Behave Read online

  At the bottom of the stairs leading to the postlecture reception hall, Miss Washburn introduced us. Dr. Watson’s forehead was gleaming; the act of overturning his predecessors’ theories had been tiring. Working a finger under his high, tight collar, he explained that he was looking for a graduate student.

  Mary was nearby, and she had already whispered a single comment in my ear: “Focus on what’s observable. That’s good sense.” So quickly had she boiled down the parts that would be relevant to her, letting the rest blow away: his showmanship, his appearance, his claims to hold the future of humanity in his hands. And now she stood silently at my elbow: unassuming, staring at him through her thick, round lenses. I could feel the weight of her attention, the heavy outline of her personality. She would not pander, and if I’d been her closest friend that day, I might not have felt the need to pander either. But I wasn’t her friend anymore. Colleagues, we’d be, and nothing more, after graduation. The mild loneliness I’d been feeling for months was, on this day, freedom: ejected from Mary’s orbit, I could more easily respond to the magnetism of someone else’s.

  “There you are,” Watson said, smiling as he turned, recognizing me as the girl who had managed to hold on to the tossed ball. “So why can’t we come up with a roomful of women who can catch properly?”

  “It’s only because they didn’t practice when they were younger,” I said. “It’s just something you learn, given half a chance.”

  “You must have had brothers.”

  “No.”

  “Then . . . ?”

  “I guess I wanted to catch the ball badly enough. To help you with your demonstration, I mean.”

  “You like to help,” he said.

  “If the person is worth helping.”

  He stared at me openly, without guile. I had to hope against all hope that I looked more confident than I felt.

  I said, “I should admit that I do have a father willing to play toss with his daughters.”

  “Good man. And what does he do for a living?”

  “Real estate.”

  “Interested in planning and building the future.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “And you? What do you think about the future?”

  “That it will be much better than the past. It has to be.”

  He smiled again, and I felt as if I was passing successfully through a maze, choosing between turns, vaguely aware of some rewarding scent in the air, happy simply to avoid a dead end.

  “And what do you imagine we do in a lab full of babies?”

  With Miss Washburn, I don’t know had often been the right, honest, admirable, and cautious answer, but with this man, I could tell that phrase would never, ever do.

  My slight pause gave him an excuse to jump in. “Babies won’t tell you their dreams, of course. Nor will they submit to hypnosis.”

  I plunged ahead, expanding on the ideas he’d just explained to us in the second half of the lecture. “I imagine you’re looking at the senses: vision, hearing. You’re seeing what develops, when and how. Issues of perception. Maybe left-hand or right-hand primacy.”

  When he frowned slightly, I backed up. “But in the lecture, you mentioned you haven’t observed as much handedness as one might expect. It’s one of those so-called innate qualities that perhaps isn’t so innate after all. Perhaps almost nothing is innate.”

  Better, his tentative smile seemed to say.

  “Maybe language?” I continued. “But I suppose that comes later, and anyway, self-reported thoughts or words of any kind actually lead us astray in a way that behaviors don’t—which explains why Wundt and James aren’t sufficient. So I imagine you’re recording reactions to the simplest possible stimuli.”

  “What’s a simple reaction?” he asked.

  “Blinking.”

  “In response to?”

  “Light, an approaching object, pain.”

  “And how about a more complex reaction—say, the turning of a man’s head to follow a desirable woman as she passes?”

  “It’s merely a conditioned response, or I guess I should say, a complex and integrated set of responses.”

  I made no mention of where, as he had explained to us in the lecture, these responses led next: how mere visual stimuli, the simple sighting of a woman’s bonnet, could initiate the building pressure of a liquid, male semen—the cause of most romantic entanglements, he’d said, easily reversed once the pressure has been released. All a bit much to spell out with Miss Washburn still looking on.

  “It’s the stuff of poetry,” he teased.

  “And the stuff of science.”

  “Which one tells us more?”

  “I think we both know the answer to that, Dr. Watson. I don’t blame the ancient poets, if that’s what you mean.”

  “How about the modern ones?”

  “I suppose they’re wasting their time. But once a year, a little Valentine’s poetry doesn’t seem out of place. If they take one day and we scientists get the other 364, the human race still has a chance.”

  “You’re assuming the scientist works more than five days a week.”

  “Is there a reason he shouldn’t?”

  He stopped me. “What’s your name again?”

  “Rosalie Rayner.”

  “And when do you graduate?”

  Chapter 3

  After receiving my degree that June, the summer stretched before me: a hot, dull limbo of Sunday Beef Wellington and mornings of tea and hard toast, and listening to the back stairs squeak as the servants carried laundry up and down, while I read about the adventures of career-minded bachelorette Una Golden in Sinclair Lewis’s The Job. I held my breath near the end, afraid that Lewis would take away Una’s desire for career once love and marriage were in the mix, but he didn’t, thank goodness, or at least I thought he didn’t: “‘I will keep my job—if I’ve had this world of offices wished on me, at least I’ll conquer it, and give my clerks a decent time,’ the businesswoman meditated. ‘But just the same—oh, I am a woman, and I do need love. I want Walter, and I want his child, my own baby and his.’ THE END.”

