From This Day Forward (15 page)

 

SR: That's why our Seders became so important to us. Cokie actually started them. What we're talking about here is the special feast at Passover.

 

CR: The first Seder I ever went to was at the Goldbergs'. After he had been such a kind and crucial presence at our wedding, Arthur Goldberg took an interest in us. And Dorothy Goldberg and my mother had been particularly good friends, so Mrs. Goldberg made sure that we were always taken care of. They invited us to their Passover celebration at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador to the UN. It was a great evening in many ways, but for me, it taught me the importance of this festival, the fundamental message of the deliverance of the Jews from Egypt. I completely understood how central this event was to the religion. The next year, when I was pregnant with Lee, I very much wanted a family Seder but I was still too unsure of myself and too hesitant about performing my own Jewish rituals. At Hanukkah I could light the candles and say the blessings, but that was about it. (We did that quite happily one night, not long after we were married, then we went to sleep only to wake up to the smell of the burning card table, which we were using as our dining-room table. We still use that table, lo these many years later, with a little tape covering the Hanukkah disaster.) So I asked Steve's parents to provide a Seder. They gamely found a Haggadah, the prayer book which outlines the Passover service, and prepared the special meal. Steven and I drove down from New York to New
Jersey and just the four of us had our Seder. I remember in the middle of dinner, Steve's twin, Marc, happened to call and was amazed that there was a ritual meal taking place. Steve's mother, Dorothy, who had already become such a friend to me, whispered into the phone, “Cokie wanted it.” I badly wanted it; I wanted to know how to inject Judaism into my household and I needed help. By the next year we were in California and we started celebrating Passover at our house every year. I went to the local synagogue and bought a Haggadah, and then I studied other Haggadahs that were available and combined them into a meaningful prayer service, which I typed up with some difficulty and copied for our Seders. I also cooked a meal I was comfortable with—a Middle Eastern meal. It seemed to me that the Bible was pretty clear about lamb being served on the night the angel passed over the Jews. No brisket of beef or boiled chicken ever made it into the book of Exodus. Also, these were people living in Egypt in springtime. I figured they had zucchini and okra and maybe eggplant. I knew for a fact they had never met a matzoh ball. So I made my annual Middle Eastern Seder, and everyone made fun of me as a
shiksa
who didn't know what she was doing. Thankfully, after a few years, the
New York Times
food section published a menu for a Sephardic Seder, a Passover meal for Jews of Mediterranean or North African extraction, and I was completely vindicated. Also, the food was better. So our Seder quickly became somewhat famous.

 

SR: I had not grown up with a lot of Jewish ritual at home—we never had Seders, for instance, and I only had a bar mitzvah because I asked for one. (Since I had a twin brother I only had to learn half the service!) I have never been as devout as Cokie, in a purely religious sense, but one of the things I learned from her over the years was an appreciation of spirituality, of prayer, of ritual. In a real sense, marrying a non-
Jew made me more Jewish. And I was eager to include Jewish traditions in our life together. Christian rituals were all around us, but we had to work at the Judaism part, and many of our friends came to feel the same way. When we left California, years later, one of our going-away parties was a Seder a whole month early. We all wanted to share the holiday together. Over the years friends have come in from all over to be with us at Passover, and our Seder became particularly important for my parents. They were very secular Jews, but at one point, after we returned to Washington, my father said to me, “Don't even bother to invite us to Seder—we're coming every year.” They even planned their spring around the holiday, timing their trip north after a winter in Florida to coincide with the Seder. When I think of the rabbis who oppose mixed marriage in all forms, who say it can only dilute the Jewish people, I wonder what they would make of our family. Two of my siblings married Jews, but my parents always came to Seder at the home of their Catholic daughter-in-law.

