Her Mother's Daughter (47 page)

Finally, a bus drew up to the corner across the street, and people got off, but Daddy wasn't there. She hopped up and down, impatient. After a while, another bus came, and Daddy got off. She was happy to see him. She liked the way he looked. He was neat and nice-looking, not like the other men. And when Daddy saw her, he smiled! He looked happy to see her!

She waited for him to cross the street to her, and then ran up to him and told him her errand. He smiled again, and gave her the quarter. But instead of running directly to the store, as Mommy wanted, she walked along with him, skipping, talking, looking up in his face. He seemed glad that she was there!

She walked down two blocks with him, then cut up to the left and ran up the hill toward Rockaway Boulevard, where the stores were. And after that, she decided she would meet him every night. It was spring, then summer; the days were long, and it was light and the air was soft at 5:10, when his bus arrived. She would watch the clock so as to leave around 5:05, and she never had to wait more than two buses. Then they would walk back together, and sometimes they would hold hands. He always seemed happy to see her, and her heart felt good.

When summer came, often Mommy would be sitting on the front steps waiting for them when they reached the house, and she would smile and get up—she would never let Daddy kiss her on the street—and go inside and serve the dinner. Daddy didn't seem so grouchy anymore, and one day she went out to the car while he was fixing the car, and asked him to explain the engine to her, and he did. But she couldn't understand the words he used: she didn't understand
generator
and
distributor
and
battery.
But she pretended she did, so he wouldn't become impatient with her.

It was vacation now, and Anastasia was happy. Then one day, when Joy was out playing, as she was about to go out and make her Persian tent, Mommy sat down at the table and lighted a cigarette, and asked her to sit down. She did so with a sense of the portentousness of her mother's request.

“You're really getting grown up, Anastasia,” Mommy said.

Anastasia was very pleased.

“You've made your Communion, you're finishing fifth grade and going into sixth. I never went beyond sixth grade in school. You're fortunate.”

“Why, Mommy?”

“I had to go to work.” Mommy's voice sounded sad and thick, as if she were going to cry. Anastasia looked sadly at her mother. “When I was nine years old—just your age—my father died….”

She began to talk to Anastasia then, seriously. Over the years, Anastasia had often asked her about her mother and father, about how she met Daddy and why they got married (this especially puzzled her), and Belle had told her bits and pieces. She had said good things about Daddy: he was a tennis player and was so good he played at Forest Hills; he was a track star; he'd gone to college but had to leave before he finished because his mommy got sick and he had to take care of her. But he was very smart—he'd made a radio crystal set when he was only a boy, and he knew everything about cars. And he had manners: he came up to the door and rang the bell, he didn't honk his horn for her the way the other boys had. He was a gentleman. But Anastasia still couldn't discover how they had decided to get married, or what kind of wedding they had. She didn't understand why Mommy wouldn't tell her.

But this afternoon, Belle began telling her different things. And she continued, for months, to talk to the child in the late afternoon. She told about having to go marketing every day when other children were playing outdoors, and having to walk far to a terrifying place clutching a few coins, and buying food and coming home and cooking dinner for her mother on a wood stove. Every night. And she was only nine. Anastasia's heart ached, listening. And how poor they were and how no one would help them except a Jewish family they didn't even know. All the people in their family abandoned them. And Mommy couldn't speak English and was sent home from school, and later she was sent home from school because her hair wasn't combed.

“My mother never combed my hair,” Belle mourned.

And Belle told her how she had to take care of baby Jean, and how she yearned, craved, education but could never have it because they were too poor, and how lucky Anastasia was. And then when Belle was older, she still couldn't get education because she was blind in one eye from measles and deaf in one ear from a mastoid infection and couldn't hear the teacher or see the blackboard. And how she had dreamed and longed to play the piano and that's why she was making sure Anastasia had piano lessons. And Joy would have them too, in a couple of years, when she was old enough. And how she knew nothing, nothing whatever about religion, and hadn't made her Confirmation until she was eighteen, and she was tall and gawky and felt stupid with all the twelve-year-olds. Her life was very sad.

