—
Everything about it was hard.
Her pregnancy wasn’t so bad, but the delivery itself was something from a horror movie. They ended up doing a cesarian, but not before she’d suffered through eighteen hours of labor. They really hacked her up during the procedure, too. Then she didn’t stop bleeding, and there was a concern they would lose her. They nicked the baby’s face with the scalpel during the cesarian, and very nearly took out his eye. Then Marjorie got an infection and was in the hospital for almost four weeks.
I still maintain that all this carelessness at the hospital was due to the fact that Nathan was what they called a “non-marital infant” (politely sinister 1950s terminology for “bastard”). As a result, the doctors weren’t especially attentive to Marjorie during her labor, and the nurses weren’t particularly kind, either.
It was Marjorie’s and my girlfriends who took care of her when she was recovering. Marjorie’s family—for the same reason as the nurses— didn’t want much to do with her and the baby. That may sound extremely unkind (and it was), but you can’t imagine what a stigma it was for a woman at that time to bear a child out of wedlock—even in liberal New York. Even for a mature woman like Marjorie, who ran her own business and owned her own building, undergoing a pregnancy without a husband attached was disgraceful.
So she was brave, is what I’m driving at. And she was on her own. Thus it came down to our circle of friends to take care of Marjorie and Nathan as best we could. It was good that we had so much backup. I couldn’t be with Marjorie all the time at the hospital, because I was the one taking care of the baby while she was recovering. This was like its own horror movie as I had no idea what I was doing. I hadn’t grown up with babies, nor had I ever longed for a child myself. I had no instinct or aptitude for it. Moreover, I hadn’t bothered to learn much about babies while Marjorie was pregnant. I didn’t even really know what they ate. The plan had never been that Nathan would be my baby, anyhow; the plan had been that he would be Marjorie’s baby, and that I would work doubly hard to support all three of us. But for that first
month, he was my baby, and he was not in the most expert hands, I’m sorry to say.
Moreover, Nathan was not easy. He was colicky and underweight, and it was a struggle to get him to take the bottle. He had rampant cradle cap and diaper rash (“catastrophes at both ends,” as Marjorie said) and I couldn’t seem to get any of it to go away. Our assistants at L’Atelier managed the boutique as best they could, but it was June— wedding season—and I had to be at work at least sometimes or the business wouldn’t function at all. I had to do Marjorie’s work for her, as well, while she was absent. But every time I set Nathan down so I could attend to my duties, he would scream until I picked him back up again.
The mother of one of my brides-to-be saw me struggling with the infant one morning, and gave me the name of an older Italian woman who had helped out her own daughter, when her twin grandchildren were born. That older nursemaid’s name was Palma, and she turned out to be St. Michael and all the angels. We kept Palma on as Nathan’s nanny for years, and she truly saved us—especially during that brutal first year. But Palma was expensive. In fact, everything about Nathan was expensive. He was a sickly baby, and then he was a sickly toddler, and then he was a sickly little boy. I swear he spent more time in the doctor’s office during those first five years of his life than he did at home. If there was anything a child could come down with, he came down with it. He always had trouble with his breathing, and he was constantly on penicillin, which upset his stomach, and then you couldn’t feed him—which led to its own problems.
Marjorie and I had to work harder than ever to pay the bills, now that there were three of us—and one of us was always sick. So work harder, we did.
You wouldn’t believe the number of wedding gowns we churned out during those years. Thank God people were getting married in higher numbers than ever.
Neither of us talked about going to Paris anymore.
—
Time passed and Nathan grew older but not much bigger. He was such a squirt of a thing—so dear in his affections, so tenderhearted
and gentle, but also so nervous and easily frightened. And always sick.
We loved him so. It was impossible not to love him; he was such a sweetheart. You never met a more kind little person. He never got into trouble, or was disobedient. The problem was only that he was so fragile. Maybe we babied him too much. Almost certainly we babied him too much. Let’s be clear: this child grew up in a bridal boutique surrounded by hordes of women (customers and employees alike) who were more than willing to indulge his fears and his clinginess. (“Oh, God, Vivian, he’s gonna be such a queer,” Marjorie said to me once, when she saw her son twirling in a wedding veil in front of a mirror. That may sound harsh, but to be fair to Marjorie, it was difficult to imagine how Nathan could grow up to be anything else. We used to joke that Olive was the only masculine figure in his life.)
As Nathan approached the age of five, we realized that we could not possibly enroll this kid in public school. He weighed in at about twenty-five pounds dripping wet, and the presence of other children alarmed him. He wasn’t a stickball-playing, tree-climbing, rockthrowing, knee-skinning sort of boy. He liked puzzles. He liked to look at books, but nothing too scary. (Swiss Family Robinson: too scary.
