Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  “Oh no,” demurred Nettie, “it would make me dizzy. And please”—she turned ardently toward my mother—“call me Nettie, not Mrs. Levine.”

  My mother flushed, pleased and confused. As always, when uncertain she beat a quick retreat into insinuation. “I haven’t seen Mr. Levine, have I,” she said. In her own ears this was a neutral question, in anyone else’s it was a flat statement bordering on accusation.

  “No, you haven’t.” Nettie smiled. “He isn’t here. Right now he’s somewhere on the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Oy vay, he’s in the army,” my mother announced, the color beginning to leave her cheeks. It was the middle of the war. My brother was sixteen, my father in his late forties. My mother had been left in peace. Her guilt was extravagant.

  “No,” said Nettie, looking confused herself. “He’s in the Merchant Marine.” I don’t think she fully understood the distinction. Certainly my mother didn’t. She turned an inquiring face toward my father. He shrugged and looked blank.

  “That’s a seaman, Ma,” my brother said quickly. “He works as a sailor, but he’s not in the navy. He works on ships for private companies.”

  “But I thought Mr. Levine was Jewish,” my mother protested innocently.

  My brother’s face brightened nearly to purple, but Nettie only smiled proudly. “He is,” she said.

  My mother dared not say what she wanted to say: Impossible! What Jew would work voluntarily on a ship?

  Everything about Nettie proved to be impossible. She was a Gentile married to a Jew like no Jew we had ever known. Alone most of the time and apparently free to live wherever she chose, she had chosen to live among working-class Jews who offered her neither goods nor charity. A woman whose sexy good looks brought her darting glances of envy and curiosity, she seemed to value inordinately the life of every respectable dowd. She praised my mother lavishly for her housewifely skills—her ability to make small wages go far, always have the house smelling nice and the children content to be at home—as though these skills were a treasure, some precious dowry that had been denied her, and symbolized a life from which she had been shut out. My mother—secretly as amazed as everyone else by Nettie’s allure—would look thoughtfully at her when she tried (often vaguely, incoherently) to speak of the differences between them, and would say to her, “But you’re a wife now. You’ll learn these things. It’s nothing. There’s nothing to learn.” Nettie’s face would then flush painfully, and she’d shake her head. My mother didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain.

  Rick Levine returned to New York two months after Nettie had moved into the building. She was wildly proud of her tall, dark, bearded seaman—showing him off in the street to the teenagers she had made friends with, dragging him in to meet us, making him go to the grocery store with her—and she became visibly transformed. A kind of illumination settled on her skin. Her green almond eyes were speckled with light. A new grace touched her movements: the way she walked, moved her hands, smoothed back her hair. There was suddenly about her an aristocracy of physical being. Her beauty deepened. She was untouchable.

  I saw the change in her, and was magnetized. I would wake up in the morning and wonder if I was going to run into her in the hall that day. If I didn’t, I’d find an excuse to ring her bell. It wasn’t that I wanted to see her with Rick: his was a sullen beauty, glum and lumpish, and there was nothing happening between them that interested me. It was her I wanted to see, only her. And I wanted to touch her. My hand was always threatening to shoot away from my body out toward her face, her arm, her side. I yearned toward her. She radiated a kind of promise I couldn’t stay away from, I wanted … I wanted … I didn’t know what I wanted.

  But the elation was short-lived: hers and mine. One morning, a week after Rick’s return, my mother ran into Nettie as they were both leaving the house. Nettie turned away from her.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother demanded. “Turn around. Let me see your face.” Nettie turned toward her slowly. A tremendous blue-black splotch surrounded her half-closed right eye.

  “Oh my God,” my mother breathed reverently.

  “He didn’t mean it,” Nettie pleaded. “It was a mistake. He wanted to go down to the bar to see his friends. I wouldn’t let him go. It took a long time before he hit me.”

