Some of the books on the shelves were all right, though. They had come from the same attic as the children’s books Anastasia had inherited: Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness; Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native; Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss; and The Constant Nymph. Anastasia could never remember who wrote that one. But she read these books through, and read Paine several times. There was also Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, but she got only to page 30 in that. And best of all was Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case Against Wagner, which she could not understand completely, but returned to over and over.
Every Wednesday night since she had been confirmed last June, she had gone to choir practice with Mrs. Murphy. Mrs. Murphy had stopped one day to chat with Mommy, on a pale soft evening when Belle was sitting on the front stoop. Mrs. Murphy asked about the child who played piano: “So talented,” she said. She asked if Anastasia would like to sing in the choir. Anastasia would. So each Wednesday evening, Mrs. Murphy stopped for her after dinner, and brought her back after practice.
Mrs. Murphy was the organist for the church. She was large of body, with thick upper arms, and tiny red veins on her nose and cheeks. She was jolly, and she really talked to Anastasia, as if she were interested. She had seven children of her own, she said, and she would tell Anastasia about them. Choir practice was strange, and Anastasia sat on the fringe. There was a tiny little man with funny hair who acted very fussy about what he would sing, because he liked to do solos. And there was a grown-up girl, in her twenties, who did all the soprano solos. The rest of the people were old, like Mrs. Murphy, and shabby and gossipy.
But Anastasia loved the music. It was wonderful what happened when all of these unprepossessing people opened their mouths together. Mrs. Murphy would coach them, but mostly she just let them sing. The melodies were wonderful, and so were the chords. Kyrie Eleison; Agnus Dei; Gloria. It came from another world, and on Sunday, when they all stood upstairs in the choir stall and followed the Mass and sang, Anastasia could picture a different place from the one she was in, a church sparer and purer, without the hideous garish stained-glass windows of St. Mary’s, without awful Monsignor Burke saying Mass, but just white walls and slits of windows and voices and this music soaring. And it was especially wonderful at Easter, when there were banks of lilies in the church and the priests wore beautiful white and gold and purple robes and the music rose into the dank space and lighted it.
Then on Columbus Day, there was a great banquet given by the Knights of Columbus, and Mrs. Murphy asked Mommy if Anastasia could go, and Mommy asked her if she wanted to. She didn’t really want to go, but she was embarrassed to be asked right in front of Mrs. Murphy so she said yes. Mrs. Murphy said she had two tickets and Mr. Murphy…well, he was indisposed or something. Anastasia never saw Mr. Murphy. And although Anastasia wondered why Mrs. Murphy hadn’t taken one of her own children, she felt honored to have been asked.
Mommy told her what to wear—her good dress from Easter—and helped her fix her hair. Mommy said this was Anastasia’s first grown-up evening. Mommy even let Anastasia use some of the brilliantine she put on her own hair, and it looked really shiny. Then Mrs. Murphy rang the doorbell, and together they walked up to the Knights of Columbus headquarters on Rockaway Boulevard. It was a big room over some stores, and when they walked in, Anastasia was terrified. There were hundreds of people, mostly men, and all grown-ups. She was the only child. Some of the grown-ups were young, in their twenties, but most of them were as old as Mrs. Murphy. But everyone was very friendly even to her, and didn’t seem to mind that she was a child. They sat at a table and a waiter came and brought her ginger ale and Mrs. Murphy had a drink, the kind Uncle Eric sometimes served to Mommy and Daddy, and there was a dinner and ice cream and speeches and singing and a little band. Anastasia remained at the table the whole night, even when Mrs. Murphy got up to chat with someone across the room. She watched and listened.
