Gertrude Faust Berger in her East 23rd Street apartment.
By Gertrude Faust Berger
It has been said that your character determines your fate. If that is the case, was my character the cause of my troubles?
I don’t like to ponder questions that don’t have answers. That’s why I wasn’t qvelling when my granddaughter Jocelyn graduated from Yale with honors in philosophy. What an unproductive and impractical pursuit – studying unanswerable, centuries-old questions about morality, truth, honor, justice, and evil. For me, a pragmatist, such ephemeral studies seemed like a frivolous expenditure of time.
I was a linguist, able to communicate with many non-English speaking people, and I delighted in the immediate answers that came from my study of words. I learned why a certain vegetable is called horseradish, although it has nothing to do with a horse, and even now I wonder how that Jewish delicacy, salami, came to have an Arab name.
I always sought answers to my questions. Now that a troublesome episode from my past is no longer history, I have questions without answers; I have received my karmic comeuppance. The poet Christina Rosetti said: “Better by far that you should forget and smile than you should remember and be sad.” So why now, after 70 years of oblivion, is the question – did I or did I not murder a baby – haunting me? Could it be the recent anniversary of Roe v Wade, or listening to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly hammer away that abortion is murder? Actually it was the Edith Piaf song “Je Ne Regrette Rien” that triggered my memory.
I teach French to a class of retired teachers in a program sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers. When I asked: “Qu’est-ce que vous regrettez?” I heard lots of regrets. Some of my students complained about wrong career choices that were forced on them by parents or the economy. One teacher regretted an abortion she had during her first year of marriage, especially because she was never again able to conceive. When they asked me, I said: “All of the above.” And my long amnesia about my own abortion hung over the horizon of my life like a thick fog.
Now that the whole scenario has surfaced in vivid detail, I can’t help wondering how this could have happened to me – a nice prudish girl from the Bronx – and a virgin? My mother always praised me for not hanging out on the stoop with boys like other bummerkeh girls (all of whom were eventually happily married). In truth, I was a loner, and didn’t mind waiting to be found by a suitable mate. I enjoyed the company of my two little sisters, Ray and Sylvie, and my father who worked for the IRT often came home with beautiful Red Seal records. I loved hearing Galli Curci singing “Ave Maria.”
My mother, a martinet, came to America from Eastern Europe alone at the age of 14 to stay with an aunt. Despite being a frustrated underachiever, she was beautiful, cooked divinely, sewed designer clothing for my sisters and me, and even won a prize for her writing during the one year she attended night school. She provided great custodial care, but did not lavish affection on my sisters and me; even our meals were served and eaten with military precision.
Not that I thought I deserved affection. Far from a model child, I was a rebel who hated most rules. When I was 5, I walked in Crotona Park, right past a sign that said Keep off the Grass, because I wanted to pick the wild fragrant roses. That cost my mother a $2 fine. I also cut up her expensive fabric to make myself a braid, and broke the head off a sleeping doll to see what made its eyes open and close. My mother said there was a Dybbuk in me, and I agreed. As a child, I bought into the religious dogmatism of my neighborhood community.
Everybody we knew was steeped in orthodoxy – superstitions, stories, and myths – and I was furious that God was going to punish me for the slightest infraction. I especially hated Yom Kippur, when God was purported to be writing down the names of all the people who were going to live or die. And when I started grade school, I couldn’t stand all the rules. Why must I raise my hand to go to the bathroom so that everybody would know? Why must I fold my hands on the desk? It seemed to me that I could just as well be reading one of the stories from my fairy-tale books since my mother had taught me how to read and write before I entered the first grade.
The teacher complained to my mother that I covered my ears while all the other children struggled with “This Was the House That Jack Built.” But I had no patience with my classmates’ stupidity. Worse, when I recited the Pledge of Allegiance, I said: “… with liberty and NO justice for all.” This won me a trip to the principal’s office. When he asked me: “What do you have to say for yourself? I replied with a question of my own: “Why are men always called Mr. while women are classified according to their marital status?” The principal’s only response was that my criminal behavior would become part of my school record.
