“To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.”
—ERNEST RENAN
While the rest of country was enmeshed in the second wave of feminism, the turmoil of the Vietnam War, the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, and the hedonistic chaos of Woodstock, I found I could not be admitted to college because I’d been traveling through Europe instead of taking the SAT. I was going to be a great artist, and that did not require four years of traditional schooling. Internally directed, self-involved, and apolitical, “things of this world” were far less important to me than my commitment to art.
I liked to hang out at the legendary Café Wha and Café Figaro in Greenwich Village, where one could get in touch with the 1968 bohemian ideal. There I would sit with my black capes, black eye makeup, and long, black hair parted down the middle, sipping espressos and observably reading Rimbaud or Baudelaire to attract like-minded friends. I spent my days imagining how I would make history, as I knew for certain I would. As Charlotte Corday said at her trial for the assassination of Marat during the French Revolution, I wanted people to “know that I had lived.”
I signed up for a few courses at the Herbert Berghof (Stella Adler) studio of acting with the ambition of becoming a Shakespearean actor, thinking a career in theater could be the way to actualize my desires. But I grew frustrated and realized that I didn’t want to be limited by someone else’s words. I felt inhibited by my role as the messenger of another’s creation; I wanted to be the creator.
Thinking that becoming a painter might give me the opportunity for undiluted self-expression, I signed up for classes at the Art Student League. While I was a student there I managed to do a self-portrait in oil and an abstract watercolor, but this iteration of my artistic self was also short lived. On my way to class one day I walked down Fifty-Seventh Street past Carnegie Hall and noticed my reflection in the glass-encased posters displayed outside. The image of myself as an artist, an introvert hurrying to class with my black portfolio, was jarringly incongruent with my internal reality, and I knew this, too, was not to be.
My search for an appropriate role, a part to play that would suit me, was beginning to oppress me. Feeling lost and alone, I tried to find myself in religion. I’d only been formally exposed to Judaism through a few summer camps and Sunday school sessions, and it hadn’t held much interest for me. I later experimented with Catholicism, the Church of Truth, and Christian Science. These experiences helped foster my lifelong search for transcendence, but none of them satisfied my quest for meaning.
I spent most of my time at home, reading. I would drag the covers off my bed and park myself on the living-room couch with a couple of pillows and whatever book my head was in at the time. I was particularly fond of Greek tragedies and existential philosophy. Not that everything I read was of that highest order: Pauline Réage’s Story of O amazed and excited me, and there was a particular passage in Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place in which Selena Cross moves her hips “expertly” on the beach that I’d read over and over again as I lounged.
My mother would look at me with disgust as I lay there surrounded by books, which had always been a point of contention. Finally she insisted that I get off the couch and told me to look for a part-time job. I began to leave the house with her each morning, she on her way to work, I with a marked-up newspaper listing of available jobs to go over in my favorite café.
I had no job experience, so I was open to taking what I could get. Almost on a lark I answered a listing for a bathing suit model. The garment center showroom was crowded with other applicants—young, attractive girls who appeared far more familiar with the process. After changing clothes in a small dark room I fought off feelings of vulnerability and managed to parade myself in front of the two men who were choosing. When they asked me to remove my top, I quickly excused myself.
Next I interviewed with an industrial psychologist whose company, Personell Projections, specialized in counseling men looking for a midlife career change. This time the employer’s request was slightly less invasive: “Can you type?” After assuring him of my technical ability, I attempted to impress him with my knowledge of psychology. Ignoring my intellectual overtures, he told me that I would not be hired unless I removed my makeup. I decided to take the job.
The psychologist shared an office with a lapsed Jesuit priest whose parents had been killed in a car crash. The resulting emotional trauma led him to leave his order and enter the secular world. As a result of this career change, he now felt free to express his peculiar sexual predilections. One day he called me into his dark office and begged me to open the top button of my blouse so he could just look. It excited me to play with the power he’d handed me—to see his lust, and to feel the throb of my own. I stood in front of him, enjoying his naked, obvious desire, and slowly opened the button.
I worked there for almost nine months until the office closed down. The lapsed priest and the psychologist could not manage to make a successful business venture.
My mother, fed up with waiting for me to find decent employment, began searching the papers herself for job opportunities for me. In a local Queens paper she found an ad for a part-time medical assistant.
