Her Mother's Daughter (88 page)

I got home late in the afternoon—as usual I'd gone first to the city to drop off my film. As the cab pulled up to the house, the front door opened, and Toni and the kids stood there. I ran up the steps, and we all cried out and embraced and kissed, and went in, and the entire front hall was hung with balloons! They were strung up the staircase as well, and in Pani's living room there was a birthday cake with candles, and more balloons and Pani herself in a chair, smiling! I'd completely forgotten it was my birthday.

He'd bought me a present—a shocking pink nylon blouse, something I'd never wear, but it was a sweet thought, and I acted as if I loved it. I put it on right away, figuring I could wear it once at least, for him. The kids eyed it, eyed me, said nothing. They'd bought me a set of recordings of Beethoven's late quartets; but after all, they'd had a longer time to get to know me. The three of them had made the cake together, and Arden had decorated it with pink icing flowers that, she said laughing, were supposed to be roses.

Oh, it was a fine year.

I was extremely ginger telling Toni what I thought about his novel. I saved the best for last, and he brightened, loving my praise of his section where the hero is daydreaming on the firing range (although I didn't believe one could, actually), and the one where he meditates on what might have made the sergeant the man he is. I did not mention that I believed the sergeant was based on his father; I did suggest the hero could be a little more human, less godlike; and that he read some journalists' accounts of the Korean War. He took it all pretty well.

That hurdle past, the next one hovered: Thanksgiving. Oh, these holidays that are supposed to be joyous!

Brad had called early that month, announcing that he expected the kids to have Thanksgiving dinner with his family. I said I would ask them. I did.

Silence.

“Well, what do you think?”

“How will
you
feel?” (Billy.)

I got up to pour myself a cup of coffee so they wouldn't see the tears in my eyes. Sentimental idiot!

“Look.” I turned around, realizing I couldn't fool them. “I'm going to feel terrible. But I want you to see more of your father than you do. You hardly ever see him anymore. I know it isn't entirely your fault. But he
did
call last Sunday, asking you to dinner, and you”—I eyed Arden—“didn't want to go. Of course I want you Thanksgiving. But I feel selfish, I feel wrong, as if I were keeping you all to myself.”

“We had it with them last year,” Billy said in a thin voice.

“You don't want him to get mad at you, to blame you. You think he won't send you any more money for us!”

“Oh, Arden, do you think that's the reason I want you to see your father?”

“Why else would you? He doesn't care about us! He only wants to show us off, to show his friends, or Grandma and Grandpa Carpenter that he is being our father, when he isn't.”

Her fierceness made my stomach tremble. What rage, what hurt, was lying there in my child's heart?

“Come on, Ard, you know Mom wants us to know Dad.”

“What for!” Her face was flushed and mottled, and I couldn't help myself, I got up and went to her and put my arms around her and held her.

She shook me off. “Let me go, Mom!” I sank back in my chair. I watched her, aghast at her pain, my helplessness.

Billy put his hand on my arm. “We'll go, Mom,” he said glaring at Arden, daring her to argue. “If that's what you want, we'll go.”

“It's
not
what I want!” I cried. “It's what I feel we should do, ought to do.”

“Why?” Arden asked coolly. “Why, if not to give him value for money received?”

Twelve, I thought. Not even twelve. Three weeks away from twelve.

“Isn't it because you feel you owe him something? you owe him
us
?”

“I have you all the time, he doesn't.”

“He doesn't want us.” The same cool voice.

“Do what you want,” I sighed. “But if you decide not to go,
you
have to call and tell him. I don't want to be screamed at for something I can't control.”

Billy stared at Arden. “
You
have to call him.”

She shrugged. “Okay, I'll call him,” she said in that cool voice. But I could hear through the coolness that she didn't want to do it any more than I did, any more than Billy did. I knew she would put it off until Brad called me in fury.

“You have to call him now,” I said.

“I'll do it tomorrow,” she said, standing, her voice rising into anger.

“Now, Arden!”

