Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(49)

“He’s not a diorama at the Natural History Museum,” I’d tell them. “You can wait.”

He cried a lot—a lot. The city sanitation crews would wake him, bouncing the metal trash cans on the concrete, infuriating him, and he, in turn, would infuriate the neighbors.

He was exhausting, unable to avoid and seeming to seek danger. If one gave him a stuffed animal with large-headed pins for eyes—common in those days—he’d yank them out and make to devour them.

Max loved Johnny, and me for producing him. But he, like his fellow fathers, had only the most perfunctory interest in the baby at the bassinet stage, leaving me to change and feed and nap and burp and quiet his screaming.

Before I had a baby, I obliged lady friends who insisted that I race from the office to see their darling offspring: There he was, asplash in his prebedtime tub, and there I was, being regaled with all his vital statistics, height and weight and pooping propensities. No conversation to be had when Baby was in the room. And I would grin through gritted teeth and compliment them: on baby’s skin, smooth as a pale cherry blossom; or baby’s precocity in the vocabulary department, demonstrable by such word pairs as “toidy seat.” I pushed back my rising gorge at their feeble minds, unimpressed that their child’s fondest wish seemed to be beating the backside of a frying pan with some chromium utensil.

After I had a baby, I was gifted with epiphanic understanding of where they’d all been coming from. Suddenly all my clothes were washable, and my sharply pointed jewelry had been retired; the only prickling was in my eyes from lack of sleep.

I understood, too, the competitive comparisons leveraged by motherhood. Was my baby as heavy as the baby next door? Did he get his teeth soon enough? What of speaking? This animal love turned even the most mundane events into monuments.

I worked from home and tried to glamour up by six, when Max got back from the rug department: powder and lipstick to paint myself the Fairy Queen of the Nursery, like in a storybook—but I’d as often be wearing, too, prune pulp and farina. At least little Gianluca always looked good: the handsome crabapple of his parents’ eyes. I did find some dresses with buttons down the front that I could dive into without looking like I’d taken a stick of dynamite to my hair. I could never bring myself to let the baby yell while I made up my face, though, so many were the nights I was mostly undone.

I wouldn’t say I was jealous, exactly. But I was intensely wistful every morning when Max would leave to go to R.H. Macy’s, and when he would return home from there every night.

*

Wishing for something never made it so, and I never wished for Max to lose his berth at R.H. Macy’s as I had lost mine. But inevitably the war came for us, as it had been coming for everyone.

Max was drafted and, like that, he was gone.

For a little over a year he had been deferred on account of our baby, but by the end of 1942 Uncle Sam could no longer do without him. He had to go to Italy because he spoke Italian.

So from early 1943 until late 1945 it was just Gianino and me, experiencing those formative years as an unstable duo. I spent all the time I wasn’t raising Johnny freelancing and writing many more letters to Max than I received. Enduring darkness and blackouts both literal and metaphoric.

I felt like a different person without Max around. A worse one.

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.