Her Mother's Daughter (81 page)

Billy and I had been playing this game since he was little, five or six. We played it only at home, but sometimes in front of my parents or the Carpenters. It made them uncomfortable. I think people felt it to be incestuous, but because they didn't allow themselves even to think that word, they simply sat there, silent, not laughing, bewildered and inarticulately embarrassed. I
knew
it was incestuous, but I thought it was a harmless way of expressing incestuous impulses. It was fun, and innocent, and besides, I sensed that Billy only asked to play—it was always Billy who gave the cue that he wanted to play—when he needed something from me.

Arden had always been unhappy about this horseplay of ours. At first I tried to get her to join in with us. If Billy pinned me, as he sometimes did, I'd cry out “Arden! Help me!” but she'd sit at the table sour-faced with disapproval and glance over at her father. She had the comfort of seeing her father looking as disapproving and uncomfortable as she felt. This time her father wasn't present and as I glanced at her, she looked forlorn, alone at the table. So I called out to her, and she leaped up and joined in. Billy wasn't too happy about
that:
this was
his
game. (No way to keep everybody happy.) And besides, Arden wasn't as gentle as I, there was some animus in her playing. She caught Billy and pulled his little finger back, but she did it too hard and he cried out in pain, “You nigger!”

That was the end of that game. Arden was angry about being called a name, but she saw the tears in Billy's eyes and was sorry she'd hurt him; Billy was angry at being hurt, but felt guilty at his name-calling: comforting was required on both sides. After we'd all calmed down and cleared the table and I'd suggested a game of hearts, and we were shuffling the cards, I asked Billy why he'd called Arden that name. He shrugged.

“Do you know what that word means?”

“It means the same as kike,” he responded promptly.

“And what does kike mean?”

He shrugged again and looked to Arden, who, called upon to be the authority, tried to fit the role.

“It means people who are dirty and nasty,” she said with assurance.

“Who told you that?” I could see that my insistence was making them nervous and guilty without understanding what their fault had been. But I couldn't let it drop. They looked at me, they looked at each other, they looked at the table.

“I mean, where do you hear these words, from other kids?”

“No, Pani says them,” Billy said, glancing at me uneasily. It was inconceivable to him that Pani could do something seriously wrong.

Oh. Oh no. Now I'd have to speak to her. Shit.

I went into a long rap about how people have different backgrounds and skin colors, how some people looked like Mr. Ferguson, pinkish white like the gladiola growing in the Lenches' garden; and some were like their father, a reddish color that turned copper in summer; and some like me, a bluish white like Grandma Belle's freshly laundered sheets. There were people the color of pale caramel, tan like Arden's friend Joan Tebaldi; and some of the color of dark caramel, like Mrs. McCabe, the lady who cleaned the Lenches' house, and some were even tanner than that, the color of chocolate, and some the color of polished ebony wood. I explained that there were other people who were the color of lemon taffy and some like the walls of our apartment where they were clean, under the pictures, which was called ecru. They were smiling with delight by now.

So I went further and said that some people whose parents hadn't let them know they loved them, did not feel good about themselves, and because they did not feel good about themselves, they had to make themselves superior to other people. And sometimes they used their color as a reason to claim they were better than all the other colors, and that this was ridiculous. I told them there were even colors they'd never seen, bluish browns and shiny dark browns that were almost black, and pale pale whites, like skimmed milk. And that all these differences were wonderful, part of the rich variety of the world. And how not just the color of skin, but other parts of people varied—some had straight hair, some very curly, some in between, and hair was all colors too. And noses were different. We had a giggling session then while the kids came up with examples of notable noses—among them mine, their father's, and each other's. And that people believed different things too, and some people believed in gods, and there were a lot of different names for their gods, and some people worshiped one and some another and they sometimes killed each other because of this. The children stared at me incredulously.

“That's stupid!” Billy announced.

“Yes, well, I don't think people are stupid, but they believe a lot of stupid things. And they have nasty names for other people, intended to make them feel bad just because of some difference or other, skin color or religion or even the place where they were born.”

Then I listed all the pejoratives I could think of, together with a translation. I could not come up with a single term that demeaned the English—their father's heritage—except cockney, which referred to class more than national background, and WASP, which wasn't really pejorative. But I ended with “stupid Polack,” the only term I knew to refer to Poles, and informed them that it described them.

“I don't like the
stupid
,” Arden said, considering. “But the other word doesn't sound so bad.”

“No word is bad inherently. I mean, words can't be bad or good in themselves.”

“Not even
damn
or
hell?”

“No. Words are just sounds. It's the meaning people put on those sounds that makes them bad or good. The words we call bad are bad because we mean them to hurt someone.”

“Who gets hurt if I say
damn
?” Billy had been experimenting with cursing recently.

“Those words are supposed to hurt God,”

“What is god?” Arden pounced.

Well, that was the end of the card game. We sat around the kitchen table talking until it was time for them to go to bed. I had a bad moment when Arden suddenly piped up: “Didn't Pani's mother tell her she loved her? Is that why she talks that way?” Otherwise we had a good night; but I was left with a gnawing stomach that kept me awake until dawn. Not wanting to spend another night like that, I went down to see Pani soon after the children left for summer school, a play and crafts program they ran at the local public school. She was, as always, thrilled to see me, which made me feel even worse.

She opened her arms to me and cried, “Ah,
kochanie,
come in, come in!” There was homemade almond yeast cake, and she started a fresh pot of coffee in my honor, although the old dull aluminum drip pot on her stove always had coffee in it. We sat in her breakfast nook, on old-fashioned high-backed wooden chairs, like pews. Sunlight poured in from the back window on the faded blue-and-white-checked tablecloth, showing a week's worth of crumbs and spills. There were crumbs on the windowsill too, because Pani kept a box outside this window for the birds, and simply brushed her ends of bread into it. She also put in chunks of fat cut from pork chops or ripped from a chicken, so some times there were ants on the sill as well. Consequently, Pani's yard always had the most birds of any in the neighborhood, which was wonderful except that the patch of yard beneath this window was always thick with bird droppings.

