Her Mother's Daughter (96 page)

But there were other things I'd sensed and lain aside. The way Woody told me his stories, for instance. It felt to me that he'd told them before, and to a woman. He had them down so pat, like a performer's routine, a speech frequently given. I could imagine Woody sitting with his wife over cocktails on the poolside terrace of their Houston house, telling her the same tales in the same way, making her feel part of an exciting secret organization, commander of her own personal army, creating her own foreign policy right under the nose of the electorate, the government. I could see how it might appeal to her. All she had to do was believe her swan was Zeus.

And the others: I'd heard Philip say—in contempt—that Jack had been a high roller in the Havana gambling casinos before Castro deprived him of his livelihood, and was with the group in an effort to regain his old livelihood. It wasn't his motivation that Philip held in contempt, but his amateur status as a soldier. Philip and Cyrus claimed to be soldiers of fortune; they'd fight anywhere for anyone, they proclaimed, laughing. But they were amateurs too or they would have seen that this expedition was ridiculous, that no one knew what he was doing. Or maybe they saw and didn't care: adventure stimulated their erotic life together.

I also remembered how good Alex and Noel, and Woody too, had been to me when I was hurt. Two of them—who?—had given me their blankets. And Woody had held me that night until I fell asleep. But I didn't forget that he tried to hold me earlier, that I had thought he was on his way to trying to seduce me. As I lay in that hospital bed musing, it came to me that Woody had not wanted to have sex with me at all. If he had, he'd have made a move in Miami. What he wanted was for the other men to
think
he was having an affair with me, to mark me off limits and himself my proprietor. But then it occurred to me that Woody's “protection” forced the men to treat me decently. He might have realized that, maybe that was why he acted as he did.

No. Woody would not have cared what happened to me.

Then I started to think about what it could have been like if Woody had not marked me “his.” Twelve crazy men and me. There was no way they would ever have accepted me as one of the guys, as I once deluded myself my college friends had.

The thought of what could have happened was terrifying, and I was glad I hadn't allowed it to come to consciousness while we were on the mission. God.

I had lost other illusions. My hero, Castro, had preferred to arrest, torture, maybe murder a woman and her children rather than spend bullets and risk his men's lives against an invading bunch of idiots. It made sense, economically. But I couldn't bear it. In later years, I came to see Castro as one more tyrant, with his camps, his decrees—not that that made Batista seem any better.

In later years, I photographed real wars, wars that were the result, the
flowering
you could say, of deeply planted seeds—wars that were cries of despair from entire peoples. But I never again was able to believe that war served any good human purpose. In every war I saw mostly absurdity, stupidity, delusion: the ridiculous spectacle of boys playing games. I never got over the sense that trip to Cuba gave me, that war was a stupidity that could be avoided if men were not boys who wanted to play games in which they could pretend to be men, could pretend that they cared about something more than creating a self-image. I never forgot how I felt when Woody was telling me his adventures, a feeling I couldn't name then but did later. Horror. Kurtz's horror. Not the fascination of the abomination, nothing grand, demonic, evil: no.

It was just emptiness, a horrifying emptiness at the heart of things. Because nothing mattered—who won, who lost, who was up, who down—except the game. And the fact that real people, with real blood streaming down an arm they raised as they cried out over the body of a dead child, real lives that involved things like buying vegetables and washing their hands and stroking the head of a child and arguing with their spouses, the fact that this was destroyed as the game flowed inexorably across cities, countryside, across the whole fucking world it seemed, that fact was irrelevant.

Our whole expedition was a joke. I was the only one wounded—and that by accident; Ettore's wife and children were the only ones killed. The CIA must have known how incompetent this group was, but the agency didn't care—they would aid and abet anything that might cause Castro trouble. And the men themselves, except Ettore, would quickly transform the incident into a tale of adventure, add it to their repertory.

I retreated from politics, from opinion. I pulled myself inside a shell; I became a suburban liberal, one of those people who argue that right and wrong were relative and could only be judged with full knowledge of personalities and the context of a situation. Since it was rarely possible to know that much, judgment was essentially impossible. It was an unassailable moral position, and furthermore, cost nothing to maintain.

