Her Mother's Daughter (44 page)

Fairy tales, myths, and the tales from Shakespeare were not simple and transparent, like the schoolbooks. They bothered her, they kept her awake at night. She could not understand who the Ice Queen was, or why she wanted to kidnap the little boy; or why Daphne was happy to be changed into a laurel; or why King Lear was so blind about Cordelia. She realized that these stories had been altered for children, things had been left out of them. Reading them was somewhat like listening to grown-ups talk: there was something missing, something essential, that would make all the rest make sense. Like grown-ups, these stories lied to children. She determined that when she was grown up, she would discover the missing part, and go back and read these stories again.

Then there were Mommy's stories, but they were true. They were all very sad because Mommy's life had been very sad. The books she liked had that sadness in them too.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
and
The Secret Garden
were about children who felt sad in the ways she, Anastasia, also felt sad, and they were her favorite books. She wondered if her life, like theirs, would move into happiness, but when she thought about it, she couldn't quite see how. Sometimes, thinking about this late at night lying in her bed by the window staring out at the clouds and the moon, her mind would slide into the world of fairy tales, and she would imagine a fairy appearing in her room and offering her three wishes.

She spent considerable time pondering these wishes, but each time she imagined this fantasy, she came up with the same ones. Actually there was only one wish: that Daddy would make more money. If Daddy made more money, Mommy would be happier and she would love Daddy; and if Mommy loved Daddy, then both of them would love the children, Anastasia and Joy, and then they would be happy too. That's what Anastasia believed. So sometimes she would nobly tell the fairy she needed only one wish, and that she should give the other two to another child who needed wishes. But other times she felt she should not leave anything to chance, and would take all three: for Daddy to make more money; for Mommy to love Daddy; for Mommy and Daddy to love Anastasia and Joy. She wondered whether, if she could really believe in this fantasy, wish it hard enough, it could come true even without the intervention of a good fairy. But she never could have enough faith to find out. She would give it up, lying there humming a Christmas song popular in the Depression years: “All I really want is this, / Daddy's smile and Mommy's kiss; / Let our lives be filled with bliss! / That's what I want for Christmas.”

Belle worked, watched her children, and planned. It took longer than she had hoped to buy the washing machine—all the doctor's bills, and a cold winter requiring more coal than she had expected—but eventually she got one. Ed went with her to pick it out. They chose a sturdy round Maytag that stood on four legs and had a green metal body. When it was delivered, Belle stood alone in the kitchen gazing at it, clasping and unclasping her hands. She kept remembering a phrase from a psalm: my cup runneth over.

Now washing was much easier. Now, on Monday mornings, she would gather together all the dirty laundry and sort it into three piles, and then pull the washing machine—it was very heavy, but it had rollers on its legs—from its corner to a spot beside the sink. She removed a wide black hose from inside the machine, attached one end to the sink faucet, and left the other end dangling in the machine. She piled the white things inside the tub, and turned on the hot water, which flowed directly into the machine. She added Oxydol, and when the water was high, Clorox. She removed the hose, put on the lid, and started the motor. While the clothes were washing, she prepared the starch. Then she could sit down and have a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

When the washing was complete, she pulled another hose up from the underside of the machine, and let it dangle in the deep tub of the sink. She drained off the dirty water. The next step was to replace the first hose and pour in clean water to rinse the clothes. She would prepare bluing and pour that in at the same time. When the clothes were rinsed, she repeated the draining process. Now she removed the soggy clothes and put them through the wringer. This was the delicate step. Sometimes Anastasia would help her with the washing, and always Belle would remind her: don't get your fingers too near the wringer. The wringer consisted of two rubber cylinders and a lever that brought them close together. You would put the piece of laundry in between the cylinders, then turn on the motor, and the cylinders would turn, squeezing most of the water out of the fabric. Each piece of laundry had to be carefully guided through.

