Daring (9 page)

A young man tapped him on the shoulder. “I've been waitin' two hours to tell you, I'll shoot somebody before I see a Nazi like you in the White House.” Kennedy pretended not to hear. Now the senator climbed halfway up the steps of the Douglas County Courthouse. He turned, and in full unprotected view, he looked down the rifle barrels of this mostly hostile crowd and tried to engage them in a friendly debate. This was courage.

“I hear the local radio station said, ‘Vote against Robert Kennedy because he's going to take your guns away,'” he said. “I'd like one of you to come here and explain that issue to me.”

A young man approached him. Kennedy looped his arm over the man's shoulder. “I know some of you are volunteers with the sheriff's posse. Did you know that 90 percent of the policemen who've been shot and killed in the United States in the last two years have been shot by people who shouldn't have guns—people with criminal records or judged insane?” Murmurs of surprise. “All the law requires is that when someone purchases a gun by mail order, he must be competent to handle it.” Kennedy wound up with his favorite George Bernard Shaw quote, which seemed to tame the crowd. “‘Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and ask why not?'”

Ethel Kennedy, unnerved by crowds like this, had been dropped off for the rest of the day. Only a few Oregon reporters climbed back into the little DC-3. The senator sat in front, the seat beside him empty. After takeoff, he leaned over the back of his seat. “Would you like to sit up here, New York?”

I stepped over Freckles, the beloved cocker spaniel who always dozed at Kennedy's feet. The senator was shivering from the last rain-soaked stop. He asked Dutton to hand him Jack's overcoat. For me, this was a poignant moment. Five years after his brother's assassination, Bobby was still mourning Jack's death, still wearing his brother's clothes.

The only question I remember asking Bobby is how he reconciled his attacks on Johnson's Vietnam policy with his earlier support of his brother's war. “I was involved in the decisions about Vietnam in '63 and '64 and '65,” he replied bluntly. “I accept the responsibility for my part of the blame. But that's no excuse for perpetuating the error.”

Wind blew a hard rain that smeared the plane's windows as we approached Seattle. The senator was in a hurry to make a national press conference. Unbeknownst to us passengers, another plane was coming straight at us. Abruptly, our aircraft plummeted a thousand feet. Men screamed. My eyes shuddered closed. While we were still dropping, I heard Bobby Kennedy quip, “I knew Gene McCarthy was desperate, I didn't think he was
this
desperate.”

THAT NIGHT DICK TUCK ARRANGED
for the Kennedys to be back on their big campaign plane, in the air and out of touch, when the results of the Oregon primary came in. At 10
P.M.
, Dutton came back to Ethel Kennedy, who was swapping jokes with newsmen over a scotch and water. Dutton moved his lips silently. “We're beat.”

The senator came back from his private cabin with a smile, his hands wrapped in towels to sop up the bleeding from all the physical contact.

“Hey, how can you look so happy?” Ethel asked.

“Because I had such a good day.” It was his fatalism again.

After eighty days of nonstop campaigning, Kennedy slept late on the day of the California primary and took his family to the beach. Polls closed at 8
P.M
. CBS projected Bobby the winner, but other networks held back.

I had to catch the red-eye back to New York. My plane was in the air when his victory became certain. At that moment, Kennedy was hurrying through the hotel kitchen on the way to his press conference.

It was after 6
A.M.
when I staggered out of the taxi from JFK and upstairs to my apartment. I had a sour premonition that something wasn't right. Maura woke when I snapped the three locks. I picked her up so she wouldn't wake my sister and carried her into the living room. The phone rang.

“Were you in the kitchen?” It was Clay, in a voice I had not heard before.

“The kitchen?”

“At the Ambassador?”

“Oh, God, no, what happened?”

“He was killed, by a Palestinian. He's not officially dead yet, but it's all over.”

I went numb.

“How soon can you get me the story?”