  I read the last page while sprawled on my bed, avoiding the landing where our maid, Annie, was mopping the floor. “I will keep my job . . . But just the same—oh, I am a woman . . .” So did Una keep her job, and get the husband, and the baby? Was that even possible? I’d read Goldman and Sanger on the plight of prostitutes and factory workers, and Maria Montessori on the development of early education for the children of working women. But nowhere had I read about educated middle- or upper-class women with children and challenging professions. Did Lewis’s last paragraph mean Una was giving equal weight to all her desires, and insisting upon them, or was it a second thought, a surrender of her determination? “Just the same—oh.” Was that, “Oh, such a dilemma,” or “Oh, I give up”?

  Annie, bucket in her hand, called from the doorway, “Miss Rosalie, you’re ready for luncheon now?”

  “In a minute,” I said. “Annie, do you think a woman can have a job and a baby and a husband?”

  There was a long pause before she answered. “I think you do what you’ve got to do.”

  I called back, “I don’t mean the kind of job you have to do. I mean the kind of job you’d like to do. To learn things and make the world a better place, for example.”

  She paused again before responding with a funny tone in her voice. “Why don’t you carry this bucket down the stairs while I go get the lunch that’s probably burning, and then I’ll think on it awhile.”

  Good Annie, who probably had more lessons to teach me than Sinclair Lewis, who—reformer though he was—hadn’t seemed able to make up his mind about Una Golden and her desires. “THE END” in those bossy capital letters came a little abruptly and breathlessly, as if he’d tired of trying to sort out fantasy and reality, or perhaps wante
d to preserve the fantasy for his female readers: that everything was possible. Or not. My Vassar lit prof had tried to explain the value of ambiguity, but it seemed like a lazy, face-saving strategy for people who didn’t know what the real answers were. No wonder I put more faith in science.

  When I was young, we’d had two Irish women living with us: Ellen Shea and Mary Noon. Later, we had Pauline and Marye Duffy and Susan. Also Bertha, from Germany, and Agnus, a widow from Maryland, and Frank and Annie, from North Carolina. Annie was only a few years older than me, but she had the long, dry fingers, cracked palms, and weary-wise demeanor of someone much older. With so many servants attending the needs of three people, Mother was not overtaxed.

  One stifling afternoon in July, a day in which no Atlantic breezes reached our Eutaw Place home, she joined me in the front parlor—a high-ceilinged room connected to our dining room via a massive pocket door—where the family bookshelves were kept. Mother asked Agnus to bring in the kitchen step stool and waited until she’d returned to scrubbing the front marble steps to reach down Hall’s book on childhood and rebellious adolescence, which was kept on a high shelf, owing to its exciting and vivid passages about sexual urges, to which Hall had devoted much lyrical effort.

  Mother and I took turns reading aloud paragraphs, determined to keep our expressions scholarly and dispassionate. Her profile was worthy of a sketch. She read with the book held out in front of her, searching for that magic distance at which her vision was still operating suitably—long nose tipped up, hair piled up in one of those Gibson Girl bouffants that was no longer fashionable but still common among ladies of a certain age, and Mother was not about to bob her hair anytime soon. At the point when the material would become too biologically specific, she’d wrinkle her nose as if trying to extinguish an oncoming sneeze.

  “Go on,” I’d urge her, just before we both dissolved into laughter.

  But the more well-thumbed book—on a low shelf, no ladder required—was L. Emmett Holt’s famous baby manual, The Care and Feeding of Children, the one that had been Mother’s bible, at least in the beginning. Folded inside were my feeding schedules and weight charts, with spaces for measurements and elimination records and additional comments to be logged every two hours.

  “Twelve days, that’s all you managed?” I asked her.

  “I meant to do better,” she said, pausing to fan the back of her neck and coil and re-pin several damp, fallen strands from her upswept hair. “But then you cried, and wanted to be fed and be held. Other times, you were sleeping so soundly, and I hated to wake you up just to stay on schedule. And as for your weight, and stripping off your clothes all the time for all those required measurements, why bother? You seemed plump and cheerful to me.”

  “And then, what happened on day thirteen? You stopped feeding me altogether?”

  She put her arm around my shoulder, stealing a squeeze. “Silly bird. I fed you all the time—more often than I was supposed to.”

  “Oh, Mother.”

  “I know, and look what happened!”

  “What happened?”

  “Absolutely nothing! As soon as you were old enough to run off into the gardens, run you did—and you grew up into a perfectly normal, slim, healthy girl.”

  She saw I wasn’t satisfied. But what grown children ever are?

  “I just wasn’t as good with record keeping, Rosalie. And then the Irish girls, they had no interest whatsoever in writing anything down. How they laughed and laughed whenever I told them what to do!”

  “That’s not very nice,” I said. But I had good memories of those profane Irish girls who chased me through the statue-dotted gardens that ran for several blocks down the middle of our newly constructed residential boulevard.

