Her Mother's Daughter (90 page)

“How about it?” Toni was smiling up at me, his face shining. I could see what he was feeling: he was my savior, my knight on a white horse, he was going to save my children for me. The situation was open to that interpretation. Why did it feel so false to me, so wrong? Wrong.

“I don't know, Toni. Let me think. Let's not rush into anything. I don't want you to be pressured into anything.” Him: or me.

“I'm not. It's what I want. I love you.”

“I know. But…” I gestured with my hand.

“And I love the kids.”

I kissed him. “Let me think. Let me talk to some lawyers. And right now I need to talk to Billy.”

“Billy?”

“Something's bothering him.”

“Well, naturally….”

“No. Something else. Something more.”

“Okay.” He stood up. “I'm just downstairs. Do you want me to come up for dinner tonight?”

I considered. I knew I did not. I didn't know how to tell him so. “Maybe it would be better if I had dinner with the kids alone. We need to talk together.”

There was only a momentary shadow on his face. “Okay.” He took me in his arms and held me, kissed my cheek, and left. I went immediately to Billy's room, knocked lightly and went in. He was lying rigid, staring at the ceiling.

I sat on the edge of the bed. “What is it, tootsie?”

His face was wrenched out of shape. He looked at me, then looked away. I could sense he did not want me to touch him, so I sat still and silent.

Eventually, his mouth opened and a hollow voice emerged. “Saturday. When I went shopping with Dad. In the car. When he drove me home.” He stopped.

I began to see. “He asked you questions?”

Billy nodded. His lips twisted.

“Like what?”

He stared at the bedspread. “He wanted to know if Toni was up here a lot. And if he ate with us. And if you paid for his food. And if he stayed all night.”

His body was taut, as if it had taken an electric shock. He looked as if he would break if he were touched.

I didn't ask him what he'd said.

“I didn't want to…I felt as if…but I didn't want to lie to him. He's my
father.
” He looked at me then.

“He's your father, and he put you in an impossible position—you either had to do something you'd feel was a betrayal of me, or lie to him, and feel you were betraying him. It was terrible of him. He was wrong, not you. You did what you felt was right.”

“No, I didn't, Mom! I didn't feel what I did was right! I told him Toni ate with us most of the time! I told him sometimes you paid for the food and sometimes he did. And I told him that I didn't know if Toni stayed all night. I did! I did!”

He had got up now, and was standing in front of me, jerking his arms like a robot. “I didn't know what to do! I didn't want to lie to him! But I didn't want to get you in trouble, and I knew it would! I didn't want to keep on being afraid of him, lying because we're afraid!”

I stood up and put my arms around him and held his body against mine. He was stiff. “I understand. I do, honey. It was too hard for you, you aren't old enough to deal with a thing like that.”

He was watching my face intently, his own face wrenched in pain.

“And you have a whole lot of different feelings, and some of them you probably don't even know you have.” I was thinking about his being too engrossed in the chess game with Toni that evening to be ready for his father. I wasn't sure what was going on inside him; I was sure that he didn't know either. Maybe he wanted his father to know about Toni, maybe he wanted to make him jealous. Maybe he wanted to suggest that Toni was more of a parent to him than Brad was. But he could have had no idea what the consequences of his actions could be. And now that he knew—I suspected nothing I said could ease his guilt.

I caressed his cheek. “We'll work it out,” I smiled at him and let him go. He stood there, stiff, his arms held tensely at his sides. “Try to remember that you were put in a situation that would have been difficult for a grown-up, that was too hard for you. Because it was, honey.”

He nodded. His eyes were damp. That was good. I kissed him and he let himself relax against me.

As soon as I left him, I got on the phone. I wanted to reach these lawyers before five. But it took several days before any of them called me back, and the tones of disapproval in their voices, their complete identification with Brad, told me as much as their hesitant opinions that it would be a long-drawn-out case, but Brad would probably win. All of them assured me they were far too busy at the moment to handle my end of it. I searched the Yellow Pages for a woman lawyer. There was one listed; it took me several more days to reach her. She sounded stiff and masculine, and told me somewhat scornfully that she did not handle marital disputes.

