Close Relations

by Susan Isaacs

  “They don’t spend it playing Mah-Jongg.”

  “Canasta?”

  “No.”

  “Filling up the ice cube tray for happy hour?”

  “Marcia, come on.”

  “I will not come on. You know, I really resent your remarks about Mah-Jongg and all that. Just because you see your mother as Saint Agnes …”

  “I do not.”

  “… the patron saint of widows …”

  Agnes Morrissey was a truly noble soul, a fine lady, a good Catholic with a grand heart. I hated her. We’d never met.

  “Hello,” I’d answer our phone.

  “Is Gerald Morrissey there?” this twinkly little Emerald Isle voice would say. Never How are you. Never Oh, I’ve heard about you, Marcia, and I look forward to meeting you even though you’re a Jew.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrissey, he’s not in right now.”

  “Thank you,” she’d say briskly, as though I were Jerry’s answering service. “Please tell him I called.”

  I would ask him, “Why can’t your mother say hello to me?”

  He would answer, “Beats me. Why don’t you ask her?”

  After her husband’s death, Saint Agnes rolled up her sleeves and went right to work, refusing to condemn her three darlings to subsistence on her widow’s dole. She taught herself to type and got a job as a secretary to the owner of a local funeral parlor. And after an eight-hour day, she’d dash home to cook the three darlings a good hot meal—probably oatmeal—and bathe them and sing to them and make sure they knew their catechism.

  “Jesus, Marcia, she’s a nice lady. Why are you so hostile? Because she doesn’t say hello? Maybe she’s shy,” Jerry would say. “Anyhow, I’d think you’d respect her. I mean, she was a working woman and all that.”

  “Boring.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Boring. I find saints boring.”

  “Come on, she wasn’t a saint. She was always so ambitious for me, wanting me to be somebody—a priest, a lawyer. And she always let me know she was just a little disappointed. But she was a good mother. She worked so hard at it. You’re just upset because your mother didn’t—”

  “You better stop it, Jerry.”

  Every so often, I kept myself busy wondering why my mother never got a job. Unlike Saint Agnes, she had worked before her marriage and had what she called secretarial skills. A couple of times she mentioned being able to do something at seventy words per minute, but I’m not sure if she was referring to typing or shorthand. She certainly didn’t talk at that speed. Her voice came out slow and weary, and generally her conversation was limited to “Do you want milk in your tea?” or “Well-bred people wear gloves when they go to the city.”

  But back to work. We had a little insurance money, a small allotment from Social Security, and Uncle Julius’s annual hundred. We padded our food budget with a lot of potatoes and twice a week ate something my mother called “fish stew,” which she concocted from the bones and heads of fish—which the fish man bestowed upon her gratis—and a carrot and a can of tomatoes. It was horrible, and while I ate it, I breathed through my mouth.

  “More?” She held the chipped china ladle carefully, so none of the thin, reddish liquid would dribble on the table.

  “No thanks.”

  There was no money for college, but I was offered partial scholarships to Goucher and Cornell. I was offered a full scholarship to Pembroke.

  My quiet mother became crazed. “How do you expect to get from here to Providence?” she yelled. “Sprout wings and fly? Do you have any idea how much bus fare costs? And clothes! The clothes you’d need there, at an Ivy League school.” Our apartment was not used to such loud noises. I was afraid the walls might crack from sympathetic tremors to her screaming.

  “But why—” I began

  “You just be quiet! And what would you pack your fancy college clothes in? Shopping bags? You’d need suitcases or a trunk. Do you have that kind of money, to buy matched luggage?”

  As she yelled that last one, I imagined with unusual clarity a set of red leather luggage: pullman, two-suiter, round hatbox, even a cute little makeup case. All in rich-to-the-touch leather. And I shrieked back, “Then why the hell did you let me apply? You sat there, with me and the guidance counselor, and you said it was okay if I got financial aid. I heard you, damn it, and now I have it.” I picked up the letter with the Pembroke seal and shook it in front of her face. “This is it. This is the most money they give to anybody! They say they think I’ll be an asset to the student body—”

  “Get out.” Her voice was normal again, thin and lifeless.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Get out of this house right now.”

