Her Mother's Daughter (19 page)

Every night the foreman blew his whistle at six-thirty. The women would stand, their pale faces drawn from the tension of not looking up, not pausing, for all those hours, from the bad air, bad light, the ache in the back. Then they all picked up their coats and handbags and trudged down to the toilet, quiet, subdued from weariness, and stood on line in front of the evil-smelling water closet, before going out into the dark winter night to stand on another line for the trolley or subway. Bella felt like one of a herd of cattle trudging down those stairs, just one more of an infinitely replaceable species seen by the bosses as so many head, treated that way.

Now Euga was working too, although no one called her Euga anymore, but rather Eugenia. She worked in a sweatshop that made hats for famous Fifth Avenue designers, and she was very good at her work. Every morning the two sisters walked together to the trolley stop, and rode to downtown Manhattan; and every night they met at the Manhattan stop and rode home together. But they never spoke of anything serious or upsetting; they never discussed their family. They chatted about fashions and movie stars and gossip about some mutual acquaintances.

Two nights a week, Bella went to Woods. Hard as it was for her, and stupid as it made her feel, she was determined to learn to take dictation and to type, because she knew that she had to get out of the sweatshops. For Bella, the difference between working in a sweatshop and working in an office was huge. The young women she saw on the streets could easily be divided into two classes: there were the ones like her, with long hair, no makeup, wearing longish skirts, usually shabby—something Bella was not. The others had bobbed hair, shorter skirts, and lipstick, and they looked smart, modern. She felt people would think differently about one kind and the other. She was not aware of the word
class,
nor the social division of lower, middle, and upper, but she knew what she saw.

It was at Woods that she met Sue Corry. Sue was also working in a sweatshop, making knitted sweaters, and was trying to improve herself. She was exactly Bella's height, and she was also blond, but she had a smart bob and wore light lipstick. Bella was thrilled by her; she knew she could never invite her home—Momma would be shocked at the way she looked—but she never invited anyone home. Sue was eighteen, a year older than Bella, with freckles on her face and a wide easy smile. Bella did not understand why Sue liked her, but she did not question her good fortune in having found a friend. It was Sue who first asked Bella if she wanted to go shopping.

Shopping? What was that? But Bella did not want to betray her ignorance, so she did not ask. Sue said she loved to go shopping on Saturday afternoons, and would sometimes splurge and have lunch out. In a restaurant? Bella breathed agreement, her mind dazed with glamorous images, and they met the next Saturday after work. At first, they walked around Union Square and gazed in the store windows, S. Klein and Mays and smaller shops. They didn't go in until they reached Woolworth's, and it was there Sue suggested they have lunch.

They went in and sat at the counter, and a girl handed them two greasy cards listing dishes. Bella studied hers intently: few of the items listed there were familiar to her. But she covered her ignorance with an appearance of being discriminating, and only a few minutes after Sue announced that she would have a bacon, lettuce, and tomato on white toast with coffee, did Bella say, “That sounds good. I think I'll have that too.” Then the girl brought them their sandwiches and coffee and put the food right in front of them. Bella looked around her to see if other people were looking at them, thinking what smart young women they were. Her heart felt large and generous and she pitied the poor women bent over in their black coats, carrying heavy shopping bags. She was a modern young woman eating out in a restaurant! She and Sue talked of many things. Sue was so interesting! She even had a boyfriend. And she knew about all the latest styles and hairstyles and what the movie stars were like in private. Bella wondered how she came to know so much. But she never asked: she listened and smiled and her eyes opened with wonder.

After lunch, which cost them each twenty-five cents, Bella noticed that Sue left some pennies on the counter, and she did the same. The girl behind the counter came over and pocketed them, and smiled at the two women. Bella felt like a great lady. The poor girl, working for pennies! Then she and Sue walked about the store, stopping at one counter or another. Bella was drawn to a big square of counters, that had a piano inside it, and a man playing popular hits. On all four sides the counter was heaped with sheet music. Bella stood and listened for a long time, her heart full of longing. Oh, if only she could play! The young man played wonderfully, she thought, and he just flowed from one song into another. After a long time, Sue bought, for fifteen cents, the sheet music to “My Buddy.” Bella sensed she wanted to move on and dragged her body away from the counter. She was content that she could hear the music even from other counters. But she was also nervous: she felt she must buy something, but had little money and did not know what to buy. Finally, she found a paper of hairpins for seven cents and bought that.

