A Life of Her Own, page 28
The phone rang a little before ten the next morning. Ezra’s mother asked if she could stop by Fanny’s apartment in an hour or so.
“I have to come into Manhattan anyway, and I’d like to bring the lace to show you. Ezra says it’s not going to be that kind of wedding, but I know once you see it, you’ll want to wear it.”
There was nothing Fanny could do but tell her to come by. She went into the kitchen to make a fresh pot of coffee.
Fanny didn’t know much about lace, but Rose had taught her enough to recognize a well-made piece.
“This is so generous of you, but—” Fanny began.
“Generous? What are you talking, generous? It’s not like I’m giving it away. I’m keeping it in the family. You and Ezra have a son, the girl he marries can wear it. God willing. Or a daughter. She can walk down the aisle in it.”
Fanny noticed Chloe wasn’t included in the line of succession, but she took the lace, wrapped it in the tissue paper his mother had brought it in, and put it carefully on her desk. She could give it back later.
“I knew once you saw it, you’d understand,” Ezra’s mother said, added she had a lot to do, and started for the door, but when she got there, she stopped and turned to Fanny. “Do you mind if I say something?”
“Please,” Fanny answered, and wondered what was coming.
“When Ezra told me about you, I wasn’t happy. A widow, I said. With a child. What do you need that for? A young man starting out, weighed down with responsibility that isn’t even his. But then I met you. More important, I saw my Ezra. And I said to myself, if this is what he wants, if this makes him happy, who am I to stand in his way?” She went up on her toes to hug Fanny. “Be happy,” she said. “Be happy with my Ezra.”
When she let go, Fanny had to wipe her eyes, though she wasn’t sure if she was moved by his mother’s emotion or ashamed of her own inconstancy.
She stood in the window, watching Ezra’s mother make her way down West End Avenue, an old woman in an unstylish coat clutching a large handbag under her arm because who knew what thieves and bad actors were in the streets. It would have been easy to laugh at the woman; not at her appearance, but at her sentimental selflessness. She was the cliché of a Jewish mother. Of mothers in general, for all Fanny knew. If you’re what my Ezra wants. Be happy. Be happy with my Ezra. She thought of Chloe. If you had a child, the wish didn’t sound like a sentimental cliché. It sounded hopeful.
She went to the phone and dialed Charlie’s number, though she had no idea what she was going to say when he answered.
Chapter Thirty
1955
FANNY WAS WORKING IN THE APARTMENT WHEN THE call came, not the apartment with the three bay windows overlooking West End Avenue but a larger place with a sliver view of Central Park. She no longer went to the library to write, though she was still a member. So was Charlie. They ran into each other there occasionally.
When she picked up the phone, she heard Harris Yost’s voice on the other end of the line. Harris was her agent. Whether he knew he was also Charlie’s agent was anyone’s guess. The political situation wasn’t as dicey as it had been. The previous March, Edward R. Murrow had broadcast an indictment of the red scare. “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.” Three months later, the attorney Joseph Welch demanded of Joe McCarthy in a nationally televised senate hearing, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” But networks and sponsors still weren’t taking chances. Harris sold the scripts Fanny delivered to him, took his 10 percent, and asked no questions.
“Ready for some good news?” he asked now.
“You sold Circles of the Moon.”
“Better than that. Talking to Strangers was just nominated for Best Original Teleplay of the year.”
Talking to Strangers was the third script she and Charlie had written for the Theater of the Air.
She didn’t bother to hang up. As soon as Harris got off, she pressed down the lever to get the tone and dialed Charlie’s number.
“Do you remember telling me some time ago that writing a script together is more intimate than marriage?” she asked when he answered.
“I’m not likely to forget it.”
“In that case what’s a nomination for Best Original Teleplay? Benefit of clergy?”
“‘Until the real thing comes along,’” he sang in his Fats Waller imitation.
“I still don’t think it’s fair.”
“That you get all the credit?”
“That I have to go to the awards ceremony alone.”
