Her Mother's Daughter (12 page)

Bella watched, listened, but Momma never looked at her. Bella wished that Momma would hit
her,
scream at
her,
but Momma acted as if she wasn't there. Bella felt that she was being torn to pieces. She wondered why Momma had kept her, why she hadn't let her go to the orphanage with the others. After a week of Momma's nightly crying, a thought pushed its way into Bella's mind: I'd be better off at the orphanage.

When Momma's sobs subsided a bit, sounding now like wind through the cracks in the windows, she would lay her head down on the table. Then Bella would approach her again, and pick up her cup.

“Would you like some hot coffee, Momma?”

Momma would answer—or she wouldn't. Bella would pour more coffee into the cup and slide it back on the table, and Momma would sit up a little, and, her chin near the table, pick up the cup and hold it to her lips.

“Do you want me to go the store, Momma?”

Frances would look at her, wild-eyed.

“For dinner, Momma.”

Then Frances would sit up farther, and slump at the same time. She reached for her purse and took out some coins. She would tell Bella to get some chop meat, or some baloney. Then she would go into the bedroom and take off her dress and put on an older one and tie on an apron and come back and begin to peel some potatoes. When Bella returned, they would be boiling, and Momma would be peeling carrots, or halving a head of cabbage. They would eat very late, and Bella's stomach twisted all through the meal. Bella helped Momma clear.

“I'll wash the dishes tomorrow,” she'd say, and Momma would nod. They would go out to the toilet, and then into the bedroom. After Bella was undressed and in bed, Momma would turn off the gas lamp and undress in the dark, and lie down beside Bella in the big lumpy double bed. Exhausted, Momma would fall immediately asleep, breathing loudly with a liquid rasp from the tears in her throat. She never caressed the child beside her. She never even said good night.

T
HE STRANGE THING ABOUT
misery is how it expands to take up all available space. A toothache can make you want to die, and while you are suffering it, you have no patience with someone who tells you that things could be worse—that you could be in a concentration camp, say, watching your family die; or in a cell being tortured by one of the specialists so popular with governments these days. I have wished to die with stomach cramps, and seen my mother willing herself to die with sinus headaches. It is hard to measure pain, just as it is hard to measure happiness.

The only measure we have, I guess, is permanence. For it is true that the moment the sore tooth, the headache, the stomach, are relieved, they are also forgotten. Pain accompanied by fear—a heart attack, say—endures longer in the memory, and maybe the fear never fully vanishes. And there are pains that never end, that pounce brutally on the heart at each recall until one dies.

The shrinks believe that we can reanimate our times of severe pain and find comfort in the understanding sympathetic therapist. Perhaps. Priests also offer comfort of a sort; like therapy, religious relief is dependent upon faith. Yet those who suffer worst are usually faithless, for pain destroys faith. And hope.

My grandmother never fully recovered from her ordeal. And although her ordeal was utterly different, neither did my mother. And my sister and I spent most of our lives trying to escape or evade the consequences of those facts. Occasionally I read novels written by women of my own age who were raised in comfort with some affection, yet suffered wretched childhoods, felt forced into conformity, or pushed into invisibility, or in some way unappreciated. And by now I know that love can be the cruelest oppression. Still, I snort in contempt at the self-indulgence of these writers. I snort just like my mother, who cannot understand how anyone who has enough money to live without worry could succumb to depression, or even be unhappy. She should know better, but she scorns such people. And so do I. I have accepted my mother's standard: no one ever suffered more than she did. There is just enough truth in this idea to give it weight.

You say—but suffering is also determined by how you react to things. You say you know people who had terrible calamities in their lives, yet maintained their courage and spirit. Admirable yes, but tell me this: what is it that enables them to do that? A certain ambience in their childhoods, a genetic propensity, a gift of love made early enough to be engraved on the soul? Are we responsible if these things are absent in our lives? Can we be blamed, can we blame ourselves?

