Her Mother's Daughter (53 page)

I bet he took her to a real restaurant, with white cloths on the table and a rose in a little vase and a waiter with a napkin over his arm. Picking up the menu. What would it say? You could choose whatever you wanted, a long list probably. Maybe they even have a glass of wine. I'll bet he was charming, he can be charming to women, he loves women. Maybe they even had dancing there, the way they used to years ago. Supper clubs. Tea dances. We went dancing once or twice, years ago. I used to love to dance.

But I'm old now. He's still young, he's not like me, things don't weigh on him. Why couldn't he do that with me? Maybe I'd feel different. Give me his pay and say, “Belle, buy yourself a new dress and let's go out to dinner on Saturday night.” Oh God, if he ever said such a thing! But I'm just his mother, his servant, the maid. I can't blame him for wanting some fun. I'd like some fun too.

What I can't forgive is his assuming I don't know, his not realizing that I'd have to know. I wonder who she is. Young. She works in his department, I think. A secretary. Probably pretty, spends all she earns on clothes. The way I did. How would she like to take care of this house and market and sweep the floors and mop and dust and vacuum and scrub that old linoleum in the kitchen and do the laundry and cook the meals? How would she like to spend her days that way, watching over two children, one sick all the time, well she can have it, I'd change places with her, let her be me and I'll take her job and spend my money on clothes and go out to dinner with married men….

Belle dragged deeply on her cigarette, and tamped it out in the ashtray, then jumped, startled by a voice. She turned quickly to see a pale figure in a white nightdress standing a few feet away from her. A pale faceless form in the moonlight. Anastasia, calling her, calling her, demanding, always demanding….

Anastasia was talking. She was attacking her, her, Belle, her mother! She was saying cold cruel things! Blood pulsed in Belle's temples, Anastasia looked red, blood mounted around Belle's heart, she wanted to kill. With all she suffered, with all her sacrifice, with everything she did for those children, her whole life given up for them, here was this spoiled selfish child criticizing her! She tried to hold herself back. She turned away.

“Go to bed,” she said as calmly as she could.

Cruel selfish brat: screaming now, protesting! How could she! When as it was, Belle barely managed to go from day to day…. She would never have dreamed of speaking to her mother like that, how dare she how dare she….

Belle stood and walked to the child and slapped her. She was hysterical, that was the trouble. Anastasia stopped speaking. Belle returned to her chair and lighted a cigarette. Alone. Alone in gloomy isolation, a dark pit of suffering, in agony. She had never had anyone, and she never would. All of them out there with their puny desires, their selfish wishes, incapable of understanding. And she was here, in the darkness, her whole body torn by claws of wild animals, and all they could do, those who claimed to love her, those who were supposed to help, all they could do was add their clawings to her scars, scrape and shriek against her skin, oh what had she done to deserve such pain, and how could she go on living?

In the spring of 1943, Frances died. She was ill only briefly, and the doctor ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death. When it was over, he came out wiping his hands, and spoke to Eric.

“The old lady was a real tippler, eh?” he laughed.

Eric was startled. “She never had a drink in her life!”

The doctor shrugged. Frances had died of cirrhosis of the liver. That's what he said.

Belle said something else, but only to herself. She said nothing to Ed, or Jean. Belle said she had died of grief.

Perhaps. For when had she had a life of her own? Her children “bettered” her by moving her to the house on Manse Street, which was a nice enough house, but far from any neighborhood where she might have heard Polish spoken, or made a friend. There was no old neighborhood for her: they had moved too often, and she had worked too hard to make enduring friendships. Her family, which had abandoned her when Michael died, was also dead or distant now. She devoted herself to her children as she had to him, became their slave, servant, caretaker. She knew no other way of life.

Then all the children had left and she was there in a house full of strangers, except Jean. She was a maid, an affectionately treated servant in her son-in-law's house. She was not paid for her labors; she was given room and board with a few pennies spending money. She raised the grandchildren as she had her own children, never raising her voice or protesting. She worked, she served. And she was rewarded: they moved to a huge house in Locust Valley, a place with no sidewalks, no trolleys, no buses, and no Polish people. She worked, she slept in her room, the little maid's room beside the kitchen. She smiled, she nodded agreeably, she knew her place.

