The Road Taken (8 page)

Chapter Ten

In 1928 Rose and Ben joyfully welcomed their first child, their daughter Peggy Ann. She was a placid and beautiful infant, with blond curls, and the blue eyes that ran in Rose’s family. Rose weighed her every week and dutifully inscribed each weight in Peggy’s pink baby book. The baby book also gave helpful hints, which followed the child-rearing edicts of the day, and Rose followed them.

“Don’t let Baby suck finger, pacifier, etc. It causes irregular teeth, etc., later.
Never
play with Baby till over six months—then, seldom.
Excitement harms.
Baby Must Have: Regular Hours for Sleeping, Feeding, etc. Good habits are as easy to form as bad ones. Protection from Contagion—No Kissing on mouth or hands! ‘Colds’ or disease never allowed near. Keep off floor—Dirt, Germs, Danger! Whooping-cough is often fatal to infants.”

Peggy’s first words were
Dada
and
Tick-tock.
She said Mama much later. Rose felt a little hurt. She wondered if it was because she, the reluctantly strict mother, let Peggy scream for food or attention when it was not time to give them to her, and that Ben, the kindhearted father, couldn’t bear to hear these cries and went into the room to pick her up.

“She’s a Daddy’s girl,” Ben said, pleased.

But of course he couldn’t nurse her, so Rose knew she was still number one. Now when she went to the park with Elsie and the other mothers, she had her own baby, and was now a true member of the club.

Hugh brought little Peggy a Victorian English highchair from his shop. You could take it apart when the baby was older and put it together again to become a small chair and table for meals. He was devoted to his niece, and loved to play with her during the brief periods when the book said it was allowed.

Since travel was not recommended for small children because of all the threatening and unknown germs that might be encountered, William and Celia made their first trip to New York to see their new grandchild. Rose and Ben took them to a few nice restaurants, but not to any speakeasies, and Rose took them to see the sights. The economy was booming, the city was prosperous, and all sorts of new tunnels and highways had been built and were being built, so Manhattan was no longer in any way an isolated island. The Smiths were only two of a stream of tourists. Celia was thrilled with everything, but Rose had the feeling that her father was only being good-natured when he smiled as she dragged them around. She could see he had lost so much of his energy in these later years, and when they left he said, “New York is too busy for me.”

“Not for me,” Celia said. “I could live here easily. We’ll be back.”

“I hope not,” Hugh said when she was gone.

But whether or not they would come back was not an issue, because in the fall the stock market crashed. People were jumping out of windows. Fortunes, that had only existed on paper because they had been bought on margin, were now lost. Since wills always had to be written and executed, Ben did not lose his job, but he had to take a cut in pay. There was only enough money for essentials now. Hugh’s antique shop became more of an upscale secondhand store, as people were forced to sell their cherished belongings to eat and pay the rent. Maude and Walter, with four growing children to feed, sold their car, and Maude tearfully told Rose on the phone that she’d had an abortion. In fact, illegal abortions soared, and the disguised birth control ads became more specific, if you knew what you were looking for. Lysol now promised “Complete freedom from fear.”

People who knew how simply stopped having babies. An only child was the norm, two was the sign of a family with some money. But in the midst of these dark days Rose decided she had to have another child before she got too old. She didn’t want Peggy to grow up alone. She’d had a wonderful family to grow up with, and what if something happened to her the way it had to her mother? Peggy would be all by herself. If Ben remarried, who knew what the woman would be like? Rose couldn’t help worrying. It seemed she worried about everything lately, and who would not?

Their second child, another girl, who looked just like Peggy, was born in 1931. They named her Joan, one of the most popular names of the year. There were four other Joans in the hospital when Rose was there. She liked giving her child a modern name; Joan would be a modern woman.

But in the hospital when Rose looked at the new baby she was disturbed by a small red blister on the child’s forehead. “What is this?”

“It’s a hemangioma,” the doctor said. “A blood blister. When she grows older and combs her hair it will bleed. Better to get rid of it right away, while she’s a baby and doesn’t feel much pain. We have a new medical miracle these days, thanks to Madame Curie. You’ve heard of radium?”

