Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

  Dear God. John was going to be free. My dreams were dangerous.

  2

  “Linda, honey, put on some rouge, stick your boobies in his face, and bingo! He’ll be kissing your feet.” My mother was great at advice to the lovelorn. “What are you waiting for? Mistletoe? Now’s the time to grab Mr. Whosis. That John guy you work for.”

  “Why would John give me the time of day?” Why would any normal, rational human being take me and John Berringer seriously, even for two seconds? The answer: They wouldn’t. They’d say, Snap out of it, Linda! But this was my mother, and the normal and rational categories were not the places you’d go looking for her.

  “Angel, if he wanted some rich Manhattan snot-nose, Mrs. John wouldn’t be in Reno, Las Vegas.”

  “Forget it, Mom,” I said, “I’m living in a dream world. Men like him don’t marry girls like me.”

  Instead of saying, Hey, what about Cinderella and the prince? my mother merely sighed; she was too drunk to give me a fight. Then she lowered her still-gorgeous eyes and gazed passionately at her plate. An outsider would have thought she’d fallen in love with her salmon croquette.

  Last night’s booze still sloshed inside her. She looked the way she usually looked on any typical winter Wednesday night—or any night: half drunk, half hung over. She didn’t even make a stab at her salmon, but then, my mother hardly ever ate anything. I worried about her; gin and ginger ale wasn’t carrots and peas. The booze drowned not only her beauty—and my mother had been so incredibly lovely—but her health. Her clear white skin, with its faint glimmering of pink—like a seashell—had turned yellow. Then the tiny crisscross lines on her face deepened until, under the glare of the light that hung over the table, her skin resembled those terrible pictures of the Okies’ dry, cracked land, desperate for rain.

  She’d bought that light herself, soon after she’d gotten married. It dangled from a once-white wire; the bulb was half covered with a glass shade painted with pink, blue and purple bunnies. Cute, silly, meant for a frilly boudoir—like my mother. The light didn’t belong in the kitchen, and neither did she. It was a useless room as far as she was concerned. She couldn’t cook and she wouldn’t eat.

  Even if she’d been starving, my mother wouldn’t have picked up a fork. Eating interfered with drinking. Two spoons of mashed potatoes could soak up a shot of gin, and my mother liked to get sloshed as fast as possible. That she held off till I got home from work, so we could have dinner together, was proof of her love. She needed a drink so badly; she had d.t.’s nearly every night: not near-convulsions, but gentle, feminine d.t.’s. Pale, trembling hands. She kept them in her lap, hoping, I guess, that I wouldn’t see them and get upset. She honestly tried. Though she was no prize as a mother and she knew it, she loved me as much as she could.

  But she wouldn’t eat to save her life—not even for me. Eating smudged lipstick, and, even plastered, my mother managed enough self-control to keep her makeup perfect. Well, almost perfect: I noticed she’d drawn one of her eyebrows into a higher arch than the other, so it looked as if she had doubts about everything I said.

  Suddenly, she sat straight up and smoothed the front of the pink duster she was wearing over her dress to protect it from the dinner she wouldn’t touch. She’d remembered we were having a conversation. “Linda, dollface, why do you keep thinking Wall Street lawyers are different? Sweetie, men are all alike. There’s only one thing makes them happy. You know that. You wanna hook this John? Clue him in you’re ready to…I’m not shocking you, am I? You’re over twenty-one.”

  “By ten years, Mom.”

  “Men aren’t like girls. They need it. He’d probably give his right arm to have your company tonight. Unless you think the reason Mrs. Whosis took a walk was because he has a chippy on the side.”

  “No, he’s not that type.” That was my worst fear: Nan getting a divorce because John was in love with someone else.

  “Sweetie, they’re all that type.”

  “Why don’t you try the croquette? Just a bite. It’s not bad.”

  “I bet it’s great! You’re a wonderful cook, lovie. But I’m just not hungry tonight. Now listen to me about men. I know what puts a smile on their face.”

