CHAPTER 7
“LOOK AT THE CAMERA! Sweetheart, look at the camera!” I stood behind Charles, beaming at my son. Little Charlie sat in a high chair, waving a spoon, a tiny cake with one candle on the tray in front of him. Daddy and Mother stood behind me; we all waved and cooed and acted much more foolishly than the baby. He simply scowled at us all with comical gravity, his plump fist clutching the silver spoon, until finally he cocked his head as if pondering what strange creatures adults could be.
“Perfect,” Charles said, as he clicked the camera. “That’s a keeper.”
“Should we release it, then?” I walked over to the baby. Now that we had all stopped acting like trained monkeys, he had turned his attention to his cake and was demolishing it with his spoon, cooing and giggling at the mess he made. My heart soared, watching his complete bliss; how marvelous to be utterly content with a spoon and a pile of crumbs! How innocent, how sweet, my baby was! I longed to pick him up and wrap him in my arms as a way to preserve his innocence—to catch it, even, as if it were a giddy virus—but I fought the impulse by picking up a tea towel instead.
The maternal instinct must be smothered; I repeated this phrase to myself a hundred times a day. Charles and I had agreed to raise the baby according to the Watson method, then much in fashion. It was a strict scientific method—Charles Junior’s schedule was planned to the minute, feedings coming precisely the same time each day, along with nap time, playtime, et cetera. Nothing was left to chance, and, most important, the child was encouraged to develop on his own, without the unnecessary, potentially harmful, influence of maternal love and anxiety.
Immediately after his birth, I had been relieved to relinquish control of my child to this method; I couldn’t wait to resume my life with my husband, just the two of us, my body miraculously light and easy again, as if it could fly on its own accord. The nurse I had hired was given precise schedules and charts by which to run the temporary nursery at Next Day Hill. When we were home, we saw the baby only a few times a day; he was presented to us, much like an exotic specimen of flora or fauna to be admired. And when he was placed in my arms, wrapped and pinned into a neat little bundle, I didn’t know what to do. Because I felt no attachment to the squalling, red-faced creature whose greatest desire appeared to be a myopic determination to suck his fist.
I knew he was mine; I remembered struggling out of the fog of ether after he was born, seeing the deep cleft in the chin, exactly like Charles’s, and smiling in relief that he did not look like me; his nose was button-perfect, and his eyes did not slant downward. I felt a bit like a princess, actually, as I fell back against my pillows with a contented sigh; I had done my job. I had produced the heir that Charles—the entire world—had so desired. While I recuperated upstairs, downstairs my parents’ doorbell kept ringing for days, as bushels of congratulatory telegrams were delivered, along with flowers and gifts—Louis B. Mayer sent a small movie camera; Al Jolson offered to come to the house and sing “Sonny Boy” to him in person; Will Rogers sent him a pony. The Sunday after his birth, churches all across the land singled out my child for special prayers; musicians composed lullabies in his honor; schools were named after him. Some in Congress suggested his birth be declared a national holiday.
And Charles, that day—I’d never before seen him so worried, and then so proud when it was all over. Even more proud than when I first soloed in an airplane. He had held my hand until the pains got too much for me and I was put under—and the memory of him beside me, never wandering off to have a cigar or do any of the distracting things men usually did at a time like that, remained with me, each detail etched in my heart. His worried brow, usually so smooth and implacable; his soothing murmurs, not real words at all, and this from a man who was usually so economic with his speech.
And then his face, when I awoke—his mouth open in astonishment as he held his son, gazing down at him as if he were a miracle, as if he’d never believed this could be the logical result of the previous nine months. Charles’s face was stripped of that polite mask he wore so much of the time, naked with hope and wonder.
So it was my husband’s behavior, his vulnerability and concern for me, that I most cherished that day—not the miraculous fact of our child. Little wonder, then, that it took me a while to appreciate him.
By now, his first birthday, I had. I had fallen in love with my son in approximately the same time it had taken me to fall in love with his father. Not immediately, but over a series of increasingly precious events. The first time he smiled and we were sure it wasn’t gas. The first time he waved when he saw me enter a room. The first time I could brush his curls—reddish blond, just like Charles’s. The first time he sat in my lap and peered intently into my face, patting me on the cheeks, studying me almost as clinically as his father sometimes did—as if trying to memorize me.
I had my heart shattered, as well—just like any woman who falls in love: the first time he said, “Mama,” and looked at the nurse instead of me.
“I suppose I should release one of these photos,” Charles said now, as he put the lens cap back on our Kodak. “Perhaps it would satisfy those vultures, those newspapermen. At the very least, it would give them something new to write about except breadlines and Hoovervilles.”
It was June 1931; the Depression was no longer a nightmarish notion but a grim reality. Yet here in the beckoning warmth of the early summer sun, it was easy to imagine that we were removed, charmed, as if in a fairy tale of our own at Next Day Hill. Mother and Daddy were temporarily home from Washington, where he was now the junior senator from New Jersey. Dwight was doing better, working with a tutor while he continued to stay at a sanitarium in Massachusetts. Con was home from school for the summer.
The gardens seemed to have exploded overnight, struggling early shoots replaced with enormous blossoms and garishly-flowering bushes. The lawn was so green as to look artificial, tidy and manicured, dutifully cared for by an army of gardeners. My baby’s birthday cake had been lovingly frosted by the cook. Betty Gow, our new nurse, was hovering in the background in her light denim nurse’s dress, a blue sweater around her shoulders, ready to remove the baby, should he begin to fuss.
But there were shadows gathering near the manicured borders of our little world. “If you don’t release a photo for his birthday,” I told Charles, as the others went inside to get the presents, “the newspapers are sure to start up that nonsense again about the baby being deformed.”
“I don’t like offering up my son like ransom,” Charles muttered, looking about the garden as if, even now, a photographer might be lurking behind a tree. “Why do they care?”
“If we don’t give them some information, they print the most awful things on their own. We didn’t release a photograph after he was born, so they retaliated by saying he was—he was a freak.”
“You shouldn’t care what they print. I’ve told you so many times.” Charles scowled down at me. Against the brilliance of this sky, his eyes did not look quite so blue, although they were clear and steady as always. His brow was still forbidding and noble; unlined, even though he was almost thirty. He looked very much like the earnest young man who landed in Paris, except that his reddish-blond hair was beginning to recede a little. And he had faint crinkles around his eyes.
“I’m his mother. Naturally, I care what is said about my child, Charles. Naturally, I don’t want people saying that he’s deformed,” I explained, wondering why it was necessary to do so.
Did I look any different to him, after two years of marriage? I was a trifle more plump after the baby, mainly around my hips. I was glad that the fashions had changed, that the slim, boyish figure prized in the twenties was no longer in vogue.
“I know you care.” Charles looked bewildered, shaking his head. But his expression changed as he gazed at his son; it softened, then turned impish in a flash; his lips curled up into a gremlin’s grin. Before I could stop him, he had snatched the spoon out of the baby’s hands.
The baby reacted by crumbling into a sobbing, cake-covered mess; his eyes scrunched up, his face turned red, and tears streamed down his cheeks, dribbling off his chin.
“Oh, Charles!” I hated it when he did this; when he got in what Betty called, in her Scottish burr, his “awful devilish” mood, teasing and tormenting everyone in his path. It was as if the crude, practical-joke-playing young airmail pilot was trying, with one last, mighty push, to break free before he was forever trapped inside the marble statue my husband was becoming.
“Charles, give it back to him,” I pleaded, trying to take the spoon, but he held it high above my head.