“Yes,” Rose said. “Of course.”

“I will put a small piece of lead on the baby’s forehead with a hole in it where the blood blister is,” the doctor said, “and then I’ll put a piece of radium over the hole and it will simply burn the hemangioma away.”

“Radium must be so strong,” Rose murmured, alarmed.

“Isn’t it wonderful? The same thing that watchmakers use to paint luminous numbers on dials can also cure disease. I’ll do it when she’s a month old.”

After the procedure, Joan cried and screamed for days and nights. It was obvious that the doctor’s idea of not feeling much pain was totally subjective. Then the site ulcerated, and whenever Rose had to clean it Joan screamed more hysterically, and Rose was near tears herself. Finally it healed, leaving a round, shallow, indented scar, which made Joan’s forehead look as if the soft baby head bones had not closed—but of course they had not closed yet because she was so young. Rose wondered if they would.

“What have I done to her?” she said to Hugh. “The doctor worried about her combing her hair, and now he just says, ‘She’ll wear her hair in bangs, she’ll be fine.’”

“Is he a doctor or a hairdresser?” Hugh asked. He was furious. His love for his two nieces was as fierce as if he had been their father.

As for Ben, he seemed not to want to deal with it at all.

But then, eventually, the indented scar stopped looking so raw, and finally turned a mottled white, although it never went away. Madame Curie died of radium poisoning after all her years of touching it and working with it. The watchmakers, who had licked the tips of their brushes to make them pointed before they dipped them into the luminous radium paint, were dying of leukemia. Radium, although it turned out to have other uses and to be very valuable, had been, like so many other cures and panaceas, elevated into a firestorm of overenthusiasm for just a moment, a mistake. At school, Joan charged her friends a nickel each to look at her “horrible scar.” Whether or not she was living with a bomb inside her body no one knew, and after a while, because she seemed normal in every way, they more or less forgot about it.

During the Depression the thing that seemed to save everyone was going to the movies. The plots were fanciful, the movie theaters even more so, their interiors resembling exotic palaces. In summer the movie theaters were the only places that were air-conditioned—a large sign outside promised:
Cooool.
On dish night you would get a free plate, if you wanted it, along with your entertainment—a further incentive for struggling families to part with their money. Talking pictures had been around for a while, but the technology was still primitive enough so that everyone on the screen had a high-pitched voice. After a while you believed they really did. Many of the actors had been trained on the New York stage, so they had accents that were almost English. You could also believe that all upper-class people spoke that way, and maybe they did.

America’s darling was blond, curly-haired little Shirley Temple, with her fat cheeks and tiny mouth, tap-dancing up and down staircases, pouting and singing her way into everyone’s heart. Peggy and Joan begged for tap-dancing lessons, and finally Rose found a woman who was willing to teach them for very little money. No matter what, you gave your children the best you could, whether it was piano lessons or dance, and you sacrificed other things that weren’t so important, like new clothes for yourself.

Although the girls liked Shirley Temple, Rose’s fantasy was Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. The top hat, white tie and tails, the twinkling feet, the impossibly glamorous chiffon tea gowns with the trailing hems that never tripped dancing Ginger . . . and what were these places? Who lived in these mansions? Who went to those parties? You believed they existed, somewhere.

Outside in the real world, hungry families with worn, lined, prematurely old faces and missing teeth left the Midwestern dust bowl in battered trucks to try to find work in California. Rose had never seen eyes so bewildered as those in the photographs of the migrant workers. Their lives were a tragedy of nature’s whim as well as the Depression. She knew she and Ben were lucky to have all the good things they still had.