 

CR: At the same time we were creating rituals to bring us together, we were surrounded by changes in the society that took their toll on all kinds of relationships. The women's movement was stirring all around us, and it was affecting most marriages, including ours, in at least small ways. Steve was invited by a college friend to help run a series of seminars at the Aspen Institute, in the mountains of Colorado. Rich people paid large sums of money to read the classics and get cultured. In this era—and I am told it has not changed very much—the men all sat at the table and talked about great works and the women sat up in the balcony and listened to them.

 

SR: And did needlepoint.

 

CR: It was appalling. Not the needlepoint part—I've always done needlepoint—the silence part. The women had all been
assigned the reading so they could discuss it with their husbands, but they weren't allowed to talk. So at the coffee breaks the women would rush up to the men saying, “No, no, no, you got that all wrong.”

 

SR: Cokie organized a revolt and insisted that the wives join the men at the table for at least one session. I was delighted. Going back to our college days, I had always thought that sharing ideas and opinions was an important part of our relationship. And it still is. Anyway, I got high marks among the women for being on their team. But I quickly tumbled out of the feminist pantheon when we gave one woman a ride to Denver and I started yelling at Cokie about the route we were taking. She kept telling me I was on the wrong road and should ask directions; I finally pulled the car over to the side of the road and told her, at top volume, that she could drive if she knew so much. I found out years later from the insightful work of linguist Deborah Tannen that not asking directions is one of the defining characteristics of modern maleness.

 

CR: We finally found the airport and flew to Washington to see my folks and then went on to New Jersey to visit the Robertses. Steve flew back to Denver, where we had left the car, and drove back to California alone because I was pretty pregnant with Becca by that time. I flew back to L.A. with Lee, who had been a terror for five hours on the plane. Of course, as we taxied into the airport, he fell asleep. I got off the plane with this angelic sleeping baby on my shoulder and Steven said, “Oh, isn't that sweet. He slept the whole way.” I handed the baby to his father, who saw that the maternity dress I was wearing—a navy number with a double row of brass buttons down the front—no longer had a single button on it! Though he tried to be helpful, Steven was still fairly clueless about this baby business. I remember at one point not long after Lee was born, some friends were considering
whether to have a baby and I heard Steve say, “Oh, you should do it. It hasn't changed our lives a bit!” “What?” I exploded. “It seems to me everything I'm doing now I didn't do before, and everything I used to do I'm not doing now! I would call that changing my life!”

 

SR: I might not have been all that helpful, but I loved being a father, playing with the kids and teaching them things, just the way my father had done with me. My dad had even written a children's book about trains, based on outings we made to the local station, so I had a good role model. I was eager for another child, and as we prepared for Becca's arrival we very much wanted to do natural childbirth. I felt it made me part of the baby's life right from the beginning. After my article came out in
Good Housekeeping,
called “We Had a Baby,” people would come up to me and talk about how brave I was, but Cokie would have none of it. “Oh,” she was fond of saying, “did it hurt much? How about those stretch marks?”

 

CR: But we could find only one hospital even remotely near us that allowed fathers in the delivery room, in Culver City. It was more of a nursing home than a hospital, but we didn't want to risk driving all the way downtown. Lee had come so fast I was afraid to go that far. Steven was on the road all the time and it was an election year again. So I was afraid I was going to be on the top of a mountain by myself, but I couldn't convince the doctor to pay any attention to me and consider inducing the baby. Fortunately, Steven was there when I went into labor in the middle of the night and this time I could tell it was moving very fast. I said to Steven, “I can't make it to the hospital. It's not going to happen.” We had a neighbor who was a doctor. I said, “Just tell Terry to come up here. I can't do it.” Steven had a mental image of me having this baby in the house, with Lee running around. That
wasn't working for him! So he kept pleading with me, “Come on, Cokie, you can do it.” Then he called a neighbor, this sixteen-year-old beauty who was one of our regular baby-sitters. She had long blond hair down to her waist and would waft around with very little on. At two o'clock in the morning Steven politely, as if it were midafternoon, said into the phone, “Mr. Moss, it's Steve Roberts. I'm sorry to bother you, is Amy home?” And I screamed, “For goodness' sake, Steven! Tell him why you're calling.” Oh! “Cokie's in labor and we were wondering if Amy could come up and sit with Lee.” Amy was sleeping out under the full moon, but Mr. Moss, the father of four, had her at our house in about thirty seconds. Finally, Steven pushed me in the car to head for the hospital and I was convinced I'd have the baby in the Volvo wagon. It was terrifying.

