Authors: Anita Diamant
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1927
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All I felt was pain.
My mother died a few weeks later. Levine took care of the funeral the same way he took care of most things—without anyone asking him and without much in the way of thanks.
I had been to the cemetery when Myron and Lenny died, but burying Mameh was a completely different experience, like night and day. Even getting there wasn’t the same. The roads were better, so we got there in no time, and instead of three mourners, there were twenty people and a whole line of cars behind the hearse.
The biggest difference was how “normal” it seemed. Mameh was sixty-five, which wasn’t so young in 1927. Nobody was shocked. She had been sick and died at home in her own bed, so it was sad but nothing like the tragedy it had been with Celia, or Myron and Lenny.
Only Papa and Levine had been there for Celia’s funeral. That was probably because we didn’t know many people back then, but maybe it had something to do with how she died. There was so much guilt mixed in with the grief. And how do you explain a healthy young woman dying from a slip of a kitchen knife?
With the flu epidemic, everyone was afraid, and walking into a cemetery seemed like tempting fate. I went to the boys’ funeral to stand in for Betty and it’s a good thing she didn’t come. The idea of her seeing those little coffins was so awful. Just remembering it still makes me feel like crying.
Before the service for Mameh, I went to look at their graves and tried to think of my sister and nephews when they were young and healthy, but all I could remember was the blood on Celia’s hands and the look on Betty’s face when they took away her little boys. Standing by those gravestones, I didn’t get any comfort or what you’d call “closure” today. All I felt was pain.
One thing hadn’t changed: the cemetery was just as bleak as I remembered. The trees had grown and they had planted bushes, but it was January and hard to believe that anything would ever be green again.
I started to shiver when the service began. There wasn’t any wind and nobody else seemed bothered by the cold, but I could hear my teeth chattering. I had to lock my knees to keep from wobbling, and if Aaron hadn’t put his arm around me, I might have keeled over, honest to God. At least Jewish funerals are short.
When they lowered the coffin into the ground, I remember thinking, She won’t be able to make me feel like there’s something wrong with me anymore.
But when the first clump of dirt hit the coffin, I realized that I would never stop wanting my mother to tell me that I was all right and that’s when I started to cry.
Life is more important than death.
After we sat shiva, Papa told Betty and me that we were official mourners for a whole year, which meant we were supposed to stay away from celebrations and music or entertainment of any kind. So no parties, no going to the symphony, not even a movie.
After the first month, Betty stopped paying attention to the rules. If her boys wanted to see the new Our Gang movie, she took them and stayed to watch. “You think I’m going to leave them in a dark theater all by themselves?”
I felt like I was living “in the meantime” and I actually didn’t mind being quiet. Papa and I ate suppers upstairs with Betty and her family, then he would go to the synagogue and I usually went to my room to read. It was sort of like living in the boardinghouse.
Not that I was a hermit. I was with people all day at work and I kept going to class. I think it was American history that term. My friends called on the phone and came to the house. Aaron and I saw each other all the time; we just didn’t talk about the wedding.
But when the flowers started blooming and everyone put away their winter coats, I started to feel like a dog on a chain. Everywhere I went, I saw couples holding hands and whispering to each other. Aaron showed me an advertisement for an apartment we could afford. I got up my nerve and asked my father how soon we could get married.
He said, “Anytime you want.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You told me I had to wait a year.”
“Did I say anything about weddings? According to the Talmud, if a funeral procession and a wedding procession cross paths, the wedding party goes first. Life is more important than death.”
You’d think he could have told me that before.
“Just don’t make it fancy,” Papa said. “No music or dancing.”
That wasn’t a problem. I’d always wanted it to be simple, and Aaron didn’t care about fancy as long as it was soon. But when I told Betty and Mildred we were thinking about getting married at the beginning of May, which was just a few weeks off, they acted like it was a disaster only a littler smaller than the
Titanic.
Betty said that since she didn’t have a daughter, this was going to be her only chance to make a wedding. And why did I want to ruin it for her?
For
her
, right?
She and Mildred complained and noodged until we agreed to wait until June so they could make everything nice. Rita asked if she could give me a bridal shower to introduce me to the other women in the family before the wedding. I’d never been to a shower—it was a new fad at the time—but my sister-in-law-to-be had read an article about them in
Ladies’ Home Journal
and she had her heart set on doing it just like it said in the magazine—right down to pink icing and sugar roses on the cake. She wanted to invite my friends, too, so I gave her Gussie’s phone number and said she’d get in touch with everyone else.
