Mr. Ettinger, who owned the building, was wary of a widow with a child, but he felt sorry for Momma. So did his wife, who sent over a box of clothes her daughters had outgrown, for Bella.
Momma sat over that box, shaking her tearful head. Bella understood. Of all their many friends and relatives, only Pane Dabrowski had come to see them after Poppa died. All the people they had entertained, the two sisters whose passage money Momma had sent: everyone abandoned them in this time. And Pane Dabrowski came, Bella thought, only because she was old and lonely, and wanted some conversation and a glass of tea. Bella’s heart hardened in a way that would never change: Polish people, she felt, were shallow and mercenary, concerned only with what they could get. The only people who helped Momma were the Ettingers, strangers, and Jewish. Bella never forgot this.
In time, though, she became somewhat cynical about the Ettingers, too, because once Mrs. Ettinger found out that Momma could sew, she would bring over a length of fabric and ask Momma to make a dress for her daughter Yetta. She never paid her, but she brought extra material, so Momma could make a dress for Bella too. After a year, Bella had thirteen dresses—almost as many as she had endowed Anastasia with. But she knew there were things she needed more than dresses. And she felt that Momma only made her the dresses so she could show them to Mrs. Ettinger, to prove that she’d made them.
Their apartment was dark; light entered it only faintly for a few hours in the afternoon. The kitchen had a wood stove, a sink, and two deep tubs, with some shelves along one wall. Momma set the round table with its fringed brocade cloth in the center, and put a kerosene lamp on top. There was a gaslight on the wall behind the stove. Momma set the double bed and an old trunk in the other room. There was a wall gaslight in that room too. Along two walls of the kitchen, Momma put the old treadle sewing machine and the old couch.
Momma left the house very early each morning; somehow, she knew what time it was, and got herself out by seven to walk the three miles to the sweatshop and be there by eight. She worked from eight until one, then had a half hour for lunch, the black bread and butter she carried with her in a folded-up towel, then worked until six-thirty. Since, most nights, Momma stopped at a market on the way back for something for dinner, it was often eight o’clock at night before she returned home.
Bella was alone all day.
“I remember being, but I don’t remember thinking or feeling,” my mother says, pulling one side of her velvet robe over her knees. “I was numb.”
Numb, and lonely, she would wander out to the street, always busy by day, but filled mainly with men walking by, older boys striding through. A few women in babushkas and shawls and long skirts hovered at the open front of the vegetable stall, feeling tomatoes. From upstairs, she could hear Yetta Ettinger playing the piano. She walked back into the dark hall and stood there listening. What she heard was only scales and exercises fumblingly played, but it sounded beautiful to her.
She decided that Anastasia would play the piano, beautifully, even better than Yetta Ettinger. And for weeks, this gave her an occupation. She made up a life for Anastasia, starting right from the beginning. She saw the room Anastasia was laid in after her birth (she passed over that part, which was fuzzy in her mind), and how her momma and poppa acted toward her. She kept careful track of just where she had left off on an evening, so she could start again the next day. The first few weeks she and Momma lived on Manhattan Avenue, Bella spent mainly in the dark house, sitting at the kitchen table and making up Anastasia’s life. She tried to go slowly, because she knew the summer was long, but within a short time, she already had Anastasia going to school.
When Anastasia came home from school, she went into a large room with shining wood floors and a beautiful rug on it, and a long piano, like the one in the store on Nostrand Avenue, and played. She had long thin fingers, and music simply poured out of them. When she was tired of that, Anastasia went up to her room, which was all pink and white eyelet, like the bedroom in Halper’s Furniture Shop, with a pretty little vanity table. Bella could never quite envision what was on the vanity table, so she left that blank for the time being. There was also a fluffy white rug which Anastasia never got dirty, and a little crimson slipper chair, like the one in Schneider’s Furnishings, three blocks away. And her sheets were embroidered with her name, and she had a real closet in her room with fourteen dresses and two pairs of boots, one for everyday and one for good.
