Her Mother's Daughter (99 page)

I invited them all back to the house for a buffet lunch. They trailed in, heavy and grey, looking around as if they were assessing the value of Pani's poor possessions. I could see them making mental notes—who was going to insist on getting the old silver sugar bowl, who the china, who the old—maybe antique by now—thin, dented silverplate flatware. They barely spoke to me, even Toni's mother, even after she saw Franny. They drank up two half-gallons of our vodka though, and devoured the food. I worked in the kitchen, or serving, and sat talking to Mrs. D'Antonio and Mrs. Schneider, Pani's friends, who kept sighing and stroking me and wiping their cheeks.

And I thought: they are her children! But we are the ones who loved her. How many sacrifices had she made for them, how had they wrung her heart? For what, I thought, for what! I slid into a rage, I wanted to throw them out of my house. But it was their house. It was Pani's friends, not the Nowaks, who helped Toni and me clean up the mess, put leftover food away, wash and dry the dishes. Then they embraced us both, and the children, and left. The sons were still sitting around in the living room drinking. Their wives, heavier but less grey than the men, sat talking in soft voices desultorily, drinking coffee. I went upstairs to my own place, lease to run until the end of June, mine, they could not dispossess me or intrude upon me. I left Toni to deal with his family. I didn't even say good-bye to them.

Yellow envelope of photographs of a house on an old street lined with chestnut trees.

Yes. That was our house. I took these just after we bought it, we hadn't moved in yet. It had four bedrooms—one large, two medium-sized, and a tiny one for Franny; a garage; a finished basement with a wet bar—water!—that I could turn into a darkroom; and a small room off the kitchen that the previous owners had used as a sewing room, that Toni could use for writing. It had a 100-by-100-foot plot, big for that neighborhood, and a wonderful garden. We bought it. That is, I bought it. I paid for it and I put it in my name. I don't know what Toni thought about that. He said nothing.

We moved at the end of June, when my lease expired. We left Pane's house empty, still unsold—the brothers were asking a very high price for it. I felt a little sad at leaving Pane's house desolate, but pleased at the thought that the brothers now had a non-income-producing property that would swiftly erode if they didn't come and take care of it. The hell with virtue, it's revenge I love. Of course what they did was to call Toni and ask him to watch over it. I had anticipated this and told Toni he should say he was busy writing, and would do it only if they paid him. But of course he didn't.

We had fun in the new house. We spent some time on it, some money, making it pretty, pleasant. Toni was restless, though; he was ragingly frustrated at not publishing anything, and maybe he was tired of being a housekeeper. He started to pressure me to buy him a sports car. I did buy a new car—we needed one. But I bought a station wagon that could hold all of us….

He was a wonderful father to Franny. He took her with him everywhere. He complained that being at home all the time was making him fat, so I urged him to take up a sport, tennis, maybe, and he did, taking lessons at the private courts in Rockville Centre, while Franny sat in her baby seat, watching, in a diaper and sunbonnet. I had never toilet-trained my children, and we didn't toilet-train Franny either; she was in diapers until she was three and trained herself.

Every once in a while Toni would fall into a depression and talk about maybe getting a job. “I'm getting older and nothing is happening. Maybe I should give up. Go back into publishing. Make some money. It's obscene, a guy my age sitting in a playground all afternoon.”

I urged him to keep trying. I told him he had talent, that one day he would write something wonderful.

I meant it. I think I meant it. But I also knew that I was terrified that he would go to work and dump Franny on me. I had
had
this baby for
him:
he promised that he would take care of it. But memories are short, and I didn't, after all, have it in writing. I felt I had done my service to the future of the human race, I had raised my two. It was enough. No more.

A beaded bracelet, African, from Kenya.

Yes, I remember this. I bought it from a woman who stood all day in a gas station (a rarity in Kenya) waiting for tourists. I bought her entire stock and handed them out as gifts when I came back, but I never wore my own. Forgot about it.

