Why not? She does not owe me the truth about this. I see it in the car, on the luxurious leather backseat of the gorgeous car that was soon to vanish. Backseats—the loci of so many of our beginnings. I like to picture it as having passion.
In any case, wherever and however it happened, there she was in March 1929 with her Wall Street job, her Pratt portfolio, and no period. She remembers nothing about the time that followed except walking onstage pregnant to receive her diploma, and crying. Crying, crying, unable to stop.
Finally, she told them, her family. Momma said nothing. Neither did anyone else. They looked at her: Jean shook her head and lamented, “Oh, Belle!” Eddie made some joke about Ed Dabrowski. Only Wally seemed to understand what it meant to her, and he took her aside later and said he could arrange for an abortion for her if she wanted it. She cried on his shoulder.
She wanted the abortion. It was all too shameful. God was punishing her because of one time, one time! She would be so humiliated in front of her friends. But she sensed without knowing how it would be to have an abortion—a dark street, many stairs, a dirty room, filth and corruption and sin and shame and it was illegal besides. And expensive. And inside her was a living being.
She sat alone in her darkened room and cried, thinking about her life as a huge joke, all her attempts, her struggle to find a place where she could breathe, where she could be on the outside what she felt inside, and here she was trapped, forever, she would never escape now. And this had been her destiny all along. How could she have imagined anything else? The only thing she wanted to be was an artist, but she had no talent, her teachers never praised her, so what else was there? She was a woman, all women ended up like this. She had all these years been a worm wriggling and twisting on a hook that had held her all along, impaled on nature’s decree, ignorant not just about life but about this too.
When she was exhausted with crying, when her nose was sore from being wiped and her eyes rimmed with red, she thought about what to do. She knew Ed was frightened but would leave the decision up to her. He was only twenty-three and just starting in life, and hardly knew if he could support a family. But if she wanted an abortion, he would find the money for her and go with her and hold her hand. And if she did not, he would marry her, grateful for her if not for the child.
In early June 1929, she and Ed drove to Washington. They found a little church and told the priest they wanted to be married. He told them they must confess first. Belle knelt in the confessional, dumb. She could not remember the prayer she was supposed to start with, “Forgive me, Father…” or how long it had been since she had gone to Confession. She began to cry and told the priest she was pregnant. Curtly, he barked out a long penance and slammed down the shutter. Then he charged out of the box and grabbed Ed by the arm and cursed him, called him vile names. Grimly, in fury, he married them.
Oh, Ed, poor Ed. Standing there, the gentle boy who loved this woman, who had wanted her in the fullness of his devotion and desire, who had not meant harm, heard himself reviled and recoiled from it, yet at the same time accepted it. He knew the priest was right. He was a man and men were like that, yes, he had pressured her, he had not thought about the consequences. He did not think the word evil, but he felt it. He knew the Father was right: fathers were always right, no matter how harsh they might seem; boys had to submit to fathers. The entire question was too hard for him and he let it go. But neither Belle nor Ed ever entered a church again of their own volition, and all Ed retained of his Catholicism was a discomfort with eating meat on Fridays.
They left the church on a dismal grey day and wandered around Washington a little, then drove back to New York. Ed saw Belle into her house, then kissed her, and drove off to his. They did not tell their families they had been married, though Belle’s family no doubt knew. Later they would tell everyone they had been secretly married for a year. The lie enabled them to hold up their heads even though they knew no one would believe them. It gave everyone a story they could accept and treat as truth.
But shame crumpled Belle’s stomach, and whenever she was alone, she cried. They both continued to work and save every penny. They went out, like any engaged couple, and Ed bought Belle an engagement ring with a real diamond in it. They looked at apartments, and in September, rented a nice three-room apartment in Kew Gardens, near enough to the subway, near to Belle’s family. They looked at furniture, and Ed was impressed by Belle’s knowledge, and by the Queen Anne sofa and chair she chose. They also bought a Tudor chair, with a high back and wooden arms, putting a deposit down and paying the furniture off on time. They bought an unpainted bedroom set, and painted it white and Ed put beautiful floral decals Belle had chosen on the fronts of the chests of drawers and the head of the bedstead.
