But her mind, in its weak moments, usually when she was sleepy or occasionally drunk, would lapse back to Anthony Pantuliano, his strong arms, firm jaw, his beautiful penis, and his fierce, dark eye. Every time she saw a photograph of the war, the tired faces of U.S. soldiers, the burning cities, the Vietnamese—their thin, brown bodies, screaming, dying, she looked for his name in the credit. She wondered if he was there amid gunfire, running through city streets with his camera slung over his shoulder. She wondered if he was burning his draft card in one of those lit-up trash cans along with the American flag.
She’d also tried not to think of my grandmother, her cold blue hands and liquor-hot breath. But she appeared also, the sturdy Polish woman, her broad lap covered by a fish-stained apron, the potato-and-onion-and-fried-fish smell of her wool sweaters, her thick-heeled shoes rooted there in my mother’s mind.
My mother had taken a bus and then a taxi the day of the funeral itself, not any sooner because she was set on avoiding my grandmother’s house. Koch’s Funeral Home was packed. Her father had been a weak fishmonger through good times and bad, always letting people run up a tab, always lightening the scale with his pinky for the poorest families, and everyone knew it. They loved him. They crowded his casket and cried.
My mother arrived only a few minutes early. She saw my grandmother next to the casket, shaking people’s hands, nodding, tight-lipped, seemingly sober and without emotion. She looked much older than my mother remembered her, not so much worn as toughened. My mother walked up to her father’s casket, ignoring the line. The couple placing a flower inside stepped back, gave her room.
It was her father, but not. He was tiny now, small enough, it seemed, to lift up and sit in her lap. His cheeks were painted, eyes closed. He looked like a little girl who’d gotten into her mother’s makeup. It made my mother think of Juniper’s wedding notes. She could hear Juniper’s voice: There’s nothing more inappropriate than a dead man in his casket made up as though he were in a chorus line in a musical comedy. She was embarrassed for him and for herself. She loved him and she hated him, too, for being weak, for being small, for confusing love with selflessness. When my mother stood over her father’s body in the stuffy parlor of Koch’s Funeral Home, she was tired and confused. Juniper was getting married. Her father was dead. She wasn’t sure who she was or what she wanted. She was unraveling. She cried, her chest heaving, sobbing for a moment, but then she felt my grandmother’s disapproving eyes on her. She wiped her cheeks with a handkerchief, stood up, and took her place next to my grandmother without speaking to her, without looking at her. The procession continued; each person giving his condolences to my grandmother and then to her.
The two women didn’t say a word to each other until the car ride to the burial in Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City. My mother’s Uncle Joseph was driving, an old, jovial man, even at a funeral. He hugged my mother, saying, “Your father was a good man.” He glanced at his sister and then whispered, “Maybe a saint!” My mother barely recognized him from photographs. My grandmother had estranged herself from the family, an estrangement she’d always blamed on her husband’s low social status, but now my mother wasn’t so sure. My grandmother was a champion at estrangement.
Uncle Joseph and his wife sat in the front; my mother and my grandmother sat in the backseat, the middle empty between them. During the fifteen-minute ride, my mother stared out the window onto the streets of Bayonne. A lot had changed, it seemed, this shop for that, and the people looked different, too, more divided into camps. There’d been some hippies three years earlier, but not this many. She’d seen hippies up north, too, especially when shopping or going to parties in Boston, but they were nonexistent in the nursing school, where hair and dress were strictly regulated, and they were equally rare in Juniper’s tight wealthy circle. It was strange to see them everywhere in this town she thought she’d known so well. They were slouching down the streets, sunning on front stoops, so much skin and hair, large poofed Afros and long, swaying shiny blond hair. She wondered if Anthony was a hippy, if he was smoking dope—she’d been warned vigorously against its evils in nursing school and had never tried it—if he was as angry as so many people her age seemed to be, angry at the war, their society, their parents.
