Her Mother's Daughter (86 page)

Of course, Belle was always happy to see Pani Nowak, she loved Pani Nowak, she was so much like Momma, even looked like her a little, not her features but the look, the round wrinkled face, the grey-brown hair pulled back in a bun, but Pani Nowak had more hair and it kept escaping from the bun. The same shapeless body, the cotton housedresses, the tie-up black shoes, the shabby black coat.

Belle's throat filled again. If only I'd been able to do something for Momma before she died. Get her a beautiful coat. I couldn't even afford clothes for the children. The tears overflowed this time, and she pulled a paper tissue from her vanity and blew her nose.

I could never do anything I wanted to do.

Pani Nowak, poor woman, her face all distorted that way, but at least she had lived. More than my poor mother did. She's sixty-eight, Momma died when she was sixty-two. I was still young, I had nothing.

She's young too, not even thirty-one, she looks twenty-five, all those men she meets, important men, couldn't she find someone better, someone who can take care of her and the children? I wonder if Pani Nowak knows. She's not herself, maybe she never will be again, she can't talk. She used to be so happy to be invited to my house for Thanksgiving, she would cry when she said good-bye. She appreciated good cooking, good ingredients, fresh sweet butter not margarine or Crisco, heavy cream. She always used to bring a babka or a strudel when she came for dinner, they were delicious, they tasted just like Momma's, I wish I'd asked her for the recipe before…I don't remember how Momma made them. Well, but at least she's walking now, even if she has to use a cane.

Maybe the boy won't last long, maybe Pani Nowak will recover completely. Oh, he'll get fed up with that life, what can it be for a healthy young man like that? It's like taking care of a baby all day, who would do that if they didn't have to? He'll go off, and then maybe Anastasia will find someone else, she should get married again, how is she going to take care of herself? You need a man. She could find someone, a big doctor, a big lawyer, she's attractive and intelligent, what's the matter with her?

At least Joy has done well for herself. Justin is a bit stiff, but he's a major now, an important man, he has security, a wonderful pension when he retires, and he could retire in fourteen years, and at least they were out of the Philippines, so far away, primitive, Joy said there were constant little wars going on, bullets flying over the military compound where they lived, horrible! A nightmare! The children, I couldn't have stood it, I would have had to come home. But what can she do, she has to be where her husband is assigned. She wants me to come to California, maybe I'll go next year when Ed gets his vacation. But then we wouldn't be able to go to Valeria.

So nice there, lovely old stone buildings, neat rooms, wonderful meals, the little nine-hole golf course, just right for me, the lake. All the people are lovely, and they're like us, middle class but not rich, there are no low-class people there, all neat nice people, the Harmons, they sent a card last Christmas, they missed us last summer when we went to Europe, Greece, the islands, Santorini, ugh.

Joy and Justin went to Hong Kong, that must be interesting. Justin is a good husband, he's a good provider and he doesn't drink or gamble or run around. Joy seemed tense her last visit, more hysterical than usual, but of course it's hard with two little children, it will be better for her in California even if she doesn't have servants there, safer, healthier. Jonathan's a handful, so active, climbing up on the roof of their house when he was only a year and a half old, getting stuck in that pipe, always in motion, but now he is in kindergarten, and Julie is no trouble, such a good child, both good kids, so were Anastasia's kids, good kids, I have wonderful grandchildren.

Maybe I will go to California. It's hard, seeing them only once every three years, and then when they come they stay a week, and Ed gets grumpy with kids underfoot, he doesn't like kids, the house a mess all the time. It would be nice if they were posted nearer, maybe next time. Ed might want to drive out there, too far, I couldn't take it even with the air-conditioning in the car, crossing the desert. Better to fly and rent a car, but that would be expensive, still it would be expensive to drive—all that gas, the motels, meals out for so many days.

They were still living in quarters, Joy had written, they hadn't yet found a house they liked. Maybe it would be better not to go next summer, she might just be getting settled in a new house. The letter is downstairs, in the porch.