When this was done, Belle put the items that had to be starched in the shallow sink, with warm water and starch. Then she began the washing process over again, with the colored things. While they were washing, she took the nonstarched things outside and hung them on the line—undershirts and the girls' underpants, and white socks. She drained, added rinse water, drained again, and wrung out the colored items. She put those that required starch in the starchy water with the others, and started to wash the dark pieces. But she rarely got this far without stopping to make lunch for Joy and Anastasia, who had to come home at lunchtime except on rainy days, when the school allowed them to bring a sandwich and provided containers of milk.

She would open a can of soup and make a baloney sandwich for them; or scrambled eggs with toast; or a grilled cheese sandwich; or a tuna fish salad. While they ate, she sat beside them, drinking tea, eating toast, and smoking. She would listen to their chatter, but it seemed far away. She was thinking about what she wanted to do for them. She had so many plans. After they left, she finished the dark laundry, and then put all the starched things through the wringer again. At last, she had it all on the line. She always sighed and slumped down in a chair when she had gotten that far. There were still things to do: the washing machine to be wiped down, the sinks to be scrubbed, the starch pot to be scoured: but the worst was done. Thank heavens for her washing machine.

When Belle saw how much Anastasia loved music, she decided to take her to the opera. Belle had never been to the opera herself; neither had Ed. She wanted Anastasia to have that experience. She looked in the newspaper, and found out what tickets cost, figured the price of going into Manhattan, and began to save. She would take the four of them for Anastasia's ninth birthday, in November. She started saving for it in May.

It also occurred to her that her children had had no exposure to religion, and one day in September, before Anastasia's ninth birthday, she spoke to her.

Mommy was ironing when I came home and she said, in a formal kind of voice, “Anastasia, sit down, I want to talk to you.”

The way she said it, I knew she wasn't mad, and that we were going to have a grown-up conversation. I felt honored, and I sat down very correctly, my back straight, not slumped.

“I am not a religious person. That means I don't believe in God. If you don't believe in God, you're called an agnostic. That's what I am. But many people do believe in God. And I was wondering if you would like to learn about God.”

Learn about God! What else did I think about night after night, lying up there in my bed beside the windows, looking out at the stars and moon, and thinking about how wrong everything was on earth, and wondering how it could be made right!

“Oh, I would!” I breathed.

“Well. There are many different religions. Different people haves different ways of thinking about God, and talking about God. These ways are called religions. Your father and I were raised in the Catholic religion. So I thought maybe it would be best if you went for religious instruction to the Catholic Church. Would you like that?”

My heart leaped.

So intense was my longing for understanding, that even after weeks of studying the catechism I knew to be mindless, to offer euphemisms instead of knowledge, to pretend that saying something made it true, I was still entranced. My devotion was of the furious bloody sort: I believed none of the crap in the lessons I had to memorize but memorized them nevertheless; but I did believe there was a God and that he carried justice within him, and that if I persevered, I would discover that justice. I knew, though, that I would never find it, or God, through the ways urged by the nuns. Even as I followed the rules, learned the venial and mortal sins, learned what the sacraments were, even as I half-accepted these as part of the road to what I was seeking, I knew the rules were too silly to be God's. And I was fiercely determined to find the place where truth and justice resided. That—truth and justice—was what the word
God
meant to me.
God
did not mean love. Indeed, I didn't really know what the word
love
meant. Because I knew my mother and father loved me, but I felt they didn't. And I knew I loved them, but I hated them too, I mistrusted them and I saw their failings. No one else my age thought their parents had failings. Little communication as I had with children my age, I did know that. Parents might be cruel or violent, but they were always Right. I did not believe my parents were always right; I thought
I
was.

Still, I wanted at least to understand what I was learning, to the degree it was possible for it to be understood. Much of what I was learning was, I knew, purposeful mystification. But some things should have been clear. For instance, the Hail Mary. The night before religious instruction, Tuesday night, I had to recite my catechism lesson for my mother. I recited every Thursday night too, before the Friday tests with school lessons—I would give her my book, and she would ask me the spelling words or the multiplication tables, and I would spill them out. This evening, I had to recite certain prayers by memory, and when I finished, I said, “Mommy, you know that prayer, the Hail Mary?”

