Her opinions changed with great swiftness: I can remember her liking S.L. and her liking Lila and then the next day she despised them.
The household, well, we all agreed then, and in later years we mostly agreed, that we were happy then for a while.
Daddy said, “We had a good time, Littlekins, you remember that, don’t you, or are you going to be a blamer?”
I don’t know how many months this covers. I think perhaps two years for sure, and probably three and a half, all told.
S.L. said, “That woman was worth her weight in gold; she never liked me but she was handy; I was never that well taken care of before in my life; and it hasn’t happened since, I will tell you that.”
As I said, sometimes she didn’t like him and sometimes she did; he was well taken care of only when she liked him.
Momma said, “S.L., you’re insulting; you know that? You exaggerate; you’re always taken care of. I’m the one who suffered after we got rid of her. Then there was no one to take care of me. You don’t do anything for anyone.”
He said, “It was all your idea to get rid of her, I loved that woman, she had a good soul.”
He didn’t love her; I did. Momma said, “S.L. liked having her wait on him and so did you; but she wouldn’t be nice to anyone who wasn’t good to you; she thought she was your guardian angel; she didn’t even want to get married until you started letting her down.” Me? “You wanted to play with other children. One thing I’ll say for myself, I was never the jealous, possessive type.” Yes, she was. When I was an adolescent and she was ill, she was possessive as hell.
“Ann Marie kept S.L. on a tight rein: I enjoyed it. He was a good father and husband under her rule, except when she got in one of her moods about knowing her place and wouldn’t talk to him, which wasn’t all that often; she didn’t like knowing her place. She was jealous of me; you don’t know what it cost me to keep her contented and working for you. Men never know what they cost women. Oh, God, I can’t stand it—”
(S.L. shouted, “You cost me my life, you bitch-whore, can’t you ever know right from wrong?”)
Ann Marie’s goodness, her moral laziness, her helplessness in some areas, her just about infinite self-righteousness—these are the equivalent of Beauty to me.
In her mind, as she looks at me, as she looks around the kitchen, she knows herself to be beautiful here. She is posturing in a way. I believe her belief is true that she is beautiful—I trust her judgment. She is like a fat empress today with a heavy will at the royal court.
Both Mom and Dad think Ann Marie longs for romance—Dad thinks it’s physical, and Momma think’s it’s mental and spiritual and financial, that it’s a matter of Ann Marie’s whole life leading up to her having a kingdom somewhere: “That’s what women need, a place of their own, where they’re boss; what else are we put on this earth for?”
I see her as perfect, as perfect in her attentions to me, but I won’t talk even for her, so I suppose she is imperfect in her goodness.
I used to stare at her a lot. I love her more than I love anyone, anyone in the world, S.L.’s phrase. He kept count; he was interested in that stuff, who loved who most. (I swear that Lila once said to him, “Who do you think you are? The Jewish God?”)
If my happiness is not too interfered with by anything, I can’t see that Ann Marie’s flaws matter.
“The way he looks at her bribes her; it’s worth more than salary.”
Her readiness to be with me and to attend to my state is the presence of grace. Literally. Lila and S.L. said to me then and to company and to me later that they never saw anything like it, that it was superhuman, “the way she takes care of the little one. No one could be more serious, could be more reliable, we are very, very lucky to have her—”
Momma said later, “Some of that was just public relations; I’m good at public relations.”
“It was like living next door to a blessing,” S.L. said, “and we had it right in our own house.” (He is illogical in speech because he is lazy and amused; also, he is illogical to indicate honesty: he told me he was the most honest soul in the world, probably.) “She loved you and it was beautiful to see; no one could see it and not want a piece of it—a piece of the pie, a piece of the peace—and I’ll tell you something, she wasn’t a nice woman, really, it was all a miracle, it was all an accident, and I’m glad it happened, but sometimes it breaks my heart that it happened and it’s all gone away now.”
I remember it in bits and pieces and sort of overall.
