The poor motherless thing. Oh my, I remember to this day the first time I laid eyes on her. Eleven years old, her and her father driving up to the Vinegar Hill place in a taxi cab, and myself still up to my elbows in soap and water, not half ready for the two of them, I hadn’t even started on the kitchen. Where’s your missus?—that’s what I was about to say, but thank the Lord I buttoned my lip, because there wasn’t any missus, she’d gone and passed away years before, the life went out of her giving birth to this washrag of a girl.
It was Mr. Goodwill himself who told me the story. A tragedy. That was after I got to know him better.
Coming from Canada like he did, he wasn’t used to coloreds, and he talked to me straight out about this and that and everything else too. “Cora-Mae,” he said, “my girl needs a woman in the house, she needs to learn things, she’ll be wanting a bit of company when I’m not here. First her mamma died, you see, and then an old auntie who took care of her up in Canada, and now she’s got no one in the world, only me.”
That’s how I came to be working for Mr. Goodwill by the week instead of just Wednesdays the way the company said. That’s the Indiana Limestone Company, I’m talking about, they’d hired on Mr. Goodwill and brought him all the way down to Bloomington. A widow-man and his little girl. Now this would be round about 1916, when Orren was overseas, his leg all shot to pieces, only I didn’t know it then. That very fall our own Lucile was six years old and starting school, and so I said yes, to Mr. Goodwill, I’d come by early and get breakfast cooking and see that the child was dressed nice and clean for school, and look to the house and the wash and all. Two dollars a day he paid me, three dollars after they moved into the big house, and that was good pay for colored help then.
They treated me nice. Mr. Goodwill had a jokey way about him.
Sometimes he’d go and leave a sack of fresh doughnuts on the kitchen table. “What’s this?” I’d say, and he’d say, “Why, someone must’ve left those there for you, Cora-Mae, a little treat to go along with your coffee.”
I’d start in on the dusting and the beds and I’d wax the furniture if it needed doing and after that I’d sit myself down with a cup of coffee and a doughnut, taking my ease. If the girl was home from school for some reason she’d sit next to me and have herself a doughnut too and a big glass of milk. Once she turned and said to me, “How come you eat your doughnut with a fork, Cora-Mae?” “I don’t know,” I said back, and I didn’t. “I never saw anyone eat a doughnut like that,” she said, all puzzled-like, and I couldn’t guess her meaning, if she thought I was ignorant, if she was being fresh or just curious the way my Lucile always was. I held my tongue and tried not to scold or fret too much over the things she’d do. I’d say to myself, remember this poor child is motherless, and there’s not one thing worse in this world than being motherless.
I still think that way in my mind. My Lucile lives way out there in California now and has her own family and a beautiful home of her own, ranch style, and I haven’t seen her for, oh, six or seven years. She hardly ever sits herself down and writes a letter home, what with all she has to do looking after her family, and I don’t hold her to blame one bit about that. Her mama’s no more than a little bitty story in her life now, something from way, way back when, and that’s the way my mama is for me. You can tell that story in five minutes flat. You can blink and miss it. But you can’t make it go away. Your mama’s inside you. You can feel her moving and breathing and sometimes you can hear her talking to you, saying the same things over and over, like watch out now, be careful, be good, now don’t get yourself hurt.
Well, that’s why I took to Mr. Goodwill’s little girl the way I did.
I’d be ironing one of her dresses or brushing her hair and I’d think: I’m all she’s got. I’m not even half a mama, but I’m all the mama she’s ever going to get. How’s she going to find her way?
How’s she going to be happy in her life? I’d stare and stare into the future and all I could see was this dark place in front of her that was black as the blackest night.
