It rained earlier in the day and now, at one in the afternoon, for a minute and a half, New York is washed clean. The streets glitter in the pale spring sunlight. Cars radiate dust-free happiness. Storefront windows sparkle mindlessly. Even people look made anew.
We’re walking down Eighth Avenue into the Village. At the corner of Eighth and Greenwich is a White Tower hamburger joint, where a group of derelicts in permanent residence entertain visiting out-of-towners from Fourteenth Street, Chelsea, even the Bowery. This afternoon the party on the corner, often raucous, is definitely on the gloomy side, untouched by weather renewal. As we pass the restaurant doors, however, one gentleman detaches from the group, takes two or three uncertain steps, and bars our way. He stands, swaying, before us. He is black, somewhere between twenty-five and sixty. His face is cut and swollen, the eyelids three-quarters shut. His hair is a hundred filthy matted little pigtails, his pants are held up by a piece of rope, his shoes are two sizes too large, the feet inside them bare. So is his chest, visible beneath a grimy tweed coat that swings open whenever he moves. This creature confronts us, puts out his hand palm up, and speaks.
“Can you ladies let me have a thousand dollars for a martini?” he inquires.
My mother looks directly into his face. “I know we’re in an inflation,” she says, “but a thousand dollars for a martini?”
His mouth drops. It’s the first time in God knows how long that a mark has acknowledged his existence. “You’re beautiful,” he burbles at her. “Beautiful.”
“Look on him,” she says to me in Yiddish. “Just look on him.”
He turns his bleary eyelids in my direction. “Whad-she-say?” he demands. “Whad-she-say?”
“She said you’re breaking her heart,” I tell him.
“She-say-that?” His eyes nearly open. “She-say-that?”
I nod. He whirls at her. “Take me home and make love to me,” he croons, and right there in the street, in the middle of the day, he begins to bay at the moon. “I need you,” he howls at my mother and doubles over, his fist in his stomach. “I need you.”
She nods at him. “I need too,” she says dryly. “Fortunately or unfortunately, it is not you I need.” And she propels me around the now motionless derelict. Paralyzed by recognition, he will no longer bar our progress down the street.
We cross Abingdon Square and walk into Bleecker Street. The gentrified West Village closes around us, makes us not peaceful but quiet. We walk through block after block of antique stores, gourmet shops, boutiques, not speaking. But for how long can my mother and I not speak?
“So I’m reading the biography you gave me,” she says. I look at her, puzzled, and then I remember. “Oh!” I smile in wide delight. “Are you enjoying it?”
“Listen,” she begins. The smile drops off my face and my stomach contracts. That “listen” means she is about to trash the book I gave her to read. She is going to say, “What. What’s here? What’s here that I don’t already know? I lived through it. I know it all. What can this writer tell me that I don’t already know? Nothing. To you it’s interesting, but to me? How can this be interesting to me?”
On and on she’ll go, the way she does when she thinks she doesn’t understand something and she’s scared, and she’s taking refuge in scorn and hypercriticality.
The book I gave her to read is a biography of Josephine Herbst, a thirties writer, a stubborn willful raging woman grabbing at politics and love and writing, in there punching until the last minute.
“Listen,” my mother says now in the patronizing tone she thinks conciliatory. “Maybe this is interesting to you, but not to me. I lived through all this. I know it all. What can I learn from this? Nothing. To you it’s interesting. Not to me.”
Invariably, when she speaks so, my head fills with blood and before the sentences have stopped pouring from her mouth I am lashing out at her. “You’re an ignoramus, you know nothing, only a know-nothing talks the way you do. The point of having lived through it, as you say, is only that the background is familiar, so the book is made richer, not that you could have written the book. People a thousand times more educated than you have read and learned from this book, but you can’t learn from it?” On and on I would go, thoroughly ruining the afternoon for both of us.