Rita planned it as a tea party on Saturday afternoon at three o’clock and told everyone to wear nice dresses and white gloves, if you can imagine.
Irene called me to ask if she could come to my party even if she didn’t embroider a pillowcase, which Rita had asked all the guests to do. When I said I didn’t know anything about pillowcases she said, “Gussie didn’t tell me the pillowcases were supposed to be a surprise. Now I’ve ruined the whole goddamn thing.”
The older Irene got, the more she swore. I remember when her grandson pooped in his diaper at his christening, she said, “Holy shit,” loud enough for everyone to hear. The look on that priest’s face!
On the day of the shower, the Metsky house was full of doilies, lilacs, and a dozen aunts and second cousins. After they all got finished hugging me, I smelled like the perfume counter at Jordan’s.
Rita presented me with a trousseau of pillowcases and towels embroidered with my new initials and I acted as if Irene hadn’t spilled the beans.
There were some other surprises, though. I knew Irene and Helen would be there but I was bowled over when Miss Chevalier and Miss Green walked in with Katherine Walters, who I lost touch with after I left the
Transcript.
Miss Chevalier kissed my cheek and said, “I’m so happy for you, my dear.” Miss Green seemed to have shrunk two inches but she still had a twinkle in her eye. “I like to think we had something to do with your marriage, since you met your fiancé in our home.”
The Ediths hadn’t been asked to embroider anything, thank goodness, but Miss Green brought me one of the lovely ceramic boxes she designed; you used to put Barbie shoes in it when you were little.
Having all those women together in one place was like looking through a photo album of my life: from when I was a baby to the Saturday Club to Rockport Lodge to working at the newspaper to meeting Aaron.
And it was amazing how well they got along. Miss Green, who had been to Ireland, talked to Irene about the town where she was born. Katherine and Betty had a debate about who was funnier: Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton. I could have told them it was Charlie Chaplin, but I didn’t want to butt in.
I asked Helen where Gussie was. “She’s just a little late,” Helen said. Gussie gave me so much grief if I was even two minutes late, I looked forward to giving her a little of her own medicine. When she finally got there, she put up one hand like a stop sign. Then Irene sang, “Ta-da,” and Filomena appeared.
I don’t know if I shrieked or just stood there with my mouth open, but everyone clapped and Betty shouted, “She didn’t have a clue!”
As soon as we’d set a date for the wedding, I wrote to Filomena to ask if she could come. She wrote back that she couldn’t because that was the week she had promised to take her teacher to a powwow in the mountains and she couldn’t go back on her word or that would be the end of their friendship. I had figured it was a long shot and I could tell how bad she felt because it was the longest letter I ever got from her. Betty was there when I got her wedding present, which came with the note saying not to open it until the wedding day.
They were all in on it: my friends, my sister, even my new in-laws. It might have been the only secret Betty ever kept. She’d rummaged around in my room for Filomena’s address, Gussie sent a telegram, and everyone chipped in for the train tickets.
It had been more than ten years since I’d seen my best friend. Filomena still wore a long braid. Her hair wasn’t pure black anymore, but the streak of white next to her cheek made her look glamorous—not old. It was the same face, though, darker and a little weathered by the sun, but just as beautiful.
She was dressed in a long skirt and a striped shawl, like the Indian girls in her picture postcards. There were stacks of turquoise and silver bracelets on both wrists and she smelled like something fresh and woody. She told me that it was sage, something the Indians used for health and good fortune. I’m making her sound like a cartoon hippie from the 1960s, but she didn’t look messy. No matter what she was wearing, Filomena carried herself like a queen.
When she saw Miss Green, Filomena took both of her teacher’s hands in hers and said, “Thank you for giving me my life.”
It was such a sweet moment. Katherine said it reminded her of how students in India honored their teachers by touching the ground at their feet. I didn’t feel quite up to that, but before the afternoon was over I thanked Miss Chevalier for everything she had done for me since I was a girl.
I wish I’d had a camera. Not that I need pictures to remember that day.
I’ve forgotten a lot more than I like to admit, but I have all the details memorized: the pink icing, Katherine’s beautiful yellow shoes, the lilacs, and the sound of Filomena’s bracelets when she threw her arms around me. Like a wind chime.
You never looked at me with anything but love.
Sometimes friends grow apart. You tell each other everything and you’re sure this is a person you’ll know the rest of your life but then she stops writing or calling, or you realize she’s really not so nice, or she turns into a right-winger. Remember your friend Suzie?
But sometimes, it doesn’t matter how far apart you live or how little you talk—it’s still there. That was Filomena and me.