Skoot Skutari’s Theory
My grandfather was born in a northern Albanian village, the son of poor country Jews. When he was eighteen he left home, telling his parents he was going to walk to Jerusalem. Instead he traveled westward to the city of Skutari (and tacked that name on to his own), and caught a boat bound for Malta. From there he traveled to Lisbon, then boarded ship for Montreal. By the year 1897 he was living in rural Manitoba, traveling from township to township and earning his living as a peddler of household sundries. Abram Gozhdë Skutari was his full name, a self-made man, a millionaire, founder and owner of a nationwide chain of retail outlets.
In the early days, though, he was heartbreakingly poor, and the life of a backwoods peddler was painful to him. He was reviled by the very farmers and townspeople who depended on him to bring them necessities. The old Jew he was called. No one had the decency to ask him his name or where he lived or whether he was married and had a family. The men in the region refused to shake his hand, as though he carried lice on his body. That hurt him terribly, he never got over the insult of that.
And then along came Eaton’s Mail Order, and suddenly people didn’t have to deal with traveling peddlers any longer. It was cheaper and easier to send in an order to the Winnipeg store for their shoe polish and hair ribbons. But how was Abram Skutari to support his wife Elena (my grandmother Lena) and their little boy (my Uncle Jacob)?
It occurred to him to apply for a bank loan and start up his own business, selling work clothes, safety equipment, fire-fighting outfits, drilling supplies, everything, in fact, that Eaton’s left out of their catalogue back in 1905. And bicycles. My grandfather had the idea that bicycles were the future. The automobile was coming in, yes, but he was looking around and seeing that every young person in Winnipeg would soon be lusting for one of the new, massproduced bicycles that had come on the market.
He was fearful, though, about applying for a loan, having never set foot in a bank, especially not the Royal Bank, an imposing stone and marble temple situated in the middle of Winnipeg at the corner of Portage and Main. He was a man who didn’t own a necktie.
He spoke brokenly. It’s possible he really did have lice—many people did during that era—but something happened that gave my grandfather courage. It was something he witnessed, an incident that changed his life.
This event took place in the summer of 1905 when he was in the midst of his peddling rounds, he and his horse and his wagon piled with merchandise. It was mid-afternoon. He pulled into a little town in Manitoba, a place as bleak as any eastern European shtetl, at that time a company town, stone quarrying, a particularly fine grade of limestone. On this day my grandfather happened to be driving past one of the worker’s houses when he heard the sound of someone moaning, as though in great pain. He didn’t stop to think or knock, but entered directly through the back door.
There he found a woman lying, unattended, in the kitchen with her legs apart, about to give birth to a baby. He could see the baby’s head starting to come. He had no idea what to do. Birth was women’s business—that was the way people thought in those days, especially a Jewish male raised in the old country, as my grandfather was.
Next door a neighbor was hanging out her clothes, and he hurriedly sought her help. Then he ran to the other end of the village where the doctor lived. It was a hot day. He remembered the heat and dust for the rest of his life. By the time they got back to the house the woman was dying. And it was my grandfather, Abram Skutari, the old Jew, who received her final glance—a roomful of people had gathered, but he was the one she fixed her eye upon. He swore afterwards that he watched her face fill up with his own fright; she drank it in, and then she died.
The child was still alive and breathing. It took my grandfather a minute to understand this. There was much noise and confusion in the room, and it was hot, and everyone was hovering around the dead woman. But there on the kitchen table was a baby wrapped i
n a sheet. Its lips were moving, trembling, which was how he knew it was alive. No one was paying any attention to it. It was as though it wasn’t there. As though it was a lump of dough left by mistake.
He reached out and touched its cheek, and felt a deep, sudden longing to give it something, a blessing of some kind. He could never understand where that longing came from, but he once confessed to my father, who was fond of retelling the story, that he felt perfectly the infant’s loneliness; it was loneliness of an extreme and incurable variety, the sort of loneliness he himself had suffered since leaving home at eighteen.
In his pocket was an ancient coin from the old country. He placed that coin on the baby’s forehead and held it there, watching as the breath rose and fell under the sheeting. “Be happy,” he said in Albanian or Turkish or Yiddish, or possibly English. Then he said it again, be happy, but he felt as though he were blessing a stone, that nothing good could come out of his mouth. He felt weak, he felt like a man made of paper and straw, he felt as though he wasn’t a man at all, that he might as well be dead.
