Naked in the Promised Land (50 page)

"If musicality is genetic, she won't be," I confess. "I'm practically tone deaf."

"Early training's the key," my music professor insists, and every night she croons to my naked belly, sends her fine contralto right through my navel into the delicate seashell ears inside me. It's a charming old British folk song that she sings. My Jewish child is bound to adore it.

She wanted me to go with her to her parents' home in San Diego for Thanksgiving. "I've told them all about you and the baby," she said.

A silver-haired, blue-eyed family. Her mother was dainty and sheltered-looking, and the house was filled with delicate heirlooms. Her father was kindly, gentle beneath a curmudgeonly exterior, a retired lieutenant colonel who still met every month with the officers with whom he'd helped liberate France thirty years earlier.

"I think it's wonderful about the baby," Phyllis's mother said in her high, sweet voice as we washed the Thanksgiving dishes together. "Just wonderful," and she patted my soapy hand with hers.

On Saturday the MacDougalls came to play bridge with the Irwins, and Phyllis and I got ready to go and see a Woody Allen film. Mr. MacDougall had been in France with Fred Irwin, and he'd kept his poker-stiff military bearing. As I was putting on my lipstick in the guest bathroom, I heard Fred defend me to his old army buddy: "She didn't want a husband, for God's sake; she wanted a baby, and that's her right."

When I'd thought of having a baby, for years it had been for the sake of my mother and Rae: I longed to give them this little entity who would bring new hope and some joy into their lives. I longed to rescue them from the fate Hitler had prepared for their kind—for our kind—by calling a Sarah or an Avrom back into existence and nourishing it so that it might someday, in its turn, add others to our tiny, decimated tribe. But now when I thought of having the baby, my whole body was charged with a powerful feeling for it and it
alone.
There was almost no minute I spent by myself when I didn't protect with fingers laced and strong as steel the belly that sheltered it, this small, unknown being inside me whom I loved already so fiercely and unconditionally, as I'd learned to love from my mother and My Rae.

I go to natural childbirth classes because I want to be awake for that instant when my child takes its first mouthful of air into its lungs. We meet in a large, mirrored room: a long-haired, Earth Mother teacher; eleven pregnant women; and eleven partners who will coach us through labor—ten husbands and Phyllis. The partners learn to take hard Lamaze breaths along with us pregnant women, to push as we will have to push. They sit behind us on the floor, their hands wrapped around our abdomens. In the mirror I see Phyllis's hands around my big stomach, laced as I've often laced my own fingers, cherishing what's inside me. I love what I see.

We didn't go to the campus on the last Monday in January because it was a university holiday, but I hadn't missed a day of work throughout the pregnancy. In all my thirty-four years I'd never been as hardy—not a single cough or sneeze all fall or winter. Not one tiny headache. Not even a broken nail. Now I'd spent the voluptuously free day reading on Phyllis's couch, walking on the ditch bank and watching a fat muskrat build its house, going to the barn with Phyllis to feed a foal who had a burnished gold coat and comically long legs. After dinner we watched the news, and just as MacNeil or Lehrer said his last word, a butterfly began to beat tiny wings against the walls of my womb, wingbeats so soft they almost tickled.

"It's time," I told Phyllis.

"It's January twenty-seventh," she said. "Mozart's birthday."

Twenty minutes later, before we reached Fresno Community Hospital, the butterfly had become a biting, burning panther. I opened the car window and drew great drafts of cooling January air into my lungs. But he didn't let me suffer long.

"It's a boy!" the doctor shouted at my final push, at nine fifty-nine
P.M.,
and I knew that Avrom was who I wanted and needed the baby to be all along.

Fresno had two synagogues, and though I'd never been inside either one, when I was about six months pregnant I went to the one closest to my house, Beth Jacob, to ask the rabbi if he knew of a girl who could live in my home and take care of my baby while I worked.

"My wife would like such a job," Rabbi Schwartz, a little man not much taller than my aunt, said with an incongruous Cockney accent. "She wouldn't live there, but she'd stay until you came home every day."

Bea Schwartz had the rabbi's Cockney accent and wore a leopardskin coat. Her hair was dyed midnight black, and her red fingernails jutted out an inch beyond the tips of her fingers. She had a distracted expression, a look my mother had sometimes had when I was a child.

I couldn't sleep. "Those fingernails," I wailed.

"But they raised two kids," Phyllis reminded me. "The rabbi said their son is a doctor."

The second day after Avrom was born, he and I came home. I hadn't planned to take all the sixteen weeks' sick leave due me, but now I loved the animal luxury of doing nothing but nestling my baby in my bed, nuzzling his rose-petal cheeks, watching over his sleep, adoring the perfecttion of the tiny pink nails on his fingers and toes. I knew nothing outside the wonder of him.

But on the fourth day the vice president called. The University Budget Committee needed to see the plans I'd drawn up for the faculty retreat on innovative instruction. Where were they? Clearly an assistant academic vice president could not take weeks away from the university to be with a baby. "I'll be in this afternoon," I told him, and with a troubled heart I telephoned the Schwartzes.

"Not to worry," the rabbi said. "We'll come right over."

Here are our days: I rise at seven, and I nurse Avrom and prepare baby formula for the hours I'll be gone. Bea Schwartz and the rabbi arrive at seven forty-five, and I leave for the university. I call at nine o'clock, at ten, at eleven. Almost always it's Rabbi Schwartz who answers the phone. (Won't the congregation be angry that he's taken other employment?) "He's doing smashing," the rabbi says. "Not to worry."

