Her Mother's Daughter (49 page)

We had one major fight in those last years we were together. Brad wanted to show off his fancy house, and decided we should give a big dinner party. I nearly collapsed. It wasn't just that I was a lousy cook, and didn't want to have to cook a big dinner for a lot of people, but I knew we didn't have the equipment, the stuff my mother had—silverware, crystal, good dishes, candlesticks, whatever. The way we'd married had assured our receiving few wedding gifts, and we hadn't bought such things since. Brad said we'd buy them. I sat down on the bottom step of the big (now carpeted) staircase that wound through the center hall of our (now fancy) house, and howled.

“I can't! I can't! Don't you see, Brad, that you're trying to force me to be someone I can't be and don't want to be!”

“Yes,” he said thin-lipped, “I see you're still a child and refuse to grow up. You think if you wear shorts and my old shirts and no makeup and go around looking thirteen, no one will expect anything of you.” He started to walk away, then whirled around. “Even pigtails, for godsakes! Last night when I came home, you had your hair in a pigtail!”

“A braid,” I said with dignity.

“I don't have a wife, I have an overgrown child! Forget it, forget it! I'll take care of it myself!”

He did too. He borrowed everything we needed from his mother, who was thrilled to see things she'd had stuffing the closets all these years getting some use. She gave us one of her many sets of dishes, half her crystal, half her yellowed table linens, and the antique silver-plated flatware that had belonged to her great-aunt Florence. He hired a cook and planned the menu with her. He browbeat me and dragged me to Lord & Taylor's in Garden City and bought me a long tubular gown in a deep purple, and gold shoes, and gold earrings.

I looked at myself in the mirror the night of the dinner party, and it occurred to me that I looked nice—my skinny small-breasted body looked glamorous in that kind of dress. But I didn't know who I was. I looked like one of my paper dolls from childhood—I'd even put on eye makeup and lipstick for the occasion. Still, I didn't know how a person who looked like that would act, and I was terrified.

I think I did not acquit myself too well, but Brad made up for it in a heartiness and heavy drinking that astonished me. The men he'd invited acted the same way, and they at least liked me, kept calling me “little honey” and one of them even patted my behind. I almost slugged him, but Brad caught my arm. I did less well with the women, who were a tough breed, heavy drinkers like their men, tanned, slim, soignée (except for a couple of motherly ones), who talked about tennis and servants and vacations at Biscayne Bay. I sat back, giggling from my two glasses of wine, thinking, Well, my dear, we have servants too, because we did—that night.

Brad never proposed a dinner party again, though, in the years we had left to us. He stayed out more and more, and at some point I realized there was another woman, and I let that be, figuring that was my solution. As it was.

In 1940, Ed was promoted. He was called “Special Tester,” and concentrated on movie houses and theaters which were beginning to install air conditioning. Brooklyn Edison did not know how to bill for its huge usages of electricity, and it was Ed's job to work out a system. He got a raise to forty-five dollars a week. Part of the reason he was given this promotion was that he had taken a correspondence course in 1938–39, from an air-conditioning school in Chicago. Ed told Belle someday air-conditioning would be a big thing and that the course was worth the expense. In 1941, he was raised to forty-eight dollars a week. And then, war broke out.

It was easy to be cynical about the causes of war in those days, for war was the solution to the Depression: two years before there had been no money, men were out of work, or worked for the WPA, or were, they say, selling apples on the street. I never saw that myself. Then, suddenly, money is pumped into the economy, disposable money, for weapons are a unique commodity—they are made to be destroyed without any intervening usefulness. I mean, a car or a washing machine also breaks down and has to be discarded after some years, but in the meantime, it has provided some service. Weapons don't. Their use
is
their destruction.