Those were great years for me. I was hot. I took photographs of everything I could dream of shooting—mountains and jungles, dams and deserts, the winding stone-paved streets of old cities, the boulevards of new ones. White on white in the Himalayas; green on green in island rain forests in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Antigua; black and white in tens of cities. I shot people everywhere: a man unaware, sitting bereft beside a railroad track, bent over, wide-brimmed straw hat pulled down over his eyes, under the Mexican sun; a skeletal Indian mother staring vacant-eyed as a two-year-old child sucked her thin dangling breast; a very old Japanese man sitting on the curb of a city street, playing with a small child in his lap; heavy-bodied women in Siberia, crimson babushkas on their heads, offering paper cones of raspberries to passengers on a train; wizened, shrunken Chinese women sweeping the streets with straw brooms. Some of these became
World
covers, but the greatest pleasure for me was
seeing
—and trying to capture what the inner eye saw.

I traveled everywhere, and everywhere I had adventures. I went by plane, train, car, and once, rushing to the scene of a car bombing in Algiers, by motorcycle; I took trams and cable cars, sailboats and motorboats, and floated in a hot-air balloon across the Masai Mara, shooting the shadow we cast on the rust-colored plain. I went by canoe to shoot a camping site in Canada; rode an elephant up the side of a mountain in India, and in a haycart outside Peking I sank in the soft hay along with two sleepy kids who had been haying since dawn. I shot the afternoon rainbow over Victoria Falls from a two-seater plane; sat in a quiet-running motorboat, its sound the drone, beat provided by the clicking of my cameras, awed by the mountains rising on either side of the Navua River in Fiji, my heart resting in the silence, the flowers that climbed the mountainside, and like larger flowers, a group of copper-colored women in brilliant wrappings washing clothes on some rocks at a bend of the river. And around that bend, a bunch of boys playing in the water, their eyes like the eyes of no Western child—alive, joyous, friendly, unafraid.

I shot a pride of lions sleeping in the sun on a giant rock in the Serengeti; and a giraffe poking its face over some high foliage right beside me; and the lake in Ngorongoro, shimmering in the sunlight, pink with flamingos; and spent hours shooting a whole tribe of monkeys scurrying back and forth across the limbs of a banyan tree, chatting excitedly, grooming each other, babies clutching their mothers, who held them, stroked them.

In Greece I shot white villages climbing up mountains, houses bleached by the sun, with red-tile roofs; and in Spain, adobe villages with the same red-tile roofs, clustered together, their backs to the dry hot wind. Always, everywhere, clustered together, like the monkeys, for comfort, safety, company. I shot wattle-and-daub villages in Ireland, England, Wales, Germany, low cottages with thatch roofs, some with half-timbering and diamond-paned casement windows. And in those places, too, streets of plain-faced houses rising uphill, connected, all the same, but each painted a different color, bright pinks and yellows, lime green, azure, brightness challenging their own homeliness. And in Samoa the quiet waiting emptiness of wood platforms and columns holding a thatch roof, set among hibiscus and banana trees, the blue sky, the blue-green water showing through the open house, the house a receptacle for the beauty around it. But sometimes a television set on the floor. And the log houses of Siberia, each with a fenced garden brilliant with broad-faced sunflowers.

All of it beautiful, filling my eyes that ache with need to
see, see.
Even the ugly and afflicted have the beauty of variety, the richness of difference: the one-roomed tin-roofed shacks of Addis Ababa almost on top of each other (how can you tell which is yours?), divided only by narrow muddy lanes smelling of urine. The settlements spread, sprawl over miles of the city; people emerge from them, tall, slender beautiful Ethiopians, barefoot, walking slowly to the bus stop, to work if they are lucky enough to have it. Old men naked in the streets—no one turns to look, they are not trying to shock, they simply own no clothes. And the half-naked boys in the marketplace, orphaned, abandoned, living by begging, bright clear eyes of once-loved children, asking for pennies, selling matches, plastic bags, whatever you want, eyes that are sure that love will be renewed. I want to pour out money to one, about twelve, whose tattered jeans are held together at the waist by a safety pin, who is barefoot and without a shirt, whose eyes meet mine in recognition—I
am
his mother, long-lost. My companion, an Ethiopian who works for a state-controlled newspaper, says don't. The other children will beat him to get it from him. I want to take him home, this child. The reporter shrugs. “It is not possible.”

