Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  My mother was distinguished in the building by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner. Although our apartment door was always closed (a distinction was made between those educated enough to value the privacy of a closed door and those so peasant-like the door was always half open), the neighbors felt free to knock at any time: borrow small kitchen necessities, share a piece of building gossip, even ask my mother to act as arbiter in an occasional quarrel. Her manner at such times was that of a superior person embarrassed by the childlike behavior of her inferiors. “Oy, Zimmerman.” She would smile patronizingly when Mrs. Zimmerman, beside herself over some slight, real or imagined, came to tell her of the perfidy of one or another of our neighbors. “Such foolishness.” Or, “That’s ridiculous,” she would rap out sharply when a tale she considered base or ignorant was repeated to her. She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She knew that, compared with the women around her, she was “developed”—a person of higher thought and feeling—so what was there to think about? “Developed” was one of her favorite words. If Mrs. Zimmerman spoke loudly in the hall on a Saturday morning, we, sitting in the kitchen just behind our apartment door, would stare at each other and, inevitably, my mother would shake her head and pronounce, “An undeveloped woman.” If someone made a crack about the schvartzes, my mother would carefully explain to me that such sentiments were “undeveloped.” If there was a dispute in the grocery store over price or weight, again I would hear the word “undeveloped.” My father smiled at her when she said “undeveloped,” whether out of indulgence or pride I never did know. My brother, on his guard from the age of ten, stared without expression. But I, I absorbed the feel of her words, soaked up every accompanying gesture and expression, every complicated bit of impulse and intent. Mama thinking everyone around was undeveloped, and most of what they said was ridiculous, became imprinted on me like dye on the most receptive of materials.

  The apartment was a five-room flat, with all the rooms opening onto each other. It was a tenement flat not a railroad flat: not one window looked into an airshaft. The apartment door opened into a tiny foyer that gave directly onto the kitchen. To the right of the kitchen, in the foyer, stood the refrigerator, propped against a wall at right angles to the bathroom: a tiny rectangle with a painted wooden door whose upper half was frosted glass. Beyond the foyer stood two rooms of equal size separated by a pair of curtained glass doors. The second of these rooms faced the street and was flooded with afternoon sunlight. Off this front room, at either end, were two tiny bedrooms, one of which also faced the street, the other the back of the building.

  Because the front room and one of the bedrooms faced the street, ours was considered a desirable apartment, an apartment “to the front.” A few years ago a man who had also grown up on my block said to me, “I always thought you were richer than us because you lived to the front.” Although living to the front usually did mean that the husbands made more money than did the husbands of those living tief, teier in draird (deeply, dearly in hell) to the back, we lived to the front because part of my mother’s claim to a superior grasp of life’s necessities rested on her insistence that, unless we stood nose to nose with welfare, an apartment to the back was not within the range of domestic consideration. Nevertheless, it was “to the back” that we—that is, she and I—actually lived.

  The kitchen window faced the alley in the back of the building, as did the kitchen windows of the building next to ours, and those of two other buildings whose entrances were on the opposite side of the square block these apartment houses shared. There were no trees or bushes or grasses of any kind in the alley—only concrete, wire fencing, and wooden poles. Yet I remember the alley as a place of clear light and sweet air, suffused, somehow, with a perpetual smell of summery green.

  The alley caught the morning sun (our kitchen was radiant before noon), and it was a shared ritual among the women that laundry was done early on a washboard in the sink and hung out to dry in the sun. Crisscrossing the alley, from first floor to fifth, were perhaps fifty clotheslines strung out on tall wooden poles planted in the concrete ground. Each apartment had its own line stretching out among ten others on the pole. The wash from each line often interfered with the free flap of the wash on the line above or below, and the sight of a woman yanking hard at a clothesline, trying to shake her wash free from an indiscriminate tangle of sheets and trousers, was common. While she was pulling at the line she might also be calling “Berth-a-a. Berth-a-a. Ya home, Bertha?” Friends were scattered throughout the buildings on the alley, and called to one another all during the day to make various arrangements (“What time ya taking Harvey to the doctor?” Or, “Got sugar in the house? I’ll send Marilyn over.” Or, “Meetcha on the corner in ten minutes”). So much stir and animation! The clear air, the unshadowed light, the women calling to each other, the sounds of their voices mixed with the smell of clothes drying in the sun, all that texture and color swaying in open space. I leaned out the kitchen window with a sense of expectancy I can still taste in my mouth, and that taste is colored a tender and brilliant green.

  For me, the excitement in the apartment was located in the kitchen and the life outside its window. It was a true excitement: it grew out of contradiction. Here in the kitchen I did my homework and kept my mother company, watched her prepare and execute her day. Here, also, I learned that she had the skill and vitality to do her work easily and well but that she disliked it, and set no store by it. She taught me nothing. I never learned how to cook, clean, or iron clothes. She herself was a boringly competent cook, a furiously fast housecleaner, a demonic washerwoman.

