Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (4 page)

Above me, Rosa and Mom studied a photo of children dressed in white linen and lace, my aunts and uncles at the bottom of a grand staircase in a foyer with a vaulted ceiling. “That’s you,” said Rosa, probably pointing to a baby with a gold bracelet in a baptismal gown. Mom was the youngest. But Mom said no, the baby in the picture was Matthew, who died of leukemia before she was born.

How sad for Mom, I thought, not registering that she wouldn’t have known him.

“So what’s this?” said Rosa. She lifted her hand. I heard a swish; she must have pulled a photo out to show Mom. “Oh, that,” said Mom. She would have been looking at the mansion’s façade: a cascade of half-moon stairs flanked by tall windows, one of which contained a stained-glass cameo of Mom’s father as a baby.

In a studied tone, Mom said, “This is my Grandpa Fanger’s house. We lived with Grandpa until he died. Then we moved to the other place.”

“Why did you live with your grandpa?”

“Look at the house, Rosa.” Mom shifted her crossed legs, the opposite foot now wagging under the table, where Rosa couldn’t see it though I had to move from its path. “Wouldn’t
you
want to live there?” Mom did not explain that her father had abandoned his large family, leaving them dependent on her grandfather. Rosa spotted the omission and said, “Okay. But why didn’t your
dad
own that house?”

The foot froze. “Mmm,” said Mom.

“Hmm,” said Rosa.

Then silence.

Mom’s voice perked up. She told Rosa about her grandfather’s store, emphasizing its location on the riverfront and its success. She said it was a fashionable shoe emporium for elegant ladies.

Underneath the table, I inhaled cigarette smoke, a smell I loved. The floor was squeaky clean. Mom would not abide a dirty kitchen. She didn’t do all of the cleaning by herself because Candy came in twice a week to clean, usually clamping between her teeth a filterless Camel—lit or, depending on her finances, unlit. Having been born black in turn-of-the-century Mississippi, Candy had never been granted a birth certificate or an education. She called me “Owleen,” which made me wonder for a time if she’d never been taught to say “I.” Her nurturing was selfless; during the year I had mononucleosis she carried me to the sofa every time she found me asleep on the floor by a heater. Because she brought us a bag of gumdrops every week, I thought of her as “Candy.” I couldn’t understand why Mom cried when she drove up to the bus stop each week and saw her holding a fresh bag. “Oh, I wish she wouldn’t waste her money on you kids,” Mom would say with a sniffle.

Now because of the summer heat, the table seemed sticky, as if the wood itself sweated. No matter how hot the weather or how pregnant she was, Mom wore nylons. By late fall she would deliver her ninth baby, and despite her legs’ shapeliness, varicose veins ruptured their surface in a few spots. Rosa’s knees were rounder but also golden brown.

Rosa asked her, “Well, what about your dad? Where was he?”

Mom just drew on her cigarette. I heard the crackle of the ember; she held the smoke and said, “My daddy was good-looking.” She exhaled forcefully. “He liked nice clothes. But he gambled. He was sick. That’s what Louise always says about Daddy.” She stamped out her cigarette.

I sucked my thumb and thought of Aunt Louise, my godmother. Mom told me once that Louise was the prettiest of her sisters when they were young. We rarely saw Louise, who was now skeletally thin and had a slight tremor. Her pale blue eyes bulged from their sockets as if she were seeing a ghost. Unlike my other aunts, she never came by for coffee because she had no time for idle chitchat. She was a widow in a rundown neighborhood not far from East Walnut Hills, and she supported her large family by working as an aide in a nursing home.

Mom was lost in thought. Again I heard her knock a Kent from its package, then the seductive strike of a match. I tried to imagine a young and glamorous Louise but couldn’t see it. Instead, I could imagine Mom’s squint as she held the match to her cigarette, and the way she clasped the Kent between her lips while she inhaled. I smelled the burning tobacco. Sedated, I rested my cheek in the cross of the cradle supporting the table. The gummy varnish stuck to my face.

Mom’s foot went still, her voice doleful, almost weepy. “Louise always says we should forgive Daddy. He was sick. That’s all. Just sick.” She started to cry, and her foot dropped to the floor as if to pin her to the ground; her free hand went up, maybe to her face, and through tears she said, “It’s not your fault if you’re sick.” She said this like she knew what it meant to be sick. Maybe because of the Depression, Mom could cry over things like the amount of sugar we poured on our cereal, but I’d never heard her cry like this before.