Anyway, suddenly men and even women were in demand, and earning good wages. Ed went to the Stevens War Industries School for six months, finishing in the spring of 1942, and under Belle's continual prodding, found a new job with Control Instruments as an inspector of electrical and mechanical elements. He was hired at $56 a week, a huge raise for him, but because he also often worked overtime, he started to bring home almost $100 some weeks. Belle put the money in the bank. The only thing she bought was a refrigerator, because she reasoned that if the war lasted a long time, she might not be able to get one. And Ed bought a car for $50, a long low 1928 Graham-Paige, once a luxury car but long out of date. Under his hands, it ran like a sleek new limousine.

With the birth of her third child, Jean stopped working, and now that Jean was home, Frances could come to visit Belle. She would stay for four or five days, and although Anastasia fervently wished to give her her bed, she insisted on sleeping on the couch. While she was there, she would bake: she made peach cake and apple cake, and “snails” made of raisins, cinnamon, and nuts. She made doughnuts, laying them out on brown paper that covered every surface in the house. She make babka and
chruściki
and poppy seed cake. She made only yeast cakes and would not use baking powder.

Sometimes she would make clothes for Anastasia and Joy—suits or coats. Anastasia hated that because she had to stand still for such a long time while Grandma fitted and pinned. Everything was made of fine wools that Mommy bought as remnants, and everything was lined in rayon. Every buttonhole and lapel was carefully done by hand.

Anastasia loved Grandma and was happy when she came, but she also felt guilty during these visits. Because she could not talk with Grandma. Grandma spoke Polish to Mommy, but English to the children. But she didn't understand anything about a child's life, and Anastasia didn't understand anything about hers. She would sit beside her grandmother, very close, and Grandma would caress her and say
“moja kochana,”
but after a while, Anastasia would feel restless and want to go and read or draw or play the piano. She would force herself to remain for a while, but it was boring. And Grandma had a funny smell, musty: as if when people grew old they, like houses, corroded and smelled of damp rot.

One time when Grandma was visiting, Mommy grew worried about her. She told Frances that she had to take Joy to the doctor, and asked her to go along. They had a new doctor now. Anastasia did not know what had happened to Dr. MacVeaney, but the new doctor lived only eight blocks away. So Frances went with them, and when they arrived at his office, Belle went in and asked him to examine her mother. Then she went to Frances and asked her to come in.

Frances wouldn't move. She was shocked. “What, Bella!” she exclaimed. She had never been to a doctor in her life. But Belle insisted, and the old woman—she was sixty-one—went in. The doctor examined her and pronounced her old and rheumatic. Belle gave him two dollars: she had a little money now, and could spare it. That was all.

But Belle felt her mother was dying. And whenever she came after that, Belle would take her by bus to Jamaica, to wander through the stores, ending at Woolworth's lunch counter. There she would buy Frances a pastrami or corned beef sandwich. Such days were a dazzling treat for Frances, who smiled broadly with happiness. She had never eaten out before. A sandwich at the counter of Woolworth's with her daughter was the greatest luxury she ever experienced.

When my mother was seventy-seven, I took a trip with her and my father to Florida. They had often driven down; I had not been there. But I had some money that year from a commission and I flew down and rented a car, and took rooms in a hotel in Palm Beach. It was an old shabby place, but very expensive: I thought they might enjoy it because they always stayed in motels. But one evening, the elevator was out of order, and we had to walk the two flights up to our rooms. When we reached the landing, I looked at my mother. She was wheezing and lowing, like a pigeon. I said,

“Mom, you aren't feeling well.”

She gave me a long meaningful look.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

She shook her head.

“You have to see a doctor.”

“No, Anastasia,” she said, with tears rising in her throat.

“Why?” I was surprised. Mother haunted doctors' offices; she went at the slightest symptom, and was well-known to the friendly family physician who lived around the corner from their house.

She just shook her head, hard. My father was still parking the car. I gazed at her, thinking.

“You think you have cancer,” I concluded.

Her face scrunched up with tears.

“You don't,” I pronounced. I don't know where I get my gall. “You have emphysema.”

She raised her head haughtily. I knew she would fight my diagnosis. It was cancer. She'd decided she had cancer several times before.

“Will you go? Emphysema is incurable, but it doesn't kill you right away. If you stop smoking, you can live many more years.”

