My Mistake (17 page)

 

Forty-three

 

We are on vacation in Truro, on Cape Cod, my wife and I, when the call comes from the adoption agency. We get ready to go, tell a crusty neighbor lady about why we are leaving, and she says, “Oh, well, that's all right, I guess. Someone in the village adopted a child from the Orient a few years ago. She's perfectly nice but a boxy little thing.”

We fly down to Atlanta, and as we walk into the agency's offices, we pass a bassinet with a remarkably small person fast asleep in it. I think nothing of it. When we sit down in the social worker's office, I say to myself, “That is our son!” He is.

We live at 324 West 83rd Street, on the top (seventh) floor of a co-op with three small bedrooms and a nano–maid's room. We have an au pair. I go down to
The New Yorker
's offices every day; my wife works as a free-lance writer. When Will is three or four months old, he's sitting in his high chair in the kitchen, messing with his food. I drop a raw egg on the floor and of course it breaks. I lean down to clean it up and I hear this strange
Gremlins
-type giggle. It's Will, the first laugh of his that I've heard; he's beginning to enjoy the human comedy and my mistakes.

 

I write a much longer story based on the events surrounding my brother's death. Mr. Maxwell is long gone.
The New Yorker
turns it down. Chip McGrath comes into my office and says, “You really got rooked. It's a great story.” My assistant at the time, a mischievous young woman, asks if I want to covertly see the opinions, and I say no. A few days later, she hands me a story from the slush pile and asks me to read it. After a couple of pages I'm mystified about why she would recommend such a clearly amateurish piece, but then I find that the third page of the story is not the third page of the story but the opinions on
my
story. I can't keep myself from reading them. My editor, Fran Kiernan, has written a negative opinion, Veronica Geng calls it “just another hospital story,” and Shawn says, “I'm afraid I agree with Ms. Geng—just another hospital story.”

A few months later, my friend Ben Sonnenberg, who has started a handsome and distinctive literary quarterly called
Grand Street,
publishes the piece under the title “Brothers.”

 

 

I tell my analyst about the opinions on my story and my placing it at
Grand Street.
Instead of responding to the umbrage I've taken, he tells me that Mike's death is threatening to turn into a “nuclear integrative fantasy” for me. Nuclear because it is becoming the center of my unconscious emotional life. Integrative because it creates a shape, a terrible and beautiful structure, for everything in my life that came before it and has happened afterward. And a fantasy because for reasons of unconscious conflict and patterns, I've begun to inject its occurrence into many parts of my history upon which it has no rational bearing. He says that Holocaust survivors often present the strongest examples of this kind of centripetal emotional distortion. (“And who can blame them?” he adds.) Their experiences during that time shape everything that has happened to them, not only during the ordeal but before and after it. No transaction will ever be free of its dark power as long as they live. When he tells me about this, it immediately calls to mind a girl I'd flirted with at a bar, the Ninth Circle, in the Village, the college summer I worked in the Morgue—as Editorial Reference used to be called—at Time, Inc. She was pretty and nice but seemed dissociated. She excused herself for a few minutes just after we started talking, and the bartender said, “Be careful with her—her brother died three years ago, and it seems like it made her really crazy. She comes in here all the time and talks to people about it.” And sure enough, when she came back, she sat down and took out a pen and wrote on a napkin, in very small letters, “My brother died,” and gave it to me.

 

Forty-four

 

William Whitworth, the wonderful writer and editor, and one of Shawn's never-going-to-happen potential successors, inherits Pauline Kael, lasts longer with her even than I did, develops a stomach ulcer, and ultimately leaves to become the Editor of the
Atlantic.

 

Forty-five

 

Natacha Stewart, whose work I edited at
The
New Yorker
briefly—an inheritance from William Maxwell—dies. Pierre Leval, a United States District Court judge, holds a memorial/reception in her honor at his apartment on Park Avenue. Someone tells me about it, and I feel I should attend. I do so, only to discover that the event is by invitation only. I apologize to the host, explain my mistake, and he graciously insists that I stay.

I talk with Mrs. Shawn—Cecille, but of course I call her Mrs. Shawn. We're talking about something interesting. After a few minutes, she looks at her watch and says she's sorry but she should be going. I protest: “Let's just finish this one question,” I say. She says, “Mr. Menaker, you don't understand. I really must be going.”

She leaves. A short time later, Shawn and Lillian Ross arrive.

Not long before this incident, Alice Munro submitted a story that included an adulterous man leaving his lover's bed and immediately making a phone call to his wife. As I recall, Shawn wrote in the margin, in his tiny hand, that he found this part of the story hard to believe—completely unconvincing.

 

Under the heading “1983 Incentive Stock Ownership Plan,” The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.'s, Notice of Annual Meeting of Stockholders, to Be Held March 22, 1983, stated that grants of stock will be made to certain employees. “All key executives and key employees of the Company shall be eligible to participate in the Incentive Plan . . . The Incentive Plan will be administered by a committee appointed by the Board of Directors . . . which will select the key executives or employees of the Company . . . to whom awards will be granted.” I noticed or heard about this stock plan, and after a couple of years I begin to wonder why (as far as I know) “key” Editorial employees weren't being designated for these grants. I go to the President of the magazine, J. Kennard Bosee, down on the sixteenth or seventeenth floor, where the Business Department is in effect pre-infatuation Thisbe to Editorial's Pyramus, and ask him about this situation. He tells me that Shawn has refused to name any key Editorial employees for these grants because the writers who aren't employees, even those under contract, aren't eligible. (It turns out that the same annual report, on page 14, describes the “1983 Authors and Artists Under Contract Stock Purchase Plan,” but a stock purchase, however advantageous the price, is not a stock grant.) I say, “But isn't he
required
to designate key employees?” Bosee says, “He just refuses.”