  Still, she and I occupied the kitchen fully. Although my mother never seemed to be listening to what went on in the alley, she missed nothing. She heard every voice, every motion of the clothesline, every flap of the sheets, registered each call and communication. We laughed together over this one’s broken English, that one’s loudmouthed indiscretion, a screech here, a fabulous curse there. Her running commentary on the life outside the window was my first taste of the fruits of intelligence: she knew how to convert gossip into knowledge. She would hear a voice go up one octave and observe: “She had a fight with her husband this morning.” Or it would go down an octave and, “Her kid’s sick.” Or she’d catch a fast exchange and diagnose a cooling friendship. This skill of hers warmed and excited me. Life seemed fuller, richer, more interesting when she was making sense of the human activity in the alley. I felt a live connection, then, between us and the world outside the window.

  The kitchen, the window, the alley. It was the atmosphere in which she was rooted, the background against which she stood outlined. Here she was smart, funny, and energetic, could exercise authority and have impact. But she felt contempt for her environment. “Women, yech!” she’d say. “Clotheslines and gossip,” she’d say. She knew there was another world—the world—and sometimes she thought she wanted that world. Bad. She’d stop dead in the middle of a task, staring for long minutes at a time at the sink, the floor, the stove. But where? how? what?

  So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over the “emptiness of a woman’s life” as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analyzed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley. Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion?

  “Do you remember the Rosemans?” my mother asks as we are walking up Sixth Avenue in the Forties. They were the family who lived in the Zimmerman apartment our first two years in th
e building.

  “Of course,” I say. “Now they were an interesting couple.”

  Mrs. Roseman was a Jewish Colette: fat and swarthy, with long dark eyes in a beautiful fox face and an aureole of gray-black kinky hair. She played cards obsessively, chain-smoked, and was openly uninterested in her family. There was always a card game going in her house and, as my mother said, “a pot of some kind of shit cooking on the stove all day long, by the time her husband came home from work it tasted like my grandmother’s old shoes.” But my mother’s voice was affectionate not indicting. She was attached to Mrs. Roseman because she, too, had been a member of Tenants’ Council Number 29 ten years earlier in a building three neighborhoods away.

  I had known since early childhood that my parents were fellow travelers of the Communist Party, and that of the two my mother had been the more politically active. By the time I was born she had stood on soapboxes in the Bronx pleading for economic and social justice. It was, in fact, part of her deprivation litany that if it hadn’t been for the children she would have developed into a talented public speaker.

  During the Depression the Communist Party sponsored and ran the Tenants’ Councils, organizations formed to fight eviction for nonpayment of rent. My mother became the head of Tenants’ Council Number 29 in the Bronx (“I was the only woman in the building who could speak English without an accent, so automatically I was voted head”), and continued to act as head until shortly after I was born, when my father made her “stop everything” to stay home with the baby. Until then, she said, she ran the council. Mama running the council was a childhood classic. “Every Saturday morning,” she would tell me, the way other mothers told their children Mary had a little lamb, “I would go down to Communist Party headquarters in Union Square and receive my instructions for the week. Then we would organize, and carry on.” How she loved saying, “Then we would organize, and carry on.” There was more uncomplicated pleasure in her voice when she repeated those words than in any others I ever heard her speak.

  Tenants’ Council Number 29 was made up of most of the women in the building my parents were then living in: immigrant Jews, coarse and energetic. Tenement intimacy among them was compounded by political comradeship. When we had moved into this, our final building in the Bronx, and my mother found Mrs. Roseman living next door, it was as though she had unexpectedly come across not an old friend but a member of a family in whose presence she had once been surprised by complicated stirrings of her own mind and spirit. She and Mrs. Roseman each appreciated the other’s ability to understand political activity that had tapped a reservoir of strong feeling.

  One particular memory of their time together in the council, remarkably unpolitical by their own lights, held them both, and they reminisced often about this incident, always with much head shaking and in an atmosphere of shared wonderment. In the middle of the Depression the women of the council rented rooms one summer, for themselves and their families, in a bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. Most of the families had taken two rooms in the main building (one for the husband and wife, one for the children), although some could manage only one. The women shared the kitchen, the men came up on weekends.

  They were fifteen women, and as my mother said, there in that kitchen she got to know them better than in the two or three years they’d been working together in the Bronx. There was Pessy, she said, “so stupid, put shit on the table she’d call it honey, but a good comrade, no matter what I told her to do she did it without hesitation or complaint.” There was Singer, “the delicate type,” she hated the vulgarity of the others. There was Kornfeld, “a dark and passionate-looking woman, never offered an opinion, always waited until everyone else spoke, then had to be asked what she thought, but always had something intelligent to say.” And, of course, there was Roseman, shrewd, easygoing Roseman, who never missed a trick. Her eyes were everywhere at once, all the while she was dealing cards.

  That summer my mother discovered that Pessy had “a real appetite, you know what I mean?” And Singer turned out to be a pain in the ass. “She was always fainting. No matter what happened, Singer’s eyes would start rolling, and she was going under.” And Kornfeld, well, Kornfeld was another story.