They moved the furniture in, and began to live as a married pair in October. It was hard, because Ed was also giving money to his father to help the family out, and now Belle was no longer working. So Ed got a night job in a pharmacy. They worried, but they planned. And then, everything collapsed. The newspapers screamed in great black letters and rich men jumped out of office buildings. Ed’s customers’ cars simply vanished and their bills remained unpaid.
He still can’t understand this. “They were all rich, you know?” Nearly sixty years later, he sits scratching his still full head of white hair. “They were doctors, stockbrokers. And not one of them paid me, not one!” He cannot comprehend this even now. They were respectable men, and respectable men pay their bills, especially if they have money and their creditor does not. This innocence of my father’s, maintained all these years, seems sweet to me, and I reach out and touch his hand.
Overnight he lost his business. They could not pay the November rent on the apartment and Belle was shamed worse than ever before in her life. She went back to Momma’s, and Ed went back to his family. At night, secretly in the dark, he and his brother loaded their furniture onto a rented truck and drove it away. And late in November, that month I always think of as bleak—the bare branches reaching desperately to a broad grey empty sky—I was born.
PART 2
THE CHILDREN IN THE GARDEN
VI
1
MY MOTHER CRIED. IT must be my first memory. Alone in the dark narrow cold room, the two of us still bound together, she screamed and no one came and she cried. Once, the door opened and a sliver of light showed, but the nurse roughly asked her why she was making so much noise, she wasn’t ready yet. She kept screaming, the pain was so terrible. She wept, and from her pain, I emerged, I Anastasia, her punishment, the midge daughter.
She kept crying after I was born, and the doctor gave her luminal. She swallowed it hungrily, day after day. But she still cried, and the crying was a scream against her life, like rain outside a window, concealing, distorting, dimming all else that occurred.
Ed came to take her home from the hospital, but she was not allowed to take her baby because they had not paid the hospital bill. She does not remember what trick they used, what ploy, but Ed got the baby out too. They carried her to the Dabrowskis’ where they were to live: it was a bigger house than the one in Manse Street. Dafna put her in an alcove off the kitchen, on a cot, with a box beside her for the baby. Ed slept in his old room, with Daniel. Belle cried. On the third day, in the afternoon while Dafna was at Josephine’s, she got up and dressed and dressed the baby and went to the corner call box and called a taxi. She left no note. She went to Momma’s house. Momma now slept in the big bed in the front room with Jean, and Belle refused to let her move. She took the dark narrow middle room. She gave the baby to Momma. She slept, and when she woke up, she cried.
Frances’s arms reached out to the baby hungrily. She reached out and engulfed Anastasia, her first baby, the baby she had always wanted, the baby she had not been able to have when she had her own. She encompassed her and sang to her and talked to her and fed her endlessly. She bounced her and told her she was a hammer thrower, moja kochanie, and she, Frances, was Babcia, Grandma. Frances w
as happy again.
Belle cried. She was only twenty-five and her life was over. Her life had ended. Ed had no job, they had no money, she was no longer a carefree young flapper concerned about clothes and outings and piano lessons and violin lessons and art school and her wonderful friends. That was all over, over forever. She would never have it again, and in truth, she hadn’t had much. Now it was done, and all she had was this creature, this clamorous thing that demanded to be fed from Belle’s own body, when after all, how could there be anything in it? She nursed for a few weeks, then gave it up. Her milk was thin, sporadic, laced with luminal; the baby screamed and clutched its little fists, it was hopeless, Belle was a failure at this just as she had been a failure at everything else. Wally went out and bought some bottles for her.
Only once did she laugh, and that was at Thanksgiving dinner. Momma brought a roast chicken to the table—they were all in trouble, Wally too had lost his job, and Eddie and Jean had had to take cuts in pay. And Wally looked at Anastasia lying in her box on a dining room chair, and said they should have roasted and eaten her, she was bigger than the chicken. The laughter that followed required handkerchiefs to wipe away the tears, and Wally thought he had been really witty. He would repeat the joke to Anastasia many times as she grew up.