  I didn’t know quite what to do. People in our family never shouted; we knew only lower-class people did that. We made neither scenes nor idle threats. I stomped to the closet, grabbed cousin Barbara’s exloden coat, and bellowed, “Fuck!” It frightened me nearly as much as it did my mother, since I had never heard it said aloud before. It was a killer word.

  And then I left and walked up and down Queens Boulevard for a couple of hours before wandering over and ringing the chimes at my boyfriend Barry’s house—the same Barry I was later to marry. I told him what had happened, and after a heated, whispered discussion with his mother in their kitchen he emerged with a dinner invitation. And while his mother, Sheri, wore her tightest mouth during the meal, I dined on veal chops and asparagus and heaps of salad and rice casserole and raisin cake and baked apple. Sheri managed to part her lips after dessert to ask, “Had enough, sweetie?” Barry, when he walked me back to the apartment later that evening, squeezed my hand and said, “Don’t be angry with your mother. She means well.”

  When I returned home my mother nodded at Barry. When he left, she said nothing, not even to express mild curiosity at what I’d been doing for five hours, although I suspect she thought I was doing something dreadful with Barry, something that would make him lose his respect for me. And him going to Columbia, premed. Actually, she never said another word about higher education until my first day at Queens the following September, when she murmured, “Good luck at college.” Queens College was free to New York City residents. Queens College was a fifteen-minute bus ride from our apartment. I did not need suitcases.

  But I still wonder why she didn’t work. Had I bus fare and luggage for Pembroke, I could have met a boy from even a finer family than Barry’s. But she stayed home.

  Of course, in those days, the nineteen fifties and sixties, most people’s mothers did not work. They were housewives. But my mother had only a three-room apartment to clean, and while she did it well—rubbing the faucets until they gleamed silver, washing the floors and covering them with newspapers so they would not get dirty immediately—it could not have taken all day. She chatted with my Aunt Estelle each morning, but for no more than ten minutes. She shopped for the cheapest toilet paper, the least extravagant bag of onions, but she was never gone for more than an hour. She had no friends, suitors, hairdressers, manicurists, tailors, or stockbrokers to spend time with.

  I do not believe my mother rejected the notion of working because of her desire to care for me. At ten, I required little care, being able to bathe and dress myself and prepare hard-boiled eggs. She did not need to hover about, urging me to study, because I was a natural grind, highly motivated to prove to my classmates that beauty and wealth weren’t everything.

  Nor was she mad for me, calling me her ootsie-wootsie lambie and pleading with me to keep her company. Rather, I sensed she found me a little unappealing, although I’m not sure why. While no young lovely, I was at least prettier than she, but that was hardly a contest. I had no vile habits on public display except for cuticle chewing, and she broke me of that long before my father died, by slapping my hand down from my mouth and saying “Stop it.” And since I was nearly as quiet as she, I can’t think that she found my personality offensive. But perhaps she wanted a jollier child, like m
y cousin Barbara, who could win an extra Mallomar by merely grinning at the adult nearest the cookie jar.

  Jerry could not accept this. “Marcia, she had to have loved you.”

  “Nope.” I was operating on a piece of corned beef, trying to separate the lean from the fat. We were having lunch in an overpriced, non-kosher delicatessen in Brooklyn Heights where they were willing to comply with Jerry’s disgusting request for a roast beef sandwich with butter and lettuce.

  “But you’re lovable. I mean, when you’re not being a pain in the ass, you’re fun and pretty and smart.” But clearly not lovable enough to get him to tell me he actually loved me.

  “But she didn’t think so. If it had been socially acceptable, she would have exposed me on a mountaintop.”

  “That can’t be true,” he remarked and took a bite of his sandwich.

  “That is the most disgusting goyishe thing I’ve ever seen you eat. I’ll bet you’ll want to follow it up with a Twinkie.”

  “What’s a Twinkie?”

  “Oh, it’s this kind of sickeningly sweet cake with …” He was smiling broadly. “You son of a bitch, you know what a Twinkie is.”