I turned on the TV. Watching recaps: Kennedy, responding to a reporter, turned his face, looking for Ethel. I didn't see the assassin raise his arm over the senator's aides. I didn't hear the shots fired from a snub-nosed revolver inches from Kennedy's head. I didn't see Kennedy stagger and fall. I didn't hear the chaos, the yelling, “My God! He's been shot! Get a doctor! Get the gun! Kill the bastard! No, don't kill this one! Oh my God, they've shot Kennedy!”

Maura walked into the living room just as another recap showed Ethel Kennedy kneeling on the floor and grabbing her husband's hand. Blood was pooling behind his ear. Maura's voice of innocence asked the question that would cause all Americans to search our souls: “Why is the lady in white bending over the man on the floor? Did something bad happen?”

“A bad accident,” I lied. “Would you like French toast this morning, sweetpea?”

I fed Maura, changed my clothes, woke my sister, and sat in front of my typewriter, lighting one cigarette after another. Clay's words played over and over in my head. “You're a journalist . . . a witness to history.” I meditated for a while. A shield of detachment gradually formed around my feelings. I began typing.

It was his fatalism that carried Bobby Kennedy through, I wrote. For all his fearlessness in pleading for rational gun control, he had to know the chances were good that sooner or later, he, too, would walk into an assassin's bullets. Among his last words were “Is everybody all right?”

Even now, in the twenty-first century, America is more than ever saturated with guns and apparently guiltless about routine massacres of innocent civilians and little children.

AROUND NOON, THE INTERCOM RANG.
“He's comin' gup, the fancy man.”

Maura got help from my sister to open the door for Clay. I heard him enter my little study and felt his breath over my shoulder. He was reading my copy.

“Not bad,” he said. I ripped the next page out of my typewriter and handed it to him over my shoulder.

“How long till you finish?”

“Two or three more cigarettes.”

He massaged my shoulders. I felt the tension release. Before either one of us knew what was happening, Clay and I were awkwardly kissing. We had to have something that still mattered.

I asked him to stop. “Maura.” He immediately withdrew. Nothing was said. We both retreated into our familiar safe professional roles, but a trespass of the heart and mind had been committed.

IT DIDN
'
T TAKE LONG
for me to learn one of the most basic requirements to become a successful book writer. One has to have the stomach to take the roller-coaster lurches from failure to success and back to failure. I was fortunate. I failed early.

My roman à clef about marriage that Clay published, “Lovesounds of a Wife,” created a good deal of buzz. To hear the story of an adulterous affair from inside the head of the betrayed wife was a new and unsettling experience. Wives and husbands fought about it. She loved it, he hated it. That's exactly what happened in the household of Gay and Nan Talese.

Gay Talese was already a famous
New York Times
journalist. A cocky Italian American man, he was staking claim to the sexual emancipation of the American male. In what might seem ironic, he also supported the idea that women of talent should be able to pursue independent careers, starting with his own wife. Nan Talese was beautiful, shy, and bookish. Gay encouraged her to talk to a friend of his at Random House about a job as an editor. Publishing was not a career friendly to women in those days, but Nan was hired. When I met the couple at a party in 1967, Nan and I immediately connected. Both of us looked like polite, winsome, white-gloved Anglo-Saxon young ladies who would never challenge the status quo. We were imposters. Underneath, we were both independent women-in-the-making.

I mentioned that I was writing a novel, an outgrowth of my article “Lovesounds.” Nan invited me to come to her office to discuss turning the story into a book. At the entrance to a palatial building with the nameplate
ARCHDIOCESE OF NEW YORK
, I stared at the marble arches in awe. This was the address Nan had given me, 457 Madison Avenue. I knew Random House was at the pinnacle of the publishing world, but I must have missed the papal encyclical that placed it under the wing of the Vatican.

Directed to the secular entrance, I climbed the broad marble stairs to the second floor. The nameplate
BENNETT CERF, PUBLISHER
told me I was in the rarefied executive area. I was redirected to the basement. There I found two of the only women editors in New York who edited serious fiction or nonfiction: Toni Morrison and Nan Talese.

