Her Mother's Daughter (87 page)

There was the time—how did she happen to tell me? I know we were standing in her bedroom, she was getting dressed, we were going shopping together, she always loved that, and she was cheerful. But something I said, or she said, something led her to turn to me and say…oh god, of course. I was traveling and screwing around and I would tell her about the men I met and the places they took me and the fun I had, she loved to hear about these things, and she was sitting on her vanity bench, powdering her face and she turned to me and said, “Good. Have fun. Have it now, when you can.”

I looked a question at her.

She turned back. She put the powder puff down. “I went to the doctor last week.”

I armed my heart.

“I've been having this trouble. It hurts,” she whimpered.

“What hurts?” Ready to leap up, to put my arm around her, to console. But she seemed entirely too cheerful for cancer….

“Sex,” she whispered.

I stared at her.

“It's been hurting for a long time. It's horribly painful, it burns and tears, I could scream, it's a nightmare! So I went to the doctor.” There was satisfaction in her voice now. “And he said it's true, that I'm very dry down there, it
does
hurt, so I can't have sex anymore.”

“Can't you do something about it?”

She shrugged. “It's age. It happens to all women.”

I sat appalled. Would that happen to me? What about my poor father, who clearly loved sex?

“So…you don't have sex anymore?”

“I can't”.

End of subject.

We had almost the identical conversation years later, also in her bedroom, when she confessed to me in a whisper that she was going blind. I was not to tell anyone—not Joy, not even my father. No one was to know except me. (Why me?) I immediately went out and bought her several kinds of magnifying glasses and the large-type
New York Times Book Review.
She was annoyed. “My sight isn't
that
bad, Anastasia,” she explained. “Not yet,” she added ominously.

I guess I am making her sound wretched. I guess she was. I know
we
were, Joy and I, when we lived at home. But at the same time, I understood, I understood her. Or thought I did. I felt her life, her pain, as if it were my own, as if it were I who had lost everything before I, Anastasia, was even born. I took her side against myself—I was her burden, the event that ruined her life.

In those days, I thought that Joy was oblivious to her, to everything that went on in the house. We never discussed Mother, or Dad, or ourselves for that matter. The only talk was jokes and stories, anecdotes about one friend or another. Joy was always out with her friends, always laughing. But after she was married and went away, and we didn't see each other except for the few days every three years Joy and Justin spent on Long Island between tours, we found a new friendship. Whether absence made our hearts grow fonder, or marriage and children gave us a common ground we had lacked before, I don't know, but while she was on Long Island, she'd always take an afternoon and come to my place for a visit. The kids would play outside in the yard, and we'd have coffee and cake, and move into drinks, and sometimes she'd stay for dinner too. We talked a little about ourselves, our lives, but because we never told each other the truth, that subject was limited. So we talked about Mother. Even then we were unhappy about her, for her: we both thought she should get out and join things, meet some people, have some companionship. Joy kept urging her to do that, she continued to urge things like that until Mother was in her seventies. She couldn't help herself, she was frustrated by Mother's unwillingness to improve her life.

But I had stopped. I stopped from sheer hopelessness. I came to understand that it was useless to urge her to do anything because she was suffering from sickness of the heart, an incurable disease. My last suggestion was that she try therapy, but Belle refused. “I would start to talk, and I'd cry, and I wouldn't be able to stop crying.” I guess it seemed to her that to open up her disease would be to let it thrive in the air, that the proper thing to do, the courageous thing—not that she would have used or even thought those words—was to keep it to herself. She had no idea that her sickness made everyone around her unhappy, and that if she had had someone to talk to, she might feel better. And truthfully, given the way psychiatrists were in those days before feminism, I felt they did more harm than good, so I didn't urge it strongly. In 1950 or 1960 the best cure for melancholia was the same as it had been in the seventeenth century—to write about it, endlessly, to write an Anatomy of it that was the longest book in the English language.

