Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(50)

I miss you more than it’s possible to say. I’m hoping we’ll both get a letter from you soon.

Love,

Mumma

In reply, I might get a love letter on an airmail sheet: Just a quickie as I am leaving soon—I loved your letters. They are always wonderful. You are wonderful in every way. Will write you and phone you when I can, but it may be some time. I LUVE MY MUMMA.

If he was feeling effusive, there might be a drawing of a heart.

Often, I might get no more than an official receipt telling me he had received from me at his APO:

1. Life magazine

2. Time magazine

3. One carton Philip Morris cigarettes and one carton Pall Mall

That was the maximum amount of smokes a soldier could receive every two weeks. Max didn’t smoke them all, but rather traded them around the country, he said, for various needs.

At any rate, this was a meager diet of love for me to live on for three long years, especially when I’d been so accustomed to a nonstop feast.

Max returned not long after V-E Day, arriving home in June of 1945.

It was a relief to have him back, but things were never the same.

It was not an abrupt or a radical change, just a different texture in the weave of our lives.

R.H. Macy’s had not held his job, and so he began working for the government—a long-term contract, doing the kind of economic development tasks he’d been doing in Italy, only here in the States. This meant long train rides back and forth between Manhattan and D.C. Which meant fewer excuses—now that he was going there often, and I was lancing freely, and we had a child whom everyone in my family wanted to see—to avoid my family.

How I came to miss the relative privacy—not to mention the privacy from relatives—that I routinely enjoyed while breadwinning, even in my bustling and clamorous office, where I could shut the door and tell the receptionist to lie: “She’s not in.”

No one quite believed that freelancing and being a mother qualified as actual work.

Friends dropped by, thinking they were helping, but often they’d only take up the time I’d set aside to read or write. They thought I was lonely without Max. And I did miss him greatly, but that was not the same as being lonely.

“Gather ye hot dogs while ye may,” I said to the few single girls left among them when they’d stop in.

Oh, they’d reply, we’re tired of the man chase. Tired of the rat race. We envy the pace of your relaxing life.

That would make me long to caress them with an axe.

I never ceased in my attempts to spin the straw of drudgery into the gold of fun. I came to feel gratified at having a scrap of time large enough to write a letter or to pay the phone bill. To put a baked potato slurried with beef juice in Johnny’s bowl, and a martini in my glass.

After Johnny was born, I was pulled by a tension between resistance and acceptance: wanting to hide the playpen sometimes, somehow, to pretend there was no infant on the premises. Why?

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.