  After that she looked again as she had before he came home. Two weeks later Rick Levine was gone again, this time on a four-month cruise. He swore to his clinging wife that this would be his last trip. When he came home in April, he said, he would find a good job in the city and they would at long last settle down. She believed that he meant it this time, and finally she let him pull her arms from around his neck. Six weeks after he had sailed she discovered she was pregnant. Late in the third month of his absence she received a telegram informing her that Rick had been shot to death during a quarrel in a bar in port somewhere on the Baltic Sea. His body was being shipped back to New York, and the insurance was in question.

  Nettie became intertwined in the dailiness of our life so quickly it was hard later for me to remember what our days had been like before she lived next door. She’d slip in for coffee late in the morning, then again in the afternoon, and seemed to have supper with us three nights a week. Soon I felt free to walk into her house at any hour, and my brother was being consulted daily about the puzzling matter of Rick’s insurance.

  “It’s a pity on her,” my mother kept saying. “A widow. Pregnant, poor, abandoned.”

  Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled. The compact was made without a word between them. We got beautiful Nettie in the kitchen every day, and Nettie got my mother’s protection in the building. When Mrs. Zimmerman rang our bell to inquire snidely after the shiksa my mother cut her off sharply, telling her she was busy and had no time to talk nonsense. After that no one in the building gossiped about Nettie in front of any of us.

  My mother’s loyalty once engaged was unswerving. Loyalty, however, did not prevent her from judging Nettie; it only made her voice her reservations in a manner rather more indirect than the one to which she was accustomed. She would sit in the kitchen with her sister, my aunt Sarah, who lived four blocks away, discussing the men who had begun to appear, one after another, at Nettie’s door in the weeks following Rick’s death. These men were his shipmates, particularly the ones who had been on board with him on this last voyage, coming to offer condolences to the widow of one of their own, and to talk over with her the matter of the seaman’s life insurance, which evidently was being withheld from Nettie because of the way in which Rick had died. There was, my mother said archly, something strange about the way these men visited. Oh? My aunt raised an interested eyebrow. What exactly was strange? Well, my mother offered, some of them came only once, which was normal, but some of them came twice, three times, one day after another, and those who came two, three times had a look about them, she must surely be wrong about this, but they looked almost as though they thought they were getting away with something. And Nettie herself acted strangely with these men. Perhaps that was what was most troubling: the odd mannerisms Nettie seemed to adopt in the presence of the men. My mother and my aunt exchanged “glances.”

  “What do you mean?” I would ask loudly. “What’s wrong with the way she acts? There’s nothing wrong with the way she acts. Why are you talking like this?” They would become silent then, both of them, neither answering me nor talking again that day about Nettie, at least not while I was in the room.

  One Saturday morning I walked into Nettie’s house without knocking (her door was always closed bu
t never locked). Her little kitchen table was propped against the wall beside the front door—her foyer was smaller than ours, you fell into the kitchen—and people seated at the table were quickly “caught” by anyone who entered without warning. That morning I saw a tall thin man with straw-colored hair sitting at the kitchen table. Opposite him sat Nettie, her head bent toward the cotton-print tablecloth I loved (we had shiny, boring oilcloth on our table). Her arm was stretched out, her hand lying quietly on the table. The man’s hand, large and with great bony knuckles on it, covered hers. He was gazing at her bent head. I came flying through the door, a bundle of nine-year-old intrusive motion. She jumped in her seat, and her head came up swiftly. In her eyes was an expression I would see many times in the years ahead but was seeing that day for the first time, and although I had not the language to name it I had the sentience to feel jarred by it. She was calculating the impression this scene was making on me.

  It’s a cloudy afternoon in April, warm and gray, the air sweet with new spring. The kind of weather that induces nameless stirrings in unidentifiable parts. As it happens, it is also the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. My mother wants to attend the annual memorial meeting at Hunter College. She has asked me to come with her. I’ve refused, but I’ve agreed to walk her up Lexington Avenue to the school. Now, as we walk, she recounts an adventure she had yesterday on the street.

