Her Mother's Daughter (23 page)

I never told my children the story about the maps: by the time they were born, it had faded from my mind. But when my first volume of photographs was published, some man gave it a brief and especially nasty review in a photographic magazine. Arden was about fourteen, and we were not getting along well. Yet without my knowing it, she wrote a letter to the editor complaining about the critic's blindness and stupidity, and for unnecessary viciousness. I never saw her letter and wouldn't have known about it had he not replied, rather sweetly, explaining to her that no one wanted to harm her mother, but that was the way things were in the public world. She wasn't satisfied, tossed the letter down in a huff, and cried out. I held her close to me, I tried to console her. I couldn't, any more than I could console my mother. Children do not understand that nothing they do can repair the past. Only my father knew how to do that: he could fix its broken clocks and necklace clasps, its collapsed furniture. He didn't deal with hearts, though.

Among the questions I asked my mother when I was four and five and six were how she met Daddy, and how they came to marry each other. There was more to these questions than interest in romance—something even a tiny child is exposed to in the world we live in. For my parents seemed to have nothing in common, no shared pleasure; and my mother invariably turned a cool cheek to my father's warm nightly kiss. It was obvious even to a small child that my father adored my mother, but my mother simply tolerated him. So what was it that led her to marry him?

Mommy was extremely evasive about such questions. Sometimes she said she didn't remember how they met, and that they just drifted into marriage—this was very unsatisfying. Sometimes she said they'd known each other since childhood, and just drifted into marriage, and when I asked how, she said they would take walks along the city streets, and when they gazed in at a furniture store, would stand there and talk about what kind of furniture they would buy after they were married. Given the rather ragtag furniture we had, I found this story unsatisfying as well. Sometimes she said they had mutual friends, and just naturally hung out together. Then I would ask what Daddy was like then, and she was evasive again: he was polite, she said. He had a car.

By the time I was an adult, and could study with a more informed eye the photographs of their youth, I had made up my own mind about why they married. Because there was something about my father in those pictures that set him off from the other men, from Wally and Eddie and Stanley Berger and Oscar Ball and all my parents' other friends. He was nice-looking, but not quite what you'd call handsome. He wore glasses and had a full head of dark hair. It was the way he lived inside his body. The other men wore their bodies like borrowed clothes. One sagged; another lifted his neck as if he wanted to disavow everything beneath it. Wally always looked as if he were about to fly out of his; my uncle Eddie looked sturdy but unconscious of his. The women in their dresses or bathing suits looked as if they were displaying whatever they wore, fashion models in front of a camera. But my father's body was a living thing, it was he, himself. He had a good, nicely formed body in a bathing suit, but even when he was in an overcoat standing proudly beside his gorgeous car, he looked like someone who would know how to give a good hug. I wouldn't let the word cross my mind, but I thought he was
sexy.

I had not seen this when I was a child because he never gave us hugs at all. And it wasn't until I was in middle, my mother in old age, that she finally put words on it.

“What attracted you to Daddy?” I asked for the thousandth time.

“Well…sex, I guess,” she confessed reluctantly.

No one remembers when Stefan Dabrowski or Dafna Pasek came to America, or how they happened to do so. Stefan was born in 1873, and Dafna in 1885, but no one recalls their birthdays, or when they were married. Stefan made custom shoes, and Dafna was a seamstress. They had five children in two sets: Edward, born in 1906, Krystyna born in 1908, and Daniel born in 1912. Then there were my aunts Marie and Eva who, born in 1921 and 1925, could have been my older sisters. My father has little memory of his parents. He remembers sitting in his high chair at the dinner table and waving a herring at his father, crying, “You're afraid of the fish! You're afraid of the fish!” And he remembers that his father was very stern and used to beat him with a strap. He is sure, however, that he deserved such punishment.

“Yes,” my mother grimaces, “you had done something awful, I suppose.”

“Yes, you know,” my father agrees mildly, “I'd probably left a mess around or something.”

“Horrible,” my mother says. I'm not sure my father hears her sarcasm.

My mother remembers Stefan though. He was a grouch, she says. He spent most of his time at home in the cellar, and when he came upstairs to eat, the noisy children at the dinner table all simmered down into silence. He was always grumbling, complaining about something.