Snow White: too scary. Make Way for Ducklings: just about right.) Nathan was the kind of child who would have been brutalized at a public school in New York City. We pictured him being pounded like bread dough by tough city bullies, and we couldn’t bear the thought. So we enrolled him in Friends Seminary (at two thousand dollars a year tuition, thank you very much) so that the gentle Quakers could take all our hard-earned money and teach our boy how to be non-violent, which was never going to be a problem anyhow.
When the other children asked Nathan where his daddy was, we taught him to say, “My daddy was killed in the war”—which didn’t even make sense, because Nathan was born in 1956. But we figured kindergartners were too dumb to do the math, so his answer would keep them at bay for a while. As Nathan got older, we’d come up with a better story.
One bright winter’s day, when Nathan was around six years old, Marjorie and I were sitting in Gramercy Park with him. I was doing beadwork on a bodice and Marjorie was trying to read The New York
Review of Books, despite the wind that kept whipping at her pages. Marjorie was wearing a poncho (in a puzzling plaid of violet and mustard) and some kind of crazy Turkish shoes with curled-up toes. Wrapped around her head was a white silk pilot’s scarf. She looked like a medieval guildsman with a toothache.
At one point, we both paused what we were doing to watch Nathan. He was carefully drawing stick figures in chalk on the pathway. But then he became scared of some pigeons—some very innocuous pigeons, which were minding their own business and pecking at the ground a few feet away from where Nathan sat. He stopped drawing and froze. We watched as the boy grew wide-eyed with terror at the sight of the birds.
Under her breath, Marjorie said, “Look at him. He’s afraid of everything.”
“That’s right,” I agreed, because it was true. He really was.
She said, “I can’t even give him a bath without him thinking I’m trying to drown him. Where did he even hear of mothers drowning their children? Why would that idea even be in his head? You never tried to drown him in the bath, did you, Vivian?”
“I’m almost certain I didn’t. But you know how I get when I’m angry. . . .”
I was trying to make her laugh but it didn’t work.
“I don’t know about this child,” she said, her face overcome by worry. “He’s even afraid of his red hat. I think it’s the color. I tried to put it on him this morning, and he burst into tears. I had to let him have the blue one. Do you know something, Vivian? He has utterly ruined my life.”
“Oh, Marjorie, don’t say that,” I said, laughing.
“No, it’s true, Vivian. He’s ruined everything. Let’s just admit it. I should’ve gone to Canada and given him up for adoption. Then we would still have money, and I would have some freedom. I’d be able to sleep through the night, without listening for his coughing. I wouldn’t be seen as a fallen woman with a bastard child. I wouldn’t be so tired. Maybe I would have time to paint. I would still have a figure. Maybe I could even have a boyfriend. Let’s just call a spade a spade: I never should’ve had this kid.”
“Marjorie! Stop it. You don’t mean that.”
But she wasn’t done. “No, I do mean it, Vivian. He was the worst decision I ever made in my life. You can’t deny that. Nobody could deny that.”
I was starting to get terribly worried, but then she said, “The only problem is, I love him so much, I can’t even bear it. I mean—look at him.”
And there he was. There was that touching little broken figurine of a boy, trying to get as far away as possible from any and all pigeons (which is not easy in a New York City park). There was our little Nathan, in his snowsuit, with his chapped lips and his cheeks all red with eczema. There was his sweet, peaked face—glancing around in panic for somebody to protect him from some nine-ounce birds who were completely ignoring him. He was perfect. He was made of spun glass. He was a reedy little disaster and I adored him.
I glanced over at Marjorie, and could see that she was now crying. This was significant because Marjorie never cried. (That had always been my department.) I’d never seen her looking so rueful and so tired.
Marjorie said, “Do you think Nathan’s father might claim him someday, if he ever stops acting so Jewish?”
I punched her in the arm. “Stop it, Marjorie!”
“I’m just so weary, Vivian. But I love this kid so much, sometimes I think it will break me in half. Is that the dirty trick? Is this how they get mothers to ruin their lives for their children? By tricking them into loving them so much?”
“Maybe. It’s not a bad strategy.”
We watched Nathan for a while longer, as he braved the specter of the harmless, oblivious, retreating pigeons.
“Hey, don’t forget that my son ruined your life, too,” Marjorie said, after a long silence.
I shrugged. “A little bit, sure. But I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not as though I had anything more important to attend to.”
—