At noon, Phyllis and I hurry back to Harrison Street so I can nurse Avrom. Almost always, Rabbi Schwartz is walking the floor with my baby in his arms, crooning off-key British lullabies while Bea sits on the couch with a faraway look. Avrom bats his big eyes and smiles toothlessly up at the rabbi.

Phyllis and I lunch on a hunk of bread and a chunk of cheese and hurry back to campus, where I spend the afternoon organizing the spring faculty retreat, thinking all the while of how the rabbi holds my son in his arms.

At five o'clock I go home and nurse Avrom, and Phyllis rushes off to the ranch to feed the animals. But by six-thirty she's back on Harrison Street, cooing over Avrom, carrying him everywhere in her arms while I fix our dinner. We eat it as he slumbers in his blue bassinet at the side of our table. Then I nurse him once more and dandle him, and Phyllis sings to him. Together we place him in his bassinet again before we tumble into my bed. At 2
A.M.
he sings to us, sings us awake with his powerful lungs. Sometimes I get up to hold him in my arms and nurse him at my breast. Sometimes Phyllis gets up and goes into the
kitchen to warm his bottle, then holds him in her arms and nurses him. The alarm buzzes at six-thirty and we tear away from each other. As I float in and out of a few more snatches of sleep, I hear the front door shut and her car start. She must drive back to the ranch to feed the animals before she goes off to work.

"Let's live together," I tell Phyllis soon, because already we're a family.

"Do you know what my father just said?" She laughed after one of her weekly phone calls to San Diego. "He said that since we're raising Avrom together, why can't we call him Irwin too."

I'd worried since my son's birth: If something were to happen to me, Rae would be too old to take care of him, and my mother and Albert were unthinkable. The indifferent state would ship him off to a place like the Vista Del Mar Home for Orphans, where poor Arthur Grossman was sent when we were kids. They wouldn't care that Phyllis loved him. What could she use to prove her tie? "Yes, that's his name from now on," I said. "Avrom Irwin Faderman."

There are so many people who are glad my son has come into the world.

When he started to talk, he called me
Mommy
and my partner
Mama Phyllis.
We couldn't stop to think about how we looked to people outside because we were too busy living our lives, but now and then word got back to us: some lesbians in Visalia who asked an acquaintance if the "bizarre story" they heard, about "a professor who had herself artificially inseminated," was really true; someone on campus who remarked to a colleague that Phyllis and I were "engaged in a social experiment." How could they know the love among the three of us and the caring? Or that as life made
me,
the family
I
made was the only one I could live in? How could they know that Avrom made up for what Hitler and what Moishe took away, that I loved him with such tenderness and joy and wonder—as though I'd invented motherhood? How could they know he was to me the completion of a sacred mission?

A woman who had a child out of wedlock in 1975 could not become a college president. I wasn't unaware when I chose to get pregnant that it might abort my career as an administrator, but now I knew for sure. My
administrative colleagues never said a word about Avrom after he was born—any more than they did before he was born. As far as they were concerned, it was as though the funny protrusion around my abdomen had just magically deflated. Of course they thought me odd. No matter what administrative skills I might have, I would never really be one of them.

But did I want to be, or was it blind ambition that had made me dream of becoming a college president, just as I'd dreamt once of becoming a movie star? I truly missed the classroom. The next school year, I decided, would be my last one in administration. After Avrom's 2
A.M.
feedings stopped, my reading started again. I pored over books that would one day prepare me to teach lesbian and gay literature. The books absorbed me and claimed me, as always, in ways that organizing the next faculty symposium never could. What luxury it was: to sit in the den after we put Avrom to bed and lose myself in the written word—especially now in words about love between women, which had changed so much from the days when I found the lugubrious
Twilight Lovers
or
Odd Girl Out
on the paperback book racks in drugstores. But I wished that some historian would place it all in context for me—trace it from the earliest images, trace what it must have been like for women who made their lives together a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, women who loved each other as Phyllis and I did now.

"Why don't you do it?" Phyllis asked.

I laughed at her musician's naiveté. "It takes scholarly skills I don't have. I'm not a historian."

"What skills don't you have?" Phyllis said. "
Become a movie actress," my mother had said.

I dismissed it that evening, but I couldn't dismiss it permanently. There was no such field as "lesbian history." With whatever scholarly skills I did possess, why couldn't I try to help create it? Who else in the whole country was in as perfect a position as I? I'd done enough work for my dissertation and my two textbooks to have some notion about research. I was a tenured full professor with absolute job security, and whatever my colleagues might think privately, they couldn't punish me for being a homosexual historian any more than they could punish me
for being an unwed mother. I had a family that kept me at home, a partner to share responsibilities with me, and when I wasn't at school I had time to work while my infant son slept. Why shouldn't I do it?

"Do it," Phyllis urged again. "You can do it."

My writing too was a sheaf of oats.

My mother and Albert and Rae come to visit. Albert carries Avrom all over the living room, calling him "Yankeleh." "Maybe I better take him for a while, Dad," I say after he tries for half an hour to teach the baby to say "Good morning, how are you?" in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. But then my mother wants to hold him, and I place him in her open arms. She sits with him on her lap, touches his little fingers with a delicate pinkie, gazes at him with a dreamy look. Is it me she sees? Is it Hirschel? "Avremeleh," she calls him. We let him sleep in his bassinet for a while, then my aunt goes to get him, to hold him, to sing "Raisins and Almonds" to him in her foghorn voice. "Under Avremeleh's little cradle," she blares in Yiddish, "stands a pure white goat..." He looks up at her with huge love eyes.

Though my aunt has asked me numerous times during the visit why Roger doesn't come and see his son, before she gets into the back seat of Albert's car for the drive home, she turns to Phyllis to instruct her: "Take care on Lilly and the baby."