My Summer With George (22 page)

After reading maybe forty romances and winning my second story contest, I was struck by the idea that I might be able to write a romance. My heart began to thump, the way it does when you stumble onto something that is absolutely right. I knew it was something I could do.

Bert and I didn’t go to the movies anymore; we would have needed a sitter, and he never suggested it. Neither did I. As a result, we didn’t have sex: the one seemed connected to the other in his brain. They were connected in mine too, which was why I didn’t suggest a sitter. Of course, for two months before and two months after Lettice was born, we were not supposed to have sex, so maybe he just got out of the habit. I don’t know; we never discussed it. But he was almost never home: when he wasn’t at work or helping his “pop” at the gas station, he was playing poker and drinking beer with other cops. He obviously didn’t miss me. I didn’t miss him. I could work seven days a week if I chose.

I determined to start writing immediately after New Year’s, but Christmas held me up. Somehow, without a car, a babysitter, or much money, I was expected to buy gifts for everyone, Bert’s family and my own. This led to much quarreling with Bert, whose help I absolutely needed. It all ended badly in every way; with great effort, I bought paltry gifts, which still nearly bankrupted us, and Bert and I were not speaking when we—or I—celebrated Lettice’s first Christmas. It took me some time to recover.

But the winter days were so dismal, so unvaried in their pallor and emptiness, that my mind drifted back to my project as the only cheerful or colorful element in a bleak life. By mid-January, I began to imagine characters and a plot—both severely limited by the genre. The style was another matter. I set myself to write paragraphs of description in different styles. I went to the library with Lettice in her carriage, and pulling a half-dozen novels from the shelves, I copied their opening paragraphs. I studied the styles of the romances I’d read. Finally, I decided on a sharp, edgy style rather than the breathy effusiveness or flowery emotionality of most romance writers.

What was most important, though, was my decision not to make my heroines good girls. Most romance heroines were simperingly good: they were a little sickening and, in my view, by my morality or amorality, whatever it was, a bad lesson for the reader. I would give my heroines the author’s imprimatur of moral rightness, but I would make them girls who thought about what
they
wanted, and saw sacrifice as an oppressive form of manipulation. I realized it might be wise to tone down this aspect at first and start with more conventional, less developed heroines. But from the first, I had a long-range plan.

By March, I had decided to set my first novel in a dilapidated antebellum mansion in the Deep South, a place I had never visited. I named the novel after the mansion,
Willowand.
It didn’t mean anything; I just liked the sound of it. My heroine, Elsinore (I was shameless, and snobbishly figured my readers would not know
Hamlet;
my fan mail showed that I underestimated them), was nineteen and an orphan, like me. But a great-uncle she has never met agrees to take her in and has her transported from the cold, rational Northeast of her childhood to a steamy, swampy, Spanish-moss-draped overgrown plantation in Mississippi. No, Louisiana. This first quandary—my ignorance of either state—sent me to the library to study the South. I didn’t take books out; Bert might just possibly notice them. I liked the library: I sat there, one hand rocking the carriage gently as Lettice slept, the other holding a book, happily reading in the quiet, sweet-smelling room. This was research! It was fun! I was having a glorious time; it was like being back in school.

I finally chose Alabama, which would have more antebellum mansions than either of the other states but was equally steamy and swampy. In an illustrated study of the South, I even found a picture of the exact house I had in mind. I studied it for a long time, jotting down its features in an old notebook purchased for my lamented junior-year English course.

I started writing
Willowand
in April 1951. It began: “The girl woke with a start as the train lurched, and her eyes widened as she saw through the window a soft green land where even the houses lacked hard edges, blurring into the trees.” I was tentative and nervous. Though I wrote fast, each day I crossed out much of what I’d written the day before, so my progress was slow. Just as before, I hid my manuscript and crossed-out sheets. I enjoyed plotting this secrecy almost as much as I did the writing, and thought I would write my second novel about a girl who is imprisoned and under surveillance—albeit by superficially friendly forces—and uses such tricks to escape. It would be a romance, but it was also my life.