Things did not improve as the years passed. When I was in the seventh grade I had no friends. I was big-busted, wearing my mother’s corset and a constricting bra, and I was klutzy. Consequently, I was one of only two eighth-grade girls who was not invited to the prom by a boy. The other girl was Molly. She was a jolly, carefree soul, and plump like me. I loved to visit her. Her house was filled with music for her ballet-dancer sisters, and her parents were laissez-faire. Their only concern was politics and the exploitation of labor, and I loved it that in her home (unlike ours) you could sit on a sofa that was not covered by a sheet.
Alas, whatever luck I had ran out when my father lost his job. After his three-week absence because of pneumonia, the IRT fired him. There were no unions in those days, and no such thing as sick time. His brother Abe, who ran a successful supermarket in Queens, helped my father open a small fruit store in the Bronx. Never were there two people less suited to run a business than my parents. My father was a generous and trusting sweetie-pie who lost money from day one, while my mother nagged him constantly about his errors. But it really was an awful business. The tomatoes were not mummified to last forever and the cucumbers and bell peppers weren’t coated with wax. Everything rotted overnight in the summer and froze in the winter. My mother’s hands were bloody and cracked from opening all the crates. And my father, who left the house at 3 a.m. to go to the market, often carried heavy sacks of produce home on his back to save the delivery charge – this being one of the few strategies he’d devised to compete with A&P’s cutthroat prices, and the various pushcart vendors.
For me, the worst part involved having to work in the store after school. My job was to deliver orders, or be in the store at night so that my parents could go upstairs to eat. None of the buildings had elevators in those days, so I used dumbwaiters to deliver the orders. This meant going to the basement and pulling ropes for the correct apartment. All the while I was fed up with my parents’ struggle, and furious with the endless monotony of this dreary routine. Not to mention the whole shtetl culture, which revolted me. I disliked the intractable adherence to prehistoric rules, the mysticism and religiosity. But what bothered me most were the nosy neighbors who kept asking my parents whether or not I was dating anyone.
As it happened, my first encounter with a member of the opposite sex was at a sweet-sixteen party. A boy led me to the bedroom. I had no idea what the game “spin-the-bottle” was about, but I found out fast. When the boy thrust a fat, wet tongue down into my tonsils, I pushed him so hard that he almost fell. My next suitor was a really sweet guy, the butcher boy from the store next to ours. Sadly, it wasn’t his pimpled face that ended our only date so much as his heavy maroon sweater that was infested with chicken feathers.
Finally I looked forward to a promising date with my dentist’s brother, who was home on break from his medical studies in England. At least, I thought, he’d be sophisticated. Besides, I was eager to visit Jahn’s, a popular ice-cream emporium. The evening was balmy. Still, Jack felt chilly and decided to get a jacket. He lived a few houses away from ours, and I went upstairs with him to say hello to his brother the dentist. Nobody was home. I waited on the couch while Jack chose a jacket. Eventually, he emerged from the bathroom, lunged at me, and pinned me to the couch. When he stood up a minute later, there was a saucer-sized stain on my black acetate dress. Jack apologized profusely, and offered me money for the cleaners, but I just ran back home. I never did get that ice-cream sundae, and became convinced that my encounters with boys were destined to be ill-fated.
Today I yearn to smell the fragrant apples, peaches, and strawberries piled on pushcarts throughout those Bronx streets. But back then I had no appreciation for such simple pleasures, and I dreamed of escaping my narrow yenta neighborhood with its gossips and spies, and regular customers who berated me for cheating them on the two-cent soup greens that I wrapped in newspaper. I loved the Irish customers who said: “Thank you, love” so graciously as I handed them their potatoes, and admired the Christians with their fancy Easter bonnets and navy suits with matching shoes. I dreamed of belonging elsewhere, and dancing to exotic gypsy music around a faraway campfire.
