Her Mother's Daughter (20 page)

Weekends were dull; and evenings too, now that she did not go to Woods anymore. The boys seemed to be at loose ends. Everyone in the family was working, and they were all doing well except Wally, who had trouble keeping jobs—he was an apprentice electrician—and they all gave most of their wages to Momma. Bella still got only fifty cents a day, as did Eugenia; but the boys, she knew, got more. And Eddie had insisted that Momma open a bank account and save money: every week he checked the balance and announced it with satisfaction. They now had $118.42 in the account.

One Friday night, Eddie came home late with a camera. It was a little rectangular box. When you opened it, a kind of nose came out, with accordion pleats on its sides. That Sunday, Eddie insisted that they all get dressed up in their best clothes so he could take their picture. Bella wore her black satin with the white satin lapels printed with roses; Eugenia wore a blue chiffon with accordion pleats; Wally wore knickers and a golfing cap (although he'd never even seen a golf course); and Eddie wore his new winter coat, a long dark brown full-skirted coat with a fur collar. Even Momma put on her best dress. He trooped them up to the roof of their building and lined them up against the brick chimney, and took a number of shots. Then he joined them in the line and asked his friend Oscar Ball, who was visiting that afternoon, to take their picture together. Of course, they couldn't see the pictures right away, and all of them were excited and nervous, waiting for the sight of this miracle. It took two weeks for them to come back from wherever Eddie had sent them, and he laid them before the family with pride. And indeed, there they all were: four young people and a mother, all of whom looked far older than they were, standing on the tar roof in front of the dark brick of the chimney, while behind them spread the roofs and walls of tenements, as far as you could see. Eddie laughed and laughed. Bella could not understand why he was laughing. Then he took a pen and wrote across the bottom:
ALL DRESSED UP AND NO PLACE TO GO.

Bella was restless. Summer still didn't come. At least, in summer, the four of them and their friends could go to the Rockaways and spend the day on the beach. She knew she had to make her move soon, but felt paralyzed. One Saturday, missing Sue, it occurred to her to stop in at the church. Maybe God's grace would give her strength. She had not been in a church since her Confirmation.

She walked in timidly, not feeling at home in this place. The church was nearly empty at five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Only a few people sat in pews near the confessional booths at the sides of the nave, waiting their turn. A few stood on line near each booth. Bella went to the front of the church where the candles flickered, and looked up at the statue of the Virgin, and the great white skinny figure of crucified Christ on a cross near the altar. She knelt in a front pew and bowed her head. But she didn't know what to do then. As she sat there, something in front of her moved. A few rows closer to the altar, a woman was kneeling, with bowed head. She was so small and bent that Bella had not seen her before. As she finished praying, the woman straightened up a little more and Bella's heart stopped: Momma! It was Momma! Then the woman stood up and worked her way out of the pew, and turned to walk down the aisle. Her face was swollen and wet, and she kept her head down as she walked. It was not Momma, but the woman looked like Momma—the same weariness in the body and the walk, the same defeat on the face. And Bella was filled with outrage. Suppose it had been Momma?

She could not bear it that her mother should bend her knees to the powers that had wrecked her young life, blighted it irrevocably. It would outrage her if her mother were to enter a church, pray, ask forgiveness. Forgiveness for what? What sin had Momma ever committed? Oh, she was often angry with Bella, but that was because Bella was so stupid. Images crowded into her mind, of Momma retching with tears in the office of the woman who took the children away; or sitting under the lamp sewing, her head falling onto the table as a cry of pain engulfed her. Or the night she had crept out of bed and peered through the crack of light showing around the kitchen door and seen Poppa with the razor strop, raising it high and slamming it down on poor Wally's little behind. And Wally, only five then, a baby, screaming, while Eddie sobbed in a corner. And behind it all, herself, a statue, a stony paralyzed image, watching, watching. What had God, if there was a God, ever done for her family that was merciful, just, or good?

