Back Then (27 page)

“And when I get back,” she said, as if she hadn't heard what he'd said, “I think I'm going to be sick.”

PART IV

CHAPTER 11

When Joe and I
were in Italy on our honeymoon, I had picked up a letter with
discovery
's return address on it at the Rome office of American Express.

“It can't be good news,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” Joe said.

“Just a feeling,” I said. “Let's sit down.”

It was as I suspected: Vance was leaving the magazine for good; he wasn't getting the support he thought owed him by Pocket Books. I handed the letter to Joe.

“He doesn't say it's final. It's says right here—this is only temporary.”

“I know Vance,” I said. “
Discovery
has lost its charm. So he blames Pocket Books. Herb loves the magazine; it makes him feel like he's got if not a hand, at least a finger or two, in belles lettres.” If I hadn't been on my honeymoon I would have howled in fury. For the rest of our trip I tried not to think about Vance's letter and what it meant in my life. When we got back to New York two weeks later, Vance had left town. No one knew where he was, though Mexico was suspected.

“I'll never get another job like that,” I said.

“Probably not,” Joe said. “It was a dream job.”

Discovery
's
death had made me grieve, more for myself than for the future of literature. American writing could limp along without me, but what was I going to do with myself all day for the rest of my life?

Herbert Alexander summoned me a day or two after I got back to work tying up the last of the magazine's chores.
Discovery,
he said, was only sleeping; it didn't have to die. “How would you like to be editor?”

“Editor of what?” I asked.

“What do you think?” he said. “Editor of
discovery.
”

“But I'm only twenty-four.”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“Do you really think I could do it?”

“Why else would I be asking you?”

I told Herb I would let him know in a couple of days. I wanted to accept but was terrified of making bad decisions, worried that my judgment was insufficiently developed, uncertain that I would be able to deal with balky, cocky, or pissed-off authors, certain that the responsibilities would crush me. Justin said I should go ahead and give it a try. This was the first time I had been faced with a major choice involving other people. Over a weekend I struggled, trying to decide whether or not to take the job. Part of me, having apprenticed for two years, felt I could do it, I knew perfectly well how to drive this car. Another part, employing a fainthearted and timorous voice said, Your feet don't reach the pedals. Forget it. This was a man's job. Faintheartedness prevailed and I told Herb I didn't think I could meet his expectations—which, in a sense, called his own judgment to account. He was not at all pleased, disgusted really, and told me I was a foolish girl. Then he offered me a job in the Pocket Books publicity department. I accepted this paler offering and for a while turned out news releases and an inhouse newsletter.

While not especially demanding, my job was agreeable enough; it took me into the offices of other Pocket Books workers, where I interviewed them for the newsletter and traded office gossip. The older men were almost invariably flirtatious and jokey, the women more subdued, often walking around with their eyes downcast. I had an office to myself with a window looking down twenty-seven floors to the skating rink in Rockefeller Center. No one checked up on me; I sometimes took a very long lunch hour, eating with my new husband (my ring was still shiny and unscratched) who worked seven blocks away; we'd go to the American Bar and Grill on Sixth Avenue or one of several little Italian places he'd discovered. Occasionally I had lunch with Bob Kotlowitz or Sue Kaufman or a Barnard friend, Marian Magid, who worked for Norman Podhoretz at
Commentary
magazine and who had a sardonic sense of humor. Always at least half an hour late, Marian would show up breathless with an assortment of ingenious excuses. After work I picked Joe up at Abrams and the two of us walked home to 303 East Thirty-seventh Street or, after we moved, to 242 East Nineteenth Street. Sometimes we had a few people in for dinner, sometimes we got dressed up in our finery and went uptown to a party given, usually, by one of his friends.