  “Damned straight.”

  I almost joined him in a smile, but instead I said, “My mother was very cold.”

  “Tell me.”

  “When she would help me with a zipper, she would hold that little tab of the zipper very carefully, between her thumb and index finger, so her hand wouldn’t touch my back or my hair or anything.”

  My mother did not like touching of any sort. When receiving change from a shopkeeper, she never extended her hand but waited until he put the coins on the counter.

  She kissed me, with less fervor than an actress kisses a talk-show host, twice after my father died: the day I graduated college and on my wedding day. Actually, she kissed me twice on my wedding day, but the second time she was ordered to by the photographer.

  “But look,” Jerry began. He spoke slowly, the way he often did in strategy sessions, so he could think fast. “Isn’t it possible that she wasn’t—what would you call it?—a demonstrative person?” He blinked, waiting for my answer. Because his lashes were so thick and dark, his mere lowering of them seemed the initiation of a sexual act. I swallowed. “Well?”

  “You know, Jerry, you’re such a politician. Everything has to be explained away, so there’s always the appearance of fairness. The whole world has to be happy.”

  “You’re so fair with everybody else and so tough on your family. Christ, why won’t you give them the benefit of the doubt?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Come on. Your mother obviously cared about you.”

  “All right. Do you want to hear the good or the bad news first?”

  Grinning, he said, “The good news. Come on. Let’s see if you can say one positive sentence about her without gagging.”

  “The good news is,” I announced softly, “she told me to watch out for speeding trucks.”

  “Marcia, you are an unbelievable shit.”

  It’s an inherited characteristic. But perhaps I am being unfair. In certain contexts, she cared about me deeply. Those contexts were always potentially public.

  “When you’re having soup,” she explained, just after reading a biography of Jenny Jerome Churchill, “you must sip silently, like this.” She would demonstrate, using her fish stew in lieu of the cream of truffle soup I would one day be having. “It’s one of those small details that speaks volumes about a person’s breeding.”

  Or, “You can never go wrong with basic black and pearls.” She said that the day I came home carrying a rather bright pink blouse. Since I had to split my babysitting earnings with her, it had taken me four months to save up for it. “It may be unfair,” she continued, “but people do judge you by your clothes.”

  “Everybody is wearing blouses like this.” Some had it in lime green and purple, too.

  “Not ‘everybody,’ Marcia. Many people prefer simple, classic clothes that you can wear year in and year out.”

  My mother’s standards of deportment and taste came from her reading and were modified by her sister’s pronouncements. But they were so grandiose, so unyielding, that in my mother’s judgment, half of any graduating class of Miss Porter’s would be deemed schlumps. She and my Aunt Estelle could discourse on the correct placement of fish forks, how to publicly blow your nose, what to say to a bride on a receiving line (“I’m so pleased for you”).

  Oddly, I never even had the opportunity to say “I’m so pleased for you” until my cousin Barbara got married, because most people in our family were too hungry after a long ceremony to wait around to shake hands and shoved their way straight to the smorgasbord. But Aunt Estelle insisted on a receiving line. “I’m paying for the finest room at the St. Regis, and for once, people in this family are going to behave like mensches.” When my turn came to tell her of my pleasure, Barbara flashed one of her zippy love smiles and grabbed and hugged me. I think I mumbled “Congratulations” into her veil.

  I always wondered where my mother and my aunt first got it, their fanatic snobbism, their fascination with the mores and the manners of the aristocracy. Their own mother had ironed pleats into skirts in a sweatshop until she was married at seventeen by a terribly unchic-looking Orthodox rabbi. Their father, Herschl Shochet, a house painter, had rainbow-speckled hair and, I remember vaguely, used to spit into the street quite a bit.

  Yet they knew all about Gracious Living. My Aunt Estelle could give an account of Brenda Frazier’s debut as though she had been cavorting at the table next to Madcap Brenda’s. My mother’s most cherished tidbit was about one of those dear Baronesses de Rothschild, although she never wasted it on me alone. Only Aunt Estelle could bring it out.

