Her Mother's Daughter (64 page)

I walked into a small office with big windows in a huge anonymous building, and shook hands with Russ Farrell, a grey-faced paunchy man with a fringe of hair, and his two assistants, who were younger, thinner, somewhat hairier versions of him. I sat on an anonymous black leather couch and stared at the pictures framed and hung on the white walls—some spectacular ones, like Margaret Bourke-White's shot of London being bombed—and watched as the three of them stood over a long table on which they had placed my portfolio, and turned over prints, saying nothing. I believe that not a single muscle moved in my body during the time they scrutinized my work. The only sound came at the end, a breath expelled by one, an approving murmur by another.

“Umm. Umm,” Farrell said, turning. “Nice work. How long have you been doing this?”

“Oh, I took pictures as a child. I've been working professionally for about ten years now,” I exaggerated.

“Really? And what have you been doing?”

“I've worked for a newspaper, and had some work in a local magazine” (two pictures in
Long Island,
a Chamber of Commerce magazine for tourists, but I didn't say that. Seventy-five dollars a shot), “and I've done a lot of portraits.” (I didn't think it necessary to add that they were portraits of babies.)

“Umm.” He took a pipe from his jacket pocket and spent considerable time getting it lighted. The assistants had settled themselves on side chairs and were looking up at him. One of them was holding a print, holding it out, then bringing it in close, getting his greasy fingerprints all over the white mounting. I wanted to yell at him to put it down. I was so nervous, I just wanted to yell, period.

Farrell sat down behind a long white desk and leaned back in his swivel chair. Over his head was a huge framed Ansel Adams. He was not staring, yet I had the feeling that he was managing to look me over carefully. I'd worn my sweater and skirt, stockings and heels—well, low heels, but not my usual sneakers. I'd put considerable thought into how to present myself, and I'd decided slacks would be a mistake. I'd seen some photographs of Margaret Bourke-White in which she was wearing a skirt even while she was
working.

Farrell examined the application I'd filled in while I was waiting to see him.

“Umm. Thirty. You look younger.”

I smiled sweetly. “Thank you.”

“And still unencumbered, huh?”

He was looking at the box I'd checked: there was one box for married, and another for unmarried. Actually, what it said was: Martial
[sic]
Status: □ married □ single. I'd checked single. It had no box for divorced. But I knew what he wanted to know.

“Well, I was married, but I got divorced last year,” I said with a slight edge of sadness to my voice. “There was no box for divorced,” I explained, demonstrating my desire to be totally honest.

“
World
requires its photographers to do a fair amount of traveling. That wouldn't present a problem, then?”

“None at all. I'd love it.”

Travel! Travel! When all my life my soul had been salivating to see the Baptistry Doors in Florence and the Duomo; the Medici Library; the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, and Saint-Chapelle; and Westminster, and Charing Cross, and the Inns of Court, and Haworth, and the Lake Country, and the Alps, and Hong Kong, and Bangkok, and and and

“Well, then, we'd like to have you aboard. You won't be staff; we'll send you out on assignments. You get paid only when you work, but we'll keep you busy.” He then gave me a spiel about wage schedules and per diem allowances and expense accounts; he talked about special pouches for delivery of film, and how many rolls to take for an article (that many!), and when to use color. I listened with a face full of attention, but my heart was beating too loudly in my ears for me really to hear much. I stood up with as much poise as I could pull together, making my voice as inexpressive as I could, trying to copy them. I kept my face still, too, and my legs, and I didn't dance at all until I got safely home in my own living room.

I danced into the
Herald
the next morning, too. After all, they knew me a little; I was allowed to dance there. I danced in and quit my job. They were all happy for me, those guys, a little surprised and a little envious, but on the whole generously happy. There are advantages to life in the slow lane, among the mediocre, the failed, and one of them is fellowship. I didn't realize then that I wouldn't have that again. They took me to their watering hole for lunch on my last day—I gave the
Herald
a week to replace me, and came in during that time singing every morning—and tried to get me drunk. But I had to drive home and take care of the kids, so I only sipped the martini they kept urging on me.

I look back on that me and shake my head. I can hardly remember her: that woman who could feel such elation, such surging power and hope, who could imagine a wonderful, brilliant, exciting future. And most of all, who didn't know what she was doing, what she was getting herself into. Not that, had I been aware, I would have refused the offer. That's the point, I guess, that even if you know what an experience will do to you, you want the experience.

