Mother and Me

by Julian Padowicz

  Academy Chicago Publishers

  363 West Erie Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  First published in 2006

  Paperback edition 2008

  © 2006 by Julian Padowicz

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Printed and bound in the U.S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file with the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-89733-570-6

  To my beautiful daughters, Karen, JoAnne, and Nadine, who knew Barbara as an exciting, glittering woman, who would not let them call her grandmother.

  Acknowledgements

  Over the years, many relatives and friends have urged me to put this story on paper, even if only for my children’s sake. Without their urging, I probably would not have made the effort.

  I am most grateful to my wonderful wife, Donna, who was not only foremost among the “urgers,” but who also made it possible for me to give this exercise the time that it needed. I am also grateful to Donna, the first person to read my manuscript, for pronouncing the words every author longs to hear, “You have written a beautiful book.”

  Memoir manuscripts by non-celebrities are not very popular among publishers. This, I suppose, is because there are so many of them, and because the author of a memoir is not likely ever to write anything else, making him or her a poor publishing investment. Fashioning and then sending compelling query letters to publishers, the vast majority of whom wish you well but don’t want to see your manuscript, is a tedious and ego-bruising experience. It was mostly the encouragement of friends who read this manuscript that made it possible for me to continue until Academy Chicago Publishers decided to take a chance with me.

  Prof. Jonathan Kistler, my teacher at Colgate University and his wife, Patricia, both dear lifelong friends, were no longer here to cheer me on, but the encouragement and critique they had given me over the years had a strong residual effect. Other friends, whose encouragement made so much difference, include my daughter Nadine Padowicz; my son, Tom Carter; Tom’s grandfather, George Carter; my father-in-law, Alvin Lass; friends Jim Larkin, Marilyn Allen, Gerry and Carol Weiss, John and Jeanine Giddings, Rob Vecchiola, Toby Lester, Donna and Ralph Loglisci, Stella Kiwala, and Arlene and Gerry Donowitz.

  Above all, I am grateful to Barbara, without whose vision and courage I would have written a very different story… in Polish.

  Author’s Note

  The major events and, above all, the narrator’s feelings portrayed in this account are true. Because the memory of feelings and impressions is stronger than the memory of facts, I have had to take liberties to fill in certain facts to make the feelings and the impressions more understandable. Some people, whom I remember as being present, and who were an essential element of the story, cannot be eliminated from the narrative, though I have no memory of their personalities. These have had to be fictionalized. Since this may well do injustice to these individuals, I have changed the names of many characters and some places, and ask that the reader accept this as the somewhat fictionalized account of a true happening.

  In addition, in order to give the reader a better flavor of the Polish culture, I have used a phonetic spelling for many proper names. My own name, Julian, for example, though it happens to be spelled the same way in Polish, I have spelled Yulian to approximate the Polish pronunciation. Its commonly used diminutive, as Joe is used for Joseph, would be Yulek. A further diminution, as Joe might change to Joey, is Yulechek or Yul. My last name, Padowicz, becomes Padovich. Where the Polish spelling is cz, I have changed it to ch to, again, approximate the pronunciation, and so on.

  Chapter One

  My earliest memories are of my governess—Kiki, I called her. I remember her sitting on a chair by my bed reading to me, her first day on the job. I was, I’ve been told, four at the time, and it’s the earliest memory that I can call up.

  I was sick. I was sick, as I remember, on most significant occasions at that period of my life—birthdays, the day I was supposed to have a ride on the carousel, the day we were to go to the circus …

  Miss Yanka, soon to become Kiki, wears a blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar and buttons up the front. How accurate this memory is, I don’t know, but it’s as vivid as if it had taken place yesterday. She had a long blond braid which she would wind around her head, and never wore makeup. Kiki never smoked or drank either, except once that I remember her having an earache and Marta, our cook, telling her that smoking a cigarette would help. I don’t remember that it did.

