The Trouble with You

by Ellen Feldman

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

In an exuberant post WWII New York City, a young woman is forced to reinvent her life and choose between the safe and the ethical, and the men who represent each...

Set in New York City in the heady aftermath of World War II when the men were coming home, the women were exhaling in relief, and everyone was having babies, The Trouble With You is the story of a young woman whose rosy future is upended in a single instant. Raised never to step out of bounds, educated in one of the Sister Seven Colleges for a career as a wife and mother, torn between her cousin Mimi who is determined to keep her a “nice girl”—the kind that marries a doctor—and her aunt Rose who has a rebellious past of her own, Fanny struggles to raise her young daughter and forge a new life by sheer will and pluck. When she gets a job as a secretary to the “queen” of radio serials—never to be referred to as soaps—she discovers she likes working, and through her friendship with an actress who stars in the series and a man who writes them, comes face to face with the blacklist which is destroying careers and wrecking lives. Ultimately, Fanny must decide between playing it safe or doing what she knows is right in this vivid evocation of a world that seems at once light years away and strangely immediate.

Release date: February 20, 2024

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

hapter One

1941

She’d married him a little recklessly. War did that to people. Across the country, girls were slipping into hastily made wedding dresses or newly bought suits and walking down an aisle or into a flower-bedecked living room where men in recently acquired uniforms stood waiting nervously.

They’d known each other only a month; they’d fallen in love in three days. She’d expected her aunt Rose to try to talk her out of it. What she hadn’t counted on was that Rose, practical no-nonsense Rose, had a reckless streak of her own. She was also a romantic, though no one in the family would have believed it. Rose knew what her family, and the world for that matter, saw when it looked at her. Rose, the old maid. Rose, who couldn’t possibly know the ecstasy and pain of love, the urgency and heat of sex, the terror and heartbreak of a back-alley abortion. Rose, whose very name was a joke, like the names of so many of the girls with whom she’d grown up and worked in the factories. Rose. Iris. Flora. Pearl. Ruby. Golda. They gave them names that connoted beauty or opulence, then sent them to work sewing hats or gloves or dresses so their brothers, Fanny’s father among them, could graduate from college and even professional schools. Rose had worked to put both of her brothers through school and been so successful at it that she’d gone from a sweatshop to her own little business. That merely validated their view of her. Everyone knew what business took out of a woman. Sometimes Rose wanted to throttle the world for the arrogance of youth, the stupidity of the married, the sheer lack of imagination of everyone who saw only this short, now stout, bossy woman with wiry red hair that made her look, she said, as if she’d stuck her finger in an electric socket, and an astonishing complexion that would have been rare on a fifteen-year-old girl and was unheard of in a menopausal woman. Rose was the only one Fanny had ever heard use the word. Even the books called it “change of life.”

Rose wasn’t opposed to Max. The rest of the family was—or in the case of Fanny’s deceased mother, would have been—unabashedly enthusiastic. He met the late Celia Baum’s criteria for men in general and future husbands in particular. He was tall, good-looking, and would be what was known as a good provider. Fanny’s father was less particular about appearance and didn’t think height mattered unless you were going to be a professional basketball player, a breed any daughter of his would marry over his dead body, but Max was Jewish and would be a professional man, a distinction Milton Baum, an accountant, appreciated. He could turn his daughter over to Max with a clear conscience and a palpable sense of relief. The extended family shared the feeling. Fanny hadn’t been exactly rebellious, but no one had ever described her as docile. That was Rose’s fault, but what could be done? The other aunts, by both blood and marriage, had children and concerns of their own. They did their best. Aunt Sarah, married to Fanny’s father’s brother, couldn’t have been more generous with gifts of twin sweater sets and charm bracelets and invitations to join her, Mimi, and Barbara on their mother-daughter outings, but her own two were a handful. Fanny’s aunts on her late mother’s side were almost as generous, but they lived in New Jersey, closer to Philadelphia than New York, and you couldn’t raise a teenage girl long distance. So, much as the family worried about Rose’s influence, Fanny fell under it by default.

The irony was that if it hadn’t been for Rose, Fanny never would have met Max. If it hadn’t been for Rose, Fanny never would have been at Barnard in the first place. She wouldn’t have been at any college. Fanny’s late mother hadn’t been an advocate of higher education for women. She hadn’t been against it; she just hadn’t seen the point. Fanny’s father, however, was vehemently opposed. Too much education was likely to give a girl ideas.

“Exactly,” Rose said.

Milton didn’t get the quip, though unlike his sister, he did have a college degree, thanks to the years Rose had spent hunched over a sewing machine.

Rose didn’t persuade him. She threatened him.

“If you don’t send her to college, I will.”

Milton shrugged. He was careful with money and liked a good bargain.

“And tell the entire family that Milton, the man I put through college, is too cheap to give his only child what I gave him.”

The only thing Milton valued more than a bargain was respect. Somewhere along the way, he’d come down with the idea that he was a paragon of many virtues.

