City of Girls (35 page)

As for the men in the hotel rooms, we would have our adventure together, and then I would usually never see them again.

I liked to leave their beds before they started telling me things about themselves that I didn’t want to know.

If you are wondering whether I ever fell
in love with any of those gentlemen, Angela, the answer is no. I had lovers, but not
loves
. Some of those lovers turned into boyfriends, and a precious handful of those boyfriends turned into friends (the best outcome of all). But nothing advanced into the realm of what you might call true love. Maybe I just wasn’t looking for it. Or maybe I was being spared from it. Nothing will uproot your life
more violently than true love—at least as far as I’ve always witnessed.

I was often quite fond of them, though. For a while, I had a fun affair with a young—
very
young—Hungarian painter, whom I met at an art exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory. His name was Botond and he was an absolute lamb. I brought him home to my apartment the night I met him, and—right on the brink of sex—he told me that
he didn’t need to use a prophylactic because “you are a nice woman, and I’m sure you are clean.” I sat up in bed, turned on the light, and said to this boy who was practically young enough to be my son, “Botond, now listen to me. I
am
a nice woman. But I need to tell you something important that you must never forget: if a woman is willing to go home and have sex with you after she’s only known
you for an hour,
she has done it before
. Always, always,
always
use a prophylactic.”

Sweet Botond, with his round cheeks and his terrible haircut!

And then there was Hugh—a quiet, kind-faced widower who came in with his daughter one day to buy her a wedding dress. I found him to be so dear and attractive that after our business was completed, I slipped him my private phone number, saying, “Please
call me any time you would like to spend a night together.”

I could tell that I’d embarrassed him, but I didn’t want to let him get away!

About two years later, I received a phone call one Saturday afternoon. It was Hugh! Once he had reintroduced himself—stammering nervously—he clearly had no idea how to continue the conversation. Smiling into the phone, I rescued him as quickly as I could.
“Hugh,” I said, “it’s wonderful to hear from you. And you needn’t be embarrassed. I did say
any time
. Why don’t you come right on over?”

If you’re wondering if any of those men ever fell in love with me—well, sometimes they did. But I always managed to talk them out of it. It’s easy for a man who has just experienced good sex to believe that he is now in love. And I
was
good at sex, Angela, by
this point. I’d certainly had enough practice at it. (As I said once to Marjorie, “The only two things I’ve ever been good at in this world are sex and sewing.” To which she responded: “Well, honey—at least you chose the right one to monetize.”) When men became too dewy-eyed with me, I merely explained to them that they were not in love with
me,
but with the sexual act itself, and they would usually
calm down.

If you’re wondering whether I was ever in any physical danger from my nocturnal encounters with all these strange and unknown men, the only honest answer is
yes
. But it did not stop me. I was as careful as I could be, but I had nothing to go on but my instincts when choosing my men. Sometimes, I chose wrong. This is bound to happen. There were times, behind closed doors, when things
got rougher and more dicey than I might have preferred. Not often, but sometimes. When that happened, I rode it out like an experienced sailor in a bad squall.
I don’t know how else to explain it. And while I did have an unpleasant night every so often, I never felt
enduringly
harmed. Nor did the threat of danger ever deter me. These were risks I was willing to take. It was more important for
me to feel free than safe.

And if you’re wondering whether I ever had crises of conscience about my promiscuity, I can honestly tell you: no. I did believe that my behavior made me
unusual
—because it didn’t seem to match the behavior of other women—but I didn’t believe that it made me
bad
.

I used to think that I was bad, mind you. During the dry years of the war, I still carried such a burden
of shame about the incident with Edna Parker Watson, and the words “dirty little whore” never fully left my consciousness. But by the time the war ended, I was finished with all that. I think it had something to do with my brother being killed, and the painful belief that Walter had died without ever having enjoyed his life. The war had invested me with an understanding that life is both dangerous
and fleeting, and thus there is no point in denying yourself pleasure or adventure while you are here.

I could have spent the rest of my life trying to prove that I was a
good girl
—but that would have been unfaithful to who I really was. I believed that I was a good person, if not a
good girl
. But my appetites were what they were. So I gave up on the idea of denying myself what I truly wanted.
Then I sought ways to delight myself. As long as I stayed away from married men, I felt that I was doing no harm.

