And it was still hard, because she had to scrape and worry because Daddy didn’t earn enough money to support them. He had no ambition, he had no drive, he never planned a thing, she had to do everything for the children, all the hopes and plans came from her, not him. Everything came from her. Daddy didn’t care about anything except a hot meal and a night’s sleep and…. He didn’t care at all about the children.
“He loves you, though,” Anastasia interjected.
Belle snorted. “He doesn’t love anyone! Look at the way he treats his family! He marries me, he doesn’t think about them, or call them, or go to see them. He would never have gone to see them once we were married, if I hadn’t said, ‘Ed, we ought to visit your mother,’ and now that his mother is dead, I have to remind him we should visit his father. It’s all been up to me, and they don’t even like me.”
“Why don’t they like you?” the child asked, pained.
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m not a good enough Catholic, I guess. Or because I smoke.”
“We used to visit Aunt Kris. Why don’t we go there anymore?”
“I don’t know, Anastasia.” Belle was beginning to sound impatient. “She got mad at Daddy for something. I don’t know what. She won’t say. And you don’t see him trying to make up with her. Does he ever even mention her and Joe? Never. He doesn’t care. It would be the same with us. If I were to die, he’d be married again in a month. And he’d marry someone who gave him nothing but frankfurters and beans to eat and he’d be just as happy, he wouldn’t even notice the difference.”
Belle was going to die soon. She had a bad heart, had always had it, and she knew she would not live long. It made her so furious when the neighbor ladies praised Daddy. “They all say the same thing—oh, how sweet Mr. Dabrowski is, how lucky you are!” She mocked their voices, making them sound silly and feminine. “’So nice, so polite. You’re so lucky!’” They don’t know what he’s really like, how he grumbles and grouches and has no ambition. They have no idea. They don’t say he’s lucky to have me.”
“You could tell them,” Anastasia said, keening on injustice.
“No. I’d never do that. They all gossip. They tell everybody everything. That’s why I talk to you, Anastasia. I have to talk to somebody, but I can’t talk to these women. But you mustn’t ever tell anyone the things I tell you. They’re confidences. I tell you because you’re so grown up.”
Her mother’s confidences struck deep inside Anastasia’s heart, and lay there piercing her. She would lie in bed at night imagining her mother’s life, trying to make it all happen over again, but with her present to save her mother from the sorrow and injustice she had suffered. If only she had been there! She would have helped her mother and made her feel better. And she would think about her father and her heart would harden. He made Mommy unhappy, he didn’t care about them, all he cared about was himself.
Over the months this new relation with her mother came to obsess Anastasia. She realized quickly that she could not initiate these intimate conversations. She would come into the kitchen and wait; she would show herself to be available. But if Mommy didn’t feel like talking to her, she would be annoyed, and if Anastasia asked her a question, she would sigh and say, “Go and play, Anastasia, I’m tired.”
It was Daddy’s fault that Mommy was so unhappy, so tired all the time, in such a bad mood. Anastasia’s stomach always knotted as she approached her home. She was unhappy enough at school, and glad when the schoolday was over, but then she would see her house and her stomach got tight. But sometimes when she walked in the back door, Mommy would smile and be glad to see her. Sometimes she was not. She was always in a bad mood on washdays, and Anastasia came to associate the smell of laundry soap and bleach with tight silent withdrawal, with grey-ness, bleakness, and isolation. She thought she had done something wrong, and would ask her mother what was the matter, but Belle always said, “Nothing.” And if she pushed it, if she asked if her mother were angry with her, Belle would get angry: “Why do you think you’re so important?”
But it was Daddy’s fault. She would be careful not to get angry with Mommy anymore when Mommy was in a bad mood, because now she understood that Mommy was angry with Daddy. She felt sorry for Mommy, whose life had been so sad and was still so hard. She completely stopped running up to meet her father after work. Instead, she stayed with Mommy in the kitchen, or put on the front stoop. She understood that to meet Daddy was in some way to fail Mommy, to betray her. Anastasia pulled close to her mother and began to look at her father with bruised eyes.
3
AS SOON AS HE could afford it, Brad decided to move us to a house. Not just any house—it had to be elaborate, not to say pretentious. He wanted one with white columns and a portico on a main street in Rockville Centre. The point of the house was not comfort, but the degree of success it announced. I was able to block the pretentious one by insisting that it was in too dangerous a place for small children; there was really no yard, it was all lawn, and at the intersection of two streets with heavy traffic. But Brad kept looking, and as a real-estate agent, he had an insider’s view, and eventually he found one he believed I’d approve of: a big old Victorian house with a gallery all around the front and one side, a big yard with old trees, and on a prime location in Rockville Centre, the town where my parents lived, the most expensive town along the South Shore of Long Island in Nassau County. The only town more expensive (in that area) was Garden City, and I could see Brad had his eye on that for the future.
I have to admit I loved that house. It was old and a little shabby, but it looked like a house a family could be happy in. There was a huge yard with big trees, and I pictured a swing for the kids, and a little wading pool. They’d been deprived of outdoor life in the years we’d lived in the apartment, but now they’d have it. They were the right age for it, too, four and five. And there was now room for me to have a darkroom in the basement.