She raised her head and looked around her. The crowd had left. There were a couple of people on line at one confessional, but none at the other. As she looked, the priest's door opened and he emerged, yawning and red-faced. His great belly was stiff under his cassock, and he trudged down the aisle toward the altar. As he approached, Bella noticed that he had the same little threads of red on his nose and cheeks that Father Stefan had had, and she recalled the sight of the priest laughing as Poppa vomited in the street.

She stood up unsteadily. How could these men, who were only men like Poppa, know what was good? Did Poppa know what was good? Did any man? Men, who did things like hit babies and hit Momma, who was a saint? She stiffened her lips and walked out of the church. For a few minutes, for the first time in her life, Bella felt furious. It passed quickly after she left the dark damp church and mixed with the people on the street. But it changed her somehow. It was that afternoon that she made up her mind to do what she had been wanting to do for a long time.

She waited until the following Saturday. Summer had finally arrived and the city air was soft and damp, and men walked carrying their jackets and hats, while women fanned themselves with handkerchiefs on the trolley. She had picked the place out long ago, wandering around with Sue, peering into windows and watching the way the operators worked. She considered the way the women looked when they were finished, and she had decided on Alicia's. It was only a few blocks from the shop, and she had told Eugenia she would be going with a friend after work. She stood outside briefly, then straightened and boldly walked right in.

“I want a bob,” she said.

Bella's hair had never been cut. When it was down, she could sit on it. It was ash blond and very wavy, and every morning Bella had to brush it for a long time, then comb it, to get out the knots. Then she fastened it back with a clip to which she had attached a large bow. But it was a baby way to look, she felt. And she was grown up now. Sometimes she put it in a big bun with hairpins, but they loosened and fell out and her hair fell down; or if she put a lot in, they made her head ache during the day. And all the women in the magazines and the movies had short straight bobs and wore glittering headbands and black around their eyes. They were
chic:
Bella felt a surge of pride at knowing that word and even how to pronounce it properly. She had heard girls at the shop say “chick.”

Her hair fell around her in long showers, and Bella's heart hurt a little. It was all over the floor and she looked down at it as if it were a limb she was having removed. But when Alicia was finished, Bella looked in the mirror enchanted. It was not Bella, it was a new person who stared back at her, someone modern and chic. Gone was the little Polaka, the ignorant immigrant girl who worked in a sweatshop. She stood, dazed, and paid Alicia the money she had been saving for months. Then, still dazed, she wandered around the streets, and in some kind of mad daring, walked into a little hat shop and bought a cloche, black straw with a little bow on its side.

When she got home, the family was all there and Momma was placing the bowls of food on the table for dinner. She walked in, and Wally glanced up from his newspaper and gave a long wolf whistle. Then Eddie turned around from the table where he was working at his stamp collection. “Wow!” he said, and Eugenia, standing behind Momma, holding a bowl of mashed potatoes, just stared looking terrified. Momma screamed: “AAAAIIEEEE! What have you done!”

Bella smiled uncertainly. Momma screamed again. Then she began to attack Bella in Polish. “You are no daughter of mine, no daughter of mine cuts her hair, what nice girl does that, it is a scandal, a sin, a shame, shame on you, how can you come in my house looking like that, a woman of the street, she goes about like that, no daughter of mine…” Momma went on for a long time. Then she slammed down the plate of pot roast she was carrying and went back into the kitchen. Eugenia smiled furtively at Bella, dropped the bowl of potatoes lightly on the table, and followed Momma into the kitchen. Bella could hear Momma screaming and cursing in the kitchen. Wally got up and came over to Bella: “You look terrific, kid,” he said in his slangy man-about-town way. But she knew he meant well, and she smiled at him gratefully. Eddie was still looking at her. “Momma will get over it, Bella,” he said kindly.

But Momma did not come to the table at all that night, and the family, very subdued, ate without her. After dinner, they cleared the table and the girls washed the dishes and then they all sat around the table playing pinochle and still Momma did not come out of her room. Every once in a while Eugenia would go into the bedroom the three women shared and check on Momma, but said nothing when she came out except “She's all right.”

