Her Mother's Daughter (11 page)

Momma bursts into tears. “No! No! My children, my babies! You cannot do, no!”

The woman purses her lips and looks over Momma's head. She is waiting. After Momma stops talking, and her sobs are a little softer, the woman says, “It's for their own good. It's for your good too. Surely you must see that, Mrs. Brez. How will you feed them, clothe them? Who will watch the little one when you are at work and the older children in school? At the orphanage they'll be properly fed and clothed, and they will be taught a trade. It will be better for all of you in the long run.”

Momma sobs louder, hitting her fists on the desk noiselessly, over and over. “No, no!” she keeps crying.

The woman twists her lips again, gazing at Momma. She looks down at her hands. Momma is crying as if she would never stop. “No, no,” she keeps repeating in a little soft voice from way down in her throat. The woman clears her throat.

“Well, perhaps…I guess it would be all right…maybe we could let you keep one of them.”

Momma stops crying. Bella is embarrassed that snot is running down from Momma's nose to her upper lip. Momma digs in her handbag for a handkerchief and wipes it away and blows her nose. She raises her head tiredly, her shoulders slumped. “I keep Isabella,” she says.

The teacher is handing out the report cards. Bella tries not to think about it. She gazes around her, seeing nothing. The teacher comes to her and hands her the card. Bella doesn't look at if, she slips it swiftly into her writing tablet. The class is dismissed, and the children tear out with that special energy and joy that marks the last day of school. Isabella Brez rises slowly from her seat and trails behind them slowly. She doesn't want to speak to any of them, to have them ask her anything. She doesn't want to know herself.

She walks home slowly, but before she reaches home, she sits down on a curb and looks around her No one is watching her, the streetlife goes on as always. She reaches into her tablet and slowly pulls out the card. She looks at the grades first. She has failed everything. At the bottom, where it says----
IS PROMOTED TO----MUST REPEAT-----
, she sees that she has been left back. Isabella
MUST REPEAT
3
^rd
grade, it says. Her heart stops. They have found out.

She stands, slumping, and drags herself toward home. Momma will be there, her head in her hands, sitting at the table over a cup of coffee, crying. Stupid. Stupid. Useless. Everyone knew she was stupid. It is a terrible thing, to be stupid and know it. She climbs the stairs slowly, and pushes open the door. Momma is alone at the table, crying. Bella enters softly, and goes to her room. She does not tell Momma she has been left back. Nor will Momma ever ask.

The man and the woman come into the almost empty apartment. They are dressed like the people in the pictures outside the nickelodeon: the man is wearing a bowler hat and a blue suit, and the woman has a big-brimmed hat with flowers on it, and a brown wool jacket over her long tan skirt. Her boots are black. They talk to Momma the same way the woman in the office did—very clearly and loud. Edmund, who is now ten; Wallace, who is six; and Eugenia, who is four, are sitting in their best clothes, rigid on the edge of the couch seat. Beside them, on the floor, are three boxes tied with string, containing their clothes. Each holds a bag in their lap—food Momma prepared for them. The man and the woman do not look at the children, and they are annoyed with Momma, who won't stop crying. The children gaze with white faces at the strangers. Finally, the man says something sharp and fast to Momma, and Momma looks up at him. Bella gasps. She has never seen Momma's eyes look like that before. The woman hurriedly helps the children up, and puts her hand on their backs to usher them out the door. The man quickly picks up the boxes and follows. But the woman doesn't go down with them; the man runs down the steps after the children. The woman comes toward Momma, who is still looking like that.

“Mrs. Brez…it isn't forever. As soon as you get settled, earn enough…you will get them back.” Swiftly, she turns and leaves, as Momma, in a great gasp puts her head in her hands again and cries as if her throat were a cave, as if the howling winds came from her belly, she cries like a storm that will never end.