By then, a week had gone by. Monday morning a letter arrived with the letterhead of Lou Regan's legal firm. Lou had handled Brad's end of the divorce. I took it into the kitchen and poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down. The letter said that he had been instructed by Brad to initiate proceedings to gain custody of the children on grounds of my unfitness if my relation with Antoni Nowak did not cease immediately. So that was it. He wanted me to break with Toni. And he was serious. I sat there holding it, watching it shake in my hand. He must really hate me, far more than I imagined. He hated me so much he wanted me not to have any happiness. Because I knew, absolutely, that he did not want the children, and a picture lighted itself on the movie screen in the back of my head—them living with him, the way he would treat them, the way he would talk to them about me, and what that would do to them.

That was intolerable and I clicked the switch on it, sending it into darkness but not oblivion.

All right. He wins. I'll break with Toni, I thought. I lived without him before, I can do it again. But then what? I would miss Toni, I would really feel awful. But I could do it, would do it to keep my kids. But once he knew he could bully me this way, he would keep it up. For the rest of my life, or at least for the next ten years or so, I would have to remain alone. If I got involved with anyone, he would pull the same trick again. And again. He'd know he had me, he'd know what would work with me.

All right, so I'd just have my on-the-road romances, lovers in transit. He couldn't stop that. Unless I met a man I wanted to marry. But I didn't want to marry again. My reluctance to marry Toni had nothing to do with Toni himself but much to do with marriage.

And if I gave Toni up in the face of Brad's threats, my kids would hate me, they would lose all respect for me, they would blame me for the loss of him. They loved Toni, they didn't want to lose him. They
wanted
me to marry him. Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

I sat there for several hours, thinking. There was no one I could talk to about this. All of my women friends in the neighborhood were shocked at my relation with Toni. They all felt it was wrong, shocking, scandalous. Even my mother, who might be expected to understand, found my relation with Toni reprehensible. I felt utterly alone. Not alone in the social sense, but morally alone. Like someone who has survived a plane crash in the Andes and has to decide whether to eat human flesh, or someone in a concentration camp who has been ordered to work for the Nazis, with an implicit promise of survival for a few more weeks, months. Someone for whom there was no right and wrong, just survival. It was wrong for me to marry, I knew that. I did not wish to marry. Ever. I hadn't realized that until this moment. I felt like a woman who goes on the streets to feed her children. Years later, when I watched film of Saigon flash on the television screen, and heard about the thousands of women who became prostitutes during the Vietnam War, I felt like their sister. It was in this frame of mind that, the next day, I asked Toni if he wanted to drive over to Hempstead and apply for a marriage license.

I
T WASN'T A ROMANTIC
way to get married, but our bond was romantic anyway. It went on being sweet and harmonious despite the hex of marriage license, law, roles. I sent Lou Regan a letter informing him that I was married to Antoni Nowak, and that he and Brad should drop dead. Oh, I didn't write that, but the tone was bitter. Because I was bitter. I was filled with shame at my cowardice. I was already ashamed at the way I concealed the kids from the guys at
World
; I was starting to feel that being a woman meant living in a continual state of shame.

Brad was shocked at what he had precipitated. I guess it had never occurred to him that Toni would be willing to marry a woman years older than he and with two kids. I know how he felt because after the letter, Brad stopped in again. He began by calling Toni and me names, and vilifying my behavior. How dare I give his kids a stepfather who didn't know how to wipe his own ass, who needed me for a mommy, who couldn't earn enough money to feed himself on dog food, and so on.

I told him to get out, wondering how many times people can replay the same scene. I felt so tired. He had forced me into a step I didn't want to take, and now he was vilifying me for it. He launched into a tirade about my rottenness as a mother, my whorish sexuality, my refusal to grow up. I wanted to go to bed, pull the covers over my head, and cry, and sleep.

