Authors: Richard Russo
It was true, of course. She had been. Watching it and then turning away, then turning back again.
“You
know
that ole white woman up there ain’t your mama, right?”
Sarah didn’t answer right away, which made Miss Rosa stare at her even harder. Finally, withering under her scrutiny, she said, yes, she knew. “I visited my mother’s grave the first day I was here.”
“All right then,” Miss Rosa said. “Lease you ain’t loss your mind completely.”
No, not completely. Sarah
did
realize that that sick old woman was someone else entirely, and if that was true, then it didn’t matter if she happened by coincidence to be roughly the same age her mother would’ve been had she not been killed that night in Harold Sundry’s car. Nor did it matter that she never left her apartment or no one ever saw her except the people who delivered her noon meal. She was simply Mrs. R. Feldman, just like it said on her mailbox. How many times had Sarah stared at that name, rearranging the letters a hundred different ways, in search of a clue? And even that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that if by some miracle it
had
been some other woman killed in that accident, if Mrs. R. Feldman somehow
was
her mother, living under an alias, it meant she’d have been hiding from Sarah herself for the last forty years, something she never would’ve done. In other words, if it
was
her mother behind that blue door, then it
wasn’t.
“I know, Miss Rosa,” Sarah finally said. “I do.” Though she wanted to ask why she, who attributed all good things to Jesus, was allowed an imaginary friend when Sarah wasn’t.
“All right then, go on home.”
Good advice, and yet. “Did you ever meet her?”
“Meet who? The woman who ain’t your mama?” She wasn’t even trying to conceal her irritation now. “Sure I met her. Long time ago. Dried-up little ole Jewish lady. Smaller’n me. That what your mama look like?”
“No.”
“All right then.”
“I know,” Sarah said.
And she did, in more ways than one. She’d tried her best to be patient with her husband after Lou-Lou’s death, the long hours he spent alone in the study with his blown-up map of Thomaston and its forest of black pins. His inability to see this death as a fact both of life and of their marriage, his inability to look past it and count their remaining blessings, had finally eroded her confidence that things would ever be right and good again between them. For a while she’d even considered leaving him to this painful loss he seemed to cherish more than their own lives. But eventually he’d snapped out of it, thank God, and things did get better. He’d recently confided to her that he never entirely banished the notion that Big Lou’s death had been some kind of cosmic mistake, that he still lived on in some parallel existence. That had troubled Sarah deeply, but here she was indulging in exactly the same fantasy.
And Miss Rosa was right. Each day, to sustain that fantasy, she was using a child. Without Kayla she had no reason to return to the Arms every day and to continue her blue-door vigil. She could tell herself that she was acting out of kindness, and maybe her affection for the girl was real, but no matter how many new sketchbooks and lunches she bought, no matter how many hours she spent on tutoring or day trips to Montauk or the North Shore, the truth was she was still using a child. She’d known that much right from the start. When Kayla gave voice to that first plaintive question—“Can you teach me?”—Sarah had been about to say no when it occurred to her that saying yes would allow her to stay, which was what she wanted most. It was the sort of thing her father always did—the right thing for the wrong reason. Like making her go out with the Mock boy because he was a Negro, then later parading him around town to make everybody feel guilty he’d been beaten up. Did he have any idea that Sarah had blamed herself? Did he understand that she’d only said yes because she was sure he’d never allow her to go out with a boy? She knew the Mock boy’d had a crush on her for months, and she didn’t dislike him; it wasn’t that. Nor did she hold it against him that he was a Negro. But she knew that everyone would stare at them and whisper, that kids who had no idea who she was would now be able to identify her—the Berg girl, who went to movies with Negroes. “I’m proud of you,” her father said when the Mock boy climbed the steps and rang the doorbell, by which she understood there was no backing out.
