“Yes,” I say. “I remember the girls.”
“Do you remember that during the war the younger one, she must have been seventeen then, got pneumonia? They thought she was dying, in those years people died of pneumonia, and I bought her. After that she always called me Mama.”
“You did
what
?” I stop walking.
“I bought her, I bought her. You know, Jews believed that if someone you loved was in danger you sold them and that warded off the evil eye.” She laughs. “If they weren’t yours what could happen to them?”
I stare hard at her. She ignores my stare.
“Roseman came to the door and she said to me, ‘The girl is dying. Will you buy her?’ So I bought her. I think I gave Roseman ten dollars.”
“Ma,” I say, “you knew this was a peasant superstition, an old wives’ tale, and still you took part in it? You agreed to buy her?”
“Of course I did.”
“But, Ma! You were both
communists
.”
“Well, listen,” she says. “We had to save her life.”
My parents slept, alternately, in either of the two middle rooms, some years in the back, some years in the front, whereupon the unused other room became the living room. For years they dragged a huge Philco radio and three monstrous pieces of furniture (an overstuffed couch and two chairs covered in maroon cloth threaded with gold) back and forth between the front room and the back room.
When I grew up I puzzled over why my parents had never taken one of the little rooms for themselves, why they slept in open territory, so to speak, and when I was in my twenties I asked my mother why. She looked at me just about thirty seconds too long. Then she said, “We knew that the children each needed a room for themselves.” I gave her back the same thirty seconds. She had made such an intolerable romance of her marriage, had impaled us all on the cross of my father’s early death, and here she was telling me that the privacy needed for sexual joy was given up for the good of the children?
My mother had been distinguished in the building not only by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner, but also by her status as a happily married woman. No, I haven’t said that right. Not just happily married. Magically married. Definitively married.
My parents were, I think, happy together, their behavior with one another civilized and affectionate—but an ideal of marital happiness suffused the atmosphere my mother
and I shared that made simple reality a circumstance not worthy of respect, definitely not what it was all about. What it was all about was Mama’s worshipful attitude toward the goodness of her married life, accompanied by a sniffing dismissal of all marriages that did not closely resemble hers, and the single-mindedness of her instruction to me in hundreds of ways, over thousands of days, that love was the most important thing in a woman’s life.
Papa’s love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety. Countless sentences having to do with all in her life she found less than satisfactory began: “Believe me, if I didn’t love your father,” or, “Believe me, if it wasn’t for Papa’s love.” She would speak openly of how she had hated to give up working when she got married (she’d been a bookkeeper in a Lower East Side bakery), how good it was to have your own money in your pocket, not receive an allowance like a child, how stupid her life was now, and how she’d love to go back to work. Believe her. If it wasn’t for Papa’s love.
Everything from work in the kitchen to sex in the bedroom was transformed by Papa’s love, and I think I knew early that sex did have to be transformed. She did not hate sex, but she did seem to put up with it. She never said physical love was unimportant or distasteful to a woman, but sentences like “Your father was a very passionate man. Your father was always ready. Your father could use ten women a night” left me feeling: To take your clothes off and lie down with a man you had to really really love him—otherwise the whole enterprise backfired. I remember at sixteen, my virginity under siege for the first time,
waking each day to the interminable battle being waged in my head and my body, and imploring my mother silently: But, Ma, how do I know if I really really love him? All I know is, I’m in heat and he’s pushing me, he’s pushing me. In the hallway, on park benches, every night in the kitchen while you’re tossing around on the other side of a wall eight feet away, safely behind the lines, I’m out here in the trenches … But there was no help forthcoming.
Love in my mother’s lexicon wasn’t love, it was
love
. Feeling of a high order, a spiritual nature, a moral cast. Above all, feeling that was unmistakable when present and equally unmistakable when absent. “A woman knows if she loves a man,” my mother would say. “If she doesn’t know she doesn’t love him.” These words were delivered as though from Sinai. Interpretation of the variety of human behaviors said to derive from love was not necessary in our house. If my mother could not identify in another woman responses to a husband or a lover that duplicated her own, it wasn’t love. And love, she said, was everything. A woman’s life was determined by love. All evidence to the contrary—and such evidence was abundant indeed—was consistently discounted and ignored, blotted out of her discourse, refused admission by her intellect. Once, in my presence (I must have been ten), a friend told her she was dead wrong, that her notions of love were absurd and that she was a slave to her idea of marriage. When I asked my mother what her friend meant she replied, “An undeveloped woman. She doesn’t know life.”
