“Fattening, though . . .” Agnes murmured, but Olivia continued: “I hope you’ll let me have the recipe.”
“Sure,” Clara said, in a faint voice. Maybe she couldn’t find the caustic tone she wanted. Brazenness can knock you sideways like that.
—
i volunteered to clear away the plates once everyone was done eating, and Snow got up to help me. Vivian and Agnes and Olivia talked over one another. Oh no no no, Snow, you’re the guest of honor, leave it ’til Phoebe comes tomorrow—but Clara gave Snow the nod that sent her to the kitchen sink with me.
I meant to ask Snow how she and Bird were getting along. I’d thought they’d be inseparable, but I hadn’t really seen them together. I’d seen Bird roaming the woods with her gang of five, and I’d seen Snow out on the terrace of Flax Hill’s European-style café (European-style as far as any of us could tell, anyhow), smoking cigarettes, hearing out marriage proposals, and giving them marks out of ten. The girls in the group laughed indulgently, knowing that Snow was too nice to want what wasn’t hers, and why not let your boyfriend practice proposing so he’d get it just right for you? The girls’ laughter got a little artificial when Snow dropped her lighter and six or seven of the boyfriends vied to pick it up. Bird’s fifteen-year-old beau couldn’t speak for stammering when he encountered Snow on the porch; yes, of course he did. Here’s what I couldn’t have foreseen—that I’d be anxious for Snow and her sister to be friends. More specifically, I thought it would be better if Bird liked Snow. I couldn’t give a reason for this anxiety; Bird has disliked people before and they’ve been fine. But like everybody else around here, Bird isn’t quite as she was. Maybe the timing of this visit is bad. While Snow’s out in the evening, Bird plays Julia’s lullabies at low volume and sits cross-legged beside the record player, listening with a vacant expression. Arturo asked me if Snow was aware that Bird had borrowed her records, and I mixed him a drink and handed it to him before I answered. “Don’t take this as me bad-mouthing your daughter; I’m not. It’s not so easy to tell what Snow is and isn’t aware of. She very sweetly keeps those cards close to her chest; I hope you won’t deny that.”
My husband drained his glass, and when he spoke again, it was about Bird, not Snow. He reminded me of how she’d been deeply interested in the Cinderella story for a few months when she was nine years old, how she’d had one or the other of us read it to her a countless number of times and gone to sleep without expressing approval or disapproval until one night when Arturo closed the storybook and she asked: “Is it a true story? Not the fairy godmother stuff and her dress turning back to rags at midnight—I know that’s true. But Cinderella just sweeping up all those ashes every day and never putting them into her stepmother’s food or anything—is that true?” He said he knew it was dangerous to say yes, but another part of him thought So what—she can’t prove it isn’t true. Our daughter settled back onto pillows and said pleasantly, “I think they’re lying to us, Dad,” before switching off her bedside lamp to let him know he was dismissed for the night. He said that the way Bird was listening to Julia’s voice reminded him of the way she’d listened to the Cinderella story all those times we’d told it to her. He was understandably concerned, so I told him everything was going to be okay, which was another lie of the Cinderella variety.
The sink was big enough for Snow and me to stand side by side while we soaked and scrubbed all the sauce boats and soup bowls and the swallow-patterned plates. We looked into the dishwater instead of at each other. She trickled water through her fingers.
“Weren’t we here together like this years ago? Only I sat up on the counter. It was your birthday and you were stirring things and chopping things and begging a cake to rise.”
“That was in the other house.”
She brought both her hands down and punched the water, spraying us both with greasy suds. I took a few steps back in case she was about to run amok, but she went still and kept her eyes averted. I wiped my face with a kitchen towel, decided to work the “game of charades” angle, and said, “Angry?” in the same tone of voice I’d have used to ask Animal, mineral, or vegetable?
She said: “I’m sorry. Close the door, please. This isn’t like me.”
When I came back to the sink, she was scrubbing again, elbow deep in dishes.
“Snow. Who told you it isn’t like you to get mad?”
She didn’t answer, just dragged her sleeve across her face, then returned both hands to the sink.
