Marilyn had also spotted Nettie and the man. Without consultation we halted our bikes far enough from the benches so that Nettie couldn’t see us, and sat leaning forward over our handlebars. For a moment neither of us spoke, we simply watched.
“She’s picking him up,” Marilyn said softly.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“That’s a strange man, and she’s picking him up.”
“How do you know that?”
“Can’t you see? By the way they’re sitting? And besides, that’s what people do here.”
“You’re kidding. How do you know that?”
“Everyone knows that.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
So the people who sat here late in the day in spring and summer were not dreaming about unexpected channels of water just beyond view, they were determining on human adventure right there on the bench beside them. I stared at Marilyn, but I believed her. She knew more about these things than I did.
Where, I always wondered afterward, had Richie been that afternoon? Mama said that in fact Richie was with Nettie most of the time, he provided her with interest value and legitimacy. Not to mention that she had nowhere to leave him or anyone to leave him with. I wondered how Mama knew this, as Nettie never discussed her forays into the street with any of us. We deduced activity from consequence. Men would be seen entering or leaving the apartment. Some came once and never again, some came three or four times, some came for weeks or months. I don’t think she took money from them. She may have let them give her things (a winter coat, a bag of groceries, a trip to the ocean), but it wasn’t money she was after.
She brought them home from foreign parts: walks in adjacent neighborhoods, subway trips she made downtown. The priest came from downtown. She had determined after her marriage to Rick never to enter a church again and she was raising Richie to know he was Jewish, but in her loneliness she was drawn repeatedly to the oldest comfort of her life. She took seriously her lapse from the Church, did not think it her right to approach the altar, sink to her knees, or ask for communion, but she would search out churches of all kinds just to sit in the back and feel brief respite in a looming candlelit interior while Richie played with the buttons on her dress, mesmerized by her heaving breast as she sighed and trembled and wept a little.
One day she was wandering around the department stores on Thirty-fourth Street. She passed a church near Gimbel’s. On impulse she walked in and slipped into a confessional. The priest was young and must have been easily moved by her broken murmurs, her whispered vulnerabilities, her confided marginality among the Jewish women who refused her pity or friendship, could not see into her feeling heart, did not understand how alone she was in this world protected as they were by husbands and respectability. The priest urged her to return and unburden herself once more. She went again, and yet again. Then the priest told himself he was making a house call to a parishioner in need.
“She bit him all up,” my mother said. “He came for months. Then she got so wild she bit him all up. They saw the marks. They said to him, Where have you been? What could he say? They locked him up, there in the monastery.”
“It’s not a monastery, Ma.” I said. “It’s just a church near Gimbel’s.”
“Whatever the hell they call it,” she said impatiently. She hated having the story line interrupted by a correction.
The priest did come for months, I remember that. He came late in the afternoon once, sometimes twice a week, but that spring evening when I saw them on the bed was probably the time she bit him all up, because I have no memory of the priest after that night.
It must have been iron in her mouth time after time. I remember the morning the chicken-store owner appeared at the door. Seven o’clock, and suddenly an immense noise out in the hallway. Mama pulled open the door and there he was, Joseph Stalin standing in Nettie’s doorway with a plucked chicken in one hand, Nettie in her nightgown with a second chicken in her hand, beating him about the face with the naked bird, shrieking, “For a chicken? You think I’ll do it for a chicken?”
But everyone, Mama included, thought she was asking for whatever she got. She was considered provocative, suggestive, inviting. If you asked for specifics it was hard to get them. Foreheads would wrinkle, eyelids would narrow, mouths would purse. No one could say exactly what it was about her. On the other hand, no one backed down. It’s not what she wears, one would say, it’s the way she wears it. It’s not what she says so much, it’s the way she says it. It’s not the expression on her face, it’s sort of the whole face. You know what I mean? I can’t put my finger on it, but I know what I mean. I would nod. I knew what they meant, too.
She had a way of walking up the block that had made me uncomfortable from the time I was ten years old. She walked like no other woman in the neighborhood. A woman’s walk might be brisk or lazy, but inevitably it was the errand-bound walk of a housewife; her legs were attached to her torso for the strict purpose of useful locomotion, she was not walking to feel her body in motion or to have its movement acknowledged or responded to. Nettie was. Her walk was slow and deliberate. She moved first one haunch, then the other, making her hips sway. Everyone knew this woman was going nowhere, that she was walking to walk, walking to feel the effect she had on the street. Her walk insisted on the flesh beneath the clothes. It said, “This body has the power to make you want.” There was nothing like her for a thousand miles around. Men and women alike hungered for her. It was awful. I could see she aroused strong emotion, but that emotion seemed bound up with punishment not privilege. The way people looked at her—the cruelty in the men, the anger in the women—made me fearful. I felt her in danger. Nettie walking up the block became woven into the fabric of early anxiety.