Bella walks slowly to the kitchen window and looks down at the carriage. She cannot see her brothers and sister, only the man, who is fixing the boxes on the seat beside the driver. The woman comes out and quickly steps up into the carriage and disappears. Then the man gets in. A strange noise comes out of Bella's throat, and Momma leaps up and runs into the kitchen and stares down at the carriage, when it begins to move, and then she screams, “Killers! Killers! Beasts! Bastards!” She is screaming in Polish, using words she never used before
(Huje,
she cries, and
Niech ich szlak weźmie!),
the kind of words Poppa would say when he came in late at night. Bella shrinks from this woman. She walks slowly into her bedroom. Except for a heap of her clothes on the floor, it is empty.

S
HE REMEMBERS NOTHING ELSE
. There must have been activity, Frances must have been busy, but Bella, wherever she was, was absent. Frances found a job in a sweatshop, ten hours a day, six days a week, for five dollars a week. She found a new place to live—it was on Manhattan Avenue, on a street like that on which they had lived before, but shabbier. The rent was six dollars a month. The apartment was only a few blocks away from their old one; there were stores on the bottom, and one or two stories of apartments above them. But this time, they would not live above a store, or even on the street, but in the back alley. The enterprising owner of the front building had put up a house in his yard. It had a one-room basement, in which an old Russian immigrant lived alone until one night, a year and a half after Momma and Bella moved in, he turned on the gas in his bedroom without lighting it, and died in his sleep. Momma and Bella would live on the first floor, in two rooms, and there was a family upstairs in another two-room apartment—a mother, father, two children, and two boarders newly arrived from Russia. These boarders had long stringy beards and spoke neither Polish nor English, and they frightened Bella.

To reach the house, you had to go through a door beside a millinery shop that fronted the street, pass the staircase leading to the apartments above, and through a long hall, and out the back. There was a small open space, and then the back building. The toilet was in the front building, though, and all three families had to go through the back door and halfway down the dark hall to use it. The millinery shop would lock up at night, but the two doors were always open.

Mr. Ettinger, who owned the building, was wary of a widow with a child, but he felt sorry for Momma. So did his wife, who sent over a box of clothes her daughters had outgrown, for Bella.

Momma sat over that box, shaking her tearful head. Bella understood. Of all their many friends and relatives, only Pane Dabrowski had come to see them after Poppa died. All the people they had entertained, the two sisters whose passage money Momma had sent: everyone abandoned them in this time. And Pane Dabrowski came, Bella thought, only because she was old and lonely, and wanted some conversation and a glass of tea. Bella's heart hardened in a way that would never change: Polish people, she felt, were shallow and mercenary, concerned only with what they could get. The only people who helped Momma were the Ettingers, strangers, and Jewish. Bella never forgot this.

In time, though, she became somewhat cynical about the Ettingers, too, because once Mrs. Ettinger found out that Momma could sew, she would bring over a length of fabric and ask Momma to make a dress for her daughter Yetta. She never paid her, but she brought extra material, so Momma could make a dress for Bella too. After a year, Bella had thirteen dresses—almost as many as she had endowed Anastasia with. But she knew there were things she needed more than dresses. And she felt that Momma only made her the dresses so she could show them to Mrs. Ettinger, to prove that she'd made them.

Their apartment was dark; light entered it only faintly for a few hours in the afternoon. The kitchen had a wood stove, a sink, and two deep tubs, with some shelves along one wall. Momma set the round table with its fringed brocade cloth in the center, and put a kerosene lamp on top. There was a gaslight on the wall behind the stove. Momma set the double bed and an old trunk in the other room. There was a wall gaslight in that room too. Along two walls of the kitchen, Momma put the old treadle sewing machine and the old couch.

Momma left the house very early each morning; somehow, she knew what time it was, and got herself out by seven to walk the three miles to the sweatshop and be there by eight. She worked from eight until one, then had a half hour for lunch, the black bread and butter she carried with her in a folded-up towel, then worked until six-thirty. Since, most nights, Momma stopped at a market on the way back for something for dinner, it was often eight o'clock at night before she returned home.

Bella was alone all day.

“I remember being, but I don't remember thinking or feeling,” my mother says, pulling one side of her velvet robe over her knees. “I was numb.”