Anyway, at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time.

After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is.

TWENTY-EIGHT

As for female friends, I had many.

Of course, Marjorie was my best friend, and Peg and Olive would always be my family. But Marjorie and I had a lot of other women around, too.

There was Marty—a doctoral candidate in literature at NYU, brilliant and funny, whom we’d met one day at a free concert on Rutherford Place. There was Karen—a receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, who
wanted to be a painter, and who had attended Parsons with Marjorie. There was Rowan, who was a gynecologist—which we all found terribly impressive, and also useful. There was Susan—a grade-school teacher with a passion for modern dance. There was Callie, who owned the flower shop around the corner. There was Anita, who came from money and never did anything at all—but she did get us a pirated key
to Gramercy Park, so we appreciated her forever.

There were more women, too, who came and went out of my life. Sometimes Marjorie and I would lose a friend to marriage; other times we would gain a friend after a divorce. Sometimes a woman would
move out of the city, sometimes she would move back. The tides of life came in and out. The circles of friendship grew, then shrank, then grew again.

But the gathering place for us women was always the same—our rooftop on Eighteenth Street, which we could access from the fire escape outside my bedroom window. Marjorie and I dragged a bunch of cheap folding chairs up there, and we would spend our evenings on the roof with our friends, anytime the weather was fine. Summer after summer, our little group of females would sit together under what passes
for starlight in New York City, smoking our cigarettes, drinking our rotgut wine, listening to music on a transistor radio, and sharing with each other our big and small concerns of life.

During one brutally airless August heat wave, Marjorie managed to haul a big stand-up fan up onto our roof. This she plugged into my kitchen outlet, using a long industrial extension cord. As far as the rest
of us were concerned, this made her a genius at the level of Leonardo da Vinci. We would sit in the artificial breeze of the fan, lifting our shirts to cool our breasts, and pretending that we were at a beach somewhere exotic.

Those are some of my happiest memories of the 1950s.

It was on the rooftop of our little bridal boutique that I learned this truth: when women are gathered together with
no men around, they don’t have to be anything in particular; they can just
be.

Then in 1955, Marjorie got pregnant.

I’d always feared it was going to be me who ended up pregnant—the smart bet would have been on me, obviously—but poor Marjorie was the one who got hit.

The culprit was an old married art professor, with whom she’d been having an affair for years. (Although Marjorie would have
said that the
culprit was herself
,
for wasting so much of her life with a married man who kept promising that he would leave his wife for her, if only Marjorie would “stop acting so Jewish.”)

A bunch of us were on the rooftop one night when she told us the news.

“Are you sure?” asked Rowan, the gynecologist. “Do you want to come into my office for a test?”

“I don’t need a test,” said Marjorie.
“My period is gone, gone, gone.”

“Gone, how long?” said Rowan.

“Well, I’ve never been regular, but maybe three months?”

There’s a tense silence that women fall into when they hear that one of their own has become accidentally pregnant. This is a matter of highest gravity. I could feel that none of us wanted to say another word until Marjorie had told us more. We wanted to know what her plan
was, so that we could support it, whatever the plan may have been. But she just sat there in silence, after dropping this bomb, and added no further information.

Finally, I asked, “What does George have to say about this?” George, of course, being the anti-Semitic married art professor who apparently loved having sex with Jewish girls.

“Why do you assume it’s George?” she joked.

We all knew
it was George. It was always George. Of course it was George. She had been infatuated with George since she was a wide-eyed student in his Sculpture of Modern Europe class, so many years earlier.

Then she said, “No, I haven’t told him. I think I won’t tell him. I just won’t see him anymore. I’ll cut it off from here. If nothing else, this is finally a good excuse to stop sleeping with George.”

Rowan cut right to the chase: “Have you considered a termination?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that. Or, rather, maybe I would do that. But it’s too late.”

She lit another cigarette and took another drink of wine—because that’s what pregnancy looked like in the 1950s.