“You feel I’ve treated you badly? Snow?”
“Yes, you have.”
I’d like to know if Snow has come to feed on adoration, on the gentle tone of voice people take with her. Does everybody who crosses her path have to love her? Capture all hearts and let none go free, is that the way she wants it? But I don’t think she knows the answer any more than I do. She’s mad that I haven’t been able to love her. Maybe she’s afraid that I see something in her that she isn’t able to see for herself. But the trouble is, I don’t see much of anything when I try to see her. She stands near me and I know that someone’s there, but when I look, I find another face in the way, and hear another voice, not Snow’s at all, but distorted versions of my own face and voice, I think. And even though this screen and I have become aware of each other, the screen rests easy, banking on its history of standing between people and my own aversion to closeness. I’ve been so afraid of getting closeness wrong, because I don’t know how to do it, because I don’t know what my mistakes reveal—maybe they reveal very good reasons for my having been unloved as a child, I just don’t know.
“Let’s make up,” I said.
“How? I don’t hear you apologizing.”
Our reflections rippled in the water, stretching to breaking point, and swam away from each other in pieces, then the pieces shivered together again, stretched to their limit, burst.
“Let’s do it the way kids do it,” I said.
“The way kids do it?” She was looking at my reflection, not at me.
“You know . . . when you treat a friend badly and you both know it and the only way to get them to forgive you is to let them hurt you.”
“What? That wasn’t how I made up with my friends,” she said with alarm.
“Oh. Maybe it was just a Lower East Side thing.” (Maybe it was me who’d taught my classmates that this was the way to make up.) “Anyway. Hit me.”
She blinked rapidly. “No.”
“I recommend it.”
“But I don’t want to. So.”
“Look . . . the way it was when I was a kid, the person you’d treated badly had to hurt you back, or there were two possibilities. The first was that you continued to like them but you lost respect for them, because in the world of kid think, not taking revenge can be a sign of weakness. The other option, and this is something that continues into adult think, is that the other person’s not taking their moment to hurt you made you stop liking them as much. You started to fear them, because it seemed like they were waiting for a better chance, a chance not just to hurt you, but to devastate you. The only way for there to be both liking and respect is if you hit me now and we call it quits. Do you get what I’m saying?”
I could see I’d somehow sold her on the method, but still she hesitated.
“I’ve never hit anyone before.”
I drew her arms up out of the water and brought her right hand down against my cheek. She pulled back sharply, scattering soapsuds. “Okay, it’s done,” she said.
I shook my head. “Come on. That was nothing.”
She tried to run, and knocked a chair over—Arturo called out “Everything okay in there?” and we called back: “Yup!” and “Absolutely!” It was like a two-legged race around the room, a race against nobody, but I wouldn’t let her go, I had her by the wrists and I used both her hands to strike at my face until she began doing it for herself. That girl slapped me so har
d my ears rang, and she said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” even as she hit me. She simmered down, sank onto a chair, and I folded up onto the floor and rested my chin on her knee. According to the clock on the wall five minutes had passed.
“I hate Olivia,” she said. I looked up at her.
“I believe you.”
“I asked her if she was surprised that you sent me to Boston. I said I bet she’d expected it to be Bird who was sent away. She said, ‘Surprised?’ and she told me about a white woman who went to Africa back in the thirties. While they were out there, the woman’s husband shot a gorilla dead. They didn’t realize it was a female gorilla until they saw the baby gorilla she’d been trying to protect. They felt guilty, so they brought the baby gorilla into their home and got an African woman to nurse it—”
“What? These people got an African woman to nurse what? The baby gorilla?”
“Yeah, I said something similar. And I asked Olivia why she was telling me this, and she said her point was that one can waste a lot of time marveling at the decisions of white folks. She said there’s nothing any of them do that can surprise her. Then she went right on signing her charity checks. That’s Olivia Whitman, can’t stop giving. I think she might hate herself, but I can’t help her out there. I feel so little love for her. I want to, but just when I’m getting there, she says or does something that makes me go nuts.”
I said: “Don’t let her see. At her age . . . I don’t know. It’d probably finish her off.”
