There’s a back-story to most events, including the birth of my daughter. Often it’s not pretty. Mine wasn’t. By the time I was thirty-four in 1973, I’d become capable of rattling off a short version of it to anyone I met. And most New Yorkers, trapped in traumas and patched together by therapy, also related a condensed version of their life stories so that once mutual confession was over, sympathy laced with humor could begin.
My spiel was – My Mother Died when I was Twelve. I Lost almost all Memory of my Childhood before that, all sense of Her. My quiet Father Drank himself silly after marrying the nurse who brought my Mother home from the hospital to Die. I got Pregnant in college. Had an Abortion. Wouldn’t have another when I got pregnant again. I wasn’t married when I had my inter-racial daughter. She Is Wonderful. I had NO skills for making a living. It’s been Hard.
It had taken years of therapy to learn to talk about these bare facts. It would take much longer to stop submerging my feelings, to set boundaries and to start directing the course of my life.
I was born in 1939, twelve years after my mother and father were married. When I was eight, I accidentally overheard that she had been married before, and learned why my older brother had a different last name. When my mother died, her image was obliterated from my memory. I don’t know what she looked like, how her arms felt when she held me, her scent, the sound of her voice, what her expectations for me were, if she loved me. I don’t remember having lived within a family, of having been a child. However, I do remember the large house she’d chosen and carefully, if sparely, furnished. It was sold within a year of her death.
My father, a reserved mid-Westerner with a doctorate in math from the University of Chicago, was ill-equipped to have born the strain of keeping her four-year struggle with stomach cancer a secret, much less taking care of a twelve-year-old. He quickly married Lou, the brassy nurse who had accompanied my mother on the plane home from the hospital and who took care of her for the last week she was alive.
Lou wore angora sweaters embroidered with beads. She wore falsies, tight skirts, high heels, lots of perfume, mascara, eye liner, lash thickener, foundation, powder, bright lipstick and crimson nail polish. This stranger, my new step-mother, carted me back and forth to visit her ex-second husband, an alderman in a Chicago ward, in whose bed she slept. Since she never told him that she’d married my father, Lou instructed me to call her by name in front of him and whisper “Mother” to her. I did not divulge her secrets to either man.
Over the six years she was married to my father, her visits to Chicago became longer while her stays at our suburban home on Long Island became shorter and less frequent. When she was away, my father drank tumblers of scotch and spent most nights sleeping in the bathtub. From my nearby bedroom, I could hear the water run in the middle of the night and assumed he’d turned on the hot tap, as if he were pulling up a blanket from the bottom of the bed because he’d gotten cold.
I took over the household tasks: washing and ironing my father’s shirts, cleaning the house, opening cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli and heating frozen chicken pot pies. My frail paternal grandmother, a thin-lipped teetotaler, lived with us. She silently, but fiercely, disapproved of all the goings-on around her, most importantly – the demon drink. I bought my own clothes from money I earned as a popover girl at Lorraine Murphys’ on Miracle Mile in the next town over. On the rare times my father and I talked, it was most often about writing – Edmund Wilson, Bertrand Russell, James Thurber, Francoise Sagan. We listened to Bob and Ray on the radio and very occasionally watched Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca on our small black and white TV.
Intuitively, I followed my father’s example of being quietly understanding and unquestioning of all that transpired around us. He had taught me that conventional social norms are arbitrary and cloying, that religion is a leaky boat in which those wanting easy answers to the difficulties of life drifted, and that most everything is arbitrary, starting with the alphabet. I was raised as an agnostic because my father thought that the definition of atheism implied an argument about the existence of god, something he considered a “waste of time.”
To compound what I’d experienced as a teen-ager, I chose the absolutely wrong college. Bard, a small liberal arts school located in an isolated area on the Hudson, was not the place for anyone as confused, repressed, silent and troubled as I was, though I had managed to appear like a fairly successful, high-school student. I fancied that I’d chosen a radical school which would provide a rich climate for thoughtful, experimental study. That I was too emotionally damaged to profit from this intellectual stimulation was not apparent to me.