So I gave up exhortation and tried my own brand of therapy—I listened, tried to understand, sympathized, I broke my heart sympathizing. I came to understand that it was not just our poverty, her endless rounds of tedious arduous labor, my father's limitations, her worry about us, that had made her so miserable and depressed when we were children; that there was something more, something older and deeper. I didn't know what it was because she hadn't yet told me about my grandmother's crying over her orphans every night. She always said simply that her mother was a saint, but she had never been able to please her.

I came to believe that she had somehow felt better when her circumstances were harsh than she did now when she had a little leisure, a little money. Because when she had to work so hard and worry so much, she could attribute her state of mind to her state of life; but when her state of life improved, there was nothing for it but to attribute her fatigued depression to a slow-working, fatal, undiscovered physical disease.

She had many diseases over the years, and some of them were real. She had to have her sinuses drained every six months—a painful operation, she told me in hushed awed tones, amazed at her own toleration of pain. Her hearing deteriorated. The first time I suggested she get a hearing aid, she was sitting in my living room in the Rockville Centre house. She stood up and walked out without a word. And I did not hear from her again until I called and apologized for upsetting her. In the mid-sixties, she had operations on her ears, but they did not help, so she had to wear a hearing aid, which she hated, after all. But even so she could not listen to more than one voice at a time, so the aid was useless in a roomful of people.

One thing I am sure of, and that is she gave up golf because of a whiplash. After that, she would play only on minicourses, the little nine-hole courses at Jones Beach and Fire Island. I guess the whiplash pain left her after a while—she never wore a neck brace—but then she said her arthritis made golf too painful even though she never grew the swelled joints and knuckles that Mr. Carpenter had in his last years, when, the kids told me, he had to climb stairs on his hands and knees. Still, she didn't give up golf entirely until after the emphysema. And I know it was after her hearing went that she gave up music lessons, closed the lid of the piano and put the sheet music up on a high shelf in a closet, out of sight: each renunciation performed like a religious sacrifice.

I did wonder about that. Was it penance she was doing? And for what? Maybe her sin was the same as mine, the sin of having been born.

Still, she never stopped trying to find that elusive wisp, pleasure, well-being, something she had been waiting for, working toward, the thing that was supposed to make it all worthwhile. Wasn't that the promise of America? She and Ed took vacations in Valeria, a nice estate in Peekskill; they took tours of Europe; they went on a cruise on a windjammer, on car trips to the South, through the Smokies, to Florida.

But it was always the same—a nightmare. Something terrible always happened, she was always unhappy. The food was awful, everywhere, without exception.

Joy and I grimaced at each other about this, and at the end of our conversation, we'd shrug and give it up. It seemed so cruel—all those years she had worked so hard and now she could not enjoy herself. We were angry with her for her intransigence, her utter refusal to take pleasure from life. People say pleasure is selfish, but if she had enjoyed herself, she would have made us feel better about everything—her and ourselves. Still, if we had known what the future would be, we would have found some way to count present blessings. After all, she was only in her early fifties, she was good-looking and slender and well-dressed, and she sometimes acted almost cheerful. She gave dinner parties and played bridge and went to people's houses for an evening of talk or cards. Their trips may all have been “nightmares,” but they went on taking them.

But I—I put quite a few nails in her coffin. Not only had I been born, something I after all could not control, but I performed a series of unforgivable actions: I repeated her error in getting pregnant and having to marry; then soon after he reached prosperity and bought me a nice big house, I divorced the man. One of the nails dislodged when I got the job with
World
—she was proud of that, proud of me, and maybe she even began to forget the divorce. But even then, even after I began to make some money, she told me she had nightmares about the kids and me living in a Volkswagen bus. “You need a man,” she insisted. Only a man could guarantee a woman's security once she had children.

But the nail got hammered back in and several more were added when I took up with Toni.

It was October 1960 when Toni and I became lovers. I was coming up to my thirty-first birthday, but I still felt like a kid: I was so wildly in love, and Toni was so much like the boys I had first made love with—shy, inexperienced, very tender, and untiringly passionate in the way only a young man can be. He had never made love before, so he had no preconceived ideas except that someone had told him women love to have their ears blown in, and I had to explain, gently of course, that that wasn't true for me at least. I taught him lovemaking, and he had a natural aptitude, so that our sex life was wonderful, marred only by the fact that he wanted to make love every night, and I didn't: every second or third night was enough for me, and he couldn't understand that. We had fights about it. But they were the only fights we had.