Everyone was so jolly. Anastasia had never seen such an event. As the evening wore on, they got jollier. Everyone seemed to like everyone else, everyone talked and smiled and laughed a lot. And everyone knew Mrs. Murphy and stopped at their table and spared a few words for the little girl. They didn’t even treat her like a little girl: well, of course she was a high-school freshman, even if she was only twelve. And Mrs. Murphy introduced her: “This is Anastasia Dabrowski, and she is a fine musician and she sings in the choir every Sunday.” And the ladies smiled at her and said, “How nice,” and asked her how old she was and what grade she was in and raised their eyebrows when she said she was in high school. But the men gave her funny kinds of looks she’d never seen before, and said things like “Look at that hair!” and “A real heartbreaker,” to Mrs. Murphy. “A lovely girl,” some of them said, always to Mrs. Murphy, never to her.
Anastasia let herself down into it. The big plain spare room was bright and noisy and filled with people laughing, and all of them were nice to each other and to her, and she felt herself slipping into the comfort of it, the sense that they were all together, all friends. “A lovely Catholic girl,” several men said approvingly to Mrs. Murphy, who beamed and nodded. And Anastasia lowered her eyes, because she did not think she was so good a Catholic. She had felt nothing at all when the bishop tapped her at Confirmation, and she had no idea whatever what Confirmation was supposed to mean: what does it mean that the Holy Spirit descends into you? It wasn’t like making Communion at all: then she had felt infused with passion, a vitality, a kind of glow. And besides, Thomas Paine said different things about God from what she learned in Religious Instruction; and Nietzsche hated Christianity.
Still, it was seductive, a spell, and as she sat there in what felt like a communal embrace, she could feel an ache in her heart that she was aware was constant, and she knew that these people were offering to heal that ache. If she just continued to come, if she let herself be one of them, they would surround her with this kind of affection, they would make her feel accepted. But what did they want for it?
She remembered vividly the night she had had a fight with Mommy, when she was ten. She had said something fresh, and Mommy had scolded her. But what she said was right, and Mommy refused to consider that, and scolded her just because she didn’t feel like arguing or explaining or talking. And Anastasia went into the porch and sat down on the floor feeling sorry for herself, and when Mommy called her to dinner, she didn’t go. She sat there in the dark room while the others sat at the table eating, and she saw the light and heard the clicks of forks and smelled the warm food. Mommy called her again, but she wouldn’t go.
Then Mommy came into the room where Anastasia was sitting and reached out her hand to Anastasia.
“Come on, Anastasia, come to dinner,” she urged.
Anastasia was shocked. Mommy had never done anything like that before. Whenever she got angry with Anastasia, it was Anastasia who had to apologize. Mommy would stop speaking to her, and she could go for days without talking, whereas Anastasia could not, so she would have to apologize. Still, she wouldn’t rise.
“No,” she said, shaking her head, refusing to speak to Mommy. Mommy knew she was wrong, that was why she did that. It was her way of apologizing. But Anastasia wanted her to say she was sorry, the way Anastasia always had to say she was sorry. And Mommy wouldn’t. Mommy went back into the kitchen. And Anastasia sat there, her stomach churning with hunger, thinking that she could go with Mommy, she should have gone with Mommy, she could do what Mommy wanted and then maybe Mommy would love her, but she didn’t want to.
She longed for Mommy to return, but she didn’t. You can get love but you have to do something they want, Anastasia thought. You have to be exactly the way they want you to be. And if you’re not, they don’t love you. And it isn’t worth it.
Eventually, she got up and went into the kitchen and ate her dinner, which was no longer hot. She sat silent at the table and did not look at Mommy. It wasn’t fair, she thought.
So here
were these people offering to love her, saying she was a lovely girl, a good Catholic girl. But that was only because they didn’t really know her. She was nicely dressed, her hair was neat, they thought she was a nice girl. They didn’t know that she doubted the existence of God, that she was stubborn and fresh and willful and selfish. And if they did know these things, they wouldn’t like her. They would turn away from her the way Mommy turned away from her. They wanted her to be just the way they were, and they would love her only if she was.
