The first thing I did after returning was march down to Jimmy Minetta’s: but he was gone. His shop had been replaced by a photo shop that sent its prints out for development, and offered twenty-four-hour service. Jimmy? They didn’t know. They thought he might have gone into Manhattan. So I went to the Long Island Herald, and offered myself as a staff photographer. They were sorry, they couldn’t afford such a thing, they had a guy who could take pictures in a pinch, but who doubled as their police reporter. They used pictures from stringers, or from AP or UPI. I went home.
I sat there chewing my lip. The place was still a mess, full of cartons of books and pots and pans that I hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. The kids were whiny and irritable. I tried to be cheerful with them, but it didn’t help. And it was those years that Arden brought up, years later, describing me as tense and anxious, but concealing it. She said my concealment brought out their tension and anxiety, as they acted out what I felt. Maybe. What in hell was I supposed to do, I ask you?
Some nights, as I sat there after they’d gone to bed, I’d start to feel sorry for myself, finding myself so low through what felt like no real fault of my own. Then my mind would slide to Frances’s tragedy and my mother’s depression, and its effect on us; and I’d pull back hard. I would not be like Frances or Belle. Would not.
2
IT WAS THE TOTALITY with which she gave herself to her martyrdom that I resented. That my father had wronged her was for me a matter of debate, but I didn’t question that her life was wretched. She was artistic and intelligent, but forced to spend all her capital of talent on things like mashed potatoes and blued starched sheets. Not that there was anything contemptible about mashed potatoes and blued starched sheets, only that they were not a sufficient expression for what she possessed. But like the middle-class wives of Brad’s friends, she found her husband, not her role, responsible for her misery. I’m not blaming her for not being political: I wasn’t either, and I was twenty-five years younger, part of another generation. But her unspoken anger hung over the entire house like the smell of bacon cooked days earlier: cold, greasy, and thick. And it fell, naturally, mostly on the children.
Gradually, it abated somewhat. Just as we hadn’t known why or when it began, we didn’t know why or when it began to end. That’s what it means to be a child in a so-called civilized society. Your life is hedged and protected, you are kept in a warm padded dark place from which you cannot see the forces that are jostling you, toppling you, pressing against you on one side or another, and sometimes lifting you clear off the ground. Whereas in so-called primitive societies, everyone knows everything about everybody, because there is so little privacy. So if one couple in the compound are quarreling, everyone knows about it and can follow the quarrel point by point, and even take sides. Such a context makes quarreling normal, part of everyday life. And when the quarrel ends, life goes on, and that’s normal too. But for us, who put on happy faces, who act in public as if cross words never crossed our lips, quarrels are private and dark and fierce, and seem disruptions of the “civilized” flow. They are aberrations, even though in fact they happen every day to everybody.
Years later, when I was nearly an adult, I asked my mother what had happened, and she said grimly that my father had promised to give up his lover, and that he seemed to have done so. He worked overtime less often, and his salary checks balanced. So she slowly, forgave him, or anyway, let up a little of her heavy oppressive moodiness. No, she never really forgave him. Years after that, eons, she could still say bitterly, “What I couldn’t forgive was that he had no mind. What did he think he was doing? And then…oh, all of it—he—forced me to realize I had to stay with him no matter what he did. That was terrible for me. Terrible.”
She didn’t forgive, but slowly, she buried it. Since we didn’t know when or why or how about any of it, we remained tense for a long time. Joy remembers little of all this—well, she was only nine and ten. But she remembers the tension, the silence, and staying away from the house as much as she could. She was wary of her parents, and became a contained, distant child. Under the ready smile, the charming little anecdote, the quick laugh, she kept herself to herself. She remained that way all her life; she suffered, when she suffered, alone. The only hint that she was distraught was a higher edge of hysteria in her voice and laugh, and when she was little, bouts of vomiting, especially on Friday mornings, when exams were given. Belle understood the meaning of the vomiting, but not of the hysteria, for which she criticized Joy all her life.