The day after the wedding shower we got together in the North End. She had to go to a big family lunch after church so she wasn’t sure exactly what time she’d get away, but I didn’t mind waiting. I was sitting on a bench in front of St. Leonard’s in the North End on a beautiful day and people were strolling on Hanover Street. Old ladies in black dresses were feeding the pigeons and watching their grandchildren play. It was exactly how I remembered it from when I was growing up, except the hats were different.
There isn’t enough room to say much on a postcard, so I had a hundred questions for Filomena. I knew that some of her New Mexico friends were painters and that she spent a lot of time with an Indian potter named Virginia. I knew she was living by herself and watched the sunset every day. She was selling enough of her pottery to scrape by. But that was about it. It was like I had an empty coloring book for her to fill in.
At first, I didn’t recognize the frumpy woman in a baggy black dress who was waving at me. Filomena’s sisters had made her take off her “costume” before church and dressed her like a grandmother. They were furious at her. How could she come to Boston for a friend’s wedding when she hadn’t bothered to make it to her own nieces’ and nephews’ first communions and graduations? They calmed down a little when she told them her friends had paid for her tickets. I guess they forgot she’d been sending them money ever since she moved to Taos, and believe me, she never had much to spare.
Filomena unpinned her braid, pulled a woven sash and some bracelets out of her bag, and in one minute was back to looking beautiful. She said she was dying for an espresso. “I’ve been dreaming about coffee ever since I got on the train.”
We went to a café where not even the hats had changed. I never saw a person enjoy anything more than Filomena enjoyed that espresso. The waiter must have noticed, too, because he brought over a second cup before she could ask.
She said, “Grazie,” and it was like they were long-lost cousins, talking with their hands and interrupting each other, just like Jews, except everything sounds better in Italian.
Filomena had brought a stack of pictures to show me and laid them out on the table in rows, like she was playing solitaire. There were a few of her sitting at a table with Morelli and three couples who were making silly faces at the camera. They had been his friends in art school and shared a big house on the outskirts of Taos. Filomena said, “We stayed with them at first, but it was like living with the Keystone Cops.
“They loved each other but they fought all the time and I could never figure out who was mad at who. Crazy people, but they were always good to me.” Eventually she and Morelli moved into a cottage on their land.
I had always imagined her living in a little shingled house like the ones in Rockport, but the house in the picture looked like a big anthill. Filomena explained what adobe was and how cool her house was on hot days. I said it sounded like living inside of a clay pot.
She got a kick out of that.
There was a picture of Bob Morelli sitting at a pottery wheel, looking down at a lump of clay between his hands. It made me remember how handsome he was.
“That’s an old picture,” she said. For the first few years, Morelli had gone to New York to visit his son in the summer, but one fall he didn’t come back. He said his son needed him, but Filomena knew that wasn’t the only reason. He couldn’t work in bronze in New Mexico and he missed the city. “Did I write that he died last year? Car accident. I’m still getting used to the idea.”
I said I was sorry and I meant it.
Filomena was excited to show me pictures of her work and there were a few vases that reminded me of Miss Green’s designs. But most of it had a different shape: round at the bottom, sharper like a tulip bulb, and mostly very dark. To me, it looked like streamlined modern art, but it was an old Pueblo style called blackware.
She said the minute she laid eyes on it she had to find out how to make it. She handed me a picture of an Indian woman with wrinkled cheeks and white hair bending over a fire. She said, “This is my teacher, Virginia; my Pueblo Miss Green.”
Virginia was one of the few people who still made blackware but when Filomena asked to study with her, she said no. “The Pueblo people don’t have much use for the whites. To them, we’re like badly behaved children.”
But Filomena kept pestering until Virginia let her dig the clay for her pottery and collect the manure she burned in her kiln. It sounded to me like work that the slaves did in Egypt but when I asked if she got paid, she laughed. “Virginia thought I should be paying her and she’s probably right. She only started teaching me how to build the pots when she broke her arm. But now that she’s getting older, I think she keeps me around because she knows I’ll keep the tradition alive. Not that she’d ever say so.”
Virginia called Filomena’s first attempts “half-breeds” and “bastards.” But once she stopped smashing them when they came out of the kiln, Filomena knew she was making progress.
“I’m really getting the hang of it now, but the tourists aren’t interested.” People want colorful souvenirs that people back home would recognize as “Indian.” So she was giving art lessons to make ends meet. “Of all the Mixed Nuts, I always thought you’d be the teacher. It turns out I like teaching.”