The evening went on for a long time, but luckily, someone gave them a ride home in a car, so all Anastasia had to say was “Thank you.” Mommy was waiting up and wanted to hear about it, but Anastasia could see that she was tired, and felt satisfied by the little she was told. Then Anastasia could go up to bed and lie there in the dark thinking about all of it, her heart a great gaping ache because she felt she was giving up something she treasured, felt she would never have it, would never let herself have it.
It was so depressing in the house. Mother refused to wake her up in the mornings, because Anastasia was so hard to waken, and always went back to sleep after Mother called her. She stopped making breakfast, too, but there was always some coffee cake if Anastasia wanted it. Usually she was so late, she just ran out of the house without eating, and even so, she often missed her bus and was late for school. That wasn’t so serious a matter in high school, though. But the allowance she was given hardly paid for lunch every day in the cafeteria; if she bought something to eat, she would have no money for movies on the weekends. So often, she just had a Coke at lunchtime. And then, when she came home from school, Joy’s and Mother’s breakfast dishes were still in the sink and the kitchen smelled from being closed up all day. She was supposed to wash the dishes and practice, but instead she sat and ate, one after another, slices of bread with peanut butter and jelly, or if there was some left over, chocolate layer cake. She would read while she ate, devouring food and huge Victorian novels. She read all the school library owned of Galsworthy, Dickens, and Trollope. Mother came home, when she came by bus, about six; when Daddy picked her up, they were home by quarter of six. So a little after five, Anastasia would hurriedly rinse the dirty dishes, and run out to the porch and begin practice. She always told Mother she was nearly finished with her hour and a half of practicing, even if she’d practiced only half an hour. But some days she felt like playing the piano and would play for three hours.
When Mother came home, she spoke little. Sometimes she talked about the ladies she sold hats to, and what they wore. Or about the buyer, or the assistant manager. She took some of Anastasia’s sketches to show the assistant manager: Belle thought Anastasia could be a fashion designer. But he said she had to learn fashion perspective: in fashion illustration, the body was far longer than the head, and not in realistic proportion. Also, he said to be a fashion designer, you had to know how to sew. Since Anastasia’s two efforts at sewing dresses, in the seventh and eighth grades, had to be ripped apart and completely resewn by Mother the night before they were to be handed in, Anastasia thought that there was another career that was not for her.
Mother would ask how school was, and listen as Joy and she gave their tiny bits of news, but her mind was elsewhere and they could feel that. The dinner table was silent. Even on the nights when Daddy was home, as he sometimes was on weekends, there was no talking. And on the nights when he worked late, Mother would go out to the porch after Joy and Anastasia were in bed, and sit in the dark smoking. Anastasia knew this. She lay in bed, her stomach churning. There was nothing she could do any longer to please her mother, no way to make her smile, or even talk. Anastasia began to feel her mother had betrayed the intimacy she had initiated. Belle had abandoned her.
This recent depression of Belle’s felt hard, angry, unyielding, like a door shut in the face of the whole world. Anastasia’s stomach twisted, and her throat constricted; she felt as if there were lumps in her that had to come out or she would die: in her throat, in her stomach, under her armpits. She was weary, yet could not sleep; she read in bed, not caring if her mother discovered her. But she could not get far enough away to forget.
One night, lying there like that, she thought she had to speak or explode. She leaped up from her bed, and without thinking, ran barefoot down the uncarpeted stairs and into the porch. Her mother did not hear her. She was outlined against the window, the tip of her cigarette red in me dark room, but only for a second. Anastasia could hear her mother exhale the smoke.
“Mommy,” she began, and Belle turned, startled.
“Oh, Anastasia, you startled me! What’s the matter?” Irritable.
“What’s the matter with you? You never talk anymore, you’re always angry, you’re always in a bad mood, you sit here night after night in the dark smoking. What is it? What is the matter?” Anastasia herself could hear there was no warmth in her voice, no love: only anger.
Belle turned her head away from Anastasia. “Go to bed,” she said in a cold voice.
“I won’t! I won’t! Not until you tell me what’s the matter! It’s not fair! You act as if you were dying, you treat us horribly, and you won’t say why!”