Now I realize that I was a horrible ingrate. It was the time of the Great Depression, and whole families were being evicted onto the street with all their possessions. So I can almost cry when I remember that my parents closed the store for a whole morning to attend my highschool graduation. They also spent an entire day’s earnings on roses for me, and used their last cent to buy me the Book of Knowledge. My parents were so proud that their firstborn had just graduated, and I couldn’t care less. I would still have to go to the store that afternoon and do the household chores on Saturday. When I passed the Hunter College entrance exam, my parents told our whole family that I was going to be a teacher. For Jews from that era, there was no greater glory than to have a teacher daughter or a doctor son. And I was happily looking forward to becoming a teacher, even though I was constantly being reminded that my education constituted a great sacrifice for my parents.
Wayward and impulsive as I was, I changed my major to German when I saw a stunning German professor walking the halls. His name was Otto Koishwitz (he called himself “OK”) and I was so taken with him that I didn’t care that there would be no jobs for a German teacher. When he left the U.S. to fight for Hitler, he took along one of his other students who became Axis Sally. I was devastated. I had yearned to go with him.
To my surprise, college didn’t please me any more than my previous schools had. I resented the lengthy assignments that were handed out by my professors, feeling that they were the ones who should be reading the books and enlightening me. Worse, Hunter was an all-girls school then, and most of the other students were snobby sorority types from well-to-do families who disdained my outlandish crocheted hats and homemade button jewelry. They all wore fur jackets that had recently come into vogue, and they didn’t appreciate my queries about what was so great about shortened coats that left their derrieres freezing.
Gertrude Faust Berger’s passport from earlier days
Fortunately, I adored the language courses. I studied German, French, Latin, and Greek, and lost myself in the alternate cultures of other worlds. The language professors were dramatic and charismatic, and I learned many romantic songs and poems, which made up for the boring Education courses. Con-sidering it a waste of money to rent a cap and gown, I decided to skip my graduation ceremonies. That was just as well, because my parents would have been depressed that I didn’t receive a single award. In fact I was lucky to get my B.A. because I had played plenty of hooky – walking in Central Park or drinking free soda refills at Lofts after I’d paid 25 cents for the first one.
B.A. or not, great teacher or not, genius or not – the NYC Board of Education was not about to employ Jews in 1934. Consequently, all applicants were subjected to a speech exam that was designed to weed out Jews, who because of their foreign accents tended to over-pronounce their “T’s,” “D’s,” and “NG’s” (as in Lon-Guyland). So instead of going through with the bogus exam, I telephoned private schools. I used a lot of nickels, but was eventually hired by the Borough Hall Academy in Brooklyn, an accredited high school for those who didn’t function well in city schools. The classes were small, and I loved teaching Latin, French, English, and Ancient History. My only complaint was frequent sexual harassment by the self-made but exploitive millionaire who owned and ran the place.
Now that I was a teacher, I no longer had to help out in the store (my two sisters worked there now and shared my Saturday house chores) and this afforded me the great luxury of exploring the city and discovering the free concerts that were offered every weekend. And it was there, at a Lewisohn Stadium concert, that a handsome, elegant, slim young man, dressed impeccably in white, took the seat next to mine. With his graceful fingers he placed a Dunhill cigarette into a gold holder, and apologized for talking to me during intermission.
“How do you like the performance?” He spoke with a fascinating foreign accent, like Charles Boyer.
“I never tire of hearing Ravel’s “Bolero.’ ”
“And do you know the music of my people – the tangos, the pasa dobles, the boleros?”
“Very slightly.”
“Well, if you are free next weekend, it would be my pleasure to introduce you to our music.”
I was immediately awed that such a refined gem was presenting me with an invitation. He was certainly not one of the schlubby neighborhood guys who offered to take me to the 5-cent Saturday-night movies. So I accepted his offer and we agreed to meet the following Saturday night at a 42nd Street cafeteria where either of us could sit and wait if the other was late.