I'll have to save up for it in either case, maybe I'll go the year after next, go to Valeria next summer.

If I'm still here. If I can still see. Her eyes filled again, and she dabbed them with a tissue. She stood up, slid her skirt, then the top, over her head, and surveyed herself in the mirror. Her hair was a little mussed, but she'd fix it later, before she left. She straightened up the room and went downstairs, into the kitchen, found her reading glasses, and walked to the porch. She sat down gracefully, enjoying the luxurious sound of her satin slip against her nylon stockings, and the soft feel of the wool skirt as she sat. Like a woman of olden times in many skirts, a lady, white hands and delicate feet, moving gracefully from room to room, sitting with upright back, pouring tea….

One cigarette on the porch, then I'll practice.

She lighted her cigarette, then picked up the letter luxuriously. Yes, quarters. What are they like, I wonder. He is a major, they couldn't be too bad, they had to be better than that horrible place Anastasia lives, all those stairs, the tiny rooms! She could move now, probably, she makes good money, but she doesn't want to leave that boy….

Five rooms, it said. They certainly couldn't stay there. They would have to stay in a motel. Anyway, it would be better, two little children racing around the house, the noise…. In Germany when she visited them it was hard enough, and that time there was only Jonathan. It was all right, the Black Forest, the Rhine, oh that was beautiful, those castles up on the mountains, the quaint little town, Heidelberg, but the guest room in Joy's house was cramped and she'd had to sleep in a double bed with Ed, the ceilings were so low, she was tired all the time….

Always tired. Always. She had always been always tired, but before she could understand it, she worked so hard, always working, trying to get ahead, make a decent life for the children. But now, she had time. She still marketed and cleaned the house and cooked and baked and did the laundry and ironing. But that was only half what she used to do. Why should she be tired now? So weary, down to her bones. Something wrong. The doctor said he couldn't find anything, he said she was just a little anemic, nothing else, vitamins, he said, she couldn't take them, they choked her. But she knew there was something wrong. She knew.

Maybe she'd get to California, and maybe she wouldn't.

W
HEN WAS IT SHE
started to fall apart? Was it after she got a whiplash in an accident, when was that, which accident? there were several. Was that the time the crazy man forced her off the road? Maybe it was after she developed arthritis. She stopped playing golf, then she stopped her piano lessons. No, she stopped the piano lessons first. Or, no—she stopped the lessons after she lost the hearing in the other ear. She had an operation on her ears that was supposed to bring the hearing back. Did she have one or two? The operations didn't help so she stopped the lessons. Was it true she could no longer take pleasure in music? The hearing aid distorted it, she said.

Maybe there was no special point of beginning, just a gradual slide, a gradual articulation of pain like the knuckle that aches for years, then starts to throb; months later it swells up, and one day when you wake up you find you can no longer use it. I can't remember any time when she seemed well, although she had to be strong, the things she did, bending, lifting, scrubbing, carrying, walking miles with heavy packages.

She was always tired when I was a child, and her sinuses bothered her, I thought “sinus trouble” was a serious disease. Every morning, for an hour at least, she blows her nose then hawks up phlegm and spits it into a tissue, over and over again. It disgusted me when I lived at home, and I would wonder why a person as fastidious as she would do that in front of everybody. I would wonder, but I guess I knew the answer. This sequence—the deep hawking cough, the sickening expectoration, and the residue, masses of wadded-up tissues in every pocket of every housedress and apron she owned—was the visible emblem of her suffering, the one kind she was able to display. She never suffered from menstrual cramps, or if she did, she never complained about them. She suffered her headaches alone in a darkened room we were not welcome to enter.

She was able to stop making hats in 1955, after she finished paying for Joy's wedding. I was around then, I was even living in Rockville Centre, but I don't remember when she stopped, she didn't talk about it. I try to picture it now: all those long lonely years in that bedroom, cutting, sewing, pleating: over. What must she have felt? Informing old Mr. Gwyn, what satisfaction! I no longer need to do slave labor for you. Not that she thought of it that way, she was grateful to him for giving her work. Closing the sewing machine and moving it into my old room; gathering leftover organdy and ruching into a pile to return to Mr. Gwyn, cleaning up all the scraps of fabric, putting away scissors and needles and thread and thimble in a place where they must be looked for, taking the floor lamp downstairs to the porch, vacuuming the bedroom of slivers of organdy for one last time….