Joy kept her own counsel, even when Mr. Callahan, her friend, the man who had bought (or stolen?) that fantastic cowboy outfit for her—hat, chaps, boots, shirt, vest, the works—attempted to rape her. She was nine, and playing with his children in their yard. She went indoors to use the toilet, and he came out of his bedroom—his wife was working then—and grabbed her. He pulled her into the bedroom, panting, and saying things to her she didn’t understand about her eyes and her cute ways, and he started to open the zipper on her pants. She did not scream or cry out. She pushed him, and he was physically unstable enough to feel the push a little and stagger enough for her to pull away, and redoing her zipper, run from the house. She left the yard and never went back. She would play with the Callahan children, but only in her yard. She never wore the cowboy outfit again, and when Belle asked her why, just shrugged and said it was too hot. She told no one until she was past forty, and Anastasia was asking her about when they were children. Belle never knew. Anastasia was, at that time, far more vocal. She came running home in a fury and in terror one February Sunday afternoon, after she had taken Joy to the playground, and met a young man with big pimples on his cheeks who kept wanting her to go on the monkey climb. He was so insistent that she became suspicious, and refused to go. She said she was going on the slide with Joy, and he shrugged and said, well, if she wanted to do that, he could show her a new game to play on the slide. Anastasia was still suspicious: why should a big boy like him want to play with two little girls? But he was so persistent she did not know how to shake him off. The new game, he said, consisted of his sitting behind her at the foot of the slide, while Joy climbed up and slid down.
“She’ll hit us,” Anastasia objected.
“But just wait, you’ll see, it will be terrific fun,” the boy-man urged.
Reluctantly, she agreed, and sat in front of him at the foot of the slide, while Joy ran around and climbed up. But before Joy even got going down the slide, Anastasia had jumped up and turned and was yelling at the man. “What are you doing! Get away from me!” When Joy came down, Anastasia grabbed her and together they ran all the way home, and burst breathless into the house.
“A man put his hands in my pants!” Anastasia announced, and Belle sent Ed out to find him.
“But I should go with him,” Anastasia argued. “He won’t know who he is.”
“You said he was about eighteen and had pimples on his face. If he’s there, Daddy will find him,” Mommy said.
Anastasia sat on the porch near the window, anxiously watching for her father. What was the point of this? she wondered. What will Daddy do if he does find him? And how could he be sure it was the same one? And besides, that guy wouldn’t hang around the playground after we’d left. He’d be afraid to.
Ed returned after about an hour, full of his wanderings, his sightings, and reports of the utter vacancy of the playground, high-school grounds, and all areas surrounding them. Belle nodded. She seemed pleased with him, and he seemed pleased with himself. He’s glad he didn’t find him, Anastasia thought, because he wouldn’t have known what to do if he had. What would he do, hit him? The boy was as tall as her father, as thick in the body, and younger. Suppose the boy hit back? But he’s pleased to have made the effort, and Mommy is pleased he did, too. Why is that? She knew she was supposed to feel protected and cared for, but she didn’t. They couldn’t protect her: they couldn’t be with her every minute. And they couldn’t protect her from the fact that she would in f
uture see every approach by a strange man as a potential assault on her body. What was it about girls’ bodies that men wanted to put their hands inside them? It made her sick. She decided she would grow up without sex. Everything she read in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—and they were the men she most respected, of all the people she had read—talked only about men, not women. Except once in a while and then… ! What they said about women was horrible! But men were pretty terrible too, she thought. She would be neither. She would grow as spirit and mind, with a sexless body.
Even Uncle Wally. Whenever he came to stay and her friends were around, he always made them sit on his lap. And one day she saw that his arm was embracing Terry underneath her dress, as she sat there. And she said later, “Were you embarrassed that my uncle was holding you that way?” And Terry got red in her face, and said, “Yeah, but I dint wanna say nothing, because he was your uncle.” Anastasia said, “I think that’s terrible, and I’m going to tell my mother.” Terry’s eyes widened. “You are! I’d never tell mine, I’d be too scared.”
