Her Mother's Daughter (32 page)

Would not be consoled, could not be consoled, Ed thought, sitting beside the bed on which Belle lay sobbing, her face and shoulders turned away from him. Never been right since…He took off his glasses and put his head in his hands. He was belching continually, but very softly. He pulled his head up suddenly, startled to realize that his hands were wet. He pulled his clean handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his glasses thoroughly; then he wiped his face and hands and put his glasses back on. Belle's sobs were coming at longer intervals now. He continued to sit there, his body bowed forward, his hands loosely clasped between his knees, waiting.

Belle tried weakly to sit up and Ed moved swiftly to help her. He pulled her up and put the pillows behind her.

“Cigarette,” she said in a small voice.

He glanced around, looking for the Luckies, and pulled one out and put it between her lips. Then he lighted it for her. She inhaled deeply, her body still shuddering with unvoiced sobs.

“Did you go to the doctor?”

She nodded.

“What did he say?”

“There's nothing more he can do for me!” she said in a tragic rush, as if she were announcing her death.

Ed put his fingers in his thick hair and began to shake it. He watched the white flakes of dandruff flurry through the air and sink to the floor.

“He can't give you a stronger dose of luminal?” he ventured after a time.

“No!” She turned on him in a rage, as if his attempt to find a solution made everything worse. “It's as strong as he can make it,” she added, her throat thick with tears, her tone injured. “The only thing left is morphine. But he says that if I take that I'll become an addict.”

He sat. It was impossible to know if he had heard her or understood her. He waited.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Belle?” he asked solicitously.

She smiled a little. “That would be nice, Eddy.”

He rose heavily and left the room. Belle glanced over at the crib: empty. Anastasia was probably with Momma. Morphine. She imagined spinning rainbow colors, sleep, rest, the end of pain. It drew her, but—to become a drug addict! If she were going to do that, to blot everything out, she might as well kill herself.

She heard Ed's step on the wooden stairs, heavy, tired. Worked two jobs every day and every night came home to her like this. He handed her the cup and saucer, and she smiled at him. “Thank you, Eddy.”

His voice was rich with gratitude. “Sure, Belle.” He wanted to reach out and touch her head, caress her, just lightly, but he did not dare.

“You should go to bed, Eddy, you're tired.”

“Yes,” he sighed. He stood up and began to undress, and as he did so, she rose from the bed and put her wrapper on. For the first time, exasperation crept into his voice. “What are you doing now?”

“I have to check on Anastasia.”

“She's all right! She's in bed with your mother!”

“I'll just see that she's all right. And I have to go to the bathroom. I'll be right back.”

He sighed in protest, and got into the bed sulkily, but in seconds sleep like an undertow had pulled him into blackness.

The house was dark, everyone was sleeping. Belle carried her teacup into the kitchen, then walked through the dark rooms to the little front porch, and sat on the window seat. She lighted a cigarette.

Eddy was good, she knew he was good. Only he was not enough, somehow….

She smoked.

Besides, all he cared about was sex. He didn't even care what he ate as long as his belly was full. He couldn't talk. He didn't like Anastasia, he paid no attention to her at all. But at least he wasn't like Poppa.

Sex. She hated sex!

Nothing left but morphine. No pleasure in her life now that Elvira was gone. Nothing but day-to-day tedium. But other women didn't seem to mind it. What was the matter with her, that she was so dissatisfied? She was useless, even to herself, worthless, stupid, always had been. She was a nothing, and she had so wanted to be something. Now never. All her dreams.

Her eyes filled with tears again, and as the feeling of pain began to creep around from her heart into her limbs, she wondered how anyone could cry so much, how it was physically possible to have that many tears inside you.

Better to die than become a drug addict. But what else was there? Only this intolerable unending pain. Maybe she could start over: get pregnant again, have another baby, accept it this time, welcome it, accept her life. Maybe she could get strong that way.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she was sobbing again. It surprised her, took her, as if she stood outside watching herself dissolve. Through her mind ran the few jewels she had culled from her twenty-nine years: the teacher saying she was lovely, Adele telling her she had artistic hands, the architect telling her she had real class, Elvira praising her clothes. Countered with these was a running voice, stupid, useless, you can't come to school you don't speak English you can't come to school like that you go home now and have your mother comb your hair comb my flaxen locks my hair my hair my mother never combed my hair

Ed stood beside her.

