starting to claim the theretofore masculine privileges of smoking and drinking. It was a way of demanding parity with men, of trying to be taken seriously by donning the trappings of the ruling class. Many of them were playing at this game, but a significant few took it seriously.
And the new advertisements were seductive. A man lights a Chesterfield and his woman companion gazes into the curling smoke. “Blow some my way,” she says. Murad brand, with a not very subtle nod to the ladies, adopts the slogan, “Be Nonchalant—light a Murad.” And here’s the one that got so many women: “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”
But shockingly, the Great War and the Great Prosperity were followed by the Great Depression. Women were thrust back into their traditional routines of kinder, küche, kirche. In their millions, they broke out the white ruffled aprons and little wash dresses and rediscovered the joys of floor wax and tuna casseroles. Still, they could not forget the brief, exhilarating fling with freedom of a sort. When Prohibition ended in the early 1930s, many young women participated enthusiastically in the afternoon “cocktail hour,” which seems to have entirely replaced the hour for high tea. One expanded one’s wardrobe to include a semi-formal outfit for late afternoons that became known as a “cocktail dress.” That useful article of furniture, the once-and-future “coffee table,” became the “cocktail table.” Fashionable young women drank highballs or bourbon on the rocks, right alongside their mates.
If the men bought the booze, women could share a “wee drop of the creature,” too. My own mother, preparing for her second wedding in 1934, was given that trendiest of bridal parties, a “liquor shower,” including highball glasses, engraved pewter liquor labels on little chains, glass swizzle sticks, and her own personal hammered silver flask, in case she got chilly at a football game. It was the height of young, trendy 1930s urbanity, in the grand style of the charmingly bibulous Nick and Nora Charles—“The Thin Man” and his delectable mate.
When World War II intruded on our lives, for many women, and aside from genuine hardships and losses, it truly was a glimpse of a brave new world. They came out of that experience more changed than the surface serenity and convention of the 1950s would suggest. Cigarettes and liquor had been offered everywhere and to everyone during the war; they were blended in the memory with recreation, rest, relief from stress and fatigue, and just plain fun. Freedom to smoke and drink without the intermediary of a protective male became associated at last, for better or for worse, with a defiance of past constraints on women’s lives. It became, in short, an outward show of independence.
When I arrived in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, this perception was firmly entrenched and I did not think to question it. There were wonderful women everywhere I looked, and many intriguing gay men. When they gathered to socialize at a Village pub, they enjoyed a smoke, they took a drink, they created a charmed circle. If you wanted to join them, to fit in, you did as they did. If you went a little over the top, they picked you up, dusted you off, spared you the sermons, and took you home to sleep it off on their sofas. You, in time, returned the favor as needed. It was another form of bonding, of “us against the world.”
But a time does come in one’s life when it is prudent to step back from all that seemed fully pellucid in the first enchantment of one’s twenties; a time to take stock and a time to question. I am reminded of Max Ehrmann’s wise and compelling advice: “Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.” (“Desiderata,” 1927). I did, as in good time and with luck, we all must. Finally, for all those who press reproach without understanding, this is just to say how it was for so many of us back then.
No, I didn’t become an alcoholic. I even stopped smoking in my early twenties and today drink only the occasional, if welcome, glass of wine. And I can reassure you that Beebo and Beth, at the end of Journey to a Woman, made it out happy and intact. How do I know this? Because I know where they are now: sitting on the pages of a manuscript written some years ago and awaiting resurrection and revision. Beth went through a sort of fever dream in extricating herself from her marriage and fashioning a life for herself that differed greatly from the one imagined by a younger Beth in her undergraduate days. It’s often in such a fire that we forge and purify our true identities, and that’s what her journey was all about. Parts of the personal odyssey are daunting and parts of it are brilliantly beautiful, and both reveal us to ourselves as no other experience could. Not everyone has the stomach to take this sort of interior trip. If it were easy, wouldn’t everyone do it? But for survivors, it brings the gift of deeper self-knowledge and a capacity for sweeter and more selfless love of others.
And so, we come to the endpoint in this story. Beth at last meets Beebo, and all sorts of good things start to happen. She has fought her way through the tough stuff and earned the joy, and so, in the earlier tales, had Beebo. I should have written a novel then that pursued them into their life together. Now, I will.
Ann Bannon
Sacramento, California
September 2002
SHE LAY IN THE DARK AND CRIED. SHE LAY CLOSE AND WARM IN her husband’s arms while their breath slowed to normal and their hearts quieted together and she wept silently at his sigh of relief. She had learned to cry without making a sound. It had taken a while but she had had plenty of opportunities to learn. If he caught her crying there was always a terrible scene. He started out by questioning her love and ended by questioning his own manhood.
“Goddamn it, Beth!” he had cried to her once, when they had been married only two months, “If I’m doing it wrong, tell me! How do I know what you want me to do if you don’t tell me? A woman isn’t like a man. I can’t tell if it’s any good for you or not.”
He was blaming her for his own faults of love she thought, and, stung, she snapped back, “What am I supposed to do, give you a play-by-play analysis? Can’t you figure it out for yourself, Charlie? You did well enough before we were married.”
“So did you, before we were married,” he flung at her. He got out of bed, lighted a cigarette in the dark, and sat down on the floor. They could not afford chairs yet, and he didn’t want to share the bed with her for a few minutes. Not until the anger wore off.
“Beth, you’ve got it just backwards,” he said. “Most girls can’t enjoy it until they’re married. Their consciences hurt, or something. They’re afraid they’ll get pregnant. But not you. Not Backwards Beth. The minute we get married it’s no fun anymore. Does love have to be immoral or illegal before you can enjoy it, honey?”
Insulted, she turned her back to him and pulled the covers over her disappointed body. She was afraid to think of what he had just said. It had too much the shape of truth and she had had to work very hard to forget it completely. Charlie finished his cigarette and climbed gingerly back into his place in bed, more chilled by his wife’s behavior than the night vapors.
It had been nine years since the first such quarrel. There had been others, but Beth had learned fast to hide the tears of frustration. True to her contrary nature, there were times when she loved Charlie—if love can be an on-again, off-again affair. And sometimes, when she didn’t expect it, desire sneaked up on her and made the moments in his arms unbearably lovely, the way they had been in college. But that was only sometimes, and sometimes was not enough.
On