  “It was positively fine,” Mother said. “I might have felt a little bossed-about, but it was true, they knew a world more than I did. And as far as they were concerned, you were their baby, not mine. They thought it was ridiculous that anyone should learn about mothering from a book.”

  “But it would have been nice to have more records,” I sulked, making my dear, patient mother smile her fretful smile.

  “Yes, it would have. I failed you, and I failed Dr. Holt.”

  “And Dr. Hall.”

  “Yes, and Dr. Hall.” She gave her own left hand a playful smack. “But he was wrong about the adolescent’s need for drama and conflict. Look at how you’ve turned out: properly finished, and as level-headed as they come.”

  We knew of other students who had been accepted into universities out west—not as prestigious, or convenient. One girl’s parents were actually moving two thousand miles away to live with her in a new city while she attended graduate school. It was touching to see how far parents would go to support their daughters’ ambitions, while still doing everything possible to thwart any indecent behavior. This was the beginning of the Jazz Age, after all. And there was white slavery to consider as well. We were informed that thousands of otherwise innocent young women (well, a few dozen, anyway) were disappearing from city parks throughout the nation, drugged by decent-looking men in suits and overcoats. That’s what happened when you let your daughters grow up, go to school, and get jobs.

  My own good luck would save me from the slavers—as long as I didn’t accept any drug-laced hard candy from strangers on the streetcar—and even from unnecessary long-distance transportation. Thanks to the proximity of Johns Hopkins, just a few mansion-covered hills away, I could live at home, while doing work with babies and children, and attend a school that my parents not only respected, but to which they and their own parents had also generously donated.

  Everyone, for the moment—how difficult to imagine beyond any present moment!—was happy. So happy that my parents bought me, at summer’s end, an automobile to celebrate: a gorgeous machine called a Stutz Bearcat, open topped and painted a bright canary yellow. My father, when he had time on weekends, taught me to drive it, and we made several excursions up and down the coast. These drives gave him an opportunity to show me his work, buying and selling land here, houses there. Such and such railroad had now extended farther down the coast and along some barrier island or through some drained marsh and this or that new seaside community had sprung up. He could say all this without seeming to boast more than was warranted, and he was just as happy to interrupt any tour and turn down a remote lane and give me the wheel, ready to delight in the bucking and swerving and my own look of horror at the engine’s sputtering response to my uneven tapping of the gas pedal.

  “I’m wrecking it, Father,” I cried out one late-summer day when I still didn’t have the full knack of driving my beautiful machine. “I’m wrecking it!”

  “Well,” he laughed, unbothered by the smell of grinding gears and burnt petroleum. “I bought you the first one. You’ll have to save up and buy the second.”

  “So, you actually believe I’ll earn an income someday.”

  “Or you’ll meet someone who will.”

  But he caught my look of consternation and corrected himself. “Not that you’ll need any help. You’ll manage just fine on your own. Stranger things have happened.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “For the car?”

  “No, for your confidence.”

  We drove home that night in comfortable silence, the setting sun glinting off the car’s chrome, my left elbow pink with sunburn, from hanging out the open window during those spells when my Father neglected to remind me to “grip firmly, yes firmly” with both hands. Perhaps he only meant the steering wheel. Or perhaps he meant more. How often we underestimate our parents’ abilities to see both into our hearts and toward the future, aware of their weakening influence, and children’s ineradicable tendencies to blunder.

  Then finally, that first softening in the air, the first cool mornings in late September and early October—waiting, still waiting for my supervisor to return from
his summer vacation, for the semester to start—and then, at long last, the first official day, my golden future ahead of me.

  “How many eggs, Miss Rosalie?” Annie asked me as I paced the front-parlor windows, fastening my charm bracelet and then thinking twice, and taking off my bracelet and the signet ring I’d worn since my sixteenth birthday.

  “No eggs. Only toast, please. Dry. Forget that, Annie, I’m not hungry.”

  Annie lifted an eyebrow, hands pushed into the front pocket of her baggy blue apron. “I’ll bring you buttered toast, Miss Rosalie.”

  “I don’t think I could stomach anything at all, actually.”

  “Then I’ll bring you a piece of fruit.”

  Was I dressed appropriately? A sort of Peter Pan–collared shirt, long front-buttoned sweater with wide sleeves, a calf-length skirt, and flat shoes. No jewelry now, and no makeup.

  “You look beautiful,” my mother said at the breakfast table, and then, seeing my eyes widen: “Not beautiful. You look professional. You look like you dressed without a thought. You look very admirably plain.”

  My father lifted his head just above his newspaper, eager to join in the teasing. “Won’t they give you a lab coat, in any case? I suppose you could get away with pajamas.”

  I still wasn’t a good driver in city traffic, and when my father offered to drop me off at Phipps Clinic, I insisted on taking two public streetcars instead. This wasn’t primary school. I didn’t want to be escorted by anyone.

  Climbing to the third floor, clutching my purse and my gloves and a folder of papers (transcripts, some letters of recommendation—did I think he would review my credentials all over again?), I encountered John Watson just inside the clinic’s main door. His manner in this sacred place was more reserved, at least on this particular day.