6th Aprm

November 5

Not sick! I even swallowed a pill and nothing happened.

November 7

Felt the funniest bump in my stomach. Like a bubble that popped out and popped back. What goes?

November 8

I’m constantly starved these days. An amazing gnawing goes on and on in the pit of my stomach. Spaghetti will douse it temporarily, and I sneak out into the kitchen while

Mom is busy somewhere else and gulp down practically a whole can. We had spaghetti for lunch on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Mother is beginning to look at it askance.

I’ve loaded her down with wool, knitting needles, and a yarn book with instructions for sweaters, knitted kimonos, soakers, and blankets. I hope she has fun. Then by way of reward I bundled her off to Bedford Village to an auction sale. We had a lovely time watching the bargain hunters and eating homemade cake sold by the local church ladies. I talked Mom out of spending her money on an Oriental throw rug, and made her lend it to me instead for the cutest old cradle you ever saw.

Only twenty-two dollars, an antique, dull waxed pine, carefully carved and in excellent condition, considering its age. We put the lovely thing in the back of the car and Morn cherished it all the way home.

Later I called up Peggy, who used to be a kindergarten teacher, studied child psychology, and knows all about baby-raising. The things she said could happen to Jake if I rocked him in a cradle I had no idea! There are men in jails today because their mothers rocked them in cradles.

So now the cradle is wrapped in an old blanket in the garage. I’ve got to keep Jake out of jail.

November 11 Armistice Day

It’s amazing what a child can do. The war used to seem to me like a dirty deal concocted by Hitler and Hirohito to interfere with my pleasant peaceful life in the country. To Pat it seemed his opportunity to don a suit of armor with a little gold bar on his shoulder and ride off on a shining charger to his last fling . To both of us it was just a case of having fun until those very ponderous wheels in Washington got around to Pat.

To Jake it was just nothing at all, though I privately felt that he hoped the war would wait till he had a chance to meet his father.

But I wasn’t so sure he’d have the chance. Pat’s hopeful application for enlistment had gone ignored now for four months but that blissful state couldn’t go on forever. It was just a race between those papers and the local draft board, with Jake and me squarely in the middle no matter who wins.

It’s queer how a relatively little thing like having a baby months and months off can make a close-up of a war 5,000 miles away .

Pat and I had lived for more than a year in England. When Mom came to visit us she and I went to Germany less than a month before the war began. (Pat was finishing up some business affairs in England.) We had seen a whole nation thinking, talking, acting under ruled, carefully-nurtured hysteria. I know there’s no arguing with people like that. There’s only one thing to do and I guess I know America has to help in the doing of it. But up to now it’s been something you read about. Suddenly it’s close and very real.

And I’ve got a feeling that Jake will be just old enough to do it all over again.

November 1

Free, at last, from the deceits of the roaring shower water. I can be sick in peace. Eliza even looks sympathetic.

I rushed down to meet Morn on the early train from New York and waited for four trains, but no mother. I wired: WHERE ARE YOU. At noon the answer carne: AT HOME SURPRISE WHERES THAT TICKET YOU WERE SENDING.

Pat was still asleep when I got home, but his rest carne to an abrupt end. He swore it had all been arranged, said he’d get affidavits to prove it. He put in a few calls to New York and let me listen to someone’s profuse apologies. I guess he wasn’t just being a son-in-law. Anyway, it’s all fixed now and she’ll be along on Monday. .

November 2

What is this? Today, the day before my Morn’s arrival with no one to say me nay, I could have been as ill as I pleased, and lo, - I’m not ill at all.

Yesterday I’m hearty and frequent and now I’m not sick, just as the doctor promised. What won’t they think up next?

November 3

Instead of six meals yesterday I had ten and the charm is still working. I woke up healthy. Oh, the joy of it! The amazing, stupendous, colossal joy of it! I may have run a month over schedule but what does it matter? I’m cured. I even considered taking a pill-but decided there was no point in pushing my luck too far.

I dressed carefully with my old stretched girdle under my slacks, and I swear when I hold my stomach in (a little something in the way of an effort) and let my jacket cover the gaping zipper fastening, you’d never know. So with a song on my lips and a tight rein on my stomach I headed for the station.

When I ran pell mell down the platform to meet her, I could see the words “Don’t run!” trembling on my mother’s lips but with a tremendous effort she controlled herself and said, “Hi ya!”

She had another struggle with herself when I hoisted her biggest case into the back of the car. I didn’t blame her but I was determined to be not a whit different from usual. Chatting briskly about nothing, I whisked us off to the joint.

It was marvelous to see her eyes pop when we entered the grounds, and when I stopped in front of the house she was quite speechless, which is something for my Mom. Bland as a button, I ushered her in, showed her the living-room, the dining-room with the world’s record table, the pink-and-burgundy bath, the quilted headboards, the gleaming, purring kitchen, the drunken rabbit and Uncle Joe. I could hardly wait for her to see the terrace with the sweep of sparkling swimming pool beyond but I saved it for the very last. Then, throwing wide the doors, I cried, “And this is the pay-off!”

It was! The cemetery benches, the wheeled chaises-even the water-had been put away for the winter. Only a gaping blue hole in the ground was left. “November I,” I had told the plumbers, “drain it,” and they had been true to their charge.

Later: Mom is really behaving beautifully. Not a bit of clucking, no advice, no cracks. And she seems to have no doubts about it being three months, instead of really four.

Again not sick, Allah be praised! I ate a specially big breakfast just to prove that “morning sickness” and I had separated. Took Muz and Peggy into New York, with the idea of lunching somewhere nice and ritzy. (I’ve got my second rent check!)

I wore my black “maternity” dress, but I put the coat on over it before I modeled the outfit for Mom, In the dressing process I got around to my neglected W.P.B. chart and entered the sad figures (Stomach, 36), then carefully hid the chart.

We cabbed all over town. First El Morocco, then the Versailles, but they were both closed for lunch. We ended up at the Algonquin with not a celebrity in sight. Mom enjoyed the matinee -but Peggy and I just sat and worried about our lost youth. She says she’s beginning to hate any one who has even a hint of slimness, and to see all those young things on the stage …

Met Pat afterwards for the ride home. I was so hungry I wanted to scream. Mother, seeing me mow down Eliza’s biscuits, merely said it was nice that I have an appetite instead of just picking at my food as of old.