The heat, the passion, the foreignness, the foreign accent, and at the same time the flaccidity of her attention as she thinks about herself, those things, and her claims and postures of goodness, they are what healed me and helped me most steadily. I can remember the course and detours of her moods, but I tend not to when the savor of reality of the happiness appears in my mind. Like pain, it banishes what is not itself and all memories that are not in harmony with it. The sensation of happiness is so strong that sometimes even merely the recall of happiness when I am going to sleep can strengthen me against the dark, or when I wake can change the nature of waking up.
I am with Ann Marie in the kitchen. What am I supposed to do with my life now?
You had only a weak grip on life; we all knew it; we weren’t good about it.
How was it that I saw around Ann Marie’s instabilities and oddities of temperament, saw my way to an improbable state of happiness for at least enough moments out of those available every day, that I lived? I lived and am grateful and will be until I die.
Perfect love: she showed you perfect love; it wasn’t so perfect, but you know what I mean.
I never thought about how unlikely that was, how improbable—actually, impossible—perfect love. I mean, that wasn’t it; it wasn’t perfect love that saved me.
You idolized her: Lila’s testimony. She means, in part, that I idealized Ann Marie.
I remember my happiness back then as a fixed condition even while I remember myself as upset or lonely, and the happiness as moderate, or modest at times, and immoderate and immodest at other times, and huge—huge—all I could manage in those days—or still. It is amazing to me, the pious neatness of my memories of her if I don’t remember a single moment as it really was. My sense of her poses her in various aspects in this light and that one, on a porch in the sun, or by the lilac hedge in the sun near where we emptied garbage; but the memory leaves the garbage out usually; and I remember her on my bed with her braid hanging down her back and her hand massaging my belly, the child’s small belly. She is quiet-voiced; that is part of it. She moves always gently. I will always like people who speak German in a soft voice.
But it’s not true. In actuality, her voice was on the loud side; it was trained and odd, and singular. And I don’t like German at all as a language.
I used to wonder that I had no memory of Ann Marie singing and no memory of her actual speaking voice, that I only remembered my being happy or her holding me, carrying me.
I do not think memory lies for a cheap reason. It is just that memory deals in totals, in summaries, in portable forms of knowledge, so that what it dredges up are things that are like mottoes or aphorisms or apothegms rather than like real moments. And the totals are often true enough as they are pictured, even if the pictured thing never happened, but is a total, a mind thing, just as what’s in a photograph never happened but is the machine’s slice of a part of reality, which it then slides out sideways, so to speak, from the forward rush of real air. Time was never that stilled; the photograph lies; the eyelike machine slices off a thin and fixed souvenir; what gives it focus makes it untrue—no one I know was ever as still as a photograph.
The myth, the lie, I don’t know what to call it, the distortion that I could say was love but seems to me to be merely self-absorption on a not very elevated scale, that presents Ann Marie as silver, as shining and steady, and humanly and inhumanly gentle and good and fierce in my defense and so on—often that seems to me more
valuable than the truth is, much more valuable to me. But I want to be fair to Ann Marie, to her life; I want not to condescend and treat Ann Marie as a shadow, as a shadow employed by shadows; and I do not want to be stuck with the notion that all goodness is to be measured by someone’s being good to me; and I remember Lila’s saying, “I don’t want to be on a pedestal, I want to be liked for what I am. Maybe I shove it down people’s throats, what I am, but I can’t help that, I want to live, I want someone to know me.”
Ann Marie and I are in the kitchen that rainy morning, we are nutty with approval of each other. It is immense approval but not unquestioning, not ideal. Perhaps that is not quite the truth: one whole side of the mind is entirely devoted to this approval; it is a complete or absolute state, for a second or two, on one side of the mind.
She assumes (it seems nearly always) that I have to go to the bathroom. I sit patiently there on the damp wood of the toilet seat holding myself to the rim with my hands so I won’t slide in, fall in, Daddy says: it makes him laugh when I do start to fall in. Upstairs I have a plastic seat with a back and straps on it that fits over a toilet, but I won’t let anyone strap me in; I prefer to risk falling in and being laughed at; Ann Marie now likes it that I like to deal with the grownup proportions of things.