Every neighborhood had a village idiot or a holy fool; we had three. There was Tom, the sixty-year-old delivery boy who worked for the butcher. He’d carry a package of meat on the run, stop suddenly, throw the package down on the sidewalk, shake his finger at it, and announce: “I’m not going to carry you anymore, you lousy thing you!” There was Lilly, a mongoloid child of forty who wandered about in little-girl dresses, a pink satin bow in her greasy hair, crossing on the red light, cars screeching to a halt all around her. And there was Mrs. Kerner, a tiny, birdlike woman who ran around with her hair wrapped in a cleaning rag, her gestures wild, her manner crazily abrupt. She would stop people she didn’t know in the grocery store or the butcher shop or at the druggist’s, bring her hands together in a pair of loose fists in front of her face and, her brown eyes shining madly, say, “Oy, I was reading just today a bee-yoo-tee-ful story from Russian literature! A story of the heart to make the most miserable of souls cry out against the injustice of this life!” Then she would forget why she was in the store, turn and fly out the door.
Mrs. Kerner was Marilyn Kerner’s mother. Marilyn was my best friend. The Kerners lived one floor below us, in the apartment next door, and were as different, my mother thought, from our family as it was possible to be. The difference eluded me. The Kerners were simply the family
downstairs, and I thought: Well, that’s how they do it in
their
house.
Marilyn was an only child. The Kerners had a three-room apartment. Marilyn and her mother slept on twin mahogany bedsteads in the bedroom; her father slept on a cot beside the couch in the living room. Mr. Kerner, like my father, worked in the garment district. He was a handsome, silent man with thick gray hair and cold blue eyes, who lived in my imagination as a perpetual source of fear and anxiety. His wife and daughter welcomed his departure and dreaded his arrival. His presence not only put an immediate stop to afternoon good times in the Kerner apartment, it was perceived as threatening. When Mrs. Kerner went stiff and alert at five-thirty, put her forefinger up in the air, and said, “Quiet! He’s coming!” it was as though Bluebeard were about to walk through the door.
I preferred spending the afternoon in the Kerner apartment to spending it anywhere else. It was like having no parent in the house. Mrs. Kerner might be masquerading as an adult out on the street, but Marilyn and I knew better. With Mrs. Kerner it was so obvious that authority was an acquired position I began to suspect that perhaps more than one mother was assuming it, not earning it. Mrs. Kerner was enchanting and irritating: more interesting to be with than any regular mother, and more oddly instructive. My mother’s presence was powerful, but Mrs. Kerner’s was touching. Her distress was so open, so palpable, I would feel a finger pressing on my heart as she laid herself open to the ridicule and dismissal of a pair of street-smart twelve-year-olds.
She was a terrible housekeeper who never stopped keeping
house. At all times she had a rag tied around her head, a feather duster in her hand, and an expression of confusion in her eyes. She would wander around the house, aimlessly flicking the duster here and there. Or she’d drag out an iron monster of a vacuum cleaner, start it up with a terrific whining noise that made you think a plane was about to land in the living room, push it across the threadbare carpet a few times, lose interest, and leave the vacuum cleaner standing where she turned it off, sometimes for two or three days.
She baked also: the most godawful stuff, a kind of bread-cake loaf, always the same unyielding mass of half-raw dough. She’d break off a piece, lift it dramatically to her nose, inhale deeply, declare it ambrosia, and feed it to me or Marilyn. “Tasty, isn’t it?” she’d say, beaming, and I’d nod, chewing as fast as I could to get it down (that took a good three, four minutes), knowing it would weigh on my chest for the rest of the day. But I wanted to get it down. I knew Mrs. Kerner would be more confused than usual if I didn’t (what was she doing wrong
now?