And the Mock boy’d known, too. He wasn’t stupid. He could see that she didn’t want to go, now that her father had said she could, but he’d already asked her, so what was he supposed to do? “You don’t have to sit with me,” he said after he’d bought her ticket, letting her off the hook. Everyone—his friends from the Hill, all the West and East End and Borough whites—was already looking at them, talking behind their hands. Her own best friend was worst. She came over when they’d taken their seats—causing several kids nearby to move—and said, “Come sit with me.” An order. Not even acknowledging the existence of the boy sitting next to her. “I can’t,” Sarah told her, and from the tone of her voice it must’ve been clear how much she wanted to. “Then it’s your fault,” her friend said, and of course Sarah believed her. If she’d done as her friend wanted, gotten up and left the Mock boy sitting there by himself, he’d have been spared his beating. But how could she have known that a beating was coming? She knew only what her father expected of her and that the Mock boy had a crush on her and still wanted to sit next to her in the dark theater, even though he now knew better than to try to hold her hand or let his arm rest on her shoulder. At one point she heard a sound, looked over and saw he was crying. They didn’t speak a single word to each other during the entire movie.
Dear God, Sarah thought. Dear God. She could forgive her poor, scared, thirteen-year-old self, but what did it mean that now, at sixty, she was again using a black child? “Ain’t no bottom to that child’s need” was the way Miss Rosa had described Kayla. For the last two weeks Sarah had been trying to convince herself that she was addressing at least a few of those needs, but in truth she was giving her only what she could easily afford.
Bottomless need.
What Miss Rosa didn’t seem to understand was that this accurately described not only most children but also the scared child that lived, at least part of the time, deep inside most adults. The first time she understood this was that long-ago afternoon in the movie theater after all the other kids had left. Sitting in the manager’s office, her nose bloodied in the scuffle, she’d then looked up and seen Lou’s face framed in the doorway and seen within him a great kindness and, yes, a terrible need that touched her deeply. He’d worn that same expression when she called him back from her Bridge of Sighs painting, and she remembered thinking that she couldn’t bear it anymore, she just couldn’t.
“And what if that
was
your mama up there?” Miss Rosa was saying. “What then? Almose a hunnerd years old. Prob’ly doan know who she is half the time and where she is the other half. What you want from her? She gon get her mind back so she can tell you what to do?”
“No,” Sarah said. “My mother never was much for giving advice.”
Oh, sweetie, I don’t know, you’ve seen what a mess I make of things. Just…do the best you can, okay?
Sarah could feel her eyes filling. “But if I could just talk to her one more time.” Maybe she didn’t know everything she’d say to her mother, but she’d at least let her know she finally understood how life worked, that one day you woke up and found yourself in the throes of what could only be despair, prey to doubts you imagined long banished, your self-confidence shredded. “The last summer we were together, she lost her way and did a very foolish thing. I might have been able to prevent it, but I didn’t, and I don’t know why. Maybe I was afraid I’d tell her the wrong thing. But now
I’m
the one who’s lost and—”
“And you thinkin’ about doin’ a damn fool thing your own self. Somethin’ you want to get talked out of.”
Sarah looked her in the eye. “Then you agree, it’s foolish?”
“How my s’posed to know if it’s smart or dumb if you doan tell me?”
“Can’t I just be like Jesus and not go into specifics?”
“No, ma’am.”
Sarah took a deep breath. “I think I’d be better for Kayla than child services.”
“Keep goin’.”
“But I had cancer last year. I’m in remission, but…no guarantees.”
Miss Rosa nodded.
“I’m thinking about renting an apartment or small house around here. That way we can visit.”
“Visit who?”
“You.”
“Me an’ that door up there, you mean,” she said, then, when Sarah offered no comment, “Keep goin’.”
“Also, if I’m here, and the cancer comes back—”
“You give the child back.”
That sounded horrible, but yes. “I don’t think I can go back to my old life. I don’t know why, but—”
“Keep goin’.”
“That’s all.”
“No it ain’t. Tell the truth and shame the devil.”
An even deeper breath. “I want to meet Mrs. Feldman.”
Miss Rosa surprised her by taking her hand. “Can’t let you take that child nowhere, not even ’cross the street, till I know you ain’t crazy. You know I can’t, so doan ask me.”