A special treat for the Carson family was to go out to eat at the Automat. They did that once a week. Rose and Ben and Peggy and Joan, and often Hugh, would take the subway uptown to West 57th Street, to their favorite Automat (the flagship one, the best and brightest, they felt), where they would get a fistful of nickels to put into the coin slots. Behind small clean glass windows, in compartments, were perfect slices of apple pie, little pots of baked beans with a square of bacon on top of each one, sandwiches, roast beef, clam chowder, cake. Coffee flowed from urns with animal heads for spigots. The children loved to choose their food; they might have been buying art. There were condiments: catsup, mustard, and hot water for tea. Poor people would make soup from the free catsup and hot water, and Rose would warn the girls not to stare. Then the family would sit at a table, sometimes with these same strangers, sometimes with people who looked rich, and eat.

Rose was thirty-eight now, and Hugh was thirty-three. He was still a bachelor, still living with them, as he most likely would forever, unless he surprised them with a life of his own. Not that he didn’t have a life of his own; he went out late in the evenings and sometimes stayed out all night, he had friends, obviously, he was busy. Rose assumed he dated women, although she never met any of them. But Hugh was so attractive and lively she was sure women liked him. There were many bachelors in the Village, “confirmed bachelors,” and sometimes they actually did marry in middle age, but more often not. Secretly, Rose would have liked Hugh to stay with them forever, with things just as they were. Uncle Hugh’s position in the household was so entrenched, so valuable, that by now Rose couldn’t imagine their family’s life without his presence, and neither could her girls, who had never known it any other way.

That year, to her surprise, Rose became pregnant again. She had thought it was less likely to happen at her age and hadn’t been as careful as she might have been. Although there wasn’t much money, not for an instant did she and Ben entertain the thought of not bringing this child into the world. She had grown up in a household with many children and this new one made her feel she was recreating her childhood. She and Ben were hoping for a boy this time.

But it was a girl. Ginger Carson, named after Rose’s idol, Ginger Rogers, was a January baby. Of the three children, she was the one who looked like Rose. Straight brown hair, the family’s blue eyes, and a sober nature. When Rose looked into those little blue eyes she saw sunshine, though, and a fierce intelligence. Ginger would be a child with secrets. Rose could tell.

Peggy was the most like her aunt Maude: rounded and glowing, a caretaker to her dolls and probably later to everyone who needed her. Joan, in the middle as Rose had been, a child who had known pain early, was the rebel. Sometimes Rose thought Joan looked for trouble in the search to find her identity. She got bad marks in deportment at school and then made the teacher laugh and forgive her. She could write an excellent note of apology, and often had to. “Please let me come back to Shop. I promise not to ‘gab.’ This year if you let me come back I would like to make bookends in the shape of a horse. I enclose a drawing of my plan.” This at seven years old.

In Europe there was an increasing threat of world war. Hitler’s army was devouring little countries, and it had become apparent, despite America’s continuing policy of noninvolvement, that he was going to be dangerous. Jewish refugees, the ones who could escape and were allowed in, told stories of Nazis and anti-Semitism, of yellow stars and pogroms, of the night of broken glass, but few people listened. America was cracking down on the arrival of immigrants; there were quotas, and then it was as if a door had shut. But finally, in 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and England and France declared war against the Axis: Germany, Italy, and Japan.

English children appeared in American schools, a few in Peggy’s class, sent away from the shrieking buzz bombs that were falling on their country. “What a short time ago it seems that we had the Cavalry,” Ben mused, “and those frightening zeppelins the Germans used—and our little planes. Now the airplanes and bombs we have make them seem like lethal toys.”

Celia had been back to visit New York several times, usually bringing Harriette, who now had a job as a secretary at a small local law firm, but remained resolutely single. It seemed no one was good enough. William, who really disliked traveling, allowed himself to be brought once to see each of Rose’s babies, and then stayed home and let Celia enjoy herself, while he waited contentedly for everyone’s Thanksgiving and Christmas visits.

Under Celia’s tutelage Harriette had become an attractive and fashionable young woman, but Celia was worried about what would become of her. She wasn’t worried about Daisy anymore: Daisy had married a lovely local young man, who worked at the bank with Walter, and she had given birth to a baby boy. But now Celia had decided that Harriette would have a better chance of meeting a successful, interesting husband if she looked for him in New York, and so whenever they came Rose got all her friends to bring around brothers and cousins and friends, and gave a cocktail party.