Luis was waiting, and when I arrived he kissed my hand and gave me a rose. If only those nasty sorority girls could see me now. On we went to Café Latino, a candle-lit mini museum with a three-piece band. The walls were covered with paintings of flamenco dancers, gauchos, and tropical landscapes. The dance floor was small, but Luis was eager for us to tango. I didn’t follow him at all. His steps were complicated and frenzied, unlike any American tango, and I was relieved not to have stabbed him with my stiletto heels. Nevertheless, Luis hugged me, thanked me for the dance, and kissed me on the forehead. The boleros turned out better.
I floated back to my seat to drink yerba mate, an Argentinian tea served in a gourd called a bombilla. Luis then pointed out the bandoneon, an instrument that was played especially for tangos. He said that beside the Argentinians, only the Japanese knew how to play it. He was descended from the Quechuan Indians of Peru, and I found everything he said fascinating. He taught me some Quechuan words. An avid and accomplished equestrian and passionate aficionado of the bullfight, he also convinced me that the bullfight was a beautiful pageant. The bullfighter, he said, had courage and grace, and I learned about the various passes.
I agreed to accompany Luis to a polo match in Westport, Connecticut, the next day, and after that we saw each other regularly on the weekends. Oddly, I didn’t pry into his personal life. Luis said he was an engineer at a hospital in New Jersey, and also that he lived on the premises in case of emergencies. I was quick to relay the warnings of all mamas about what guys expected, and assured him that I wouldn’t be offended if he wanted to cancel. But he protested vigorously. “Oh, no!” he said. “I’m happy to have your company. You’re so responsive and animated. Besides, Me gusta mirarme en tus ojos verdes. I like to see myself in your green eyes.”
Every weekend Luis offered up some exciting program, and he spoke Spanish to me. I had studied Spanish, but now I devoured the Amsco Spanish Review Book all week. Each Saturday night was another life, another world, another trip. The kaleidoscopic Russian Tea Room, the Czardas music at the eponymous restaurant, the Viennese waltzes at the Café Geiger on the East Side. Even mundane activities seemed captivating. I usually had coffee and dessert while Luis sipped a glass or two of wine. Nevertheless, the waiters made me feel like royalty, and Luis was impressed that I spoke German to them. When I finally gave up my kosher cheese sandwiches, I consumed pastels, empanados, and dulce de leche with guilty pleasure. Imagine a milk dessert after all that pork!
Still, I knew almost nothing about him. Luis was quite well traveled, and the fact that he regularly quoted poetry and philosophy led me to believe that he was nicely educated. But what had brought him to New York? God only knew. Maybe he’d killed somebody in Quito. He told me that you had to kill the one who seduced your wife. It’s called punto de honor. But the truth was that our relationship made little sense. I liked being greeted with Hola linda and Hasta muy pronto guapa, and his hugs and cheek kisses as he held my face in his hands made me feel pretty. Yet the guilt I felt as a result of sneaking around bothered me a lot.
I always told my mother that I was going to meet my puritanical friend, Clara, and I told Clara that I was using her as an excuse. She was not so displeased with that, but was really distressed that I was involved with “a guy you picked up.” In those days nobody dated a stranger. You had to know the whole lineage of the person you dated, even the history of their ancestors. Clara was sure that Luis was a strangler, an ax murderer, a Blue Beard. She told me that I was willfully living out a blind adolescent fantasy. What was I expecting? Marriage? And even if that was possible, was I prepared to face disownment by my entire family?
I protested: “But he treats me with respect and affection. I feel so cared for when we walk together and he puts his arm around my shoulder.”
In the end, though, I realized that I had to put a stop to this hopeless joy, this sunny weekend world. But what was I going to tell Luis – that he was not Jewish, didn’t speak enough English, and that I knew nothing about him or his family? I assumed he would be humiliated; perhaps he saw himself as a kind of Pygmalian, molding me into a Spanish Galatea.
