And: “Your mother was always quick to dress herself up. You’d say about another woman she was putting on airs, but you wouldn’t say it about her—it was just one of the things she liked and she made it seem religious almost, a duty. She was like a queen that way.”
M
Y FATHER
, Max, came from Odessa. My mother did not meet him there, but she sailed from Odessa on a grain ship, and she landed in New Orleans.
Lila: “No one met her, not one of her relatives—she only had one sister in this country—but I swear to God she wasn’t frightened. The first thing she did was have her hair done. I won’t say she was vain; it wasn’t like vanity in her, it was something else. But she went out on the
street afterward, and she saw what she had done to it was wrong. What money she had she was never afraid to spend on herself. Oh, you don’t have any grip on what she was like. She could live on cabbage or on air; she could walk and not take a streetcar. She had a terrible amount of energy, you know. Anyway, she went to a better beauty parlor right away, the same day, the same hour, and had her hair done all over again, so no one would laugh at her. She was an immigrant, but she knew what was what from the beginning.”
And: “After a while, she married Max and went to that little town. She did laugh a lot, always, but it was often cruel, very cruel—her jokes were mean. But sometimes she was just like a girl. She would never go shopping with me. I used to give her things—silk scarves, jewelry—but then she stopped taking things. I never knew what to make of her.”
Giggling, she journeys by bus or train up the Mississippi Valley, Memphis, St. Louis, inland in Illinois.
Lila: “She used to let us all lie on her bed, and she would tell stories until we were faint with laughter. If you ask me, she wasn’t prepared for her sister’s not being high society. Her sister must have lied a lot when she wrote home—you know how it is—and Ceil made jokes about it.”
And: “Ceil made money from the first, writing letters for people to the old country, and she worked in a restaurant, but that was dirty and hard, and then she took to working in people’s houses because she was safer there from men, and after the first year she started speaking English better.”
One story about Ceil’s father, who was killed nearly ten years after Ceil died, was that the Russians (in another war) ordered him and his congregation to evacuate, to retreat to the east. He, for one reason or another—disloyalty to Stalin among his reasons—refused to accede to that order to migrate to Siberia. He was in his eighties. Eighteen shots—so the family myth goes—were fired at him by the Russians, but the Germans were near and the Russians fled, and he was healed or miraculously had not been hit or was so wounded it didn’t matter to him if he lived or died, and he lived in an in-between state until the Germans came, and he confronted them, too, a living dead man in his anger, and the Germans shot him, in midcurse, in front of the Ark. Some part of this is true, is verifiable.
Lila: “Ceil betook herself from her sister’s, and she went to St. Louis, where some educated Jews lived and there was a good rabbi. Some
people took her in, but she worked as a maid, and they used her—she didn’t know how not to work; she was accustomed to doing everything for her father—and she thought the St. Louis rabbi was silly and knew nothing—she said he had no God—and she had offers, but they didn’t interest her. But everybody liked her, we all liked her, and wondered what would happen to her, and she married Max. We warned her, but she was stubborn—she would never listen to anyone.”
H
ERE IS
Ceil in America, in Illinois—in a little town of thirty-five hundred—among American faces, cornfields, American consciences and violence; and her earlier memories never leave her, never lose their power among the sophistications of this traveler in her costumes, her days, her mornings and evenings. I think it was like that. Of course, I know none of this part as a fact.
S
HE LIVED
at the edge of the farm town, in a wooden house—it had five finished rooms in it. Across the road, the farm fields begin on the other side of a shallow ditch. Those fields stretch without a hill to the horizon. Never is the landscape as impressive as the skyscape here. From the rear of the house to the center of town is perhaps two and a half blocks. The houses are close together. Nowadays, there are trailers set up permanently on these streets where there were lawns once. It’s not a rich town. To the east, between the town and the superhighway, which is seven miles away, two slag heaps rise in the middle of cornfields. In the course of a day, the shadows of the slag heaps make a clocklike round on the leaves of the corn around them.
In the summer, the laboring factory sky and the rows of corn in their long vegetable avenues form an obscene unity of heat. In winter, the sky is a cloud-jammed attic, noisy and hollow.
S
HE WAS
ashamed, you know—her accent, her size. She knew she was something and that people admired her, and still she hid herself away. She could see her way to a dime, her eyes would light up over seventy-five cents—I could never do that. She was good at arithmetic, she could do numbers in her head better than a man, and she could make people laugh, and no one thought she was a liar; you don’t know what that means in a little town—everyone
keeps track of who makes money, and if anyone makes money people think he’s gouging everyone else. She had a good eye for just how good she could do on a deal and still go on in that town; she was honest, but she was a good liar, and she socked some money away so people wouldn’t hold it against her; she was getting richer by the day, by leaps and bounds, and she wanted a child to make her life complete.
