Back Then (29 page)

“It's Bill,” she said. “Bill Faulkner. He's in town working with his editor.” This was Albert Erskine, a lean southerner who had been briefly married to Katherine Anne Porter and who was famous all over town for his social polish, his old-fashioned manners.

“It's all right if I bring him, isn't it?” Jean said in her breathy, little-girl voice.

“I guess so,” I said. “Sure, that's fine. Does he know where we live?” I knew Jean was Faulkner's New York girlfriend, I had heard this in the kind of whisper that gossip often uses to transmit delicate messages, though I could not remember who the messenger was.

“What difference does that make?” she said.

The idea of William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize, walking into our apartment and shooting the breeze with our friends, mostly junior people in publishing, many of them wet behind the ears and brash, was as daunting as if I were the village priest informed the pope was about to show up for dinner and all I had in the house was cabbage stew and black bread.

The bartender—a graduate student not much younger than we were—arrived and set up the bar in Joe's study. I brought out trays of cheese and crackers in a heightened state of nerves; I had some trouble holding the trays steady. Guests appeared and dumped their coats on our bed. By a little after nine Jean and her friend had still not arrived and I began to think that they would not come at all, had found another party at a better address, or had decided to keep the party a private duet.

Just as this thought occurred to me, bringing with it both disappointment and relief—because I really didn't want to deal with this daunting visit—they came in. Jean was wearing a blue taffeta dress, the skirt puffed out below the waist like a bell, her black hair brushed and shining. She was beautiful in a Liz Taylor sort of way. And, a step or two behind her, Himself, in a thick, impeccably tailored tweed suit, a slight man not more than five foot eight, with delicate features, a furry gray mustache, and melancholy eyes. With my heart pounding noisily against the back of my throat and my legs gone soft, I went over to greet them.

“This is Bill Faulkner, Anne. I just picked him up at the airport.” They gazed at each other with hungry eyes. I said something about how nice it was that they could come. Faulkner bowed slightly and said it was a pleasure. I escorted them to the bar and left. I went back to that room only once during the evening, terrified that I might have to talk to him. But there was more to it than shyness. It was his aura, his scale—too large and bright, not the man himself, who was shy, to the point of reticence, but what he had done with his life. Our celebrated guest, I learned later, had backed up against a wall and talked rather formally and in a near whisper with those who were braver than I was. One of them pointed to a tiny rosette in his lapel and asked what it was. “That's the French Legion of Honor,” he said, withdrawing a white handkerchief from his sleeve and patting his lips with it. “For service during the First World War. I was a pilot, you know.”

Exceedingly famous people upset the psychic balance of a gathering—unless everyone there is equally famous—making waves, creating a kind of draft. It may be thrilling to realize that the man standing next to you is a writer from Olympus, but the psychic space between you is as wide as if you had four legs and fur and he two and feathers. You can see nothing “natural” about William Faulkner or Laurence Olivier or T. S. Eliot, for it's almost impossible to get past the luminescence of the enormously gifted.

A few days later I had a lunch date with Marc Jaffe, an editor at New American Library. We met shortly after noon in an East Side restaurant with a French name and a clientele of publishing executives, literary agents, and a smattering of tourists—a place in which it didn't hurt you to be seen. The prime-cut customers were sent upstairs to the second floor; Marc was prime-cut. As we reached the top of the staircase I saw William Faulkner sitting at a table for four, a bottle of wine in a cooler his only companion. He had a plate of food in front of him and seemed quite content to be alone. When he saw us, he got up and, still holding his napkin, walked over to us. Bowing slightly from the waist, he said “How do you do, Mizz Kaplan.” Trembling, I introduced him to Marc.

After we sat down at our table Marc said, “So that's William Faulkner. I'm surprised how shy he is.”

I realized that this would be one of those frozen moments and that I would unashamedly think of it as “memorable” for the rest of my life. I transmuted Faulkner's unremarkable greeting into prose as indelible as his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

“He is shy, isn't he?” I said and stopped myself from telling Marc he'd been at our house, since we hadn't invited Marc to our party. “And isn't he gorgeous?”