After some procrastination, I planned my final adios for our sixth weekend together. The day was hot, I was very tired from my Saturday chores, and I wanted nothing more than to stay home and sleep. But how could I leave Luis plantado (stood-up)? Neither of us had a phone, so that would be the end of it. It didn’t seem nice, or possible.
It was so hot that I couldn’t bring myself to don a girdle, so I dared to go out wearing only my thin bloomers. When I arrived at the same 42nd Street cafeteria where we always met, Luis was eager to give me some recordings of Andean music. Next, we went to dinner and ate mata hambre, the national beef dish of Argentina. I was swept away as usual, and when Luis invited me to his weekend hotel room to listen to the music, I decided yet again to postpone my goodbye speech.
Luis’s room was stifling despite a creaky old fan. He sat on the only chair next to the table with the Victrola, a crank-operated record player for 78s; I sat on the bed. He apologized for serving me vermouth in blue glasses (the only ones he could find in a store that day) that made it impossible to enjoy the color of the wine. I was so impressed. The music was eerie, plaintive, haunting. I kept drinking and listening to his explanation about the various Indian instruments. The soothing vermouth tasted so much better than the Seder Manischewitz, and my eyes felt gluey as the room spun. Suddenly I couldn’t sit up. I fell backward onto the bed, as if paralyzed, and then became suddenly cold. I pulled my skirt around my body like a blanket. I fell into a dreamless sleep and was dead to the world.
Eventually it was a cold, wet towel on my face that woke me. At 10:30 p.m. Luis said that he had better get me home. I couldn’t believe that I had been unconscious all that time. I felt woozy and could hardly stand up, so I cancelled Sunday’s date. Embarassed, I agreed to meet Luis the following weekend for more mata hambre.
I kept putting off the end of this escapade, just as I habitually procrastinated my diets. A couple of weeks later I woke up nauseated. My favorite morning coffee smelled repulsive, and all I wanted to eat was the green tomatoes that my father had ripening in the store. I thought I had a stomach virus (we used to call it “the grippe”), but after about ten days I felt fine. Then I remembered that I had missed my period. Must have been the virus. I didn’t give it a lot of thought, but when it happened again the next month I was sure I had cancer.
We didn’t have a family doctor, and I wouldn’t have wanted a male doctor to examine me anyway, so I visited a clinic on the East Side called Women’s Hospital. As the doctor was examining me, I asked her if it was cancer.
“No, my dear,” she answered coldly. “You’re pregnant.”
Pregnant! How could I be pregnant? I had never had sexual relations with a man.
She smirked and said sarcastically: “Maybe you’re the next Madonna.”
“What can I do?” I cried.
“Have the baby” was the scornful and condescending reply, at which point she called for her next patient.
The next day was Saturday. I would tell Luis. He worked in a hospital and could advise me about getting a second opinion. Before he sat down I exploded with the hideous news. Surprisingly unflustered, he admitted what he had done. He had found me so “ee-ray-sees-tee-blay” the night at his hotel that he just intended to hug me close – and then it all happened in a minute. He was so sorry. Me da tanta pena, it gives me so much pain. But I shouldn’t worry. Manana he would bring me some sure-fire abortion herbs from the curandera.
I sat motionless as a stone and swore that he was lucky I wasn’t one of his compatriots. Had I been a Latina girl, I would have poured scalding coffee all over his glossy black hair and handsome, untroubled face. My screeching rage would have caused a small army of policemen to descend on the place. But I was unable to make a sound.
I guiltily boiled the herbs in my mother’s kosher pot and drank the vile concoction. Throughout the next week, I inspected every piece of toilet tissue I used for signs of blood – all in vain. Strangely, I also became obsessed with the thought that no Jewish man would marry me now. I’d never feel the pride of the honeymoon morning’s traditional blood-stained sheet. Worse, I could not bring myself to blame Luis. It seemed incredible to me that I could become pregnant from one minute’s ghostly sexual act, yet I considered it my fault. God had let this happen to me as a way of punishing me for all my sins.