I did tell part of the truth to Toni and the kids—making the whole thing a joke, a sitcom war. I left out what real shooting there had been; I minimized my wound, saying I fell on a sharp stone, cut myself, didn't take care of the wound, which became infected and I developed blood poisoning. For a few weeks the kids chanted a rhyme about me, “Mommy is a Clumsy Clown, went to war and she fell down!” but then they forgot that too.

The doctors saved my arm.

L
ONG AGO, ALL THAT
. Not just twenty-odd years ago—a different life. Or maybe, that
was
my life before I died, years ago. A thousand, even a hundred years ago, I wouldn't have lived past forty, if I made it that far; few men did and even fewer women—women worked so hard, they had less to eat and less nourishing food than men, and they died in childbed. So maybe the years after forty are a bonus, nature's reward to women for surviving that long. Most men are dried up, grey and weary after forty; women aren't. Their children, if they have them, are grown, and their careers, if they have them, are well-launched, and they have their friends, and they still have living juice in them.

But if I am any example, well, and lots of other women I know too, we are alone, we have only our work. There are no men for us, there is no love waiting to happen. And I figure maybe nature intended us to use these bonus years for the well-being of others, recognizing in its wisdom that somebody's got to do something about the world the men are transforming into their own image—rigid, sterile, mechanical.

That's what I try to do now, do for others. I can't do anything for myself because there's nothing I want. Clara says the truth is that I don't want anything because there's nothing I want that I believe I can have, when in fact all I have to do is reach out my hand. She really gets on my nerves sometimes.

Whenever I am not out on an assignment, I sit here hour after hour writing this account of my mother. This room is the best thing in my apartment. The window in my studio looks out over the city. The view is just rooftops and the long open tunnel of Eighty-sixth Street ending in a triangle of shimmer that is the Hudson River; and a wide swathe of wounded city sky retreating, gauzed and vacant. I am alone. I don't mind being alone, I like it. If I wanted someone here with me, I couldn't think of a name. There is no one I want, nothing.

I have few resource materials: my journals, which I kept only intermittently, a stack of yellow envelopes stuffed with family photographs, pictures I didn't file and label, didn't paste in albums. I leaf through account books I used to keep a record of my expenses in those days. They are my only help in recalling where I was at times when I wasn't keeping a journal. And there are a few letters. That's all. That and my brain, in which the past is registered, my brain and the kids', except they forget things, it's amazing how they forget. Oh, I guess I forget too.

Yet my memory for some things is keen. I remember vividly that my first thought when I arrived home after the Cuban trip was that I might be pregnant—something I'd managed to forget during it. I didn't know if I'd had a period while I was unconscious, so it wasn't until I missed in February that I brought the matter up with Toni and went for a pregnancy test. It was positive. Toni was overjoyed; the kids were thrilled. I tried to be positive about it, but I was mostly worried. How would I explain this to
World
?

The baby was due—by my reckoning—in August, so I told Russ I wanted to work on a book, and needed to take a leave of absence from June through the end of September. He wasn't angry—in fact he seemed impressed; he was happy to give it to me, he said, I needed it after my “ordeal.” He paid me for the Cuban trip, paid for all my time in the hospital, and threw in a bonus. I was touched. It was the first time I'd seen anything kind in him. With that and the money I had saved we'd be okay for a few months even though I wasn't working.

And then—feeling grateful that I'd kept my arm and my life, and feeling content with my life—even with the pregnancy—something happened that made me believe the old saw that those who have get. Russ Farrell knew lots of people in publishing; his favorite pastime was gossiping. And over his many lunches he mentioned that I was going to work on a book, although he had no details. So the story went out, but no one could figure out who I'd signed with or if I had, and this caused interest, and by the end of April I'd had four calls offering me advances on a book of photographs. The advances were small: money wasn't the issue. Legitimacy was. I signed a contract with Focus Inc., the most prestigious publisher of photography books at the time, for a book to be called
Power.
And then I settled back to a relaxed pregnancy, careful only not to gain much weight.