I finished my first manuscript in July. I was so pleased with myself for completing it, and for doing what I thought was a good job, that days passed before I realized I had no idea what to do next. I decided to consult my sisters, the New York sophisticates. As always when we called each other, they got on separate extensions, and we all talked at once. They squealed approbation when I told them what I had done.

“But I don’t know what to do now. I’ve made a list of the companies that publish romances, but they’re all in New York, and I don’t know how to get an entrée into them…”

“Arlene Scott,” Susan said. “She’s a secretary at a publishing house. I met her through Ginger, an old roommate, who worked at Stratford Books before she got married. She’ll know what to do. I’ll call her tomorrow and call you back.”

“Umm. One other thing…I haven’t told Bert about this.”

There was a long silence on the other end as this got digested.

“Okay,” Susan said finally. “So if he’s home, I’m just calling to see how my one and only niece is. How is she, by the way?”

I waited in tantalized agony, pins and needles in my fingers and toes. But several weeks elapsed before Susan called with instructions to mail the manuscript to a friend of Arlene’s called Nadine, who was a secretary at Swan Books, which specialized in romances. “Nadine’s friendly with a couple of editors there, and she’ll ask them to read it,” Susan concluded.

It was my turn to squeal.

My brother’s and sisters’ lives had changed over the past two years. Tina had gone off to Hollywood to make her fortune, and we rarely heard from her. A few months after Lettice was born, a crumpled package arrived in the mail, containing a tiny outfit, already too small for her, with a card from Tina, but no news. Susan was now secretary to the vice president of her agency and made very good money for a woman. And she was engaged to a designer in the agency’s art department, Eldon Willis. Eldon owned a car and had driven Susan and Merry up to Bridgeport to welcome Lettice into the world. Merry was still the same, as she lamented. And she still read romances.

After Lettice was born, Jerry and Delia bought a house in the country, just outside Bridgeport, a wonderful big old place like our house in Millington. Delia had learned to drive and had her own car now, and Jerry, sounding cheerful, told me they were trying to start a family. I rarely spoke to Delia, but Jerry stopped over a couple of times a month and took me and Lettice out for a little drive, for ice cream or a trip to a park. He was a godsend. He knew I never went anywhere but the supermarket. Maybe he wasn’t a good person in the way Delia was, but in my book he was better.

The family had split apart in some ways. Living in New York, my sisters were exposed to things Jerry and Delia never thought about. They went to art museums once in a while, and to plays; they saw movies that didn’t come to Bridgeport; and their speech had improved. They acted and sounded like educated middle-class women, whereas Jerry’s speech had deteriorated from his working in a factory with uneducated people, and since he never went anywhere to speak of, he seemed sort of—I hate to say this—provincial. When they were all together, my sisters and Jerry, they seemed like members of two different classes. Yet Jerry and Delia were probably better off financially than Susan and Eldon and, certainly, than Merry, who was still just a secretary in a pool. Someday, though, Eldon might make more money than Jerry. Class was a subtle thing.

Listening to my siblings, I realized that my own speech was decaying swiftly from constant exposure to Bert and his family, with whom we frequently had Sunday dinner. I thought about Shaw’s
Pygmalion
and realized that my Millington teachers had hoped I’d improve myself at Mount Holyoke. Maybe I could still get educated—not by college but by the women’s magazines. They, after all, were the only honest and direct source of truth about women in the world. They and only they openly admitted that for women, class and money were everything. Oh, they mentioned virtue, touted as the highest good: women had to be virtuous. But if you considered what they really meant by virtuous, it had to do with appearance and manners. The virtuous girl was rewarded with marriage to a prosperous, faithful, well-spoken man. For a girl like me, a girl who had fallen, redemption was the only hope. And redemption was marriage to a man with some money, a man who wore a suit to work. And the only way to get him was to speak well, dress well, be humble and chaste. I sadly realized I was already unredeemable.