I wanted to come out and climb into her lap. Instead, I reached for her ankle to stroke it but stopped just shy of that when Rosa said, “Whaddaya mean sick? You mean crazy?”

I sat up. My head narrowly missed the frame rimming the underside of the tabletop. My face was inches from Mom’s hip. Rosa had a magnetic control over Mom. Even I could tell that Mom would be wise to quit right here. Mom stopped crying and ground her foot into the floor. I thought she might spring up and call an end to this talk. Instead she barked, “I already told you he gambled.”

Maybe here Mom would walk out. No. Rosa leaned forward. “Why would he gamble?” Was this a gentler voice, or was it a setup?

Mom’s waist bent in Rosa’s direction. I couldn’t see their heads, but Mom had to be right in Rosa’s face. If I poked my head out, I’d see everything, but I’d be right between them and that was not the place to be. Anyone who is one of eight children knows that you get out of the way when the force between dueling family members closes in.

“I don’t know,” said Mom in an affected, throaty voice before she switched to a rhythm like a rock skipping over the water: “I-real-ly-did-not-know-him, ROSE. I-guess-he-drank-too-much.” Rosa backed away and her head dipped backward so that I could see her face. I wondered if she saw me, if this was all a show. They were locked in position: Rosa arching her back, smiling in Mom’s face, and Mom right over her, ready to pounce. There was no sound at all.

I almost gasped. I’d seen this before. They’d look ready to kill each other, and yet Rosa would be smiling.

Finally, Mom settled back in her seat. I heard her take another drag on her cigarette. I saw the tremors in her free hand resting on her thigh before she gripped the saddle of her chair.

I was relieved it was over. I’d had enough. We’d all had enough. I began to regret that I’d sneaked under the table because I knew too much and this bordered on treachery.

Rosa now leaned forward and said, “How could you not know your dad?”

At this I was ready to spring out from under the table and throw my hand to Mom’s lips and say, “Stop!”

Curiosity kept me there, though. Our maternal grandfather cast a new light on how we viewed our mother.

Mom sighed, exhausted. Her father’s splintered image was now spilled across the table with these photographs. She kept trying to explain him but the harder she tried, the more he slipped through her fingers. “He didn’t live with us, Rosa.”

“Why not?”

“My mother kicked him out.”

“What?” Rosa sneered.

“You heard me.”

“Did she
divorce
him? That’s a sin.”

“My mother was a saint!” The volume rose, but Mom’s tone stabilized in a warning. “That is no joke, Rose. Ida Fanger was a Martyr. Mary was right there at her bedside when she died.”

“Mary who?”

“Mary who?” Mom held out her arms. “Are you kidding? The Virgin Mother, that’s who!”

“Huh?”

“Look,” said Mom, slapping her right hand on the tabletop as if it were the Bible. “It’s true. I know because the room got cold and suddenly it smelled like roses. Roses, right when my mother died. That’s a sign from Mary, you know? Roses and a cool breeze, that’s how Mary visits people.”

“Oh?” Rosa’s voice teetered on the edge of a giggle.

Mom was just getting started, though. “After Mother died, the room got really warm and the smell of roses vanished. Now explain that.”

For a moment there was silence, as if Rosa were convinced. Every time I’d heard the story of Ida’s visitation, I imagined my grandmother’s hospital room like a refrigerator full of roses, but that day the kitchen was as warm as melted butter and I smelled only the daily grind of coffee and the smoke of cigarettes. Then Rosa asked what I was dying to hear but would never dare ask: “So what happened to your dad?”

“Well,” Mom said in an aloof tone, “he ended up on the streets.”

I didn’t buy her detachment. Neither did Rosa, who prodded, “The streets? You mean he was a hobo?”

Hobo: the word hit me as harshly as if someone had spit in my face. I went numb and felt only the sensation of drifting away without really leaving. Mom and I had seen hoboes downtown while coming from Pogue’s department store on our way to Shillito’s. We’d come out the door that faced Fountain Square, and there underneath the awning we’d brush past men holding tin cups and asking for money.

Earlier that same year—before I was fitted for artificial legs—we saw a man on his knees.