And it was still hard, because she had to scrape and worry because Daddy didn't earn enough money to support them. He had no ambition, he had no drive, he never planned a thing, she had to do everything for the children, all the hopes and plans came from her, not him. Everything came from her. Daddy didn't care about anything except a hot meal and a night's sleep and…. He didn't care at all about the children.

“He loves you, though,” Anastasia interjected.

Belle snorted. “He doesn't love anyone! Look at the way he treats his family! He marries me, he doesn't think about them, or call them, or go to see them. He would never have gone to see them once we were married, if I hadn't said, ‘Ed, we ought to visit your mother,' and now that his mother is dead, I have to remind him we should visit his father. It's all been up to me, and they don't even like me.”

“Why don't they like you?” the child asked, pained.

“Oh, I don't know. I'm not a good enough Catholic, I guess. Or because I smoke.”

“We used to visit Aunt Kris. Why don't we go there anymore?”

“I don't know, Anastasia.” Belle was beginning to sound impatient. “She got mad at Daddy for something. I don't know what. She won't say. And you don't see him trying to make up with her. Does he ever even mention her and Joe? Never. He doesn't care. It would be the same with us. If I were to die, he'd be married again in a month. And he'd marry someone who gave him nothing but frankfurters and beans to eat and he'd be just as happy, he wouldn't even notice the difference.”

Belle was going to die soon. She had a bad heart, had always had it, and she knew she would not live long. It made her so furious when the neighbor ladies praised Daddy. “They all say the same thing—oh, how sweet Mr. Dabrowski is, how lucky you are!” She mocked their voices, making them sound silly and feminine. “'So nice, so polite. You're so lucky!'” They don't know what he's really like, how he grumbles and grouches and has no ambition. They have no idea. They don't say he's lucky to have me.”

“You could tell them,” Anastasia said, keening on injustice.

“No. I'd never do that. They all gossip. They tell everybody everything. That's why I talk to you, Anastasia. I have to talk to somebody, but I can't talk to these women. But you mustn't ever tell anyone the things I tell you. They're confidences. I tell you because you're so grown up.”

Her mother's confidences struck deep inside Anastasia's heart, and lay there piercing her. She would lie in bed at night imagining her mother's life, trying to make it all happen over again, but with her present to save her mother from the sorrow and injustice she had suffered. If only she had been there! She would have helped her mother and made her feel better. And she would think about her father and her heart would harden. He made Mommy unhappy, he didn't care about them, all he cared about was himself.

Over the months this new relation with her mother came to obsess Anastasia. She realized quickly that she could not initiate these intimate conversations. She would come into the kitchen and wait; she would show herself to be available. But if Mommy didn't feel like talking to her, she would be annoyed, and if Anastasia asked her a question, she would sigh and say, “Go and play, Anastasia, I'm tired.”

It was Daddy's fault that Mommy was so unhappy, so tired all the time, in such a bad mood. Anastasia's stomach always knotted as she approached her home. She was unhappy enough at school, and glad when the schoolday was over, but then she would see her house and her stomach got tight. But sometimes when she walked in the back door, Mommy would smile and be glad to see her. Sometimes she was not. She was always in a bad mood on washdays, and Anastasia came to associate the smell of laundry soap and bleach with tight silent withdrawal, with grey-ness, bleakness, and isolation. She thought she had done something wrong, and would ask her mother what was the matter, but Belle always said, “Nothing.” And if she pushed it, if she asked if her mother were angry with her, Belle would
get
angry: “Why do you think you're so important?”

But it was Daddy's fault. She would be careful not to get angry with Mommy anymore when Mommy was in a bad mood, because now she understood that Mommy was angry with Daddy. She felt sorry for Mommy, whose life had been so sad and was still so hard. She completely stopped running up to meet her father after work. Instead, she stayed with Mommy in the kitchen, or put on the front stoop. She understood that to meet Daddy was in some way to fail Mommy, to betray her. Anastasia pulled close to her mother and began to look at her father with bruised eyes.