He didn’t realize he was weeping until he felt the weight of an arm on his shoulder. It was the doctor, who was also weeping. They stood together like that. Their tears mingled.
Mingled—that’s the word my grandfather used when he told this story, our tears mingled. The other man’s arm on his shoulder felt like a brother’s arm and the touch of it made him wail even louder.
After that they all signed the death certificate and then the birth certificate, even my grandfather. Everyone was astonished he could write his name. He set it down: Abram Gozhdë Skutari, and as he wrote he felt a surge of strength come into his body. He felt the strumming of his own heart. He felt he would be able to do anything, even walk into the Royal Bank at the corner of Portage and Main and ask for a loan.
But that child’s sadness never left him. He swore he’d never seen a creature so alone in the world. He lived a long life and made a million dollars and loved his wife and was a decent father to his sons. But he grieved about that baby all his days, the curse that hung over it, its terrible anguish.
Mrs. Flett’s Theory
Surely no one would expect Mrs. Flett to come up with a theory about her own suffering—the poor thing’s so emptied out and lost in her mind she can’t summon sufficient energy to brush her hair, let alone organize a theory. Theorizing is done inside a neat calm head, and Mrs. Flett’s head is crammed with rage and disappointment. She’s given way. She’s a mess, a nut case. In the morning light her hurt seems temporary and manageable, but at night she hears voices, which may just be the sound of her own soul thrashing. It sings along the seams of other hurts, especially the old unmediated terror of abandonment. Somewhere along the line she made the decision to live outside of events; or else that decision was made for her. Write a gardening book, her daughter Alice advises. Go on a round-the-world trip, says Fraidy Hoyt. Take some courses at the university. Teach yourself macrame. Look into allergy shots or vitamin B complex. Listen to soothing music, keep a diary like Virginia Woolf, go for long walks, indulge in hot baths.
Question your assumptions, be kind to yourself, live for the moment, loosen up, pray, scream, curse the world, count your blessings, just let go, just be.
All this advice comes flying in Mrs. Flett’s direction, but she’s too distracted to hear.
You’d think she’d be scared to death by the state she’s in, but she’s not. Her hair’s matted, her fingernails broken, her houseplants withered, her day-to-day life smashed, but sleeping inside her like a small burrowing creature is the certainty that she’ll recover. For one thing, she distrusts the sincerity of her own salt tears, and, another thing, she remembers how, years ago, she and Fraidy loved to quote poor old William Blake: “Weep, weep, in notes of woe” and how the word woe made them fall over laughing, such a blind little bug of a word.
Now, at the age of fifty-nine, sadness flows through every cell of her body, yet leaves her curiously untouched. She knows how memory gets smoothed down with time, everything flattened by the iron of acceptance and rejection—it comes to the same thing, she thinks. This sorrowing of hers has limits, just as there’s a limit to how tangled she’ll let her hair get or how much dust she’ll allow to pile up on her dressing table. That’s Daisy for you. Daisy’s resignation belongs to the phylum of exhaustion, the problem of how to get through a thousand ordinary days. Or, to be more accurate, ten thousand such days. In a sense I see her as one of life’s fortunates, a woman born with a voice that lacks a tragic register. Someone who’s learned to dig a hole in her own life story.