She looked up at him apologetically. “I can't help it, Eddy, I can't help it!” she sobbed.

“Come to bed, Belle,” he said kindly, tiredly.

She allowed him to help her up. She blew her nose and stuffed the handkerchief in the pocket of her wrapper. She held up her head.

“I'm not going to take morphine. I'm going to have another baby. It isn't good for Anastasia to be an only child.”

“Sure, Belle,” he said. “Whatever you want.”

At least one of her children was wanted. None of mine was, really; the first two were accidents. I was just beginning to think that Arden was old enough at nine months to sit in a playpen in the crowded backroom of Minetta's shop so I could work with him a few afternoons a week, when I discovered I was pregnant again. Brad was still using condoms because I was so ill at ease with the diaphragm I'd gotten after Arden was born, and god knows we had sex infrequently enough, but it happened just the same. The thing is that although Brad fully accepted the first pregnancy, knowing how rapaciously we'd reached for each other in those days, this time he felt suspicious and tricked, as if I'd either put something over on him or the baby wasn't his at all. This indifference was indicative of what had happened to us in less than a year of marriage.

Brad rarely sold a piece of property and if the agency had not belonged to his father, he would have been fired long ago. “Well, of course,” I'd say to him when he came home depressed and grey-faced. “You weren't cut out to be a salesman, you were supposed to be a musician.”

He'd just look out the window. “Cut it out, will you, Stahz?” He'd fiddle with his spoon, stirring and restirring the sugar he'd begun to take in coffee.

I knew he felt like a failure, and I knew my proper wifely office was to support and encourage him. But how can you encourage someone you love to go on doing something that makes them miserable and is all wrong for them? I couldn't bring myself to suggest that in time, if he watched his father, he'd learn the skill of selling. So I'd go maundering on about music and painting and our old dreams and how we could still do it, how all he had to do was pick up the phone, the guys still remembered him, he could pick up a few gigs, I'd get a part-time job, we'd get by. He'd sit there at the table in our one room staring at the coffee cup and acting as if I were not there until finally he'd get up in a rush and sweep out—where? There was nowhere for him to go. After a while, I'd go downstairs and peer out the Charleses' front windows and see him sitting on the steps of their front porch, his head in his hands. And my heart would feel as if it were breaking. At first I'd go out and sit beside him, put my arm around him. Just sit there, say nothing. And after a while we'd both get up and go back upstairs to Arden's wailing—she was not used to being left alone in a playpen. But at some point, he'd pull away from me when I went out and embraced him, and sit inches away, miles away it might as well have been. So I stopped going out.

And then he sold a big parcel, an estate with tennis courts and swimming pool and a solarium, and made enough on it to keep us for a year. That was the turning point, because that sale raised his confidence and made him beam and shake hands and announce his name with the same hearty vapidity as his father. Success made him a success. And just in time, he announced to me cheerily, because the second baby was due soon and we had to get out of this dump. I hadn't much liked the apartment until he started to call it a dump, and then I found myself defending it rather fiercely—it was homey and cute, and we'd…well I couldn't bring myself to say we'd been happy in it, but it had been our first home. We found another apartment in East Rockaway, with two bedrooms, and rented it for a sum we could afford—sixty dollars a month, I think. Hard to remember things like that, although my mother remembers every dollar of rent, electricity, coal, and food that she spent in her early married life. We collected furniture from more attics, and moved a month before Billy was born. But now I was really stuck, because it was miles to the nearest store, and I couldn't go anywhere without a car. And of course Brad took the car his father had finally given him, writing it off on his taxes, took it every day, because now he never took a day off even though he was allowed to. And he began to take law courses at night at a local college, because he wanted, he said, to become a tycoon. A tycoon! My flaky lover? Ah well, he wasn't that anymore. Before we moved, I wheeled Arden over to Jimmy Minetta's to say good-bye, my stomach making it hard for me to reach the handle of the carriage. As we hugged and Jimmy wished me all kinds of happiness—he thought having babies made women happy—I suddenly found myself crying, sobbing right out loud, scaring poor Jimmy out of his wits. He sat me down and hauled out the dust-covered bottle of bourbon that he had stashed away in the cabinet where he kept developing fluid, and poured me a glass. I couldn't drink it, though, nor could I explain why I was crying, me the cheerful joker, the good pal, the girl who was one of the boys. I finally blurted out something about missing him and the shop and all the guys which Jimmy could accept, although he looked puzzled by it. And he told me I could come back to work for him anytime, just as soon as my kids were on their feet—literally, I guess.