Then, one evening, Ed drove up and Wally let him in. Everyone looked up: but no one knew exactly what had happened. No one had asked any questions. He was stiff and tense, and so were they. He asked for Belle. She was in bed, crying. He went up.
Ed sat on the bed beside her. He took her hand and bent to kiss her, but she wrenched her head away violently. Tears sprang into his eyes and throat, but he remained beside her. He cleared his throat. He tried to stroke her brow, but she again turned her head swiftly, hard, away.
“I got a job, Belle,” he whispered.
She looked at him. Her head lay still. She waited.
“I’ll be a tester and troubleshooter for Brooklyn Edison. It pays twenty dollars a week.” He was proud of himself. It was not negligible to get a job right after the Depression struck; he got it only because he had had a year of college. She saw this, and her mouth tightened. She knew it was a real accomplishment, that he must have tried hard for this job; but she had contempt for how easily he was satisfied. What did he think they could do with twenty dollars a week?
“We can’t live on that,” she said.
He bowed his head. He did not dare to ask her to return to his father’s house, nor to ask if he could come here. She watched him. She understood. There were no words.
“We can live in this room,” she said finally.
And he bent and kissed her forehead, and she let him. He sat there, stroking her hand for a long time. They did not speak. Then he said he had to go and would be back the next evening. The next night, he walked from the trolley stop with his suitcase. He had sold his car to pay the hospital bill. He moved into the dark little room where they would live for the next three and a half years.
Belle forced herself to get up each morning. Anastasia slept late and never woke her mother in the mornings, so Belle would rise and put on a robe and slippers and go downstairs and drink coffee while Momma cleaned up the dishes from the others’ breakfasts. Ed Dabrowski rose first, at six, and prepared his own cereal and boiled egg and toast; but Momma still prepared breakfast for her children, for Eddie and Jean, who went out to their jobs at seven forty-five, and coffee and toast for Wally, who left at eight every morning just as if he had a job to go to. After several cups of coffee, the last shared with Momma who sat down with her, and two cigarettes, Belle would go upstairs and fetch the sleeping baby, who often did not want to be wakened, and was sullen and sleepy.
Belle heated a bottle and prepared Pablum for Anastasia. Then Frances would close all the kitchen doors and turn the gas jets of the stove up high and set an enamel basin in the sink and fill it with warm soapy water. When the room was warm enough to make most people faint, Belle would undress Anastasia, set aside her dirty diaper, and immerse her in the basin. Momma hovered holding a great towel. Belle rinsed the baby from the long arm of the tap and Momma grabbed her and covered her and dried her. Then Belle dressed her in fresh clothes, and laid her in a cushioned basket on the kitchen floor. Only then—neither woman noticed that they were staggering with the heat—did they turn off the gas jets. They did not reopen the kitchen doors for some time afterward, lest the baby catch a chill.
Belle would empty the diaper into the toilet off the kitchen, carry it down to the cellar to soak in the deep tub along with those from yesterday. Then she went back upstairs and scrubbed her hands, then toasted some bread and spread marmalade on it and ate, while Momma—who would never leave Anastasia in her basket—bounced and spoke to the baby, calling her “moja kochana, my sweetheart, my little hammer thrower, Babcia’s girl.” (Did the words pierce Belle’s heart, still addressed to another?) Belle went back downstairs and scrubbed the soiled diapers on a board and rinsed and wrung them and carried them back upstairs in a basin. She pulled her coat on over her nightgown and robe, and went out to the tiny back porch and fixed them on the clothesline, which squeaked with each tug on the rusted pulley.