In the middle of August of 1962, my third child, my baby, my little Franny was born; and early in September,
World
called and begged me to break into my leave and fly to Algeria to cover the elections. I couldn't refuse: the reason they'd sent me there in March was to get to know the place, to make contacts, to gain an informed view. And they wanted a heroic slant on the outcome of this struggle for independence. I didn't tell them I no longer had a heroic slant. I was fascinated to see what had happened there, quite apart from heroism.

Toni did most of the caretaking of Franny right from the beginning, assisted by Billy and Arden. I didn't even nurse her because I knew I had to go back to work and didn't want the mess that comes when you stop nursing. I felt fine. My figure had bounced back to normal after her birth, my arm had regained its strength after a summer of swimming, and my book was finished.

So a little over a month after the appearance of Frances Nowak, named for both our grandmothers, Toni's and mine, I took off for Algeria carrying my usual knapsack and camera case, feeling utterly secure that she would receive great care and even greater love, knowing my book was good and that my family was happy. I was on top of the world.

Or was I. Maybe that's just the story I told myself. Maybe I was anxious and guilt-ridden about leaving the baby, and upset at Toni's dismay at the thought of taking care of her
alone.

“But I've never taken care of a baby! I won't know what to do if you're not here to tell me!”

“You'll learn! I had to learn, you will too.”

“But you're a woman!”

“What in hell does that matter? I never took care of a baby before.”

“But you saw other women taking care of babies…your cousins or something.”

“I did not. I learned. I read Dr. Spock. I used my perceptivity. I sympathized. I made mistakes.”

He moaned. “Suppose I make a mistake!”

“I turned off the cold tap first, once when I was bathing Arden. The hot water almost scalded her back.”

His head was in his hands. “Ohhh,” he moaned.

“But not really, not badly. I mean, the water hurt her but she wasn't really burned. She just cried.

“And when Billy was little, I put him in his Grandmother Carpenter's bed one afternoon for a nap, and he woke up and got into the pills she kept in her bed table. I found him sitting on the floor, pills dotting the carpet all around him, while he chewed and babbled and grinned happily to see me. I didn't know what he had taken or how many.”

Toni was mock-sobbing now, his head on the table in front of him.

“I fed him Syrup of Ipecac. He threw up for hours.”

Toni sobbed louder.

“Toni.”

He raised his head.

“You will be fine. Just pay attention to her.” He looked doubtful. I took his face in my hands. “Darling, love is attention.
Attention.
Just give her that. She'll be fine. I'll be back in ten days.”

So maybe the whole time I was away, I worried. But I should have been feeling good: those were happy years. Why didn't I realize that then? I always let myself be distracted by small details, the troubles that can fill any day, any week, if you let them. I neglect to sit back and enjoy the overall experience. I keep thinking that once this and that is repaired and this is solved and that is explained,
then
I can sit back and relax, savor the air, the scent of roses. As if life were a garment that had to have every minute wrinkle ironed out of it, that had to be perfectly smooth before it could be worn. Knowing that nothing is ever perfectly smooth.

Yes, I was filled with guilt about leaving a newborn baby, even for ten days; and there was something in me that didn't want to leave her, that missed those clutching tiny fingers, the baahing cry startling me in the middle of the night, those sudden smiles that came from nowhere and made my heart, just as suddenly lighter than air, float. I missed her smell, that baby smell of milk and talcum and pee and fresh new skin.

I missed the scent of roses, too: the spring before Franny's birth, Toni dug up sections of the backyard and planted a garden. He put in lilacs and daffodils, tulips and rosebushes, some annuals. Only the roses bloomed that year, and he and the kids would cut bouquets and carry them in to Pani. She had improved some—was able to move around with a cane and to eat by herself. Although she could not speak, she did understand much of what was going on around her. When I came back from the hospital with Franny in my arms, I held her out to Pani, and tears rolled down her poor old cheeks, the wrinkles so deep in them, like channels for the tears. I wondered if her tears had always run down the same way and that was what made the wrinkles. We didn't dare to let her hold the baby by herself, but Toni pressed the tiny form against Pane's body, and she put her arms under it so she felt that she was holding her, and she gleamed at her. We told her we'd called the baby Frances after her and my grandmother, and she hugged me. Maybe she'd forgiven me for scolding her, for marrying Toni.