She said, “I found out about a place in Canada. It’s sort of a home for unwed mothers, but more deluxe than the usual fare. You get your
own room, and all that. My understanding is that the clientele is a bit older. Women with some money. I can go there toward the end, when I can’t hide it anymore. Tell people I’m on vacation—even though I’ve never taken a vacation in my life, so nobody will believe me, but that’s all I can do. They even said they could place the baby in a Jewish family—although where they aim to find a Jewish
family in Canada, who knows? Anyway, I don’t care about religion, you all know that. As long as it’s a good home. It seems like a nice enough facility. Plenty expensive, but I can swing it. I’ll use the Paris money.”

It was typical of Marjorie to have solved a problem on her own before reaching out to her friends for help, and certainly her plan was sound. Still, my heart hurt. Marjorie didn’t
want any of this. She and I had been saving our money for years, planning to take a trip to Paris together. As soon as we had enough cash gathered, our plan was to close the boutique for the entire month of August, get on the
Queen Elizabeth,
and sail to France. This was our shared dream. We were almost there with our savings, too. We had worked for years without so much as a weekend off. And
now this.

I knew right then that I would go to Canada with her. We would close down L’Atelier for however long was necessary. Wherever she was going, I would go with her. I would stay with her through the birth of her baby. I would spend my share of the Paris money to buy a car. Whatever she needed.

I scooted my chair over next to Marjorie’s and took her hand. “That all sounds wise, honey,”
I said. “I’ll be right there with you.”

“It does sound wise, doesn’t it?” Marjorie took another drag off her cigarette, and looked around at the circle of her friends. We all
had the same loving, pitying, and somewhat panicked expressions on our faces.

Then the most unexpected thing happened. Suddenly Marjorie grinned at me, in a slightly crazed-looking, lopsided manner. She said, “Goddamn it
to hell, but I don’t think I’ll go to Canada. Oh, Christ, Vivian, I must be out of my mind. But I just decided it right now. I have a better plan. No, not a better plan. But a different plan. I’ll keep it.”

“You’re going to keep the
baby
?” Karen asked, in open shock.

“What about George?” Anita asked.

Marjorie stuck her chin up in the air like the tough little bantamweight fighter she’d always
been. “I don’t need stinkin’ George. Vivian and I are gonna raise this kid ourselves. Aren’t we, Vivian?”

I gave it only a moment’s thought. I knew my friend. Once she had decided something, that was it. She would somehow make it work. And I would make it work with her, like always.

So once again I said to Marjorie Lowtsky: “Sure. Let’s do it.”

And once again, my life completely changed.

So that’s what we did, Angela.

We had a kid.

And that kid was our beautiful, difficult, tender little Nathan.

Everything about it was hard.

Her pregnancy wasn’t so bad, but the delivery itself was something from a horror movie. They ended up doing a cesarian, but not before she’d suffered through eighteen hours of labor. They really hacked her up during the procedure, too. Then she didn’t stop
bleeding, and there was a concern they would lose her. They nicked the
baby’s face with the scalpel during the cesarian, and very nearly took out his eye. Then Marjorie got an infection and was in the hospital for almost four weeks.

I still maintain that all this carelessness at the hospital was due to the fact that Nathan was what they called a “non-marital infant” (politely sinister 1950s terminology
for “bastard”). As a result, the doctors weren’t especially attentive to Marjorie during her labor, and the nurses weren’t particularly kind, either.

It was Marjorie’s and my girlfriends who took care of her when she was recovering. Marjorie’s family—for the same reason as the nurses—didn’t want much to do with her and the baby. That may sound extremely unkind (and it was), but you can’t imagine
what a stigma it was for a woman at that time to bear a child out of wedlock—even in liberal New York. Even for a mature woman like Marjorie, who ran her own business and owned her own building, undergoing a pregnancy without a husband attached was
disgraceful
.

So she was brave, is what I’m driving at. And she was on her own. Thus it came down to our circle of friends to take care of Marjorie
and Nathan as best we could. It was good that we had so much backup. I couldn’t be with Marjorie all the time at the hospital, because I was the one taking care of the baby while she was recovering. This was like its own horror movie as I had no idea what I was doing. I hadn’t grown up with babies, nor had I ever longed for a child myself. I had no instinct or aptitude for it. Moreover, I hadn’t
bothered to learn much about babies while Marjorie was pregnant. I didn’t even really know what they ate. The plan had never been that Nathan would be my baby, anyhow; the plan had been that he would be Marjorie’s baby, and that I would work doubly hard to support all three of us. But for that first month, he was my baby, and he was not in the most expert hands, I’m sorry to say.

