Her Mother's Daughter (83 page)

The second assignment was even more of a challenge, since I'd never done sports photography: damn few women did. It was a challenge to capture those long-limbed guys jumping for baskets, leaping in circles to hedge the opposition, running, passing, dribbling the ball. I shot them at practice, and they let me get right on the court with them. I was nearly run down a few times, but I got a great shot of Robertson from below, as he leaped for a shot. It made him appear nine feet long, with huge thighs and feet and all of him in motion.
World
put it on the cover. What a coup! Here too the close-up, zoom-out technique worked beautifully, since of course each player was unique and had a slightly different technique, yet the team worked together like a corps de ballet.

Here I stayed at a motel, and after the game with Penn, the team ended up partying in my room clear through the night. Two of them fell asleep there, but it didn't matter, since I never went to bed at all, just kept on partying until it was light, packed my bags, and called a cab for the airport. Slept all the way back. Fun.

I was nervous when I had to ask Pani to watch the kids while I went to New Hampshire. I went downstairs during the afternoon, when Toni was at work, and instead of my usual cheery announcement of where I was going and when, I asked her diffidently if she would watch over the children for the four days. A shadow deepened on her face and she looked at me sadly. My heart stopped, my mind whirred: my mother would surely be willing to take them for four days, but she'd have to drive them all the way to Lynbrook to school each morning, and pick them up each afternoon, and they'd be unhappy away from their friends. I wondered if Mom would be willing to stay in my apartment. I was wondering how to ask her when Pani said, “Yes, Anastasia, I will do, but soon no more. I am old, too tired for such big ones.”

I was relieved and burdened at the same time. “Okay, Pani. Thanks. I'll have to look around for someone else. If you'd just do it until I find someone, I'd appreciate it very much.”

She nodded soberly and turned away from me.

So she hadn't forgotten or forgiven! Why was she so pleasant to me, then?

The next time I called around, culling numbers from friends, from cards on the supermarket bulletin board, from ads in the newspaper. I found a woman, a widow, who was willing to babysit at my house for days at a time. I was nervous about her. She sounded prissy over the telephone, I sensed the kids wouldn't like her, I foresaw months of problems, difficulty in getting away, worry while I was away, and kids unhappy while I was gone and furious when I returned. I only hoped she had a stiff uneasy telephone manner, and would be better in the flesh. But she would be visiting her daughter in California during the time I needed her.

I had to make another trip downstairs, I assured Pani that this would be the last time I would ask her, and she, she let tears creep into her eyes! I wanted to shout, to smack the wall. What did she want of me? I was only doing this because she had instructed me to. Did she want me to apologize? I couldn't. Maybe I should have let the whole issue go and just told the kids to ignore her language, but once I had broached it, I couldn't retreat, couldn't say I was wrong. Because I wasn't. Why did I feel so wrong?

I stamped back upstairs and tried to calm down. I told myself her attitude might not have anything to do with our quarrel. Maybe she had been happy to take the kids because she liked the extra money and she was lonely and enjoyed being with the kids. Maybe now she had Toni for company, and to bring in a little extra money—because he did buy things for the house apart from his board—she could let herself feel her age and tiredness. Maybe she was feeling worn out—she was only sixty-eight, but she'd had a hard life since childhood. But with a woman like Pani, you could never hope to find out the truth of her feelings. It occurred to me that although Sonders and Pani were opposites, both of them were in different ways tyrants. Both permitted only one sort of relation; their way of being was the only way of being. And then I thought: but my mother is like that too. And then I thought maybe we all are. And then I decided to stop thinking.

On the way from the train station, I wasn't thinking about anything except wiping my silly smile off my face—a smile that had covered it all the way from Cincinnati. I was tired but quiet and glowing the way you are when you've had a wonderful time and people have made you feel good about yourself. My car was not in front of the house when the cab dropped me off, but I assumed Toni had taken it to go marketing or to take the kids someplace—it was a Saturday afternoon.

So I was shocked when Toni met me at the front door, and even more shocked by his face. Immediately I thought something had happened to one of my kids.

