And, our grandmother added, this time to Johanna, and in a studiously offhand way so as not to make a thing of it, if the two of them had children one day, only think how long it would take to cart them into the city every morning to Brearley or Collegiate, and then back to Brooklyn again!
But there was a school nearby, very nearby, in fact, called Walden. And if that school did, oddly, refer to itself as an “educational collective” and was the kind of place where children apparently learned from drum-beating teachers, well, that was all right with her, not that she said this to her mother-in-law. Already—more than once—she had walked dreamily around its periphery, peering through the iron gate at the multicolored playground full of shouting girls and boys. Yes, their children could go to Walden. If, that is, they were ever born.
Chapter Three
Fertility and Its Discontents
In which a rosary is said for the Oppenheimers, with remarkable results
Our mother also had a job, though not, of course, for the money. She worked three days a week as a program director for the American Society of Magazine Editors, a position made available to her through the intervention of Wurttemberg’s legal counsel, whose sister was executive assistant to ASME’s director. The actual job application and hiring had consisted of a lunch at Smith & Wollensky (at which she’d been so afraid to order anything off that expensive menu that she’d ended up with an onion soup and a waiter who looked at her with open hostility); after that she was basically handed the annual internship program and told that she was in charge. Johanna liked reading the application essays of students from the Midwestern state schools, who seemed starstruck by the prospect of interning at Progressive Grocer or Scientific American, and the Ivy League girls (women) who she suspected would drop out of the program if they didn’t get assigned to Vogue, Mademoiselle, or Glamour. They were only a few years younger than she was, but they were all so focused! In fact, they made her wonder if the rest of her generation wasn’t rushing past her into some promised, post-coeducation future she hadn’t been told about. In June, when the young people arrived in New York for their orientation, she was the one to greet them in the lobby of their NYU dormitory, offering ASME T-shirts and maps of the city with the restaurant for their welcome dinner circled in red. Waiting for them at her little table, handing them their keys, she watched them approach, already in their Professional-Summer-in-New-York-City clothes, and felt the force of their ambition. The only thing she wanted as much as these college students wanted to work in magazines was to be pregnant.
Then, during her second ASME summer, not one but two young interns (Seventeen and Reader’s Digest) came weeping to her with unexpected and very unwanted pregnancies, and Johanna Oppenheimer walked directly into the office of the sister of Wurttemberg’s legal counsel and quit. After that, fertility and its discontents would be her only employment.
How she came to despise the use of the word “journey” to describe this, the grating, grueling, sometimes boring, always excruciating business of trying and failing to become pregnant. It was not supposed to be a thing at all! It was supposed to just happen in the way it had always happened, something along the lines of open legs, insert penis, bring forth offspring. That was how it had worked for her sister, and even for the thoroughly unremarkable person Bobby had finally married and impregnated (though not, as it happened, in that order). But not for Johanna and Salo Oppenheimer. For the first year, Salo wasn’t even aware of the fact that his wife was actively trying to become pregnant, and she somehow persuaded herself that this made it not count as a year of failure. Then one afternoon she asked him, as if the notion had just occurred to her, whether the two of them were not ready for the next step. And he had said: “Next step to where?”
It wasn’t that he was holding back. He wasn’t holding back. He wasn’t even afraid. It was just that the idea of it, of a pregnancy that might, in due course, turn into a baby and thence into a child, or “person,” was so utterly beyond his ken that he could not immediately understand what she was talking about. He was so not there with her in her longing, so not bitterly disappointed each month when it didn’t happen. He wasn’t a step behind, vaguely believing that it would all work out eventually. It wasn’t an acknowledged issue between them, something he’d made his feelings clear about and asked her to concede to. No. It simply wasn’t there at all. It was as if the entire notion of procreation would have to be fully reinvented for the sole edification of Salo Oppenheimer.
If she could have moved ahead without his help or even knowledge, she’d have done it in an instant, but the first thing you gave up when you dragged yourself, finally, to the famous infertility doctor you’ve read about in New York magazine was the privilege of keeping a secret from your husband.
“We’ll see you and your partner on the eighth, at eleven A.M.,” said the receptionist for the famous infertility doctor.
She would have to tell him.
“What do you mean, infertile?” had been Salo’s first reaction.
“I don’t know. I’m just concerned. I’d just like to get checked out. Both of us to get checked out.”
“But we haven’t been trying to get pregnant,” Salo said. He looked more mystified than anything. This gave her hope.
“I’d like to try. I think we’re ready.”
He was only twenty-seven. She was only twenty-four.
“I’m not ready,” said Salo.
Johanna canceled the appointment and went back to not telling her husband that she wasn’t doing a single thing to not get pregnant.
Another two years passed.
She became increasingly, privately, intractably frantic.
“Bobby and Christina are pregnant again,” she told him one morning as he was looking through his briefcase for some elusive bit of paper.
“Oh?” said Salo. “There it is. I knew I picked it up off my desk, but I couldn’t remember what I did with it.”
“Are you still not ready? Because I am ready for you to be ready.”
“Ready for what?” he actually said. He was snapping the latches of the briefcase. It was burgundy, made of eel skin, the one she had picked out to replace the Big Brown Bag.
“To have children, Salo. I would like to. I think we would be such wonderful parents.”
This was not precisely true. She was full of apprehension when she thought about him as a parent.
“Well, sure. But why is this so important right now?” he said.
Why? Because each individual cell in her body was howling at her, every day, all day, incessantly. Because she walked through their house on the Esplanade imagining children into the empty bedrooms. Because even their dog, a standoffish dachshund named Jürgen, seemed to understand he was only a placeholder for something vastly more significant that might at any moment replace him.
“I’m concerned that something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong. We’re not even trying to get pregnant.”
Three years was a long time. She had different priorities now.
“I thought it would take a while, so I went off the pill,” she said.
Salo frowned. “And when was that?”
That, said Johanna, doing a rapid calculation in which she omitted the first year of unilaterally not trying to not get pregnant, was two years ago.
After a long moment, he said: “I see.”
So this time they made it to the famous infertility doctor, Lorenz Pritchard of Fifth Avenue and Lenox Hill (“and Georgica Pond,” Salo would later joke, “courtesy of me”).
“We’ll see you and your partner on the fourteenth, at four P.M.,” said the receptionist.
Dr. Pritchard’s office was papered with photographs of infants, smiling and drooling infants, infants in color and black-and-white. Johanna shielded her eyes against the glare of these children as she went inside. She took a seat on the leather banquette, eyed the vat of pink ranunculi, and began filling out forms on the clipboard. Height. Weight. Sexual history. Sexual habits. Drug use. There was no end to what she was being asked to reveal.