She, of course, was fearless. She took on all corners. Every pair of eyes on her was met by her own: wide, innocent, taunting. Sexual malice ran so deep in her it was an essence: primitive, calculating, stubborn; enraged at the center; made reckless by some burning imperative that pushed against a shifting outer limit, wholly determined by how bad she felt about herself and her life on any given day of the week. She knew of no other way to make herself feel better than to make people want her. She knew that when she swayed her hips, raised her eyelids slowly, brushed her hand languorously through her red hair, promise stirred in the groin. She knew this. It was all she knew. She thought this knowledge gave her power. She thought her own heartlessness was power. “You will feel and I will not feel,” her swaying body said, “and that will make you weak and me strong.” But she understood her situation only very imperfectly. She was, after all, a peasant from a village in the Ukraine with a limited grasp on things. Richie understood better than she what was actually going on, and one hot summer evening when I was seventeen and he was eight he showed me what he knew.
It was late August. Deep, serious heat. Cumulative heat that never entirely evaporated from the streets or from the apartments. You suffered the heat either intensely or less intensely. In the evening the worst of the midday swelter eased off and a weak breeze came through the windows propped open by wooden-framed screens. A convalescent sensuousness overtook the semidarkened rooms. We began to recover from the assault of the day.
I was sitting on the couch in the living room in a mood of dreamy exhaustion, trying to read in the last hour of daylight. Richie was sitting beside me, demanding attention. He was a beautiful child, dark-eyed, dark-haired, with high pink-and-white coloring, an irresistible smile, a voice like his mother’s, soft and insinuating. He knew that in our house he had rights rather than obligations. This knowledge allowed him to move to the edge of brashness, although rarely did he cross a border from which he could not beat a safe retreat. On this particular evening, though, Richie wanted me to be with him. I elbowed him away, my eye not leaving the page. He refused my refusal.
“Richie,” I said in exasperation, my eye still on the book. “Not now.”
“Yes,” he sai
d. “Now.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
I laughed, but kept on reading. Richie climbed onto my lap and began to play with the front of my dress, a brief halter-style affair, white and summer-thin, held closed by a zipper that stretched from neck to navel. I pushed weakly, inattentively, at his hands, still reading. He twined his arms around my neck and pressed his open lips against my throat. Startled, I felt his live mouth on me. I pushed seriously at him, but too late: he had sensed my hesitation. He held on to me, pressing himself against my chest as though now he had a right to me. He was strong, stronger than me. We began to fight as though we were both adults, or both children. Suddenly, in one incredible motion, Richie pulled the zipper of the dress all the way down, pushed one hand under my bra, the other under my panties. Before I realized what was happening, he had grasped my nipple between two fingers and was moving the middle finger of his other hand toward my groin. I went up like a tinderbox: instant convulsion of the body. In half a second I had his hands off me and was holding him out by the wrists, immobilized. I looked into his face, amazed. He looked back into mine. I could see in his face what he saw in mine. I could also see what he made of what he saw. His face was intent with triumph, interest, excitement. And behind the excitement something even more curious: a kind of sadness, a gravity. I thought of Richie five years old, strapped in a chair, staring at Nettie and the priest on the paisley-covered bed. He’d been growing wise since that night. He knew then his mother’s life was not an exercise in power but an exchange of humiliations. Now he was just trying out what he knew.
A glorious day, today: New York hard-edged in the clear autumn sun, buildings sharply outlined against the open sky, streets crowded with pyramids of fruits and vegetables, flowers in papier-mâché vases cutting circles on the sidewalk, newspaper stands vivid in black and white. On Lexington Avenue, in particular, an outpouring of lovely human bustle at noon, a density of urban appetites and absorptions.
I have agreed to walk with my mother late in the day but I’ve come uptown early to wander by myself, feel the sun, take in the streets, be in the world without the interceding interpretations of a companion as voluble as she. At Seventy-third Street I turn off Lexington and head for the Whitney, wanting a last look at a visiting collection. As I approach the museum some German Expressionist drawings in a gallery window catch my eye. I walk through the door, turn to the wall nearest me, and come face to face with two large Nolde watercolors, the famous flowers. I’ve looked often at Nolde’s flowers, but now it’s as though I am seeing them for the first time: that hot lush diffusion of his outlined, I suddenly realize, in intent. I see the burning quality of Nolde’s intention, the serious patience with which the flowers absorb him, the clear, stubborn concentration of the artist on his subject. I see it. And I think, It’s the concentration that gives the work its power. The space inside me enlarges. That rectangle of light and air inside, where thought clarifies and language grows and response is made intelligent, that famous space surrounded by loneliness, anxiety, self-pity, it opens wide as I look at Nolde’s flowers.
In the museum lobby I stop at the permanent exhibit of Alexander Calder’s circus. As usual, a crowd is gathered, laughing and gaping at the wonderfulness of Calder’s sighing, weeping, triumphing bits of cloth and wire. Beside me stand two women. I look at their faces and I dismiss them: middle-aged Midwestern blondes, blue-eyed and moony. Then one of them says, “It’s like second childhood,” and the other one replies tartly, “Better than anyone’s first.” I’m startled, pleasured, embarrassed. I think, What a damn fool you are to cut yourself off with your stupid amazement that she could have said that. Again, I feel the space inside widen unexpectedly.