When Bella would occasionally go out on the street, she would walk like Anastasia, stepping daintily over horse droppings and peering haughtily in the shop windows. Sometimes, Bella would ask her what she thought of something in a window, and Anastasia would wrinkle her little nose and say it was cheap-looking. Then Bella would walk on, not wanting it either.
Darkness would grow on the little house without Bella noticing, and when the door opened, Momma would speak harshly: “You stupid, sitting in the dark!” And Bella would jump up and turn up the gaslight, although it was hard for her to reach. She would light the kerosene lamp too, as Momma put down her bags, and stare at the grey-faced woman. Momma wouldn’t speak. She’d go to the stove and put wood in it for a fire; then she’d measure coffee into the drip pot, and put a kettle of water on the hot part of the stove. Then she’d sink into a chair and put her face in her hands. When the kettle was steaming, she’d get up wearily and pour water into the coffeepot, and sit down again. After a little while, she got up and poured some coffee into a cup, and sat with it, her hands around the cup as though they were cold—but it was very hot, it was July.
Momma would sip the coffee, but in a few minutes, she’d choke, and the sobs would come out of her mouth the same way they had the day the strange man and woman came, as if her throat were a cave, and wild winds were trapped inside. She said bad things, awful things, and Bella stood transfixed. Sometimes, she would pull back to the couch, the old couch from the dining room, that Momma had put in the kitchen, and lean her legs against it.
“Psiakrew! Chuje! Devils! Devils! What did they do to me, why, why? They take my children, who the hell are they to do such a thing! Niech ich szlak weźmie! My children, my babies, my little orphans! Moje biedne sieroty, moje drogie! Hell, hell, hell, why did this happen to me?”
She would sob and scream, cursing and using words Poppa had used, but that Momma had never uttered before.
Bella approached her warily. She touched her sleeve. “Momma, I’m here,” she said in a small voice.
But Frances lifted her arm brusquely, loosing the small fingers. She went on crying and screaming.
“Please don’t cry, Momma,” Bella begged.
Frances ignored her: she was inconsolable. She was pounding the table with her fist, soundlessly; then she pounded her own chest so hard Bella could hear the thump. Bella drew back slowly, slowly, until the back of her legs touched the couch. Her belly rumbled. She was hungry.
Now Momma had her hands over her belly and she was moaning and rocking back and forth. Then tears burst forth again, and she slapped her own face, she tore at her cheeks with her nails, she pulled out strands of her hair.
Bella watched, listened, but Momma never looked at her. Bella wished that Momma would hit her, scream at her, but Momma acted as if she wasn’t there. Bella felt that she was being torn to pieces. She wondered why Momma had kept her, why she hadn’t let her go to the orphanage with the others. After a week of Momma’s nightly crying, a thought pushed its way into Bella’s mind: I’d be better off at the orphanage.
When Momma’s sobs subsided a bit, sounding now like wind through the cracks in the windows, she would lay her head down on the table. Then Bella would approach her again, and pick up her cup.
“Would you like some hot coffee, Momma?”
Momma would answer—or she wouldn’t. Bella would pour more coffee into the cup and slide it back on the table, and Momma would sit up a little, and, her chin near the table, pick up the cup and hold it to her lips.
“Do you want me to go the store, Mo
mma?”
Frances would look at her, wild-eyed.
“For dinner, Momma.”
Then Frances would sit up farther, and slump at the same time. She reached for her purse and took out some coins. She would tell Bella to get some chop meat, or some baloney. Then she would go into the bedroom and take off her dress and put on an older one and tie on an apron and come back and begin to peel some potatoes. When Bella returned, they would be boiling, and Momma would be peeling carrots, or halving a head of cabbage. They would eat very late, and Bella’s stomach twisted all through the meal. Bella helped Momma clear.