When Bob Kotlowitz set me to writing back-cover copy, I figured they must be grooming me for an editor's mantle. The first of these was for a reissue of the Raymond Chandler thriller
The Lady in the Lake
. Bob explained that my copy should tease the reader with just enough plot to hook him without giving away the whole story. At the same time, it had to make an instant pitch. I took the book back to my office and dug in. The more I read, the more lost I became; following the narrative and keeping track of who was doing what to whom and why was about as easy as following an overgrown trail through a dense forest, and I felt like the child I once was, confronted with a math problem whose theorem I had forgotten. After finishing the novel and taking extensive notes, I typed a draft and brought it to Bob. “This doesn't do it,” he said. “It limps. I want it to dash.” I could feel tears gathering. After several more drafts, in which I managed not to reveal that I never
had
unraveled the plot, I gave Bob something he could accept, while he confessed that he had deliberately given me a task formidable for even the most experienced copywriter; Raymond Chandler, he said, was justifiably known for his labyrinthine plots. Should I take that as a compliment? Everything else from then on, he assured me, would be a breeze.

A few days later Herb asked me to select poems for and write a preface to a new edition of Ogden Nash verse, a book that had done extremely well. Ogden Nash was probably the most read, the most popular composer of light verse then going—and oh so mid-century polite, giving matters sexual the tiniest little tweak:

Compared to writing a précis of
The Lady in the Lake
, doing the Nash edition was a piece of cake.

My brassy presumption—that I deserved to do, day in and day out, the thing I most enjoyed—made me restless at Pocket Books; we were not a perfect match. I wanted something with a mouthful of very literary teeth; my brain was dozing. When I paid Herb my farewell visit, I was close to tears. He didn't seem to understand why I chose not to stay on and become a full-fledged editor—something he assured me would happen sooner rather than later. Unable to identify the true source of my restlessness, I couldn't give him an answer that satisfied either one of us.

More
or less by default, I enrolled in Columbia's graduate school, department of English, and managed to stay there for three months. The only class in which I couldn't help dozing—more from boredom than fatigue—was Gilbert Highet's classical literature, mainly because he was more a very smart actor than a teacher, gesturing, pacing, yelling, reading long passages of Homer aloud; some people whose devotion to serious matters was more profound than mine dismissed him as a “showman.” A good teacher didn't need to carry on as if he were Laurence Olivier. In my other courses everyone (all headed toward professorships) took down every word the teacher uttered; all you could see was the tops of their heads. Another mismatch.

Mainly
by default my next job brought me to Park Avenue South and into the New York office of the ancient and decorous Boston publishing firm of Houghton Mifflin Co. HMCo brought out surefire sellers like Winston Churchill and grand literary writers like Carson McCullers and the debut stories of Philip Roth. They “discovered” Rachel Carson. Since the early 1930s they had been publishing the English-language edition of Adolf Hitler's
Mein Kampf
.

I had heard about an opening in the editorial department from someone who knew someone, the network functioning as it should. I showed up in the office on Park Avenue South for an interview with Jack Leggett, the New York editor, who told me I was overqualified, which I was, but it didn't matter because I couldn't seem to find anything else. A cheerful Yale man with a well-tempered literary sensibility and an enthusiasm that was constantly being thwarted by the top editor in Boston—a fierce woman married to the poet Robert Hillyer—Jack too was an ideal boss; every instruction was issued as a request. “If you feel like it, why don't you. . . .” On paper I was assistant editor; in actuality a peon whose principal labor was reading manuscripts. Some were so rotten you could smell it by the second paragraph. But since you were supposed to write a report for every manuscript submitted, coming in either over the transom or through an agent, you had to go far enough past paragraph two to write a report that sounded as if you had read the whole thing. I felt like a Dickens character, forced to sit on a stool rubbing blacking into gentlemen's boots from morn till night. During the switchboard operator's lunch hour I was often asked to fill in for her, routing calls by inserting what looked like miniature fire hoses into round holes on a panel and then holding back a small Bakelite lever, causing the phone in someone's office to ring. “Houghton Mifflin, good afternoon.” I understood that this midday task was a kind of mortification and that they wouldn't have dared ask any man in the editorial department to work the switchboard. But in a mindless way that I wouldn't have admitted, it was a relief from the eye-watering, disheartening work I did during the other seven hours in the HMCo office.