But she’s tired of being sad, and tired of not even minding being sad, of not even in a sense knowing. And in the thin bony box of her head she understands, and accepts, the fact that her immense unhappiness is doomed to irrelevance anyway. Already, right this minute, I feel a part of her wanting to go back to the things she used to like, the feel of a new toothbrush against her gums, for instance. Such a little thing. She’d like to tie a crisp clean apron around her waist once again, peel a pound of potatoes in three minutes flat and put them soaking in cold water. Polish a jelly jar and set it on the top shelf with its mates. Lick an envelope, stick a stamp in its corner, drop it in the mail box. She’d like to clean her body out with a hoot of laughter and give way to the pull of gravity. It’s going to happen. All this suffering will be washed away. Any day now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ease, 1977
Victoria Louise Flett is only twenty-two years old, a student at the University of Toronto, a tall stringbean of a woman with large hands and feet and straight blond unyielding hair that she bends carelessly behind her ears. So much for her coiffeur. She favors jeans and sweaters and an old denim jacket—as a matter of fact, she owns no other clothing. These clothes are dark in color and dense in weave, as though she’s trying to keep the bad dreams of modern life out. To correct her nearsightedness she wears glasses with round metal frames, and her eyes behind the rather spotty lenses appear cold and serious. It is 1977; she is no longer the tenderly sheltered child of a large household; her voice, an embarrassed voice, shunts between adult censoriousness and teenage perplexity. Her emotional rhythms are sometimes uneven, as you might expect, and yet she is capable of generous insight.
She’s confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that has burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says, to see men and women—though, oddly, they are mostly women—tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university’s records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. Victoria doesn’t believe these earnest amateurs are looking for links to royalty or to creative genius; all they want is for their ancestors to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded (but severely occluded) lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection. Common sense, that prized substance, seems to have disappeared from the world; even Victoria realizes this.
Victoria’s great-aunt Daisy, now retired and living in Florida, has become preoccupied in her mature years with the lives of her two dead fathers: Cuyler Goodwill, her blood parent, and Magnus Flett, her father-in-law. But Victoria’s aunt pursues her two departed fathers in an altogether different spirit than the usual weekend genealogist. She’s more focused for one thing, and, at the same time, more dreamy and ineffectual, wanting, it seems to Victoria, to pull herself inside a bag of buried language, to be that language, to be able to utter that unutterable word: father. It’s true Aunt Daisy has read a few works of social history, memoirs, biography—quite a few more in recent years than her niece would ever imagine—but she does not go on detective outings to local libraries and gr
aveyards, and she has not traveled to her birthplace, Tyndall, Manitoba, to visit the famed Goodwill Tower built in memory of her own mother; she imagines, anyway, that the structure has been sadly vandalized, stone after stone carried away by souvenir hunters, so that nothing remains except a slight doughnut-shaped depression in the ground. She has not contacted the Mormon Archive in Salt Lake City and has no plans to do so. She’s sent off no letters of inquiry. She sits comfortably, very comfortably indeed, on the flowered settee in her Florida room (three walls of louvered glass), and thinks about her two departed fathers. That’s as far as she goes: she just thinks about them, concentrates on them, dwells on them. For her grandniece, Victoria, the two fathers are described, but never quite animated; their powers are asserted, but not demonstrated. Aunt Daisy mulls over their lives.
She wonders what those lives were made of and how they ended: noisily as in the movies or in a frosty stand-off? Of course, she doesn’t do this all the time—only at odd moments, late in the afternoon, for instance, when the day feels flattened and featureless, when she’s restless, when she feels her own terrifying inauthenticity gnawing at her heart’s membrane, and when there’s nothing of interest on television, just the local news from Tampa or the weather report.
Her life at seventy-two is one of ease. Three times a year she gets a good perm, as opposed to an ordinary perm, and ends up with hair springy as Easter basket grass; she’s submitted (once) to a painful facial, tried (two or three times) a new shade of lipstick, thinks (every day) about having her varicose veins done. And she’s bounded back from the depression that struck her down some years ago. Her physical health is good-to-excellent. She has money in the bank, plenty of it, though she lives modestly. Ten years ago she sold her large Ottawa house and moved to Florida’s west coast, purchasing a three-bedroom condo in a Sarasota development nearby to where her old friend Fraidy Hoyt has settled, and not far from Birds’ Key where another friend, Labina Greene Dukes Kavanaugh, lives with her third husband, Bud.
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