At that point, with Johnny just days old, there was no need to fight about adding to our menagerie, so in my mind I said no way, no how, and outside I said nothing. I just kissed Max on the lips and turned back to the baby.
I came to like it, sort of, motherhood. And I instantly loved Gianluca, Gianino, Little John, Johnny. So much so that I could admit to myself that all my simpering girlfriends and workmates had been right: I’d never felt a stronger emotion.
But the other thing I felt—that no one had ever told me I might—was that as much as I loved him, I could never be totally sure that I wanted him around forever. I did not know if my life was categorically “better” for having him here.
*
Our days fell into a routine that was an unprecedented mix of the banal and the hectic.
The pregnancy had added volume to my statuesque figure, of course, but I lost the weight in no time—in sterilizing bottles and making the formula, in bathing him, little acrobat as he was, and in feeding him and not myself. Six ounces in twenty minutes? Never. He took forever to eat. Took the occasional after-breakfast snooze, the 1:30 rest.
I did like it when people came over to see him, although during his nap I wouldn’t wake him for friends or even for relatives, not when he was all cozied in with his quilts and sweaters and booties, knitted by the hands of loved ones more domestic than I.
“He’s not a diorama at the Natural History Museum,” I’d tell them. “You can wait.”
He cried a lot—a lot. The city sanitation crews would wake him, bouncing the metal trash cans on the concrete, infuriating him, and he, in turn, would infuriate the neighbors.
He was exhausting, unable to avoid and seeming to seek danger. If one gave him a stuffed animal with large-headed pins for eyes—common in those days—he’d yank them out and make to devour them.
Max loved Johnny, and me for producing him. But he, like his fellow fathers, had only the most perfunctory interest in the baby at the bassinet stage, leaving me to change and feed and nap and burp and quiet his screaming.
Before I had a baby, I obliged lady friends who insisted that I race from the office to see their darling offspring: There he was, asplash in his prebedtime tub, and there I was, being regaled with all his vital statistics, height and weight and pooping propensities. No conversation to be had when Baby was in the room. And I would grin through gritted teeth and compliment them: on baby’s skin, smooth as a pale cherry blossom; or baby’s precocity in the vocabulary department, demonstrable by such word pairs as “toidy seat.” I pushed back my rising gorge at their feeble minds, unimpressed that their child’s fondest wish seemed to be beating the backside of a frying pan with some chromium utensil.
After I had a baby, I was gifted with epiphanic understanding of where they’d all been coming from. Suddenly all my clothes were washable, and my sharply pointed jewelry had been retired; the only prickling was in my eyes from lack of sleep.
I understood, too, the competitive comparisons leveraged by motherhood. Was my baby as heavy as the baby next door? Did he get his teeth soon enough? What of speaking? This animal love turned even the most mundane events into monuments.
I worked from home and tried to glamour up by six, when Max got back from the rug department: powder and lipstick to paint myself the Fairy Queen of the Nursery, like in a storybook—but I’d as often be wearing, too, prune pulp and farina. At least little Gianluca always looked good: the handsome crabapple of his parents’ eyes. I did find some dresses with buttons down the front that I could dive into without looking like I’d taken a stick of dynamite to my hair. I could never bring myself to let the baby yell while I made up my face, though, so many were the nights I was mostly undone.
I wouldn’t say I was jealous, exactly. But I was intensely wistful every morning when Max would leave to go to R.H. Macy’s, and when he would return home from there every night.
*
Wishing for something never made it so, and I never wished for Max to lose his berth at R.H. Macy’s as I had lost mine. But inevitably the war came for us, as it had been coming for everyone.
Max was drafted and, like that, he was gone.
For a little over a year he had been deferred on account of our baby, but by the end of 1942 Uncle Sam could no longer do without him. He had to go to Italy because he spoke Italian.
So from early 1943 until late 1945 it was just Gianino and me, experiencing those formative years as an unstable duo. I spent all the time I wasn’t raising Johnny freelancing and writing many more letters to Max than I received. Enduring darkness and blackouts both literal and metaphoric.
I felt like a different person without Max around. A worse one.