I remember, in my childhood, curling up in a tight knot on my bed, my whole body consumed in liquid fire of pain because I felt unloved. Yet in a way I was loved—love being another of those essential things that cannot be measured, another of the qualities discarded and dismissed by our age which trusts only that which can be measured. I
felt
unloved. How much more then did Bella feel unloved? And how much deeper the effects of lovelessness on her?

And how can I make sense of Frances, whom I remember as so gentle and loving, so entirely tender and giving? I feel I may not presume to judge my mother, but I have spent much of my life doing so. My mother could never even consider judging her own. How could she, given the facts? Yet toward Bella Frances was not tender or even gentle, but harsh and critical. Why was that? Did she see Bella as her other self, expect her to be adult and dependable and resourceful in equal measure to herself? Frances had been adult early—by thirteen certainly: she might have wondered why Bella was not. But then, Frances had had a loving mother, attention, had heard laughter in her early years—things she was not able to give her daughter, reserving them for her granddaughter, me, Anastasia. She must have loved Bella—why else would she have chosen her? Perhaps she loved her most, loved her as she loved herself, and therefore was hardest on her, in the same way she would be hard on herself. I know she loved her, I saw them together. But Bella never knew it.

Maybe for Frances it was the cost: how could this timid weepy child ever be good enough, ever be enough to justify Frances's suffering? For during those terrible years, Bella's survival was the entire apparent purpose of Frances's life. If this was what Frances felt, it was inherited, because that is what my mother felt too, about us, during the terrible years of our childhood. And I?

Still, I understood Frances. One night, after my second husband had left me, I had a few drinks too many and was lying in my room crying and Franny came in. She approached the bed tentatively, and I tried to stop sniffling, I sat up a little and blew my nose, and she sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on my back. She was little, she was six. She asked me why I was crying. Then the other kids came in too, and gathered around me on the bed. They wouldn't understand because I couldn't tell them the whole thing. So I said I was crying because I was angry with myself for fucking up my life, for marrying Toni, for getting myself stuck in poverty again.

And Franny, who didn't understand at all, just rubbed her little hand over mine, smoothing it as if that could smooth my spirit. Arden's eyes were bright: I knew that look: it meant she was trying to transfer some of her intense energy, her fervor, to me in my depression. I knew the look because I'd given it, often enough, to my own mother She said, “But Mom, if you hadn't married Toni, you wouldn't have Franny.”

I kept my mouth shut. What could I say? That's exactly the point? I mumbled something.

Billy was farthest from me, at the foot of the bed, looking down at the floor. His new deep voice rumbled incoherently, and I had to ask him to repeat what he'd said.

“I asked you if you felt that way about Dad. Our father. Bradley.”

I was angry enough to feel it was essential to be honest. “Well, yes, to tell the truth.”

“But if you hadn't married him, you wouldn't have had us,” he went on in a drone, raising his head to look at me.

I sat up, my head hot with fury. “So what?” I cried. “If I hadn't had you, if I'd married somebody else, I'd have had other children! I'd have loved them just as much!”

Their faces paled. They stared at me. Inconceivable, it was inconceivable that I could have said that, that I could even imagine loving some other hypothetical children as much as I loved them, that they were not loved because of their personal qualities, their specialness, their wonderfulness. I leaned back, a bit regretful. “I wouldn't have known you, see?”

They saw. They nodded solemnly. They were even saintly, they didn't storm off to their rooms and sulk, but offered me tea and some music, both of which I swiftly accepted. They put on my music, not theirs—one of the late quartets, which did nothing for my mood. But I could only smile my appreciation, as radiantly as I could manage. After all, they were proving that I was wrong, weren't they? I had to be wrong.

Mother love. There is supposed to be no room in it for coldness of heart, for a private cell for oneself, with doors that sometimes clank shut. And the more you love your children, the more shocked they are to discover that you possess a single strand of ambivalent—or negative—feeling. Insatiable for this love we expect to be absolute, we cannot forgive its mere humanness. Well, I thought, that's one fault I don't have. I'd long accepted the limitations of my mother's feelings for me. I was adult.