My mother was angry, too, don’t get me wrong. She hated the war. She hated the treatment of blacks. She was sickened by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. The news coverage of the war turned her stomach, made her body ache. It made her think of blood and death and her own dead baby, lost that hot night in the convent dormitory bathroom. She never went to protests, though. They weren’t suitable to her life with Juniper Fiske who, like Julie Nixon with her bouffant poof-flip hairdo, didn’t want to be lumped with the hippies of her generation, calling the youthful war protestors “a very vocal minority.” It wouldn’t have been appropriate or grateful for my mother to side with the likes of Dr. Benjamin Spock at Juniper’s parents’ Sunday dinners, for example, as they agreed with Spiro Agnew’s comment on the “spirit of national masochism encouraged by an effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Covertly, however, my mother had begun to listen to Eugene McCarthy, who really seemed like he wanted the war to end. He sounded sensible and sincere. In the 1968 election, she’d decided to write in his name, but there hadn’t been a blank space as she’d expected, and so she refused to vote.
The car was quiet, somber. Finally, my grandmother spoke up. “You do good at your school?”
“Yes,” my mother said, not taking her eyes off the passing street scene.
“I no longer can support your education.” She said the word education as if it were something dirty or untrue, as if my mother’s education had been a grand hoax, a lie she’d fooled my grandfather with for years. At this, Uncle Joseph turned on the radio, quickly flipping from an inappropriately happy polka to classical, to give them privacy.
My mother hadn’t really thought that without her father, she’d have to quit school. She already had a partial scholarship, but there was no way she could replace the money her father sent each month to cover the remainder of the tuition. She had two years left. But she turned around quickly. “I don’t need anything from you.” She missed her father. Not that he would have defended her. He was never capable of that. But she wanted him to have overheard the conversation, the way he’d overheard her mother’s insults all her life, like an uncomfortable stranger seated on the same park bench. She missed the solace that he would give her later, behind her mother’s back, some shy smile, a small stroke of her hair. But he was gone now.
My grandmother nodded and turned to the window. “When you were a baby, you cried out once, so afraid. I waited until you were asleep, poured melted wax into a pan of water over your head. I repeated three Hail Marys. This was all to find out what had frightened you, to see the image that would appear from wax. It was my face. It was my face in the wax. You were afraid of me.” She glanced at her daughter. “But I can see that is no longer true.”
My mother didn’t say anything, but she was thinking, You’re right. I’m not afraid of you. She was surprised, too, by the image of her young mother, melting wax into water to see what had frightened her child, surprised that at one point in her life, her mother had been interested enough to go through a ritual like that. But she remembered my grandmother’s speech the night after she had found out about my mother and Anthony, how my grandmother had said that as a baby she’d been so perfect. She felt that old dirtiness creeping into her, the dirtiness my grandmother seemed to store inside of herself.
“This will be the end of it,” my grandmother said. “There’s nothing more between us.”
My mother nodded. “Fine,” she said, and she meant it. That was fine with her.
My mother didn’t remember much about the burial except that the eulogies would have embarrassed her father. He’d have hated the fuss. He’d have wanted to insist on leaving, but he’d have been too embarrassed
to call any more attention to himself. She imagined him shaking his head vigorously, saying, “No, no, no,” wagging his hands, his cheeks flushed, that he’d glance at his wife, who would be angry at the attention—as if it were undoing or at least denting her life’s work. And my grandmother did seem annoyed, her feet shifting, the little O of her mouth puffing out not grief-filled but exhausted sighs.
It was a hot day, breezeless, suffocating. My mother was wearing Sbicca spectator shoes, black-and-white wingtips with sling backs, and a sleeveless black Dacron-wool knit dress with two white stripes around the waist, carrying a black wooden-bead shoulder-strap pocketbook. It wasn’t perfectly appropriate—they were Juniper’s hand-me-downs but not what she would wear to a funeral. My mother could barely hear the soft-spoken priest over the noisy traffic on West Side Avenue. When they lowered the casket into the ground, my mother threw in her flower, but she was mostly surprised that what she felt was not a new ache but the same old ache she’d known for years. She told me she’d lost him long before his death.