She told me all the neighborhood gossip, I told her bits and pieces about my trip to Scandinavia. Then she began to tell me anecdotes about the children, and how cute they were. Often her anecdotes were testimony to how much the children loved her, but that was harmless, I felt, she did love the children and they did love her. I grew more and more tense; I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and listened as her voice lilted up and down with laughter and affection. After three cigarettes smoked in a chain, I began.

“Pani Nowak, the children are using some words that are not nice.”

“Oh!” She stared at me. Then she shook her head. No, no, it was not possible, they were good children, they would never use bad language.

“Well, last night, Billy said ‘nigger' and ‘kike.' I wonder if you've heard any of the children in the neighborhood using those words?”

She looked at me. I could see her debating. But then she decided. She took the noble course. She claimed responsibility. She opened her mouth and out came a tirade….

She hated Jews. She'd been a servant when she first came to America, and the wealthy Jewish family she worked for treated her like a slave and fed her the scraps from their plates. She understood Yiddish, she could hear them talking about goys, especially Poles, they hated them, they looked down on them. She hated the colored too: her sister had had a fine house in Brooklyn, but the niggers had moved in and trashed the neighborhood. When her sister had to sell the house, she got almost nothing, after her husband's funeral there was nothing left, she had to go live with a daughter-in-law who treated her miserably, and she died in just two years. In real Polish neighborhoods, they were too smart to sell their houses to niggers—or to Irish or Italians or kikes, or anybody except other Poles. Those people were savages, animals, they should go back to Africa, all those people, they should go back where they came from.

I have no excuse for what I did then except that I was a lot younger.

“Should we go back then, too?” I began, calmly. “After all, the colored people have been here longer than we have. My grandparents didn't come here until about 1900. When did you come, Pani?”

She drew in her breath between her teeth, almost whistling.

I then pointed out her illogic: Some Jewish families were unkind and exploitive, but so were others. Unkindness had nothing to do with Jewishness: my Polish grandfather had abused his own children, and what about her own Zbyszek, hadn't he made her weep beating their sons? It wasn't the fault of impoverished colored people overcharged for a house in a decent neighborhood, and finally unable to keep up the payments, that Pani's sister had ended her days in misery. I used reason.

Now, just thinking about this makes my face hot with shame. What did I think I was doing? Did I think I would convert her?

After a time, I saw the uselessness of my words. All I had accomplished was to make her feel uneasy with me. And I needed her. I told myself that didn't matter: a person of principle doesn't allow personal need to interfere with the transmission of truth. I told myself it was more important to insist upon just sentiments than to avoid hurting the feelings of an ignorant prejudiced old woman.

But I could not avoid seeing her eyes.

It was done, though. I couldn't take it back, wipe it away, give her a hug and tell her to go on being herself, and go back upstairs and tell the kids they simply weren't to use those words, and that was that.

I made my face compassionate. “I understand your feelings,” I said. Water sprang to her eyes. “But I do not want my children to use words that cast contempt on other people.”

She folded her face. She stood up, and walked around the kitchen, drying and putting away the dishes resting on the dish drain—something she never did, she just used them again. She turned the heat off the coffee, another act rarely performed in this house until she was about to go to bed. As she walked, she talked, in a cracked old voice, never looking at me. She explained that God himself, as the priest himself often said at Mass, perhaps I should go sometimes, it would benefit my children, whose religionless upbringing she worried about, God himself had decreed that only Catholics would be saved, that all others are damned. It could not be an offense to damn those whom God had damned. She knew what she knew. She was muttering now. I stood up, with a firm severe expression on my face.

“Pani, you must not use such words around my children.”

She stopped, she turned, she looked at me. She heard the voice of authority, and saw the posture of a man giving orders. She lowered her head, hunched her shoulders: the change was slight, subtle, yet in front of my eyes she was being transformed into my broken grandmother. And I was doing the breaking.

“Yes, Pani,” she said. She had never so addressed me before.

I thanked her for the cake and coffee, and left. I went upstairs and sat down in my breakfast nook shaped just like hers, just lacking the crumbs on the sill and the bird-feeder. I sat there for a long time, thinking. What
should
I have done? What was right? I wasn't just worried she wouldn't take the children again. Just then, that seemed unimportant.

I had loved her, I still loved her, and she had loved me and my kids. She was a good sweet woman in most ways. It came to me that the price of her sweetness, her complete acceptance of anything we did was this hatred for the alien. To keep us always in the black in her moral bookkeeping involved keeping those who were not of her group always in the red. She couldn't tolerate the near-blacks, the greys, the off-whites that were the joys of my profession. For a photographer, pure whiteness is a scorched photograph, a blanked-out spot; and pure black is just as useless. But I had always known how her mind worked. I had understood that the corollary to the fact that the kids and I could do no wrong was that other people got charged with the anger she felt at our failures, that the only way she could offer absolute love to the people she loved was to offer absolute hate to the stranger. I'd been happy enough to go on bathing in her warm acceptance. I'd been willing to consider her a saint. It was convenient.

Why hadn't I seen my own complicity in her bigotry before I charged down there and ruined not just her day, but her year, tainted the last years of her life, her pleasure in my kids, in me? Was it worth it? Had I advanced truth or justice an iota?

I knew that if she took the children again, she would obey me. But she would never again trust me not to hurt her.