  There was a photograph of my father on the wall over my bed. He, I had been informed, was in Heaven.

  Mother, on the other hand, was usually in Paris or Vienna or Rome or Budapest. Occasionally, I would be told to walk on tiptoe around the apartment and had to wash in the kitchen sink and use the cook’s toilet. Then I knew that Mother and my stepfather, Lolek, were back in town and asleep.

  Mother, I was told, was very beautiful. Unlike me, she had blond hair, like Kiki’s. Sometimes I thought it was even lighter than Kiki’s and sometimes darker. She was taller than Kiki and thinner. She had very large, round eyes and full, round cheeks, which reminded me of jelly donuts. I was to learn later that she had had a screen test once to see if she had it to be a movie actress. Apparently, she didn’t. It was Kiki, however, with her light blue eyes and thin pink lips, her blond eyebrows and eyelashes under the crown of braids wound around her head, who was my standard of beauty.

  Mother, I decided, didn’t wear ordinary clothes. Whenever I saw her, she was either in her bathrobe or what I later learned to call cocktail and evening dresses. Her shoes all had very high heels, even her slippers. I didn’t like the way she smelled. It was cigarettes and a lot of perfume. Kiki just smelled of soap. Mother’s perfume smelled like I-don’t-know-what. My stepfather Lolek was very tall and bald, with a lot of black hair on his chest. People said they made a handsome couple, but I thought Lolek was ugly.

  I remember asking once why my father never came back from his trip to Heaven the way Mother and Lolek returned from Paris. We were in the kitchen where Kiki was preparing our supper, which we would eat in the room she and I shared. The cook, Marta and Kiki exchanged looks. Marta had very black hair and a big rear end. Her hands were large too, with rough, dry skin, but when Kiki had a day off and she had to wash me, Marta’s hands were very gentle. She came from the country. Her father raised potatoes and sugar beets, and they had a cow. Marta told me she had grown up in a house with a thatched roof.

  Some time later, probably that same evening or the next day, Kiki sat me down and explained the whole situation. Technically, it seemed, my father was not really in Heaven. My father was dead, like Marshal Pilsudski who, I knew, had recently died, but while Marshal Pilsudski, a Catholic, had gone to Heaven, Kiki did not really know where a Jew would have gone. Having been a very good man in his lifetime, my father had certainly not been consigned to Hell, but she knew that Heaven really wasn’t where he was.

  Over the next two years or so, I learned from Kiki about God and Mary, their little boy Jesus, and the Holy Ghost. This last, I saw from pictures, was like a white pigeon that they had. This, I supposed, was like the canary that I was going to get some day when I was old enough. The four of them, I learned, as well as the angels and saints, all loved Catholics like Kiki.

  How they felt about Jews was another thing that Kiki could not speak authoritatively about. Quite likely, I suspected, they weren’t even aware of their existence. Certainly, it was quite obvious that the Jews I sometimes had to sit near, though never next to, on a hot and crowded trolley, in their long black coats and huge hats, with their bea
rds and earlocks, had no place among the white-robed and sandaled Catholic residents of Heaven.

  Once I was old enough to do such things on my own, Kiki informed me, I could get christened by a priest and become a Catholic like herself. Then, I too would be loved by God, Mary, their boy Jesus, the pigeon, and all the saints and angels. Then I too could aspire to ending my days in Heaven rather than among the Jews whom I had come to picture as riding sweaty trolleys through eternity.

  And if terminal illness should befall me before the age of self-determination, Kiki assured me she was authorized to christen me herself. Against this eventuality, I learned the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Act of Contrition, all of which I recited fervently at bedtime.

  I would attend mass with Kiki, say the rosary she lent me, and feel the benevolence of God as He looked down on us from his special perch over the altar. He had his head inclined to one side, which I saw as an expression of kindly concern for our well-being. That he had no clothes on, I took as some sign of purity that, with maturity, I would come to understand.