She nodded.

I recited the first stanza: “Hail, Mary! full of grace, / the Lord is with thee; / blessed art thou amongst women; / and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” I recited, using the rhythms we'd been taught. “Well, what does that mean? ‘Fruit of thy womb, Jesus?' What's
womb
?”

“Oh, Anastasia, I don't know,” she said.

“Mommy!” I protested.

“Look it up in the dictionary,” she said, as she always did when I asked her the meaning of a word.

“I did. It said
uterus.
I don't know what
uterus
is. I looked up
uterus.
It says
womb.
”

My mother seemed to me to be slightly smiling. She shrugged. “Ask the sister.”

So next time we said the Hail Mary in catechism class, Wednesday afternoon (you were let out of school half an hour early for it), I raised my hand. Sister John the Baptist raised her eyebrows, and when we had finished the prayer, she said, “Yes, Anastasia?”

She liked me, I knew that. That was because I always knew my catechism perfectly and the other girls didn't. In Catholic school, the girls were separated from the boys, you had different classes. But the other children were all much younger than I; it was normal to make your First Communion at seven, after a year of instruction, so they were probably around six. I was almost nine. I recognized that I was older than the others and didn't feel superior to them. But I didn't have anything to do with them, either.

“What does it mean,
fruit of thy womb, Jesus?
What is a
womb
?”

Sister John the Baptist stood stock-still. She gazed upon us with a quiet expressionless face. “Excuse me, class,” she said, and left the room abruptly.

The girls moved around in their seats, and a few of them whispered to each other, but that was all. We were public-school kids, far more unruly in our own school than here: maybe, as in the old joke, we were intimidated by the guy nailed to a cross up at the front of the room. Eventually Sister returned, and she went on with the class just as if nothing had happened. She never answered my question. By now I was doggedly determined to get a response.

I went home and told my mother what happened. Again, I had the strange sensation that she was smiling, but she said, again, “I really don't know, Anastasia. Maybe you should ask the sister
after
class.”

So I did. I grabbed Sister after everyone had gone, and spoke to her in the hall. I explained that I had asked my mother this question and that she didn't know and had told me to ask Sister, that I asked Sister, but she'd forgotten to answer me. Would she please answer me now?

She looked at me meditatively, kindly. “Do you come from a religious family, Anastasia?”

I gazed at her. “I don't know, Sister.”

“Do you have holy pictures in your house? Holy water?”

“No, Sister.”

She patted me on the shoulder. “I'll bring you some,” she said, as if she were offering a starving person food. And the next time the class met, she asked me to stay late, and gave me a shoe box full of holy pictures, a holy water dispenser, and a beautiful gold filigree cross with an ivory Jesus on it (at least it
looked
like gold and ivory). I accepted the box in utter bewilderment. I was pleased with the gift, but didn't understand why I was being given this instead of an answer.

I carried it home reverently, and unpacked it carefully, holding up each picture to gaze at it. The holy pictures, which were reproductions of masterpieces of Italian art, were very beautiful in my eyes, except for the ones by someone called Murillo, which were full of pretty little boys that reminded me of the children in children's books. I tacked my favorite pictures to the wall beside my bed, and packed the rest away in the box. I carried the cross upstairs, and nailed a tack in the wall over my bed, and hung it there alongside the photographs of Margaret Bourke-White and Wendell Willkie that I had cut out of the newspaper. They were my heroes at the time; Willkie would be my candidate for president the following year. I didn't know what to do with the holy water dispenser. I took it downstairs and asked Mommy if she wanted to hang it on the wall, and she made a face, so I carried it back upstairs and laid it back in the shoe box, with the pictures. I placed them neatly on the bottom shelf of the rickety bookcase my father had built for Joy and me.