Moreover, Nathan
was not easy. He was colicky and underweight, and it was a struggle to get him to take the bottle. He had rampant cradle cap and diaper rash (“catastrophes at both ends,” as Marjorie said) and I couldn’t seem to get any of it to go away. Our assistants at L’Atelier managed the boutique as best they could, but it was June—wedding season—and I had to be at work at least sometimes or the business
wouldn’t function at all. I had to do Marjorie’s work for her, as well, while she was absent. But every time I set Nathan down so I could attend to my duties, he would scream until I picked him back up again.

The mother of one of my brides-to-be saw me struggling with the infant one morning, and gave me the name of an older Italian woman who had helped out her own daughter, when her twin grandchildren
were born. That older nursemaid’s name was Palma, and she turned out to be St. Michael and all the angels. We kept Palma on as Nathan’s nanny for years, and she truly saved us—especially during that brutal first year. But Palma was expensive. In fact, everything about Nathan was expensive. He was a sickly baby, and then he was a sickly toddler, and then he was a sickly little boy. I swear
he spent more time in the doctor’s office during those first five years of his life than he did at home. If there was anything a child could come down with, he came down with it. He always had trouble with his breathing, and he was constantly on penicillin, which upset his stomach, and then you couldn’t feed him—which led to its own problems.

Marjorie and I had to work harder than ever to pay
the bills, now that there were three of us—and one of us was always sick. So work harder, we did.

You wouldn’t believe the number of wedding gowns we churned out during those years. Thank God people were getting married in higher numbers than ever.

Neither of us talked about going to Paris anymore.

Time passed and Nathan grew older but not much bigger. He was such a squirt of a thing—so dear
in his affections, so tenderhearted and gentle, but also so nervous and easily frightened. And
always
sick.

We loved him so. It was impossible
not
to love him; he was such a sweetheart. You never met a more kind little person. He never got into trouble, or was disobedient. The problem was only that he was so fragile. Maybe we babied him too much. Almost certainly we babied him too much. Let’s
be clear: this child grew up in a bridal boutique surrounded by hordes of women (customers and employees alike) who were more than willing to indulge his fears and his clinginess. (“Oh, God, Vivian, he’s gonna be such a
queer,
” Marjorie said to me once, when she saw her son twirling in a wedding veil in front of a mirror. That may sound harsh, but to be fair to Marjorie, it was difficult to imagine
how Nathan could grow up to be anything else. We used to joke that Olive was the only masculine figure in his life.)

As Nathan approached the age of five, we realized that we could not possibly enroll this kid in public school. He weighed in at about twenty-five pounds dripping wet, and the presence of other children alarmed him. He wasn’t a stickball-playing, tree-climbing, rock-throwing, knee-skinning
sort of boy. He liked puzzles. He liked to look at books, but nothing too scary. (
Swiss Family Robinson:
too scary.
Snow White:
too scary.
Make Way for Ducklings:
just about right.) Nathan was the kind of child who would have been brutalized at a public school in New York City. We pictured him being pounded like bread dough by tough city bullies, and we couldn’t bear the thought. So we enrolled
him in Friends Seminary (at two thousand dollars a year tuition, thank you very much) so that the gentle Quakers could take all our hard-earned money and teach our boy how to be non-violent, which was never going to be a problem anyhow.

When the other children asked Nathan where his daddy was, we taught him to say, “My daddy was killed in the war”—which didn’t even make sense, because Nathan
was born in 1956. But we figured kindergartners were too dumb to do the math, so his answer would keep them at bay for a while. As Nathan got older, we’d come up with a better story.

One bright winter’s day, when Nathan was around six years old, Marjorie and I were sitting in Gramercy Park with him. I was doing beadwork on a bodice and Marjorie was trying to read
The New York Review of Books,
despite the wind that kept whipping at her pages. Marjorie was wearing a poncho (in a puzzling plaid of violet and mustard) and some kind of crazy Turkish shoes with curled-up toes. Wrapped around her head was a white silk pilot’s scarf. She looked like a medieval guildsman with a toothache.