But abortion continued to be a source of literary and personal fascination for Hahn. In “Kathy, Not Me,” she frames the story of her roommate’s abortion within the solipsism and confusion of living in New York in 1930. There is a relentlessness to Affair and its single-minded focus on relationships and their consequences—the lovers, the roommates—amid the onrushing panic of dire times. Thirty-five years later, having given birth to two children, Hahn was able to tease the threads of that panic apart: the individual, and the abortion, occurs within a broader climate of fear and uncertainty. “We talked about ourselves constantly,” she wrote, but young Americans did not clearly see themselves within the momentousness of the Great Depression. All around Hahn, newly unemployed women boarded trains back home to their mothers. Kathy learned she was pregnant around the time that she lost her college scholarship. “She did not intend to have it; outside of books and movies, girls in her predicament never did. Both of us knew that much but very little more, except that the operation was illegal,” Hahn wrote. The boyfriend, after being persuaded that the abortion was “a matter that involved him as well as Kathy,” found the doctor, paid for part of the operation, and showed up at their apartment on the day of the appointment, floridly drunk. Hahn took Kathy to the doctor. When they returned, the two women limped up the stairs past him. Hahn lived with Kathy’s crying for two weeks, until she helped her board a train back home to the Midwest.
Hahn’s depression worsened even though Kathy wrote to tell her she was fine, now. In the aftermath, Hahn accepted dates, a manic carousel of them, just to get out of the apartment in which her roommate’s ghostly crying still seemed to float. “Though it was past, and though it was Kathy, not me, someone had gone through all that cruelty,” she wrote.
“All that cruelty.” The physical—the abortion, the green cast of Kathy’s face when she came home from what Hahn knew was a terribly painful operation. The emotional—that callous, drunk boyfriend, who needed convincing to take any responsibility. The societal—those trains taking women back to the past, to live their mothers’ lives. The historical—the past to which they traveled. Hahn took a handful of sleeping pills and immediately vomited them up. (In Affair, Hahn gave this half-hearted suicide plotline to the roommate.)