Her Mother's Daughter (98 page)

“Of course I didn't! How could I get lunch! I don't know where to go, I can't speak Greek! And I have no money, you didn't leave me any money! Six hours you were, six!”

His face cringed. “I only had a sandwich, Belle,” he said, as if that exonerated him. “We should get you something to eat, what would you like, Belle, some fish?”

“Oh, Eddie!” she cried with contempt, disgust, despair. “It's too late now! It's four o'clock!” She was shrieking now, and Ed looked around him furtively, embarrassed. “We have first seating for dinner, six o'clock, it's too late to eat lunch!”

“Maybe we could just get you a snack to tide you over, Belle,” he ventured. “Here, let me help you.” He put his arms around her waist as if to lift her from the wall.

He helped her to her feet and she tottered beside him, leaning on his arm. They began very slowly to walk toward the main street. The group leader ran up to them.

“Folks, we've got to get back to the ship by five, so if you want to do some shopping, now's the time.” He spread his arm to indicate the shops, winked, and moved on. Belle, whose hearing was always worst when she was upset, looked to Ed for translation. He leaned toward her and barked in her ear. “He asked if we want to go shopping! We have to go back to the ship at five.”

“You don't have to shout!”

“I wanted you to hear, sometimes you don't hear!” he defended himself. “What do you want to do?” Anger seeped into his voice. He stopped on the sidewalk.

Her voice emerged as a cry, petulant, helpless, a whimper. “I don't care! I'm hot, I'm exhausted, I just want to go home!” She hated herself. Why was she like this? Why was life so awful, why was everything such a nightmare? Ed looked around again to see if people were listening, watching them. “I want to go back to the ship,” she said quietly, with the dignity of martyrdom.

Solicitously, Ed took her arm and helped her as if she were ill, and led her to the pier. “I'll just run and get you a cold drink,” he said, leaving her again, and she cried out to him not to go but he was already gone, and she turned her suffering face toward the water, sitting on the bench hunched over, patience on a monument. Never, never again would she let Ed go anyplace without her, never! Oh, what a horrible day, a horrible day! Horrible.

“Horrible, it was a nightmare,” she told Anastasia. “I'll never go to Europe again.”

She was bored. She was tired of the neighborhood, where she no longer had any friends. Ann Gwyn had died; Belle had befriended Mr. Gwyn's second wife, another woman of intelligence and refinement, who took on the twins as her own, and who suffered, as Ann had, from her husband's tightness with money, and, presumably, everything else. But then the old man died, leaving Charles Gwyn rich, and they moved to a large house on the North Shore. The Bradshaws moved to Florida, to St. Petersburg. For a few years, they sent postcards and Christmas cards and in January, boxes of oranges. Then the messages ceased. Belle presumed they had died. New people moved into the houses on either side of her.

“So young, Anastasia, to have houses like that, such lovely houses. I don't think they're more than thirty. They're Jewish. The father of that one, Mrs. Halpern, must be in the garment business. At least once a week he drives up in his big Cadillac and gets out of the car carrying three or four brand-new dresses in plastic bags. Can you imagine? Without lifting a finger she gets so many dresses! Every week! She changes her clothes four or five times a day, I know she does because I see her. In the morning she walks the dog, and drives the children to school, and she's wearing one thing. Then around ten she goes marketing and she's wearing something else. Then she comes back and goes out again for lunch or after lunch, and she's wearing something else. Then in the evening when she walks the dog around five, she has on something else! And they go out at night—a lot! And I'm sure she wears something new then too. Can you imagine?”

When she spoke of these neighbors there was an edge in her voice that I had never heard in it before.

“Awful people! Their children use our yard as an alley! Dad went out and scolded them, but they didn't pay any attention to him. I made him go to the parents and complain, but the children
still
run back and forth. They ruined all my flowers—the petunias, the zinnias, the marigolds—I worked so hard planting them and those children just trampled them.”

The Halperns and their friends on the other side, the Allens, did not speak to the Stevenses. “I suppose we're not good enough for them, poor little Christians with their six-year-old car!”