  “I was standing on the avenue,” she tells me, “waiting for the light to change, and a little girl, maybe seven years old, was standing next to me. All of a sudden, before the light changed, she stepped out into the street. I pulled her back onto the sidewalk and I said to her, ‘Darling, never never cross on the red. Cross only on the green.’ The kid looks at me with real pity in her face and she says, ‘Lady, you’ve got it all upside down.’”

  “That kid’s not gonna make it to eight,” I say.

  “Just what I was thinking.” My mother laughs.

  We’re on Lexington in the lower Forties. It’s a Sunday. The street is deserted, its shops and restaurants closed, very few people out walking.

  “I must have a cup of coffee,” my mother announces.

  My mother’s wishes are simple but they are not negotiable. She experiences them as necessities. Right now she must have a cup of coffee. There will be no sidetracking of this desire she calls a need until the cup of steaming liquid is in her hand being raised to her lips.

  “Let’s walk over to Third Avenue,” I say. “There should be something open there.” We cross the street and head east.

  “I was talking to Bella this morning,” my mother says on the other side of the avenue, shaking her head from side to side. “People are so cruel! I don’t understand it. She has a son, a doctor, you should pardon me, he is so mean to her. I just don’t understand. What would it hurt him, he’d invite his mother out for a Sunday to the country?”

  “The country? I thought Bella’s son works in Manhattan.”

  “He lives in Long Island.”

  “Is that the country?”

  “It isn’t West End Avenue!”

  “Okay, okay, so what did he do now?”

  “It isn’t what he did now, it’s what he does always. She was talking to her grandchild this morning and the kid told her they had a lot of people over yesterday afternoon, what a nice time they all had eating on the porch. You can imagine how Bella felt. She hasn’t been invited there in months. Neither the son nor his wife have any feeling for her.”

  “Ma, how that son managed to survive having Bella for a mother, much less made it through medical school, is something for Ripley, and you know it.”

  “She’s his mother.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Don’t ‘oh, God’ me. That’s right. She’s his mother. Plain and simple. She went without so that he could have.”

  “Have what? Her madness? Her anxiety?”

  “Have life. Plain and simple. She gave him his life.”

  “That was all a long time ago, Ma. He can’t remember that far back.”

  “It’s uncivilized he shouldn’t remember!”

  “Be that as it may. It cannot make him want to ask her to sit down with his friends on a lovely Saturday afternoon in early spring.”

  “He should do it whether he wants to or not. Don’t look at me like that. I know what I’m talking about.”

  We find a coffee shop on Third Avenue, an upwardly mobile greasy spoon, all plastic wood, vinyl leather, tin-plated chandeliers with candle-shaped bulbs burning in the pretentiously darkened afternoon.

  “All right?” my mother says brightly to me.

  If I said, “Ma, this place is awful,” she’d say, “My fancy daughter. I was raised in a cold-water flat with the toilet in the hall but this isn’t good enough for you. So okay, you pick the place,” and we’d go trudging on up Third Avenue. But I nod yes, sit down with her in a booth by the window, and prepare to drink a cup of dreadful coffee while we go on with our weighty conversation about children and parents.

  “Hot,” my mother says to the heavy-lidded, black-haired waiter approaching our table very slowly. “I want my coffee hot.”

  He stares at her with so little expression on his face that each of us is sure he has not understood. Then he turns toward me, only his eyebrows inquiring. My mother puts her hand on his arm and cocking her head to one side smiles extravagantly at him. “Where are you from?” she asks.

  “Ma,” I say.

  Holding the waiter fast between her fingers, she repeats, “Where?”

  The waiter smiles. “Greek,” he says to her. “I Greek.”

  “Greek,” she says, as though assessing the value of the nationality he has offered her. “Good. I like Greeks. Remember. Hot. I want my coffee hot.” He bursts out laughing. She’s right. She knows what she’s talking about. It’s I who am confused in the world, not she.

  Business over, she settles back into the argument. “It’s no use. Say what you will, children don’t love their parents as they did when I was young.”