Belle stood then and walked toward Anastasia. In the dark, she was a darker form, outlined against the window. “I told you to go to bed.” Icy.
“No!” There were tears in Anastasia’s voice now. “You’re horrible! You’re mean! You don’t love us!”
Then Belle raised her arm and struck Anastasia, struck her over and over. Belle knocked Anastasia to the floor. She lay there sobbing. Part of her wanted to get up and sock her mother back, hard. But she didn’t. “I hate you! I hate you!” she sobbed.
Belle returned to her chair and lighted another cigarette. After a few minutes, Anastasia picked herself up and went back to bed.
In the spring of 1943, Daddy’s company had a day’s outing for its employees: a boat trip up the Hudson, and a picnic at Bear Mountain. Belle bought flowered pink chintz and made the girls identical pinafores, and a sundress for herself. All the big bosses were going to be there, she said. It was an important occasion.
They drove to Manhattan, to a pier on the West Side, where the Day Liner was berthed. There were hundreds of people circulating around the boat, and some of the men came up and spoke to Daddy and called him Mr. Dabrowski. Anastasia deduced he was their boss, and she felt proud. Then Daddy said, “Belle, there’s a very nice woman I think you might like, somebody to talk to, she works in my department. I’ll introduce her to you.” And Anastasia felt something. Something felt bad, something was going wrong. And Daddy led them up the gangway, and up to the higher deck, and straight toward a group of women who were sitting together, just as if he knew where they’d be. And Daddy seemed nervous and excited, but he would be, because he never did anything like this for Mommy. But Mommy was like ice, and Anastasia was annoyed with her.
And Daddy said, “Oh, there she is,” in his happy voice, and he started to say, “Belle, this is…” when Mommy turned on her heel and walked the other way. And Anastasia was shocked into stillness. She looked at Daddy: he was running after Mommy, calling her. Joy was looking at Anastasia, who took her hand; they walked after their parents. And Mommy stopped and Daddy spoke to her, but whatever she said was as if she had hit him and he reeled backward, and she looked over to them and said, “Come, girls,” and Joy dropped Anastasia’s hand and ran to her mother, and Daddy just stood there, and Anastasia walked slowly up to him and stood with him.
And all the rest of the trip, Mommy stood with Joy at the railing of the lower deck, and Daddy stood by a column, seventy feet away, staring at her. Anastasia stayed with her father. He hardly noticed it. Several times he said to her, “Why don’t you go with Mommy, she feels bad that you’re not with her.”
“No, I want to stay with you,” she said.
He was not consoled by her presence. He looked intently, unwaveringly, at Belle, gazing at her standing seventy feet away as if she were behind glass in a museum, u
ntouchable, unattainable, the object of his intensest desire.
That moment—it may have lasted an hour or two—is engraved on my memory. I don’t recall how the day ended—obviously, it did. There must have been hamburgers and hot dogs and orange soda and trips to the toilet. There must have been walking together to the car and getting in it together and driving home together. I remember none of that. And in fact that day did not end for us. We returned to a grey tension in which a dropped fork could startle the whole room of us. We went back to live for months, perhaps, in a silent house in which no one ever raised their voice and no one ever smiled.
That was the one occasion in my life when I took my father’s part against my mother. It was the first time in my life I ever openly blamed my mother for anything. And there is no question that this seriously disturbed me: I must have felt terribly guilty, because during that summer, on a horribly hot night when I slept with my head at the foot of my bed so as to get whatever breeze there was on my face, I dreamed a dream so vivid and clear that it remains with me still. I was lying there, with my head at the foot of my bed, when the curtains that shielded our room from the little landing were pulled open. A figure stood there in a long white nightdress, outlined against the light on the landing. It approached me, a pale faceless form in the moonlight, a woman carrying a knife. She came to stand just beside me, and then raised her arm and prepared to plunge it into my heart. I screamed. I kept screaming. I woke my mother, who came in.