Numb, and lonely, she would wander out to the street, always busy by day, but filled mainly with men walking by, older boys striding through. A few women in babushkas and shawls and long skirts hovered at the open front of the vegetable stall, feeling tomatoes. From upstairs, she could hear Yetta Ettinger playing the piano. She walked back into the dark hall and stood there listening. What she heard was only scales and exercises fumblingly played, but it sounded beautiful to her.

She decided that Anastasia would play the piano, beautifully, even better than Yetta Ettinger. And for weeks, this gave her an occupation. She made up a life for Anastasia, starting right from the beginning. She saw the room Anastasia was laid in after her birth (she passed over that part, which was fuzzy in her mind), and how her momma and poppa acted toward her. She kept careful track of just where she had left off on an evening, so she could start again the next day. The first few weeks she and Momma lived on Manhattan Avenue, Bella spent mainly in the dark house, sitting at the kitchen table and making up Anastasia's life. She tried to go slowly, because she knew the summer was long, but within a short time, she already had Anastasia going to school.

When Anastasia came home from school, she went into a large room with shining wood floors and a beautiful rug on it, and a long piano, like the one in the store on Nostrand Avenue, and played. She had long thin fingers, and music simply poured out of them. When she was tired of that, Anastasia went up to her room, which was all pink and white eyelet, like the bedroom in Halper's Furniture Shop, with a pretty little vanity table. Bella could never quite envision what was on the vanity table, so she left that blank for the time being. There was also a fluffy white rug which Anastasia never got dirty, and a little crimson slipper chair, like the one in Schneider's Furnishings, three blocks away. And her sheets were embroidered with her name, and she had a real closet in her room with fourteen dresses and two pairs of boots, one for everyday and one for good.

When Bella would occasionally go out on the street, she would walk like Anastasia, stepping daintily over horse droppings and peering haughtily in the shop windows. Sometimes, Bella would ask her what she thought of something in a window, and Anastasia would wrinkle her little nose and say it was cheap-looking. Then Bella would walk on, not wanting it either.

Darkness would grow on the little house without Bella noticing, and when the door opened, Momma would speak harshly: “You stupid, sitting in the dark!” And Bella would jump up and turn up the gaslight, although it was hard for her to reach. She would light the kerosene lamp too, as Momma put down her bags, and stare at the grey-faced woman. Momma wouldn't speak. She'd go to the stove and put wood in it for a fire; then she'd measure coffee into the drip pot, and put a kettle of water on the hot part of the stove. Then she'd sink into a chair and put her face in her hands. When the kettle was steaming, she'd get up wearily and pour water into the coffeepot, and sit down again. After a little while, she got up and poured some coffee into a cup, and sat with it, her hands around the cup as though they were cold—but it was very hot, it was July.

Momma would sip the coffee, but in a few minutes, she'd choke, and the sobs would come out of her mouth the same way they had the day the strange man and woman came, as if her throat were a cave, and wild winds were trapped inside. She said bad things, awful things, and Bella stood transfixed. Sometimes, she would pull back to the couch, the old couch from the dining room, that Momma had put in the kitchen, and lean her legs against it.

“
Psiakrew! Chuje!
Devils! Devils! What did they do to me, why, why? They take my children, who the hell are they to do such a thing!
Niech ich szlak we
ź
mie!
My children, my babies, my little orphans!
Moje biedne sieroty, moje drogie!
Hell, hell, hell, why did this happen to me?”

She would sob and scream, cursing and using words Poppa had used, but that Momma had never uttered before.

Bella approached her warily. She touched her sleeve. “Momma,
I'm
here,” she said in a small voice.

But Frances lifted her arm brusquely, loosing the small fingers. She went on crying and screaming.

“Please don't cry, Momma,” Bella begged.

Frances ignored her: she was inconsolable. She was pounding the table with her fist, soundlessly; then she pounded her own chest so hard Bella could hear the thump. Bella drew back slowly, slowly, until the back of her legs touched the couch. Her belly rumbled. She was hungry.

Now Momma had her hands over her belly and she was moaning and rocking back and forth. Then tears burst forth again, and she slapped her own face, she tore at her cheeks with her nails, she pulled out strands of her hair.