She wasn’t planning on riding again with my grandmother in the backseat of her uncle’s Ford Galaxy. She looked around during the final prayers, maybe wondering where the closest bus stop might be, maybe because she sensed someone watching her, and that’s when she saw him far off, leaning against a tree by the entrance. Anthony. It was as if she’d been expecting him—he’d obviously been expecting her—and she simply peeled away from the crowd and walked toward him. He was a hippy, the wavy hair on his oversize head brushing his loud color-swirled-tie-dyed T-shirt collar, his bell-bottom blue jeans faded and patched. He was barefoot. She remembered the street shimmering with heat, for a moment wondering if he was a mirage, but he wasn’t. She walked up to him without saying anything, put her hands on his face, pressed her body up against him, and they rolled to the other side of the tree. She was about two inches taller in her high heels. She stared into his one dark eye and remembered what it was to be in love with someone real, someone not nailed to a cross, someone more than a wealthy figment of her imagination.
The first thing Anthony said to my mother was, “Come on, I want to show you everything.” And he started to run out of the cemetery, hopping over gravestones like a leprechaunish track star, and she zigzagged after him. At the gates, he grabbed her hand, and they started walking quickly, breathless, up West Side Avenue. My mother stopped to take off her high heels; three blocks later, she peeled off her stockings, the soles ruined with nubs and runs. She tossed them into a garbage can. She hooked the swingbacks of her shoes with two fingers. It was dawning on her that she was on her own, that she’d been cut loose, permanently. Juniper wouldn’t miss her, as she was so distracted with wedding plans. And her boss had set her free. Of course, my mother wasn’t going to move in with my grandmother, the supposedly grief-stricken widow, to nurse her back to emotional health. And her father, whom she wouldn’t have hurt for anything, was dead. For the first time in her life, no one really knew where she was or what she was doing.
Anthony was different, freer, and yet serious, too. He was thicker, broader, and he no longer carried the heavy smell of death from the slaughterhouse. My mother had forgotten how deep Anthony’s voice was, or maybe it had become more resonant—three years of speaking that she’d missed—and she was surprised, too, by what he was saying. And he was speaking so quickly that she could barely keep up.
“You never got the letters, did you? I wrote hundreds of them. At first your father took some of them, like he might get them to you, but I don’t know, maybe he buried them somewhere. I begged him to let me know where you were, but he wouldn’t.” He stopped on the street. “I’m sorry about your dad. Dino got word to me. He thinks I’m an American ingrate. He won’t talk to me anymore, but he made sure I knew. He still feels bad about the last time he saw you. He didn’t think it was an emergency. He left me a note that said you’d been crying, but you’d be okay. It was the next day before I got the whole story out of him. After Bitsy died, he got more sensitive. He realized there’s always something you still want to say to someone.”
“Bitsy died?”
“Yeah, she got hit by a milk truck. Look, I’m sorry about your dad. I know how you felt about him.”
My mother shook her head, lifting up her hand. She didn’t want to talk about it and start crying.
“I still think about my mother,” he said. “I know how it can be.”
“Do you still think about the flying circus?” she asked, trying to sound light.
“I’ve become a circus freak,” he said, standing back from her, his arms outstretched. “One day the Fetucci Flying Circus plane will come for me,” he said. “To take me away from all of this societal constraint, nice middle-class barbarism, to a land of happy freaks.” He paused a moment, but it was a held-breath pause that my mother didn’t interrupt. “I let them out, you know, the sheep and pigs and old run-down horses. Not that first night but a week later when I figured you weren’t getting my letters. They wouldn’t go. I opened the pens and shouted and flapped my arms. I screamed at them, but they wouldn’t leave their stalls. They sat there scared to death, wide eyed, paralyzed. Isn’t that perfect,” he said. “Just like us, too, us human beings, going around scared to death of freedom.” And then he shouted it. “Freedom!” He jumped up on a mailbox and raised his hands in the air.