You were her success in the world, you were her success in America in a nutshell.
I
WAS BORN
in her bedroom, at home.
I
feel
her; I feel her moods.
A
LONGSIDE
the house and running at a diagonal to it is a single-track railroad. It is set on a causeway six feet high. I think I can remember the house begin to shake with an amazing faint steadiness until, as if in an arithmetical theater, the house begins to slide and shimmy in a quickening rhythm that is not human. It is as if pebbles in a shaking drum became four, then eight, then rocks, perhaps like numbers made of brass in a tin cylinder, antic and chattering like birds, but more logically. In lunacy, the sound increases mathematically, with a vigor that is nothing at all like the beating of a pulse or the rhythms of rain. It is loud and real and unpicturable. The clapboards and nails, glass panes and furniture and wooden and tin objects in drawers tap and whine and scratch with an unremitting increase in noise so steadily there is nothing you can do to resist or shut off these signals of approach. The noise becomes a yawning thing, as if the wall had been torn off the house and we were flip-flopping in chaos. The noise and echoes come from all directions now. The almost unbearable bass of the large interior timbers of the house has no discernible pattern but throbs in an aching shapelessness, isolated.
At night, the light on the locomotive comes sweeping past the trembling window shades, and a blind glare pours on us an unstable and intangible milk in the middle of the noise. The rolling and rollicking thing that rides partway in the sky among its battering waves of air does this to you. Noise is all over you and then it dwindles; the shaking and noise and light flow off, trickle down and away, and the smell of the grass and of the night that was there before is mixed with the smell of
ozone, traces of burnt metal, a stink of vanished sparks, bits of smoke from the engine if the night is without wind.
The train withdraws and moves over the fields, over the corn. The house ticks and thumps, tings and subsides. The train moves southwest, toward St. Louis.
T
HE WOODEN-ODORED
shade of a porch, the slightly acid smell of the house: soap and wood—a country smell.
My mother’s torso in a flowered print dress.
A summer, an autumn, a winter—those that I had with Ceil.
T
HE HOUSE
had very large windows that went down quite close to the floor. These windows had drawn shades that were an inhumanly dun-yellow color, a color like that of old lions in the zoo, or the color of corn tassels, of cottonwood leaves after they have lain on the ground for a while—that bleached and earthen clayey white-yellow.
M
Y MOTHER’S
happiness was not the concern of the world.
I half believe that my mother had a lover. I half remember going with her to see him; she took me with her on a train that ran by electricity among the flat farm fields. I stood on the seat and looked out the train window. My hand marks and nose marks and breath marks—I remember those and her hand wiping the marks away. I see wheeling rows of corn, occasional trees, windmills, farmhouses.
Maybe I am mistaken.
L
ILA:
She had more character than any woman I ever knew, but a lot of good it did her.
Your mother knew she’d made a mistake marrying Max; she gave him money and she knew he would spend it and go off: she was no one’s fool, but how she had the nerve to live in that little town alone I just don’t know; everyone’s watching; you can fall flat on your face.
Ceil’s business did well in hard times and in good times. My brother said she was a genius at business—she had such a good head men were interested in doing business with her; men enjoyed talking to her, she was their size,
and you could see she was religious, she was serious; it tickled people that someone so smart lived in such a little town and worked so hard and didn’t speak English well and was getting ahead in the world anyway.
You won’t understand this, but she wasn’t ashamed of being a woman.
I
OFTEN
think I would have disliked Ceil—at least at times. My mother. I imagine the lunatic and pitiable arrogance, the linguistic drunkenness of my mother on her bed of language and anathema.
I
WAS
her child—her infant, really—and the most important thing in her life, she said, but never to the exclusion of her rising in the world or the operations of her will.
I
N MY DREAMS
at night, often the people of a small town crowd around the white-painted wooden farmhouse, carrying torches, to celebrate my election, my revealed glory of destiny; if they applaud or cheer too loudly, I awake and leave them behind in the dream that is a lost planet, a wandering asteroid from which they cannot escape. My mother’s dreams and her life were of her election. As in most lives, there is quiet in it, but not often.
Ceil’s pride kept her from making friends; friends would have preserved her life but altered the workings and turns of her mind. “She was comfortable only with people who worked for her; she had to be the best; she had great pride in her mind; she thought she knew everything.”