“You could always take Ezra.”
“That’s unkind. Besides, I don’t think his wife would like it.”
Joy Geller, Ezra’s self-proclaimed fiancée, had gotten her way in the end, or rather six months after Fanny had told Ezra she couldn’t marry him and given him back his ring, which, she noticed when she ran into the happy couple on Broadway, he hadn’t passed on to Joy. She was wearing a larger diamond on her left hand. For some reason, the size of the stone assuaged Fanny’s guilt. She took it as a sign that, as she’d said to Ezra when he’d called to ask her to dinner the first time, everything was working out for the best. He’d behaved well during the encounter, as Fanny had known he would. He asked after Chloe. He even said he’d seen the broadcast of the teleplay she’d written. “It was good,” he added, and managed not to sound surprised. She’d always known he was a decent man.
Mimi was less forgiving. No matter how many times Fanny told her she was the one who’d broken off the engagement, Mimi persisted in believing Ezra had treated her badly. It wasn’t that she thought Fanny was trying to save face, only that Mimi had a fierce tribal instinct and a wide protective streak. Ezra, the former catch, was now a devious Don Juan.
Poor Fanny clearly wasn’t any good with or about men. Charlie Berlin was another example of her ineptitude. Mimi knew nothing about the fronting arrangement, and if she suspected an affair, she pushed the discomfiting thought from her mind, but she did know Charlie figured somehow in Fanny’s life. She couldn’t imagine what Fanny, and for that matter Rose, saw in him. Mimi didn’t like men who weren’t susceptible to her iron femininity.
Fanny was touched by Mimi’s outrage, and if her attempts to introduce her to eligible men were annoying, Fanny knew they were well intentioned. What she couldn’t abide was the pity. Sometimes she wanted to scream at Mimi, at the world, that she was not a lonely widow who warranted the word “poor” before her name, but a woman who loved and was loved.
There were other times, however, when Fanny took a secret pleasure in hoodwinking the world. It was like the fronting arrangement, only more visceral. But the aspect of the masquerade that she couldn’t forgive herself for was lying to Chloe. Though Chloe liked Charlie, she wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about a mother who was the subject of gossip and scandal. Like most children, she was sufficiently innocent to be judgmental.
What Fanny didn’t realize was that she needn’t have worried. The idea of an affair didn’t occur to her daughter, at least not yet. Chloe was perfectly willing, or almost, to accept the idea that her mother and late father had engaged in the mechanics of sex once. After all, here she was. But surely no one as old as her mother would dream of doing it again. Sex didn’t worry her, but marriage intrigued her. Mothers were supposed to be married. They got married when they were girls. If they were widowed like her mother and Aunt Mimi, they remarried. Her mother was much nicer than Mimi, and prettier too, so why wasn’t she married? Was it Charlie’s fault? Maybe he was what Aunt Mimi called a confirmed bachelor. You could tell from the way she said it what she thought of the breed. Or maybe her father was to blame. Her mother just couldn’t get over him. She took the question to Rose rather than her mother. She knew she stood a better chance of getting a straight answer from her aunt.
“Charlie’s around a lot,” she began.
“He’s a friend of the family,” Rose said. “I knew him before your mother did.”
“And they like each other a lot.”
Rose waited.
“So why don’t they get married?”
It was the opportunity Rose had been waiting for. She delivered a crash course in red scares going back to the aftermath of World War I and bringing it up to date with the current blacklist. She’d sowed the seeds. She only hoped she’d live to see them flower.
The summer after Talking to Strangers was nominated for Best Teleplay was the first summer Chloe didn’t have to flee the city. A doctor named Jonas Salk had developed a vaccine against polio. But camp had become a tradition, and Chloe loved it. Moreover, that summer she’d be in the senior bunk. That wasn’t a position she was likely to relinquish after working up to it for so many years.