When Nan was hired, she confided, the managing editor had dropped a careless insult. “Of course, you'll copyedit your own books and do cookbooks.”

“I don't know a thing about cooking,” Nan piped up in her high, airy voice. “Why don't you ask Jason?”

This was tantamount to asking Elizabeth Arden to do a client's nails. Jason Epstein was editorial director of the paperback line at Random House. His friends and colleagues knew that Jason was also a serious, even scholarly, cook. But men didn't write or edit cookbooks. That was the girls' realm. It wasn't until his eighty-first year that Jason published his version of a cookbook, a charming culinary memoir called
Eating
.

When Nan was excited, her eyebrows jumped off her forehead. “I love ‘Lovesounds,'” she said. “It will be a book for the times.” With conspiratorial enthusiasm, we began the editing process.

Nan had the same conflicted feelings I did about trying to balance a serious career with marriage and motherhood. The way she managed to commute between those worlds, she confided, was to live only twelve blocks from Random House, so she could walk home and give her two little daughters lunch. She and Gay rented five separate apartments on different floors in a building on East Sixty-First Street. Knowing that I needed a quiet retreat to rewrite, she kindly invited me to use a typewriter on her second floor. I could hear her prolific husband banging away on the floor below. He called his separate apartment his “bunker.”

Gay's incessant typing on the first floor kept me racing on the second. Nan would insist I come up to have lunch with her and the children in the zone to which they were relegated. She suggested for my book that I turn the story into a
Rashomon
, alternating chapters from the subjective point of view of both the wife and the husband. As women, I suppose, we felt we needed to represent the man's point of view. I took pains to disguise the real names and places, moving the characters up in social class to render the husband as an up-and-coming attorney who lived on the Upper East Side. That only made me an easier target.

I
'
LL NEVER FORGET CLAY CALLING
me months later. “I just picked up the Sunday
New York Times Book Review—
you're in it!”

“What does it say?” Clay read the opening line: “‘Gail Sheehy's
Lovesounds
is an angry book about a woman whose wifeliness approximates disease . . . She even has a child, apparently to convince her friends that she is not, to use that dreaded phrase, a ‘career woman.'”

“Stop, Clay.” I put down the phone and looked for a place to be sick.

When I was able to read the rest of the review, it felt like body blows directly to my gut. Only in the last paragraph did the reviewer mention the conflict at the heart of the story: the husband has been having an affair, so the wife, a successful career woman with a two-year-old child, tries for a year to be “the perfect wife.” When that effort suffocates them both, the wife has to decide whether to accept the pain and humiliation of a husband who she learns is still cheating on her, or to strike a blow for self-respect and independence by getting a divorce. She chooses the latter. That, to the reviewer, is her sin.

It was a few years later, when the women's movement had surfaced and was growing strong, that I began to grasp why my book had caused such a backlash. It had been published in 1970, just as the world of unsettling change was upon us. Consciousness-raising sessions had barely begun, so those of us who were “liberating” ourselves did not have any language or emotional concepts with which to understand what we were living. The review gave me an early feel for the reactionary rage at the earthquake of gender that would shake up the 1970s.
Lovesounds
was ahead of its time. It did not sell.

Nan herself was always expecting that when she had another child, she would quit her career and stay home to be the perfect wife and mother. She never did. She outlasted most of the great male editors with whom she started at Random House and has been on the top of the heap for decades, today directing her own publishing imprint at Doubleday.

Looking back through the retrospectoscope of forty years, I appreciate how vastly social conditions have changed and improved for women. But I also see, stronger than ever, evidence of an observation I made when I wrote
Passages
in my midthirties: “Women can have it all, but not all at once.” I had predicted that women who tried to wear all three hats in their twenties—marriage, motherhood, career—would likely see at least one blow off. Young women, like young men in their twenties, need time to extend their education, try out different partners and career paths, survive failure and build resilience, before they are ready to balance the competing demands and delights of marriage, family, and career.