Luis and I had arranged to meet the following weekend, and as I sat waiting for him in the cafeteria, I couldn’t help noticing the multi-colored holiday lights (it was approaching Thanksgiving already), which irritated and mocked me. When he finally showed up, he didn’t greet me with Hola guapa, but rather with Que te pasa? and he couldn’t believe that I’d had no resultado. Probably because I was such a healthy athlete, he said. Then, while swirling sugar into his coffee and blowing smoke rings, he told me how terribly he regretted having to leave for Ecuador because of a family emergency. I thought of a line of old poetry: “I am the sole consumer of my woes. None cares or knows.”
Luis paid the check, donned his stunning trench coat, and offered to accompany me wherever I wanted to go. I told him no thanks, I’d stay where I was for a while. At which point he wished me Buena suerte, and was gone.
What now? Maybe I could rid myself of the sinister clump by diving off the 10-foot. board at the St. George Hotel where I usually swam. I poked myself with cocktail stirrers. I entreated God. All fruitless. That clump refused to detach itself. I thought about my old friend Molly. She had married her cousin and would surely advise me. But when I shared my story with her, she gave me the most ridiculous advice: Tell my parents. My Orthodox parents! I thought she was crazy to offer me such advice.
One night the store was empty when I came in. My father gave me a tearful and defeated look, while my mother screamed in a torrent: “You lousy kurveh fucking a scvartzer pimp. Get the hell out! For this we made you into a teacher? We never want to see you again. We’re sitting shiva for you.”
Apparently Molly, who was a frequent customer, thought that she would be helping by telling my parents how bright I was, studying Spanish every weekend with a South American tutor. Surely, she thought, this would smooth the way for me to confess about my “rape.” But my explanation that I’d had only one lesson fell on deaf ears. It was followed by more curses and implications, and again: “Get the hell out!”
Now I had to leave. But where was I to go? Feeling bereft and forsaken, I wandered around until 10 p.m. looking at the various empty Bronx lots with their overgrown grass and weeds, and thinking to myself how comforting it would be to lie down in one of them. But I was too much of a coward, so I tried to go home. The door was bolted, but my wonderful sisters were not sleeping. They heard me in the yard, whistling the family whistle, and opened the door. My parents didn’t throw me out again, but they refused to speak to me. My father was sweet, but my mother engaged in a more hostile kind of peace.
I went to teach in the mornings, bleary-eyed, but the sleepless nights stretched into days, days into weeks, weeks into months. Nobody knew my plight. I was adrift, a cork floating on the ocean. The problem would soon be obvious, so I offered God all sorts of sacrifices. Now it seems so melodramatic and unbelievable, but in 1934 there was no welfare, there were no single mothers, and no acceptance of a disgraced woman in my community. Finally, a nun at a subway entrance answered my prayers by handing me a leaflet. Large black letters on the front cover read: The Wages of Sin Is Death.
How brilliantly clear that was, and so logical. I had walked along the pier at the Hudson River many times, and now realized how easy it would be to fall into the icy water and drown. The report would say that I might have lost my balance, or been pushed. I also knew that some people swallowed pills, but all I could think of was Aspirin. Still, the thought that my struggle-filled life would be no more was the first thing that had comforted me in months.
The next day I bought a tin of aspirins, went to a tawdry bar, and ordered a martini. I put three aspirins on my tongue and took a gulp of the foul drink. I waited to take another sip, but decided I didn’t have to. I felt so strange already and knew that if I didn’t start walking, I might not make it over to the river. How I envied the people all around me who, smiling, animatedly carried their gaudy little Christmas purchases.
I stopped at the corner of 14h Street and was waiting for the light to change when I heard somebody calling my name: “Gertrude!” Was there something hallucinogenic in the drink? Again: “Gertrude!”
Standing there, facing me, was Martha, a classmate from Hunter.
