Dry Your Smile (25 page)

“Nothing, Momma. It's a beautiful name. I like it a lot. It's just—strange that—”

“There's nothing strange about it. People change their names all the time. Just like I'd already changed my maiden name. It's normal. What do you know about life, about anything, Julian?”

“I don't. I don't, Momma. I know I don't. But all I mean is, it's … peculiar. Not being my real name.”

“The hell it isn't!” she shouted at me. “It's legal, it's real, it's mine, it's yours. The whole goddamned country knows you by that name. That name is famous because of you and me. What could be more real? Are you crazy?”

I remember thinking: back off, don't aggravate her further, get more facts if you can.

“Momma?” I reached out and touched her hand. She pulled it away.

“Momma?” again, “And he never … I mean, in thirteen years he's never once—”

“Never.” The word hit like a fist in my face. “And don't start to get romantic fantasies in your overheated brain, Baby, about finding him, either. Get the message?
Never
. He didn't want you. He still doesn't.”

“But, how do we know that for
sure?
I mean—”

“Do you hear him pounding down the door out there to get in to see his cherished daughter?”

“No, Momma.”

“He didn't want you.
I
wanted you.”

“Yes, Momma.”

“
I
bore you, raised you, sacrificed for you, loved you. He didn't give a damn for his precious daughter. He only wanted a son.”

“He did? Did he say that?”

“He didn't have to say it. Maybe he did say it, I can't remember. It doesn't matter, I knew it. Your father, Julian, is a Prussian ice-man, arrogant and fancy, the kind from a long ‘line'—and wanting to extend it. A son he would have stayed with his wife for. A son.”

I just sat there, crying. She looked at me and seemed to relent.

“Baby.
I
wanted a
daughter
. What would I do with a son? Look, it's no use thinking about it. Put it out of your mind. It's always been just us against the world, you and me, remember? Back in the old Yonkers apartment, when we'd go window shopping and plan our future and bake cookies together and laugh? It used to be enough. It still is. We've got each other. That's all we've ever really had. But we're special, you and me.”

She reached out her hand for mine now. I took it gratefully.

“Julian? Baby? You're thirteen now. You're a big girl with a wonderful career and life ahead of her. There's no stopping us. What's the point of mooning after some scum who never wanted you? Even if you could find him—and you can't and he's moved on by now and he might be dead for all I know—believe me, Julian, he wouldn't see you. He'd throw you out on the street. I won't have you hurt like that. I love you. I love you more than anything in the world.”

I looked up at her and when I saw that she was crying too, it burst inside me and I hurled myself into her arms. This time she took me under the covers, inside next to her, where it was warm and safe.

I must have cried and cried. I remember her crying, too, and her hand stroking my hair and the softness of her breasts under her nightgown, the cloth all wet with my tears, and her murmuring,

“Some kind of inhuman monster, the war must have made of him. That he could be so loving. Marry me. Father you. Then vanish. Goodbye, farewell,
auf weidersehn
, that's it. Some kind of
creature
…”

The last thing I remember, before we must have cried ourselves to sleep in each other's arms, was my whispering, trying to comfort her in turn,

“Like Zeus in the myths. Huh Momma? He appeared as a swan or a rain of gold coins or a bull, and then—”

And her crying, saying softly,

“Yes, my baby. Like Zeus in the myths. Just like that. Just like in the myths.”

After that night we never spoke of it again.

But it didn't leave me. The knowledge that he might be out there somewhere has been with me every minute since.

At first, I was just so grateful to her—for having wanted me, kept me—and for telling me the truth.

Then the anger started, snake in the garden. Why had she lied to me all those years? Why did she imply I was “fragile” and unstable? Why had she been so
mean
when it turned out that I knew? Then the guilt started.
Hello
, guilt. Because she
was
the one who had raised me. Then the feeling, growing like a tumor, that I owed her so much I could never get away from her. And through it all still loving her. For having survived. For having loved
me
.

So here I am, age seventeen, locked in battle with her all this time later. Still obsessed.