This triggers my father's memory. “Yes, if we had lamb chops, he'd look at them and say, ‘What are these things with tails?' He hated meat with bones in it. He liked lots of potatoes and pot roast, things like that. My mother let his complaints roll off her back. Of course my mother wasn't a very good cook.”

“Your mother hated to cook. She would spend all day at her sister's; Josephine was a wonderful cook. Your mother would rush home, pushing some child or other in a baby carriage, carrying a big bowl of borscht from Josephine's.”

“My mother was always cheerful,” he recalls.

“She was social, cheerful—like Joy,” my mother says with a tingle of disdain. “She loved to be out with people. She went to Josephine's every day and the two of them would walk over to the Hasidic section of Williamsburg—Josephine lived near there then, remember? And they would stay there all day, chatting, laughing—they both spoke Yiddish—and buying a few things. Josephine was a brilliant cook. She made tripe—well, she wouldn't give anyone her recipe, but it was the most delicious thing I ever tasted. She made her own kielbasa. But your mother was a genius with a needle. She could make anything, and without a pattern.”

My mother turns to me. “When I was in the hospital after you were born, she wanted to come to see me, but she had no money for a present. So she rummaged through her boxes of scraps and found a bunch of old ribbons—all different colors and widths. And she made me a bed jacket of those ribbons—it was exquisite! I've never seen anything like it, anywhere.”

My father is probing his memory. I wonder if he wonders why it is he recalls so little. “I remember the first penny I ever earned,” he announces with pleasure. “It was during the Jewish holidays, and an old Jewish man beckoned to me in the street. I went to him and he asked me to turn on the gas lamp. I did it, of course. And then he said, ‘There's your penny.' He didn't touch it, it was lying on the table, he must have laid it out the day before. And I took it. That was the first penny I ever earned.”

He cannot remember, but he must have had trouble in school, because he did not finish high school until he was nineteen. I ask if it is not possible that he had trouble because he could not speak English when he started. It could be, he shrugs. He doesn't remember. He too had no toys or books or pencil and paper.

“But it didn't matter, because I made my own toys!”

I am suddenly aware that while my mother fastens on whatever sorrow was inherent in a situation, my father fastens on triumphs, successes.

He made, first, a scooter, the kind I remember boys making in my own childhood—a crate on its side was nailed to a board, and wheels nailed to the bottom of the board. Somehow, the way the crate was attached permitted it to be used to steer the vehicle. “Yes, one of those. I made it when I was thirteen. And then I made a high-speed scooter!” He laughs. “I put a bar in front instead of the crate—less wind resistance, higher speed. And then all the kids on the block copied me! So then I added a sidecar!”

I have rarely seen my father enjoy himself this way.

“Yes, and then I made a model airplane. This was only about 1920, 1921, you know, people didn't make things like that then. We used to have egg crates made of wood, not plywood, we didn't have that yet, but very thin wood. And I cut it in eighth-inch strips and planed each strip down, and made the fuselage and the wings. I even made the propeller, and I attached it with long rubber bands. It had a thirty-six-inch wingspan. Everybody came to look, they all rubbed their chins, they couldn't figure it out.” He laughs again, then stops. “But it hardly flew at all—just across the lawn. I would have had to tighten the rubber bands to make it fly better, and that would have made the whole thing collapse.”

He subsides inside himself, and I know he is wondering what else he could have done, how it could have been managed, making a plane that would fly.

My mother pulls him out. “And you made a radio,” she urges.

“Oh, yes! I made a crystal set.” He explains in detail how this was done, and does not seem to realize that I can't understand what he is talking about: wires, circuits, crystals. “Yes, and I needed to put up an antenna, and the way the distances were, it had to go on the second floor of the house across the street. So I went over and asked them if I could attach it, and they were terrified. They'd never heard of radio, they thought it would bring lightning and burn their house down. I can't remember how I convinced them, but I did, and as I was putting it up, all the men in the neighborhood came around and asked what I was doing. And when I told them, they looked at each other. ‘Radio?' they said. But within three months, there were antennas all up and down the block! And I called my father when I first heard it and he came over and took the earphones. It was KDKA in Pittsburgh! Imagine! All the way from Pittsburgh! And my father said, ‘Pittsburgh!'”