  I (obviously) didn’t. Maybe my mother was right. After all, Betty Johnston Voss had been born to please men. She was beautiful. Huge, limpid brown eyes instead of the predictable blue. Blond hair so soft that it looked like the froth on top of an ice cream soda, and if that wasn’t enough (and it wasn’t), the world’s deepest dimples. My father had pulled a fast one, beating out the competition by eloping with her the day she turned sixteen. I’d been born nine months later.

  “Now’s your chance, Linda. I know you’re more like your father than like me. Real smart, listening to the news, reading the papers. You could get yourself a lawyer if you weren’t—well, you know—such a stick. Get your hair out of that old-lady bun. Wear red lipstick. Give him a little thigh.”

  “Mom, that’s not law firm etiquette.”

  “Baby doll, you use your brain. So what’s wrong with using your legs too?” My mother smiled encouragingly, then belched. “I wouldn’t tell you this if you was a kid, but now…Listen, if he wants a virgin—you’ll pardon my French—he’s gonna find a young one, so you might as well…What the heck. Live a little.”

  It was so hard being a brainless ex-beauty. There she sat—in a chair upholstered in faded red oilcloth at a creaky oak kitchen table—behind a wall of makeup, forty-seven years old. She’d started boozing soon after she’d lost my father, when she suddenly realized it was impossible to be a child bride when you were no longer a child—and when the groom was kaput. A bride was all she’d ever been or wanted to be.

  When I didn’t want to scream at her for stealing food money for her boozing or for throwing up in her bed or—once—for carrying on with three men in a car parked right in front of the house, my mother broke my heart.

  “Don’t be afraid of a little fun, Linda,” she went on. Her eyes were made up to look wide and girlish, and she’d painted her mouth into a young pink kiss.

  My mother was the youngest and prettiest of five sisters. Her father, a subway maintenance man, had died of a heart attack when she was six or seven, and her mother had kept the family going by taking in boarders, and from a few things my mother had said (“Mama had her favorite boarder, and Lucille had hers, and Meg hers, a trolley motorman with a peg leg, and…”), I guessed they’d managed to supplement the family budget a little above and beyond the rent money. They’d had to. My mother’s father’s family—the Johnstons—hadn’t helped out at all after he’d died. The Johnstons weren’t a close-knit group, although for some peculiar reason they could always be counted on to show up in droves for a funeral. As far as I knew, my mother’s mother’s family—she thought their name was Dunstan or Duncan—were all dead, although there might be a cousin in California.

  My mother gave her hair a tender, loving pat, checking to see if it was still fluffy. “Let loose. Like I do. Live a little!”

  Six nights a week my mother let loose. She traipsed from bar to bar along the Brooklyn-Queens border. Nearly every night she wound up with the first man who gave her the eye. Usually she was home before dawn, but sometimes she didn’t show up for days at a time.

  “Why don’t you give old John baby a try? You two got a lot in common, working together on law stuff, talking German. How many girls speak it? I’m not talking about those Kraut piggies with earmuff braids. Your father could’ve had a million of them, those fatties. It would have made his old lady happy, but he wanted an all-American girl, not some frowline. But I admit, I used to think it was so nice, your father saying sweet nothings to me in German—when we were alone, if you get me. Not that I got what he meant, but it was so Continental.”

  That my mother could have spent almost thirty years living in a German-speaking house never caring enough to even learn the meaning of the word ja explains what she was like. That her mother-in-law, my Grand
ma Olga, could have come to America in 1884 and spent fifty-four years in Brooklyn and Queens—until she died in 1938—refusing to understand a simple yes explains what she was like too. My mother at least had an excuse. Like many born beauties, she had been allowed to concentrate on her own loveliness; skills like speaking foreign languages, scouring bathtubs and shopping for groceries were things she could get other people to do for her. My Grandma Olga, on the other hand, would not learn English because it was a waste of time; she’d truly believed it was only a matter of a year or two before she’d go back to Berlin in a fur coat. And when she no longer believed that—that America was the land of opportunity—she refused to listen to its language.

