Her Mother's Daughter (84 page)

I finished Thinking when I finished my drink. I always ended that way—since I could never find my way out of the mazes I built, I simply had to pull down the shades on them. But the questions didn't disappear; they crumbled in a heap like cobwebs in an unused barn, dark, thick, frightening grey masses lying along the floor and climbing the wall in a corner of the room.

One by one, the sons left. Three of them were staying in a motel—the nearest one was in Rockville Centre—so they had to rent a car as well. That cost money they would prefer to spend otherwise. There was no one to cook for them, so the men had to eat their own cooking (hah!) or spend money to eat in restaurants.

Antoni left with a roar, slamming the front door with his heavy Gladstone bag, stamping down the front steps to the waiting cab. (Toni never, while they were visiting, asked to use my car. And I never offered.) Paul and Jan stayed to bring Pani home from the hospital. Toni told me when they were going to pick her up, so I was ready. I ran downstairs thinking This much I would do. Pani didn't clean often and the men certainly hadn't, and her room, the room she would be confined in for a long time, was filthy.

The curtains—I had known this and prepared for it—were too disgusting to be saved. First thing I did was take them down, dust flying out from them and making me cough. I bunched them up and tossed them in the garbage. Then I found a mop, tied an old towel around it, and mopped the ceiling, the tops of the walls, especially the corners, which had cobwebs as thick as those in my brain. I lugged my vacuum cleaner downstairs and it gulped up several years' worth of dust from the faded rug; I got down on my hands and knees with a damp sponge and wiped up the wood floor around the carpet. I dusted every surface with lemon oil and washed the windows and the mirror. I checked the bed, but someone—Toni probably—had lain fresh sheets on it. Then, with a soapy cloth, I sponged all the knickknacks. I unwrapped the fresh curtains I had bought at Woolworth's and hung them. Finally, I brought down a jug of chrysanthemums and set them on the chest of drawers across from the bed where she would see them. I ran back upstairs—I didn't want to be there when they came in, and I was hoping they wouldn't notice what I'd done. They'd think they had me; they'd think I was another one of those good women they could cozen into doing their work for them.

I watched from the window as they helped her out of the car; my cheeks felt as if they were bleeding, but it was just tears. She looked so frail, so tiny in the wheelchair, like a baby in a carriage. Her hair, which had been that colorless greyed brown, was almost white, and she was wearing the same shabby old black coat she wore every spring and fall. There was silence downstairs for a long time, and I smelled coffee. I would not go down until they left.

At last they did, and I went down and knocked lightly. Toni must have been expecting me because the door opened immediately.

He kissed me. “Thanks for cleaning Gram's room. I wanted to do it, but my uncles were in there until just before we left. It was sweet of you.”

“It was nothing. How is she?”

“Sleeping. She's exhausted. But she noticed the flowers. I told her you'd brought them.”

My eyes filled up. I was getting goddamned soupy with this business.

“You want to see her?”

He led me to her room and pushed open the door, which was ajar. “I want to be sure I hear her,” he explained.

A stranger with white hair and a twisted face was lying in the bed, making a high hump for such a little woman. The shades were drawn. The room smelled of soap and flowers. She was breathing evenly.

Toni and I sat for a while in the living room, talking in whispers. He told me a little about his uncles, and apologized for Louis's intrusion on me. “I couldn't stop him. They don't listen to me.”

“I understood.” I sipped the coffee he'd poured for me. “So you're really going to do it—take care of her?”

“If I can. She can use a bedpan. She only needs pills now, not shots. And if she needs a shot, a nurse will come. Mainly, she needs to be fed, kept clean, and kept company.” He smiled like a mischievous boy.

He was going to keep her clean? Empty her bedpans? Was he another saint? Ugh, the very thought…But of course I'd do such things for my children, had done them for years, without thinking…. Well, I wasn't going to start pasting gold stars on his forehead. Maybe he was really strange, and got kicks out of things like that. A weirdo. Maybe his father knew him better than I did. I got up.