I'm smiling, delighted with his delight. “And what did you hear? What kind of broadcast came over on KDKA?”

“Oh, that I don't remember. Maybe music, some kind of music. Talking. I don't know. You know, it didn't matter. It was getting it that mattered.”

I mull that over, remembering when he built his first hi-fi set. He would listen intently, but I soon realized he did not
hear
the music at all: what he heard was sound—every distortion, scratch, imperfection, was a cry for his attention. Whereas I heard only the music, and filled in or ignored distortions. Are these things built into our genes?

“And
THEN,”
my father announces his masterwork, “I bought a car!” He doesn't remember how he earned the money to buy it. It was an old one, it probably cost about a hundred dollars, an Olds V-8, a big one. “And I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about cars. The first day I had it, I picked it up someplace around Prospect Street, and I drove it down Bedford Avenue, and I realized I didn't know how to turn it, and I was so frightened I just kept going straight, and I drove it all the way to Sheepshead Bay!” He laughs, we all laugh. “So there was the water, and I had to turn it around! And the next Sunday I took the family out for a drive to Asbury Park, and I stopped for gas, and the mechanic said, ‘Do you want me to check the oil?' And I said, ‘Oil?' I didn't know there was oil in the engine!”

But there were still strange sounds in this car, and it smoked, and he felt something was wrong. So, knowing nothing about cars, he took apart the engine, replacing, refiling, cleaning various parts, and put it back together again. He did this in a garage around the corner from his family's house on Quincy Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a fine neighborhood then. And the men who patronized the garage came and watched him and asked what he was doing, and when, three months later, he put his car back together again and it ran perfectly, all of them asked him if he would take care of their cars. And so, he suddenly had his own business.

“That was after Columbia,” my mother says coolly.

“Ye-es.” He is confused again.

“You were a college boy when I met you,” she adds, and I hear something in her voice, and I know what it is.

Dafna Pasek had come from the same village as Frances; in later years, the two women knew about each other in the way members of an ethnic community know about each other even when they rarely meet. Stefan's mother, Pani Dabrowski, came over only many years later, and she used to visit Frances, was the only person who did, after Michael died and they were impoverished.

“She was a terror. She only came because she was lonely, she didn't know many people. She'd come into the house and yell at Momma, ‘Go get me some tea!' Dafna and Stefan paid her passage and she was supposed to live with them and help out around the house. But they had five children, and Josephine had none, so she soon moved over to Josephine's. Then Stefan was so angry he forbade his family ever to visit Josephine again. But they did anyway—every day,” my mother recounts mournfully.

And once, Belle and Ed played together in the front yard of Josephine's house on Ten Eyck Street. Although they were only six and four or thereabouts, they both remember that. They met again when the Brez family was settled in Manse Street, and Jean was learning to play tennis with a girl who played at the Forest Hills Tennis Club, and who knew Krystyna Dabrowska. The friends planned a tennis party—they would each bring some friends. Krystyna arrived in a lovely car driven by her brother Ed, and Jean brought Belle. Whatever it was on my mother's side, I know it was love at first sight for my father.

What did he see? There she is, in her bob, her flapper clothes, her coy poses with her girlfriends, copied from magazines. She is not conventionally pretty—her eyes are too small and deep-set (they are my eyes too), her face too long and narrow for the popular female look. But there is a fineness in her features and expression, and something I have to call character in her face, that set her off from those surrounding her. She would not have spoken of her past—besides, it is a past he shared, although his family never reached the depths of poverty. She lived in a nice house in Forest Hills and worked in Wall Street; she was a member of a drama club, and she took piano and violin lessons. She spoke well. She acted fine, a fine lady. She went to Pratt at night. And she was a great dancer. How accomplished she must have seemed to this boy from Brooklyn! But maybe it was less her accomplishments that drew him than something he probably had no words for then, and still does not, something fragile and tentative that matched the delicacy of her face, something tight and frightened that needed his strength.