“Well I don't know about that,” Marc said. “And I've heard he has something of a drinking problem.”

“Nobody's perfect,” I said.

In
the 1950s, as in times long gone, the notion of “doctor” inspired reverent submission. The medical practitioner was viewed as part high-ranking army officer, part school principal, and the remainder, shaman. When you went to see him [
sic
] you asked no questions, neither about what he was doing to you—especially when you couldn't see what it was—nor what your chances for improvement were. By remaining beyond the obligation to report, he kept you emotionally at arm's length and conveniently out of his hair. Office visits were snappy and to the point. A tap here, a poke there, a tweak, an X ray, a swabbing, the shining of strong lights in small places, the hint of pain and humiliation enhancing the diagnostic process. The prescription he handed you didn't tell you much either, not even the drug's name or probable side effects (vomiting? purple spots on your belly? blinding headache?). You were afraid of bothering the doctor, and he liked it that way. In other words, what your doctor did to and for you was none of your business.

Incredibly, from the moment we met, Joe and I had not once talked about having children, the idea never having occurred—at least consciously—to either of us. This was our partnership: one and one make one—forever.

And then, along about our second year of marriage, everything changed, and I wanted a baby so badly the desire felt like a wound. Surprised at how, without any awareness, I'd made a 180-degree turn, I was a newcomer to the sort of profound transformation a person can undergo more or less overnight. The woman who drives you crazy in November becomes your best friend in December. You may think this is because she's changed but it's more likely you who has been able to see her through a cleaner window. From
I never want children
to
a baby is the only thing in the world I need
—this happened almost overnight. Although he didn't share my enthusiasm, Joe, a generous man, was willing to go along with it. I had no trouble conceiving—it took three months—but for no reason other than superstitious fear, I wasn't sure that it would ever happen.

Babies had played no part in Joe's life; he had never even held one.

My
mother and father were doctor snobs. While a lot of non-Jews resort, when they're really hurting or fearful, to a Jewish doctor, figuring he or she is not only smarter but softer of heart, my parents consulted mainly WASP doctors, those trained at Columbia or Harvard, with offices on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

As soon as I had missed one period, and, cavalierly, not having visited a gynecologist since Anatole had dispatched me, four years earlier, to get myself fitted with a diaphragm, unconsciously repeating, almost verbatim, the line in Mary McCarthy's novel
The Group:
“Get yourself a pessary,” I phoned my mother to ask for the name of her doctor. The nature of our watery bond made it far easier for both of us to connect when there was something specific to talk about; I was, I suppose, using my request to try to warm up to my mother. There was a shadow across her that she almost never—no doubt because she didn't really know how—invited me to step in and share, and this phone call seemed to please her. “His name is Equinn Munnell,” she said. “He's very handsome; all his patients are in love with him.” I told her he sounded like horses and money. She assured me of his brilliance.

Women did not invite their husbands to come along to their medical appointments, and if they had, the likely answer would have been: “Are you kidding?” A man was expected to show up for work no matter what was happening outside the job; many bosses didn't know—and didn't want to know—when an employee's child was sick or his dog run over.

So I arrived, solo, at Dr. Munnell's Park Avenue office ten minutes ahead of time. There were seven or eight comfortable chairs in Dr. M.'s waiting room, and all but one were occupied by women reading up-to-date magazines like
Holiday, Town and Country, Yachting
. For most private doctors and dentists this let-thepatients-wait-forever policy was standard; they scheduled more patients than they had hours to see them in. What happened to those at the end of the line? Did the doctor stick his head into the room and say, “Sorry, folks, we're closing shop. Come back tomorrow”? Even when you showed up on time you often waited several hours to be seen—and these were not clinics where you would expect to sit on a hard bench all morning or afternoon; these were Park Avenue, top-of-the-line specialists.