Hovels in Mexico City, too, and muddy streets. But here there are a few trees, a beat-up car rests askew in a rut, there is not the same look of starvation. Is even that relative? But here you cannot breathe, the air and water are foul, poisonous. I shoot Coalicue the Filth-Eater, deposed Mother of the Aztecs in her skirt of snakes, majestic and ugly, dominating the Anthropological Museum, dominating the city, still alive. And wonderful ugly sexual sculptures in a children's playground in Stockholm, penises digging up vaginas, reaming a mine, harrowing hell. And a tall cross bearing an ivory Christ bleeding, along a deserted country road in Normandy.

And everywhere, men. I always packed my diaphragm. I never even thought about it, I didn't try to conceal it from Toni, it was simply natural, normal, for me to take it. Ah, I had wonderful times, in wonderful places—a grove in the Alps above Geneva, grass studded with edelweiss: at the edge of the water, one day at a strangely deserted Walden Pond; coming out from a hotel to the Grand Canal and looking across to the lights of San Giorgio, unable to part—so sitting down for a late-night coffee in the Piazza San Marco. Beautiful boys, men. I recall making love with a beautiful blue-eyed Irishman named Shane among the reeds by the lake at Lissadell. I'd never before made love on a beach, and my body luxuriated in the sand, the sun, the reeds, sibilant, all around us. There was a handsome Pole named Adam who took me to his mother's apartment in Warsaw, and pulled out a sleeping couch and heaped it with immaculate white lace-trimmed linens and a comforter and lay me in it as if I were a baby; and a sweet-faced blond hotel clerk in London who tried to act cynical and knowing, but was as sweet at my breast as a baby.

There was a jolly red-bearded German who took me to a wood-beamed, smoky restaurant in the old town of Frankfurt, where he gorged himself on spareribs and sauerkraut and a whole pitcher of beer, then chugged whiskey in bed and laughed through sex; and a delicate blond French boy, who made love as if he were creating a work of art, and who had the most ecstatic orgasm I have ever witnessed.

Not everything was pleasant, of course. Shane, a puritan without knowing it, begged me to be true to him at least until the next day, when we were to meet again. I laughed. Did he think I screwed every hour on the hour? Or that I didn't know he was married? And the Venetian merchant mariner cried out at the moment of climax, “You are virgin, I know it, is first time for you, beautiful Stacey!” And a kind-faced gentle, middle-aged Greek, also a reporter, who courted me by taking me to restaurant after restaurant, all filled with men, no women anywhere (the men ate out alone, he said, because they were unmarried, having had, like him, to spend their youths earning money for their sisters' dowries. Since I saw hundreds of women—and only women—rushing through the streets of Athens marketing, shopping, every evening, I did not believe him.). When we finally went to bed, he immediately got on top of me and kept shaking my body, while he thrust his penis at me hard, repetitively. The thrusts were hard; the penis wasn't. At some point, he shuddered. That was it. I wondered if he'd lost the knack, or if he'd never had it.

There was the guy in Florence, nice-looking, in his thirties, who suddenly fell into step beside me on the sidewalk and said, “How did you enjoy the Bargello? And Dante's house, it is wonderful? But your favorite was Santa Maria Novella, no? You stay there the longest time.”

Astonished, I turned, yes, I would have a coffee with him, I was curious. I questioned him. He had been following me since eleven o'clock.

“How can you keep a job and follow women all day?” He was wearing a nice suit, he was not penniless.

He shrugged. “I work for insurance company.”

That did not explain anything, I felt, and questioned him more, but he dismissed my questions with a shrug. “I see the big cameras and I know you are important. I follow only the important ones.” He told me Florentine men had a scale from one to ten to rate women they fuck—of course he did not use so obscene a word—and that I was a One.

“Americans are Ones?”

“Americans are Twos. Important beautiful women are One. Ethiopians are Ten.”

“Why is that?”

He spread his hands. “They are fat and ugly.”

“Ethiopians are beautiful,” I argued.

“They are easy.”

“Ethiopians are easy and Americans are hard?” I couldn't believe this, given what I knew about the two countries.

“Scandinavians are also easy. But they are beautiful, so they are Fours. Or sometimes, Fives. French and Germans are Five or Six, depending. And British are Three.”

“This seems to have less to do with hardness and easiness than with coloring,” I suggested. “Are Italians prejudiced against dark coloring? They are dark themselves. And what about Italian women?”