But I knew I'd never go back there. I couldn't see much, but I could see far enough ahead to know that having one kid is one thing and having two is three other things. I could foresee grey years of piles of laundry and dirty dishes, crying squabbling kids, hours in the supermarket, my cart piled high with magnum boxes of detergents, railroad-car-sized loaves of the gluey white bread Brad and the kids liked, and half-gallon bottles of milk. And it occurred to me that this must be how Brad had felt, a couple of years back, when the iron doors started to swing shut on him, and life constricted to a dreary pattern of the known, the preordained. And my heart ached, for him and for me, two children, I still felt—we were still only twenty and twenty-one—caught in a cosmic plan—that's how it seemed then—from which thought of escape was only a delusion.

I sniffled all the way home, but after that I never cried again. Not, anyway, until years later, when there didn't seem to be much reason for crying. Who knew then that you store up tears you fail to shed? I went home, and two days later we moved, and a month later Billy was born, and then it all came true, the nightmare I had foreseen, the dreary round of days. I sank so far in it that I forgot even the notion of escape, forgot that I had any existence other than mother, cook, and bottlewasher, or that life lived according to a different plan was even possible.

For Belle, having another child was to be the escape from her round of tears and luminal; she vowed to give up the drug the day she knew she was pregnant—but perhaps because of the luminal, she didn't get pregnant, and continued to take the drug. So the events of the household those turbulent years of 1932–1933 happened far away from her, out there in the grey whirl of other people's lives. Eddie married Martha—Belle does not recall the wedding—and they moved into the house on Manse Street. Momma insisted on giving them the bright big front bedroom. Jean was sent to share Wally's room, which embarrassed her, and Momma herself would sleep downstairs on the old lumpy couch that had seen so much of this family's life. This event pierced Belle's consciousness and outraged her. She took all the money she had managed to save and went out and bought a new firm daybed for Momma to sleep on. Eddie and Martha hardly noticed. Martha, like Jill before her, treated Momma as a servant, a role Momma was always willing to fill, but bitterness rose in Belle and she glared at Martha with hatred. The anger felt good, pumping through the veins and arteries, creating energy, and she gave up the luminal; a few months later she was pregnant, and her biggest worry was how four of them would manage in the narrow little room they occupied.

As it turned out, that was an unnecessary worry. Jean and Eric married in the spring of 1933, Eric having in so short a time restored his savings, and they moved to a fine apartment they had furnished with all new things. Belle does not remember their wedding or the apartment, although Anastasia recalls a chaise lounge, a thing she had never seen before, that stood in Jean's new bedroom. It was covered in mauve satin, and had a matching satin cushion against its one arm, with a white angora cat sitting against it. Anastasia thought it the most beautiful piece of furniture she had ever seen although she did not understand why the cat was there. Belle began a new plan: she wanted to ask Wally to take the dark middle room and to move with Ed to his room, the one with two beds and room for a chest of drawers. She knew Wally would agree. But in June, Eddie Brez announced his printing company was moving to Massachusetts, and that he, promoted to manager, would have to move. The dinner table fell silent at the news: no one said anything, but they all knew that Eddie really maintained the house, that what Wally and Ed Dabrowski earned could not support it. But once informed, Eric stepped in as rescuer. He would take on the mortgage payments, he would take over the house—and Momma. But Wally, Belle, Ed, and Anastasia would have to move out. Again there was silence. They were too embarrassed even to look at each other, sitting in the familiar living room with its shabby furniture, the home they had all worked for, the house that was their visible proof of escape from the slums.