Fathers aren't subject to such demands. They are allowed to be almost anything, and if they give any love at all, kids feel grateful. Goddamned unfair. Still, fathers are dismissed in a way mothers aren't: they aren't given the same importance. But they can do just as much harm. Look at Bella.

If Bella felt her mother did not care about her, what on earth did she feel about her father? It was probably fortunate in some ways for his children that he died as young as he did, before he could fuck them up even more. The damage he did was mainly to Bella and Wally—Eddie had a kind of imperviousness, and Euga was too young to see. Then too, it was Bella and Wally who resembled him—the thin face, the nervous gestures. For Bella, Michael Brez would stand forever as her image of what men were. Cruel and capricious and unpredictable and utterly selfish; yet brilliant, dashing, popular, charming, and able to make money, able to take care of a family in a way a mother could not, no woman could. Men could be dangerous, treacherous, and perhaps even brutal, but you needed a man absolutely. I remember when I was divorced and had the two kids—before Franny was born—and living from hand to mouth, which was the way I spent most of my life, and my mother would have nightmares every night. She told me she would dream that the kids and I were living in a Volkswagen bus. This terrified her, and she urged me to get married again. It wasn't that she thought much of the man I was seeing, only that he had a good job and was a man. You get one, you keep him, and you see to it that he stays in his place. For my mother, that was the only solution.

A man had nothing to give a woman except economic security. From a man you would not get friendship or understanding or sympathy. Sexual pleasure—well, that faded fast. You got support and legitimacy for your children, and you had to make sure your man didn't try to assert himself in other ways. If he did and you allowed it—you were finished, you'd be subject to a tyrannical brute for the rest of your life, and your children too. But you could not live without one.

My mother taught me these lessons early—she started when I was nine years old.

I
F MY MOTHER BEGAN
to teach me about men when I was nine, she also taught me about the nature of women—but her lesson expurgated much. I knew nothing about Grandma's crying, about her treatment of my mother, until I was over forty, and she nearly seventy. We were sitting, as usual, in the little side room she called the porch, smoking and drinking, the street outside quiet and dark except for the streetlights, the towel already stuffed under my father's door. She had begun again the litany I had heard so often.

“My father died when I was nine years old. I have been cooking since I was nine, I had to go all the way into Jewtown—it was so terrifying….” She is still composed. Her voice has not broken with tears, she is still speaking in adult rhythms. I listen, as always, but tonight my own depression is severe, and I cannot tell her about it. This makes me edgy. I understand for the first time that in our relationship there is room only for one history, one truth—hers. I am permitted only to be Anastasia as she demands Anastasia be. So I challenge her a little.

“But how did you come to do it at all? I mean, what gave you the idea, and how did you do it? Where did you get the money for the market, how did you know how to cook?”

So she told me about the crying, and as she does, she cries herself, in great wrenching sobs, her fist at her forehead. “Tearing me to pieces, to pieces, I wished she'd hit me!”

Bella sat in the apartment daydreaming about Anastasia, and it got dark, and Momma came in and growled at her, and she leaped up and turned up the lights, and ran to Momma and hugged her around her hips and said, “Hello, Momma, I was waiting for you.”

And Frances patted her head gently, lifelessly, and went toward the stove.

But Bella ran ahead of her. “Sit down, Momma, I'll make your coffee, you must be tired.”

And Frances sighed, and lowered herself into a chair. But Bella wasn't thinking about Momma's tiredness, she had no conception of what her mother felt. She was nine, and Momma was an absolute, like the North Pole, and whatever she was or did or said created the world Bella lived in, a world she couldn't attempt to explain or understand. But the thought had entered her mind that if when Momma came home at night, the lights were on and her coffee ready, she might be less unhappy. And then things might be a little better for her, Bella.

She piled wood in the box and lighted the thinner sticks. She filled the kettle and put it on the stove. She measured coffee into the old tin pot the way she'd seen Momma do it.