However, in the past year an odd circumstance has begun to obtain. On occasion, my head fails to fill with blood. I become irritated but remain calm. Not falling into a rage, I do not make a holocaust of the afternoon. Today, it appears, one of those moments is upon us. I turn to my mother, throw my left arm around her still solid back, place my right hand on her upper arm, and say, “Ma, if this book is not interesting to you, that’s fine. You can say that.” She looks coyly at me, eyes large, head half-turned; now she’s interested. “But don’t say it has nothing to teach you. That there’s nothing here. That’s unworthy of you, and of the book, and of me. You demean us all when you say that.” Listen to me. Such wisdom. And all of it gained ten minutes ago.
Silence. Long silence. We walk another block. Silence. She’s looking off into that middle distance. I take my lead from her, matching my steps to hers. I do not speak, do not press her. Another silent block.
“That Josephine Herbst,” my mother says. “She certainly carried on, didn’t she?”
Relieved and happy, I hug her. “She didn’t know what she was doing either, Ma, but yes, she carried on.”
“I’m jealous,” my mother blurts at me. “I’m jealous she lived her life, I didn’t live mine.”
Mama went to work five weeks after my father died. He had left us two thousand dollars. To work or not to work was not a debatable question. But it’s hard to imagine what would have happened if economic necessity had not forced her out of the house. As it was, it seemed to me that she lay on a couch in a half-darkened room for twenty-five years with her hand across her forehead murmuring, “I can’t.” Even though she could, and did.
She pulled on her girdle and her old gray suit, stepped into her black suede chunky heels, applied powder and lipstick to her face, and took the subway downtown to an employment agency where she got a job clerking in an office for twenty-eight dollars a week. After that, she rose each morning, got dressed and drank coffee, made out a grocery list for me, left it together with money on the kitchen table, walked four blocks to the subway station, bought the Times, read it on the train, got off at Forty-second Street, entered her office building, sat down at her desk, put in a day’s work, made the trip home at five o’clock, came in the apartment door, slumped onto the kitchen bench for supper, then onto the couch where she instantly sank into a depression she welcomed like a warm bath. It was as though she had worked all day to earn the despair waiting faithfully for her at the end of her unwilling journey into daily life.
Weekends, of course, the depression was unremitting. A black and wordless pall hung over the apartment all of Saturday and all of Sunday. Mama neither cooked, cleaned, nor shopped. She took no part in idle chatter: the exchange of banalities that fills a room with human presence, declares an interest in being alive. She would not laugh, respond, or participate in any of the compulsive kitchen talk that went on among the rest of us: me, my aunt Sarah, Nettie, my brother. She spoke minimally, and when she did speak her voice was uniformly tight and miserable, always pulling her listener back to a proper recollection of her “condition.” If she answered the phone her voice dropped a full octave when she said hello; she could not trust that the caller would otherwise gauge properly the abiding nature of her pain. For five years she did not go to a movie, a concert, a public meeting. She worked, and she suffered.
Widowhood provided Mama with a higher form of being. In refusing to recover from my father’s death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her. She remained devoted to this seriousness for thirty years. She never tired of it, never grew bored or restless in its company, found new ways to keep alive the interest it deserved and had so undeniably
earned.
Mourning Papa became her profession, her identity, her persona. Years later, when I was thinking about the piece of politics inside of which we had all lived (Marxism and the Communist Party), and I realized that people who worked as plumbers, bakers, or sewing-machine operators had thought of themselves as thinkers, poets, and scholars because they were members of the Communist Party, I saw that Mama had assumed her widowhood in much the same way. It elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech. Papa’s death became a religion that provided ceremony and doctrine. A woman-who-has-lost-the-love-of-her-life was now her orthodoxy: she paid it Talmudic attention.
Papa had never been so real to me in life as he was in death. Always a somewhat shadowy figure, benign and smiling, standing there behind Mama’s dramatics about married love, he became and remained what felt like the necessary instrument of her permanent devastation. It was almost as though she had lived with Papa in order that she might arrive at this moment. Her distress was so all-consuming it seemed ordained. For me, surely, it ordered the world anew.
