Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(43)

“Sneerer at Love Engaged to Wed,” said the headline in the New York World-Telegram, followed by the subhead, “Lillian Boxfish, Poet, to Marry Rug Buyer.” The lede read, “Man bites dog—or, even more incredible, love bites Lillian Boxfish. The young lady who writes books of verses putting the sneer on the tender emotion has got herself engaged. Miss Boxfish has another set of poems all ready for publication. It should be titled Eating My Words.”

Truth be told, I had branded myself as the scoffer at love—but the expectation that I scoff vocally at love every time some society-page scribbler buttonholed me at a function had grown oppressive. As had trying to explain that the love I scoffed at was not the genuine article—the visceral and untidy relations between adult humans—but rather the flat simulacrum thereof deployed by advertisers less imaginative than I to sell things that nobody needs. Worst of all was a suspicion, one I could neither dismiss nor explain, that my scoffing had done nothing to check the stupid sentimentality that it took as its target, but had actually strengthened it somehow, amounting in the public eye to a few rounds of witty banter prior to the taming of the shrew. I had been typecast in a bad role; my best option was to break character. Paradoxically, I figured, I would be more free to live and work and write the way I chose if I did so while married to someone I truly loved.

For I truly loved Max. And I would continue to do so for decades, even after we were no longer a couple.

The spring leading up to our wedding, the spring of 1935, proved that the life of a self-styled poet sophisticate and crack ad copywriter about to marry is not a tranquil one.

There was the telephone jangling all day with queries from friends who wanted to know “What about that sunny spinster’s life now?”

Even Helen, though supportive, was stunned when I told her. She kidded around, throwing a hand to her lovely high forehead, pretending to feel faint and asking for a chair to collapse in as she absorbed the shock.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, actually—no one in the press, that is—but Helen wisely persuaded me to give some interviews, if only because the society columnists were going to go crazy at the news regardless.

Even as “How dare they?” became the mental counterpoint to all my activities in the days that followed our engagement announcement, outwardly I went along with the reporters’ questions, sweet and buttery as a lamb, because in the end: Live by the sword, die by the sword.

The strangest profile of all ended up being the one in the L.A. Times. “This beguiling young lady is going to be married,” it said. “So her picture is printed for that and various other reasons. First, she is a remarkably intelligent young woman, in addition to being beautiful. She writes real poetry and sells it for real money. Not every poet can do that. In addition, this remarkable young person can and does write advertising, a talent that makes her at least twice as rich every year as two members of the United States cabinet combined.”

I might have been gratified, once, at this piece’s emphasis on my earning capabilities. And I did get a small frisson from thinking of Frances Perkins, secretary of labor, who earned $15,000 per year when I was pulling down over $30,000.

But the stories about it had begun to seem vulgar.

I won’t even quote the article about the engagement that ran in my hometown paper, in Washington, D.C., under the disgusting headline of “Love, Women’s Greatest Role.”

Indeed, it was my mother who really sent me over the edge. I read that clipping because she mailed it to me, of course. In doing so, she was the only one in that ecstatic, albeit beleaguered, time who set me to sobbing. It happened one night after getting off the telephone with her, alone in my apartment, reading over old drafts of antilove poems, thinking: You know you have done something horribly wrong if your mother is saying, “I knew it. I told you so.”

I had been so sure when I told Max yes, but the public uproar had shaken me more than I thought it might, causing me—just slightly—to doubt.

Should I do this? Why was I doing this?

But then Max would come over, and I’d know why.

So I did it. And for a few years, I was as happy as I had ever been—as happy, it turns out, as I would ever be again.

Even after our divorce, twenty years later, he’d still sign the notes he sent with his child support checks “love.”





14

Mulligan

The golden Ds on the scarlet awnings—surrounded by laurel wreaths in heraldic style—seem to stand not merely for “Delmonico’s” but also for “do over.”

The restaurant lofts steak smells over the intersection of William and Beaver, and as they waft toward me, I feel, finally, famished. I should be, I suppose, after a three-and-a-half-mile walk.

During our marriage, whenever Max was away on business, which was often, I missed him terribly. What I did not miss were my evening dates with pots and pans. I rejoiced in rest from rump and roast, from spuds and the suds of dishes washed. Max taught me to cook, but it brought me no joy without him, so I kept the food simple when I just made it for me, for me and Johnny: fragrant coffee, honest stew.

We had a cook, too, a few nights a week, to help me then while I was freelancing. She made hearty food: roasted chicken and creamed potatoes, oysters and grilled tomatoes, squash or scrambled eggs or scrod.

For the second and last time in my life I step up the three steps and stand in the doorway where I last stood almost thirty years ago. Whether and how the place has changed I can’t say; I have no memory of the entrance. Despite my damned good health, I do take note of things like steps—and hips, and trips, and falls—differently now than I did in my fifties. Thirty years! I was in sorry shape then, but I was younger, younger, younger.