“It looks perfect!” she said to me, excitedly showing me the ad. I shrugged, indifferent to what seemed a rather boring job description. But it was close to home, and I would only work two nights per week and Saturday mornings. At least I would have time to pursue my other dreams, whatever they turned out to be.
THE REGO PARK medical office was in a small two-family house with an English-style garden in the tiny front lawn. Rows and rows of identical redbrick two-story houses lined the neighborhood, reminding me of Malvina Reynolds’s 1962 song “Little Boxes.” I was interviewed by a well-coiffed, perky woman in a white nurse’s uniform. She questioned me about my background and showed me around the office, which consisted of a waiting room, an exam room, a consulting room, an X-ray room, and an office in the back where bills and charts were kept.
Part of my job would require taking chest X-rays of patients, and there was a small darkroom to develop the negatives. As the woman toured me through the space she laughingly told me that if the physician, Dr. Gold, ever joined me in the darkroom, it was not to flirt, but because he sometimes needed to assist in the developing process. It was then that she confessed to being Mrs. Gold; she was just helping out until he hired a new assistant.
Next, I had an interview with Dr. Gold himself. He appeared to be impressed by the fact that I was so deeply serious and needed part-time work to help support my studies. I noticed he was extraordinarily handsome. When the interview was over, Mrs. Gold told me she would call in a couple of days to tell me whether or not I had the position.
That evening, my mother took a break from hounding me to get a job. She chattered on about how extremely pleased she was at the idea that I might be working for a doctor—not to mention his office was close to home, and he was Jewish! I was not home a few days later when Mrs. Gold called the house to give me the good news—I had gotten the position—so my mother role-played as me, accepting the offer with much pleasure and confidence.
DR. GOLD WAS A well-established internist who practiced as a primary-care family physician. He knew all his patients’ life stories, their problems with their children, their marriage issues and money worries. From the first day we worked together his compassion for them was apparent. When I would tell him that a patient owed money or had walked out after an appointment without paying, he’d smile and say, “Let it be. It’s okay. They can’t afford it.”
As he specialized in internal medicine and diabetes, Dr. Gold’s patient population was large and varied. Patients who were survivors of the Holocaust came to him monthly so that he could fill out their medical reparations forms for the German government. I found this extremely disturbing; it seemed they were tacitly accepting the idea that there was a kind of restitution for the Holocaust. But Dr. Gold put pragmatism before politics. They needed the money to buy food and keep roofs over their heads.
An old woman who had suffered terribly in the camps came to the office each month. I recognized the blue tattoo on her forearm as the one shared by my Polish piano teacher and a neighbor who lived near my parents. I stared at the numbers in horrid fascination as Dr. Gold dutifully filled out and signed the woman’s German forms.
Then there was the young married man who was diagnosed with lung cancer from the chest X-rays that I had just taken. I was not in the room when Dr. Gold told him he had only a few months to live, but I stood outside the office listening to the muffled voices and the slow sobbing interrupted by long, painful pauses.
Many of Dr. Gold’s patients had been seeing him through all stages of their lives. Dr. Gold was the sage, the counselor, the healer. He was the doctor, historically a position of high honor and respect within the Jewish tradition. His was a loving type of paternalism and compassionate practice of power that I came to admire and respect.
It was his hands that first attracted me to him physically. They held a great deal of power, and I never saw him abuse it. I would watch them in focused concentration as he examined the patients, put the stethoscope on their chests, palpated their stomachs, wrote on their charts, and helped them to dress. They conveyed a solid, protective tenderness. Each finger, strong and well formed, gave the impression of a world unto itself. As the weeks passed, I found myself stealing moments to study them.
WITH THE COMING OF SPRING I was delighted to find a flowering lilac tree in the small garden behind the office. Gently, I cut a sprig, found a small glass to use as a vase, and left it for Dr. Gold to find on his desk.
As my respect for him grew I continued to look for creative ways to please him. For the holiday season I built (with the help of a florist friend) a charming winter scene out of paper mache, complete with a small inn, Christmas trees, and a horse and carriage. I imagined that he was enchanted.
At the end of each day, after all the patients had been seen, I would go into Dr. Gold’s office, settle in across from his desk, and we’d talk. We discussed everything from politics to philosophy to books we both loved. I found that this man I admired and respected wanted very much to hear my opinions on all sorts of things. I was even more surprised to find that he liked to share himself with me.