I knew I was implicitly disavowing my children; and I knew I didn't want them to know I was doing that. The morning after I was hired, I called an answering service and had our telephone number hooked up to it, and turned off the bell in our house; and ordered a new phone for us. That way, if
World
called me, they would reach a nice professional-sounding service that would take the message and convey it to me. There would be no risk of a young voice answering the phone and yelling out “Mommy!” It was an extra expense, but necessary, I told myself.

I told myself plenty. In fact, I didn't know and don't now whether my acrobatics were necessary. I simply wasn't taking any chances. Would they have hired me if I'd been married? If they knew I had small children? Maybe. Would they have hired me if I'd worn pants to the interview? Twenty years later I heard some men talking about not hiring a woman because she showed up for the interview in pants. But they weren't the same men. I don't know, didn't know. I only knew I had a deep pervasive sense that women had to be extremely careful in the public world, that the smallest thing could be used as grounds for rejecting them. And having kids is not a small thing. I had kids; but I also had Pani Nowak.

I also had, only a seed then, but it would grow, a hot hard pebble of shame lodged near my navel. But I was too excited to notice it.

B
ELLE AND ED HAD
one more ordeal to pass through on their road to secure status in the middle class. The recession that followed the end of the war sent many businesses into decline, and Bunnell was one of them. In May of 1949, it finally shut its doors. Along with many other men, Ed was out of work, and could not find a job at his rank.

Arden was six months old, and had been sick with a fever for a week. Anastasia was feeling cooped up in the one-room apartment, and had asked Brad to come home in the afternoon, pick her up, and drive her to her mother's house, then pick her up there in the evening. She didn't call first. Belle was always home. Brad dropped her in front of the house, and drove off, not noticing the long ladder propped in front of the house. Ed was standing on it, scraping peeling paint from the clapboard on the upper story. Anastasia peered up at him, Arden in her arms, her paraphernalia on the sidewalk beside her.

“Hi!”

He turned and waved.

“How come you're home?”

He just waved again, and turned back to his work. Anastasia rang the front doorbell. Belle answered it, her face drawn.

“How come Dad's home?” she asked cheerfully (as always).

Belle grimaced, turned away, and walked into the living room. Anastasia followed. Belle turned back after the door was closed. “He lost his job.”

Anastasia paled. “He was fired!” This seemed inconceivable: her careful, efficient, methodical father, fired?

Belle didn't answer. “Take off your coat,” she sighed. “Do you want some tea?”

Not until she was an older woman did Anastasia discover that her father had not been fired, that the company had failed. Belle spoke rarely about the event, but always appeared to blame Ed for what had happened to him. Ed did not speak of it at all. The heavy dark counterpane of grim depression so usual in that house settled once more.

Who but Ed would set about repainting the house the day after losing his job? But in a week he had regained enough presence to go looking. There was nothing, and after a month, he took a job on the night-shift assembly line at Republic Aircraft for two dollars an hour, and a day job repairing vacuum cleaners for fifty cents an hour. For a year and a half he continued in this schedule, five nights a week at Republic, six days a week at Hoover, earning altogether eighty dollars a week, not quite enough to get them through. He never complained. When he was home, he painted the house or worked on the car. Belle made hats, managed to make 250 hats a week now. Joy was finishing high school, was a member of a clique, and needed this certain sweater, this skirt. But she asked for little, as little as she could. Nor could Anastasia help her parents.

In November of 1950, the same month Billy was born, Ed found a good job with the manufacturer of complex instruments like gyroscopes that paid him $100 a week and gave him good bonuses at Christmas. He was forty-four. He would remain there until his retirement in 1971, on his sixty-fifth birthday. By then he had a good salary, but one not commensurate with his value: the company had to hire five men to do his job after he was gone. He went immediately to work part-time, off the books, in various electronic firms, and continued to work until Belle demanded that he stop, when he was seventy-six. By then they were comfortable; their house looked like other people's houses, they had imitation Sheraton in the dining room, new rugs, lots of tables and knickknacks; their car was a Cadillac and not more than six years old. Belle had a sable stole and a mink jacket, both already out of style; and a spotted-cat coat that was only ten years old. They had taken two three-week trips to Europe on tours; and many vacations in upper New York State and Maine. Everyone they met found them a lovely couple.