F
ROM THE QUALITY OF
the light, I guessed it was time to get up. Yawning, stretching, and listening to bird chatter (which had dwindled a bit since daybreak), I thought about the day ahead. Tuesday. A croissant and coffee for breakfast, work until noon, a swim. Then I’d have lunch and rest, sitting in the sun reading my
New York Times.
Afterward, I might do a little weeding. A gardener took care of the grounds, but I liked to put my hands in the soil once in a while. Later in the afternoon, Alma Nutley, the publisher, was holding a tea for the British writer Edith, Lady Haswell, who was staying on the Island with her for a few weeks. It should be an elegant affair, everyone in high gear. I would probably end up going out for dinner with someone there. If not, I could nuke my leftover blanquette de veau from dinner at Citron the other night. It would be a pleasant day.

After my swim, I sat outside on a chaise, drying out, a notebook on my lap, a sandwich and a pitcher of iced tea, the portable phone, and my Rolodex on the table beside me. I called the plumber to look at the outdoor shower, which was dripping; I made a dentist appointment. Then I lay back in the lovely warm sun and sipped iced tea. I was sleepy, and didn’t feel like reading the
Times.
I baked in the sun, remembering my first acceptance…

It took nearly two months for an editor to read and approve my manuscript, but eventually someone did and called Susan—I couldn’t leave my own number—to say her company would publish it and pay me five hundred dollars. Susan called me at home. “Can you talk?” she screamed, and gave me the news.

Of course, they wanted a few changes, and needed to set up a meeting. I was going to have to go to New York. For a while, that seemed impossible. I considered telling Bert the whole thing, but the mere thought of getting him to understand what I had been doing—and why—was overwhelming. Besides, I intended to leave him without any warning. I knew he’d try to stop me, not because he loved me or even enjoyed my company, but because I was his property, I belonged to him. I didn’t want to fight with him or listen to him yell and threaten. It would be a waste of time.

But I could tell Jerry now: I’d hesitated to confide in him, afraid he might discourage me. Jerry couldn’t take Lettice for me, but Delia could, and Jerry could talk her into doing it. She had finally become pregnant and, forced to leave her job in her fourth month, was sitting at home, bored and miserable. And indeed, it all worked out.

So in October 1951, just before my first wedding anniversary, I took the bus to New York. There, I met with Eda Doyle, an editor at Swan Books. She was a well-dressed, hard-looking woman in her late forties, a little portly, a dyed blonde with a thick, hard mouth and skin toughened by years of foundation makeup. But she would show herself over time to be a woman of great kindness. She suggested some changes and said they’d like the finished manuscript in a month. I signed a contract without even reading it. She asked if I had an idea for another book. I told her my idea about a paranoiac heroine, and she liked it. It was not all that original, even I knew that, but given the conditions of my life, I’d probably recounted it with some fervor. I said I’d like more money for it—$750. Her eyebrows rose, but she agreed. “If we like it, if we accept it, okay.

“One more thing,” she added tentatively. “We feel—well, the authors of romances usually use pen names. They like to take somewhat romantic names…”

“Yes, I know. And Elsa Schutz isn’t romantic.” I’d written the book under my maiden name. In fact, I never in my life called myself Elsa Shiefendorfer. “I’ve picked out a name.”

“Yes?”

I felt my face grow hot. I was as embarrassed as if I were laying my sexual fantasies on the desk for her perusal. “Hermione Beldame,” I offered shyly.

She looked as if she were going to choke. After a moment, she repeated, “Hermione Beldame?”

I watched her face.

She finally met my eyes. Was her complexion a little pink? “Let me think about it. You like it, huh? You think it’s beautiful?”

My eyes were somewhat damp, and I made my lips thin and mean to keep them from trembling. I could tell she didn’t think it was beautiful. She thought it was ludicrous. I wanted to sink under the desk and disappear, but I held my head up stiffly.

“It’s a name I think women will like. Trust me.”

My authoritative tone made her head snap up. “Really.” She looked at me sharply. Was I an idiot hick twenty-year-old or a smart cookie who had figured the angles? I could see her mulling this over. I decided to play it tough.

“Yes. I’m sure of it.”

In fact, I was. I had tried it out on Delia, Susan, Merry, even Jerry. All of them felt it had solidity and trustworthiness, but also a fluttery, lacy femininity. I left Eda’s office buoyant. I was launched on my secret career, on my way out of Bridgeport and away from Bert, on the freedom road.