  On Saturday, late in the morning, Pessy would come down in her nightgown, yawning and rubbing herself. The others would start laughing. “Well, Pessy,” someone would say, “tell us what you did last night. You did something good?” Pessy would snort, “What’s to tell? You do what you have to do, then you turn yourselves ass to ass, and you go to sleep. What do you want me to tell you?” But she’d be red-faced and smiling like she had a secret. Singer would turn her face away. And Kornfeld, she’d be sitting in a corner of the kitchen (she was one of those too poor for two rooms, they slept in one room with the three children), she would get more quiet than usual.

  One Sunday night, after the men had gone back to the city and the women were all sitting on the porch, somebody suddenly said, “Where’s Kornfeld?” They looked around, sure enough, no Kornfeld. They started calling, “Komfeld, Kornfeld.” No answer. They went into her room, the children were sound asleep, but no Kornfeld. They got frightened and began to search for her. They fanned out, two by two (“My luck,” my mother said, “I got Singer”), each with a flashlight (“You know how dark the countryside was in those years?”), and started yelling into the world, “Kornfeld, Kornfeld.”

  “An hour we must have been running around,” my mother said, “like crazy people. Then I take a look and there, we’re maybe half a mile from the farm, lying across the middle of the road, a black shape, not moving, you couldn’t tell what it was. Right away, Singer starts fainting. I look from the road to Singer, from Singer to the road. ‘Shut up, Singer,’ I said. Then I turned to the thing in the road and I said, ‘Get up, Kornfeld.’ Singer’s mouth opened and shut, but she didn’t make a sound. The thing in the road didn’t move. Again I said, ‘Kornfeld, get up.’ And then she got up. I turned Singer around and walked her back to the farm.”

  “How did you know it was Mrs. Kornfeld?” I asked the first time I heard the story. “I don’t know,” my mother said, “I just knew. I knew immediately.” Another time I asked, “Why do you think she did it?” My mother shrugged. “She was a passionate woman. You know, Jews weren’t so bold forty years ago, like some people I could name, they didn’t have sex with the children in the room … Maybe she wanted to punish us.” Another year my mother startled me by saying, “That Kornfeld. She hated herself. That’s why she did it.” I asked her to explain what she meant by “hated herself.” She couldn’t.

  But what I have always remembered most about the Kornfeld story was that Mrs. Roseman, who gave off more sexual shrewdness than all the women in the building put together, and considered my mother a working-class romantic, had respected her because she’d known the thing in the road was Kornfeld.

  “Do you remember the girls?” my mother asks now, as we are approaching the Time-Life Building. “The two daughters she had by Roseman?” Mrs. Roseman had had a lover when she was young, an Italian Communist who had died and left her pregnant. Mr. Roseman had adored her, married her, raised the child (a boy) as though he were his own, and had then fathered two children himself.

  “Yes,” I say. “I remember the girls.”

  “Do you remember that during the war the younger one, she must have been seventeen then, got pneumonia? They thought she was dying, in those years people died of pneumonia, and I bought her. After that she always called me Mama.”

  “You did what?” I stop walking.

  “I bought her, I bought her. You know, Jews believed that if someone you loved was in danger you sold them and that warded off the evil eye.” She laughs. “If they weren’t yours what could happen to them?”

  I stare hard at her. She ignores my stare.

  “Roseman came to the door and she said to me, ‘The girl is dying. Will you buy her?’ So I bought her. I think I gave Roseman ten dollars.”

  “Ma,�
�� I say, “you knew this was a peasant superstition, an old wives’ tale, and still you took part in it? You agreed to buy her?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “But, Ma! You were both communists.”

  “Well, listen,” she says. “We had to save her life.”

  My parents slept, alternately, in either of the two middle rooms, some years in the back, some years in the front, whereupon the unused other room became the living room. For years they dragged a huge Philco radio and three monstrous pieces of furniture (an overstuffed couch and two chairs covered in maroon cloth threaded with gold) back and forth between the front room and the back room.

  When I grew up I puzzled over why my parents had never taken one of the little rooms for themselves, why they slept in open territory, so to speak, and when I was in my twenties I asked my mother why. She looked at me just about thirty seconds too long. Then she said, “We knew that the children each needed a room for themselves.” I gave her back the same thirty seconds. She had made such an intolerable romance of her marriage, had impaled us all on the cross of my father’s early death, and here she was telling me that the privacy needed for sexual joy was given up for the good of the children?

  My mother had been distinguished in the building not only by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner, but also by her status as a happily married woman. No, I haven’t said that right. Not just happily married. Magically married. Definitively married.

  My parents were, I think, happy together, their behavior with one another civilized and affectionate—but an ideal of marital happiness suffused the atmosphere my mother and I shared that made simple reality a circumstance not worthy of respect, definitely not what it was all about. What it was all about was Mama’s worshipful attitude toward the goodness of her married life, accompanied by a sniffing dismissal of all marriages that did not closely resemble hers, and the single-mindedness of her instruction to me in hundreds of ways, over thousands of days, that love was the most important thing in a woman’s life.