Her Mother's Daughter (22 page)

She was clearing her part of the table, preparing to leave, when Mr. Ostrovsky came out of the office. His face was pink, and sweaty, and she felt sorry for him and she tried to paste a smile on her face.

“So you want to be an interior decorator, Belle, huh? So okay, next Monday, you start. My wife says okay.”

She arrived at her usual time—eight o'clock—on Monday morning, although the salon did not open until ten. She had decided to wear her old black satin. It was still good, because she had not worn it much in the six years she'd had it, and she wanted to look as much like Madame as she could. And she had applied—very delicately—eyebrow pencil and powder bought at Woolworth's on Saturday in excited adventurousness. She waited until she got to work to apply the makeup, so Momma wouldn't see it. She had also bought a pale pink lipstick, and she traced it lightly against her lips. She squeezed her lips together: the paint was hardly noticeable. Then she went to the door of the salon and stood there, waiting for Madame to arrive. Her friends were already at work on the lampshades, and kept smiling at her over their shoulders, and leaning over to whisper to each other. They all had told her she looked beautiful, and as she gazed at them, she felt sorry she was leaving them. She loved them.

Madame didn't arrive until close to nine, and didn't notice Belle, who was now standing inside the salon gazing at some lace-trimmed satin pillows Madame had recently bought. She came striding in and glared at Arthur, saying, “Why wasn't that bench moved! I told you on Saturday to change that arrangement!”

Arthur jumped. “Yes, Madame, I was just wondering if you wanted the mirror on this wall or that…” he began apologetically.

“That wall, of course. No, no,” she said irritably as Arthur moved a low carved bench to one side, “not like that.” She pointed: “I want that chaise here, and the small table there, with the bench alongside the chaise.”

Belle saw immediately the effect Madame wanted, and stepped forward shyly. “I could help,” she offered, starting to move the chaise.

Madame looked at her briefly, questioningly. “Oh, yes, Isabelle, isn't it?” Then she turned back to Arthur. “NO, you idiot! This way!” As Arthur moved the heavy piece, Madame gave each piece a twist, so that the arrangement had a certain flair. I knew that, Belle thought, her heart warming. Maybe I can do this. Then Madame tossed a paisley shawl over the back of the chaise. The effect was wonderful. Madame turned and started for her office, then looked back. “Come with me, Isabelle.”

Belle followed Madame into the office, a place she had never entered. It had a Louis Quinze desk and chair, and ugly metal file cabinets all around the walls. The desk was heaped with papers and fabric samples. Madame went through the office into the stockroom and beckoned Belle. “These packages have to be delivered this morning and when you are through, go over to Acme and pick up the fabric I've put a rush on. And take trolleys or subways, no taxis, you hear? I'm not paying for taxis! Get going!”

Belle stared at her. It took a few minutes before she comprehended what she was supposed to do. Then obediently she accepted the packages and checked the addresses, and found out where Acme was, and set off, the boxes stuffed in a shopping bag. And as she walked the many blocks to the first spot, something inside her was laughing and crying at the same time: a messenger girl! That's what she was to be! Interior decorator, hah!

There was much excitement at home these days. It was Eddie's idea, as usual. They had over five hundred dollars in the bank now, and he said that was enough to buy a house. They had lived long enough in apartments over stores, in slums. They would have a regular house with a garden, and Momma would stay home and take it easy, it was about time. And they would have a regular Momma to cook and do laundry and clean for them, and they could invite friends to the house.

Only Momma was less than enthusiastic about this plan, but she bowed to it as she bowed to everything her children did these days. So on Sundays, the brothers and sisters traveled by trolley out to Queens, where they looked at houses, and at last bought one, on Manse Street in Forest Hills. It had a living room, dining room, and a kitchen, with a pantry and a back door and a little deck outside, and a nice garden in back, and a garage. Upstairs there were three bedrooms and a bathroom.