Shawn gets wind of my descent to seventeen and my concern and calls me into his office a few days later. He explains. He says he couldn't in conscience designate key employees for stock grants because most of the artists and writers couldn't have them. “And after all, they are the most important people,” he concludes. I say, “But it wouldn't
hurt
the artists and writers if Editorial employees received these grants.” I'm thinking that there must be some fairy tale or Aesopian narrative that illustrates the ridiculosity of depriving, say, the donkey of hay simply because the horse can't have any. But I can't come up with it. Shawn says, “Well, I don't expect you to understand this, Mr. Menaker, but it
would
hurt the artists and writers. This inequity would hurt everyone.” I tell him that I disagree with him, that I think this isn't the right thing to do, and I think I even say something crass, like “Why not just get the money up here and we'll
all
split it up?” (What I wanted to say and didn't was “Isn't this at the very least violating the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission?” Because it seemed to me that that might very well be the case.) And he just looks at me with this dyspeptic expression and I leave, and do and say nothing more about it. Later, when S. I. Newhouse buys the magazine, I estimate, approximately and conservatively, that the stock grants I and some of my colleagues might have received would have been worth between $100,000 and $200,000 for each of us.

I am still in analysis at the time, and when I tell my . . . colorful analyst this story, he goes nuts. “What is
wrong
with you people?” he practically yells. “Are you
sheep?
What kind of insane asylum are you working in? You should be not on this couch but down at the courthouse with a lawyer esuing this man Shown and even having him arrested! This is a cult!”

 

S. I. Newhouse, the scion of a newspaper millionaire and owner of Random House, has just acquired
The New Yorker.
It has been a publicly held company but now it will be privately owned, Newhouse having acquired all the stock for too great a price—$200 per share. At a meeting of stockholders, across the street from the magazine's offices at 28 West 44th Street, the acquisition is made official. When the meeting is over, I cross the street and, as it happens, get into an elevator just before Newhouse himself does. I press the button for the twentieth floor.

Newhouse is smiling gladsomely. “Do you work for
The New Yorker
?” he says.

“Yes, I do.”

“May I ask your name?”

“Dan Menaker.”

“I'm Si Newhouse,” he says.

“Yes, I know. I was just at the meeting. I am—I was a stockholder in a very minor way. Congratulations.”

“Thank you. Are you an editor?”

“Yes.”

“Do you work with fiction or nonfiction?”

“Mainly fiction.”

“Great! I can't wait to sink my teeth into that Alice Munro story we're publishing next week.”

Newhouse has promised to keep the offices of
The New Yorker
physically separate—in a different building—from the offices of Condé Nast, which he also owns. He has promised to keep William Shawn on as Editor for as long as he wishes to remain. He has promised to consult with the staff when and if a new Editor needs to be appointed.

He doesn't keep any of those promises.

 

Forty-six

 

My father, eighty-three, senile but otherwise pretty functional, has a cardiac problem that has him in Nyack Hospital. My mother and I consider putting him into a nursing home after he's released. But he dies of a ruptured aortal aneurysm in the hospital at night, alone. A nurse tells us he said he was very cold, and she gave him an extra blanket and returned a few minutes later to find him dead.

Even in his method of dying, my father relegates himself to a kind of second-class family citizenship, or to being my mother's third child. Or maybe he was her first. He slept in a small separate bedroom in the house in Nyack—ostensibly because of his loud snoring. Whenever my brother or I accomplished anything notable, or my mother was promoted or in some other way recognized, my father would be pleased but would almost always add, “It makes me feel inadequate.” But he was my father, and in his way a charming and debonair man, and intelligent. But he was also the youngest of seven, and a replacement child at that, as another boy before him had died in infancy, and he never seemed to get out of the shadow of his more enterprising family and then of his redoubtable wife. The love I feel for him after he's gone contains more than one kind of sadness.

 

Forty-seven

 

I publish a second book of stories called
The Old Left.
It's better received than the first one was, as any grocery list would have been. An acquaintance at a party says to me, “Hey, Dan! I saw your little book in a store—I forget which one.”

“Which book or which store?”

“Both.”

 

Fifty-one

 

Robert Gottlieb, the former Publisher of Knopf, has been Editor of
The New Yorker
for about five years.

Let me back up a little here. After Shawn put off his departure as long as he could, Newhouse finally required him to name a date. I guess he did. Meanwhile, it seems that Gottlieb and Newhouse had been huddling about Gottlieb's eventual succession to the position. When Newhouse formally announced Gottlieb's appointment, a huge staff meeting took place at
The New Yorker
's offices, at which Lillian Ross and others led the protest against this act of
lèse gotrocks.
A letter asking Gottlieb not to accept the position was drafted and sent to him. Scores of writers and editorial employees signed it. I was one of them. I signed out of naïve outrage over Newhouse's breaking his promise to consult with the magazine's staff before making this choice. It was all pretty silly. Many who signed the letter wrote privately to Gottlieb explaining that their objections were based on principle, not on his character or qualifications. The private letters were also, obviously, based—maybe even based primarily—on the signatories' hope to keep their jobs. Mine certainly was.

In any case, these five years have been wonderful years for me. They will turn out to be perhaps the best professional period of my life, thanks to Gottlieb's eclectic taste in fiction and his willingness to take chances with new writers. Few people will later understand what Gottlieb achieves for the magazine through his endorsement of more adventuresome and surprising short fiction. It proves to be his signal achievement, one that will turn out to have a significant and enduring effect on the literary world from that point on. A large part of an entire generation of important American writers finds its first prominence in the magazine's pages.

Forward again, five years. I am up in the country, on a weekend in June, in what I still think of as Enge's house, with my wife and our two children, William, eight years old, and Elizabeth, five.