“Why?”
But Terry wouldn’t answer. She blushed and turned away. Anastasia loved her friends, but she knew they came from different kinds of homes than hers. She had walked over to Terry’s one night to pick her up for the movies, and her father was sitting in the living room listening to a ball game on the radio. He was huge, with a red face, and he looked at her suspiciously, and asked Terry a lot of questions about where she was going and what they were going to do. When Terry answered him, her voice sounded frightened.
Anastasia told Mommy about Uncle Wally. Mommy said, “Don’t worry, Anastasia, he won’t do it again.” And Anastasia believed her, and in fact, he never did. He left their house the next day and it seemed it was a long time before he came to visit them again. She didn’t mind. She felt uneasy around him. He was a strange man. He always tried to get her to cook for him, he insisted on it.
“I don’t know how to cook!” she’d protest. “And I don’t want to!”
But he’d keep asking her, keep insisting, until finally, once, she tried. He wanted fried eggs, so she cracked an egg and held it over the frying pan and as it hit the pan, it broke. And he laughed at her, mocking: “You don’t hold an egg a foot over the pan, dummy! Of course it’ll break if you do. You hold it just a few inches over the pan.”
She glared at him. “Well, if you know how to do it, do it yourself!” and stalked off.
But next time he came, he asked her again. “Women are supposed to cook,” he wheedled.
She really turned on him then. “Well, I’m not a woman, I’m a girl!”
She would not be a woman, she would not.
She couldn’t forget the things Nietzsche and Schopenhauer said about women. Her mother wasn’t the way they said women were. So maybe they were smart and knew about many things, but they didn’t know about women. But when Nietzsche wrote about Christianity, she attended: for what he wrote sounded true. And what he said about the misery of most lives, their pointlessness, about people doing things they didn’t want to do because they thought they were supposed to: well, that she understood perfectly.
She confided her doubts to her mother. “You know, Mommy, all these men have different ideas about God. And some of them don’t even believe in God. What do you think?”
Belle raised her hand. “I don’t know, Anastasia. I can’t argue with you. Why don’t you go see a priest?”
“He’d get mad at me.”
“No, he wouldn’t. He’d probably be glad to discuss religion with you.”
Anastasia had her doubts, but the next time she went to Confession, she decided to try her mother’s advice. She repeated the Act of Contrition, then said, “Father, I have been reading some books that make me wonder about religion, about God. I wondered if I could talk about it to you.”
The priest, his face shadowed and crossed with the grillwork of the opening, drew back from her. She didn’t know who he was: she didn’t know any of the priests except Monsignor Burke. But the voice that emerged from the confessional box was more strongly Irish even than his, and not at all glad.
“Ya either take it on faith or ya get out of the Church!” it thundered.
Anastasia’s heart thumped, and tears filled her eyes. The voice that emerged from her then came from somewhere outside herself, for she was surprised to hear herself saying, “In that case, I’ll get out of the Church,” and once having said it, she had to stand up and leave the confessional. As she trudged back home, she felt teary and forlorn, but she did not see what else she could have done. Her greatest sorrow was that she could no longer, in good conscience, sing in the choir—not that the priest would have known, or anyone at all.
In fact, it was not a painful separation. Religion as it had been presented to her was not satisfying intellectually, whatever it was sensuously, with the music, the flowers, the priests’ gorgeous costumes. She continued to think about divine purpose, but if there were a deity, she was sure it had no special relation with Catholicism, or any other church. And by the time she was eighteen, she had discarded any notion of a Supreme Being. If she had a religion after that, it was centered on humans. But she never claimed to have a religion at all, and when she entered a Catholic hospital to give birth to Arden, and the clerk insisted on knowing her religion, Anastasia told her she was a Hindu. The clerk asked her how to spell it.
