Jim joined the Merchant Marine in 1944, and I went to work in a parachute factory. The great war was on. Battles were being fought. Juke boxes were playing. People’s eyes were lit up.
I wore overalls in the factory. I was surprised that they insisted on this. Putting a girl in overalls is like having her work in tights, particularly if a girl knows how to wear them. As parachute inspector I was back in math class again. The men buzzed around me just as the high school boys had done.
I have noticed since that men usually leave married women alone, and are inclined to treat all wives with respect. This is no great credit to married women. Men are always ready to respect anything that bores them. The reason most wives, even pretty ones, wear such a dull look is because they’re respected so much.
Maybe it was my fault that the men in the factory tried to date me and buy me drinks. I didn’t feel like a married woman. I was completely faithful to my overseas husband, but that wasn’t because I loved him or even because I had moral ideas. My fidelity was due to my lack of interest in sex.
Jim finally came home, and we lived together again. It’s hard to remember what you said, did, or felt when you were bored.
Jim was a nice husband. He never hurt me or upset me—except on one subject. He wanted a baby.
The thought of having a baby stood my hair on end. I could see it only as myself, another Norma Jean in an orphanage. Something would happen to me. Jim would wander off. And there would be this little girl in the blue dress and white blouse living in her “aunt’s” home, washing dishes, being last in the bath water on Saturday night.
I couldn’t explain this to Jim. After he fell asleep beside me at night I would lie awake crying. I didn’t quite know who it was that cried, Mrs. Dougherty or the child she might have. It was neither. It was Norma Jean, still alive, still alone, still wishing she were dead.
I feel different about having a child now. It’s one of the things I dream of. She won’t be any Norma Jean now. And I know how I’ll bring her up—without lies. Nobody will tell her lies about anything. And I’ll answer all her questions. If I don’t know the answers I’ll go to an encyclopedia and look them up. I’ll tell her whatever she wants to know—about love, about sex, about everything!
But chiefly, no lies! No lies about there being a Santa Claus or about the world being full of noble and honorable people all eager to help each other and do good to each other. I’ll tell her there are honor and goodness in the world, the same as there are diamonds and radium.
This is the end of my story of Norma Jean. Jim and I were divorced. And I moved into a room in Hollywood to live by myself. I was nineteen, and I wanted to find out who I was.
When I just wrote “this is the end of Norma Jean,” I blushed as if I had been caught in a lie. Because this sad, bitter child who grew up too fast is hardly ever out of my heart. With success all around me, I can still feel her frightened eyes looking out of mine. She keeps saying, “I never lived, I was never loved,” and often I get confused and think it’s I who am saying it.
6
I had been a sort of “child bride.” Now I was a sort of “child widow.” Many things seemed to have happened to me. Yet, in a way, nothing had happened, except that I was nineteen instead of nine, and I had to look for my own job.
The sort of instinct that leads a duck to water led me to photographer studios. I got jobs posing for ads and layouts. The chief trouble was that the photographers were also looking for work. Finding a photographer who wanted me as a model was easier than finding one who could pay more than promises.
But I made enough money for room rent and a meal a day although sometimes I fell behind on my eating. It didn’t matter, though. When you’re young and healthy a little hunger isn’t too important.
What mattered more was being lonely. When you’re young and healthy loneliness can seem more important than it is.
I looked at the streets with lonely eyes. I had no relatives to visit or chums to go places with.
My Aunt Grace and Aunt Anna were working hard to keep food in their kitchens and the rent paid. When I called on them they felt sorry for me and wanted to help me. I knew how they needed the half dollars in their purses; so I stayed away unless I had money and could take them to a restaurant or the movies.
I had only myself. When I walked home from the restaurant in the evening with the streets lighted up and a crowd on the sidewalks, I used to watch the faces chatting to each other and hurrying someplace. I wondered where they were going and how it felt to have places to go to or people who knew you.
There were always men willing to help a girl be less lonely. They said, “Hi, baby,” when you passed. When you didn’t turn to look at them they sneered, “ ‘Stuck up, eh?”
Sometimes they followed you and kept up a one-sided conversation. “You look all right, baby. How about we drop in someplace for a drink and a dance.” After a half block when you didn’t answer them, they got indignant and swore at you and dismissed you with a final insult.
I never answered them. Sometimes I felt sorry for them. They seemed as lonely as I was. It wasn’t any moral attitude that kept me from accepting their sidewalk invitations. It was not wanting to be used by others. Norma Jean had been used, told to do this, do that, come here, clean the kitchen, and keep her mouth shut no matter what she felt. Everybody had had the drop on Norma Jean. If she didn’t obey, back she went to the orphanage.
These lonely street corner wolves “hi-babying” me sounded like voices out of the past calling me to be Miss Nobody again—to be used and ignored.
One evening I met a man in a restaurant. We walked out of the place together, and he kept talking to me in the street. He was the first person who had talked to me for quite a while, and I listened eagerly.
“This town has sure changed a lot in the last forty years,” he said. “Used to be Indians right where we’re walking. All this was a kind of desert. You had to ride a horse to get anywhere.”
“Did you used to live here forty years ago?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “How old do you think I am?”
“About sixty,” I said.
“Seventy-seven my last birthday,” he corrected me. “The name is Bill Cox. You going anywhere?”
I said I wasn’t.
“Why not drop in on me and the missus?” he said. “Live right near here. She didn’t feel in the mood for night life, so I’m bringing her home a sandwich.”
I became a friend of Bill Cox and his wife. The three of us would walk together in the streets at night sometimes, but more often just Bill and I would promenade. He talked chiefly about the Spanish-American War in which he had been a soldier and about Abraham Lincoln. These two topics were very exciting to him.
I had never heard of the Spanish-American War. I must have been absent from school the week it was studied by my history class.
Bill Cox explained the whole war to me, its causes and all its battles. And he also told me the life of Abraham Lincoln from his birth onward. Walking with Bill Cox in the lighted Hollywood streets and hearing stories about the Spanish-American War and Abraham Lincoln, I didn’t feel lonely and the sidewalk wolves didn’t “hi-baby” me.
One evening Bill Cox told me he was going back to Texas.
“I’m feeling a little sick,” he said, “and I’d hate to die anyplace except in Texas.”
He sent me a few letters from Texas. I answered them. Then a letter came from his wife saying Bill Cox had died in an old soldiers’ home in Texas. I read the letter in the restaurant where I had met him and walked home crying. The Hollywood streets seemed lonelier than ever without Bill Cox and San Juan and Abraham Lincoln.
7