Ed put up a high fence of wood palings behind the pine trees that lined the driveway. That stopped the children.

One late afternoon in winter, on her way to pick up the kids from ice skating, Anastasia stopped in to visit Belle and found her mother distraught. “I feel so awful,” Belle moaned.

They settled in the porch with scotch and water. The street was bleak, bare branches under a muted grey sky.

“I sit here,” Belle began, her eyes looking damp, “and look out. Mrs. Brand goes to the market and comes back, she still drives that old Plymouth, she must be having a hard time since her husband died. Sometimes Margery stops in with the baby. Sometimes on a Sunday she comes with her husband, for dinner I guess. Mrs. O'Neill has visitors all the time, the girls with their children, one two three blond heads in the backseat of the car, they must all have a child every year. She has practically no teeth in her mouth but Mr. O'Neill is never home, he has the money to booze it up with his pals.

“I don't know any of the others, the Wilsons have moved, and the Peakes. Just these Halpern and Allens, and they don't speak to us. I feel surrounded…” Her voice rose.

“Mrs. Halpern—so young to have such a beautiful house, can you believe it, Anastasia? She even has a girl to clean it, twice a week, a colored woman, I see her coming and going in a taxi. And her clothes, oh, her clothes! And her dog, she has a little dog, it looks like a rat, it yaps all the time, and she walks it three times a day, she walks it up and down along the sidewalk, and then, when it's ready to do its business, she brings it over here, to the curb in front of
our
house! Where
we
can step in it!”

Anastasia's face, bent toward her mother, kept pace with Belle's account, registering sadness, pity, outrage….

“This morning she did it again! Every morning I watch her do it! And I wanted to run outside, Anastasia, I almost did, I was going to shout at her, ‘You kike! you yid! Keep your filthy dogdo on your own property!' Oh, Anastasia, can you imagine?”

The glisten of her eyes grew thicker.

“You didn't do it, though,” Anastasia said very calmly.

“No.” The tears overflowed, and Belle wiped them away with a tissue. “But I almost did. I wanted to. Maybe tomorrow I will!” she added, a willful petulant child. But then she cried again, “Can you imagine that, Anastasia?”

Anastasia reached forward and took her mother's limp cold hand. “Tonight you'll send Dad over to tell them. You didn't do it, that's the important thing. Everybody's prejudiced, Mom. I'm sure the Halperns make nasty cracks about goys, everyone has these feelings. The important thing is you didn't do it.”

Anastasia hated the sound of her own voice preaching at her mother. Belle hated it too. But this time, she did not respond, she looked blank. And that weekend, Belle and Ed began looking in earnest for a new house.

So it wasn't really Anastasia's pregnancy that led Belle to flee from Nassau County to Suffolk. It is simply Anastasia's habit of mind to assume that she is responsible for every sorrow her mother suffers. It is to be presumed that this habit of mind gives her pleasure or she would give it up.

Months passed before they found a house they liked, and more months before they moved in. The house was far out on the island, in Brightwaters, on a small lake. They moved in the June after Franny was born, and for several years after that Belle was occupied with decorating, shopping, furnishing her new house on a small budget. There was carpeting to be bought, drapes to be resewn to fit the new windows, new furniture to fill the “family room,” something they hadn't had before, and iron furniture for a broad summer room on the back of the house facing the lake, a real porch, finally, where Belle could sit every afternoon and study the animals, the birds, the foliage, in their seasons. Anastasia told herself her mother was finally safe.

R
EMNANTS FOUND IN A
box.

OCTOBER
20, 1963

Dear Anastasia—or should I write Stacey—ha!

Thanks so much for the silver spoon and fork you sent Jennifer. They are darling! I love the little animals on the handles. She can't use them yet, but soon—I hope! It's really not that bad because we have a wonderful nana for her, she doesn't speak English but she loves babies. But it's so hot and humid here all the time, you can't blame a baby for fretting, she has prickly heat.