Belle saw that her children were becoming more independent, and was pleased by that. At last, Anastasia had some friends; at last, Joy seemed to be over her bouts of sickness, and was doing well in school. She had made the Honor Roll last quarter. But Belle was facing a serious problem. The Carles wanted to sell both houses, and retire to a small apartment in Jamaica. Minnie’s back was bothering her greatly as she aged, and she felt she had to give up housecleaning. With so much money around because of the war, Mr. Carle felt he could get $9,000 for the house. Belle did not want to leave the little house; she was fond of the quiet neighborhood, the yard. But she knew that was too much money for this house; anyway, they couldn’t afford it.
So began six months of househunting. They drove out in the shiny sleek old car, every Sunday, to different towns on Long Island. They looked at houses in Huntington, Douglaston, Hempstead, Freeport, and Rockville Centre. And each Sunday they had dinner out in a nice restaurant. Anastasia did not understand how they could suddenly afford this, or why it happened, but she enjoyed it. So did Belle, who oversaw the children’s dress with great care each Sunday.
And while they were looking, Belle made the decision to change their name. They had often discussed it, she and Ed. It was déclassé to be Polish, and especially to have such a foreign name. But Ed had feared upsetting his father. But Dafna had died some years ago, after a long undiagnosed illness; and Stefan, despondent after her death, had followed her two years later. So, there was nothing to stop them now. And Belle did not want to enter the new neighborhood with their present name.
“Poor Daddy suffers so,” she explained to Anastasia. “In his plant, they call the men over the loudspeaker, and they always mispronounce his name. He gets called Dabooski and Dalouski and things like that. It upsets him.” Belle and Ed spent many evenings considering new names, and finally decided on Stevens, after Stefan. It sounded English, which was what Belle wanted to be.
The truth was, she was more English than Polish. She liked subdued simple clothes, in browns and blacks and tans; and bland boiled food; and the English style of home decoration. The women she would most admire in her life, except for Gertrude Grunbacher, were all of English extraction—Ann Gwyn, Mildred Bradshaw, and Martha Thacker. She liked their understated speech and manners, their avoidance of the emotional, their personal reticence. If she had met any Englishy people when she was young, you might have thought she modeled herself on them. When Anastasia pointed out that the name was Englishy, and so was her mother, Belle was pleased.
But English name or not, soon after they moved into their new house in Rockville Cent
re, at the end of August 1944, Anastasia knew that they would not pass muster. Even the neat white frame colonial house could not disguise them. Disguise took money. Nothing could disguise their ridiculous-looking old car. In South Ozone Park, they had been viewed as rich because they had a car at all; but in Rockville Centre, the 1928 Graham-Paige was laughable among all the prewar but still snappy Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles, and Buicks. And while Belle rarely went anywhere except to the market or the dry cleaner, Anastasia was almost immediately invited into the houses of her new girlfriends. The difference was striking. For her friends’ houses had maids in them, and gardeners taking care of the lawns. Inside there were wall-to-wall carpeting and lush couches, with ornate little side chairs, knickknacks everywhere, formal dining rooms furnished in imitation Sheraton. Some of the houses had little rooms just for the telephone; her friends had bedrooms furnished in antiqued white, with canopies over their beds, and matching vanity table skirts. The wealthiest threw their clothes in a heap after wearing for the maid to pick up. Many had collections of stuffed animals in the corners of their rooms.
Anastasia would sniff with contempt: I wouldn’t want such things, she’d decide, then catch herself. You can’t be sure you wouldn’t want a thing until you have the chance to have it. Only then do you really know. And anyway, not all the girls were so rich, although all of those who weren’t envied those who were. All except the “tramps.” There were a number of these in the school, and Anastasia made friends with several of them. The school was divided into groups: there were two cliques, the Christian one and the Jewish one; then there were the drips; and the tramps. Anastasia knew she was destined to be a drip. The new school was dismaying.