Ceil dresses herself in her efforts and her decisions.
Y
OUR MOTHER
was cursed by your grandfather if she should ever stop being Jewish: look, not just Jewish, strict, you know what I mean—you know what I mean by strict? I don’t
know if I have the wherewithal to tell you the story if you don’t make an effort to understand it on your own; be said she was supposed to die in a bad way if she wasn’t a Jew just the way be was, the way he said Jews should be; you know what people are like who have those kinds of minds, don’t you? Well, Ceil got taken ill, and she said it was because she wasn’t a Jew anymore that her father would let in his house.
Now I want to switch to another woman’s voice, away from Lila—not a woman I know well.
You want to hear? Mostly, men don’t want to
know. My mother went to see Ceil in the hospital when she was dying, she went every day, even when Ceil couldn’t speak; she said it was good for her
[edifying for her mother: the nobility, the piety, the strength in suffering]—
but maybe not. There’s truth in those old things, but how can you tell? Everybody dies anyway. Maybe she didn’t keep it up, Ceil, but she had a lot of dignity. She liked God, you know, better than people—maybe except for you. She said she owed it to God. She said she had no right to complain. I don’t know if I understood it. She had one sister here, and the sister didn’t like her children; they were too American, they weren’t good to her—you know how some young people are—and she was afraid they were no good. Ceil told me in confidence that her sister was nothing special: she was a stupid woman and greedy and not very nice. Ceil was different; she talked different; she looked at things different. Her sister hacked herself up with a meat cleaver. You know, it’s funny how many suicides I know about. People hide it from children, you know. She made sure no one was in the house; she sent all the children to the movies. Ceil’s sister was twenty years older than her. I think there was a curse on her, too. She took the cleaver and she chopped up everything—all her furniture and all her clothes, everything, handkerchiefs and stockings. And then she hit herself over and over, over and over—are you sure you want to hear this?—until she was dead. Then Ceil had been having trouble with Max, and she did something she was ashamed of; it was the abortion, but she did it to herself with the help of a Frenchwoman who knew her. And Ceil got a little sick; it was nothing bad, but she went to her sister’s funeral and sat shiva and she took you with her, and she said to me that the voice of her father was in that room and she tried not to listen. Ceil had a lot of money in the bank, a lot of money, and she loved you, it was nice to see. She didn’t want to die, I promise you that. When she was sick, she said you would feel she ran out on you. A woman is always wrong. I was lucky. It never got so serious for me I couldn’t laugh. Oh, maybe once or twice I thought I would die from it. I wanted to go be in an asylum, but it wasn’t my children who saved me. They take, they don’t give. She said who would ever give you now what she did, what a mother gives, for no good reason, who would take care of a child like a mother? A woman has her own children or she is ignorant. How can you let a mother go when you’re that little and then you have to take what you can get—it’s a terrible story, as I said—but she got ill, it was in her soul, she was disgusted with all of us—it happens to a lot of women. She didn’t give in right away; the doctors said she would die in a week, but she lived on six months because of you—in pain that was terrible. It couldn’t even be God’s anger, it was so terrible; it came from the devil, she said, and the drugs weren’t strong enough to touch it. It’s terrible
when nothing can help. She stank from an infection so bad it made people throw up—it made her sick, her own stench. It was like something out of hell. They put her on a floor where everyone was dying. You know how doctors run away when they can’t help you. And it got worse and worse and worse. She lay there and she plotted to find someone to save you. And to tell you the truth, she didn’t want Lila to have you—she didn’t like Lila at all; Lila is trash, she said—but when Lila brought you to see her and you were better than you’d been and Lila had on her diamonds and a lot of perfume and you liked her, Ceil said it was better maybe you were saved, no matter what, no matter who it was—even someone, practically a Gentile whore, like Lila: Ceil talked like a rabbi, very strict. She said Lila wasn’t as bad as some people thought. Lila was brave. No one could tell Lila what to do. Lila brought you to your mother and she put you in your mothers arms, and you cried when she held you; you can’t blame yourself: it was horrible; you knew your mother only when she was well, a strong woman like that, and here is this bag of bones, this woman who prays in a crazy way, and she is crazy with worry about you; and she prayed you’d live and be all right and do something for the Jews. You cried and you turned and you held your arms out to Lila. I’ll tell you the truth, it killed Ceil, but she wasn’t surprised—she said to me its easy to die, it was hard to live, I want to die now, and she died that night. Don’t blame yourself. The only thing she asked me to tell you is to tell you to remember her.