), and I think I felt protective toward her from our earliest time together.
She never finished vacuuming because halfway through a push across the rug she would stop, jerk about (sometimes forgetting to turn off the machine), rush into the bedroom or the kitchen, where Marilyn and I were reading or drawing, and, with her hands on her face and her eyes shining, exclaim, “
Oy
, girls! Only this afternoon I was reading a story in the paper. A woman—poor, good, beautiful—was rushing across the street, her last penny in her hand to buy milk for a sick child she left upstairs, only a minute she left it, just to buy milk, a car comes rushing
around the corner, hits her, knocks her down, crushes and destroys her. A
gevalt!
People come running. Blood everywhere! The world is drenched in her blood. They take her away. And guess what? You’ll never believe this. It is impossible that the human mind should have imagined what actually happened. Are you ready? An hour later they find her hand in the gutter. Still clutching the penny.”
Marilyn, if she was drawing, would forget to put down her charcoal stick. I, if I was reading, would remain sitting with a page between my fingers. Irritated at first by her appearance in the doorway, we invariably found ourselves drawn in by her urgent, lilting voice. My heart would beat faster as she spoke, my attention press itself against the unexpectedness of her details. Mrs. Kerner was a spellbinder. Hers was the power of the born storyteller—that is, the one for whom every scrap of experience is only waiting to be given shape and meaning through the miracle of narrative speech.
It wasn’t a philosophic need to make sense of it all that drove Mrs. Kerner to storytelling. It was, rather, that she treasured feeling, and for her the arts—music, painting, literature—were a conduit for pure emotion. She told stories because she pined to live in a world of beauty among cultured people who had feeling. And feeling, girls, was everything. A person’s life was made rich or poor, worth a ransom or something to throw away in the gutter, if it was enhanced by or stripped of feeling.
Mrs. Kerner would generally deliver this impassioned speech about art, life, and feeling after she had told us a story. Sometimes she would then push up her sleeves and run to the piano, which had been bought for forty dollars
over Mr. Kerner’s protest so that Marilyn who hated it, never touched it, would be able to bring into the house, right into the house, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Mozart. The piano stood unused in the foyer except for the two or three times a week Mrs. Kerner rushed at it, wiped the bench with her skirt, sat down with the exaggerated motions of an artist at the piano, raised her arms high in the air, and brought her fingers down hard into the opening bars of “The Volga Boatmen.” That was it. That was all she could play. The opening bars of “The Volga Boatmen.” These she repeated ten or twenty times with no diminution of interest on either her part or ours.
The piano urge frequently overtook her during the last moments of the afternoon when, feverish with our shared storytelling rapture, she would lose track of the time. As she was crashing about on the piano keys the door would open and we would all freeze. Mr. Kerner would look silently at us. Then he would walk past us into the apartment, take a turn around the living room, come back into the foyer, hang his coat up carefully in the hall closet (he was the most fastidious man I ever knew), say, “The house is a pigpen. What have you been doing all day?” walk back into the living room, sit down in the one upholstered chair, and begin reading the paper. We would all scatter immediately: Mrs. Kerner to the kitchen, Marilyn to the bedroom, I out the door.
One Saturday morning Marilyn and I were on our way to Tremont Avenue, the major shopping street in our neighborhood. Just out the front door, Marilyn remembered that she had forgotten her wallet. We ran back upstairs, rushed into the Kerner apartment, and pushed into
the bedroom, Marilyn first, me right behind her. She stopped abruptly on the threshold and I rammed into her. With my hands on her back I looked past her shoulder into the room. Mr. and Mrs. Kerner were in one of the mahogany bedsteads, he on top of her, both of them covered with a blanket, only their naked upper bodies visible. His face was buried, hers thrown back, her eyes closed, her mouth twisted in a silent moan. Her hands pressed strongly into his back, his mouth sucked at her neck. The convulsion was violent and, I knew instantly, mutual. A rush of heat and fear went through my body from my throat to my groin. It was that mutuality.