Then the two women straightened the house, made the beds, dressed. Around eleven, it was time to go out. Belle put on a dress and hose and high heels, and powdered her face and put on lipstick; Momma always wore her old cotton housedresses and the brown sweater with the hole in the sleeve and her shabby ancient black coat and a straw hat with a wilted brown rose on it. Anastasia was piled into layers of flannel and wool, every inch of her covered except her tiny face, and set into the carriage, a fine English pram that the brothers and sister had chipped in to buy. Momma was always very cheerful as they set out, whatever the weather: this was the high point of her day. They would walk to the Boulevard and stop at Momma’s favorite markets. Momma knew all the shopkeepers—the German butcher, the German baker, the Italian vegetable man, the Scottish grocer. She always smiled and chatted with them, and they laughed and joked with her and made little lights go on in their eyes, and sometimes they even kissed her hand. This made Belle look at her mother in a new way. Momma, after all, was forty-eight years old now, an advanced age in Belle’s eyes, and since she had stopped working, she had gained fifteen pounds—120 was too heavy for her small frame. Her fine hair was still long and wound up into the same unfashionable bun, and the blond color had darkened into a mousy grey. She had a gentle face and a sweet smile but her face was etched with pain in hundreds of tiny fine lines. She walked a little too slowly, her legs swollen from years of hard work, her frame a bit bent from years of bending over sewing machines; and her clothes were shabby and shapeless. She looked like a worn-out peasant woman. Yet these men—could her mother possibly be thinking of—impossible! But there was no mistaking the way these men acted, the way Momma acted, almost fifty. Even the gaunt surly owner of the stationery store where Belle stopped every other day for a pack of Luckies smiled, showing his yellow teeth, and called Momma “Dear Mrs. Brez.”
The women would buy only what they needed for the day. Although they had an icebox, they could not carry too much at one time even with the carriage, and besides, Momma loved the daily outing. And Momma loved being with Bella (she never adopted Belle’s new name) and Anastasia, and Belle felt somehow calm being out with Momma, and all of them walked home looking forward to lunch. For lunch, Belle would scramble eggs or make grilled cheese sandwiches for her and Momma, while Momma fried bacon slowly until it was dark and crisp, then crumbled it into bits and laid them on Anastasia’s tongue. And Belle, eating slowly but with relish, would feel that this was the best time of the day, and would think—Grandma, mother, and baby, three-way, that’s the way it should be. Then Momma would clean the kitchen while Belle changed Anastasia’s diaper and gave her a bottle and set her in the basket for a nap. And Belle would look at the clock that hung on the kitchen wall over the stove and see that it was only two o’clock and her heart would sink. Anastasia would
sleep for about two hours now; and Momma would go up to her room and sew. She was making a pink silk coat and hat, with embroidery, for Anastasia for the spring. She had lined the coat with white crepe de chine, and Belle had embroidered, in a paler pink, small flowers on the coat collar and the side of the hat. Belle was proud of the outfit, remembering the Ostrovskys’ shop: no rich child had anything finer than this. But her part in making the outfit was done. She would pick up a book and go up to her room and lie on the bed and start to read. But soon she was crying again.
She did not understand why she cried so much. She tried to think, to cut through the tears with reason. But the back of her head was filled with a whirling fluid hot as tears, painful as cut flesh. And this hot crimson-purple fluid dyed everything it touched, heaved up like waves and drowned thought. It whirled her thoughts around too, so that she could not make them come out in neat lines, or squares, or sort out right from wrong. Was she wrong to be so miserable? Should she be happy? Was she neurotic, like Poppa, like Wally? How was it Ed was happy? Was he wrong to be happy, having so little to make him so?
She would think: I’m a miserable neurotic. I should be happy. After all I have a healthy baby, a nice place to live, we could be living in that slum, the old neighborhood! I have good food, and I don’t have to go to work every day in a sweatshop. Ed is devoted to me. He has a job. Wally doesn’t. Ed isn’t standing on a street corner selling apples. She would think: it’s nice here all day, just Momma and the baby and me, it’s peaceful, and if I don’t have a beautiful house and servants like rich ladies, I have clothes as good as theirs, and so does Anastasia; I eat as well, probably better, because rich ladies have things like one lamb chop and peas and a Waldorf salad for dinner, that’s what their maids told Momma when they lived in the old neighborhood and Momma had lots of friends.