She turned her head away from me.

“If I make the appointment, will you go?”

She bit her lip, tears in her eyes. She nodded. Then she turned back to me. “But I don't want to know….”

“You mean, if it's cancer, you don't want to know.”

She nodded.

“All right, I promise. If it's cancer, you won't be told. But you will go?”

She nodded. I laid my hand on her arm. She pulled away from me and fled—as fast as her tottering uncertain walk could take her—down the hall to her room. “Now just leave me alone, will you! Just leave me alone!” She disappeared into their room as my father appeared. He raised his eyebrows. “The lady went to bed?”

“Yes. Do you want to go for a walk?” My father and I were always tired at night from our days of physical restraint—we mostly sat, and when we walked, we had to walk very slowly with my mother, so we took brisk walks in the evenings, after she was in bed.

“Yes,” he smiled. “But first I have to see that my lady is all right.”

I followed him into their room. Mother was sitting in a chair by the window, smoking. “Would you like a drink, Belle?” my father asked solicitously. She nodded.

He went into the bathroom for a glass, and poured her some scotch from the bottle they carried with them. Then he added water.

“Dad and I are going for a walk,” I said.

She nodded. She wouldn't look at me.

On our walk, I told my father what I thought, and that I would make an appointment with an excellent doctor in the city. He listened, sighed, said nothing. Then, “Oh, I hope not,” he moaned, and began to belch.

“Well, I think it's only emphysema, Dad, which is serious, but not immediately life-threatening. Haven't you noticed how she sounds when she walks? That cooing noise.”

Well, he hadn't. Or had blotted it out. Who knows? We kept walking in silence punctuated only by his belches, frequent and deep, the only sign my father ever gave of emotional upset.

I
WATCHED MY CHILDREN
playing, saw how they ran up to Brad when they saw him, welcoming him like puppies, no matter how he treated them. He wasn't cruel; he'd smile and tousle Billy's hair and pick Arden up and kiss her. He wouldn't kiss Billy, and I'd get tears in my eyes watching his face as he watched his father kiss Arden, hold her in his arms. And I'd go out and pick Billy up and hold him, and kiss his cheek. But his head would turn away from me, yearning toward his father.

Sometimes I talked to Brad about them, asking him to be more affectionate, but he always said he didn't want to make a sissy out of Billy, and he had to counter me, since I was doing a good job of turning him into a pansy. I've never understood this logic—that affection turns a man, but not a woman, into a sexual deviant; and that lack of it assures his manliness. I couldn't penetrate Brad's prejudices, though.

And then I'd think about my own father, and how I yearned for his affection, and later, how I yearned for him to be something he was not. He has always tried, he still tries, to be
good;
but his idea of goodness is a child's. He tries to be complaisant with my mother—with Joy and me, too, now. And he was taught, in his childhood—he had to have been taught—that badness lay in developing an independent mind, in thinking and feeling and seeing for oneself. This had a profound effect on him.

He could
do
things by himself. He could fix anything, build anything. When I was about eleven, he built a collapsible Ping-Pong table that we could carry up from the basement and set up in the yard on fine days. But when we played, Joy or Mother and I, our balls would fly over or through the picket fence into neighboring yards, and Mother was perturbed. She thought the neighbors would object to our entering their yards to retrieve our balls. So she spoke to Ed, and he devised a retriever. It was a long broom handle with a tin can on its end, and a lever. We would stick the pole through the space between two pickets, lower the can on the ball, work the lever, and the ball would be captured, so it could be carried back to our own yard. We all thought he was a genius for inventing that, and showed it off proudly to our friends.

And once, on his own, without Mother's asking him, he did something for me myself. It was at Christmas, the year I was twelve.

Christmas was an important time in the family. Every year the weeks before Christmas were filled with whispering, concealment, and excitement. Joy was gay, excited with anticipation; Anastasia was not: she knew there would be no surprises for her. All she would get for Christmas was a book. If she was lucky, two or three books. So she felt the whispering and concealment were on Joy's behalf.