“Vunderrrrbarrrrr—niiiiiiiiiiiiiz(ccsc)e—nyce—” (she shows off a merely technical reproduction of a short, Midwestern syllable) “—liddle dee-mun—you deffil(ll)—Ritter—”
Knight. Cavalier.
Good God, the feelings …
My frail eyelids, my leaning head now, my trusting stare; she glances at these. She never gazes—never—not when she is visible. She shows a (German) slyness, pride, honor; she has a maybe sly, nervous quickness of tempo. And her self-righteousness and her Nordic gloom sit on top of that. She denies being gloomy. She has a determined cheerfulness atop the gloom. I am dozing as I sit here under her glancing regard; I mimic her oblique and glancing approach that way; my eyelids are open but I am adoze, sort of; my mind is turned off; or rather it is sheer openness, as when I am asleep and the world is mostly just me; I trust her so, it is like that—she is a dream (Momma’s phrase).
She straightens up; she is daydreaming; she often daydreams; she daydreams of me sometimes or of a child like me she won’t have to share with Lila and S.L.; she would love me more if they were dead—maybe not; maybe being rivalrous with them pleases her, is the root of our Perfect Love—(“She built her life on outdoing me in the end, and she was one of the ones who won out, except I had you, Wiley, and she didn’t, her children never came to amount to anything. Yet. And I’ll be dead before they do—”) She daydreams about me and mercy and goodness when I am there in front of her; and mercy and goodness are there so far as I know; but she wants more, this isn’t enough; she wants a house of her own and children of her own and I don’t blame her, Momma says, but I do; if I interrupt her, her eyes grow big and knowing and stare at me, but they don’t see me; she only sees me in those quick glances—a longish look makes her somehow subject to me, almost submissive, daydreamish: the son of her employers.
I climb down from the toilet, stand there big-eyed, vague for a moment, much stirred physically; and then I walk behind her into the kitchen. I hold myself back in mood, as-a-duty and as-a-pleasure. I do not know that I have an appetite for wild or perhaps dependent kinds of caress. She has a similar stiffness. We mimic each other—she is babyish. She is religious, a Lutheran. Ann Marie’s and my affair places in my mind a secret immediacy of an eccentric and covert Christianity. This is a secret about me.
She is openly contemptuous of Ma and Pa at times, and of visitors, especially about the issues, those questions of if and how I am to be kissed and touched; these issues, and what my moral and religious nature is and what proper care of a small, unhappily bereaved child is like.
Ma will say in a little while, I guess I have to buy her off if I want to be master in my own house. She means she will have to Get Rid of Her Someday—maybe soon.
Ma said, Ann Marie is not the same as me; she works for me.
Ann Marie is not the same as anyone—she is not like anyone; she is a singularity in the world.
She is going to feed me, but she pauses to announce, to remember she is happy because of me: “You did goot, Liebchen.”
Oh, how I love her.
Momma has a dark theory that says good people have to get even with you for their goodness: she means goodness is a martyrdom: “My mother devoted her life to me, and you know what that means? That means she ate my life right up; she ruined me a thousand times over; who do you think picked S.L. for me? Momma did. He wouldn’t get in her way. Well, S.L. and me, we tried to run off; we tried to make a go of it away from her and all of them, but S.L. couldn’t make it as a businessman; and I missed Momma. I’m not blaming anyone; I’m not even blaming her; I wanted to be her favorite child and I was; and I’ll tell you something: I’m going to die young as a result; I can feel it in my heart. And I’ll tell you something else: she does me mostly harm but she loves me, and she’ll never outlive me; when I get sick, she won’t nurse me, she’ll hide, and she’ll get sick, and she’ll die in her guilt and praising herself the whole time. I know a few things in this world, and of the things I know, Momma is one of them.”
Lila was right.
“Ann Marie was no good for you after a while, but I was afraid if she left you’d get sick again. But in the end I took the plunge; she only wanted to make you her slave.”
Lila said, “I do good, I like getting my own way, but I’m not a homebody, God forbid; we employ five in help. Ann Marie, who is really family; we have a crippled gardener who does some house repairs; but he’s no good, our house is turning into a slum; just look and you’ll see. We have a laundry woman; a man who does our heavy cleaning—woodwork, windows—and we have a part-time car person. It’s very hard; they all want to be family; they suck my blood dry.”