Mom was right. Dr. M. was darkly good-looking, with sleek brown hair and a smile one notch below seductive. He wore a long white coat, open to expose an expensive three-piece suit beneath. The backs of his hands were very hairy. During a short interview I told him I thought I was pregnant. “Lets just take a look-see,” he said, motioning for his crisp, middle-aged nurse to escort me to the examining room. She handed me a cotton johnny and told me to remove everything I was wearing, and then get up on the table. Briskly, Dr. M. inserted a speculum that felt as if it had been stored in a freezer and poked around while the nurse stood off to the side, staring at the wall. Back in his consulting room he told me he thought I was a month or so into pregnancy but they would test my urine on a rabbit to make sure. The rabbit test was positive.

Soon I was showing up once a month at Dr. M.'s office, setting aside a three-hour block of time for each visit. His affability factor was high, but I sensed that below it lay a chunk of ice not much subject to melting.

Dr. Munnell apparently liked his women thin. He instructed me to gain no more than seventeen pounds. This seemed like very little weight to me, but he assured me it would be best for me and for my baby. Unquestioning, I put myself on a punishing diet and for nine months was always ravenous. Meanwhile, from the fifth month on, the baby—gender unknown—moved about in its quarters almost constantly, kicking and twisting even at night while I lay in bed, too excited to sleep more than a few hours at a time.

Until just a few years after the war, women starting out in labor were doped to the ears or knocked out altogether, the idea being that they would find the pain of childbirth intolerable. Just in time, a new notion about giving birth took hold of the imagination of a lot of women who thought it would be invigorating to give birth the way peasants do, laying down their scythes when birth was imminent and having the kid at the side of the field, then going back to work for the afternoon shift. This was known as natural childbirth, without anesthetic, mechanical assistance, or episiotomy. It included a course of workshops where you and your husband, along with a dozen other couples, crouched on exercise pads in a gym while an instructor told you how to respond physically and psychologically to each of the three stages of labor and how to lessen the “discomfort” by panting and/or taking deep breaths. The instructor also showed you gruesome pictures and explained the risks to the unborn of any sort of anesthesia. When I told Dr. M. that I wanted to try giving birth by this new method, no drugs or painkillers, he was skeptical—“Well, Anne, if that's what you want. . . .”

There was no way of telling my baby's gender, so I thought of it as “it.” On May 10, the day before it was officially due, I looked as if I had a watermelon inside my belly. My navel had popped out like a cork. Labor, however, had not begun, and my water hadn't broken, but Dr. Munnell had planned for this baby to arrive on the eleventh. My private room at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, on 168th Street, overlooking the Hudson River, had been reserved. “Come on in,” he told me over the phone, “we'll induce you.” He explained in his white voice that they would start dripping Pitocin into a vein in my arm by IV. Before the procedure, a young resident came into my room to take my history. He pulled up a chair and sat by my bed, a folder on his lap. There wasn't much to tell him—I was twenty seven and almost never sick. A medical frown accompanied his rebuke: “Why have you waited so long to have a baby?” he asked.

“My mother was thirty-nine when she had me,” I said. “Mother and child are still doing fine.”

The frown persisted. He made me feel as if I'd broken some rule no one had told me about. Before they wheeled me to the labor room, they made me take off my earrings and my wedding ring.

Designed to bring on the muscular contractions of labor, Pitocin packed a wallop: I went from zero to sixty-five in less than half an hour. I groaned politely. “Are you sure you don't want something for the pain?” Dr. M. asked, as he withdrew his head from between my legs. “Well, maybe a little something,” I said. “But no Scopolamine.” This was a painkiller we had been warned about in the childbirth class; it was a so-called truth drug that would make its victim say anything that came into her head and then, after it wore off, not remember a thing. We were also told that it was commonly used by torturers to loosen men's tongues. When we settled on a small fix of Demerol, I felt I had betrayed my sisters in the natural childbirth movement.