Her Mother's Daughter (24 page)

And she saw a nice-looking young man with a splendid car, a college man! He was unlike her brothers, he had been to high school and was at Columbia, and he could play tennis, he ran in races, he had built his own radio! “He was a man,” my old mother tries to explain, “he did things men did, but had more in his life, a little more, he had some education.” And there was that chemistry. And the fact that she was not afraid of him. She knew from the first that he would accept anything she did. Belle was terribly afraid of most men.

“He was polite and deferential to his parents, and they lived in a lovely house then, a brownstone. And he was always polite to me, to Momma and my sister. Only he was a little quiet.”

A lover of mine, who'd been a street kid and had fought his way into adulthood, a beautiful boy who got caught by culture just as he was entering manhood, once told me I'd converted him. “Where I grew up,” he said, “they said men were either fighters or lovers. And I wasn't too good at this love business, so I became a fighter. But now I'm a lover.” He was, too. And so was my father—always. Violence dismays him inordinately, and so do depictions of sex. As his family raised themselves into the middle class, he raised himself as a gentleman. From my present perspective, I know my mother chose well. But it did not seem so when I was growing up.

E
D DID WELL AT
school once he learned English; if he was not too good at reading, he excelled at math. On the strength of his math and science grades, he was accepted into an engineering program at Columbia. But Ed had a disability he didn't know about, and probably attributed to stupidity. Since he remembers nothing unpleasant, he remembers nothing of this and did not recognize it when it reappeared in his daughter Joy, who grew up thinking she was stupid despite much evidence to the contrary; it appeared again in her son, Jonathan, in whom it was finally diagnosed as dyslexia. It is hard for them to read—the letters jump around in front of their eyes, and some letters appear upside down or on their sides.

So Ed finished only one year at Columbia. He could not do the work, despite the brilliance attributed to him by his family, many of his teachers, and sometimes, by himself. For several years he had been working at the garage around the corner from his house, working at nights doing small mechanical jobs. After he rebuilt his Olds, though, and had car owners thronging to him, the garage owner was glad enough to let Ed have space in his shop in return for his servicing the forty-four cars that were kept there. They were grand cars, owned by prosperous professional men and one woman (who always puzzled Ed: she was single, lovely, and had no known source of income, but a grand Chrysler convertible). Ed began to take care of these cars mechanically and even did bodywork with a rubber hammer so well that people thought he had replaced the dented fender or door. And he bought himself a new car, a jade green Hupmobile convertible with a black top.

It was in this car that he came to pick Belle up for dates. He never honked, like some of the other fellows who came to their house. He always parked the car and got out and came to the door, and led Belle out holding her arm gently, seeing she did not trip on the steps, helped her into the car and shut her door firmly, but quietly. They went out together for three years, and Ed was always courteous and devoted.

She must have felt some relief, finding herself after all to be like other girls. For all the other girls she knew had dates, or were married, all except Gertrude, who in fact would never marry, and Adele and Mala, who had real careers. Girls talked about boys a great deal, she knew. But the few dates she had had were dismal evenings she preferred to forget. There was something about men that made her pull away, pull back: she sensed a violence in them, an aggressiveness that their easy camaraderie could not conceal. Even her brothers….

And if she had, on occasional nights, investigated her own body, and received some pleasure from that, she knew it was a dark and shameful thing, to be hidden. Ed did not attempt to do anything shameful whatever, although he was athletic and strong. And his nice open sensual face was warm, and when he looked at her his eyes glowed. She must have felt something for him, something romantic and melting, because this most unsentimental of women sent him a Valentine's Day card in February 1929, picturing a young girl in a ruffled dress and pantaloons sitting before an easel, painting. I know this because he still has it.

She knew Pani Dabrowski did not like her. Dafna saw her as a flapper, sophisticated, who would corrupt her son—even though Belle was very careful never to smoke in front of her. Mr. Dabrowski though, always had a special smile for her. But really, none of that mattered because Belle was terrified of marriage, and they did not spend much time with Ed's family. Ed often came to Manse Street and sat watching Belle as she played a new song she had learned on the piano, or stood singing with the others around the piano. And he always smiled at her, and was gentle.

