One difference with writing was that Barnard cared about it. Miss Tilton, commenting on something I’d written once, said she thought artists made the best writers. I presumed she meant fallen-away artists. “Something about composition,” she guessed. “Seeing it whole.” I didn’t know. I knew things—experiences—had a shape.
The first story I wrote for John Kouwenhoven’s creative writing seminar was not about my family, or was only obliquely. It was about me. Or it was about a young college girl named Gabriella, with a summer job as an artist in a small costume jewelry factory near home. I had had such a job.
After years as an ugly duckling, Gabriella has metamorphosed into a surprising beauty. She is not used to this, and acknowledges it only because the other women in the factory, already distanced by the advantage of her education, communicate it in cold, envious compliments that make her feel self-conscious and strange. She tries being friendly but they hold back, suspicious, and she grows increasingly isolated and lonely. Every day, her boss, divorced, in his fifties, comes by the little studio she works in alone to cheer her up. He takes her out to lunch. Then to dinner. In the dark, afterward, in the front seat of his parked car, he romances her. They never really make love, and he never presses her for surrender.
The romance lingers. Fall comes and she returns to college. Saturdays, he takes her on long drives into the country to see the changing leaves. He sends her flowers. He tells her he loves her. She loves him, too, a little. She feels safe in his kind of loving, but also vaguely beached in it, as if she is asleep, as if it is an endless summer from which nothing has stirred her. Her mother, who has watched her come and go in his big silver Cadillac, wonders what is going on between them. What is going on? Gabriella realizes that she doesn’t know and must at last confront him. He confesses he is impotent. He begs her not to leave him, but she does, renouncing his summer love, his passionless world of summer without end.
I called it “The Door Out of Innocence.” I suppose Mr. Kouwenhoven could see how, even for a girl’s story, it might fit into the master narrative of American coming-of-age fiction. Being discreet, he didn’t ask whether it had actually happened. I imagine there were a few laughs in the faculty lunchroom about the door not being opened quite wide enough. He gave it a B+.
I was encouraged. I dared to reach back now to the passionate depths of my childhood in Arizona, searching out the hidden roots of the life we were living at home, a life so hauntingly anguished and violent at times and yet so utterly frozen that none of us could look it in the face. I wrote about the squab farm. I told about my brothers’ beating. I wept. I seemed to write it, word by word, on my own body. But Mr. Kouwenhoven didn’t get it, just didn’t get it, he said. He pick-picked at little details. He gave a B-to an undigested bit of my soul.
Both stories—the second with more strategic and secret care—had to remain hidden from my parents, who would first have killed me and then killed each other if they’d known what I was doing. The whole idea of my writing, which to them meant prima facie the likelihood of revealing family secrets, threw them into a steely panic. Not just my father, an educated reader who theoretically knew that this was what writers did, but my mother too, who held with an even fiercer passion to the principle of omertà—the guarded and sacred silence of southern Italians surrounding all things within the walls of la famiglia.
And yet they did not ask to read what I wrote. Perhaps they were too self-absorbed, my father in bed more and more now, still structuring tragedy out of the mysterious catastrophes of his life-drama, my mother working hard toward her equivalency diploma, because something needed to be done—how else keep all this together—keep us in school? And there had always been a certain sacrosanctness in what took place between me and my teachers, which perhaps they preferred to guess than to know. But though it might be a long way off, what might someday land between covers was another matter, and I can remember the bizarre clash I had with my mother the day she found Ogden Nash’s Bad Parents’ Garden of Verse atop a pile of books about to go back to the library, and flew into a rage simply over the title.
So they helped me preserve my innocence for them. But I was not innocent, not in any of the ways they would have wanted me to be, and maybe not in any way. I hadn’t yet slept with anyone, of course, but I had wanted to, longed to, dreamed of doing it, many times. The confessional would have burned with my adulteries.
But my father had been right about keeping me at home: commuting to school and passing every night under his roof did hobble one’s love life. It hobbled one’s social life. I could see it quite easily from the college man’s point of view. Without a car, what was he supposed to do with a girl who lived in New Rochelle, New York, which was barely still in the state, for Chrissake? How was he supposed to get home once he got me there? He wouldn’t get me there. If I was lucky, he would drop me off at the 125th Street station about eleven and wait for the train, then see me onto it with a peck on the cheek, careful not to rouse himself before the lonely trip to upper Broadway. And he would not do this often.
But, oh, how they would murmur as I passed them on the mid-Broadway island, firing them a glance like Giovanni Verga’s hungry Lupa. Tom Galvin, a young college poet who made the Catholic students’ club one of his haunts, featured my flashing ankles in one of his poems, with a suggestion, perhaps, that I was a moving target, but I was impressed. He was a wonderful poet. He wrote incessantly, a model of dedication to the craft. Uncertainly half-Catholic, he was also a bit too professionally James Joyce with his wire-rimmed spectacles over his shortsighted eyes, having come to about chapter 4 in Stephen Dedalus’s struggle with writing and faith and sex. He actually invited me out one night, then took me to the railroad station in a taxi. On the way he placed his hand gently on my thigh. When I quivered, and asked him not to, part of me meant it. It was the part he heard.
“The elephant is slow to mate,” he muttered, in a considered, lapidary way, like a life sentence, staring at me as he withdrew his hand. I stared back into his glasses, a deer in headlights, a hurt, stung panic at my heart. “T. S. Eliot,” he said.
Well why didn’t I at least kiss him? I don’t know. I was scared, conflicted, a pagan little virgin. Vorrei e non vorrei. That terrible beautiful line in that cruel and beautiful opera, it had been written for me. I didn’t love Tom Galvin, and he hadn’t yet awakened any other recognizable passion. I could do nothing in cold blood, not even in cool blood, least of all chance my body to a stranger, a real person and not some phantasm I had cranked out of my own mental dreamstuff, someone who was not impotent, not impotent at all, but who knew just how and when to be kind.
My mother would have understood this keeping back, this fierce maiden integrity, from inside her own chaste-hearted shame. She might also have understood it from inside of my shame, knowing it to be different from hers, that it had always been different. But she had refused, and it had opened a new gulf between us. She had taken me to a doctor to treat an unaccountable pain at the tailbone end of my spine—a cyst, but he had not accurately diagnosed it, and had had me come back, night after night. His nurses applied compresses to it and warm, buzzing electrical devices, but the pain went obstinately on and got worse. One evening after an appointment, when I was waiting for my mother to fetch me home, he surprised me, sternly announcing, “No more of this, young lady, let’s see what’s really wrong with you.” The nurses had gone and we were alone. He had me partly undress. He roughly bullied me into the examining stirrups and explored me savagely with his hand.
I didn’t know it was criminal to do such a thing, alone like that in his office, I knew only, as soon as outrage had cleared my mind of the sheer blackness of terror, that it was wrong. I had stupidly complied. But then he was a doctor—what was I to do? How could he have done this? And when my mother had finally come and seen me white and terrified, she was furious. But furious was not enough. Why hadn’t she killed him when I told her? Why instead had she fled with me in baffled anger as if she flinched from it—she, who had always been so righteous and bold? Why hadn’t she killed him? I myself wanted to kill him. Why hadn’t she protected me?
Yet as if my mother’s ethic