Then surveying the room, her bedroom, a bedroom again, looking amazingly spacious and clean and bright now. Free. She was free. Did she feel free, released, delivered? Did her heart sigh with relief? Did her eyes fill with tears at the thought that now she could have a life? I don't recall her saying a word.

She set out to become a lady of leisure, but she had no training for it. She hadn't ever known a lady of leisure, so what could she model herself on?
Vogue?
Except when I was very young, and she occasionally bought a copy of
Woman's Day
at the A&P—a magazine not intended for ladies of leisure—she never read a “woman's” magazine. She had contempt for them. She did not read much until her later years, when she subscribed, bless her, to
Mother Jones,
and
The Nation.
She never talked about what she read, except when KAL 007 was shot down over Sakhalin. Then she called me up at ten o'clock at night in outraged pain, asking me what kind of government we had, what kind of country were we living in, did I know? did I understand?

I loved her that night.

Maybe it was the accidents. There were a couple, maybe three, four. She was an uncertain driver. It was hard to believe that a maniac with burning eyes would drive his car directly toward her, crossing from his lane to hers, so that she had to pull off on the shoulder of the road through Tanglewood, a small community near Hempstead Lake, making her crash into a tree. She was going only about five miles an hour, so the car was just dented, but she complained about severe pain in her neck and shoulders afterward. Or maybe that was after a different accident.

I already thought of her as sick. Maybe I always, after my first childhood, thought of her as sick. She dragged so with fatigue, her voice was so often drained of life, not teary but thick and soft, as if her tears had lodged themselves permanently in her sinus passages and her throat, occasionally venturing out in the daylight, but never departing. And then there were those days in which she lay in her room unspeaking, a cloth over her head, the shades down, the room smelling of slept-in sheets and soiled clothes.

After I got my own car, I would often drop in of a morning to have coffee with her while the kids were at school, and one day she opened the front door and staggered back from it as if she were falling, fainting backwards, and she cried out. I had to catch her, hold her up. I was frightened, but it turned out she had a cold and was feeling woozy in the head….

I remember a time—I was at college, still living at home—when she stopped talking to me. Several times I asked her what was wrong, but she only shook her head, pinched her mouth, and whispered “Nothing.” After a few days, in stiff anger, I attacked her. I said it was clear
something
was wrong, since she wasn't speaking, and it would be better for her to tell people what it was than to go around not speaking to them. Tears sheened her eyes. She cried out in a thick voice that she was no good, she knew she was no good, I was always blaming her, attacking her. I always misunderstood her, no one knew her suffering.

I did what I knew I had to do: apologize, express sympathy, and ask again what was bothering her, this time in a tone of deep maternal concern. She whimpered out her answer: she had been to see Dr. Hoxton because of a flush that appeared regularly on her cheeks. He listened, and when she described it, asked if it was in the shape of a butterfly. It was. He nodded soberly, sadly, and said he'd have to take some tests.

There was, she said, a form of cancer that manifested itself in this way. The doctor thought she had it. She tried to keep things to herself, but she knew she was dying. Years later, I would receive such news from her more calmly, but that was the first time, and I was horrified. I tried to console her, but she was, as always, inconsolable, and after some time lashed out at me: “All right, Anastasia, all right! I don't want to talk about it anymore!” The topic dropped into oblivion, was never mentioned again. I was afraid to bring it up, afraid of her anger, or maybe, afraid of my own. But after a few weeks, I couldn't contain myself, and asked. She shook her head in silence. When I pressed her, she admitted that the tests had been negative. She said this in such a way that I was left with the impression that she did not believe the tests and knew better. Luckily, I had my Pollyanna streak: I chose to believe the tests, so I forgot about it. I don't know when she did.