Laura Shapiro Read Online Free Page B

around her shook with fear. Not Julia; she was absorbed in a book. When they reached the airport, she looked around with pleasure and remarked, “It looks just like China.”
    Julia had what they used to call a good war. She spent it in a world she had barely known existed, and the exotic locales were the least of it. What seized her imagination most were her colleagues, the vigorous academics and professionals Donovan had made a point of recruiting. She had grown up with people who had money, leisure, and every opportunity for travel and education, yet who spent their lives absorbed in golf and parties—a class she later described as “a lot of Old Republicans with blinders on, and women who rarely develop out of the child class and create just about nothing.” Now, in the excitement and heightened intimacy of wartime, she was meeting people who saw the world very differently. Here were “missionaries, geographers, anthropologists, psychiatrists, ornithologists,” people who had chosen work they loved and pursued it with hearts and minds fully engaged. They spoke foreign languages, they were eager to taste foreign foods, they were passionate, sophisticated, and adventurous. Her mind flew open. She had found her tribe.
    Back at the Branson School, in her senior year, Julia had published a witty essay in the literary magazine that began “I am like a cloud.” She was born, she wrote, with deficient tear glands, which meant that at the slightest emotional stimulus her eyes began to flood. Sitting in the theater she tended to embarrass everyone around her. Yet this did not mean she was a maudlin creature, she emphasized, far from it. She might look weepy and vulnerable, “but in my innermost inner I am as hard as a nail!”
    No, she wasn’t hard as a nail, at school or later. The warmth she projected was genuine. But Julia had a firmness at the core, a constitutional strength of spirit that helped her pass smoothly through her first thirty years without the trauma or self-pity that might have attacked another woman in the same situation. She was always too tall to receive the abundant romantic attentions that someone with her charm had every right to expect; she was ruefully aware that she had wasted most of the time she spent at Smith; she had flubbed both her dream career as a writer and her actual career in business; and her single status at age thirty was like a medal of dishonor proclaiming inadequate femininity. None of this forced her psyche into neurotic twists and turns. Julia could not be toppled: there wasn’t an ounce of self-destruction in her personality, and her confidence ran so deep she hardly noticed it. But she knew that Donovan’s office had been her salvation, and that the war years put her on a road she might never have located otherwise. She always kept her OSS signaling mirror in a kitchen drawer.

    The most important person she encountered in Ceylon was the man who would make her Julia Child. The two of them became friends right away, since Julia attracted friends as naturally as she laughed. Apart from her sociability and her impressive skills at the Registry, however, Paul Child found few points of contact with this big, jovial Californian. It wasn’t so much that their backgrounds were different—nobody had a background like Paul’s—but that Julia still seemed embedded in hers. Raised carefully in a manner befitting her parents’ comfortable ambitions for her, she was naive and inexperienced—a “grown-up-little-girl,” Paul thought. He, by contrast, had lived like a character in a boys’ adventure story. His father, who worked in the Astrophysical Observatory at the Smithsonian, had died in 1902, when Paul and his twin brother, Charlie, were only a few months old. Their mother, Bertha Cushing Child, moved the two boys and their sister back to Boston, where she had grown up. A trained contralto, she managed to