When I think back now to how it was then: oh, that mix of fierce passion with boyish tenderness! I say boyish because I've never found it in an older man, although people say men are changing. These days I wouldn't know. When we'd finish, he'd hold on to me, making little cries in his throat, like a puppy overwhelmed by the pleasure of being stroked. He didn't want to let go, and sometimes we'd fall asleep that way, which was dangerous. Because I didn't want Pani to know what was happening. I wanted Toni to get up and go back downstairs and sleep there, so he'd be there in the morning when she woke up. She woke up very early, before six, and needed help getting out of bed to go to the toilet. So I could not sleep soundly; I'd have to remember to wake up and caress him awake and send him, forlorn and complaining in a high thin voice, back downstairs.

Still, I think she knew. Debilitated as she was, there was something in her eyes when she looked at me these days, something cold that had never been there before. She said nothing. What could she do? She was a helpless old woman, dependent on us. And that made me feel awful in a way I wouldn't have if she'd been able, strong. I felt I was shoving something unpalatable down her poor old throat, force-feeding her a fact she would never be able to digest.

The kids, though, didn't seem to suspect anything. They adored Toni, and accepted him as one of the family without any question about just what role he occupied. He had dinner with us most nights; sometimes I cooked, sometimes he did, and sometimes we cooked together, which the kids loved. They'd join in, crowding the little kitchen. Pani could eat very few things, mostly soups and stews with a little meat and vegetables cut up very small; and she ate early. So we took turns on that too. Every couple of days one of us would cook up a pot of soup or a stew and freeze it in Pani-sized portions, so she could have a varied diet. We'd do this downstairs in her kitchen, which was bigger than mine—we'd always have four or five different dishes in her freezer.

Those first months are hard to remember now. They melt together in a glaze of golden sunlight and autumn leaves and walks and furtive touches and smiles and the cries of the kids running ahead, finding treasures, celebrating simply being alive. When I had to travel, I knew the kids were safe and loved and happy and hardly even missing me. I paid Toni for babysitting, over his objections. He said the allowance he got from his father and uncles was enough for him—and god knows he didn't buy anything except books. I had to take him by the hand, the kids giggling helplessly, and force him into the car and downtown to buy a new pair of jeans.

The time came when I had to read Toni's writing. I managed to procrastinate so that I could read it when I was away from home, so that if I didn't like it I would have time to prepare my voice and my face—and my words. I got an assignment in England and Wales. I was excited about it: the piece was on stone ruins from prehistoric ages in England—at Stonehenge and Castlerigg and West Kennet and other places in the British Isles. Just recently I was reading that scholars think these ruins date back to a time when women were central in society. But in 1961 everyone was sure men and men only had built the things, and I simply accepted that opinion. If only I'd known! I'd have photographed them entirely differently—showing the democracy implicit in circles, the beauty of the arrangement, the wisdom of the builders, the knowledge they must have possessed about stars and moon. Instead, I focused on how imposing they were, how impressive, how huge a task it must have been to cart the stones to the sites, to build these structures.

Toni gave me a hundred pages of a novel. I took the typescript out on the plane, after dinner was over, and the plane dark and silent with sleeping passengers. I finished it on the flight back, relieved that there were lots of good things to say. The novel was about a handsome, brilliant, sensitive young man under the command of a sadistic top sergeant during the Korean War. Toni's knowledge of war had come mainly from his brother's stories and other novels and didn't ring true. And the hero was entirely too wonderful. But the sergeant really came alive. Shades of Daddy. And so did long passages when Toni forgot to idealize himself and just let his hero meander around in his mind, seeing, feeling. What this meant to me was that Toni did have talent and could write well when he forgot himself and his preconceptions and simply let himself observe, or when he was writing something he knew about. That he was talented pleased me enormously, and I was elated; not only did I have good words to say, but I might even be able to help him—if I spoke with great care.