But the move to the house didn’t make Brad happy. He was a little anxious about money, because he paid a lot for it, and besides that, it had all those empty rooms we couldn’t afford to furnish. Adeline found a hideous used dining room set for us for twenty-five dollars. Brad gave her the money but the furniture was so awful he wouldn’t have it in the house and it stood in our basement waiting for him to refinish it, until the house was sold, years later. When I realized that Brad was never going to put up a swing, I asked my father to do it, so at least the kids had that, and the wading pool I bought them out of my housekeeping money. I had money of my own now, enough to put in the darkroom and even to buy a metal photograph file—a purchase that made me feel like a professional for the first time.
I had to start all over again, of course, in the new neighborhood, and it was harder here because not many people had children, and those who did had enough money to have professional photographs taken. It is a phenomenon I have often noticed—that, when a husband does well, wives somehow do worse. I still had contacts with people who’d heard of me in the old neighborhood, and so still got some commissions, but they dwindled with time until I was doing only one or two a week.
One of my conditions for moving to a house with three bathrooms (all of which I’d have to clean) miles away from stores or public transportation was a car, and with much grumbling, Brad bought me a small used Rambler that wouldn’t go over sixty. Brad had no patience with my complaints: “You never clean anyway, so what difference does it make how big the house is?” he said. My other condition was a piano. I was starved for music and I wanted the children to study it. Brad was nice about that, and I found an old upright with decent tone. Only he didn’t want it in the living room—he said it was an eyesore.
We moved in the late spring, just as things were springing into bloom, and I stayed outside with the kids and played much of the day. I was happy in the beginning. I felt rejuvenated, somehow. We’d play tag, and hide-and-seek, and sardines—joined by the few other children in the neighborhood or one of my friends from the old neighb
orhood with her kids.
I kept on photographing them, under the trees, in the garden: beautiful pictures, shimmering with summer and childhood and golden-haired cherubs. And every night I’d bathe them in the nice big tub in the upstairs bathroom (Brad and I had our own bathroom! What a luxury!) and play ice-cream cones with them the way my mother used to with us: making a great lather of the shampoo, and holding it in my hand and offering them a bite of my ice-cream cone. It set them giggling as hard as Joy and I used to; and I wondered in passing how my mother ever came up with that game. For surely no one had ever played it with her.
When fall came, I piled the kids and my cameras in the car and drove off to some exotic place to take pictures—the back of movie houses (wonderful dark red fire escape against the blank grey wall), the railroad tracks (old railroad cars rusting on sidings, the parallels of track taken from oblique angles, the wheel of an idle train taken up close, a deserted old railroad station), lots full of pipe waiting to be laid for sewers, crates piled up behind supermarkets: now, I thought, I would create art.
Oddly, Brad was often impressed with these efforts. He’d always been patronizing about my photography. He saw it as a hobby, too expensive for me; he liked some of my pictures of Arden, but he thought anyone could have taken them. Yet without my knowledge, he took a shot of mine, of a derelict car abandoned along the Southern State Parkway (in the years before such things were common), and sent it into the local newspaper, the Long Island Herald. And they printed it! They sent me a check for fifty dollars, and asked for more of my work.
I was happy with that, of course, but even more I was touched by what Brad had done. I met him at the door the night the paper called to ask permission to print it, with a big smile and a hug. I was affectionate—the truth is, I climbed all over him. His act had renewed my old feeling for him, I felt (for a moment) we were buddies, companions, together, rather than opponents linked in a power struggle. I jabbered, I crowed, I spent the fifty dollars forty ways, and I gave him real meat loaf and mashed potatoes to eat. (The kids were always in bed before Brad got home at night. Just as well. He was always impatient with them. Like my mother, I shrugged and decided that was the nature of the male.)
He accepted my affection, although I sensed a kind of wariness in him. He accepted it through dinner, and into bed. After we had made love (I, disappointed, as had become usual with us), and were sitting up smoking, I said, “Brad, what’s the matter? You seem—I don’t know—withdrawn.”
He turned on me then with an expression I’ll never forget. It was tight, his teeth were a bit bared, and his eyes held utter hatred. It would have shocked me at any time, but just after we made love, it made my heart really bang, as if someone had hit me hard in the chest with an oar.
“I notice that the only time I get affection from you is when you have success in your career!”
“Then why did you let me make love to you!” I cried out, and leaped out of the bed naked. “If that’s how you feel, why did you send the picture in? Why do you stay with me? What is this? What is going on? Let’s just call it a day, Brad, there’s no point! I feel violated, I feel raped! To make love at a moment when you are hating me! Horrible!”
I pulled on an old shirt of his that I used as a bathrobe, and stormed out of the room and went downstairs, thinking how convenient it was to have a downstairs to go to when you’re having a fight. It was dark down there, and silent, the proper place to sit out a drama: And think how foolish I was, how even when my heart felt broken, I was thinking about how I appeared, how my actions would seem from the outside, about how much more of a statement I was making by going down into the dark living room than I ever could have made when we had only four rooms on one floor.