When an editorial position opened up in Houghton Mifflin's Boston headquarters I told a friend, Bob Gutwillig, about it. Bob already worked in publishing, had edited his college literary magazine, and wanted to edit books as a career rather than make money—there was no question of doing both at the same time. Jack agreed to interview him. After Bob left I asked Jack if he was going to recommend him. He shook his head.

“Why not? I thought he was just right for the job.”

“They'd never go for anyone with a last name like that,” Jack said. I didn't ask him why he had bothered to interview Bob at all. Maybe he wanted to see if Bob looked Jewish—which he did.

I thought Jack was joking, but he wasn't. Soon after the Gutwillig episode I went to Boston for an HMCo sales conference and realized, while surrounded by other employees, that I was the only Jew on the payroll. I hadn't felt so conspicuous since the second grade at the Brearley. All these Yankee blue bloods, a retired naval commander, a nature freak who wore boyish rubber-soled shoes that squeaked like a threatened bird, assorted brahmins and social register-ees, and not a single Hebrew—with the exception of me, and I worked in New York so I didn't have much chance to spread contamination: could this possibly be legal? The phrase “they prefer to be with their own kind” came swimming up from somewhere in my unconscious. I had already decided this was true and untrue in about equal portions, and that there's always a part of you that simultaneously yearns to belong and to remain outside, each part pulling against the other like two dogs fighting over a grease-soaked pot holder. Looking around at the perfect American faces with perfect New England noses, outdoorsy cheeks, and long sturdy fingers, I knew exactly what Jack had been trying to tell me. Bob would have languished at wonderbred HMCo.

CHAPTER 12

Like Dora,
David Copperfield's child-wife, I knew nothing about the flesh, blood, and bones of a home, or how to maintain their health, my rich, arch-feminist mother having warned me away from the kitchen and from doing any chore that didn't require a college education. In effect, I was helpless and hadn't the faintest idea what went into a stew or a cake, how to iron a blouse, or how to get rid of a stain. Paradoxically, I was helpless while continually waited on by what my mother called “the help”—governess, cook, maid, laundress, and sometimes butler. This was all very well when I lived at home, but as soon as I married and moved out of the big
house on Sixty-third Street, and into Joe's three-room apartment on East Thirty-seventh Street, my ignorance caught up with me. Dora didn't seem to mind—or even to notice it; but I wasn't at all sanguine about my incompetence. I felt stupid and didn't like it that my husband knew more about keeping house than I did.

I don't know how we would have managed—probably not as well as Dora—if Joe hadn't been living alone for almost a decade before we met, in which time he had become adept at shopping, cooking, and cleaning up after himself. The day we started back to work he picked me up outside my Forty-seventh Street office at five o'clock and told me we were going to stop at the Grand Union on Third Avenue, where he would begin my lessons on how to buy and prepare food. Never had I felt so binary. By day (like the Green Hornet) I was the hotshot managing editor of a classy literary magazine; by evening, hesitating outside the Grand Union, I was a domestic illiterate.

My mother shopped for the family's provisions while lying in bed and talking over the phone to the grocer and the butcher at Gristede's around the corner on Third Avenue. She knew both their first names and chatted them up in a time-honored faux-flirtatious manner. “I'll have eight of your lovely lamb chops, Stanley.” She had, as far as I knew, never set foot in a supermarket, those wonderfully convenient new grocery stores I'd been reading about, where you wheeled a steel-wire cart in front of you and plucked whatever you wanted or needed from shelves arrayed down several aisles. Too bad—she was the sort of person who would have enjoyed shopping at a supermarket, where impulse is far more fun and creative than a list.

David Copperfield was optimistic about his bride-to-be, Dora: “I showed her an old housekeeping book of my aunt's, and gave her a set of tablets, and a pretty little pencil case, and box of leads, to practise housekeeping with.”