The air I breathed was soaked in her desperation, made thick and heady by it, exciting and dangerous. Her pain became my element, the country in which I lived, the rule beneath which I bowed. It commanded me, made me respond against my will. I longed endlessly to get away from her, but I could not leave the room when she was in it. I dreaded her return from work, but I was never not there when she came home. In her presence anxiety swelled my lungs (I suffered constrictions of the chest and sometimes felt an iron ring clamped across my skull), but I locked myself in the bathroom and wept buckets on her behalf. On Friday I prepared myself for two solid days of weeping and sighing and the mysterious reproof that depression leaks into the air like the steady escape of gas when the pilot light is extinguished. I woke up guilty and went to bed guilty, and on weekends the guilt accumulated into low-grade infection.
She made me sleep with her for a year, and for twenty years afterward I could not bear a woman’s hand on me. Afraid to sleep alone, she slung an arm across my stomach, pulled me toward her, fingered my flesh nervously, inattentively. I shrank from her touch: she never noticed. I yearned toward the wall, couldn’t get close enough, was always being pulled back. My body became a column of aching stiffness. I must have been excited. Certainly I was repelled.
For two years she dragged me to the cemetery every second or third Sunday morning. The cemetery was in Queens. This meant taking three buses and traveling an hour and fifteen minutes each way. When we climbed onto the third bus she’d begin to cry. Helplessly, I would embrace her. Her cries would grow louder. Inflamed with discomfort, my arm would stiffen around her shoulder and I would stare at the black rubber floor. The bus would arrive at the last stop just as she reached the verge of convulsion.
“We have to get off, Ma,” I’d plead in a whisper.
She would shake herself reluctantly (she hated to lose momentum once she’d started on a real wail) and slowly climb down off the bus. As we went through the gates of the cemetery, however, she’d rally to her own cause. She would clutch my arm and pull me across miles of tombstones (neither of us ever seemed to remember the exact location of the grave), stumbling like a drunk, lurching about and shrieking: “Where’s Papa? Help me find Papa! They’ve lost Papa. Beloved! I’m coming. Wait, only wait, I’m coming!” Then we would find the grave and she would fling herself across it, arrived at last in a storm of climactic release. On the way home she was a rag doll. And I? Numb and dumb, only grateful to have survived the terror of the earlier hours.
One night when I was fifteen I dreamed that the entire apartment was empty, stripped of furniture and brilliantly whitewashed, the rooms gleaming with sun and the whiteness of the walls. A long rope extended the length of the apartment, winding at waist-level through all the rooms. I followed the rope from my room to the front door. There in the open doorway stood my dead father, gray-faced, surrounded by mist and darkness, the rope tied around the middle of his body. I laid my hands on the rope and began to pull, but try as I might I could not lift him across the threshold. Suddenly my mother appeared. She laid her hands over mine and began to pull also. I tried to shake her off, enraged at her interference, but she would not desist, and I did so want to pull him in I said to myself, “All right, I’ll even let her have him, if we can just get him inside.”
For years I thought the dream needed no interpretation, but now I think I longed to get my father across the threshold not out of guilt and sexual competition but so that I could get free of Mama. My skin crawled with her. She was everywhere, all over me, inside and out. Her influence clung, membrane-like, to my nostrils, my eyelids, my open mouth. I drew her into me with every breath I took. I drowsed in her etherizing atmosphere, could not escape the rich and claustrophobic character of her presence, her being, her suffocating suffering femaleness.
I didn’t know the half of it.
One afternoon, in the year of the dream, I was sitting with Nettie. She was making lace, and I was drinking tea. She began to dream out loud. “I think you’ll meet a really nice boy this year,” she said. “Someone older than yourself. Almost out of college. Ready to get a good job. He’ll fall in love with you, and soon you’ll be married.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said sharply.
Nettie let her hands, with the lace still in them, fall to her lap. “You sound just like your mother,” she said softly.