So tense were they that they began to giggle at nonsense, and before long, they were really laughing, having a good time. And Bella, in the middle of this, looked at them and said, “One more thing. I'm not Bella anymore. If anyone calls me Bella I won't answer. My name is Belle.”

M
OMMA DID NOT SPEAK
to Bella for two weeks, and when she did, her voice sounded wounded. Frances had won the battle and lost the war. She had regathered her children, had kept her family together after all, only to lose them to America. Confused, hurt, and helpless, she subsided further into the old woman I knew when I was a child—she was only forty-seven when I was born, younger than I am now, and sixty-two when she died. Not very old, in our accounting. But she was bent and old by forty-five.

Belle, armed with her bob and her new name, got herself a job at Crowell Publishing Company as a file clerk. She had to accept less money—another source of outrage to Frances, but she fought less hard now—but she got to work in a beautiful building with a marble lobby and elevators, and she sat all day in a big room full of desks, well-lighted and far less noisy than the shop because there was only the clacking of typewriters, not the continual whir of sewing machines. Impaired as she was, noise bothered Belle because over it she could hear literally nothing. She looked around her at other modern women like herself, and sighed with satisfaction. She had made it into the middle class. She was saved.

These days, she had lunch out every day with the other girls in the office, at Rexall Drug Store. By now she knew whether she wanted a chicken salad or a grilled cheese and tomato, and didn't dally over the menu, but ordered with the rest and gossiped about the office, and clothes, and movie stars, just like the others. And after they had coffee, Lillian Gutman, who was the daring one who said daring things about the bosses and made them all laugh, brought out cigarettes and passed them around. Belle always took one, and smoked it right down, her eyes bright, glancing around to see if people were looking at these smart-looking young women having lunch out, laughing, and smoking. For a few months, she felt glorious: she was one of the girls she had envied back in grade school, gay and laughing, sophisticated, well-dressed. She knew how to belong.

But the job itself was horribly tedious. It was even worse than the sweatshop because you could not daydream as you filed or you would make a mistake; whereas you could work a sewing machine without thinking at all. And she earned less money and spent more, for the lunches every day ate up her entire allowance. She had no money to buy shoes, or anything else, no money to go out on Sundays. She always had to ask Momma, and although Momma always gave it to her, she also gave her a look of grim contempt. She could hear what Momma did not say: “You see? You see?”

So when after six months she got a raise of a dollar and a half, she did not tell Momma. She worried about it all the way home. On the one hand, she would have liked to brag a little, to show Momma how well she was doing in this foreign world, to prove to Momma that she was still good. But she could not bear the looks Momma gave her. She reminded herself that the boys were allowed to keep far more of their wages than she and Eugenia. And besides, now she needed money for cigarettes. The others now all took turns buying them and passing them around—it wasn't fair that Lillian supply them all. So Belle had to, too. She argued with herself, and won. The dollar and a half was secreted each week in a special part of her purse.

And before long, Eugenia too came home with a bob. Momma cried again, but she was never as hard on Euga as on Bella, and the shock soon passed. And then Euga said she wanted to be modern too, and would henceforth be called Jean. The boys went along with all this cheerfully: they liked having modern, smart sisters. Only Momma stubbornly continued to refer to her daughters as Bella and Genya. And when both sisters worked on her, showing her pictures of the modern young women in the fashion magazines, she stopped protesting entirely, and even made them dresses with short hems.

“You girls are flappers!” Wally crowed.

On a Sunday near Easter in 1924, the family had a surprise visit. People in those days did not telephone, for few people had telephones; nor did they write. They simply came, taking one or two or three trolleys or trains, and descending upon you en famille. That was one reason why Sunday dinners were always so ample: you never knew if someone might stop in.

The visitors were Momma's sister Mamie, who had married only a few years before, her new baby and the older girl, and her husband, who was an
artist
! Belle had never met an artist and she looked with awe at this tall thin handsome man with the shapely mustache, who walked around as if he owned their house, and talked, like Poppa, as if he knew what he was talking about and others did not. He was a real artist, he had sculptures in the Metropolitan Museum, Mamie whispered to Momma.