Belle had made hats for over ten years, stopping only after she had paid the bills for Joy's wedding, which took her a year. She stopped at the end of 1955, and settled back to enjoy herself. By that time, Ann Gwyn was dead of breast cancer; and within two years, both Gertrude Grunbacher and Mildred Bradshaw had also died. Only Elvira was left, settled into a grouchy old age. Rollo had died, and she missed having a man. She picked up with her old boyfriend, but he drank too much now, she said, and kept talking about “Whitey” as if whites were his enemy, something she couldn't comprehend. She'd always been his friend. Only Jean and Eric were left, and the two couples still played bridge every Saturday night, and a few times went on vacations together. That old relationship had always been strained: Eric holding forth pompously, looking down at Ed; Jean sweet, complacent and complaisant; Belle quietly resentful; Ed silent. But they were all either couple had. The heavy mantle of gloom lifted in the middle years, but descended again as Belle entered old age. Eric died then, and the bridge games ended. They were still together, she and Ed; and alone, as he had wished, without noisy interfering children. Ed mellowed; he showed affection to his grown daughters. There was never dust on the many side tables now; nor radios playing, nor Coke bottles lying around. There was order and peace and stillness in the large house by the water that they had acquired, and the two of them, together, alone.

S
UNDAY, JANUARY 12, 1960
. Emplaned.

Emplaned: A word that couldn't be expected to drop into my day like a package through a mail slot.

My day, my days: getting the kids off in the morning, driving over back suburban roads to a three-story brick building, a boring job: smile, yes sir, I'll see if he's in, smile, sorry sir, he's gone for the day, smile, oh, yes sir, I'll be glad to buzz him for you. Then the drive back, the woman's lunch—an apple and a cup of yoghurt—the supermarket, trying to find meat that costs less than 85 cents a pound, decent vegetables the kids will eat, tight-lipped, anxious; then unloading the heavy bags that really hold so little; then the laundry—down to the basement with a heavy straw basket full of smelly clothes, standing there waiting for water to fill the tub before pouring in the bleach, feeling itchy in the dark cobwebbed dank space lighted by a single bulb with a metal string hanging down, checking water temperature, soap, then back up two flights, back down in half an hour, transfer the whites to the dryer, put in the dark things, back up two flights, back down in half an hour…oh I know I shouldn't complain, things were so much worse for my mother, but why is it that half the human race never has to do things like this and the other half never has time to do anything else?

Then the kids are home, noise, confusion, sometimes laughter, often squabbling and sullenness, even tears. Then commands, authority, that's not fun, why do you have to force them to do things? Change clothes, only one Scooter Pie apiece, eat fruit if you're still hungry, be back by five to do homework, an hour's respite for me until I have to start dinner, time to fold the clean dry laundry (more trips downstairs), to do some dusting, vacuum the living room rug, shabby and discolored, ugly, it's hateful to clean it….

Hate cooking, but dinner is a good time, the kids calmer, they love to eat, we talk, joke, tease, tell about our days, make things up sometimes. We all clean up after dinner now, they're old enough, that's not bad except they're in a rush to turn on that Thing, that Box, that Noise that fills my life with plastic—plastic joys, plastic violence, plastic adventure, oh god the noise of it. To escape it I have to go to my bedroom, and the kids feel abandoned so usually I sit with them trying to read, while they sit on the floor like two hypnotized robots believing everything they see there. That Box is manufacturing their dreams, forming their imaginations…but to deny it to them I'd have to make a point, take some dramatic or moral or intellectual stand, make them different from their friends…. Sometimes, if the program is too paralyzingly awful, I do leave and go into my room and sit at the table and start to go through some pictures, but then one of them will come in and stand quietly beside me and ask if I dislike the program, and say they'll change the channel if I want, if I'll just come back in. And sometimes I say no, it's okay, I just don't feel like watching television tonight, and I go on working but I can't concentrate because I feel so guilty, I keep seeing that pale face saddened by my defection. Or am I imagining the sadness? Brad said I wasn't as important to them as I liked to think. But I have to go by my feelings, don't I?