He spoke of his time as a Navy medical officer in the Second World War, when he had made the landing in Normandy on one of the first LSTs (amphibious ships designed to deploy troops and tanks directly onto the shore). He told me of his panic and terror when the boat in front of him was blasted out of the water. Fresh corpses lashed against the side of his LST as the men tried to steer their way carefully toward the hell of the German guns on the shore. He returned from the war a pacifist.
He talked about his impoverished childhood on the Lower East Side and how he had struggled to leave it behind. He remained ashamed of his poor, immigrant Jewish upbringing and the anti-Semitism it led him to experience until late in his life. He had gotten himself out of the ghetto physically, but it was still very much a part of who he was.
He also graphically described his experience as a resident at Bellevue Hospital. Victims of self-abortion were so common at Bellevue that the night shift came to be called the “midnight express.” Women would start the process by inserting foreign devices into their cervixes at home; when they started to bleed, they came to the emergency room, where physicians would perform a procedure called dilation and curettage, scraping tissue from the uterus—essentially an abortion. Abortion was never openly discussed during my childhood, but I’d heard of a situation like this once before, when I was about ten. I overheard my parents’ discussion of a Philadelphia physician whose patient died while he was performing an illegal procedure. To cover for himself, he cut her up in pieces and put her remains down the drain.
Dr. Gold was interested in my history, too. He recognized my intelligence, and when he learned I didn’t plan to go to college, he began a gentle, supportive campaign to convince me to apply. After a few months of our talks I agreed to send in an application. I ascribed to the Socratic view that an unexamined life was not worth living, and I thought that studying psychology would give me the chance to continue examining mine. My therapist had connections at NYU and was able to help me register for three nonmatriculating classes. I got all As and was accepted as a full-time student.
I’d report on my classes to Dr. Gold during our talks, and I came to cherish these times as our personal oasis. Thrown together from different worlds and generations, we found a common safe harbor—he from his grinding responsibilities, I from my eternal state of longing and aloneness.
Our time together in the evenings was interrupted by his wife calling to find out exactly when to expect him so she could have dinner on the table. As the office assistant, it was my job to answer the phone. “It’s your wife,” I would say, forcing indifference as I gradually came to resent her intrusion. But Dr. Gold slowly began to extend the hour, bit by bit, so we would have more time to finish our discussions.
And then the Saturday ritual began. After the morning office hours I would either go out for sandwiches or he would take me to a local diner, where we would have lunch together before he went on his hospital rounds. “You need at least one good meal a week,” he would say.
My feelings began to grow beyond admiration and respect. I would imagine his hands gently touching my hair, moving over my face. My work became a way to surround myself with him even when he was absent. One Sunday afternoon I took sheets of EKG results with me to the beach, organizing them in neat piles on my towel and filing them into carefully marked folders while a friend from college lay next to me, tanning in the sun.
I was dating young men at the time, but they bored me. Dr. Gold was powerful, sophisticated, intelligent, handsome, and warm. He was twenty-eight years older than me, and I wanted him to want me.
He started to tease me with double entendres, nuanced sexual asides that I couldn’t help but savor and read into. He began looking at me in a slightly different way, and I responded in kind. Being limited to an unattractive white uniform, I managed to accessorize with high black boots and black lingerie that was slightly visible through the fabric. I caught his gazes, though our eyes would never connect directly. We were professional with each other as we worked side by side, but an unspoken attraction was deepening between us.
My second summer working in the office, I planned a trip to Europe with three friends of mine. We would go to Monaco and Italy and drive through the south of France, staying at student hostels along the way.
Dr. Gold and his wife always spent August in Cannes with two other couples. They stayed at the five-star Carlton Hotel, which was right on the beach and teemed with celebrities and jet-setters. Before we closed the office for the summer, he had told me to come by the hotel while I was in Cannes so that he and his wife could treat me to an exclusive French dinner.
To my inexperienced eyes the Carlton Hotel was a palace. I was overwhelmed with the decor, shops, fashionable people, and ambience of money. When I arrived, I was met by Mrs. Gold, who greeted me warmly. We ate a gourmet dinner at a restaurant high in the mountains overlooking the sparkling lights of the Riviera, and I was invited to join them at the hotel beach the next afternoon. I did, and we sunned ourselves while I desperately tried to concentrate on the Hermann Hesse novel I had brought along. Suddenly Dr. Gold became extremely upset. He was missing $500 in cash that had been in his pocket before lunch. He demanded to see the concierge of the hotel, who advised him to go into town and report it to the police.