Snow had given me a black eye. And Arturo asked me a leading question before I even attempted an explanation. “Did you fall over?” That was what he asked. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what happened. It became an odd little running joke between Snow and me for the next few days. As she passed me, she’d whisper into my ear: “Did you fall over?”
And then there’s Mia. Mia and what she’s been doing behind my back. She only came clean when I phoned her and told her about the rat catcher. I couldn’t work out who’d told him where we were. Olivia and Agnes and Gerald didn’t know his name, and even if they did, what would their motive have been? For half of a sleepless night I thought it had to be Arturo. Arturo knew the rat catcher’s name. Arturo could have tracked him down. This thing he has about completing things, having the whole gang there for the head count—
Mia interrupted me. “We need to talk,” she said. “I’ve got an all-nighter to pull, but I’ll come over when it gets light.”
She was true to her word. She arrived as I was making coffee, slouched in a chair in front of the stove, too decaffeinated to stand. The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot. Snow was there with me, smoking her breakfast cigarette and telling me something about her job. Her tone suggested she wasn’t looking forward to getting back to work; I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what she was saying. I was merely making listening noises. I do remember that she said she’d helped Bird get ready for school. It’s been a long while since Bird’s requested help getting ready for school. I don’t know what tasks would be involved in helping her get ready at this stage of her advanced ability to comb her own hair, get her own books together, and eat her own cereal, so I thought it was a good sign that she’d allowed Snow to think she was helping. Mia was carrying a red folder. She passed it to me, kissed Snow, and asked her, “Remember me?” Snow’s smile was perfectly vague and perfectly tender, and she said: “Of course.”
“And how’s your Aunt Clara?”
“She’s back in Boston now, and doing just fine, thank you.”
She left us; she had errands to run. Agnes wanted her to buy fuchsia wool.
Mia stopped smiling as soon as she’d gone. “Give me a break,” she said. “That girl cannot be for real.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know. Maybe this is actually as sincere as she gets.”
“I’ll take that under advisement. What happened?” She brushed my bangs to the left. “Don’t tell me Arturo . . . ?”
“No, Mia. But if I ever want to make him cry, I’ll tell him ‘people’ think he has the makings of a fine wife beater. I tripped over a chair. I know, I know. Why is my life so exciting?”
Mia’s folder contained a single sheet of paper. It was a xeroxed birth certificate. Name: Frances Amelia Novak. Date of birth: November 1, 1902. Place of birth: Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
“Where’d you get this?”
She lifted her coffee cup to her mouth and set it down again. “I went looking for your mom, Boy.”
“Why would you do that?”
“That doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I found her. I found her.”
“It was you who brought the rat catcher after me.”
“I told him where to find you, yes. Sit down, Boy. Sit down and hear me out. I thought he deserved the chance to tell you what I’m about to tell you. He had one last chance and he didn’t take it and he’s not going to bother you anymore.”
Frances Amelia Novak. Date of birth: November 1, 1902. “I’ve got to get to work. Tell me later.”
“No, now. You need to know this now. Mrs. Fletcher will understand.”
Mia was bleary-eyed from her all-nighter, and when she jerked her head, three neon pins escaped her hair and scuttled across the floor. I still wanted to trust her. “Start with why you did this.”
“Okay. I wanted something to write about. The way you’re looking at me, people have looked at me that way before. One guy called me a bloodsucker. That’s not it. It’s more like my mind’s stacked with all these incongruous items, other people’s stories that I’ve been telling pieces of. And the people don’t come back for their stories, but that doesn’t make them mine. The Mia Cabrini pawnshop, I call it sometimes. But since the termination . . . my termination, I should say, but that sounds like the termination of myself, doesn’t it . . . I’ve got to write something. That or get a hole drilled in my skull to let the fog out.”
I poured us both more coffee. It was cold and thick. “It would’ve been better for you to write about the termination itself. Maybe it’d help you. I’m not just saying that because you’re using me.”