It was just beginning to be summer when they moved in, and Momma seemed happy because she had a garden for the first time since she left Poland. If she missed going to work, or seeing her Polish friends, she said nothing. If she did not enjoy being a servant to her children, she said nothing about that either. But she subsided into an even deeper sadness, and became indifferent to her appearance. Not that Momma had ever dolled herself up. But now she let her hair hang in wisps when it slipped out of the bun; she wore the same housedress for days without washing it; and she wore always a long-sleeved ugly brown sweater with a great hole at the elbow. She walked many blocks to the markets in which no one spoke Polish; she cooked huge meals for her big family; she washed and starched and ironed and mended. Occasionally, she cleaned the house. Otherwise, she sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee.

Belle had savings of her own, and she immediately put a down payment on a piano, an old upright; and signed up to take piano lessons. She could bring her friends home now, although she was a little ashamed of Momma, with that big hole in her sweater, and her teeth gone, and her…well, she had a little odor. Still, it was the best time of Belle's life, and she lived in a constant state of excitement. All of the children had friends, and the house was crowded with visitors on weekends. Stanley Berger knew how to play piano, and the boys would bring out the mandolin and banjo and the whole crowd would sing. Now when Belle went into Woolworth's, she would buy a new folio of sheet music, the latest hit. Momma fried huge trays of
chruściki
for them, or coffee cakes, and they drank coffee, and they smoked cigarettes. Belle even smoked right in front of Momma.

Momma insisted that the girls take the big bright front bedroom, and the old double bed was moved in there. They bought Momma a used but still good mattress and springs, and Momma slept alone in the narrow dark middle bedroom. The boys' two beds were moved into the back bedroom, which was fair-sized and had light, if not as much as the front one. There were real closets in this house, and a gas stove, and a glass-fronted china cabinet built right into the dining room wall. At first the house looked sparsely furnished, but every week Eddie came home with something new—a rug he had bought at an auction (How did he do that? Belle wondered. How did he
know
to do that?), a lamp, a china tea set.

And in her new happiness, Belle had the confidence to leave Ostrovsky's and get another job. She found one with an architect, but there wasn't that much to do. There were just the two of them in the office, and Belle typed and answered the telephone, but the architect himself didn't seem to have much to do. And every time he passed her, he put his hand on her shoulder or arm, and she would pull away and look at him, but he'd turn his face away. After three months, he fired her.

So she went to Wall Street and got a job decoding secret messages sent from one bank to another. This job paid fairly well, and it was a respectable job, but it was horribly tedious, because even after Belle had decoded the messages she couldn't understand them. She remembered the beauty of the interior decorating shop with longing; and her treatment by Madame with bitterness, and as she thought about all of it, she realized what she wanted to be. In the fall of 1926, Belle enrolled in Pratt Institute to study art.

W
HEN I WAS LITTLE
and asked my mother about her life, it was these years at Manse Street that she concentrated on: the time when she had many friends, when the house was filled with activity. She talked lovingly of her friends, who were unvaryingly beautiful, intelligent, and talented. Gertrude was somewhat stinted in these accounts—she was the loyal old friend. But Adele, Miss Poland of 1927, was the most beautiful girl in Brooklyn; and Mala Megerian, whom she met in art school, was her introduction to an exotic and rarefied world. Mala, a gorgeous Syrian, came from a wealthy family who lived in a house furnished with Middle Eastern antiques and art, and when Belle visited, “everyone there was a doctor.” “Everyone?” I asked, since for me everyone included women. “Everyone,” she assured me. They were not all medical doctors, although there were a couple of those, but truly educated men, with Ph.D's. “Oh! The men!” I exclaimed. She didn't notice.

I even met these old friends, who visited my mother occasionally in my childhood, and they were indeed the rare creatures she had described. Even Gertrude, who was as horse-faced and homely as ever, having, when I met her, a bit of a mustache, and who still lived with her sister and mother in an ornately furnished apartment in Brooklyn, as spirited and jolly in her forties as she had been earlier.