Dr. Gold did not speak French, and there were no English-speaking policemen in the station. I spoke French almost fluently, so I volunteered to accompany Dr. Gold into the village and act as his translator. We drove into the picturesque town with its designer shops and cobblestoned streets and found the small police station at the corner of the square. I informed the magistrate of the theft and translated our conversation for Dr. Gold. Now our roles were reversed: I was the expert, assisting Dr. Gold in a new and strange environment. I saw him looking at me with appreciation. The police report was taken down, and after the magistrate assured us of their intention to investigate, we left the station.
Afterwards we had a coffee at one of the small outdoor cafés along the main square. As we sat quietly smoking and drinking, things changed forever between us. We were finally alone together, not in a small office or diner in Queens, but on the French Riviera. Nothing was done, nothing was said. But there in the South of France with Dr. Gold, images of the way our lives could be began taking shape.
One year later, on the last night in his office before he left once again for his August vacation, we became lovers.
DR. GOLD—Marty, as I began to call him—and I had been having an affair for two months when my father began to get chest pains. He was working as a salesman for a company that required him to carry a thirty-pound case. My mother convinced him to make an appointment to see Marty. I developed his chart, took his height, weight, and blood pressure, did an EKG on him, had him undress, and left him alone for the examination. Later in the consultation I stood behind my father when Marty told him that the pains he was having were due to angina. “You’re a good candidate for a heart attack,” he told my father. “Don’t carry that case, it is too heavy for you. You must change your life.”
My parents decided to get a second opinion; Marty’s honest prognosis and the radical changes he recommended seemed impossible. How does one follow a dictum, “You must change your life,” when the life you are living is all that you know?
The second doctor gave my parents the answer they wanted to hear. This time the EKG was normal; the physician did not find anything potentially problematic with my father’s health, and he saw no reason why my father could not go on making sales calls with that thirty-pound case.
Two weeks later, I received a call from my uncle early in the morning telling me that my father was very ill and I was needed at home immediately. My heart sank. I rose from the bed that also served as a couch in my first studio apartment in LeFrak City, dressed quickly, and made the twenty-minute drive down Queens Boulevard to my parents’ apartment.
I opened the door to find my mother frantically vacuuming back and forth, back and forth over the same small piece of orange carpet in the living room. I recalled that she had also been vacuuming the day we heard on the radio that John F. Kennedy had been killed.
She looked at me with the terror and helplessness that always seemed to be brimming just beneath her surface. Her eyes were unseeing and frantic.
“Mommy,” I said.
She kept vacuuming. I walked slowly to her, gently took the machine from her hands, and turned it off.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “They say he is in the hospital—what happened? Do you know what happened?
“Let’s call the hospital and find out.”
My mother followed me into the small kitchen and I picked up the wall phone. It was early April, and as I looked out the kitchen window at the familiar row houses and trees, it occurred to me that every spring from then on would be different.
I reached the hospital, somewhere in Western Pennsylvania where my father had gone a couple of days earlier on a business trip.
“Who are you calling about please?” asked the voice on the other end of the phone.
“I am Jack Hoffman’s daughter,” I said, struggling to control my anxiety.
A pause—a time period impossible to measure.
“Oh,” the voice said, “I’m terribly sorry, but Mr. Hoffman passed away sometime last night.”
I hung up the phone and turned to my mother. “He’s dead. Daddy is dead.”
Her white face contorted in pain as she howled in a kind of primal scream.
In that moment we became unequal in grief. I was the one to tell my mother the news, and I was the one to comfort her. That night I slept in my parents’ bed, my mother clinging to me desperately, crying for my father.
I had moved out of their house just two weeks before. I was twenty-four years old, struggling to be on my own and to get away from that eternal triangle. My mother came to my apartment a few weeks after my father’s death and angrily told me that I was responsible for it. She said I had betrayed him by moving out, that the loss had killed him. Her words cut me deeply. My mother and relatives pressured me to move back in with her, but I resisted the pull of that dark place.