  My mother rested her elbow on the table. It creaked. The table had been Olga’s choice: plain wood, straight legs; cheap but serviceable. She’d bought it in the late 1880s or early ’90s, after she’d come to America. Throughout the house, her no-nonsense chairs sat stiffly beside my mother’s flamingo-and-palm-tree wallpaper; her white iron bedsteads were covered with spreads that my mother picked, with flower, kitten and bird designs in every single pastel shade ever invented by man.

  “Lookit, Linda,” my mother said, as I brought the dishes over to the sink. “I got an idea to help you loosen up. Make believe you’re me! Come on, don’t laugh. It’ll work. Flirt with that John a little, call him big boy in German. Play your cards right and before you know it, no more typing for you. He’ll set you up real nice someplace.”

  “Mom, I don’t want to be set up.”

  I went back to the table, swept off a couple of crumbs and put the ketchup in the icebox. It was just as well my mother didn’t even try to help anymore. Dishes flew out of her hands, then crash-landed on the floor. And her idea of an interesting use for leftovers was to dump everything into the garbage. I went back to the sink and wrapped her salmon croquette in waxed paper. Her dinner was almost always my next lunch.

  “So maybe he’ll set you up legit. What’s the matter, you never heard of a boss marrying a secretary?”

  “I’ve heard about it, but…”

  “Listen, for the time being get what you can out of him. A good time, satin nightgowns. Some girls get diamond watches, even. And then who knows? Maybe a wedding ring.” For a second, a mist came over her eyes. She blinked it away before it could ruin her mascara, but when she spoke again, the mist was in her voice. “Maybe he’ll be your Herman, honey!”

  Was my father something! To hear his name—Herman Ernst Voss—you’d think: Big deal, another Heinie. But would you have been wrong! My father was a real American. Tall and strong. And smart.

  Right from the start, my father was good in everything: sports, math, history. And so all American he could have been Andy Hardy’s taller, handsomer big brother. If he hadn’t quit high school to get a job, he could have gotten a scholarship to any college; that’s what the principal told him. But he had to.

  His father, Otto, had died of influenza when my father was little. Otto had been a butcher, but he never got to own his own shop. When he went, all Olga had was a little insurance; it was enough to cover the casket, but not the hearse or the hole in the ground. Some German-Jewish charity paid for that, although they wouldn’t have been too thrilled if they’d heard Otto Voss’s claim to fame had been his pork patties.

  For the next eight or nine years, my Grandma Olga went back to the work she’d done in Berlin as a girl. She got a job in a button plant in Brooklyn, operating the press that made the holes in the buttons.

  She worked till she couldn’t. Her arthritis got so bad she could hardly lift her pocketbook much less heavy machinery. So my father had to leave school and support her.

  But my father. When he left school, he told his mother, “I’m not going to get stuck making sausages the rest of my life. This is temporary.” By the time he was eighteen, though, my father was the master sausagemaker of Ridgewood, a prince among butchers, and he was making the wages of a man twice his age. And he seemed content. He was always having fun, something Olga (being German) was slightly suspicious of.

  Fun was something that happened on Sunday afternoons. If you came from Berlin, sure, you were much more lighthearted than the average potato-dumpling German, but you were not exactly a fluff-headed fool. You knew real fun was for the people who could afford it: business tycoons who kept cabaret singers as mistresses; barons who threw huge post-boar-hunt bashes. It was the job of the rich to have fun. The berlinerisch-speaking lower and middle classes were supposed to be the happy masses. But it’s an effort to be a happy mass, and Olga couldn’t manage it a lot of the time. She was too busy trying to figure out why she’d been born poor and plain and Jewish—why life had shoved her into three slots she wouldn’t have chosen for herself—to let loose and go whoopee. Olga had wanted to be a grand German lady, and she never even came close. And so while she kept her solid berlinerisch ability to laugh at the guys at the top, she couldn’t laugh at herself too well; she had never realized a single one of her lovely dreams. That was no laughing matter.

  But my father was an American. And was he a popular, happy American! Olga used to say it was a blessing they couldn’t afford a telephone, because it would never have stopped ringing; as it was, there was a parade of girls past the house every summer night. He was so handsome it didn’t matter that he was a Jew. He was a catch for any girl. Olga said it a little wistfully, because any girl would have been better than what he got; my mother was not exactly what Olga had in mind as daughter-in-law material.