She whirled on me. “I'll do it when I want to! Okay?” The “Okay?” was an afterthought, a halfhearted concession to my status as mother. She marched from the room, into hers, slammed the door, locked it.

Billy and I looked at each other.

“She won't call him.”

“I know.”

“He wouldn't scream at her.”

“No. But he'd sound hurt, he'd be angry quietly, he'd act martyred and blame me. It would infuriate her.”

“What it really is, is we're all afraid of him.”

I stared sadly at my boy. “I guess so.”

“Is that right? I mean, if we let him bully us aren't we sort of…” He searched for a word.

“In collusion? I guess we are. Maybe I'm cowardly. But—oh, I don't know, Billy, maybe I'm deluding myself, but I feel he asks so little of me, of you kids—it seems the one thing we should give him….”

He stared at the floor. His little face was so sad for a child his age. It ripped at me.

“Not because we're afraid of him,” I burst out. “Not because he'll yell. But because he'll yell only because he's really hurt, and if he's hurt, he cares, and…”

He nodded. We sat there in a companionable silence. When Billy and I were together, we could be silent for long periods and yet feel close, so close that sometimes I felt we were thinking with one brain, feeling with one heart. I did not have that closeness with Arden.

Then I said, “I have an idea! They have Thanksgiving dinner early, at midday, don't they still?” He nodded. “So you go to them in the morning, stay until about five or six, and come home and have Thanksgiving here at night. I'll make dinner for around eight, or seven.” My mind was whirring: how would my mother feel about that, a big dinner late at night? Not good.

“Sure,” he said uneasily.

“What's wrong?”

“I don't think we can eat that much.”

I burst out laughing. “Of course you can!”

I cooked Thanksgiving dinner downstairs. I had never had Thanksgiving before, we always went to Mom's. But I didn't want to leave Pani on Thanksgiving, and it was just too hard for her to go out. Mom was just as glad not to have to cook. But was I nervous, cooking a turkey! I got a twenty-two-pounder and roasted it five hours. Mother said it must have been frozen (it was) because it was dry. “And,” she said in a tone of voice that suggested I had done this to persecute her, “the gravy is burnt!” (It didn't taste burnt to me—but what do I know?) She had me nearly crying at the table. I had tried so hard to please
her
—no one else was fussy.

She never hesitated to criticize my cooking—or my appearance, or anything else about me—but there was animus in her voice that day, she was angry with me. She saw instantly that Toni and I were involved, and she didn't like it. Toni didn't notice. She was polite to him, and he wasn't used to polite families. He was used to people screaming and shouting when they were displeased, upending tables, throwing crockery. He didn't realize people could smile at you and still hate your guts. He was my sweet innocent baby. Not that she hated him. She was indifferent to him, personally. She was angry with me for taking up with someone so unsuitable, someone without money or status, someone I could not marry, who couldn't support me.

But he loved her, loved the way she sat like a grande dame, dressed so beautifully, her hair so elegant, sipping a scotch and soda, expecting to be waited on. It was unique for him to see a woman in such a position, and he gloried in it. I'm sure he wished he could see his mother treated that way. To him, my mother was a creature from a more exalted world than he had known, and his voice crowed with delight every time he spoke to her. He didn't notice that she never addressed a remark to him. I did.

I did, but I said nothing. I hadn't expected her to like it. And I knew she'd be polite, and that if he didn't see her often, he would go on not seeing her coolness. But when, at Christmas, he broke out his bank account and bought her a silver gravy ladle, I had to say something. We were at her house. Toni and I had carried Pani, bundled in blankets, out to the car and set her in the front seat. The kids and I sat in back with the presents that wouldn't fit in the trunk. Pani was extremely excited at going out, and I worried a bit about her. But she was settled in high state in my mother's living room, and Toni had two queens to wait on—three, if you count me. He was overjoyed.

Mother and I were in the kitchen, preparing to set out the Christmas Eve feast that followed the giving out of presents, and I whispered into her good ear: “Toni is sweet, isn't he?”