“I’ll wash the dishes tomorrow,” she’d say, and Momma would nod. They would go out to the toilet, and then into the bedroom. After Bella was undressed and in bed, Momma would turn off the gas lamp and undress in the dark, and lie down beside Bella in the big lumpy double bed. Exhausted, Momma would fall immediately asleep, breathing loudly with a liquid rasp from the tears in her throat. She never caressed the child beside her. She never even said good night.
IV
1
THE STRANGE THING ABOUT misery is how it expands to take up all available space. A toothache can make you want to die, and while you are suffering it, you have no patience with someone who tells you that things could be worse—that you could be in a concentration camp, say, watching your family die; or in a cell being tortured by one of the specialists so popular with governments these days. I have wished to die with stomach cramps, and seen my mother willing herself to die with sinus headaches. It is hard to measure pain, just as it is hard to measure happiness.
The only measure we have, I guess, is permanence. For it is true that the moment the sore tooth, the headache, the stomach, are relieved, they are also forgotten. Pain accompanied by fear—a heart attack, say—endures longer in the memory, and maybe the fear never fully vanishes. And there are pains that never end, that pounce brutally on the heart at each recall until one dies.
The shrinks believe that we can reanimate our times of severe pain and find comfort in the understanding sympathetic therapist. Perhaps. Priests also offer comfort of a sort; like therapy, religious relief is dependent upon faith. Yet those who suffer worst are usually faithless, for pain destroys faith. And hope.
My grandmother never fully recovered from her ordeal. And although her ordeal was utterly different, neither did my mother. And my sister and I spent most of our lives trying to escape or evade the consequences of those facts. Occasionally I read novels written by women of my own age who were raised in comfort with some affection, yet suffered wretched childhoods, felt forced into conformity, or pushed into invisibility, or in some way unappreciated. And by now I know that love can be the cruelest oppression. Still, I snort in contempt at the self-indulgence of these writers. I snort just like my mother, who cannot understand how anyone who has enough money to live without worry could succumb to depression, or even be unhappy. She should know better, but she scorns such people. And so do I. I have accepted my mother’s standard: no one ever suffered more than she did. There is just enough truth in this idea to give it weight.
You say—but suffering is also determined by how you react to things. You say you know people who had terrible calamities in their lives, yet maintained their courage and spirit. Admirable yes, but tell me this: what is it that enables them to do that? A certain ambience in their childhoods, a genetic propensity, a gift of love made early enough to be engraved on the soul? Are we responsible if these things are absent in our lives? Can we be blamed, can we blame ourselves?
I remember, in my childhood, curling up in a tight knot on my bed, my whole body consumed in liquid fire of pain because I felt unloved. Yet in a way I was loved—love being another of those essential things that cannot be measured, another of the qualities discarded and dismissed by our age which trusts only that which can be measured. I felt unloved. How much more then did Bella feel unloved? And how much deeper the effects of lovelessness on her?
And how can I make sense of Frances, whom I remember as so gentle and loving, so entirely tender and giving? I feel I may not presume to judge my mother, but I have spent much of my life doing so. My mother could never even consider judging her own. How could she, given the facts? Yet toward Bella Frances was not tender or even gentle, but harsh and critical. Why was that? Did she see Bella as her other self, expect her to be adult and dependable and resourceful in equal measure to herself? Frances had been adult early—by thirteen certainly: she might have wondered why Bella was not. But then, Frances had had a loving mother, attention, had heard laughter in her early years—things she was not able to give her daughter, reserving them for her granddaughter, me, Anastasia. She must have loved Bella—why else would she have chosen her? Perhaps she loved her most, loved her as she loved herself, and therefore was hardest on her, in the same way she would be hard on herself. I know she loved her, I saw them together. But Bella never knew it.
Maybe for Frances it was the cost: how could this timid weepy child ever be good enough, ever be enough to justify Frances’s suffering? For during those terrible years, Bella’s survival was the entire apparent purpose of Frances’s life. If this was what Frances felt, it was inherited, because that is what my mother felt too, about us, during the terrible years of our childhood. And I?
