I was still doing the same job, ostensibly, as I’d always been doing: influencing people with kids and families. I was supposed to be pulling their strings with my skills. I knew that most ad writers followed a simple formula: If you have a worry, then they have a product; buy the product, banish the worry. I had never worked that way, and I wasn’t about to start. But I understood it. More so now than ever.
With Max thousands of miles across the sea, maddeningly unreachable and maybe in danger, I felt myself vulnerable in ways I never thought possible. As if I’d spent every day for a long time at the shooting range but had always been secure, safe behind the barrier. Now I was walking amidst the targets, and I didn’t like it. That analogy came up a lot in my mind as the war dragged on, inspired by one of Max’s earliest letters from basic training about marksmanship practice.
He ended up in a noncombat position, thank god, as an American officer in the Allied Control Commission for Italy—executive director of the economic section.
That still put him largely beyond my reach. Our correspondence remained wildly uneven.
I would send, for example, a typical letter that read something like this:
Dearest Puppa:
I’ve been sending you V-mail letters every day and others, too, but they fill up so fast. So I have been jotting down things Gianino says that are new and funny and sweet, which I know you would want to hear.
This A.M. the first thing he said when I went in because he was shaking the crib apart was “Daddee, mail!” How he had that on his mind I don’t know because all I’ve said about mail is that I’m writing Daddee and he can put a kiss in the letter. Anyway, now all incoming and outgoing mail must be kissed.
Tonight when I was feeding him dinner, he said, “Mommee, is Daddee all right?” just like that. And I said Daddee was fine and he put his darling little arms around me and his face against my cheek and said “Mommee so sweet. I love Mommee.” What an intuitive little party! When I have made a point of being full of good cheer, he still knows he’s got to pinch-hit for the greatest guy in the world.
I miss you more than it’s possible to say. I’m hoping we’ll both get a letter from you soon.
Love,
Mumma
In reply, I might get a love letter on an airmail sheet: Just a quickie as I am leaving soon—I loved your letters. They are always wonderful. You are wonderful in every way. Will write you and phone you when I can, but it may be some time. I LUVE MY MUMMA.
If he was feeling effusive, there might be a drawing of a heart.
Often, I might get no more than an official receipt telling me he had received from me at his APO:
1. Life magazine
2. Time magazine
3. One carton Philip Morris cigarettes and one carton Pall Mall
That was the maximum amount of smokes a soldier could receive every two weeks. Max didn’t smoke them all, but rather traded them around the country, he said, for various needs.
At any rate, this was a meager diet of love for me to live on for three long years, especially when I’d been so accustomed to a nonstop feast.
Max returned not long after V-E Day, arriving home in June of 1945.
It was a relief to have him back, but things were never the same.
It was not an abrupt or a radical change, just a different texture in the weave of our lives.
R.H. Macy’s had not held his job, and so he began working for the government—a long-term contract, doing the kind of economic development tasks he’d been doing in Italy, only here in the States. This meant long train rides back and forth between Manhattan and D.C. Which meant fewer excuses—now that he was going there often, and I was lancing freely, and we had a child whom everyone in my family wanted to see—to avoid my family.
How I came to miss the relative privacy—not to mention the privacy from relatives—that I routinely enjoyed while breadwinning, even in my bustling and clamorous office, where I could shut the door and tell the receptionist to lie: “She’s not in.”
No one quite believed that freelancing and being a mother qualified as actual work.
Friends dropped by, thinking they were helping, but often they’d only take up the time I’d set aside to read or write. They thought I was lonely without Max. And I did miss him greatly, but that was not the same as being lonely.
“Gather ye hot dogs while ye may,” I said to the few single girls left among them when they’d stop in.
Oh, they’d reply, we’re tired of the man chase. Tired of the rat race. We envy the pace of your relaxing life.
That would make me long to caress them with an axe.
I never ceased in my attempts to spin the straw of drudgery into the gold of fun. I came to feel gratified at having a scrap of time large enough to write a letter or to pay the phone bill. To put a baked potato slurried with beef juice in Johnny’s bowl, and a martini in my glass.
After Johnny was born, I was pulled by a tension between resistance and acceptance: wanting to hide the playpen sometimes, somehow, to pretend there was no infant on the premises. Why?