As ever, it was Helen who had the most sensible solution. She sent reporters from her women’s magazines over to profile me and my happy little family.
In 1946, for instance, we were written up—Max and Johnny and me, all three—in Woman’s Day. “The toddler pictured here is a strapping young gentleman of this decade’s bumper crop of babies. As you probably know, Mrs. Caputo is Lillian Boxfish in public life, famous for her light verse and one of the best-liked contributors to this very magazine. It is still too early to predict Johnny’s future, but if he shows a tendency to clutch a pencil and put marks on paper with an inspirational light in his eyes, we will keep you posted.”
The attention did make me feel a bit better, like I existed again.
It was also Helen’s idea to collaborate on another book, not unlike our etiquette guide, but this one with an eye, of course, toward the how-tos of motherhood.
So Now You’ve Done It: A Practical Handbook to Handling Baby we called it.
In my initial drafts, I wanted to tackle such burning questions as:
Why do people feel they need to have children to act like children? Why not eat Cracker Jack in the street if that’s your pleasure? Why not scuff the leaves or romp in the snow? Cut out the damn middleman and do what you want.
In the end, though, we aimed at—and hit—the popular middle, offering, as the jacket copy said, to help the consumer enjoy their new baby: “Here, at last, is the book which treats babies not like bundles from heaven, but like a bundle from Macy’s—something you’ve wanted in your home that always arrives C.O.D.”
Thus was Johnny, both directly and indirectly, a well-documented and inspiring and much doted-upon child.
Max snapped endless photographs: Johnny in the pram; me in a fur coat, pushing him on a swing in our neighborhood playground; Johnny sitting on a bench, eating an ice cream; me holding him in my lap; Johnny at seven, perhaps, playing the recorder with some lady on the piano accompanying him, or the other way around.
As Johnny grew up, I wrote poems not only about, but with him, like “Leave Us Batten Down Our Belfries”:
I dote on cats
And also kittens
But I loathe rats
And all their rittens.
I feel the same toward bats
And bittens.
*
I tried not to smother him. I’m not sure I succeeded. Wholesome neglect is not in my nature; if I decide to do something I don’t hold anything back.
Max and I turned our hearts over to Johnny. Providentially for us he was a benevolent dictator. We called him Attila, our affectionate pet name, when it was just the two of us, so wholly conquered did we feel. He was a wonderful child, sensitive and kind and extremely musical from an early age.
And while I hadn’t even been sure I wanted him at first, it hurt my heart slightly as he grew, inevitably, up and away—loving, always, but more and more independent with the passing days. Watching him grow, I sometimes recalled that party long ago on the Upper East Side, and my otherwise-all-but-forgotten date, Bennie, when he, looking out over the city, had spoken of “the way a crane creates, then erases itself, from the skyline.” He’d been referring to how I, as a copywriter, created R.H. Macy’s, but the same metaphor might easily have been applied to how I, as a mother, was creating my son.
Don’t get me wrong—don’t let my ambivalence distort the story.
We still had good times.
Max and I were still in love.
We had fun with Johnny. The carousel in Central Park. Root beer floats. Fireflies.
We spent a few weeks each summer at our place in Maine: family vacations at Pin Point, which Max and I had rented on our first out-of-town trip together, then bought back in 1938.
We’d take Johnny for a swim in the lake, then leave our bathing suits on the green lawn near the white house to dry: pastel remnants of a day well spent beneath a blue sky.
But also cold skins—old skins we could never quite put back on and feel as warm as we used to, as comfortable in.
16
Back to the Stars
Any day you walk down a street and find nothing new but nothing missing counts as a good day in a city you love. People are forever tearing something down, replacing something irreplaceable.
Walking north on Church Street, away from Delmonico’s, I can smell the Hudson River—cool and murky, full of hearty but toxic fish, shiny and reeking with fuel from the ferries.
I want to see the water.
I’m not on a schedule, and I’ve got the time. Wendy is likely not expecting me at her party at all, and certainly not at any particular hour. Even midnight is a negotiable deadline.
So I turn left on Vesey. It used to lead all the way to the water’s edge, but not anymore, not exactly.