon, I could tell that something was wrong.

  I insisted she tell me what it was, pointing out that it couldn’t be worse than anything I would imagine: Dave had fallen through the ice and had to be rescued, I thought, a feat he’d managed when Warren and I were in Hawaii on the Fab-sponsored vacation. Or perhaps Patty is balking again about going to school. In the first weeks after Warren died, the nuns practically had to peel her off me in the schoolyard. She was afraid to let me out of her sight, and now I’d been away for three days.

  But actually I couldn’t have imagined what Mother told me: Allan, only forty-three years old and always in perfect health, had suffered a burst aneurism in his brain.

  He died two weeks later, and once again we stood in stark disbelief at the family grave in Gate of Heaven cemetery and watched as his coffin was placed between those of his mother and Warren. Now there were eight fatherless Clark children, ages six to fourteen, and Ken, at thirty-three, had lost his mother and two brothers in the space of only four months.

  June, Allan’s widow, and I became each other’s dates. We attended all the various school functions for the kids for the next twelve years until Patty, the youngest, was out of high school. We called ourselves the Dolly Sisters, after Rosie and Jenny Dolly, the showgirl sisters of the 1920s.

  That spring, June and I decided to take our broods to Washington over the Easter holiday. Neither one of us was up to coloring Easter eggs or pretending that the Easter bunny was going to hip-hop merrily into our homes. Someone had suggested an apartment rental there. “You’ll love it. So comfortable. Just like home.”

  I don’t know whose home he had in mind. We took one look at the dreary rental and paid three times the amount for rooms at the Intercontinental Hotel, which three nights later caught on fire.

  We’d spent that last day sightseeing, including a visit to the White House. On the street outside, the anti–Vietnam protesters were marching and chanting. We got back to the hotel in time to let the kids have a swim in the indoor pool. Warrie, age thirteen, had just suffered three of the thirteen accidents that were visited on the family. He’d broken his wrist while roller skating, and just as that healed, he broke his arm in a fall from his bike. Dave had inadvertently sat on the arm cast while backing up from adjusting the television. Warrie had thrown a punch at him, and Dave raised his knee to protect himself.

  The result was that Warrie broke his knuckles against Dave’s bony knee. Since he’d have been helpless with two casts, the doctor wrapped the knuckles in thick protective bandages. The next day was April Fool’s Day. When his eighth-grade teacher saw him come in with the cast on his left arm and a thick bandage on his right hand, she’d sternly told him to take the bandages off. There would be no April Fool’s Day nonsense in her classroom. Warrie tried to explain, but she didn’t believe him. Then when he unwrapped the bandage and she saw his swollen knuckles, the poor woman burst into tears.

  Since the injured knuckles were purely his own fault, I was getting beyond sympathy. Now they were pretty well healed, and the arm cast would be coming off in another ten days. He wanted to go swimming with the others. I finally relented, provided he agreed to stand by the side of the pool, in water only up to his waist and with his arm out of the water. For insurance, I pinned plastic around the cast. Needless to say, he got the cast wet, and it dissolved. I don’t like to believe what the kids tell me I said to him—“I don’t give a damn if your arm grows in crooked”—but I probably did.

  That evening we watched the 6:30 national news together and saw ourselves featured in it. They had photographed the demonstrators in front of the White House, and we happened to be on the line to enter the mansion while the cameras were rolling. June and I agreed it was a good thing we weren’t in Washington with hot dates. Not that we wanted them nor they us. If there’s one thing that I can assure you, it is that very few men are interested in young working widows with a gang of kids to support.

  That night about 3:00 A.M., a clang-clang-clang sound boomed through the hotel. I woke up. “What??????” Then thought, FIRE!

  I opened the door. Smoke was filling the hallway. No one seemed to be there. We were in a two-bedroom suite. The kids and I were all good sleepers. I wondered how long the alarm had been sounding before I woke up. I rushed to phone June, who was on the other side of the third floor. There was no answer.

  I shook the kids awake and herded my little flock to the elevator. When I pushed the button, Warrie raised his now castless arm and pointed to the stairs. “You never take an elevator when there’s a fire.”From the mouths of babes… We rushed down the stairs. Firemen and equipment were everywhere. We found June and her three in a section of the lobby that extended beyond the building and had been deemed safe. We sat there shivering for the next hour or better, joking about our getaway vacation, until we were told to go back to the rooms.

  The fire had been in a utility closet and was now out. No harm done. Everything was fine.

  We were barely settled back in bed when “clang-clang-clang” again roared through the hotel. Now I was really worried. The fire was probably in the walls, I decided. I can’t believe I actually pushed the elevator button again and once more had to be rereminded by number-one son that you always use the stairs when evacuating.

  This time we weren’t in the lobby long. The fire trucks, sirens blasting, returned, but in a few minutes we were assured that someone had tripped the alarm by accident. “Go to bed. Get a good night’s sleep,” they told us.

  Right!

  When we checked out the next morning, I was on line behind a man who was arguing that he didn’t think he should pay for an expensive room when he’d spent most of the night shivering in the lobby or sniffing for smoke.

  Ever ready to save a buck myself, I was thinking, “
Go for it, pal,” and praying he’d prevail.

  “And it took a guest to call the fire department,” the guy argued. “You people were trying to put it out on your own.”

  I waited for the clerk to tear up the bill. Instead, he leaned forward and dropped his voice to a stage whisper. “Sir, I’m going to share something with you. I worked in a hotel in Boston where three floors were in flames before the management sent for the fire department.”

  That was such a stunning lie that the guy gave up arguing. He paid. I paid. June paid. You can’t win ’em all.

  They used to say about President Herbert Hoover that he had so keen a memory for names and faces that he could kiss a baby and thirty years later shake the hand of the voter and address him by name.

  Obviously, that’s an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that some of us never forget a name or face, while others are genetically hopeless at either. I belong to the second group. I’ve always maintained that if I met my mother in a place where I didn’t expect to find her, and she was wearing a new hat, I’d introduce myself to her. Now that I was going into New York regularly and meeting a host of new people, I was determined to remedy that deficit.

  June had a different problem to overcome. She was terribly shy about speaking in public, but she loved politics, was active in the Republican party, and knew that she wanted to run for office someday. Obviously, in order to do that, she needed to be able to overcome her shyness.

  We both noticed an ad in the paper for the Dale Carnegie course in self-improvement, meeting one night a week for fourteen weeks. Dale Carnegie, a motivational lecturer and author, had written one of the bestselling books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People. According to the ad, by signing up for the course, we would become more outgoing and more successful. The course also promised to improve our memories so that we would almost never again forget someone’s name. That promise turned me on.