That’s ridiculous. Sometimes I think I was born saying, “That’s ridiculous.” It shoots out of me as easily as good-morning-good-evening-have-a-nice-day-take-care. It is my most on-automatic response. The variety of observations that allows “That’s ridiculous” to pass from my brain to my tongue is astonishing.
“Adultery makes modern marriage work,” someone will say.
“That’s ridiculous,” I’ll say.
“Edgar Allan Poe is the most underrated writer in American literature,” someone will say.
“That’s ridiculous,” I’ll say.
“Sports have an influence on people’s values.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Movies have an influence on people’s fantasies.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“If I could take a year off from work my life would be changed.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Did you know that most women refuse to leave the husbands who beat them?”
“That’s ridiculous!”
Three years ago I ran into Dorothy Levinson on the street. We hugged and kissed many times. She stood there repeating my name. Then she smiled and said, “Do you still say, ‘That’s ridiculous’?” I stared at her. She hadn’t seen me since I was thirteen years old. I felt the blood beating in my cheeks. Yes, I nodded, I do. She threw back her head and nearly had a heart attack laughing. On the spot she invited me to have dinner in a restaurant that night with her and her husband. What an evening that was.
Dorothy Levinson. So beautiful it twisted your heart. Now here she was, fifty, slim, lovely, full of shrewd Jewish wit and crinkle-eyed affection, her face looking remarkably as her mother’s had at this same age: soft and kindly, slightly puzzled, slightly sad.
The Levinsons. I had loved them all—Dorothy, the four boys, the mad parents—but most of all I had loved Davey, the youngest boy, when we were both twelve, and how I had suffered because he hadn’t loved me at all. There he’d been, thin and athletic, with a headful of glossy black curls and brilliant black eyes (every little girl had wanted him), and there I’d been, pudgy, sullen, superior. The whole thing had been quite hopeless.
The Levinsons were our summer people. Between my tenth and my thirteenth summers we were in residence at Ben’s Bungalows in the Catskill Mountains. Two contingents dominated this bungalow colony: people like ourselves from the Bronx and people like the Levinsons from the Lower East Side. Or, as my mother put it, “the politically enlightened and the Je
wish gangsters.”
The Jewish gangsters had it all over the politically enlightened in the mountains. They learned quickly where good times in the country were to be had, and went after them as single-mindedly as they pursued their share of the action on Grand Street. They swam out farther in the lake than we did, roamed farther afield in search of wild fruit, trekked deeper into the forest. They danced in electric rainstorms, slept on the open mountainside on hot nights, persisted in losing their virginity wherever possible, and in making everyone else lose theirs as well.
The darkest and wildest of them all were the Levinsons—from Sonny the oldest son, to Dorothy the only daughter, down to my beloved Davey. They were so beautiful it was hard to look directly at them. Two summers in a row we shared a double bungalow with the Levinsons, and I was in a continual state as they slammed in and out of the screen door that hung on the same thin frame as ours. I remember those summers as flashes of black silky curls whirling by in the noonday sun, or quick darting glances in the bright shade from a pair of black eyes filled with scheming laughter. They were always going somewhere, planning something. Whatever they did it was the thing to do. Wherever they went it was the place to go. I longed to be asked to join them, but I never was. I stayed behind in the bungalow with my mother or read on the grass nearby, while they ran out into an intensity of sweet summer air to catch salamanders and frogs, explore abandoned houses, plunge repeatedly into the lake, feel sun burning into bare brown flesh, long after I had been called in to supper.
Dorothy and her husband and I went to a restaurant in the Village, and the talk plunged headlong into the past. Dorothy’s husband, an accountant, knew he didn’t have a chance and settled good-naturedly into playing audience for the evening. Dorothy and I, absorbed by every scrap of memory—Grand Street, the Bronx, Ben’s Bungalows—talked over each other’s voices, shrieking with laughter at everything, at nothing.
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