  What I did come to understand was that this was just a statue of God that somebody had made out of stone, like the one of Frederick Chopin in the park. But at the same time that it was only a carved statue, it was also God because God was everywhere. The fact that it was a carved statue and, at the same time, God, who could hear our prayers and our praise of him, was a mystery, which I was very proud that I appreciated. I wondered how many other children my age understood such deep things—certainly not my Jewish cousins.

  Then Kiki introduced me to the real world. That was not even God up there, she said, but his other son Big Jesus. And that wasn’t a special perch, but a cross he had been nailed to. And it was we, Jews, who had nailed him there.

  Now I understood everything. I understood why God didn’t allow Jews into Heaven. And I despaired that I happened to have been born one of them. Because questioning God’s actions was arrogance of immense proportions, I willed myself into not wondering why God had consigned my soul to a Jewish existence when he could have so easily had me born into a Catholic family. But it was fortunate that I had as my governess someone like Kiki who could eventually bring me into the circle of God’s love.

  Sin, or rather the lack of it, I understood to be another ingredient in the scheme of things. Catholics, I learned, could get their sins absolved through confession followed by communion. But since this therapy was not available to me, sinning was something I simply had to avoid if I didn’t want to end up riding sweaty trolleys.

  There were two occasions on which I came close to damning my immortal soul. One was when, for what reason I don’t know, I insisted on putting on my blue woolen sailor suit for our daily trip to the park instead of the one Kiki had selected. After an exchange in which Kiki told me the day was much too hot for such a costume, she totally surprised me by not overruling me, but letting me have my way. Walking to the park and sweating from the heat, I felt as though I had broken all Ten Commandments at one blow. If deep contrition could eventually neutralize sin, I must have stored up credit for ten years of debauchery in that one walk.

  The other occasion involved the proper replacement of my toys in the space beside the cupboard in our room. Apparently I had not conformed to code and, after reprimanding me, Kiki got down on all fours to make order out of my chaos between the cupboard and the exterior wall.

  On sudden impulse, I laid both hands against her bathrobed backside and pushed. Kiki’s head banged against the wall in front of her. I was immediately wracked with guilt, though for some reason this act did not have as heavy an impact on my conscience as the issue of the wool sailor suit.

  Then there was the terrible secret. This was not a moral issue, but a medical one. It appeared that the smooth, reddish skin on the tip of the organ through which I urinated and which we called my birdie, had the property of causing insanity if touched beyond what was necessary for elimination and hygiene.

  “Touching your birdie will make you crazy,” I was told. Since this had not been presented in a morals context, but simply as a medical fact, I did not associate the act in any way with Heaven and trolley cars. But lying in bed at night, I simply could not resist slipping my hand below the covers for momentary contact of one fingertip with that dangerous organ. Some day, I knew, as no one else did, I would be as crazy as my Uncle Benek who, must have done the same thing in his youth.

  Within walking distance of our apartment there was a public park. This park, I understood, had been a royal residence and contained a palace that one could tour with felt slippers over one’s street shoes. Its walls were gilded, and there were paintings on these walls in huge gold frames, depicting a variety of activities featuring either vastly overdressed or underdressed—some even totally undressed—people. Something Kiki must have said, or possibly her body language, led me to understand that there was a significant similarity between the overdressed people and the friends of my mother whom I occasionally saw in our apartment with their hats and veils, jewelry, fur stoles, and cigarettes. They walked funny, and occasionally patted my cheek and gave me smelly kisses. “Painted women,” I had overheard Kiki and Marta call them. Overdressing I understood to be pretentious and improper. Because Kiki expressed no opinion regarding the underdressed or undressed ones, I took this as approval. Nor did I miss the connection to the saintly and equally naked Jesus above the altar of Kiki’s church.

  The painting I remember most vividly is of a king seated on a throne with a sword in one hand and a baby held up side down by one foot in the other. This, I had come to understand, was King Solomon, Poland’s smartest king.