It was not until, claiming illness so I could stay home from school, and burrowing around in her vanity, I found the wonderful boxes and jars of makeup that she told me she'd been a member of a drama group. I loved this stuff—greasy deep purple and grey and green eye shadows, pink and crimson rouges in little pots, a dried-up mascara, and heavy black eyebrow pencils—and would occasionally resort to it at times of boredom, making my face over into a new face, wishing I could make it over even more. Then she showed me the photographs of her drama group—a bunch of arty types posed in a wonderful room with beaded curtains and paisley throws, some holding cigarettes, their heads all pointed upward so the fine line of chin and neck would be captured in the picture. I could hardly recognize my mother, she looked so young and glamorous. I was deeply impressed, but my mother, oddly, made nothing of it. “It was nothing really. I didn't act, I couldn't act. They were all actors, not me. I lost touch with them after I got married.”

It was hard for me to connect this mother I knew, with her three cotton housedresses and her one good dress, a rayon print, this mother I saw at the stove, at the washboard, hanging clothes on the line, with the glamorous scene of the picture. Then I began to rummage in the huge old trunk that was kept in the closet I shared with my sister—the only one big enough to hold it. And I found a violin (“Oh, yes, I wanted so badly to play the violin. I took lessons. I took piano lessons too. But I had no talent. All I had was dreams”), and a portfolio of her sketches from art school, and a stack of tiny postcards and some books of photographs. These fascinated me, because the photographs were all of naked women posing among trees and flowers; and the postcards were of paintings. There were several hundred of them, all, I knew only later, of Impressionists, except for a few Turners. I used to pore over these—the photographs and the postcards—for hours, and pinned several of the cards up on the walls of my room. My favorites were Corot and Turner, and I would study the pictures minutely. They were hard to see, since they were only about two-by-three-inch reproductions, but they were
MINE,
I insisted, from my first glimpse of them. I studied the sketches too; they were all life studies of nudes, and I thought they were wonderful. But my mother dismissed those too.

“They're not good. I should throw them away. I had no talent.”

I clutched them. “Don't throw them away!” I cried.

She didn't, and forty years later, as my parents are about to move from their house to a new one on the water, she finds them in the attic. Joy and I and our children clamor to see them and reluctantly, but with a little pride, she brings them down. I examine them. They
are
good, I wasn't wrong. They are not anatomically perfect, she needed more training, but they have something—an almost magical quality, as if the bodies were not flesh and bone but light, spirit. I tell her so.

She shrugs. “Well, I spent three years in art school, and not one teacher ever told me I was good.”

“You were a girl,” Arden pipes up. “Art teachers never praise girls. Only boys.”

My mother gazes at her. “Is that true?” she asks me.

I solemnly assure her it is, although in fact I have no idea. But Arden's best friend is a painter who has suffered through many art schools, and she begins to recount Irena's story. My mother's attention drifts. This is all too late for her. She turns to Arden and Billy. “I received my diploma from Pratt just before your mother was born. I walked up on the stage pregnant. I was sure she would be an artist,” she concludes regretfully.

“Well, she is!” Billy announces fiercely.

My mother shrugs. “Oh, photography…”

But when Mommy was not talking about her wonderful friends and her fun-filled life, she was talking about the other part. It began, “My father died when I was nine years old.” I could not connect these two parts, nor did I perceive the gap between them until I was older, an adolescent. By then, some of the gap had been filled in with “I only went to the sixth grade,” “I went to work in a factory when I was fourteen,” and “I was sent home from school because I couldn't speak English.” There was a particularly cruel story that I mulled over night after night in bed, vowing to get revenge when I grew up. In it, my mother was assigned in fifth grade to copy some maps from her geography textbook. Unsure of herself, she made many trials, and did painstaking sketches and finally produced maps she thought might pass. She handed them in the next day, and when the teacher saw them, she cried out, “You traced these!” and tore them into shreds. My timid mother was unable to protest, and was merely heartbroken. I pictured scene after scene: I would find this teacher, track her down, and walk into her classroom and slap her face and say “That's for what you did to my mother!” Or I would humiliate her in front of her class. This story bothered me for more than a decade, and I was nearly grown when I finally discarded the hope of punishing the villain.