With the phantom of him, the reality of her, the unreality of me.

I feel only one authentic thing. Writing the secret down has proven it.
I'm going to be a writer
. Some kind of weight got removed from me just by putting it on paper. Catharsis and all that—which Barbara warned you had to be careful about. Catharsis isn't enough. You have to transform it to make it art.

But then, I'm young. As Barbara said, “Have a little compassion on yourself.” I'll try, Barbara, wherever you are. I'll try, Father, wherever you are.

I'll try, Julian, wherever you are.

Oh dear god I don't believe in, please never let her look through this history notebook.

Oh my beloved mother, we
will
lose each other, you and I, just-us-against-the-world—and against each other. I lose you every time I find you. And I'll go on losing you, over and over.

Because your fierce will is mine, too, little Momma. Given into my hands by you yourself.

And I just might write more of it down.

And I just might lose Julian. And find me.

*
I didn't tell even Bram the most sacred secret of all, what I've put together piece by piece for years now, about in my case parents plural. I wonder if I dare trust that to this journal. Better think about that first, Julian.

CHAPTER FOUR

Spring, 1982

Athena, Ltd., was a wonderful place to visit, but Julian had never wanted to live there. Athena was a successful feminist publishing house—a contradiction in terms unless one scrutinized the terms.

“Successful” in this case meant the firm had pioneered its way into existence to begin with and managed to stay there for nine years, sometimes teetering on the rim of bankruptcy but continuing to acquire, print, and distribute books by and about women. “Feminist,” of course, had as many definitions as there were women to define them. Feminism could mean saving the world or your own soul, or both. Athena, Ltd., was less ambitious in its definition. Its founders—a group of five intrepid women weary of laboring for years in publishing industry vineyards—had conceived the idea of a house they would control, one which would publish books on every aspect of the women's movement and of women's lives, for a general, even mass, audience. They would name it after Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and because adding “Incorporated” sounded capitalistic and patriarchal, they opted for the more elegant British term “Limited.”

Unfortunately or fortunately, words have a mystical power of their own, bearing within themselves like a coded RNA the capacity for reproduction, duplication, evolution—and mutancy. Or, as philosophers have guessed and poets muttered for centuries, be careful what you say: it might mean something. None of the five founders had given much thought to Athena's mythic origins: that she was the sole goddess not born of woman but sprung from the brain of Zeus—that thunderbolt-heaving, arch-capitalistic arch-patriarch. Or that Athena, tipping the scales with her decision that Orestes go unpunished after matricide, did so because she deliberately sided with the boys. Nor had they dwelt overlong on the ironic capacities inherent in the word “limited.” They had no time for semantic luxuries. They worked hard. They meant well. They wanted power.

Now, almost a decade after its founding, Athena's growth showed features both of its zeusean ancestry and its limitations. Julian had related to Athena with a supportiveness that increased its vigilance in direct proportion to her growing dependence on them for work. She had seen the list expand steadily from five books the first year to ten each season. Athena now produced its own paperbacks as well as hardcovers. It had won a few prizes. Some of its authors had been translated into foreign editions. It had begun spin-off lines—in anti-sexist children's books, in health; finally, to Julian's alarm, in fashion and cookbooks. It still published some works by and about a wider constituency: older women, radical women, lesbian women, black and Hispanic, Asian-American and Native Indian women. But these had begun, around the fifth year, to be “now and thens” produced from a peevish threefold sense of principle, unavoidability, and keeping at bay the relentless criticism the women's movement reserves for its own.

