From This Day Forward (14 page)

 

CR: All of New York was on strike that week, which made the idea of leaving sound good to me. And the truth was, the minute a baby arrives in New York, it becomes a completely unlivable city. It was one thing to be young and newly married and have jobs and enough money to go to the theater and out to dinner. The baby changed everything. Just going to the grocery store meant bringing the baby and trying to figure out a way to carry both him and the food home. When I tried to take the baby to the pediatrician for his first visit, I stood at Broadway and Seventy-fifth for half an hour trying to hail a cab and couldn't get one. Finally, in tears, I went back to the apartment, called the pediatrician, and canceled the appointment. I felt like a total failure as a mother who couldn't take care of my baby because I couldn't get to the doctor's office. I was plenty happy to leave New York.

 

SR: Before we left, we had to decide how we were going to celebrate the birth of this baby. In Jewish tradition there's a ritual circumcision, called a Bris, when a baby boy is eight days old. We didn't want to do that; among other things, there was no way Cokie's parents could come to New York then. But we did want to have some event marking Lee's arrival.

 

CR: The baby was circumcised in the hospital, which, in 1968, was an extra twenty-five dollars. Steve's Grandpa Abe called me shortly after I got home from the hospital and barked into the phone, “I want to tell you something. Whatever you do, don't circumcise that baby.” Astonished, I asked, “Why?” And he said, “Because I've read all about it. Your sex life is never as good.” This was my grandfather-in-law! I said, “Too late, Pop.” Then I told him we were having a party to celebrate the birth of his first great-grandchild. And, despite what he saw as my precipitous action on the circumcision front, he accepted the invitation.

 

SR: He called me up the morning of the party and said he couldn't come. “Why?” I said. “Because I won't have a place to park.” So I said to him, “Pop, if you leave now, I will go outside and lie down in a parking spot in front of the apartment and make sure it's there for you.” He did come, and we have a picture of him holding his great-grandson. It was great to have family and friends around; most of my family was in New Jersey. So was Cokie's sister, Barbara, who had stayed with us after the baby was born to help take care of him. But then we announced we were moving. It was hard on my parents when I said to them, “The good news is you have a healthy baby grandson. The bad news is we're about to take him three thousand miles away.”

 

CR: Which, now that I think about it, was really vicious of us. At the time it didn't even occur to me, but it was mean.

 

SR: I think that on reflection, the timing was good. There's always a balance in a young marriage. We were still working out a lot of things for ourselves, as any couple does. Exactly how to be parents. Exactly what role religion would play. Exactly how we would balance work and family. Just learning more about each other. Professionally, of course, it was a great
opportunity for me to become the bureau chief in Los Angeles. But personally it gave us some space at a key time in our marriage to figure things out without either set of parents looking over our shoulders. I don't think it's a total accident that when both of our children got married they moved far away from us—our daughter to California and our son to London. At least in part they were reflecting what we had always said, that it's a healthy thing at this stage of marriage to have some time on your own.

 

CR: A stupid thing for us to have said!

 

SR: California was like another country to us. We knew nothing about it. A college friend of Cokie's who was from L.A. came over for dinner, and I remember her drawing on a napkin a sketch plan of the city, suggesting places we might live. The
Times
flew us out there to house-hunt and we couldn't find anything we liked.

 

CR: The houses were perfectly normal houses, houses we could have found in Cleveland or Bethesda. I was mightily unimpressed. We were in California. We were supposed to have a California house. One of them did have an avocado tree in the backyard, but that was about it. Finally, we saw an ad in the paper: “Not for everyone. Great view, Malibu, overlooking the ocean,” or something like that. So, we decided, shoot, we'd go take a look at it.

 

SR: We were staying in downtown L.A. at the Ambassador Hotel, the place Bobby Kennedy had been shot six months before, because it was literally the only hotel name I knew in the whole city. We got on the freeway for the first time, an adventure in itself, and drove west to Santa Monica and into a tunnel. When we came out of it there was the Pacific Ocean! I had never seen it before. It was truly dramatic. We
followed the directions and drove about seven miles up the Pacific Coast Highway, then turned up into the hills. We kept going up, and up, and up, thinking there must be some mistake. I remember as we were driving up, I turned to Cokie and said, “Are we out of our blooming minds?” Finally, we found the house. It was the last one on the top of the hill, nothing but open country behind it.

 

CR: All we could see from the driveway was this little rambler, this L-shaped California house. We walked in the door and looked directly in front of us and there, through a glassed-in living room, was a magnificent unimpeded view of the Pacific Ocean. And we said, “That's fine, we'll take it.” We had not looked at a bedroom or asked the price. The landlady kept saying, “No, no, no you won't, you don't know how inconvenient it is.” And we said, “In fact, we will. We'll take this house.” We didn't even ask each other. We knew this was the house. This was California.

 

SR: We lived in that house for five years. After we signed the lease, we went back to New York, and a few weeks later, with friends lining up to take over our rent-controlled apartment, we packed up to drive across the country in Cokie's rattletrap Ford Falcon. The baby was about three months old and he traveled in a bassinet in the backseat. Our enduring memory of our trip west to our new life was seeing this fuzzy blond head poking up at us.

 

CR: We had many adventures on the trip. First, just to prove our anxious parents right, the car broke down as soon as we got to Washington. We visited lots of family members along the way, and I got a speeding ticket in Seguin, Texas, a town with an enormous statue of a pecan on the courthouse lawn. In Arizona we started up a mountain for a picnic lunch and suddenly encountered snow. We had to turn around and
come back down to a coffee shop next to a gas station, where we asked the guys there to check the car while we ate.