  Beside a pond in the park, I remember a huge bronze sculpture of the composer Frederick Chopin, seated under a windblown willow. Peacocks walked the park paths, occasionally displaying their beautiful tails.

  To this park, Kiki and I would walk every morning. Along the way we would stop at a butcher shop—white tiled floor, walls, and ceiling—to have sandwiches made for our lunch. Mine would always be boiled ham, Kiki’s sausage. Sometimes, in the park, Kiki would give me a tiny bite of her delicious sausage sandwich, but I understood that it was bad for me.

  Along our way, we would pass a stand of doroshkas, the horse-drawn cabs that still served Warsaw, and I would look with envy at the drivers on their tall seats, eating bread and long shafts of sausage. When I grew up, I decided, I would be a doroshka driver.

  Sometimes, people in the street would all be stopped, their necks craned and their arms extended upward, pointing. That meant there was an airplane overhead. Kiki and I would crane our necks, too, scanning the sky for the little silver cross. “There it is! Look, there it is!” we would point out to each other.

  Usually I went to the park under arms, a sword hanging from my left hip, a pistol strapped to my waist, and a balloon tied to one of the shirt buttons holding up my short pants. In the park, Kiki would sit on a bench and knit a sweater or short pants for me, or she would read from a tiny book. I was instructed to play, but not to get dirty or talk to any children we didn’t know. Since I knew no other children besides my cousin Anita, her cousin Andy, and another cousin of mine named Fredek, and since they all lived in a different part of town and came to our park only by special arrangement between governesses, I never did figure out what I was supposed to do.

  I would walk up and down the paths and soon find myself not in the presence of the bronze Frederick Chopin under his willow or the blue and green peacocks, but the underdressed men and women of the non-offensive palace paintings. The overdressed ones I had adopted Kiki’s distaste for, but the lounging, uncovered ladies would get up from their beds and their chaises and serve me plums and oranges and tell me how glad they were that I had come to visit. Men and women would stop whatever it was they were doing to each other and invite me to participate.

  Sometimes I would encounter other children running after each other, shooting their guns and waving their swords. But knowing full well that any disobe
dience of Kiki was likely to lead to trolley cars, I would ignore them and return to my soft-voiced and soft-bodied ladies and their muscular friends.

  On occasions when one of the cousins came to visit in our park with his or her governess, or we went to their park, the governesses would sit together on the bench, and we, children, would be sent off to play, but nicely.

  Anita and Andy always came together and had an agenda of their own, to which I could find no access. I would walk or run behind them, but had little understanding of what they were doing. Fredek always welcomed my company to help him get revenge on someone. He would tell me that we must sneak up on some Charlie or Joe, and I must hold him while Fredek kicked him in the belly. Sneak around the park as we might, much to my relief we never did encounter either Charlie or Joe, though on returning to our governesses, Fredek would describe at length and with mounting excitement how he had punished the offender, until his governess acknowledged that it was time they were getting on home.

  Marta’s niece came from the country to work for us. She must have been in her teens and slept on a cot in Marta’s room, off the kitchen. That cot and Marta’s bed filled the room practically wall to wall. The girl’s name was Susan. She was to do the cleaning in our apartment while Marta tended to the cooking.

  I hated Susan. I would punch her and kick her legs whenever she was within reach and no one was watching. One day, Susan was polishing the hardwood floor in the salon with a device that was a broom stick with a heavy, flat, iron weight at the bottom around which you wrapped rags. I went over to her and began kicking her shins. Suddenly the question of why I was doing this occurred to me. Susan had done me no harm. She was just a girl living in a tiny room in a strange family’s apartment, trying to make a living, and I was hurting her. Why in the world did I want to hurt her?

  The fact that I was hurting an innocent, vulnerable person—she never fought back—hit me like thunder. Why? Why? I was filled with a strange desire to hold her and say comforting things to her. I wished terribly that what I had done could be made not to have happened.