Some of the girls who worked under me had made a few of them into a card, collaged and oversized, covered with copy on the front and signed inside by everyone in the department.
“This one’s my favorite,” said Chester, my boss, reading a postcrash one from November 3, 1932 in the World Telegram: “‘Nature in the roar,’ it says, below a vintage Helen McGoldrick illustration of a crying baby. ‘This is a brand new baby, hot off the griddle and very determined.’ Still so funny, Lily.”
“Not so funny that R.H. Macy’s could find it in their hearts to keep me,” I said.
“Dammit, Lily,” said Chester. “I’m happy as hell for you two, but we’re sure going to miss you.”
“Chip, dear,” I said, clutching both hands to my abdomen. “I know you’re a man overcome with emotion, but language, please. Little ears! Snooks in here is highly advanced.”
“Lillian, you’re irreplaceable, you know that?” said Chester. “I’ll keep the freelance pipeline flowing.”
As much of a prince as Chester was being, one could only sugarcoat the hemlock so much. My career as I knew it was dying. Dead as of that day. To be reborn in a different incarnation, perhaps, but not here on the thirteenth floor. R.H. Macy’s was kicking me out.
It wasn’t personal. Every woman who got pregnant met the same fate. Maternity leave was unheard of; having one’s job held was not an option, and the assumption was that a mother couldn’t work anyway—not to mention that she shouldn’t, what with having a man, her baby’s father, to support the little family.
What else could I say but, “Thank you, Chester. And good-bye for now.”
The end, now that it had arrived, threw new light on what had come before. All the reminders I had received over the past fifteen years that I was remarkable—the highest-paid advertising woman in America, et cetera—were now swept away by this final reminder that I was not. I had loved this place, and I had succeeded here, but my successes had done nothing to change it in any real way, no more than Clever Hans the counting horse had opened up opportunities for equine bookkeepers. All the articles that I had clipped and mailed home to my mother to prove that I was right and she was wrong now seemed to be saying something different: that I was a novelty, not a paragon. A freak. The exception that p’d the r, all right.
Max carried the box out, down to Thirty-Fourth Street, and I felt grateful for the falling snow because the flakes on my face made it less apparent that I was crying again.
*
If we’d had a girl, I’d have papered the room as pink as a Turner sunset. As it was, we had a boy, and went with blue—though when he was brand new I wrote him a two-line poem, “To a Baby One Day Old”: “It seems a sweet absurdity / to call so small a morsel he.”
He was born on January 25, 1942: little Massimiliano Gianluca Caputo, Jr. He was the second person on this earth with whom I fell, in spite of myself, into love at first sight.
We decided not to call him Max—too confusing—but to focus on the Gianluca component. And so in those early days he was Johnny, sometimes, and sometimes he was Gianino, and sometimes he was our Little John. He was fiercely and always ever after our son.
When they sent us home from the hospital with him, it felt like we were actors, the leads in a heist film. Like we couldn’t be getting away with such outrageous treasure.
The first morning after our first night back in our Murray Hill apartment all together, Max and I sat up in bed, propped against pillows, staring down at Johnny, asleep in my arms.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said to the baby’s closed eyelids, which seemed impossibly thin, delicately veined. “This is … a person.”
“You’re doing great, Lils,” Max said. “Think of it this way: In a lot of regards, this is no different than learning to swim—terrifying at first, but ultimately a matter of confidence. Jump in. You’re doing it.”
“I suppose,” I said, and he put his arm around me as the snow fell outside.
We’d been afraid that Tallulah, an old cat by now, a grizzling ten, would resent the baby. But that first morning she hopped on the bed and sniffed him curiously before curling into a furred heap in Max’s lap, joining us in watching the infant sleep. She seemed determined to steady all the nerves that needed steadying, which was to say every nerve of mine.
I was happy, of course, that Johnny was there. But childbirth had left me jagged, ripped. It was physically the worst experience that I had ever endured, and I had less than no desire to endure it again.
Max, on the other hand, was over the moon.
“I don’t want to rush things, Lils,” he said, stroking a finger down sleeping Johnny’s cheek. “But you and I need to make more of these guys. They’re great!”