The week of shivah was spent at my parents’ apartment. The presentation case my father had carried was still there, and I took it and carried it purposefully toward the garbage chute in the hallway. I was just about to throw the damn thing away when one of my uncles stopped me. He was afraid that if I destroyed it, the company would have to be paid. I was furious, feeling absolutely powerless, unable even to take out my rage upon this black box, this pathetic surrogate.
I was in my parents’ bedroom with my mother when Marty walked in to pay his respects. She moved easily into his arms for comfort when he bent to embrace her. I left the apartment with him that afternoon.
Driving down Queens Boulevard I didn’t notice the red lights or the blur of moving objects around me. I only knew I was in a safe harbor sitting beside him. He stopped at one of our favorite diners and over a cup of chicken soup told me what a gift it was for my father to have gone so quickly, never conscious of his life slipping away. As a doctor he had seen so many different endings; this was one of the better ones, he assured me. His words were a small comfort in an ocean of pain.
AFTER MY FATHER’S DEATH, there was no money for me to go to NYU. I transferred to Queens College and took on two more part-time jobs in addition to my position in Marty’s office to pay for my education. Taking out student loans eased some of the financial burden, but the responsibilities of being on my own and the fact that I was always the oldest student in the class put me on a very different trajectory than my classmates. I rarely had time to involve myself in the social life of the college, so focused was I on my work, studies, and newly found love.
I was always somewhat removed from the collective reality. After the Kent State massacre, Queens College students were conducting sit-ins, protesting from the tops of buildings, and cutting classes to demonstrate. In my Psychology of Personality class, which was held in a large theater-like room, a student boldly walked up to the professor while he was lecturing. Taking the microphone from his hands—“liberating” it, as he declared—he began to order the rest of us to march out of class, to act! Trembling with excited rage, he pointed outside, where students had created a cemetery on the lawn with four stones signifying the students who had been murdered.
Our professor told the class that we could all leave to act on our principles, but we must also understand that principles had consequences; no one who left would receive a grade for the year’s course.
There was a pause, and then a great commotion ensued as everyone stood and headed to the door. They filed outside until I was the only one left seated in the room. I believed the professor when he told us there were consequences to actions, and I made the calculation that going to graduate school was more important than joining the group at that moment. I was wrong—I could have joined and lost nothing. The grades for that semester were calculated on a pass/fail system that term, and everyone was given a pass.
The incident left me disgusted with the lack of authenticity of the political activism at Queens, especially after the murders of those students. Rather than holding them accountable for their act, the college administration reinforced the notion that politics was theater—you could engage in it and lose nothing. Only in the United States was radical political action diminished this way. French intellectual history values the consecrated heretic. In the Soviet Union, writers who were viewed as threats to state authority were sent to the gulag. But at Queens College, you could cut classes all you wanted, call it politics, and cruise through your final grade.
The experience taught me the danger of expecting support from people who did not expect to lose anything by their engagement with radical politics but loved to act as if they did. Even then I knew that it is really only when one can get past one’s own fear and situationally transcend self-interest that one can gain courage to take risks and perhaps make a difference.
I did get a whiff of real activism—feminist activism—while I was at Queens. Anaïs Nin visited the campus and read to a group of literature and psychology students from her diary. I recall a small, elegant woman with long gray hair tied tightly in a bun, porcelain skin, and bright blue eyes, an icon of a bygone era. Later, Florynce Kennedy spoke about lesbianism and abortion, giving the class one of her famous lines: “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” I was amazed and impressed by her bold language and her strong anti-establishment critique. It was thrilling to hear that kind of unbound language from the podium. Her brand of intellectual engagement was far more compelling to me than empty sit-ins ever were.
THE EXTERNAL POLITICAL WORLD soon began to affect life at Marty’s office, too. In November 1970 the New York Times reported that “a dramatic liberalization of public attitudes and practices regarding abortions appears to be sweeping the country.” The Title X Family Planning program, designed to provide women with access to contraceptive services, supplies, and information, was enacted in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act. By 1971 over half the people questioned in opinion polls favored legalizing abortion. Thanks in part to the work of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), lawyers who had previously emphasized the effect of unconstitutionally vague language on medical practitioners began to argue on behalf of women’s right to decide when to have a child. Organizations that had been working to reform abortion laws changed their goals, strategies, and often their names to reflect the new movement for repeal of all state abortion statutes.