“What is it?” I gasped.

He shook his head. “Nothing. It's all right. The kids are fine.”

I held on to the molding of the doorway, which looked as if it were moving. “Then where's my car?”

Nice, selfish question. I wasn't thinking clearly. I shouldn't have had so much to drink last night. The fun of it—the night itself—had completely vanished from my memory.

He grinned a little. “I cleaned out the garage. Thought it was stupid for you to have to park in the street with a perfectly good garage back there. Some of that junk was old when my grandfather collected it. Why don't you come inside?” he laughed, grabbing my duffel bag and camera case.

I stepped into the small hallway. “Well?”

“It's Gramma.”

I could feel my face grow cold. Pani! Sweet good Pani!

“Had a stroke. It's not too bad, they think she'll recover, she's in the hospital now. Her right side.”

It was only because I was tired and still had alcohol in my blood, but I burst into tears. This—it occurred to me later—gave Toni a perfect excuse to embrace me, and placed our relation in a slightly different mode—but I swear, I insist, that wasn't on my mind at the time. (I'm almost sure.)

The kids came out of Pani's apartment at the sound, and they began to cry too, and embrace me, and we all walked back in there as if it were our home, and pushed away the Scrabble board and Toni brought me a drink (I didn't tell him how little I needed it), and we sat together until dinnertime as they told me the horrible details of the day before.

Pani recovered, but she would never be the same. The right side of her face drooped a little, giving that sweet accepting visage a cast of malevolence. Her right eye protruded slightly, and she had almost no vision in it. And for months, she could not walk. She needed a permanent caretaker.

Her sons arrived to visit her in the hospital and decide what to do with her. Knowing how little they cared about her, I was sure her sons would stick her in a nursing home for the rest of her life and sell the house and split the proceeds. I would have to move. By now I had some money in a bank account, but I was saving it because I didn't believe that my job, my good fortune, would last. I would need it again, I felt, to tide me over after
World
bounced me, until I found another way to earn a living. And I didn't want to move—my kids liked this town, had friends nearby, would be unhappy moving. But all that was secondary.

I was terrified for Pani. I went to see her every day; I talked to her even though she didn't seem to hear me; I stroked her hands, I told her everything the kids were doing. If one of her sons were there, he would glare at me, sitting in a corner, reading a newspaper. She improved. It was obvious she could get better, to some degree anyway. But she wouldn't get better in a nursing home.

And a nursing home is precisely where the family intended to send her, I discovered later. Toni stopped them. He argued—passionately—I know because when he described the arguments to me later, he was still passionate—how much they owed her, how good she was, and how she deserved a chance at whatever life was left her. They countered that she would need continual care, that that was expensive, that they could not afford it (having so many car payments, so many kids in college; one was still paying off a new swimming pool; another had two little ones with braces on their teeth), and besides, who could they trust? They would have to send checks, the woman would have to be able to cash them, how could they be sure she wasn't boozing it up and leaving Momma to rot in her own pee? Who would take care of the house, see to it that the leaves were raked, the snow shoveled, the oil delivered, that the roof didn't leak?

Toni had an answer: himself. Would they trust him? He wanted to write, he hated his job, it was mindless, and it left him little time for writing. For a stipulated monthly payment, he would take care of Pani, and be able to write. Her Social Security check would continue to keep up the house, with his help. They were aghast. It would have been different if he'd been a girl, a woman. Then they would have given her the bare essential in payment, and gone home and forgotten her. “They would have gone home, boozed it up, and let her rot in her own dust,” Toni said bitterly, later.

But Toni was male, the first child in the entire family to go to college, and
this
was what he proposed to do with his splendid masculinity, his college degree? What in the name of heaven and hell was wrong with him? Was he a man or wasn't he?

Toni won, but not because they ever accepted his case. He won because they didn't want to be bothered. They had wives who wanted them to come home, jobs or businesses to attend to. None of them wanted to take the time to search for a nursing home, or a companion—in fact, one of the brothers, Louis, came up one evening and asked me if
I'd
do that. I would have, of course, if Pani had been alone and in need of that, but I was furious.