Too ill with ulcerative colitis to start college right after graduating from high school, I spent the year in Manhattan where I began seeing the first of many psychiatrists. My father had rented a Greenwich Village studio apartment after selling our house, vowing never to cut another lawn. Only the bathroom, where he occasionally slept, had a door. As an escape from that situation, I took up with an Italian man, twelve years older, who saw me as a beautiful doll to be schooled in sophisticated culture starting with the New Wave of foreign films. He lived in a minuscule tenement apartment in Little Italy, shared with a fellow from Calabria.
By the end of that year, my father had divorced Lou and quickly married his third wife, a kindly, conventional woman with little understanding of his intellectual preoccupations or the complicated life he had provided for me. Now that he was in her capable hands, I went off to college, relieved.
When I arrived at Bard in 1958, I must have appeared to others as intelligent and attractive. My undoing was that all feelings about what I had experienced growing up were buried so deeply that it would be years before I understood anything of the toll upon me. I was numb to the core, but excellent at playing whatever role I thought was necessary to fit in. Only years later did I learn how common this ‘act as if’ attitude is to those who have grown up in fractured homes or around alcoholics.
Many of my classmates came from equally troubled homes, but theirs were located in New York City. They had assumed a pretense of sophistication and were way ahead of the sexual revolution. Not for nothing was Bard nicknamed the ‘little red whore house on the hill.’
By the time I quit school at the end of my sophomore year, having learned very little academically, I had slept with one icy guy who specialized in playing pool because he mother never let him forget that his older brother had tested at a genius level; a Hungarian freedom fighter who was dating the icy fellow’s ex-girlfriend; and a drunk kid who, a few months after we had late-night-sex on the grass near the local bar, cracked up the flashy red sportscar his grandmother had just given him, and died. Soon after that, I started dating Kemper, an ostensibly stable guy and an Army veteran. Unfortunately I became pregnant. Very unfortunately. A few months before, a young woman had died in Queens after an illegal abortion. The newspaper headlines were ominous. Every abortionist had closed doors, shut off phones, including the legendary doctor in Connecticut to whose farm my friend had been driven in the dark of night the previous fall.
Kemper tried his best to find a solution, but there was none. Help, if it can be called that, arrived only after my father accidentally opened what he thought was a bill from the gynecologist and found out that I was pregnant. He called my psychiatrist who said that if two psychiatrists certified that I was too mentally unstable to have a child, an abortion could be performed in a New York hospital. My doctor was willing to write the letter, as was the severe European woman I consulted.
The hitch was that I was just over eight weeks pregnant, and since vaginal abortions were not permitted at that stage, it was necessary to have a hysterotomy, an operation not unlike a cesarean section. As I carried my small bag through the hospital lobby, I was positive that I’d die during the operation.
I didn’t, and went back to Bard with a remarkable sense of optimism, believing that I had a future (though what it was I never pictured.) That feeling lasted about two weeks. At the end of the spring semester, I quit school to marry Kemper. Neither of us knew what we were doing, much less what we felt. I walked out on the marriage after six months, understanding nothing of the complex reasons that had lead me, us, to this crisis.
For four years, I drifted through tentative jobs, each paying less than the last, and unsatisfying affairs. Then Darryl, a casual college acquaintance, phoned. He’d just been returned, broke, flown from Italy on an army carrier, courtesy of the American government. He’d been traveling there after graduation with a friend (ironically the woman who later married my ex-husband) until her money ran out. I found him thrillingly attractive. His straight nose flared slightly at the nostrils, his cheek-bones were prominent, his chin sculpted, his skin a light tan with a spread of freckles across the cheeks, hair neatly trimmed into a close Afro. His easy smile showed a tiny gap between the upper front teeth. Darryl had the lean body of an athlete, a dancer perhaps. Those were the days when the term was Negro rather than black or Afro-American. He had been one of the rare non-white students on the Bard campus.
Flattered that he remembered me, I invited him to dinner at my St. Marks Place apartment, hardly imagining that once I’d opened the door, he wouldn’t leave. After one night, we had begun living together. I never thought to protest. Only years later did I come to understand his profound passivity, to realize that he’d had nowhere else to go but his father’s in the Bronx – a sorrier choice.