A referendum in the state of Washington repealed that state’s abortion laws, and three more states, including New York, followed suit. In February 1971 the American Bar Association officially supported a woman’s right to choose abortion up to the twentieth week of pregnancy, and in December that year the Supreme Court heard the first round of oral arguments in Roe v. Wade.
In the two and a half years between July 1970, when New York’s new abortion law took effect, and January 1973, when the Supreme Court’s Roe decision legalized the procedure everywhere, 350,000 women came to New York for an abortion, including 19,000 Floridians; 30,000 each from Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois; and thousands more from Canada. By the end of 1971, 61 percent of the abortions performed in New York were on out-of-state residents.1
In the New York medical world, this political and social sea change brought about a flurry of activity among health clinics and private practices that wanted to help meet the new demands for abortions. Referral networks were set up all over the country by the Center for Reproductive and Sexual Health (CRASH), one of the first and largest New York abortion clinics; the Clergy Consultation Center; and representatives of Eastern Women’s Center to help women travel to New York to receive services. Cars and limos were sent to meet and greet patients at the airports. Eastern and CRASH “doing” up to three hundred patients a day was not unusual. New York City was soon declared the abortion capital of the nation.
Like others, Marty and his colleague, Dr. Leo Orris, saw the change in New York’s abortion law as a historic opportunity. They were both founding physicians of the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York (HIP), the first not-for-profit HMO founded to provide low-cost comprehensive health services on the East Coast. HIP had twenty-eight medical groups throughout the city, and Marty and Dr. Orris felt strongly that as the major health care provider in New York, HIP should be at the forefront in providing abortions.
They approached the HIP board of directors with a proposal for adding abortion services for patients, but some members of the board—which included union representatives, teachers, politicians, and clergy—were morally and religiously uncomfortable with the radical changes wrought by abortion becoming legal.
The HIP board’s solution was to give Marty and Orris permission to create a separate medical office to deliver abortion services to HIP subscribers. HIP doctors in all five boroughs would refer patients who wanted abortions to this new clinic, which would be responsible for hiring the doctors and running the operations. The board was satisfied because HIP was not officially offering abortion services, and those in favor of providing them were satisfied because there was an official HIP referral source to which they could send their patients.
Marty and Orris decided to invest $12,000 each and form a professional partnership. In 1971, on the heels of legalization, they opened Flushing Women’s Medical Center, one of the first ambulatory abortion facilities in New York.
MARTY’S NEW PROJECT became the focus of our evening talks. He wanted to find a way to get me involved in Flushing Women’s. I had proved myself a skilled assistant, and it was obvious I could be instrumental in creating the clinic. As I had fallen in love with Marty’s stories, he was also engaged with my developing narrative. “Young, ambitious classical musician leaves art behind and finds herself a healer and medical pioneer,” he said teasingly. He wanted to make me into a star. Just as importantly, the clinic would provide a way for us to keep working together, to have our own world separate from the one he had to share with his wife and family. He told me it would be our project, our space to build and to share.
Marty’s vision for our future was exciting, and I loved the idea of continuing to work with him in a more permanent fashion. But the project was appealing on another level as well: indeed, working at the doctor’s office had become an outlet for my inchoate drives, an unexpected answer to my long search for meaning.
Marty was a family physician. At that time specialization had not balkanized medicine, and you could have one doctor for the majority of medical issues that would arise throughout your life. As his assistant I was part of that intimate world by proxy. I was the “nurse,” the person with whom patients made their appointments, who called with their lab results, and who gave them their prescriptions. They shared their frustrations with me as I weighed them or wrote their symptoms down in their charts. I reduced their anxiety and softened the edges of their office visits. Patients’ joys and tragedies, births and deaths, were played out in the office, and I was an integral part of these milestones. I was part of their healing process, and the affiliative medical power I began to gain suited me.
When Marty officially asked me to join him in helping him run Flushing Women’s, I didn’t have to think twice. It was the spring of 1971, I was twenty-five years old, and abortion had been legal in New York State for almost one year. It would be another two before the Supreme Court would legalize abortion nationally in Roe v. Wade. I would get to keep working with Marty and be on the front lines of an exciting, pioneering new era of medicine. Having left my childhood behind, and longing for a great stage to act upon, I was ready to throw myself into creating new worlds. Now was the time—this was my hour.