Living Room (5 page)

“Just like Rosalie, you make me feel that I’m the child.”

“You’re not, Pop. But neither am I.”

Philip Hartman looked into his fifteen-year-old daughter’s intelligent eyes, looked at how tall she was, nearly his height and not yet full grown, the shape of a woman now, and knew he was making a discovery he should have made before.

Finally he said, “If only Rosalie were alive to see.”

*

Philip Hartman’s daughter, at age sixteen, was one of fifteen hundred students in her school who were requested to take a test administered by a team of psychologists from the Board of Education. As part of the effort of the time to eliminate surprise from the world, it was a new kind of I.Q. test, all the students were told, which graded not only relative aptitude and intelligence but the possibility of realizing the indicated potential. Shirley scored highest in her class of thirty-two. Her teacher, Mrs. Calcagni, who Shirley characterized to her friends as an “Uncle Tom in womanface,” hated girls who, in her view, “tried to be smarter than everybody,” which meant smarter than the boys, too. When Shirley’s test score proved to be eleven percent higher than the next highest, Mrs. Calcagni accused Shirley of having cheated. Shirley was retested alone in an empty office adjoining the principal’s office, watched over by a monitor, and scored four points higher than she had previously simply by being familiar with the test. This put her at the top not just of her class but of the entire school.

When Philip Hartman heard of this, he said, “I ask you, did King Solomon have an I.Q. test? Did Spinoza, Marx, Freud? I don’t believe in tests like that.”

Shirley knew her father venerated the powers of the mind. She therefore suspected that he was worried about something else. If a girl had a superior intelligence, it narrowed greatly the field of prospective husbands. On one of their Sunday walks, she confronted him with this suspicion, and Philip Hartman exploded.

“You think I’m not on your side, your own father? Do I want my peace in heaven disturbed by knowing my smart daughter is such a success she is living alone, without a husband and children?” Later he said, “Who am I to talk? What do I know about how people believe today? Shirley,” he said, “maybe God knows what He’s doing.”

“Maybe she does.”

Hartman couldn’t believe he had heard correctly. “That’s terrible,” he said in a tumultuous whisper. “God is God.”

“You called Him He.”

“Everybody calls Him He!”

“Not everybody,” said Shirley.

In another century,
thought Philip Hartman,
she would be burned like a witch.

Trying to bottle the stridency in his voice, Hartman said, “God made Adam before He made Eve.”

“God made the devil before making Adam. Maybe he got his priorities mixed up. Let’s run.”

Hartman watched his daughter gambol off ahead of him, soon so far ahead he thought he would never catch up as he found himself clumsily trotting after her, panting, thinking this was not good for his heart. If a devil had got into Shirley, it must have come from him. He was as responsible for her as God was for people. Was there a Jewish family anywhere that the father didn’t pretend to be the head, the teacher, the leader, the patriarch, while in actual fact the
balebusta,
the housekeeper, cook-in-chief, budget-maker, budget-keeper was really in charge of everything including not only the patriarch himself but the destiny of the children? Shirley had better slow down or she would have his death on her conscience.

His own father, rest his memory, had taught him that in Russia women added
ova
to their husband’s names, he would be Hartman, his wife Hartmanova, his mind was whirling, was he thinking of something no scholar had ever thought of before, that Jehova is a woman’s name? God in heaven, forgive us all, God a She? What was happening to the world?

*

Two years later, when Shirley, despite her Bronx background won a full scholarship to Barnard College, Hartman, his hands clasped in joy, said, “I don’t know why God should be this good to me. I don’t go to
shul.
Weeks pass, I don’t even think of God.”

“Maybe God isn’t paying attention,” said Shirley.

“Please,” said Hartman, “don’t ever say anything like that in front of Mrs. Bialek.”

*

In her freshman year, Shirley chose as her project the rewriting of the Federalist Papers from a woman’s point of view. When Hartman found out what she was up to, he said, “It’s none of my business, I haven’t read these Federalist whatevers, I should be ashamed, but is nothing sacred?”

Shirley did not know how to convey her intention to him.

“Your teachers approve of this?”

“Yes.”

“The next thing you’ll be rewriting the Talmud,” he joked.

“Maybe.” She kissed him on the cheek.

*

At the end of her freshman year, she won the Virginia Gildersleeve Prize for Creative Writing for a short story. The night before the award ceremony, Hartman said, “Are you writing so much above my head already? Don’t you think a father should read the thing that won the prize?”

So she let him read it, an understated narrative from the point of view of a seven-year-old girl whose mother has just died.

When Shirley returned, she found him weeping openly. “They think this is good?” he said. “It’s terrible. It makes people cry, is that what you want to do with your life?”

She did not know how to step across that gulf.

*

Shirley graduated in 1964 magna cum laude.

“Graduate school,” said Hartman, “which?”

“Maybe one day. Not now. I’d like to try working.”

“At a job?”

“I can teach in a private school without a graduate degree. There are a lot of secretarial jobs. I can type. I can handle the phone. I can write. I want to see what it’s like out there.”

After a moment’s silence, Hartman said, “Your mother will be very disappointed.”

CHAPTER FOUR

SOME YEARS LATER, there would come a time when James Johnson Finnmaker, whose role as a labor strategist was second only to that of George Meany, and whose fame as an orator had induced invitations from unlikely sources, addressed a convention of the National Association of Manufacturers by saying, “Gentlemen, some of the newspaper stories announcing that I would address this assembly suggested that I would be speaking in what they called the enemy camp.”