  “Ma, do you really believe that?”

  “I certainly do! My mother died in my sister’s arms, with all her children around her. How will I die, will you please tell me? They probably won’t find me for a week. Days pass. I don’t hear from you. Your brother I see three times a year. The neighbors? Who? Who’s there to check on me? Manhattan is not the Bronx, you know.”

  “Exactly. That’s what this is all about. Manhattan is not the Bronx. Your mother didn’t die in her daughter’s arms because your sister loved her more than we love you. Your sister hated your mother, and you know it. She was there because it was her duty to be there, and because she lived around the corner all her married life. It had nothing to do with love. It wasn’t a better life, it was an immigrant life, a working-class life, a life from another century.”

  “Call it what you want,” she replies angrily, “it was a more human way to live.”

  We are silent. The waiter comes with the coffee. She has the cup in her hands before he has fully turned away. She sips, looks scornfully after his retreating back. “You think it’s hot?” she says. “It’s not hot.”

  “Call him back.”

  She pushes the air away with her hand. “Forget it. I’ll drink it as it is, the devil won’t take me.” Clearly the conversation is depressing her.

  “Well, all I can say is, if he wasn’t her son Bella would never lay eyes on him again.”

  “That makes two of them, doesn’t it? He certainly wouldn’t lay eyes on her again if she wasn’t his mother, would he?”

  My mother gazes steadily at me across the table. “So what are you saying, my brilliant daughter?”

  “I’m saying that nowadays love has to be earned. Even by mothers and sons.”

  Her mouth falls open and her eyes deepen with pity. What I have just said is so retarded she may not recover the power of speech. Then, shaking her head back and forth, she says, “I’ll tell you like the kid told me, ‘Lady, you’ve got the whole t
hing upside down.’”

  At this moment the waiter passes by carrying a pot of steaming coffee. My mother’s hand shoots out, nearly unbalancing him. “Is that hot?” she demands. “This wasn’t hot.” He shrugs, stops, pours coffee into her cup. She drinks greedily and nods grudgingly. “It’s hot.” Satisfaction at last.

  “Let’s go,” she says, standing up, “it’s getting late.”

  We retrace our steps and continue on up Lexington Avenue. The air is sweeter than before, warmer, fuller, with a hint of rain now at its bright gray edge. Delicious! A surge of expectation rises without warning in me but, as usual, does not get very far. Instead of coming up straight and clear it twists about, turns inward, and quickly stifles itself to death; a progress with which I am depressingly familiar. I glance sideways at my mother. I must be imagining this, but it seems to me her face reflects the same crazy journey of detoured emotion. There is color in her cheek, but her eye is startled and her mouth pulled downward. What, I wonder, does she see when she looks at me? The mood of the day begins to shift dangerously.

  We’re in the Fifties. Huge plate-glass windows filled with color and design line the avenue. What a relief it’s Sunday, the stores are closed, no decisions to make. We share an appreciation of clothes, my mother and I, of looking nice in clothes, but we cannot bear to shop, either of us. We’re always wearing the same few articles of clothing we have each picked hastily from the nearest rack. When we stand as we do now, before a store window, forced to realize there are women who dress with deliberation, we are aware of mutual disability, and we become what we often are: two women of remarkably similar inhibitions bonded together by virtue of having lived within each other’s orbit nearly all their lives. In such moments the fact that we are mother and daughter strikes an alien note. I know it is precisely because we are mother and daughter that our responses are mirror images, yet the word filial does not seem appropriate. On the contrary, the idea of family, of our being family, of family life seems altogether puzzling: an uncertainty in her as well as in myself. We are so used to thinking of ourselves as a pair of women, ill-starred and incompetent (she widowed, me divorced), endlessly unable to get family life for themselves. Yet, as we stand before the store window, “family life” seems as much a piece of untested fantasy in her as it is in me. The clothes in the window make me feel we have both been confused the whole of our lives about who we are, and how to get there.