Her mind whirled all the way home. She went home alone because Sue lived in the Bronx. She felt as if wires had been plugged into her head, her arms, her legs, and were sending impulses through her body. Everything was new, and interesting, and wonderful, and she was allowed to enter the new world. But she would not have dared to enter it alone: she needed a friend.

The Saturday-afternoon expeditions became a custom; the friends went at least twice a month. In time they gained courage and went inside some of the clothes shops and looked over the merchandise with slightly snooty looks on their faces, as if they could afford anything but found everything in some way wanting. In fact, Bella rarely saw anything she wanted. Momma made all Bella's beautiful clothes, which were far nicer than anything in the stores. She had matching dresses and coats in navy blue and in beige; and she had two pleated skirts, one slim-line skirt with a kick pleat with buttons above it.

Then they began to walk uptown along Fifth Avenue, or Madison, and gaze in the windows of the really expensive shops. They never found the courage to go inside these, but they oohed and aahed about the exquisite embroidered satin nightgowns and bed jackets and slips; the cashmere sweaters; and the beaded dresses that stopped above the knee. Some days they just walked. They passed great hotels, the Hotel McAlpin and the Waldorf. Sue had a friend who had been taken to tea at the Waldorf, and said it was really beautiful, with palm trees and everything, right in the room! A space formed in Bella's heart: tea at the Waldorf! Oh, what would that be like! But Sue said even if they had enough money they could not go there, because a man had to take you. Bella learned so much from Sue. They would walk arm in arm, and press themselves together, although Bella felt a little uncomfortable about this, and shifted herself slightly away each time. But Sue was very affectionate, she even used to touch Bella's arm when she spoke to her.

One Saturday during an uptown jaunt, Sue suggested they have lunch at Schrafft's. Schrafft's! With gold letters on its front window, and Venetian curtains—so elegant—and real tables and chairs! Feeling daring, ready for anything, Bella clutched her handbag and agreed. They sat at a table and had chicken salad sandwiches and coffee and it wasn't so expensive, it was only thirty-five cents. Bella realized that Woolworth's wasn't so great after all—it was only a counter, a luncheonette. Schrafft's was a
real
restaurant, and now she was a young woman of the world.

One day as they sat over their coffee, Sue began to talk about religion. Her mother was very pious, she said, and went to church every day. Sue was religious, but she felt that was excessive. What did Bella think?

Bella didn't know.

“You're Catholic, aren't you?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“You guess so! Did you receive?”

“Receive?”

“Holy Communion! You must have received!”

Bella had a dim memory of a white dress and white silk stockings, and a bouquet of flowers, back in the old life, before Poppa…“Yes. And my father was close friends with our priest…,” she began.

Sue warmed to that. She leaned forward, her face glowing. “I
knew
you had to be Catholic. I told my mother you were. She doesn't like me to make friends with people who aren't Catholic.”

Bella just looked at her.

“And of course you must have been confirmed, too,” Sue went on.

Bella shook her head.

“But, Bella, you're seventeen! You should have been confirmed at twelve or thirteen!”

Bella's mouth opened. “My father died,” she said finally.

That was something Sue could understand. “Oh. Yes. But Bella, you must be confirmed.” Sue talked for a long time then, softly, persuasively, about the sacraments of the Church, and its Laws, and Salvation. If you weren't saved, she said, when you died you went to hell with all the non-Catholics and sinners, and burned forever in eternal fires.

Bella was appalled. How was it that Sue, who was only eighteen, knew all these things, and Momma, who was forty, did not? Why was it that everything she learned she had to learn from her friends? Why wasn't Momma concerned with the state of her soul? Did Momma want her to go to hell? Oh, what a home she had! A place to sleep, eat, and play cards, nothing more. She had never learned anything in her home, never. If not for her friends she would have gone on forever in ignorance and stupidity. Bella barely listened to Sue's description of hell: she felt she knew better than Sue what hell was like, and that she had spent several years there already. Maybe if she had been confirmed, and had experienced God's grace, as Sue said, all that wouldn't have happened.