Darryl quickly turned the larger of my two almost bare rooms into a studio where he produced countless drawings on huge sheets of heavy paper -- tangled charcoal lines, the center dark and hidden. Though his desire to paint seethed beneath the surface, he had no job and couldn’t afford canvas and oils.
Perhaps because I had grown up with a father who parsed words, Darryl’s reticence was intriguing. I imagined him a secret waiting to be revealed. I wanted to know what he knew, read what he read, think what he thought. When he wasn't drawing, he read books with glossy illustrations of work by Pevsner, Archipenko, Gabo and Duchamp, along with Klee's diary. I picked them up when he put them down and learned that devotion to the work was all that mattered; that artists were men and that becoming acknowledged was near-to-impossible, particularly for a black man. Who besides Romare Bearden had achieved recognition? I naively decided that his obvious talent -- coupled with his highly valued light skin, handsome face, trim form and charming smile -- would override any discrimination. The work that he somehow would magically produce would be recognized, exhibited and purchased.
Darryl never talked about the practical steps he needed to take to start painting, much less the problems that his race would have caused in having his work accepted to galleries. In fact he only mentioned ‘race’ twice during our seven years together. Once was to note that he habitually waited to enter our apartment lobby if a lone woman had preceded him, paused until she’d unlocked the inner door and started up the stairs.
Some months after he moved in, I became pregnant. Years later, I realized this was inevitable since I never checked my diaphragm. I didn't know how. The doctor's instruction to slide the rim behind or in front of or near some mysterious internal area was lost on me, though I undoubtedly nodded as if I understood him. I believed that women were responsible, the keepers of birth control. Condoms were something high-school boys saved in their wallets. I blamed myself.
I knew I wouldn't recover from another abortion. The pale, puckered scar, from the slit into my uterus during the first one was a constant reminder of what had been taken from me. Though the mark had faded slightly in three years, a cyst of loss remained. My decision to keep the next child was made instinctively and beneath consciousness. It was not that I disapproved of abortion, but that my being could not tolerate another loss.
There was no joy in the pregnancy, but no sickness either. My stomach grew, the baby kicked, a doctor examined me regularly. Avoiding mirrors, I never noticed the forlorn expression that would have stared back. Darryl and I slept spooned together in the narrow bed, my face to the wall, and time passed while I waited to be delivered. I attended the childbirth class alone.
My father had raised me to question all conventions and never alluded to the fact that Darryl and I weren’t married. This was apparently insignificant to him, though rare for the times. However, he chose a crowded restaurant at lunch time to say, "Have you considered what this baby might look like? Given the genetic mix, there is no predicting the color. Even if the father has light skin, it's entirely possible that the baby won't." Slave ancestors mixed with the genes of a white grandparent on Darryl’s father’s side, and a Cherokee grandmother on his mother’s allowed him to almost pass. My father’s reasoning implied that I didn't know anything about Mendel's law. I did. It was irrelevant to me. My father wasn’t overtly questioning my choice of having a child with a black man, but merely wondering whether I’d been fooled by Darryl’s light skin into believing that it would predictably be of a similar color. At least that’s what I assumed since the only prejudice he’d ever displayed, however mildly, was against religion.
I remember nothing of packing for the hospital, the first contractions, whether we took a taxi, only that the labor room was small and dark. I protested as the nurses shaved my pubic hair, put in the line for an IV. Some of the time Darryl sat on a chair while I lay there. I was surprised, since I thought he'd leave immediately and wait for a call.
The nurse gave me a pill she said would take away memory of pain. It did, leaving not even the dim recollection of early contractions. I stayed in this disassociated state until I found myself, child delivered, in a room with two other sleeping women. She was born on January 22, 1965, at 1:22 in the morning. I was twenty-five.
My swaddled baby, tucked in a clear plastic cart, was wheeled in to visit me. Though relieved that she had ten toes, ten fingers, eyes which opened and shut, a strong cry, I did not allow myself to realize how lovely she was until Darryl visited early that afternoon and nodded his approval. Then I reveled in her pale skin, dark, straight hair and delicate features. Her brown eyes already appeared to focus. She looked ready for life. I have never lost the sense of how extraordinary she was, a vital being passed into my care.