A
S SOON AS HE
could afford it, Brad decided to move us to a house. Not just any house—it had to be elaborate, not to say pretentious. He wanted one with white columns and a portico on a main street in Rockville Centre. The point of the house was not comfort, but the degree of success it announced. I was able to block the pretentious one by insisting that it was in too dangerous a place for small children; there was really no yard, it was all lawn, and at the intersection of two streets with heavy traffic. But Brad kept looking, and as a real-estate agent, he had an insider's view, and eventually he found one he believed I'd approve of: a big old Victorian house with a gallery all around the front and one side, a big yard with old trees, and on a prime location in Rockville Centre, the town where my parents lived, the most expensive town along the South Shore of Long Island in Nassau County. The only town more expensive (in that area) was Garden City, and I could see Brad had his eye on that for the future.

I have to admit I loved that house. It was old and a little shabby, but it looked like a house a family could be happy in. There was a huge yard with big trees, and I pictured a swing for the kids, and a little wading pool. They'd been deprived of outdoor life in the years we'd lived in the apartment, but now they'd have it. They were the right age for it, too, four and five. And there was now room for me to have a darkroom in the basement.

But the move to the house didn't make Brad happy. He was a little anxious about money, because he paid a lot for it, and besides that, it had all those empty rooms we couldn't afford to furnish. Adeline found a hideous used dining room set for us for twenty-five dollars. Brad gave her the money but the furniture was so awful he wouldn't have it in the house and it stood in our basement waiting for him to refinish it, until the house was sold, years later. When I realized that Brad was never going to put up a swing, I asked my father to do it, so at least the kids had that, and the wading pool I bought them out of my housekeeping money. I had money of my own now, enough to put in the darkroom and even to buy a metal photograph file—a purchase that made me feel like a professional for the first time.

I had to start all over again, of course, in the new neighborhood, and it was harder here because not many people had children, and those who did had enough money to have professional photographs taken. It is a phenomenon I have often noticed—that, when a husband does well, wives somehow do worse. I still had contacts with people who'd heard of me in the old neighborhood, and so still got some commissions, but they dwindled with time until I was doing only one or two a week.

One of my conditions for moving to a house with three bathrooms (all of which I'd have to clean) miles away from stores or public transportation was a car, and with much grumbling, Brad bought me a small used Rambler that wouldn't go over sixty. Brad had no patience with my complaints: “You never clean anyway, so what difference does it make how big the house is?” he said. My other condition was a piano. I was starved for music and I wanted the children to study it. Brad was nice about that, and I found an old upright with decent tone. Only he didn't want it in the living room—he said it was an eyesore.

We moved in the late spring, just as things were springing into bloom, and I stayed outside with the kids and played much of the day. I was happy in the beginning. I felt rejuvenated, somehow. We'd play tag, and hide-and-seek, and sardines—joined by the few other children in the neighborhood or one of my friends from the old neighborhood with her kids.

I kept on photographing them, under the trees, in the garden: beautiful pictures, shimmering with summer and childhood and golden-haired cherubs. And every night I'd bathe them in the nice big tub in the upstairs bathroom (Brad and I had our own bathroom! What a luxury!) and play ice-cream cones with them the way my mother used to with us: making a great lather of the shampoo, and holding it in my hand and offering them a bite of my ice-cream cone. It set them giggling as hard as Joy and I used to; and I wondered in passing how my mother ever came up with that game. For surely no one had ever played it with her.

When fall came, I piled the kids and my cameras in the car and drove off to some exotic place to take pictures—the back of movie houses (wonderful dark red fire escape against the blank grey wall), the railroad tracks (old railroad cars rusting on sidings, the parallels of track taken from oblique angles, the wheel of an idle train taken up close, a deserted old railroad station), lots full of pipe waiting to be laid for sewers, crates piled up behind supermarkets: now, I thought, I would create art.