Athena managed commercially on three authors. One was Elsa Levin, a humorist who wrote not-quite best-sellers with such titles as
How to Bore Your Rapist Off You
and
The Housewives' Survival Manual
. The second was Oleander Ongatari, who had been born and raised in Westport, Connecticut, and educated at Vassar, but who had learned the hard way—after unsuccessfully peddling a novel based on the life of Anna Magdalena Bach—to adopt an African name and turban before publishing her subsequent smash short-story collection:
Up Side Yo' Haid and Down in Mah Heart What's a Woman to Do Wid a Baaad Man
. The third was Fiona Trax, who wrote erotic science-fiction novels in which women in a futurist society had so much power they could afford to wear miniskirts made of silver lamé and walk around with no tops (they all had perfect, sprightly breasts) and no man dared take it wrong. Athena had recently celebrated a new triumph. They had acquired Maxine Duncan Brewer, who had never published more than one book at each of her previous six publishers, and who had left behind her a trail of broken contracts with haggard editors now prone to alcoholic nervous breakdowns, yet who sold extraordinarily well:
You Can Make It to the Top, Sister!, How to Play and Win by Men's Rules
, and
Supergal, Go for It!
had been her greatest successes.

Nonetheless, Athena still existed precariously, squeaking by in chronic debt and gamely enduring ridicule from both big corporate publishers and more-radical-than-thou feminist collectives which produced three mimeographed chapbooks of Heavy Theory a year. Its founders sometimes wondered why they had abandoned what in retrospect seemed like secure careers for the tightrope on which they now swayed. Periodically, the Athenas envied their imitators and the luxuries afforded them by geographical placement or single-issue orientation: Virago in England, Frauenoffensive in West Germany—these could afford to publish more serious works of fiction and even of feminist philosophy, because their audiences had not suffered American educations and still read for enlightenment as well as pleasure. Back home, such women's movement publishers as the Feminist Press generally restricted themselves to reprinting classic works by foremothers in the suffrage movement or publishing texts for women's studies. At other times, however, the Athenians would congratulate themselves on their Golden Mean, that they were not singularly academic, neither too radical nor sold out, that they were, in fact, performing a vital service to “feminist men and women.”

Aware of Athena's behind-the-scenes difficulties, Julian sympathized with their predicament, but still found herself at loggerheads with some of their politics. Every time she went to the cheerful chaos of their offices, she felt guilty about her ambivalence and ambivalent about her guilt. She had worked there regularly as an in-house editor for a year, during one period when Larry and she were particularly desperate for the bail-out only a steady job could provide, without the occupational anxieties of free-lancing. But working in a hierarchy of women who had public nonhierarchical principles produced anxieties all its own for her. On the other hand, free-lancing for Athena could be a pleasure.

No glass-and-chrome sweep of offices in Publishers' Row, not for Athena. First, it would be a bad image. Second, movement purists might picket it. Third, Athena couldn't afford it anyway. So the company was ensconced in Manhattan's jewelry district, a brazen contradiction to its surroundings, where Hassidic men clogged the streets, wearing long black coats and black hats from which their sidecurls dangled like exotic earrings, carrying bulging black briefcases with double locks, never smiling, arguing animatedly with one another in Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, and English about the quality, weight, and cut of diamonds, the price of gold, the latest robbery of Isaac Yeshudel's ultra-secure safe. Rising in the elevator of Athena's building was a lesson in the humility of encountering other human beings' passionate engagements with issues crucial in their lives and utterly irrelevant in one's own:

“So, Moishe. Whaddya think of the blues?”

“Ach. The rough Johannesburg sends us. Moses could strike with his rod and even he couldn't get more than a carat a cut.”

“Three times as much. I pay for platinum
three times
more pennyweight than gold. So you look on the world market? On the world market it costs the same identical. Three times more for me only? What is? I'm a leper?”

“Lissen. I remember when you got factory men who were
workers
. Ya know how I mean? Craftsmen. Geniuses. Dedicated. They loved their work, they didn't care about salaries. Now you have? Spies. Not even Spanish from Spain.
Schwarzes
, darkies. And Germans. Nazis I got working for me. Whaddya wonder? It's a surprise workmanship's down? All they care from is money.”

Sometimes, if Julian entered a crowded elevator and was seen to press the button for the fifteenth floor, silence would descend on the passengers as they ascended. Or a man would scowl, with a mournful shake of his earcurls,