  “Hilda, tell Barbara and Marcia how the Baroness de Rothschild coordinates her dinner parties.”

  “Jesus,” I breathed.

  “Marcia,” my aunt said patiently, “right now you’re a newlywed and Barry is in medical school, but once he graduates you’re going to be called upon to function as his hostess. You’re not going to keep on working forever.” She gave me her most genteel smile. “Go ahead, Hilda,” she ordered.

  “Well,” my mother would begin, glancing around Estelle’s beige living room as if checking that none of the Baroness’s social competitors were hiding behind the brocade drapes, listening to this gem, “she keeps a system of filing cards. Each time someone comes for dinner, she writes down the date and what she served.”

  “So that next time,” Estelle carried on, “she won’t repeat the same menu!”

  God forbid that should happen. Barbara, recently engaged to Philip, leaned back on her mother’s beige sectional sofa, picking at a thread on a white silk pillow and nodding. She seemed fascinated. Sitting next to her, I heard the low-pitched choking noise meant for me, as though Barbara were about to heave. “How clever,” she told them.

  “And there’s more, Barbara,” her mother said, leaning forward.

  My mother leaned forward too. “She writes down the name of the china pattern she’s using, and the sterling too. She has more than a hundred sets of dishes!”

  Later, Barbara and I sat in her bedroom, dangling our feet over the edge of her narrow bed onto her white shag rug. “And what do you serve the viscomte when he comes to dine?” she asked.

  “Pork.”

  “But of course.”

  Yet right beside this idiot infatuation with the elite, the two sisters had a different set of values which admitted a little more reality. Under this system, Roz Weinberg, wife of Lou the Podiatrist, had compensated for her husband’s lack of an M.D. degree by wearing Kimberly knits and having an apartment in Palm Beach, as opposed to Miami Beach. Norma Klein, who had grown up with my mother and aunt, had married well—her husband was a lawyer for what Estelle called “corporate interests”—but her house!

  “Hilda, let me tell you,” said Estelle. “Unbelievable.” Estelle had been invited to a reunion.
My mother had not. “Custom-made plastic seat covers. I mean, if she’s not going to take them off for us, who is she going to take them off for?”

  “I didn’t think she was that lower class,” my mother observed.

  “That’s nothing. You know what her color scheme was? Purple.”

  “No.”

  “Purple. I mean it. All right, I’ll be fair. She mixed it with a little lavender.” And they both shook their heads, filled with awe and pity for the tragedy of Norma Klein. “And you should see her. Hilda, you wouldn’t believe the change. Remember that sweet, lovely Norma? So understated? Well, she wore bright orange lipstick and iridescent green eyeshadow. I mean, she looked like a kurveh.” Kurveh is Yiddish for whore.

  The two sisters dropped bits of Yiddish all around them, apparently never considering that it littered their refined landscape, that Brenda Frazier would call last year’s dress “that old thing” rather than a shmateh. The mother tongue was as much a part of them as their receding chins.

  But that was the extent of my ethnic heritage, unless prejudices were counted. In that case, I scored quite high, having learned early (Jews being both precocious and brilliant) that: (1) If anything is missing, its disappearance can be blamed on a black maid or the most recent black to pass through the neighborhood, (2) Irish men are alcoholics and Irish women have thick ankles and somehow, despite their lack of discernible sexuality, they have large families, (3) Italians comprehend the importance of a meal and are almost as good parents as Jews, except they smack their kids and don’t worry about higher education, (4) Poles are stupid and anti-Semitic, (5) Puerto Ricans carry knives, and (6) WASPS feed their children TV dinners and won’t let Jews work in their banks.

  “What did they used to say about Jews in the Bronx?” I asked Jerry. “Come on, tell me.”

  “Nothing much.”

  “Really, you can tell me.”

  “They used to say, ‘Give a Jew a quarter and he’ll make a dollar.’ Stuff like that. About Jews being pushy and greedy and loud.”

  “Did they really?” He nodded, looking quite cheerful. “Come on, what else?” I urged.