“My God, you look ghastly,” she said. “What’s the matter with your eyes?”
Martha had not been a close friend at school. She was very bright and obsessed with political matters – economic injustice and minority causes – my complete opposite. She had left a year early to study nursing and was waiting to enlist in the armed services. Without forethought, I burst out about what I was planning.
Miraculously, Martha said to me: “Then it will probably make you feel better when I tell you that I had an abortion last week.”
She was so calm about it, as if she was talking about a trip to the bathroom. She would take me to her doctor immediately. But I had to have $50. Where was I going to get $50? That was a fortune.
Martha suggested that I ask my horrible principal for an advance. She accompanied me to Brooklyn after she’d bought me a grilled cheese sandwich and a malted. I could hardly walk. I managed nevertheless to tell my principal that my friend needed emergency surgery. He shot me a cunning smile. “Are you sure you’re not having an abortion?” But he did finally give me the money.
The next day we went to see Dr. W., who had to okay me for the abortion doctor because it was very dangerous to perform abortions in those days. Doctors who were caught were jailed, and I later learned that many women died from botched surgery.
The receptionist wasted no time. “Give me the $50.”
I gave her the money, went into a darkened room, and stretched out on a table. Then I was given some sedative, which knocked me out. The abortion was just ending when I came to so I heard Dr. G. cursing: “God damn! God damn!” Then he didn’t say another word. What must he have seen? The nurse quickly handed me a sanitary pad and I was on my way.
I found Martha in the waiting room, and we immediately got a cab to her place on West 10th Street. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe I was finally rid of that mass, that murderous cancer, that disgrace. And I felt absolutely fine. As I reclined on her couch and waited for her to bring dinner and Kotex, I wondered if it had been my character that had gotten me into this terrible mess … or had it been fate? But then, Martha was my fate too.
Will my philosopher granddaughter ever be able to decipher this puzzle? Who will really know? Was it a clump of cells that I had removed, or the beginnings of an actual person? What I had thought of at the time as a disgusting piece of protoplasm, I now realize was a living being, and although late-term abortions are performed with some regularity these days, I can’t forget the crime I committed.
Or was it a crime?
Nowadays when I think about the past, my conversations with myself usually involve the words “What if.” These conversations begin with impersonal questions like, “What if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated?” But they quickly turn extraordinarily personal: What if today’s mores had evolved by 1934, the year of my unwanted pregnancy? Would I be sitting in my Epiphany Branch library reading Dummies Guide for the Single Parent? What if my then world hadn’t threatened to brand me with a scarlet letter? What if my religious parents didn’t plan to sit shiva for me? What if I had met some offbeat guy who wanted to marry a “fallen” woman? What wunderkind might I have birthed? Maybe he would have found a cure for cancer or brokered peace in the Middle East. Or what if I had no wunderkind, but rather a disabled child who would make both our lives far from rosy?
Eventually I stop pondering these pointless questions – enough is enough – and switch to other universal words: “If only I’d …” And I think specifically about that fateful steaming Saturday night when I was dying to stay home instead of going to meet Luis …
Inevitably, I console myself with thoughts about the family I did raise. My daughter refuses to read my story, but my granddaughters are fascinated by the fact that abortion existed in that ancient, faraway land – and to their grandma!
When my eventual socially acceptable husband (from whom I am now long divorced) said he was disappointed that I wasn’t a virgin, I became obsessed with fear that he might unearth my terrible secret. I was constantly terrified. Desperate to hide my past, I chose the old doctor who had approved me for the abortion instead of a licensed gynecologist when I became “legitimately” pregnant, because I was afraid that a gynecologist would discover that I’d had an abortion and tell my husband. The doctor (who turned out to be a lung specialist) made a terrible mess of my daughter’s birth, and I concluded that this was the price I had to pay for my aberrant life.
I still love Edith Piaf’s songs. Yet I wonder if there is anyone who can truly agree with her assured “Je Ne Regrette Rien …I regret nothing.”