'Shook, baby girl' was printed on the tiny white plastic wristband. We thought it would be a boy, Christopher Alexander, and had not picked a girl’s name. I waited two days for him to decide on the name, Kristina Lisa, and to accompany me to the government office where he signed the papers and gave her his last name. I hoped this signaled his investment.
Because I had given up my pleasant apartment, believing the landlord would evict me for being unmarried and having a baby, we took her to a cavernous, low-ceilinged loft on the Bowery which Darryl had rented. In early mornings, a man’s raspy voice called from the street below, "Don't forget to pray today, boys. Don't forget to pray." Looking down from the dirty windows, I watched a tall, shabbily dressed black man wave his Bible, exhorting men still sleeping in doorways.
Light from the front windows penetrated only a few feet into the dark, bare, cold space. Darryl constructed a small sleeping room in back with boards found on the street and insulated it with plastic sheeting. It was just large enough for the stove, the double bed he'd made from a discarded pull-out couch, a chair and the small table for Krissy's bed – my mother’s laundry basket. A lamp burned day and night.
When he fired up the small wood-burning stove, the room briefly became so hot we took off all our sweaters, then cooled quickly. As I lay in bed and nursed the baby, I could hear the piercing sound of the power saw as Darryl cut firewood from trucking pallets he'd dragged back from trips around the neighborhood. I half waited for his screams, certain he would cut off a finger or slice his hand.
By the time Krissy was born, I’d already seen three therapists, but my reaction to any situation that might have provoked anger was delayed months, if not years. One leakage of what must have been buried rage against Darryl surfaced on the afternoon my half-brother came to visit. When I heard the doorbell and looked down the long, narrow flights of stairs as Darryl descended, I hoped to witness the blustering rage I'd occasionally seen my brother display, ungainly stamping and sputtering, his big face bright red: "What! What have you done to my sister, you good-for-nothing. How dare you....What are you going to do now?" I hoped he’d voice what I was unable to. Instead I heard his cordial greeting and watched he and Darryl chat amiably as they climbed up to meet the new baby.
Fears of death had long bobbed just beneath my surface. The only image I remembered of my mother was her skeletal form curled under a sheet on my parents’ double bed shortly before her death. Often I crept toward Krissy's basket, later the crib, to reassure myself she was still breathing. When she was sick, I feared that the doctors would diagnose a serious illness. As she lay against me in the clinic waiting room, my racing heart must have transferred an animal sense of danger. By the time our turn came, three people had to hold the screaming baby down while she was examined.
In fact, Krissy’s development was normal. She laughed and cooed, turned her head to follow a moving finger, reached for toys, arched her back and rolled over at the stages Dr. Spock deemed appropriate.
Darryl took care of her during the five or six hours I worked every weekday. When I discovered the ear plugs he’d been using while I was out, I worried whether he was feeding and changing her often enough, playing with her at all, but said nothing, having learned that questioning him was useless. Perhaps Krissy learned that crying when I wasn't there got her nowhere because she soon adjusted her schedule to mine, sleeping away the mornings, waking when I got home and remaining alert and curious until late evening when she finally accepted that the day was done.
Darryl refused to become a waiter again, a job he considered demeaning, and never searched for anything else. I was responsible for a baby girl and saddled with a man who didn’t support himself, much less contribute to the household expenses. My employers, landscape architects, had accepted my unwed pregnancy, and they allowed me to work until just before the baby was born. I went back to pressing Lettreset and Zipatone patterns on presentation maps a week afterwards.
Consciously, I was captivated by the fantasy that Darryl and I were part of a collective change in America of the mid-sixties, not recognizing that our relationship was so detached and meager that we hardly functioned as a couple. Though I was virtually apolitical, never reading newspapers or voting, not owning a TV, friends had taken me to the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963, where I’d carried a plastic bag with wet washcloths to breathe through if we were gassed and been awakened by Martin Luther King’s dream. In my mind, Krissy was riding the interracial wave, one of countless lovely mixed children of different shades, curly hair and beautiful eyes, lively and bright, harbingers of an equable association between blacks and whites. I gave not one moment’s thought to what it would be like for her to bridge these two worlds, to be neither, but both.