So Fanny went off to Barnard. The choice of schools had something to do with Rose too. Fanny had flirted with the idea of Smith. The campus looked idyllic in the catalog. But Rose did alterations for a woman whose daughter was at Smith. The girl, who was Jewish, had been assigned as roommates the only other Jewish girl in her dorm and the one Negro girl in the class. Rose, the old leftie, loved the idea of a Negro roommate, but felt Fanny might be more comfortable at a school with less prejudice and more of what were called, though never by Rose, “her own kind.” The irony was that Fanny ended up rooming, by choice rather than assignment, with Susannah Bennett, who’d strayed from the Episcopal Church. Fanny wasn’t thumbing her nose at her family, who, with the exception of Rose, were nothing if not tribal. She and Susannah had simply hit it off when they’d both had their short stories read aloud in freshman English and each had admired and envied the other’s.

Then, during her senior year, she met Max, who was speeding through medical school at Columbia. The government, eager to get physicians into action as soon as possible, had reduced training to seventy-two weeks. By the end of the war, the course would shrink to a mere sixty weeks, but by then Max would be in France.

At the end of their first month together, on the afternoon that broadcasts of philharmonic concerts and football games were interrupted to announce that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, an American military base in a place so obscure most people couldn’t find it on a map, they decided to marry. If medical training could be rushed, certainly marriage didn’t have to dawdle. Everything was speeding up, like the pages being torn from a calendar in a movie sequence to show the passage of time.

Her recklessness was rewarded. Unlike many people in love, they were well suited. There were, of course, minor disagreements over matters like his inability to empty an ashtray, her overreaction to the dog-earing of a page in a book, and why you could maim a magazine that way but not a hard-bound or even paperback volume. Nonetheless, their worldviews meshed. They agreed about politics. They liked many of the same movies, paintings, music, and books, even if he didn’t treat his as well. They were besotted with each other. He made her feel not only desired but desirable, though not with empty compliments. He was too canny for that. He knew the way to her heart was through her mind. When she’d confided the story of the freshman mixer she’d spent in the ladies’ room because no one had asked her to dance, he didn’t tell her the boys at the mixer must have been blind. He merely pointed out that she hadn’t stood much chance of being asked to dance in the ladies’ room. God, she loved him.

They were also of the same mind about the most important issue of the day. All around them, men who were going off to war and women who were being left behind were wrestling with the decision. Some were determined to have a child. If the man didn’t come home, he would leave something of himself and the girl would have something of him to hang on to. Others were more cautious. Husbands thought it would be unfair to the offspring and the girl. Wives could not imagine raising a child alone. Max and Fanny had no trouble making up their minds. He said his genes were crying out to go on, the noisy little buggers. She wanted his child. And though neither of them would dare to say it—they didn’t want to tempt fate—both were functioning on the assumption that he would come home. The red crosses painted on the tops of hospital tents weren’t an insurance policy, but at least he wouldn’t be storming beaches or parachuting out of planes.

Although Rose hadn’t opposed the marriage, she thought they should wait to have a child, but said nothing. Her familial reputation for bossiness wasn’t any more accurate than the view of her as an inexperienced spinster.

A year after they married, eight months before Max shipped out, Chloe was born.

* * *

The crowd milling in the heartless winter sunshine pouring through the steel-and-glass roof of the Pennsylvania Station churned with tension. Men lit one cigarette from another, stamping out the last with an army boot or oxford; made jokes; and repeated last-minute instructions. The bankbook is in the top left-hand drawer of my desk. Remember what I told you about the fuse box. Be a good boy/girl and listen to Mommy. The women held their faces, shadowed by their best hats, because this would be the image he would take with him, rigid with determination not to cry. Children stood docile and frightened or chased siblings around their preoccupied parents. The handful of WACs, WAVEs, and nurses waited in twos and threes. Strangely enough, no one came down to see them off. When Fanny thought about it later—she was too distraught to at the time—she couldn’t imagine why. Perhaps their families didn’t approve of their leaving home to go gallivanting around the world, even if they were doing it for patriotic reasons. All she knew for sure was that Life magazine had commented on the fact in a pictorial essay.

Max made no jokes. He was unhappy and apprehensive, but not awkward. He repeated no instructions. Fanny had a good memory and knew her way around a checkbook if not a leaky faucet. But he did light one cigarette from another.

Fanny wasn’t wearing her best hat. Somehow worrying about clothing at a time like this struck her as frivolous. Besides, she was fairly sure this image of her standing on the concourse of Penn Station was not the one he would carry with him. The night before, after they’d made love, she’d started to pull the sheet and blanket that had slid to the floor back over them. She wasn’t modest, merely chilly now that the sweat was beginning to dry. He’d stopped her, got out of bed, turned the three-way bulb in the lamp on the night table that was on dim two notches up to bright, and stood looking down at her.

“What is it?” she asked.