But my appearance didn’t matter, because Brad never came down. I sat there in the dark smoking away (just like my mother) and staring out the window, and he simply turned out the light and went to sleep. At some point, I realized he wasn’t coming, and then I had to stop in my tracks. I’d been feeling wronged and hurt and angry; now I had to recognize that what was happening was serious. It wasn’t a momentary act of rage. Brad hated me.
The tone in which he said “career” was one of utter contempt. And I couldn’t see why, if he held my activity in such contempt, he had helped me in it; or why, if it was so contemptible, he was threatened by it. The whole thing mystified me, but I couldn’t even think it through because I was so absorbed in feeling. And what I was feeling was overwhelmed with self-pity.
All kinds of things rose into my chest, as if my innards detached themselves from their proper places and floated upward, about to drown me. I felt willing to die, but they floated up up up and never did drown me. I couldn’t even cry and let them out. Why? Why? What did I do that was so bad as to make him hate me?
But I knew. I had to hold it back, to keep it from coming into my mind, because it was too terrible. I knew why he hated me and I knew he was justified. I couldn’t go further that night. I knew I’d have to do something, but I was too tired….
I went to bed. I slept beside him, stiff, not letting my body touch his. That was the first time. I was to do that many nights afterward, sit up late smoking, thinking, planning, then go up sorrowfully, like an old woman burdened with eons of sorrow, and lay my ancient body coldly beside his in the lumpy bed. It was hard to lie on that old mattress and keep my body away from his, because it sagged in the middle, and I kept rolling down toward him. So for months, I slept poorly, in a rigid posture on a narrow strip of the bed, as far from him as I could get.
I usually woke up with the kids around six, gave them some milk and dry cereal, and went back to bed again until nine, when Brad got up. I’d fix breakfast for him and sit with him, drinking coffee, until he left. Then I’d begin the business of the day. The morning after our fight—although you can hardly call it a fight, since he said nothing whatever to me after I yelled at him—I didn’t get up for him. I stayed in bed until after he left. That night, when he came home around nine, as usual, I was working in my darkroom. I’d left him a plate covered with the lid of a pot, in the oven. It held dried-out chicken, vegetables, and rice. I guess he ate it, because the plate was in the sink the next morning, but I didn’t check the garbage pail. After I’d finished my darkroom work, I sat in the living room until around two, smoking, thinking, planning, and then went to bed.
We went on living like that for weeks: he never took a day off, and I never waited to have dinner with him, as I used to. He’d write me notes: take grey suit to cleaner; have brown shoes resoled; shaving cream; club soda. Little affectionate things like that. I did whatever he ordered: that’s what I was being given room and board for, wasn’t it?
But meantime, I was struggling with myself. Because I knew what I was doing was dishonest, and therefore demoralizing; but I couldn’t figure out a way to do anything else.
Brad hated me because I had lost respect for him. And I had, I couldn’t deny it. It wasn’t just because he had become a real-estate salesman instead of a sax player. Or, maybe that was the start of it, but he could have been a real-estate salesman and still been a person, a whole human being, couldn’t he? Even if he adopted that pompous voice his father used, and the manners of a “successful” man who belongs to the right clubs and was jovial and hearty, whose manner says “I’m one of the crowd, boys, and used to being treated like one,” he could still be a tender person, he could caress one of his kids once in a while, couldn’t he? Or couldn’t he? Maybe when money and prestige become your goals, you lose touch with everything else.
I would sit in the living room watching the kids play together. They got along pretty well now, and Arden would make up games and Billy would join in. They walked around, two little self-important people with their little sweet voices, discussing the best way to set up a toy store—they were in the process of selling off all their toys—and I’d hear echoes of Brad and me in their remarks, and look at the sweet curve of their cheeks and the soft sweet hair that frame
d their faces, and their little chubby legs, and I wanted to embrace them and weep, to hold them close to me and cry for all I knew they would never have, any more than I had had it.
I had no business living with Brad if I didn’t respect him. It was wrong, for him, for me. It was what my mother had done, staying with my father. It demoralized us all. I remembered how I felt, watching my parents together. But the truth was even worse. I didn’t just not respect him, I didn’t even like him. I didn’t want to create the kind of home I’d been raised in. I should leave: that was clear. But how?
This was 1954. People didn’t just walk out on each other in those days. How could I justify leaving him? “I don’t like him?” Hah! And then how would I live? Since installing the darkroom, I had in my sugarbowl a total of $69.80, if I included the $50 check from the Herald—which I had not yet received. The picture editor had said they’d like to see more photographs by me, but I knew enough not to inundate them with pictures, and even if they took one every week—which was improbable—I couldn’t live on that. I could go back to Jimmy Minetta’s, maybe, or find a job. But who would look after the children?
After several weeks of holding my head, staying up late, and walking around all day with a headache, I decided on a course of action. I would present the whole thing to Brad—tell him the truth of how I felt, of how I understood what he felt, and ask him to join with me in a separation in which he would help support the kids. It was a shocking business, but I was determined. I’d never known a divorced person, except Uncle Wally, and his divorce was never discussed. When my mother admitted it to me, she had whispered, even though we were alone in the room.