She said nothing when she read in the newspaper that Poland had again been invaded by the Germans, but a part of her heart died: she had been raised under the partition, and forced to speak German in the schools, in the street. Did she know what happened to her village, that the people who lived there were shot, thrown in a pit, and covered with lime? They were not “her” people, they were Jews and Frances was raised Catholic, but were they not her people? She died in the same year the village of Zmegrud was destroyed.

Was it very different for her that she was saved? Living in a fine house in a neighborhood without sidewalks, with a country club, unable to drive, miles from the nearest public transportation, living on her son-in-law's charity? No one spoke Polish anymore. The old ways had vanished. She hardly knew her grandchildren, they were a strange breed in this country, a foreign land; she spoke its language but she did not understand it.

Not one of them knew her. No one, except maybe Bella, had ever understood her. For them, for their friends, for the people she entertained, she was just an old woman, a servant, a foreigner in an old brown sweater with a hole in the sleeve. It had been long, and hard, and what had it given her after all? Tired. It was time to die.

D
IVORCE CAN STRIP YOU
down to your essentials faster than any other loss. When someone you love dies or falls sick, there is always something besides yourself you can blame. But when you divorce, you have to blame yourself. You don't need society to tell you you are a failure, as it assuredly did tell women who divorced during the fifties; you know you are a failure because after all, you wouldn't have gotten married if you didn't want to. So if you wanted the marriage to be a joy, and it wasn't, and it grew so bad you had to end it, you failed at an enterprise you once wanted to succeed. And then when it's over, you're not dead, you go on living, and living alone.

I used to feel so sorry for my children because of the way their father treated them that I overlooked all kinds of bad behavior, and just hushed them up and cuddled them and told them they were good. And sometimes they weren't so good; and—although I didn't discover this until years later—they always thought they were bad when their father scolded them. So they came to think of me as either a fool or a liar, indifferent to their behavior. I used to think that if Brad and I could just separate, the children would be calmer, more contented: with just me around and no one to throw them into hysterical crying all the time, they would settle into the peace and love I could provide. Well, the opposite happened. They became moody and irritable. Billy spent hours in his room devising mazes and Arden became savage, storming in from school every afternoon and glaring at me as if I had somehow ruined her life; and then storming out again to play with one or another friend. Since she was stormy with her friends too, she often had no one to play with; and that was worst of all.

And I, who had been telling myself for years that I would paint if only Brad weren't around, had to admit to myself that I was never going back to painting, that I was not an artist after all. The best I could be was a photographer. It took me a few late nights sitting up in the dark to admit that to myself, and the pangs I felt brought tears to my eyes. But maybe photography could be an art too, I thought, trying to cheer myself up. People were beginning to write about it as if it were.

The worst thing I had to admit was that Brad had been right about me. I had tried to remain an eternal child. Now that I had to pay for everything, and wasn't given a weekly allowance anymore, I had to figure out amounts for rent and telephone and car insurance and electricity, and just starting to do that made me want to scream, all I could think of was my mother and her painstaking allotments of dollars and fifty-cent pieces to budgetary categories. Horrible! Not the way I wanted to live! But there I was. I never told Brad he'd been right, though. By the time our divorce was final, we were barely speaking.

Brad introduced the subject of divorce in May of 1958. He was almost thirty, I was twenty-eight. Arden was nine and a half and Billy had just had his eighth birthday. We'd been married just ten years. Brad had been staying out nights, and for several months he hadn't attempted to make love to me, so of course I knew. We still appeared in public as a couple—we went to dinner with friends, to movies and an occasional play, but our conversation was completely superficial. But that was no clue, since that was the only way Brad ever talked. He liked to talk about people's new houses; or their new boats; or their taking a trip to Europe. He'd remark that this one said that restaurant was good, and we should try it. He'd suggest I buy myself something decent to wear, and toss me a fifty-dollar bill. I'd tell him about the things that went wrong in the house (more appliances, more trouble), or cute things the kids had done, or their marks on tests, or what one of my friends or her husband had done: but that was all. I was just waiting, biding my time. There was no way I was going to get out of this marriage if
I
wanted to: I'd have to wait until
he
did.