 

SR: We came out and they had the car up on a rack and they had taken gouges out of our tires and said you need three new tires. They had circled the gouges in chalk. I figured that they vandalized it, but what was I going to do? We were about to drive across the desert. I said, “What if I don't get new tires?” The guy in the gas station said, “Fine, go drive across the desert with these holes in your tires and your new baby.” So this bandit held us up, and I was helpless to do anything about it because I had to protect my little family.

 

CR: Also, all the way across the country we were hearing on the radio about mud slides in Malibu. We were convinced that we would get there and our dream house would be at the bottom of the hill. We finally got to California. We drove through the tunnel, out to the Pacific Ocean. We drove up and up and up the mountain, and when we got to the top, the house was still standing right where it belonged. We went in and found waiting for us a notice from the draft board that Steve was no longer eligible to be called. My other big concern—hardly of the same magnitude—was whether Pampers would flush. I put one in the toilet and it flushed right down. I was literally jumping up and down, I was so happy. Everything was right, our house was there, we were going to start a new life, everything was perfect, and then the baby just burst out laughing in this wonderful giggle. His first real belly laugh. It was a great moment.

 

SR: Welcome to California!

NEW PARENTS IN CALIFORNIA

So there we were, on our mountaintop in Malibu, with lots of space and sun, a new baby, and a new life. Some mornings, when the early fog clung to the coastline, we were literally above the clouds. What we didn't have was a community—no family, no friends, not even the people we passed on the street and greeted daily in New York. In fact, we had to get in the car and drive several miles just to buy a bottle of milk or loaf of bread, let alone find a conversation. Most young marriages face the same sorts of tensions we were encountering. Like newly planted tomatoes they need plenty of room to grow and thrive, but they also need stakes to keep them from sprawling on the ground. And no stakes are more important to the sturdiness of a marriage than friendships.

 

CR: All of my life friendships have meant a great deal to me. Suddenly I found myself on top of a mountain with a little baby, no friends within hundreds of miles, and Steven on the road much of the time. Fortunately, lots of friends and family came to visit and it was a time when people stayed for a while when they went all the way to California. Also, Sophie Altman, my boss from Washington days, sold
It's Academic,
the show I had worked on right after college, to the NBC affiliate in Los Angeles and hired me to produce it, so I met some people at the station. Then another alum of Altman Productions showed up in California and started working with me. I had known Sylvia Rowe since Wellesley and she and her two little girls and Lee and I spent a good deal of time together. They were the only guests at Lee's first birthday party because they were the only friends I had. Steven, as usual for that era, was out of town.

 

SR: Cokie told me that Lee's first birthday party was the last one I could miss, but even if he doesn't remember, I look at the pictures now and feel a bit guilty about not being there. And I suppose that's progress, because I don't remember feeling guilty at the time.

 

CR: Our friends Terry and Margaret Lenzner lived right around the corner from us in New York and actually stood on the corner and waved good-bye when we left for California. About the time Lee was turning one, they did something so smart I've learned from it ever since. When we moved, most of our friends gave us names of people to call, saying, look up our friends, the so-and-sos. I never would do that because I was too shy, I didn't want to impose. What was I supposed to say, “Invite me to dinner?” The Lenzners did it the other way around. They called friends in California and said, “Steve and Cokie Roberts have moved there; you call them.” That's exactly what happened. Monroe and Aimee Price called us and invited us to their son Gabriel's second birthday party. Lee was the littlest kid there; he was fourteen months old. I remember him sitting on the end of the picnic-table bench—not too steady there.

Millie Harmon was at that birthday party, she had kids who were three and a half, one and a half, and newborn, and we quickly became very good friends. Her middle child had a regular play day with another little girl, and when Lee joined them, I started making friends. It was a delightful community of women whose kids all played together. That summer, when I was pregnant with Becca, we went east to see our families. And while we were away, Millie's husband, Ellis, was killed. He and Tom Brokaw, who was at that point a local anchorman on KNBC, were on a rafting trip together and Tom called us with the news. It was hard to take in, to even imagine my friend Millie all alone, with three little girls and a big black Lab. After we got back to California, Millie and I started having regular Monday-night dinners together
because Steve was usually on the road early in the week. One of our favorites was a pizza place, Regular John's, a kid-friendly place where we could get a glass of wine! That started a ritual, which our friends continued long after Steve and I left California. Once, when I happened to be back on a visit on a Monday, I went to dinner and discovered what had started with Millie and me taking the kids out had become a big deal with people taking turns cooking. About thirty people were there, so it had become a lot of work. But the dinners kept going because they filled such a need. Hardly anybody in California has a blood family around, and we all wanted that kind of connection.

 

SR: A whole group of us started spending many holidays together as well. Millie was the only California native in the gang. One Thanksgiving Tom and Meredith Brokaw, who had three little girls, came to our house for dinner, and Tom brought small boxes of raisins for all the kids. The evening wore on, the wine flowed, the kids got bored. First they started tossing the raisins around, then they jumped on them and ground them into the carpet. We were too relaxed to care, and at one point Tom turned to me and said, “Well, I guess the raisins were a bad idea.” That's become a family saying ever since, when some well-meaning plan goes awry. “I guess the raisins were a bad idea.”

 

CR: We also realized that we had to create religious rituals for ourselves. Back home Steve knew he was Jewish because it was simply part of the culture. Now, if Judaism was going to be part of our marriage, we had to deal consciously and conscientiously with the religion itself. That was particularly true for me. I couldn't make any cultural claims to Judaism, so the religious rituals became terribly important to me.

 

SR: I think this is especially true of mixed marriages. Each spouse has to identify with and participate in the other reli
gion more deliberately. You always knew you were Catholic in the way I knew I was Jewish. You had the nuns, the weekly Mass, all those reference points.

 

CR: Absolutely. Memories of a Catholic girlhood, from a positive perspective, as opposed to Mary McCarthy.