So when did it start, and how, his importuning, his warm body pressing against hers? And did she want it too, her young body clamoring for that kind of love? Was that what the Valentine meant?

“Only one time, Anastasia, that was all it was, just that once. And in a hallway! There wasn't even any penetration, I thought nothing could happen.”

Well, I can't quite picture this scene. What hallway? Because I remember the house on Manse Street, and its hallway was open to the living room where surely Wally would be sitting reading the newspaper, and beyond, to the dining room where surely Eddie would be sitting at the table working over his now extensive stamp collection. This was a family of night people. And if they were not there, why stand up, why not go sit on the couch? Standing up in a hallway with no penetration, with something cold and sticky running down her leg? Could my mother be lying to me?

Why not? She does not owe me the truth about this. I see it in the car, on the luxurious leather backseat of the gorgeous car that was soon to vanish. Backseats—the loci of so many of our beginnings. I like to picture it as having passion.

In any case, wherever and however it happened, there she was in March 1929 with her Wall Street job, her Pratt portfolio, and no period. She remembers nothing about the time that followed except walking onstage pregnant to receive her diploma, and crying. Crying, crying, unable to stop.

Finally, she told them, her family. Momma said nothing. Neither did anyone else. They looked at her: Jean shook her head and lamented, “Oh, Belle!” Eddie made some joke about Ed Dabrowski. Only Wally seemed to understand what it meant to her, and he took her aside later and said he could arrange for an abortion for her if she wanted it. She cried on his shoulder.

She wanted the abortion. It was all too shameful. God was punishing her because of one time, one time! She would be so humiliated in front of her friends. But she sensed without knowing how it would be to have an abortion—a dark street, many stairs, a dirty room, filth and corruption and sin and shame and it was illegal besides. And expensive. And inside her was a living being.

She sat alone in her darkened room and cried, thinking about her life as a huge joke, all her attempts, her struggle to find a place where she could breathe, where she could be on the outside what she felt inside, and here she was trapped, forever, she would never escape now. And this had been her destiny all along. How could she have imagined anything else? The only thing she wanted to be was an artist, but she had no talent, her teachers never praised her, so what else was there? She was a woman, all women ended up like this. She had all these years been a worm wriggling and twisting on a hook that had held her all along, impaled on nature's decree, ignorant not just about life but about this too.

When she was exhausted with crying, when her nose was sore from being wiped and her eyes rimmed with red, she thought about what to do. She knew Ed was frightened but would leave the decision up to her. He was only twenty-three and just starting in life, and hardly knew if he could support a family. But if she wanted an abortion, he would find the money for her and go with her and hold her hand. And if she did not, he would marry her, grateful for her if not for the child.

In early June 1929, she and Ed drove to Washington. They found a little church and told the priest they wanted to be married. He told them they must confess first. Belle knelt in the confessional, dumb. She could not remember the prayer she was supposed to start with, “Forgive me, Father…” or how long it had been since she had gone to Confession. She began to cry and told the priest she was pregnant. Curtly, he barked out a long penance and slammed down the shutter. Then he charged out of the box and grabbed Ed by the arm and cursed him, called him vile names. Grimly, in fury, he married them.

Oh, Ed, poor Ed. Standing there, the gentle boy who loved this woman, who had wanted her in the fullness of his devotion and desire, who had not meant harm, heard himself reviled and recoiled from it, yet at the same time accepted it. He knew the priest was right. He was a man and men were like that, yes, he had pressured her, he had not thought about the consequences. He did not think the word
evil,
but he felt it. He knew the Father was right: fathers were always right, no matter how harsh they might seem; boys had to submit to fathers. The entire question was too hard for him and he let it go. But neither Belle nor Ed ever entered a church again of their own volition, and all Ed retained of his Catholicism was a discomfort with eating meat on Fridays.