And so the night he came home and acted serious over dinner and asked me to sit in the living room with him afterward and have a drink, I made him wait until the kitchen was cleaned up and I'd taken a shower and washed my hair. Let him sweat, I thought. I wanted him to be eager and unwavering. Then I joined him, carrying a rye and ginger ale. I'd recently been forced—given our social life—to take up drinking, but I still wasn't used to it.

He began by saying he'd been thinking about what I'd said the night soon after his great coup with the shopping mall, that we didn't have much in common anymore. And that I'd seemed to suggest I didn't care very much about him anymore. But I wasn't about to let him take the offensive, so I interrupted:

“Cut the shit, Brad, you're fucking around, right?”

He stopped, he stammered, he flushed. He said, “Jesus!” and got up and left the room, and I was afraid I'd gone too far. But I could hear the ice clinking in the kitchen and knew he was just pouring himself another drink and getting time to compose himself.

I felt like a hypocrite, though, cheap and small. Because if there was one thing I
didn't
blame him for, it was fucking around. I'd have been fucking around myself if I had felt any desire whatever. I sat there sipping my disgusting watery drink, shaking my head at myself.

Because I had always tried to live with what I privately called integrity—I'd tried to be honest with myself and in my life. And sometimes I'd even feel a little self-righteous in the face of other women. I knew that Brad had loved me once, genuinely; and that what had changed was that he had adopted a role for himself, and wanted me to adopt the complementary role, and I wouldn't. I
was
being stubborn and rebellious and intractable; and even though I told myself regularly that I had the right to be the person and live the life I wanted, I only occasionally believed it. After all, no other woman I knew felt they had such a right. Whatever they'd been, or their husbands had been when they first married, all their husbands had adopted the role Brad had chosen, too; and their wives had gone along and been complements. Who was I to stand out against the whole world? Or what seemed like the whole world.

Brad didn't want a divorce because he no longer loved or liked me; he couldn't even see me, so how could he know who I was? He wanted a divorce because I was not playing the role he wanted his wife to play. He wanted a wife who cared about the same things he did. His friends' wives all acted as if they cared about the same things their men did, whether or not they felt that way. And none of those men really saw their wives as people, any more than the wives saw the husbands as people. They each saw each other as roles.

I didn't hang out with Brad's friends' wives, but when we all went out to dinner together, I couldn't avoid hearing the things they said in undertones to each other, or reserved for the Ladies' Lounge while combing their hair or powdering their faces or washing their hands. I would stand there in the pink wallpapered, perfumed, mirrored, satin-chaired Ladies' Lounge, while they examined their parts to see if it was time for a freshening of the dye, or lamented the appearance of a blackhead, or nearly wept, because they were developing enlarged pores, and listen to them slam Harry and Al and Doug and Len and the rest. And sometimes you could figure out that in fact Lydia must have been getting it on with Eileen's husband, because whenever Eileen said something nasty about Harry, Lydia would look away. Most of the women sympathized with each other and laughed about the men, and said things like “It won't matter in a hundred years,” or “What are you gonna do?” and went on jovially as ever.

They simply took their lives for granted. I mean, if they were unhappy, they thought it was because they'd married the wrong man, and that if they had just married a different one, life would be beautiful. They complained about their own men and flirted with all the others, and over the next ten years, many of this group exchanged mates. I wasn't able to feel that way. No one else's husband appealed to me that much, to begin with. But for me, it was clear that it was the life itself we all led that made me unhappy. I certainly didn't want to exchange being one man's wife just to become another's. I didn't wa
nt to be
a wife at all. But I couldn't articulate that. In the first place, it was insulting to the other women; and in the second, what the hell else was I going to do, what else could I be? People have to,
somebody
has to do the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning of the house, and in our world it was decreed that somebody was women. Even if I weren't married, I'd still have to do those things. There was no escape. So to protest about it seemed ridiculous, futile.