Still, I understood Frances. One night, after my second husband had left me, I had a few drinks too many and was lying in my room crying and Franny came in. She approached the bed tentatively, and I tried to stop sniffling, I sat up a little and blew my nose, and she sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand on my back. She was little, she was six. She asked me why I was crying. Then the other kids came in too, and gathered around me on the bed. They wouldn’t understand because I couldn’t tell them the whole thing. So I said I was crying because I was angry with myself for fucking up my life, for marrying Toni, for getting myself stuck in poverty again.
And Franny, who didn’t understand at all, just rubbed her little hand over mine, smoothing it as if that could smooth my spirit. Arden’s eyes were bright: I knew that look: it meant she was trying to transfer some of her intense energy, her fervor, to me in my depression. I knew the look because I’d given it, often enough, to my own mother She said, “But Mom, if you hadn’t married Toni, you wouldn’t have Franny.”
I kept my mouth shut. What could I say? That’s exactly the point? I mumbled something.
Billy was farthest from me, at the foot of the bed, looking down at the floor. His new deep voice rumbled incoherently, and I had to ask him to repeat what he’d said.
“I asked you if you felt that way about Dad. Our father. Bradley.”
I was angry enough to feel it was essential to be honest. “Well, yes, to tell the truth.”
“But if you hadn’t married him, you wouldn’t have had us,” he went on in a drone, raising his head to look at me.
I sat up, my head hot with fury. “So what?” I cried. “If I hadn’t had you, if I’d married somebody else, I’d have had other children! I’d have loved them just as much!”
Their faces paled. They stared at me. Inconceivable, it was inconceivable that I could have said that, that I could even imagine loving some other hypothetical children as much as I loved them, that they were not loved because of their personal qualities, their specialness, their wonderfulness. I leaned back, a bit regretful. “I wouldn’t have known you, see?”
They saw. They nodded solemnly. They were even saintly, they didn’t storm off to their rooms and sulk, but offered me tea and some music, both of which I swiftly accepted. They put on my music, not theirs—one of the late quartets, which did nothing for my mood. But I could only smile my appreciation, as radiantly as I could manage. After all, they were proving that I was wrong, weren’t they? I had to be wrong.
Mother love. There is supposed to be no room in it for coldness of heart, for a private cell for oneself, with doors that sometimes clank shut. And the more you love your children, the more shocked they are to discover that
you possess a single strand of ambivalent—or negative—feeling. Insatiable for this love we expect to be absolute, we cannot forgive its mere humanness. Well, I thought, that’s one fault I don’t have. I’d long accepted the limitations of my mother’s feelings for me. I was adult.
Fathers aren’t subject to such demands. They are allowed to be almost anything, and if they give any love at all, kids feel grateful. Goddamned unfair. Still, fathers are dismissed in a way mothers aren’t: they aren’t given the same importance. But they can do just as much harm. Look at Bella.
If Bella felt her mother did not care about her, what on earth did she feel about her father? It was probably fortunate in some ways for his children that he died as young as he did, before he could fuck them up even more. The damage he did was mainly to Bella and Wally—Eddie had a kind of imperviousness, and Euga was too young to see. Then too, it was Bella and Wally who resembled him—the thin face, the nervous gestures. For Bella, Michael Brez would stand forever as her image of what men were. Cruel and capricious and unpredictable and utterly selfish; yet brilliant, dashing, popular, charming, and able to make money, able to take care of a family in a way a mother could not, no woman could. Men could be dangerous, treacherous, and perhaps even brutal, but you needed a man absolutely. I remember when I was divorced and had the two kids—before Franny was born—and living from hand to mouth, which was the way I spent most of my life, and my mother would have nightmares every night. She told me she would dream that the kids and I were living in a Volkswagen bus. This terrified her, and she urged me to get married again. It wasn’t that she thought much of the man I was seeing, only that he had a good job and was a man. You get one, you keep him, and you see to it that he stays in his place. For my mother, that was the only solution.