“I have a job, Louis! Surely
you
owe her this!”

He sat there, a beer can in his hand, chewing on his thick lower lip. “Well, you owe her too. You used her enough, I guess. Baby-sitting.”

“I always paid her.”

“Uh-huh. Fair recompense for her time, on the open market, I suppose?”

God, I hated him.

“I paid her ten dollars a day for every day or partial day I was away.”

“Barely covered their food, I'd think.”

“I paid for their food.”

“Where I come from, we pay our baby-sitters fifty cents an hour to stay with them when they're
asleep.
Don't sound like fair recompense to me. A lot of responsibility she had, watchin' kids all days long.”

“
My
kids sleep too. Ten hours a night. And they are in school for five. That means I was paying your mother over a dollar an hour for the hours they were awake. And they were often not here.”

“Yeah. That's a worry,
ain't it
.” Louis's grammar did not come from ignorance—the other brothers were well-spoken enough except the one who worked at the GM plant near Detroit, who spoke in a calculatedly tough “masculine” way. Louis put on the folksy accent to disarm. He'd probably adopted it when he moved to Missouri where he sold real estate—adopted it to hide the fact that he was a Yankee. He was the most prosperous of the brothers. “Worryin' about where they are when they're not here?”

I stood up. “It appalls me that you are trying to shunt the responsibility for your mother onto me. I guess you've noticed that I care about her. I guess too that's more than you do—given the way you've all ignored her for years.”

“Well I guess we don't need you, little lady, to tell us what we oughta do. Any good woman'd be honored to repay some of what you owe her.”

I couldn't control myself then. “And the problem with you is you've had too many good women in your life: you've learned to be a bastard! Get out!”

He rose lazily, heaving his great belly out of the chair. “Yeah, well I guess you're throwin' me out of a house I own, little lady, at least one-fifth of,” he chuckled in his folksy way.

“You don't own this apartment as long as I have a lease and am paying rent on it. And she isn't dead yet!” All my life I'd read about people talking “with gritted teeth,” and I never before understood what that meant. Now I was doing it.

I flopped in a chair after he'd gone and I'd noisily locked and chained the door behind him. I sat there trying to relax my neck and shoulder muscles. I could hear them arguing downstairs. They were really yelling; they'd subside, then one voice would rise through the floorboards like a sonic boom. I knew it was Antoni, Toni's father, and I knew that he was showering contempt on his son as a pansy and a weakling, and I understood why Toni did not want to go back to Ohio. The argument rumbled and roared for nearly two hours. The voices began to sound drunk. The front door slammed. I guessed it was Toni, gone out just to get out of there, and I ran to my front window. He was walking, head down, hands in his pockets, fast. Where could he go? I felt awful for him, I wanted to throw open the window and tell him to come upstairs and sleep in my bed with me, warm and safe.

Suppose the kids had heard and were lying in bed in terror? I got up and tiptoed to their doors, pushed each one open a crack and peered in. They seemed asleep. I whispered their names; neither one moved. Asleep.

I poured myself a drink, formally, something I do when I am preparing to Think. I flopped in the chair again. Would Pani hate the way I treated her son? I know she would have hated the way he treated me. How could it happen, this good woman, this saint, this sweet loving person, how could she have sons like Louis and the others?

I knew her husband was domineering. I could hear it in her voice when she talked about him, even though he'd been dead for over twenty years, and I'd seen it in her posture when I bullied her into submission about her language. He may have been brutal, cruel, to his sons, probably was. But that would not account for the way they treated her, the way they must feel about her.

I thought about Pani's sins. Not being honest, that was the main one: all that sweetness and all those smiles, when god knew what was going on inside. But I'd known Pani for quite a while now, and I had no sense that inside she was very different from outside. She wasn't brittle and angry, covering it over with a smile like the glaze on pastry. She wasn't calculating or mean or envious. She was really good: the only serious fault I'd ever seen in her was her bigotry. Maybe she whitewashed her sons' behavior and blamed everything on other people, especially if they were not Polish, not Christian, not white. Was that enough to account for them?