He waited for the laughter to subside.

“While I do not necessarily consider myself among friends…”

Again, the laughter.

“…I speak to you about a problem that only now seems to have captured our attention. For years some of us in the labor movement have suggested that the work week for blue-collar workers be shortened so that the men and women of this country’s work force will be able to spend less time in its factories and more at home and at leisure to do what they choose. But the movement for a thirty-two-hour week cannot become, in time, a movement for a twenty-two-hour week and then a twelve-hour week and finally a no-hour week. That is economically senseless. That is why my emphasis has been on changing the nature
of
work. Perhaps we cannot bring back the day of the artisan and the craftsman taking pride in their individual daily accomplishments. But the monotony of mass production on the assembly line must be dealt with. You cannot ask grown men and women to spend their work weeks of whatever length being bored. You gentlemen know that boredom produces shoddy goods. Gentlemen, boredom also produces shoddy lives.

“There has been much talk in industry circles of an interview with Miss Shirley Hartman published in
The New York Times
and widely reprinted in which this advertising executive, not yet thirty, has challenged the whole concept of executive work as being as boring as that of the production line. Miss Hartman, as you know, maintains that the meetings, and paper-shuffling, and memo-writing, office politics, the bulk of executive work, in fact, is nonproductive and counterproductive because ultimately the executive has to confront his own boredom with much of what he does each day, each week, each year, in the one life granted us.

“I think the reason there is so much talk about Miss Hartman’s view is that she concentrated not on the middle-management and top-management roles in industry, where the basis of her thesis is increasingly obvious, certainly to the people in this room, but Miss Hartman has leveled the same charges against so-called creative work, whether in her own industry, advertising, or teaching, or journalism.

“It is my belief that long after the political revolutions of Asia and Latin America have brought the people in those countries face to face with the same problems that the Soviet Union faces, that we here face, we will have to deal with revolutionary attitudes toward the nature of work. And because Miss Hartman has thrown the gauntlet to her creative peers, and to you gentlemen in industry, I think that now, perhaps, the thinking and managing people of this country will find themselves better able to understand that the fundamental problem
of
the working man in the United States is
not getting more and more pay for less and less work, but finding a way out of the mechanical life we have inherited from the industrial revolution.

“I was asked here to present this handsome trophy to Miss Shirley Hartman. She agreed to be here, and then yesterday your committee was advised by telegram that she regretfully would not be joining us in this air-conditioned ballroom today because glorious weather had been predicted and she was going swimming.”

Not everyone on the dais laughed.

“I would guess that there isn’t a single person in this room under thirty years of age, except perhaps one or two of the waiters. If I were the same age as Shirley Hartman and had it to do all over again, I think I know what I’d do. Personally,” said James Johnson Finnmaker, “I think she has the right idea.”

CHAPTER FIVE

WHEN A FRIEND who had been on the college
paper with Shirley heard about an advertising agency that wanted a junior copywriter who could handle, according to them, “the woman’s point of view,” the friend tipped Shirley off.

“It sounds like your thing, Shirl.”

Shirley wasn’t sure. She phoned for an interview and was put through to a Mr. Sealy. Shirley didn’t like Mr. Sealy’s voice. Later, when she found herself face to face with him, she was unimpressed. Someone on high wanted Perry Sealy to try out an idea. Mr. Sealy had no faith in the idea; he really didn’t want to pay much for a useless experiment. A man would have cost twice as much as he offered Shirley.

“May I think about it overnight?” asked Shirley. “May I call you tomorrow?”

“Sure,” said Sealy, “but if someone suitable comes along this afternoon and takes the job, it’ll be gone.”

“I do understand that you’re anxious to fill the position right away,” said Shirley, hoping she sounded just a bit breathless and innocent, “it’s just that one interview this afternoon, they’re offering twenty-five a week more. I’d hate to miss that interview, just in case, I’m sure you understand.”

“Please,” said Mr. Sealy, gesturing toward the chair.

She knew, suddenly, what colored people meant when they referred to “the man.” Mr. Sealy had the barest note of condescension in his voice. “It costs this agency more than twenty-five,” he said, “just in my time, you understand, for each interview, and I’d like to save the cost of seeing more candidates. It makes more sense from an out-of-pocket point of view to give you the extra twenty-five, if you’ll accept now.”

Her temptation was to point out to the man that twenty-five more a
week
was well over a thousand dollars a year. He must realize that. He was saying something stupid because he assumed
she
wouldn’t get it. It would serve her interest to say nothing, just like Negroes. She smiled.

“Well?” asked Mr. Sealy.

“This seems like such a nice company,” she said.

Mr. Sealy smiled, a politician on television. He stood up. She stood up. He pumped her hand.

Over such handshakes
,
Shirley thought,
countries make treaties with each other
.

*

Shirley had hoped for a small private office because she thought best behind a closed door. Instead she was given a desk in a semi-open space with three-quarter partitions, next to the typing pool. Her in-box was filled with memorandums for new employees, forms to fill out and a questionnaire about her hobbies and areas of special interest. She decided it would take her all day to mess with the lot, removed only the list of telephone extensions and threw the rest in her wastebasket. Then with a yellow pad in front of her, and three sharpened pencils lying beside it, she thought about this face makeup they were proposing to call Ultra-Light and wanted to interest younger women in. Matrons wouldn’t buy it, she had been told, it didn’t cover enough. She had half an idea.

Shirley had been sitting there with her eyes closed when she heard Mr. Sealy’s voice ask, “Getting orientated?”