In the oratorio or chorus of women, Momma as the coloratura—“I’m a dazzler, for better or for worse, that’s my fate”—will now sing, or rather Lila will say to company about Ann Marie and me: She has no one else to love, she has to love him; really, who else does she have? She’s a maid, she’s a housekeeper; its an impossible position; my heart goes out to her: she’s coarse in some ways, German—she’s a German hammer. A German amour? German and hammy? Hamlike? A German hammer: Momma is clumsy and just grabs at words.
She means Ann Marie is obstinate and strong, very strong in being not forced to hide in her bedroom as often as Momma is in hers. She means Ann Marie’s noisy when she climbs the stairs and carries things; Ann Marie breathes loudly and that hammers at Momma, who has “the nerves of a bird, you know what that’s like?” Momma means Ann Marie is a pork-lover like Joseph, father of Christ, a carpenter with a hammer, and a fool maybe, a cuckolded fool; and she means Ann Marie is hammy and a Valkyrie—she just plows all that together and says Ann Marie is a German hammer.
My mother was a lover of rhetoric. And she means yet more: Momma used to say, “Use your head, try to understand me, don’t make me go on and on.”
One of Ann Marie’s prides is that she doesn’t ever get tired. She believed her goodness and her “common sense” made her strong. She did not “give in to” the exhaustions and the having-to-catch-her-breath moments that Momma had; Momma said, “I can tell you from experience there’s no rest for the wicked.” Ann Marie pauses; she leans against a counter; Ann Marie has a great deal of will, so that even though in actuality she is catching her breath after an inner dialogue with someone who insulted her maybe, she starts to hum, she makes a low, vibrant, very pretty noise—too sharp in pitch, maybe, for childish comfort; she hums as if music were her purpose and not the moment’s otherwise physical stillness. Similarly, she wrestles with a jar lid, a jar of applesauce, as if that made her happy. Maybe she really isn’t ever tired, and my belief that she is is just my perception after all. She stops humming; she breathes deeply; she moves; now she’s fatl
y speeding up again. Her readiness to be good to me was really an off-again, on-again thing; but steadied by her simplicity in naming how she felt. So that now she says, she carols sort of, “Ich liehe dich, mein Liebchen.” She takes pleasure in my company and feels something like the thing Daddy feels when he compliments her on her cooking: “You know what Browning said, Ann Marie? He said, ‘God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world.’ ”
She carols, “Verke, Verke, Verke, verke, verke, la—la ah hhh.”
She’s singing about her work in the world—I mean, she’s really singing about it.
She often works without thinking; she makes messes of things; now the abble sawzz spills from the jar she is jerking around while she sings, and some of it slops on her dress. She is startled; she purses her lips; perhaps she counts to a certain number; then she says, “Littull Vfiilileee, ich liebe dich, mein Liebchen.”
Momma said, “Ann Marie’s never getting tired gets expensive. I lost a silk blouse and three cotton singlets this week, all burned by her with her magic iron. Well, live and let live. But I wish she were more modest, I’ll say it to God and to you, but I won’t say it to her. I’m scared of her.”
Ma said, “Ann Marie is very religious but she’s just about only as Christian as it suits her; she’s a young woman; you can’t tell because she’s heavy, but she’s young.”
Ann Marie has a kind of set expression on her face in order to appear tireless and unchanging, also deep-souled, although her mind is wandering: this is a major tactic of hers.
Momma said, “People can be what they want; if they’re boring, it’s because they want to be boring; boring people can say what they want about themselves, and no one will check up on it because no one cares. Good-looking people get watched all the time. Isn’t that the point? If you ask me, it takes nerve to look good; good looks are the big risk; all looks are a risk; you need brains knowing how to look good; you need brains to know how to withstand the pressure. Plain people don’t have to be honest; it suits them to lie; and they do, they lie to themselves and everyone else all the time: it’s a different way to live; there are a lot of advantages in being plain, believe me. I know whereof I speak.”
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode Page 58