“Thanks for the coffee. And anytime you want to use the car, just yell. And if you need to get out, go to the market or anything, I'll be glad to spell you.”

“Thanks. Mrs. D'Antonio and Mrs. Schneider have offered too. I think everything will be fine. They even brought over a casserole and a ham and a couple of cakes, so Gram won't have to eat my cooking for a while.”

“Good.” Yes, women do gather round to help. “I have a pot of chicken soup on the stove, I'm making for her. I'll bring it down later.”

“You all are saints,” he smiled.

“Don't say that!” I cried out sharply, and frightened myself with the loudness of my own voice.

Toni quit his job, and settled in immediately as Pani's caretaker. Little by little, she improved. At first she stayed awake only for minutes at a time; then she began to sit up for a half hour, so Toni carried the television set into her room and set it up on the bureau across from the bed. Then she began to stay awake for several hours at a time. She loved the game shows. The kids visited her every day, and on rainy days one of them would stay with her and play gin rummy or checkers. I visited her every day too, and her friends came in several times a week.

But she could not speak, and that grieved her. She would try to talk, she would gesture with her left hand, and roll her eye. But she would give up in frustration. Sometimes a tear appeared on her cheek after one of these efforts.

Because she went to sleep for the night around nine, Toni was free at night. And of course so was I. So it came to pass that he would come up or I would go down, one night out of three, one night out of two, and spend an hour or two chatting. He was writing well, he told me, putting in four to five hours a day.

We talked like friends, like women friends. After all, we were both “women”—we took care of the relatively helpless; we washed dishes and did laundry, marketed and cooked, worried about others. We also both had work of our own, creative work which did not lend itself to discussion but was simply there, like validations of our personal existence. The current of desire that had struck up between us at our first meeting resurrected itself with this togetherness, this privacy; but of course Pani was always in the next room, or my kids, and just knowing they were there inhibited us. At the same time, the repression of our feelings acted as a great stimulus to them—for there is no aphrodisiac like tension, taboo. I'd be startled to find myself staring at his hands while he was talking; or catch him staring at my mouth—I could tell it was my mouth, not my face he was looking at. But something had to happen to carry us over the barrier we had created.

I had several assignments during this period, all of them in the States, none requiring me to be gone for more than four days. Each time, Toni took care of the kids, working it in easily enough with his care for Pani. He was upstairs and down, just as if we were all one family living in a two-story house; Toni slept downstairs so he could hear Pani if she wakened during the night, but left the door to our apartment open. The children adored him. He treated them more like an older brother than a parent; he taught them to play poker; he read Arden's stumbling attempts to write poetry, and bought her some paperback books of poetry—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost. He played ball with them, played chess with Billy, watched TV football games and talked sports with him. He was gentle and his authority was always couched in a tone of “C'mon guys, you know you gotta do this, you know I gotta do what I'm doing too.”

After a while, he told me something about his parents. He hated his father, hated his dominating, bullying manner with his children and his wife. Antoni was a table pounder, a bigot, and mean with money. He was already, only two months after Pani's return from the hospital, dragging his feet about contributing to the small check the brothers sent Toni each month. But worst of all, he drank. Not every day or even every week—but when he drank, he drank until he was drunk, and then came home violent, beating his wife or any child who was handy. “My two older brothers got out of the house as soon as they could. They got the worst of it, he was younger and stronger, and there were only the two of them. My oldest brother just ran off when he was sixteen—after my father whipped him. The other one enlisted during the Korean War and never came back to Dayton.”

Toni loved his mother, but his voice sounded thin and lemony when he talked about her.

“You don't respect her,” I ventured.

“How can I?” whined the lemony voice. “She lets him beat up on her, her poor bones are frozen in a cowering position. And when he used to beat up on us, she would just stand there and cry and wring her hands.”

“He doesn't hit the children anymore?”

Toni looked over at me. “Can I have a drink? I mean, a real drink, whiskey. Do you have any?”

Since I had been a “success,” I'd taken to keeping a bottle of rye on a shelf. I poured a drink for each of us.