My mother was shocked. She started to giggle nervously. He slid down off the mailbox and landed in front of her. They were eye to eye now that she was barefoot, too.
“You’re perfect,” he said. “More absolutely you than I remember. Dotty Verbitski. I’ve said it in my mind a million times. I thought you might have, you know, rebelled a little. Changed. But you’re still you. I like that. I can be the one to give you the message. It’s wild, Dotty, out there in the world. I want you to come with me, into the world!”
My mother told me that he could make her stop breathing. He could say something that was completely arresting and she would have to remember to let the air out of her lungs.
They took the bus back to Bayonne to his one-room apartment that he shared with Elvin and Cathy, a couple, although neither one was into “ownership.” When my mother walked in, Cathy was sitting cross-legged on a mattress on the floor, staring at the palms of her hands, her stringy light brown hair hanging down in planks, hiding her face. Elvin, tall, black, and rail thin, was packing up. He took one look at Dotty Verbitski and said, “Far out! She looks like she’s about to do a commercial for toothpaste.”
My mother definitely stood out in her black knit dress, holding onto her wingtip sling-backs, her hair in a chignon with ringlets in front of her ears. The room was cluttered with bongs, blankets, and pots coated with burned rice, and she said there were books, stacks of them everywhere. My mother remembers titles like the I Ching, The Way of Zen, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night, James Joyce’s Ulysses, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It. Anthony was carrying around a copy of The Making of a Counter Culture by Theodore Roszak. He was telling Dotty about Woodstock, that it would be better than the gigs in Atlanta and Atlantic City, better than the Yip-out in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow.
Elvin continued stuffing clothes into a large backpack. He pulled off his T-shirt and slipped on the white Indian silk shirt. “Do I look like Leary?” he asked. “A black Leary.”
Anthony snorted, stuffing things into a backpack. “Leary’s an idiot.”
“Who’s Leary?” my mother asked.
“Leary’s for the people,” Elvin said. “Drug-based equality for all.”
“Who becomes a Buddhist at West Point?” Anthony said. “Who’s a psychologist whose wife kills herself?”
“Who’s Leary?” my mother asked again.
“No one really listens to Leary,” Anthony said. “Not even Elvin. He thinks every white man has a credibility gap like Johnson. Tell her you don’t listen to Leary,” Anthony said to Elvin.
“Leary’s got a credibilit
y gap, if you ask me, like Johnson and Nixon and all those white guys.”
“And me,” Anthony said.
“You’re white, aren’t you?”
Cathy suddenly jerked her head up. She flipped back her hair and her plain freckly face appeared. She piped up, “Leary is the high priest of LSD. You wouldn’t have heard of him. They’ve never mentioned him on Laugh-In.”
Elvin told Cathy to get Dotty some clothes. It was obvious that Cathy didn’t want to, but it was equally obvious that she did what Elvin said. She added under her breath, “Yeah, so when we get there, people won’t think I brought my mom.”
My mother tucked the nasty comments away. It’s the way she operates. She planned to sting Cathy with a zinger when she least expected it. She watched Anthony jump around the room, getting everything ready. He was deep in concentration, sorting bongs and books.
Cathy handed my mother a tie-dyed shirt and a pair of low-cut bell-bottoms. My mother went to the bathroom to change. It had just one bar of soap, one hairbrush, and a half-empty bottle of aspirin. The shirt was too high cut, the pants too low, leaving her middle exposed. She felt very uncomfortable, soft and pale, like one of her father’s fish with its white belly. Her suitcase was in the back of her uncle’s Ford Galaxy, probably parked in his driveway by now somewhere in Bayonne. She had only her pocketbook, inside it some money, a bus ticket back to Massachusetts, and a pale-pink lipstick. She folded her funeral clothes and left them neatly stacked on the back of the toilet lid, along with her shoes. She freshened up her lipstick. Still clutching her navy blue pocketbook, she walked out of the bathroom, a little hunched to hide her belly.