Fanny and Charlie flirted with the idea of traveling while Chloe was away, but hotels still insisted on seeing the titles Mr. and Mrs. in the register. If the couple checking in seemed bogus or nervous, some even asked for a marriage license. Real estate people were less intrusive. Once the check for the rent cleared, agents minded their own business. They took a cottage on a lake in Connecticut.
In the morning, they awakened to mist rising off the water. In the afternoon they worked, then went for a swim while small white sails ghosted beneath a Wedgwood sky and canoes cut silently through the shimmering surface. When the voices of mothers shouting at children to get out of the water this instant drifted across the lake, one of them went inside and brought out gin and tonics, and they sat side by side in Adirondack chairs watching a gaudy sun slip into the stand of pines on the far shore. And they made love. After their first week in the house Fanny wrote Rose a postcard. “Sin really is delicious.”
“You’re more right than you know,” Charlie said when he saw the postcard. They were sitting side by side in bed. He was reading. She’d just finished a letter to Chloe.
“I was joking. I don’t regard what’s going on here as sin.”
“I do.”
She pulled back to look at him. She knew a joke was coming, but she couldn’t figure out what it would be.
“The original sin wasn’t sex. It was knowledge. And that’s what love is. Knowing the other person.”
He put his book on the night table, took off his reading glasses, and turned to her. “Knowing the other person almost as well as yourself. Maybe better. Knowing and forgiving. Knowing and not blaming in the first place. Knowing, knowing, knowing.”
At the end of August, they returned to town, and Chloe came home from camp. She’d grown at least an inch and was wearing a bra beneath her Camp Winding Wood T-shirt. Bras had been only one bone of contention between her and her mother for the past several months. Chloe didn’t need one—she was a leggy coltish kid with a flat chest—but some of her friends did, and she’d begged Fanny to buy her a double A or at least what was called a training bra. All in good time, Fanny had insisted. There was also the problem of pierced ears. Fanny put her foot down about those too.
“What’s wrong with pierced ears?” Chloe demanded.
“You’re too young. And I don’t believe in self-immolation.”
“Only my mother could call piercing your ears self-immolation. Karen’s mother took her to have hers pierced.”
“Next time around have the sense to be born to a mother like Karen’s.”
Though Rose didn’t interfere openly, she did point out to Fanny that she was trying to keep Chloe an innocent child because she saw herself as a louche mother, or would be thought so in the eyes of the world. But that summer at camp Chloe had outsmarted her. She’d persuaded a girl in her bunk to trade one of her bras for a snazzy beaded belt. Fanny told Chloe the other girl had gotten the better deal and let it go. She even gave her daughter points for resourcefulness.
Four and a half years later, in January of 1960, Otto Preminger announced that he had hired the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for his forthcoming film Exodus. Network executives and television producers breathed sighs of relief and tossed their copies of Red Channels into wastebaskets or put them through shredders. Rose said wasn’t it a shame that lost years and lives cut short by suicide weren’t so easily undone, but she was pleased.
A week later, Chloe, who’d come home from her freshman year at Smith for the weekend, stood leaning against the doorjamb of Fanny’s room, watching her mother fasten her pearl necklace. It occurred to her that it was the same pearl necklace her mother had worn that night so long ago when Chloe had stood with her hand in her father’s, watching her mother descend the stairs. She barely remembered the house, but she could recall that night, or at least that moment. She’d been a flower girl in Aunt Barbara’s big splashy wedding. Now she was going to be a witness, she and Rose both, to her mother’s marriage in a judge’s chambers.
“So you’re finally going to make an honest man of Charlie.”
Fanny met her daughter’s eyes in the mirror. “Did he put you up to that?”
“He didn’t have to. I’ve been hanging around him, or rather he’s been hanging around us, long enough for me to make the crack on my own.”