How odd, I had thought, but from Mom’s arms I looked hard at him and saw that he had no legs. I pulled the hem of my Polly Flinders dress over my exposed knee. After that I went numb. As we approached him, I saw for the first time the image that most people associate with the word “amputee”—a beggar. What happened next was something I couldn’t understand at the time but in years to come I would see it this way, beginning with me asking myself, “Is that what I look like?” I’d never seen anyone else without legs. As we passed, I could not look at him. Maybe it was because I saw something of myself in him; or perhaps it was because I had to look down to see him, a grown man, which seemed wrong. The shame I felt for this man, then myself, so overwhelmed me that I actually felt myself turn light as a balloon and drift from Mom’s arms, as if something crucial had been wrenched from my body and set loose for an instant. I don’t know how long the feeling lasted, but I do know what made me come back to myself: Mom. She had me right there in her arms, the legless man now behind us, and while she toted me the few blocks to Shillito’s I studied her face. I traced the lines on her forehead, the ones on either side of her mouth. The prettiest girl in Cincinnati, that’s what people always said about Mom, but I could only see her lines.

As I studied her I wondered, “How does she look at me? Does she go numb all over? Is she ashamed of me?” On the next block, when she shifted me to her other hip, I felt the sudden return of my own weight. Now, from under the table, I began to wonder if Mom felt shame about things that didn’t even concern me, shame about her own childhood.

In years to come, I would pick up stories of my grandfather, John Fanger, mostly through Rosa. The family historian, she was the only one who would speak of things considered taboo, my birth and Mom’s father topping the list. She would tell me that our grandfather stalked Mom when she was a teenager. Maybe he was just curious to see how his baby daughter was turning out, or maybe he was attracted to Mom’s sultry black curls and model’s figure. He would approach her on the street in front of her friends. Mom would be mortified because he might be dirty, unshaven, wearing tattered clothes, and reeking of alcohol. Other times, he would hunt Mom down, wearing a brand-new suit and driving a car. He’d invite her to ride over to his new office. She would hop in, hopeful, thrilled to find her father redeemed. Inevitably, she’d uncover a ruse: borrowed suit, car, job, office. She’d have to pretend to go along with it because he was her father.

Much later, I heard someone ask Mom, “What was the happiest day of your life?” I expected her to say her wedding day, because she always said she loved our father more than anyone else. Instead she said, “The happiest day of my life? My First Communion. I wanted my daddy to show up for it, and he did.”

I never found out whether John Fanger died in a warm bed or on the streets. In any case, it was Mom’s grandfather’s death that would affect her daily life more than her father’s. He died in the early thirties, and Mom’s brother had to take over the shoe store. While the Depression had undermined the store’s success, it was the flood of ’37 that devastated it. The river came up so high that my uncle had to paddle a rowboat to the store and climb in through a second-floor window to save whatever shoes were left.

There was hope that the sale of the mansion in East Walnut Hills and the antiques in it would raise enough money for Ida and her children to live comfortably. Unfortunately, Mom’s father undermined the plan. He held an auction and sold the antiques. Ida moved the family to a smaller house in the suburbs. In the meantime, he sold the mansion to a funeral home and gambled all of the proceeds away. The one piece Ida took from the mansion was a Victorian clock, which now resided on Aunt Gert’s mantel.

All of that seemed worlds away from where Mom sat on this day. In the fall, she would be thirty-seven and a mother of nine. And yet she seemed a girl, her voice so high-pitched that when I answered the phone even Aunt Gert would ask, “Joy?”

Just as I thought their conversation had ended, Rosa slid her chair back, scraping the linoleum, and pointed at the stack of photos. “Your
dad
was a hobo,” she said.

I touched Mom at the same time that she flinched. My hand came to rest on the chiseled bone of her ankle. I rubbed my thumb over its knob, her nylons between our two skins.

Maybe she was too deflated to comment. Her devastation was so palpable that even Rosa let it go when Mom said in a coarse whisper, “It
was
the Depression, Rose. A lot of people lived on the streets.”

CHAPTER 3

Open Spaces

O
ur father came home from work every night at exactly 6:15. He was as predictable as a clock and yet a mystery to us kids. Everything about Dad told us that he had a lot on his mind: the way he rocked back on his heels, lock-kneed, shuffling the change in his pocket. When he walked in the door, he always headed straight for a beer.