But I did my duty. I was cold, hard, forbidding. I commanded him to leave my house. But this time, Toni, who had heard Brad shouting, came upstairs and confronted him. (Marriage does make a difference.) And Brad shut up. He just shut up. I couldn't get over it. This kid, the mere presence of this twenty-two-year-old boy, had the effect of silencing him, when I could not. Male territorial insanity yields only to another male. What a difference the possession of a penis makes! I thought then, maybe for the first time. This thought filled me with rage, I was overwhelmed with it, drowning in a purple fire that pumped through my brain. I was angry with Toni as well as Brad, something he couldn't understand, couldn't be expected to understand.

My pattern with Toni was set. I never tried to make him understand what he didn't understand. I never forced him to take the responsibility of being a partner. I let him be my boy-lover, my pet. Brad wasn't entirely wrong. He was just a pig.

It passed, of course, my anger, Toni's; we came together again with as much passion and joy as before, and life went on. But something profound had happened to me, I recognized it even though I did not choose to think about it. Life happens in the interstices of things; events are merely the visible reflections of processes buried and secret, like the frenzy of life that goes on beneath the earth, on the other side of silence, as the insects and earthworms and snakes and seeds and roots and air and pebbles join together or repel each other, move back to make space among themselves, while you see nothing until one day there is a mound, an ant heap, where nothing was before, or a blade of grass erupts through the warm idle clumped soil. Allowing Brad to force me into marriage did something irrevocable to me. It was not Toni's fault. Nothing was ever Toni's fault. Except being young.

But life came back, the shame subsided, the choice came to seem right. Shameless I became: it was that or die. We were able, without shame, to tell Pani we were married, to avoid seeing the grotesque expression that crossed her face when we told her, to avoid letting ourselves know what she felt, to avoid caring. Was able to blind myself. I don't know if Toni needed to, I don't know what he saw. The innocent are ignorant. We were even able to leave Pani for two weeks, having asked Mrs. D'Antonio to stay with her during that time, it was only right, we told our selves, we were entitled to a honeymoon, a little vacation, we took care of her all year long. We were able to relax into a glowing well-being, lying together on the beach at Barnstable, on the Cape, where I'd taken a little house on the bay for August, sprawled in beach chairs in the sun, smelling of sun lotion and sea salt, sand, and mustard from our sandwiches, reading together, smiling at each other when the kids shouted in the water, him pouring me a glass of lemonade from the gallon thermos, happy to have me break his concentration by reading aloud from Robert Lowell's
Life Studies
—“Tamed by
Miltown,
we lie on Mother's bed”—breathing his appreciation….

And later, after chicken cooked by Toni and the kids on the barbecue grill while I smile in the kitchen peeling avocado and tomato, washing lettuce, after lingering over coffee on the screened porch, listening to the birds celebrate sunset—clamorous, hot, sweet—the four of us breathing together in silent reverence for the concert, after dusk descends and the birds fall silent, the locusts continue the music, we rise, yawning, stretching, saying in hushed voices
time to clean up,
and do it together in lazy easy movements, quietly, even the dishes abiding by the decorum, not clanking as they touch the porcelain of the sink or the wooden shelf where they are stored after being dried—after all that, a noisy game of hearts which Billy wins easily, protecting his face against the thrown cards of the rest of us, after laughter and banter, and kisses good night, and sleepy sunburned faces pressed against ours, after all that, a midnight walk alone along the beach, and the moon rising and the water lapping our bare feet, and holding each other and stopping to kiss, and barely talking except once, one fatal moment when Toni holds me and whispers in my ear, “I'm so happy. So happy. I've never been so happy. I love you. I love them. I want one of my own.” And I kissed his eyelids.

What could I do? You can't go back on a promise like that. Useless to reason, cruel to suggest that that was a night when I'd have agreed to anything. My only hope was that I'd have difficulty getting pregnant. But I didn't. It took only a few months. I assumed I was pregnant when I missed my period in mid-December, but I said nothing to Toni. That sounds like something out of a sentimental novel of the thirties when men never seemed to know whether their wives menstruated or not, but there was so much confusion that December that Toni
didn't
notice. And I said nothing because I was committed to an expedition I imagined would be the most exciting of my life.