She squirmed. “Ye-es. He's sweet,” she admitted, very reluctantly.

“He spent most of his savings buying you that ladle,” I said, knowing what hit my mother's core.

Her eyebrows rose.

“He adores you,” I added, finishing the job.

Eyebrows remained raised, shoulders shrugged. “I don't know why.” It was a question.

“He just does. You're probably very different from his mother.”

“Oh, Polish men…!” my mother exploded in soft-voiced contempt.

She has a gift. She can convey so much in a phrase, in a tone of voice. All of it was there, years of watching men bully and abuse their wives, of watching the women, her own mother, shabby and shapeless in old housedresses, bent into postures of servility, smiling and cringing simultaneously.

“Yes, he hates his father,” I agreed, “who is terrible.”

My mother nodded. And she did act a little warmer to Toni after that.

I discovered that the kids knew that Toni was my lover when Arden came down with scarlet fever. She woke up around midnight, one Tuesday night, felt hot and feverish, then was seized with nausea and couldn't make it to the bathroom. She cried out as the vomit propelled itself out of her throat, and I leaped up from bed naked, threw a robe around me and ran to her. Toni grabbed his jeans and followed. The poor kid was crying, she was humiliated and upset at fouling her room, and I had to calm her down as I helped her into the bathroom. Billy woke too and Toni pressed him into service cleaning up the mess.

“Ugh! Ugh!” cried my fastidious son. “Why should I clean up
her
vomit?” The
her
was dyed in all the venom of sibling rivalry.

“Because she's sick and upset and your mother is busy helping her and I need you to help me,” Toni said firmly, and without a word, Billy went for the paper towels and the liquid cleaner. I should be able to command obedience like that!

She was so hot I was terrified. I cleaned her up and led her back to bed and got a basin of warm water and alcohol and washed her face and neck down with it. I kept this up for an hour or so until she felt cooler. I was afraid to give her an aspirin until I knew what was wrong.

For the next few days, things were chaotic in the house—the doctor's visits, medicine to be administered, chicken soup to be simmered, the busy unsettled quiet of a house where someone is ill. I sat for long periods beside Arden's bed bathing her with alcohol as she swam in and out of delirium. I kept Billy home from school; it figured he'd be carrying the stuff as well, and a few days later, he came down with it too. But he didn't run such high fevers, and I worried less about him.

It was a few weeks before they were more or less normal again, sitting around in the living room in pajamas and robes watching the tube, complaining about boredom, getting into arguments with each other at the least thing. During Arden's illness, I made Toni stay downstairs at night. He'd come up in the afternoons and—blessed relief—play chess with Billy and read poetry to Arden, allowing me a couple of hours to go to the market or just sit in my room working. And he ate with us. But I wouldn't let him come back up later on. I don't know why, exactly. Superstition—if I had sexual pleasure, my kids would die?—or maybe I just wasn't in the mood for sex with two sick kids in the house. So one night Arden turned to me during a commercial and said, “How come Toni doesn't come up at night anymore?”

Billy looked over too, adding his look to me question.

I know I must have changed color. “What do you mean?”

Arden gave me a knowing look. “Come on, Mom, we know Toni comes back up at night after we go to bed.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. I was trying to protect you from that knowledge.”

They both laughed. “Us or Pani?” Arden chirped nastily.

I shook my head. “You kids are too much.”

Then we all laughed, long and hard, out of relief, I guess.

“Why doesn't he just stay up here with us after dinner, and go to bed when you do?” Billy wondered.

“Because you-all like to watch television and he likes to read.”

“You read. In your room.”

“Yeah, but there's only a hard-backed chair in my room and I have to read in bed. It wouldn't be comfortable for two.”

They gave each other a long considering look. I understood what it said, and was amazed: they so much wanted Toni to spend his evenings upstairs that they were considering giving up evening television. I held my breath.

“Maybe you could put the TV in one of our rooms,” Arden ventured.

I just looked at her.

“Yeah, you're right. We'd fight about which room.”