 

SR: We were just lucky. We'd been worried that we would never get across town in Manhattan traffic and this was even worse. This was the California freeways. If this baby had come in the middle of the day, we would have been cooked!

 

CR: We went tearing down the mountain and across the freeways to the hospital. We had called the doctor and said the baby was coming. He went back to sleep. Not a good habit for an obstetrician. We got into the hospital and I told the nurses, “This baby is coming right now.” “Sure, sure,” they humored me. “No, I'm serious,” I insisted. “The baby's coming.” A quick exam: “Oh, the baby IS coming.” In we went to the delivery room immediately, but the doctor still wasn't there. In retrospect, but believe me not at the time, it was this hilarious Keystone Kops scene, with everybody but me and the baby trying to keep her from coming. Finally, Becca just delivered herself and Steve caught her. Without his old basketball reflexes she would've landed on her head. As her feet emerged, the doctor came rushing in the door.

 

SR: Later he kept saying to us, “Beautiful feet, this child has beautiful feet.” Because that's all he was there for.

 

CR: She did get a staph infection in her eyes for being in the birth canal for so long. It was so sad, this little bitty baby with this awful eye infection.

 

SR: Cokie's brother, Tommy, was running for Congress in Maryland and it was September 15, the day of his primary. Montgomery County has a large Jewish population, and he shamelessly campaigned all over the district that day saying he had a new Jewish niece named Rebecca. She helped him win the Democratic primary, but he lost the general two months later.

 

CR: My mother had said, “Don't have that baby until the fifteenth, because I want to be there for this one.” I assured her that the baby wasn't due until sometime after that. But she showed up on primary day, and Mamma came straight to California. By the time I got home from the hospital, after only a day, my mother had adopted the neighborhood dog, a huge but friendly creature named Freddy. Half the dogs on the hill looked like him, because he managed to get to any dog in heat no matter how high the fence. Not only did I have a new baby and a new dog, but Lee decided that if he ever went to sleep again, I'd have another baby. So sleeping was out. Then a huge brushfire threatened the house. I kept resisting evacuation. It made it too real in a way. Finally, though, we packed up.

 

SR: There was a firebreak on the ridge behind us, and the question was whether the flames would leap over it. I could see the whole thing from the kitchen window.

 

CR: That first night we left with just the family pictures and some work we were doing and a change of clothes for every
one! That made my mother crazy because she has been burned out twice in her life, so she's very skittish about fire. We moved into a hotel downtown, next to Steve's office, and there we were—a not-quite-two-year-old, a brand-new baby with a staph infection, my mother and Steve and me. I was producing
It's Academic,
and I had to go into work just days after Becca was born. I had planned a taping for shortly before she was born, and then she came early and I couldn't cancel the taping. The station was airing news specials on the fire, and when I got there I saw this huge map with areas of destruction marked. Our friend Tom Brokaw, who was anchoring all the specials, said to me, “Cokie, I think your house is gone. Here's the map.” We just assumed the house had burned down. There was nothing to be done about it.

 

SR: But in fact, it wasn't burned. The maps were wrong. We were able to move back into our California house, now with two kids and a bigger child-care problem, particularly since Becca soon proved to be a handful. As soon as she learned to walk, she had a habit of wandering off, leaving us all in a panic. Once, when she was just two, she managed to make it several miles down the beach before a lifeguard finally located her. It was one of those terrifying situations where we were walking with her and thought she was with us, and Becca followed the wrong people. We frantically searched the beach and tried not to think about the possibility that she had headed into the Pacific Ocean, but finally a lifeguard spotted her through his binoculars—her two little pigtails gave her away!