That space. It begins in the middle of my forehead and ends in the middle of my groin. It is, variously, as wide as my body, as narrow as a slit in a fortress wall. On days when thought flows freely or better yet clarifies with effort, it expands gloriously. On days when anxiety and self-pity crowd in, it shrinks, how fast it shrinks! When the space is wide and I occupy it fully, I taste the air, feel the light. I breathe evenly and slowly. I am peaceful and excited, beyond influence or threat. Nothing can touch me. I’m safe. I’m free. I’m thinking. When I lose the battle to think, the boundaries narrow, the air is polluted, the light clouds over. All is vapor and fog, and I have trouble breathing.
Today is promising, tremendously promising. Wherever I go, whatever I see, whatever my eye or ear touches, the space radiates expansion. I want to think. No, I mean today I really want to think. The desire announced itself with the word “concentration.”
I go to meet my mother. I’m flying. Flying! I want to give her some of this shiningness bursting in me, siphon into her my immense happiness at being alive. Just because she is my oldest intimate and at this moment I love everybody, even her.
“Oh, Ma! What a day I’ve had,” I say.
“Tell me,” she says. “Do you have the rent this month?”
“Ma, listen …” I say.
“That review you wrote for the Times,” she says. “It’s for sure they’ll pay you?”
“Ma, stop it. Let me tell you what I’ve been feeling,” I say.
“Why aren’t you wearing something warmer?” she cries. “It’s nearly winter.”
The space inside begins to shimmer. The walls collapse inward. I feel breathless. Swallow slowly, I say to myself, slowly. To my mother I say, “You do know how to say the right thing at the right time. It’s remarkable, this gift of yours. It quite takes my breath away.”
But she doesn’t get it. She doesn’t know I’m being ironic. Nor does she know she’s wiping me out. She doesn’t know I take her anxiety personally, feel annihilated by her depression. How can she know this? She doesn’t even know I’m there. Were I to tell her that it’s death to me, her not knowing I’m there, she would stare at me out of her eyes crowding up with puzzled desolation, this young girl of seventy-seven, and she would cry angrily, “You don’t understand! You have never understood!”
Mama and Nettie quarreled, and I entered City College. In feeling memory these events carry equal weight. Both inaugurated open conflict, both drove a wedge between me and the unknowing self, both were experienced as subversive and warlike in character. Certainly the conflict between Nettie and my mother seemed a strategic plan to surround and conquer. Incoherent as the war was, shot through with rage and deceit, its aims apparently confused and always denied, it never lost sight of the enemy: the intelligent heart of the girl who if not bonded to one would be lost to both. City College, as well, seemed no less concerned with laying siege, to the ignorant mind if not the intelligent heart. Benign in intent, only a passport to the promised land, City of course was the real invader. It did more violence to the emotions than either Mama or Nettie could have dreamed possible, divided me from them both, provoked and nourished an unshared life inside the head that became a piece of treason. I lived among my people, but I was no longer one of them.
I think this was true for most of us at City College. We still used the subways, still walked the familiar streets between classes, still returned to the neighborhood each night, talked to our high-school friends, and went to sleep in our own beds. But secretly we had begun to live in a world inside our heads where we read talked thought in a way that separated us from our parents, the life of the house and that of the street. We had been initiated, had learned the difference between hidden and expressed thought. This made us subversives in our own homes.
As thousands before me have said, “For us it was City College or nothing.” I enjoyed the solidarity those words invoked but rejected the implied deprivation. At City College I sat talking in a basement cafeteria until ten or eleven at night with a half dozen others who also never wanted to go home to Brooklyn or the Bronx, and here in the cafeteria my education took root. Here I learned that Faulkner was America, Dickens was politics, Marx was sex, Jane Austen the idea of culture, that I came from a ghetto and D. H. Lawrence wa
s a visionary. Here my love of literature named itself, and amazement over the life of the mind blossomed. I discovered that people were transformed by ideas, and that intellectual conversation was immensely erotic.
We never stopped talking. Perhaps because we did very little else (restricted by sexual fear and working-class economics, we didn’t go to the theater and we didn’t make love), but certainly we talked so much because most of us had been reading in bottled-up silence from the age of six on and City College was our great release. It was not from the faculty that City drew its reputation for intellectual goodness, it was from its students, it was from us. Not that we were intellectually distinguished, we weren’t; but our hungry energy vitalized the place. The idea of intellectual life burned in us. While we pursued ideas we felt known, to ourselves and to one another. The world made sense, there was ground beneath our feet, a place in the universe to stand. City College made conscious in me inner cohesion as a first value.
I think my mother was very quickly of two minds about me and City, although she had wanted me to go to school, no question about that, had been energized by the determination that I do so (instructed me in the middle of her first year of widowhood to enter the academic not the commercial course of high-school study), and was even embattled when it became something of an issue in the family.
“Where is it written that a working-class widow’s daughter should to go college?” one of my uncles said to her, drinking coffee at our kitchen table on a Saturday morning in my senior year in high school.
“Here it is written,” she had replied, tapping the table hard with her middle finger. “Right here it is written. The girl goes to college.”
“Why?” he had pursued.
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