—
Filomena was in Boston for a few weeks before the wedding and we saw each other a lot. Irene had a dinner party for us with Gussie and Helen, who brought her husband and kids. One evening, Aaron took Filomena and me out for ice cream. She had a lot of family obligations, but we made sure we had time alone and we never ran out of conversation because nothing was too trivial or painful to talk about. I don’t know how many times we each said, “I never told anyone but . . .”
I told her how I wished I’d been more sensitive and sympathetic to poor shell-shocked Ernie and how I had a dream about trying to save that poor farm girl in Minnesota. I confessed that I was relieved my mother wouldn’t be at my wedding, and how sad I was about feeling that way.
Somehow, telling Filomena about those things made them seem lighter and less terrible. I remember asking her if that’s what it was like after going to confession in church. She said “God, no. When I was a girl I thought I’d get in trouble if I didn’t say all the Hail Marys and Our Fathers. But nothing bad happened if I didn’t say them and I didn’t feel any better when I did. It was like putting a penny into a slot and nothing comes out. By the time I was twelve, I only went to church when my sisters made me.”
She said she felt better talking to someone she could see, someone who cares about her. “The time I almost died in that bathtub, what kept me going was the look on your face and Irene’s and that wonderful nurse. I could see how worried you were, not mad or angry or disappointed. You just didn’t want me to die. And afterward, too, you never looked at me with anything but love: no pity, no judgment. I’ve thought about this a lot, Addie. You made it possible for me to forgive myself.”
I had no idea it was so important to her, just like she was surprised to find out what I remembered from our conversations that first week at Rockport Lodge. She changed the way I thought about myself. “You told me I had a good eye and that I was good listener. You laughed at my jokes and took my ideas seriously.”
You know, Ava, it’s good to be smart, but kindness is more important. Oh dear, another old-lady chestnut to stitch on a sampler. Or maybe one of those cute little throw pillows.
—
I guess I hadn’t written much about the classes I’d taken, because Filomena wanted to know about college and my teachers and the subjects I’d studied. When she asked what I was taking in the fall, I said I wasn’t planning to sign up. I already felt like an old lady with all the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds and anyway, once I had children, I wouldn’t have the time and I’d really be too old.
It wasn’t like today. In those days you never heard of a married woman going to college. But you’d have thought I’d said I was going to join the circus or enter a convent. Filomena gave me a lecture about women in Taos who started businesses at fifty, even sixty. She said Virginia’s niece was in her forties when she left her kids with her mother and moved to Albuquerque for three years to become a nurse.
She said, “You’re not even thirty years old, which means you’ll be in your fifties when your children are grown up, and you don’t have to wait anyway. When they go to school, you can go to school, and you don’t even have to move to Albuquerque.”
I said maybe, but that wasn’t enough for Filomena. “Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t keep taking classes at least until you have a baby.”
The reason was that I still didn’t know why I was taking classes at all. It would have been different if I wanted to start a business or be a lawyer. But I was still just “dabbling” and I wasn’t even enjoying it.
I had taken literature classes thinking maybe I should be an English teacher like people had been telling me since I was a kid. It was true that I loved reading stories and novels. But the only courses I could take were about Milton or Dryden or Chaucer. They weren’t easy to understand. And the professors? They didn’t care whether we understood the poems, much less loved them. None of my homework was as interesting as the writers I was reading in the magazines or books I took out of the library: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis.
Filomena said she was going to talk to Aaron about my staying in school. “He’ll be all for it. You still don’t know how smart you are, just like you don’t know how pretty you are. But Aaron knows. He also thinks the sun and moon revolve around you. What wouldn’t I give to have someone care about me that way.”
I said, “But I thought you didn’t want to get married.”
“That has nothing to do with wanting to be loved,” she said. “I know you never liked Bob and things didn’t turn out the way I wanted, but he was the love of my life. The time we spent in Taos was the happiest I’ve ever been. He found us a studio and made me believe in my talent. We were together day and night. He used to say we were made out of the same clay.”
Filomena said she was “keeping company” with someone. “He’s very nice, but you only get one great love in a lifetime.”
Then it was my turn to make a speech. “Who made that rule?” I said, and ticked off the war widows I knew who were happily remarried.
Filomena said she wasn’t complaining. She liked her independence and privacy and the fact that nobody judged what she did or didn’t do.
She admitted that she got lonely for her family—and for me. She missed Italian food and good coffee and the smell of the ocean. “But I belong to that landscape now, to the sky and the mountains. I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”
From the moment Filomena walked into my wedding shower, I had wanted to ask if she was ever coming back to live in Boston. That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, but I meant it when I said, “Then I’m happy for you.”