Bella squeezed Sue's hand and promised she would go for instruction in the catechism. Sue smiled radiantly at her convert, lifted to another plane, she and her friend shining with God's light. She told Bella she would introduce her to a priest whose parish was near where they worked, downtown—she occasionally popped into his church for First Friday, she said. And he would teach Bella. And soon Bella went from work on Tuesday nights to the rectory where Father Ambrose tested her on the catechism questions she was supposed to learn that week. Bella learned it all, but for her it was just words. She felt stupid again: she simply didn't understand what the Holy Ghost was supposed to be, or what grace was, or sin, for that matter. How could a baby be born with sin on its soul?

Nevertheless, in the spring of 1922, after her eighteenth birthday, Bella went to church in a white dress and stood on line behind fifty twelve-year-old children (towering over them again, she thought grimly; then thanked Sue that she was saved at all), and felt the bishop put his hand on her head, and tried to feel the Holy Spirit descending upon her. And when she could feel nothing, she concluded she was just too stupid to recognize what was happening to her.

Sue came to her Confirmation with her boyfriend, and afterward, he took the three of them out to a hotel and bought them a Communion breakfast—eggs and bacon and orange juice and champagne! Bella had never had champagne before, and she decided that making her Confirmation and having champagne meant that she was now, really and truly, grown up.

Sue's boyfriend, Andy, liked Bella, who was shy of him and simply smiled a lot. And Sue loved Bella, feeling responsible for the very state of her soul. The two of them invited Bella to go with them one Saturday night to the Cotton Club, the famous nightclub in Harlem. In great excitement, Bella told Momma she needed a new dress, a fancy one. Bella chose the fabric, a melon chiffon, and Momma made her a dress with little straps and a flat bodice, with a skirt that was many different lengths, all overlapping. And Bella used her last savings to buy herself a pair of silk shoes with high heels and a strap across the instep, and have them dyed to match the dress. As a surprise, Momma made her a silk coat just a few shades darker than the dress. And Bella went to the Cotton Club.

“Oh, I was such a stupid kid,” my mother says with disgust. “I don't know where I was, I was always in a dream. Here I had all these chances—they took me to the Cotton Club many times, I heard all the great musicians, like Duke Ellington and Count Basie and…oh, all the great ones. And I didn't even know what I was listening to, I didn't realize!”

I have just put an Ellington record on the hi-fi. I always listen to music turned up loud when I clean, and it's time for the semiannual straightening up. The kids' shoes and underwear are strewn around the living room, and my papers are heaped on every surface. There's no room to sit down, here or in the kitchen, so I think I'll have to do something. Then I hear this unsteady step on the walk outside and peer down from the front window, and there she is, tottering up the walk in her high heels. Saved from cleaning! I hastily pick up piles of things and stack them on other piles, so there will be someplace to sit down, and go into the kitchen and put on a kettle for tea. It takes her a long time to mount the stairs to my apartment, and I fidget, fighting the impulse to run out and help her. She arrives at the top breathless, annoyed, pink in the face: “Those steps!” She comes in and gets settled. Unlike my ex-mother-in-law, she is not bothered by the messy way I live. But she complains about the music. I go to take the record off, commenting, “I thought you liked Duke Ellington.” And she goes into her tale of the Cotton Club, which I have heard dozens of times before. The moral of her story is the same as ever: her ignorance of what she was hearing is one more source of grief; grief is the only residue of the experience. For the first time, I wonder why.

Bella finished her business course in the spring of 1923; she decided that armed with a certificate verifying that she had completed two years of study, she could risk looking for a job in an office. But she was very nervous about doing this. Momma had gotten her her other jobs, had introduced her to the foremen, who liked Momma and smiled and bobbed their heads, saying, “Ah, your daughter, Mrs. Brez, a good girl, I'm sure,” and Bella had smiled and almost curtseyed. To go alone into a world she had never entered before terrified her, and she kept putting it off. There was a late summer that year; the weather remained chilly right into June. Sue married Andy. They had a nice apartment in the Bronx with a living room and bedroom suite of new furniture. Bella visited them once, taking an embroidered bridge cloth and napkins, and Andy had served them champagne. But since then she had had no occasion for seeing Sue, who dropped out of Woods and was now pregnant.