Yes, I flew to California to have her. The clinic on the base is very good but they're not really set up for obstetrical matters, hah! And I thought I'd feel more comfortable in an American hospital, and the Army was willing to pay for my flight. Justin flew over the day the baby was born, and helped me going back so it wasn't bad at all. That way the kids were only alone for a couple of days, and we have this nana and the housekeeper speaks English and my friend Annette looked in every day to make sure they were alright.

The children are great. Jonathan started third grade this fall and Julie started second and they're a couple of eager beavers, doing projects for social studies and Julie's going to be in the school play, she plays a tooth. Some fun making her costume! The American school here is really great, they have great teachers, the wives of officers stationed here. So it's nice because they're our friends too and everyone knows everyone else.

How is your new baby? Frances. It's nice you named her after Grandma, Mother must have been pleased. I hardly remember Grandma. Is she walking yet? It will be so much fun this Christmas with two babies to look at, children really love Christmas, I remember I did when I was a child. I'm looking forward to it. It will be my first Christmas home since I got married. I'll be glad to get out of here too although our next tour is in Panama and I don't think that's much better. Not that it's bad here, the Army is really great, as Justin says the Army takes care of its own. We have the PX and the Officers' Club and excellent Medical Care and cheap Help. Justin loves his work, he loves the Army. But it is hot and humid all the time and there are so many bugs and outside the enclave there's nothing to do, no place to go really, it gets a little boring after a while always seeing the same people and doing the same things all the time. But my tennis game is getting pretty good.

I guess Mom and Dad's new house is really beautiful, I'm dying to see it. It will seem funny though not to drive to Rockville Centre the way we always have. We'll fly to California December 1. Then we'll fly to Iowa to visit the Selbys for a couple of weeks, and then to Long Island. With three kids, and all their stuff, that's a big deal, as you can imagine, all that packing and carrying, but it'll be great, we'll have a ball.

Love, Joy

P.S. Mother tells me you're having a book published, pictures of power. What does that mean? Anyway, congratulations! Maybe I'll get to see it when I get home.

Mass card, picture of crucified Jesus.

Pani: Yes, the card says Frances Nowak, January 12, 1964. She was only seventy-one when she died. They don't have long lives, those old ones, I wonder why. You'd expect them to live long—they don't have careers that give you ulcers and heart attacks. Of course they all worked so hard for so long, were poor for so long, probably lived on bread and coffee. Pani worked in sweatshops too, like Grandma, for years. They didn't buy the house in Lynbrook until she was fifty and her sons were grown. She brought the boys up in a railroad flat, three bedrooms, Bedford-Stuyvesant. She worked in the sweatshop all day, worked at home all night: marketing, cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, and dealing with the kids and husband. They could afford to buy this house because they could rent the apartment upstairs, a good investment, Zbigniew said. Smart—he only lived for five years after that. He left her a thousand-dollar life insurance policy and this house. The insurance money buried him; she survived on Social Security and the rent.

I wonder how she felt about her life. The old ones never say. They act as if they are not entitled to have feelings about their lives. Their only concern is to survive. That's all they allow themselves to want: survival, their kids' and their own. I wish I'd talked to her more. I used to talk to her a lot, but after what I did, she wasn't open to me anymore. I could understand that.

She left her house to her sons. It didn't matter how they had treated her: blood is all that matters to the old ones. They came to Long Island to bury her and immediately put the house on the market. It wouldn't fetch much, and after taxes and the real-estate agent's percentage and division by five, they would not get more than a few thousand dollars apiece, but they were hungry for that money, you could see it. They told Toni it was time he got out and got himself a man's job.

It didn't snow the day we buried her, but the sky looked like snow, heavy and grey like a bag of tears frozen solid. They laid her beside her husband in an old unkempt cemetery in Brooklyn. It had hardly any trees. Only at a distance you could see some barren brown sticks suggesting them. There were miles of old marble stones, tilted and greying, dotting the frosty earth, and lots of dull grey crosses, some askew. We cried. We couldn't stop crying, the four of us—I'd left Franny with a neighbor. The sons were grey and heavy. I like to think they would have liked to cry, but couldn't anymore. Like me now.