Understanding nothing of Darryl’s background or the prejudice he’d experienced, I clung to the few stories he told about his childhood as emblematic. He told me of the brilliant satin costumes he wore singing in local talent events and on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, easy success for the attractive, light-skinned boy. Until his voice changed. I visualized Darryl as a young Harry Belafonte, so handsome and talented that he became accepted as a token by white audiences, in order to understand the expectations Darryl’s mother had for her handsome older son. Her death from painful, disfiguring cancer of the jaw when he was seventeen removed the support she’d provided as she willed him to become a successful black artist.
Krissy was little more than a year old the first time Darryl left us to catch a ride across country, to chase a dream in San Francisco. I sobbed as I listened to his footsteps descending the stairs from the sixth floor tenement apartment we’d moved into. This scene would be enacted many times when he came back and then left again. Sometimes letter from another woman on the west coast would arrive in my mail box. Occasionally she’d call and I’d hand him the phone. I hadn’t enough sense of self to be jealous.
Even though we were unhappy together and Darryl was emotionally distant and economically non-supportive, I longed for him as soon as he left. When he came back, things would be okay for a while, a few weeks, a couple of months, until I began to voice my needs. Once I asked him to make dinner when I was late picking up Krissy from daycare after work, he said, “My people have taken care of your people for years. I won’t do it.” This bitter reference, only the second he’d ever made to race, silenced any more demands. The fact that Darryl acted out the same pattern that my father’s second wife Lou had, of disappearing and returning, that I played my father’s role of passive acceptance, continued until three years of sessions with my fourth therapist helped me sever my dependence on a man unable to love me or care for his daughter.
When Krissy was just weeks old, I had started photographing her and kept on recording her development, her father, our friends, the places we lived. At first, I knew nothing about exposing the film correctly, much less developing it and printing. I never imagined that a career teaching photography would slowly evolve from my obsession. At that time, I thought only of Darryl’s work. Extra money pared from my small salary went for materials he needed: drawing paper, ink, charcoal. There was never enough to buy oils and canvas. I worried that he had so little.
It took four years to realize that I had started photographing my baby because I was unable to remember my mother. The few snapshots in the leather-bound family album provided my only image of her. It was not that I imagined that I would die and my daughter would forget her childhood in a tragic retelling of my own story, but I was still determined to created tangible proof of what she had experienced. When I began, I never imagined that I would photograph Krissy for eighteen years until the morning she stood on the apartment steps for her last-day-of-high school photograph and said, “That’s it. You’re finished with the series.”
Those photographs chronicle the growth of my beautiful baby as she developed into a diminutive, sparkling, extroverted girl. Following my father’s pattern of never telling her about my worries – the strain of providing for the two of us, my job difficulties – I also ignored talking about race. The moment she had the courage to bring the subject up is etched in my mind. I visualize the macadam street we were walking across when she said, “It would be so much easier if I looked half black instead of like I’m Irish. Why don’t I?” She was already in high school. Though she wouldn’t have approved, I had been informing her teachers that she was bi-racial, that her first nine years had been spent in a dangerous New York neighborhood until she and I had moved to Massachusetts and that, for many years, her father played no role in her life. My hope was that this information would stop them from viewing her as the typical middle-class child, with two parents and a well-furnished home, that most of their students were.
I would have died emotionally had I not given birth to my baby girl. Refusing to submit to another abortion was the first time I set a boundary, wasn’t passively obedient to the needs of others. A big step. Through experiencing her alertness from the first moment I saw her, the way she later danced down our Lower East side block, her curiosity about languages spoken by strangers, the plays she invented, the stories she told, the costumes she constructed, I was given a sense of joy that helped lift me from the depression that had weighed upon me since my mother’s death. Even though my childhood remains forgotten, my mother erased, my daughter taught me about life. Her birth saved me. Because of her, I had to grow up.
Published in Birth Stories Anthology, Catalyst Press