They left the church on a dismal grey day and wandered around Washington a little, then drove back to New York. Ed saw Belle into her house, then kissed her, and drove off to his. They did not tell their families they had been married, though Belle's family no doubt knew. Later they would tell everyone they had been secretly married for a year. The lie enabled them to hold up their heads even though they knew no one would believe them. It gave everyone a story they could accept and treat as truth.

But shame crumpled Belle's stomach, and whenever she was alone, she cried. They both continued to work and save every penny. They went out, like any engaged couple, and Ed bought Belle an engagement ring with a real diamond in it. They looked at apartments, and in September, rented a nice three-room apartment in Kew Gardens, near enough to the subway, near to Belle's family. They looked at furniture, and Ed was impressed by Belle's knowledge, and by the Queen Anne sofa and chair she chose. They also bought a Tudor chair, with a high back and wooden arms, putting a deposit down and paying the furniture off on time. They bought an unpainted bedroom set, and painted it white and Ed put beautiful floral decals Belle had chosen on the fronts of the chests of drawers and the head of the bedstead.

They moved the furniture in, and began to live as a married pair in October. It was hard, because Ed was also giving money to his father to help the family out, and now Belle was no longer working. So Ed got a night job in a pharmacy. They worried, but they planned. And then, everything collapsed. The newspapers screamed in great black letters and rich men jumped out of office buildings. Ed's customers' cars simply vanished and their bills remained unpaid.

He still can't understand this. “They were all rich, you know?” Nearly sixty years later, he sits scratching his still full head of white hair. “They were doctors, stockbrokers. And not one of them paid me, not one!” He cannot comprehend this even now. They were respectable men, and respectable men pay their bills, especially if they have money and their creditor does not. This innocence of my father's, maintained all these years, seems sweet to me, and I reach out and touch his hand.

Overnight he lost his business. They could not pay the November rent on the apartment and Belle was shamed worse than ever before in her life. She went back to Momma's, and Ed went back to his family. At night, secretly in the dark, he and his brother loaded their furniture onto a rented truck and drove it away. And late in November, that month I always think of as bleak—the bare branches reaching desperately to a broad grey empty sky—I was born.

M
Y MOTHER CRIED. IT
must be my first memory. Alone in the dark narrow cold room, the two of us still bound together, she screamed and no one came and she cried. Once, the door opened and a sliver of light showed, but the nurse roughly asked her why she was making so much noise, she wasn't ready yet. She kept screaming, the pain was so terrible. She wept, and from her pain, I emerged, I Anastasia, her punishment, the midge daughter.

She kept crying after I was born, and the doctor gave her luminal. She swallowed it hungrily, day after day. But she still cried, and the crying was a scream against her life, like rain outside a window, concealing, distorting, dimming all else that occurred.

Ed came to take her home from the hospital, but she was not allowed to take her baby because they had not paid the hospital bill. She does not remember what trick they used, what ploy, but Ed got the baby out too. They carried her to the Dabrowskis' where they were to live: it was a bigger house than the one in Manse Street. Dafna put her in an alcove off the kitchen, on a cot, with a box beside her for the baby. Ed slept in his old room, with Daniel. Belle cried. On the third day, in the afternoon while Dafna was at Josephine's, she got up and dressed and dressed the baby and went to the corner call box and called a taxi. She left no note. She went to Momma's house. Momma now slept in the big bed in the front room with Jean, and Belle refused to let her move. She took the dark narrow middle room. She gave the baby to Momma. She slept, and when she woke up, she cried.

Frances's arms reached out to the baby hungrily. She reached out and engulfed Anastasia, her first baby, the baby she had always wanted, the baby she had not been able to have when she had her own. She encompassed her and sang to her and talked to her and fed her endlessly. She bounced her and told her she was a hammer thrower,
moja kochanie,
and she, Frances, was
Babcia,
Grandma. Frances was happy again.