Sarah felt Kayla’s eyes shift from Miss Rosa onto her, and then her own eyes started leaking. “Why do I feel like she’s in there?” she said. “If it’s not true, why does it
feel
true?”
“I’ll pray on it,” Miss Rosa said. “You know I will.”
T
WO DAYS LATER,
Miss Rosa abruptly ordered Kayla back into their apartment. It was late afternoon, and the gangsta children had mostly risen and come out, shirtless, to hang over the railings and practice looking lethal. Sarah thought maybe that was why the girl had been sent inside, then realized it wasn’t. They’d just returned from a drive to Orient Point, where Kayla had sketched the ferry that ran between there and New London, Connecticut. It had been a mostly uncomfortable outing.
“What’s the funny name of that store?” she’d asked.
“You know perfectly well,” Sarah said. She’d taken to heart what Miss Rosa had said about filling her head with talk of Thomaston and Lou and Ikey Lubin’s. Kayla wasn’t making things easy, though.
“
You’re
supposed to say.”
“That’s good,” Sarah said. She’d gotten the line of the ferry right—not easy, because it was deceiving. She was beginning to slow down, to really see before cutting loose with the ink.
“You’re right,” she said. “I do know. It’s Mikey’s.” And when Sarah didn’t respond, chanted, “I’m right. It’s Mikey’s, Mikey’s, Mikey’s.”
Once the girl was safely inside, Miss Rosa said, “Here’s the way it’s got to be. You gon go ’cross the street and call that man and say you comin’ home. I ain’t lettin’ this child be an orphan twice, you understand me?”
“But—”
“You thinkin’ about makin’ a new life, then go make it, but if you want this child you gon take her back to your ole life an’ that good man that’s waitin’ on you. You doan make that call,
I
call child services.”
“If you could just give me a little more time—”
“Hear me out, then you can have your say. Won’t make no difference, but you tell me if it make you feel better.”
Sarah tried not to look up at the blue door but did anyway.
“You make that call today an’ tomorrow morning you an’ me gonna go upstairs, say hello to that ole white woman.”
She felt her heart leap with anticipation and, surprisingly, fear. If the woman inside the apartment wasn’t her mother, she’d lose the blue door, and the door, she realized, had become almost enough. “She agreed? You spoke to her?”
“Five minutes,” Miss Rosa went on. “I told her you juss want to say hello ’cause of your mama. So we gon say hello and you gon see this old Jewish lady ain’t your mama and then we’re gon
leave.
You understand all that?”
Sarah nodded, not wanting to trust her voice.
Miss Rosa was smiling now. “Then you gon live like a woman with a brain in her head and not no lunatic. Maybe help a child, too.”
Sarah had only to look at Miss Rosa to know this was the best deal—the only deal—she was going to cut with her. “This is what Jesus advised?”
“Jesus tole me to use my own bess judgment, an’ that’s all we’re gon say about Jesus, too. I didn’t live so long to get talked out of Him, no ma’am, so doan even try.”
Sarah then went back to Sundry Gardens to make the promised call. “I’m going to be bringing someone with me,” she warned her husband. “You’ll love her.” If you love her, he said, so will I, and she felt the dam of her emotions break, a relief every bit as intense as when the oncologist told her she was in remission. So profound, in fact, that the next morning she told Miss Rosa that it wasn’t even necessary to trouble Mrs. Feldman after all. The madness had passed. She was going to be fine.
Surprisingly, Miss Rosa would have none of it, and they climbed the stairs and knocked on the blue door. A feeble voice inside said the door was unlocked, so Miss Rosa opened it wide. The first thing Sarah saw was her mother, and the second was the carpet coming up to meet her.
T
HE NEXT AFTERNOON
Sarah said goodbye to both Miss Rosa and the Arms. With the help of a couple of the grandmas, the old woman had managed to clear mounds of clothing off a love seat, where they sat at an angle, their knees almost touching. Miss Rosa was a small woman, but today, indoors, among the towers of clothing and shoes, she seemed like she might be on the verge of disappearing altogether.