She didn’t flinch. “I don’t think it would have been better. I want to describe what someone goes through when they refuse to be a mother, or when they realize they just can’t do it. I mean, okay, so I knew what it was for me. I knew that I was afraid of yet another relationship in which I care about someone a hell of a lot more than they care about me. For that to play out between me and a kid, for all our lives . . . I don’t regret the termination. I know I cried all over you about it being my last shot at having a kid, but I think I’ve done all my crying over this. I hate that my life is teaching me that I can only be loved if I put my love out of reach and just drift above people until they love my remoteness. I’m not just talking about romances, but about friendships too. Whoa, Mia, you’re too intense. I get a lot of that. So I know that I won’t be loved the way I need to be. I know that’s not going to happen in my life. I’ve got other stuff to do, I can just get on and do that other stuff. But say I go ahead and print that, it’s just a sob story, easy enough for most readers to think they understand. If I’m going to talk about this thing, I don’t want to be confirming anybody’s theories about the way life goes—not even my own. So I was thinking. I was thinking, maybe I could do a well-disguised piece about Olivia Whitman. She sent Clara away. But then she raised her other two. I wondered if I could write about you and Snow for a second, but Snow isn’t your kid anyway. And then I thought about your nameless mother, and I thought she might be dead. But if she was alive . . .”
“Is she?”
Mia leaned forward in her chair. “Boy, don’t you get it? When I started searching, I started with the rat catcher. I thought I could find your mother through him, and that turned out to be true. I
searched public records for anything connected to Frank Novak and Francis Novak and Frantisek Novak and I found a few, but none that led me to that address on Rutgers Street that my pal mailed that money to years ago. I went down to New York for two weeks and pestered poor innocent Francises and Frantiseks. I stood outside the brownstone you grew up in, trying to switch on X-ray vision. I looked up your birth certificate—”
“I haven’t got a birth certificate.” I’d been proud of that, having to enroll at high school with an affidavit sworn by the rat catcher that he was my father and that I’d been born on the date he said I’d been born on.
“It’s on record that you have. But this is stuff you could’ve looked up if you’d wanted to . . . anyhow, your birth certificate says your mother is Frances Novak and your father is unnamed. The Frank Novak who raised you doesn’t officially exist.”
“Doesn’t exist?”
“Not officially.”
I cackled. I couldn’t help it. She didn’t know what she was saying.
“Keep hearing me out. I’m not just talking out of my ass here. I did a lot of work on this and I can show you all the paperwork. That’s why I haven’t been around much. Maybe you thought I was moping. Maybe I hardly crossed your mind. Anyhow, my earlier searches came to nothing because I’d been looking for men. Frances Amelia Novak was born in Brooklyn in 1902. Her father, Sandor, was a Hungarian immigrant, a concert cellist turned delivery-truck driver, and her mother, Dinah, was an Irish-American seamstress who made these quilts . . . I went to see one of them at the folk art museum, the tiny one in Midtown. It was art, what your grandma made. Frances was a scamp with a knockout smile—”
Mia was showing me a series of xeroxed photographs. Oh, God.
“And she was super, super smart. It was a pretty mixed neighborhood—linguistically, I mean—the warmest reception a colored messenger boy would get around there in those days were questions like ‘Do you think this is Harlem?’ But Frances picked up snippets of Czech and Dutch from the neighbors, as well as speaking Magyar, her father’s first language, fluently. She brought out the best side of her more idealistic teachers, made them feel that she had just the kind of intellect they’d got into teaching to help develop. She’d ask for additional reading and extra assignments. You’d think the other kids would’ve hated her, but they were glad for her, voted her Most Likely to Succeed. She made it into Barnard on a scholarship, got her BS in her chosen field of psychology, embarked on postgraduate research, maybe with a view to becoming a faculty member . . . that’s what she told her friends, anyway. She knew that the first female member of the psych faculty had been taken on less than five years ago, and they’d taken her on as an unpaid lecturer. She knew that she’d need more than just a flair for the subject, more than just curiosity, she’d need to be utterly single-minded in her pursuit of a faculty position, and the research itself meant more to her than that. She was interested in sexuality. More specifically, she was interested in proving that homosexuality isn’t a mental illness. But she never finished her paper—”
Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel Page 23