  But my father wasn’t having anything to do with the local Helgas; he wanted a girl as red, white and blue as he was, and sure enough, he found one. He was twenty-three years old, keeping company with a girl named Annabel Johnston. Could you get more American than that? It seemed so, because to both families’ amazement, my father dropped twenty-year-old Annabel and eloped with her sixteen-year-old sister. Her name was Betty. My mother. The all-American girl—dumb blonde variety.

  Truly dumb. Smart dumb blondes marry sugar daddies with limousines and fat cigars. But my mother was the real McCoy: absolutely magnificent, genuinely dim; she picked a guy who worked ten hours a day in a two-bit sausage plant, who came complete with a live-in mother who didn’t speak English. And smart dumb blondes keep their figure; my mother got pregnant with me a couple weeks after the wedding.

  But big deal: they were crazy for each other. When I was a kid, my mother would leave Olga and me with the dishes and lead my father toward their bedroom. He wouldn’t look back, but my mother would give us a wave. “Nighty night,” she’d call. “We’re so-o-o sleepy.” Even then, when I didn’t understand, I knew.

  It wasn’t just in the bedroom, either. They were more in love than Romeo and Juliet. When the Depression came and the meat business got bad and my father got laid off for almost a year when his plant closed, a lot of beauties would have taken a hike. Not my mother. She loved having him around the house, and even though for a while there things got very bad—to keep us going, we had to take scraps from a butcher my father knew who was still working—she was blissfully happy. (To be fair, my mother only looked at the pictures in the Sunday paper, and since we couldn’t even afford the paper in those days, she probably didn’t realize there was a Depression on.)

  There was only one thing my mother couldn’t give my father: companionship. But that was okay. All she had to be was his “little girl.” That was enough. That was wonderful, in fact. His mother had been smart and hardworking, but so German. Finally he had someone who wasn’t ambitious for him; he had a dumb, happy American, not an ambitious immigrant. If it wasn’t for her, Olga told him, you’d own a string of butcher shops by now. My father grinned at his mother and said, Who needs butcher shops? I have my family. What he meant was, I have my little girl.

  And so what if my mother couldn’t give him companionship? For conversation, he had the guys at work. And then he had me. Since “little girl” was taken, he called me his pal.

  “Hey, pal, I’m gonna take
you to the plant Saturday. Show you what a real, prime pork belly looks like.” Boy, did we have great times! Going places, or just talking. “What are you, a parrot? Don’t tell me what the radio says. Tell me what you think.” Naturally, we had our moments. If I was fresh, he wouldn’t take any guff from me. “Shape up, Linda!” he’d snap, and a couple of times he gave me the back of his hand.

  But most of the time was wonderful. Just walking to the hardware store with him to pick up a bunch of penny nails, I’d be so proud. All the other girls’ fathers looked like fathers. Mine was tall and lean, with strong, manly features. He looked special, like someone famous who was just passing through the neighborhood.

  We talked about everything—movies, baseball, politics. He was a Dodger fan and a Democrat. “Pal, there’s only one group in the world richer and rottener than the Yankees—Republicans. They don’t care about anything but holding on to everything they got. They don’t give a damn about the little guy, and don’t ever let anyone con you into believing different.” He told me all about sausage casings, and I told him all kinds of dopey things about the kids in my class and, later, about the people at work. We talked about everything in the world—except two things: ragtime music, which he loved, which I didn’t get…ragtime music, and my mother.

  My mother did nothing except stay beautiful; at thirty, she still acted like the sixteen-year-old my father had eloped with. She listened to the Victrola, visited her girlfriends (they gave each other manicures) and went to the city, to the fancy department stores, to try on clothes. So my grandmother got down on her arthritic knees and scrubbed the floors. She did laundry, she cooked. Naturally, I worked alongside her. I guess I figured housework was something that skipped a generation. But once I finished high school and went to business, I wasn’t much of a help. My grandmother was really the housewife in her son’s home—which I guess made my mother, the dumb blonde, the kept woman.