Toni settled down again in the old shabby armchair facing the equally old shabby couch. He sipped.

“I studied to kill my father,” he said.

“When I was ten, I was short for my age. The neighborhood we live in, in Dayton, is blue-collar, rough enough without being really dangerous. When I was about ten, I told my father I wanted to take boxing lessons. I was small for my age, and I told him I wanted to do something to protect myself. That was the one thing I ever did that pleased him. He signed me up at the local Y, and I trained myself to fight. I worked hard, for years. I ran, I jumped rope, I learned judo; later on, I did a lot of weight lifting, to strengthen my muscles….”

(So
that's
how he got those arms, that chest!)

“I worked out every afternoon after school for a couple of hours. My father was surprised at my dedication. He started to talk about my possibly training to be a fighter—bantamweight, that's all I'd ever be able to be. But he didn't know the real reason I was training. I wanted to turn myself into a superman so the next time my dad started in on my mom, I could level him. I knew it would take years—you've seen my dad.”

Antoni weighed over two hundred, although he was only about five feet ten. Toni was no taller than that now.

“As it turned out, though…” he wiped his hand across his face, “I didn't defend her, I defended myself. I'd done something he didn't like—I can't recall now even what it was—he didn't like most things I did. Maybe I'd dared to defend my friend Brian. My dad hates everybody who isn't Polish—and lots of people who
are
Polish, too—but the people he hates the most are the Irish, I guess because there are a lot of them in our neighborhood, and they were moving up a little faster than most of the Poles. Anyway, he didn't like something I said, and he swung his arm out to deck me, and without thinking, without even realizing what I was doing, I grabbed his arm and turned it back. It happened so fast…it made him fall right out of his chair. I was thirteen.

“It's funny. You can hate your father, but there's something—I don't know—a mystical taboo on him. I felt terrible, seeing him on the floor like that, I was overcome with guilt and terror, I felt that God would reach down from heaven and strike me dead on the spot. My dad saw all this on my face as he sat there on the floor staring at me. He looked at me—the only word to describe his expression is malevolently. And I must have looked terrified, so he knew he could get away with what he did next.

“He stood up real slow and started to take off his belt. ‘Hit your father, will you?' he said. I stood there. I didn't say a thing. My mother didn't say anything either. Her face was dead white. I guess she thought he'd kill me.”

Toni gulped some rye.

“He reached over and grabbed me by the hair and pulled me down the cellar stairs and told me to let down my pants. Then he threw me over a low table and began to belt me. I didn't try to stop him, I felt he had the right to do this after what I'd done. But I wouldn't cry out either, and he kept hitting me, he said he was going to hit me until I cried. And I wouldn't cry.”

There were tears in my eyes, and I wanted to go over and hold him, but I didn't move.

“My mother had come downstairs too, I don't know when. She walks silently and speaks in a soft low voice. But suddenly, along with his grunts and the whack of his belt, I heard her voice, low and sad.

“‘You will kill him, Antoni,' she said. No crying, no tears at all. His arm held for a moment. I was half out of it with pain, but my heart was whirling, I thought, yes, and then he'll kill her, but he didn't. He stopped. He walked upstairs.

“I was sick after that, for quite a while. I couldn't go to school. But he never raised his hand to me again. I don't know why. Maybe he thought the next time I'd feel justified in killing him. And the next time he started in on my little brother, I just stood up and looked at him, and he stopped.

“But he kept on beating my mother. I wasn't able to stop that. He'd come in late at night, after a boozing session, and just whack her. For no reason. She always cried softly, so as not to frighten my little brother and sister and me. Sometimes I'd hear something and go running downstairs, but by then he'd have stopped and fallen into a chair, passed out. Once I went over to wake him up—I was about sixteen, and as tall as he by then, and a hell of a lot stronger, even if he had sixty pounds on me. I was going to wake him up and punch him out. But my mother wouldn't let me. She held on to me, weeping, begging. I gave up then. I was going away to college soon, and I vowed I'd never return to that house, that craziness.”