She went on watching her mother close the clasp on the necklace and smooth the twin strand of pearls on her navy-blue suit. Rose had forbidden beige. She said it screamed second wedding. Chloe was glad her mother and Charlie were marrying. As a child, she’d wished desperately for her mother to remarry. She’d wanted to be like other families. And as she got a little older, she’d wanted her mother to release her grip. No, that wasn’t fair. Her mother had never clung. She’d had her work. She’d even had Charlie, though it had taken Chloe a while to realize that. She didn’t know when the truth of their relationship dawned on her. It seemed to her now that she’d always known, though that couldn’t have been. At ten or twelve or fourteen, she would have been scandalized. She was grateful to her mother for keeping the information from her. But somehow she’d figured it out, not suddenly but gradually. And now that she was old enough not to be scandalized, she was glad. She would hate for her mother to have been alone all those years.
She was glad, too, that her mother had ended up with Charlie rather than Ezra. Though she hadn’t been sure of her preference in those days, she knew now that life with Ezra would have been explosive for her if not for her mother. Over the years, she’d run into him a few times. He and his family had moved to New Rochelle, but his office was still in the neighborhood, though according to her mother in a swankier building. He was always unfailingly friendly, but as she grew older, she could sense his growing disapproval. The last time she’d seen him, only a year or so ago, he hadn’t been able to hide it. “You’re such a pretty girl, Chloe, but you’d be even prettier if you didn’t wear all that black. And put on a little lipstick.” Okay, she admitted it. That day she was looking especially Beat. She and Charlie were a better fit. Charlie had given her a copy of On the Road. On the other hand, with Ezra as a stepfather, she might have become a different person, though she doubted it. Not only did Rose and her mother set an example, their blood ran in her veins.
The funny thing was that as happy as she was that Charlie was in her mother’s life, as well as she and Charlie got along, well enough to sometimes gang up on her mother, she’d never seen him as a replacement for her father. The wound she’d suffered that night when she was almost six was like the lingering injuries of the returning war veterans that these days acted up only under certain weather conditions. She could go for weeks at a time without thinking about her loss, then some temperamental storm or meteorological depression made it ache all over again.
It took another several years for Charlie to get official credit for the eight plays he and Fanny had written together and the two Best Teleplay awards they’d won.
Fanny and Rose never would have seen the demonstration—neither of them would be caught dead watching the Miss America Pageant of 1968 or any other year—if Fanny hadn’t been switching channels. Rose was in bed, and Fanny had gotten up to turn the dial on the television set Charlie had moved to the bedroom from Rose’s sewing room when she came home from the hospital after her stroke. Shots of the demonstration outside Convention Hall in Atlantic City flashed on the screen. Fanny stopped switching channels.
Several hundred women, most of them young, and a sprinkling of men were marching and shouting and pumping fists and signs into the air. NO MORE BEAUTY STANDARDS. WELCOME TO THE CATTLE AUCTION. ERA YES. The camera zeroed in on a trash can with a sign on it saying FREEDOM CAN. Women were dancing around it, tossing in high heels, curlers, copies of Playboy magazine, bottles of dish detergent, and bras. The reporter said the demonstrators had hoped to burn all the items, but had been unable to obtain a fire permit from the city. “Bra burners,” he snickered.
As Fanny and Rose watched, a protester dashed up to the can, whirled a bra around her head like a lasso, and tossed it into the trash can.
“Men burn their draft cards,” Chloe shouted into the reporter’s microphone as her face filled the screen. “We burn our own forms of injustice and oppression.”
The reporter stopped chuckling. “And now, back to the contest for Miss America.”
Rose, who’d sat up at the sight of Chloe on the screen, leaned back against the pillows. “Now I can die a happy woman.”
“Don’t say that. You’re not dying. You’ve had a stroke, but you are not dying. I won’t permit it.”
“Okay, but when I do, I’ll go knowing I left my fingerprints on two generations.”
Fanny sat on the side of the bed and took Rose’s hand.
“Fingerprints? Don’t be modest. You’re the Rodin of our existence. Without you we’d still be a couple of lumps of unformed clay.”
“You do know it took some time for Rodin’s genius to be recognized, don’t you?”
Fanny stood and moved to the television. A bevy of young women in bathing suits filled the screen. She switched off the set, returned to the bed, and took Rose’s hand again.
