I’d been sensitive to smells for the past eight months, but the mawkish white scent of the freckled pink flowers was especially nauseating. The obscene open blooms—flung wide, stamens dangling—served to make the room feel even closer than it already did, more wintry, the windows more emphatically locked. A gift of lilies was an aggressive move, always. Even cloddish Olive understood that.
“You really put a lot of thought into these, Olive. Thank you,” I said, because it was mannerly and because it was true. The flowers were on the nose: odiously odorous and overly apt. Funereal, really.
“You look a vision, Lillian,” she said. “Like a flower yourself.”
What cloying falsehood. I looked absurd.
Still, I looked her in the eye and said, “How sweet of you, Olive. I have the women’s department of R.H. Macy’s to thank for making this particular silhouette possible.”
I had always liked dressing—shopping and matching, creating a style. In the early 1940s, though, the fashions for women expecting a blessed event did not look or feel so blessed. Made to conceal one’s impending maternity, they seemed designed to induce both embarrassment and regret. A popular maternity frock was called, with all its associations of blood and violence, the Butcher Boy: an unflattering mess with a flapping front of rayon crepe that the ads said would keep your little bundle-to-be as secret as a rabbit in a magician’s hat. How unmagical. I saw it billed elsewhere as “a pretty holiday disguise.” Why disguise it? It was a fact of life.
Yet there I sat, at a vacant desk in the copy room on my last day of work at R.H. Macy’s, wearing a Butcher Boy but still looking unmistakably ready to burst.
Max had come up from the rug department on the seventh floor and stood by my side, the picture of beaming paternal pride.
Since we’d found out what was cooking, he’d been a paragon of consideration and attention. We joked that my new motto should be “Make hay while the muffin’s in the oven,” and that I looked darling sporting the halo he was so willing to set on my head.
Even prior to the pregnancy I had become one of the women to whom, for years, I had been advertising—those in charge of their households, each buying for her man: his crackers and milk, his collars, his pants, his cod-liver oil, his brace of lamb chops. But I didn’t mind all that. I liked it. I did for him, and he did for me.
I would catch myself staring at him at the oddest times, still smitten: him standing in the fridge light in his undershirt, looking for a midnight snack. I was so ferociously in love that conformity felt like rebellion. Before him, I’d thought myself singly blessed to be single. “Proud virginity” some newspaper profiles called it (although, although). These same profiles proclaimed that Max had “tamed” me, which grated, but to myself I said that I was going to be the exception that p’d the r.
Max wanted a baby more than just about anything, and I wanted Max, so we’d embarked on a tear of trying. We married in 1935, but I produced no child for seven years. I was, as the doctors had it, of advanced maternal age—even more advanced than my charts reflected because of my lying by a year.
I’d had three miscarriages—blood and violence indeed—before the being that eventually became Johnny took root. I half expected Max to blame me—for being too old, for not really wanting it, things I half-believed of myself—but he never angered, never wavered, never really doubted that I’d give him what he most yearned for.
When Johnny seemed as though he would come to fruition, I’d been so reassured and excited that I’d wanted to tell everyone, but I didn’t.
Max and I decided to keep this one—the one that would work—a secret for as long as possible, both because we were so afraid we might lose him, too, and because I wanted to keep my job until the very end. I wanted to continue earning the money because I liked having it, and I wanted to keep working because it was fun, and I was anxious and needed something else to think about.
When I finally had to tell everyone, I made a point of fibbing. When friends and relatives asked when to expect the baby to arrive, I gave them a date two weeks beyond the one the doctor had given me. They still checked in ad nauseam—and in those days I was never far from nausea—but I was spared the final flurry that I’d seen almost all my friends caught up in, with mothers and mothers-in-law transformed into prosecuting attorneys: Is it or is it not true, young lady, that you ought to have pushed forth the screaming bundle of joy by now? The pressure I was under to produce felt more prying and presumptuous than any work deadline. When Johnny emerged a full fourteen days ahead of ostensible schedule, I was hailed as a hero. In the meantime, I just took in their advice with a grain of aspirin.
Someone handed around slices of chocolate cake from the downstairs café. We ate it reminiscing about the ads I had written over the past fifteen years.