by Sara Gran
I close my eyes and silently repeat shanaishwaraya Allen died of pneumonia in 1989 Joshua must know this, because he quickly changes the subject before Allison or I can intervene, and the rest of the afternoon passes without a hitch. When the article comes out, one month later, there’s no mention of the slip-up A black-and-white picture of Evelyn is on the cover, and when my mother sees it, she thinks they’re celebrating the first issue of the Greenwich Village Review.
Chapter 11
My mother calls, and I try to talk about doctors and tests. She says she wants to see Eva
“Mom,” I begin gently. “Eva’s—”
“Oh stop, I know Eva’s dead. I mean at the cemetery, in Brooklyn. All that talk in the interview, it made me think of her We haven’t been there since you were a girl. We could make a day out of it. Go see my old house, walk through the neighborhood. We can go to Renault’s for brunch ”
So at ten thirty on a gray and raw Sunday we meet for omelettes at Renault’s, one of the last great diners Once a year we’ve always found a reason to come to Renault’s, five blocks away from the house my mother was born in. My father used to play Elvis Presley on the private jukeboxes at each booth. Now Evelyn and I play Sinatra. She’s in good spirits today, and very much here
“We can go to Eagle Appetizers for smoked fish on the way home,” she says “We can go to Stillman’s for suits. It’s like having an uncle in the business,” I say We always get a kick out of the mottoes in Brooklyn.
“We could go to King Carpet, where every customer is Royalty”
“We could go to the beauty parlor on Thirteenth Street that adds sparkle. You know, we really could go to Still-man’s,” I tell her. “I could use a new suit for work.”
“What do you need a suit for?” she asks. “I thought you wore blue jeans there.”
“Only on Fridays,” I explain. “That’s casual day. Sometimes I have meetings.”
“With who?”
“Publishers Managers Literary agents. Sales reps ”
“What do you have meetings about?”
I can’t answer that, so I counter that we could go to the dry cleaner on Eleventh that leaves your clothes fresh as spring.
After breakfast we take a walk down Prospect Place, where Evelyn lived until she was fourteen.
“The Christensens lived over there. Finns. Alcoholics. First the parents, then the kids. And they married alcoholics too Sad
“Mrs. Primorski lived on the second floor over there with a girl who they said was her cousin Lesbians. Nobody cared. They were nice people. The Abramowitzs lived over there, they bought the whole building and when the kids grew up they gave them each their own apartment. They were Jews, no one had a problem with them except the people next door Ed and Martha Pokowski. Martha Pokowski went to church three times a day. She told my mother, this is like twenty years ago, that I was going to hell because I published pornography. I think that was after we did a story by Philip Roth. They hated Eva. They said her parents were trash.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know Eva’s parents had just come from Poland, they didn’t speak any English, people thought they were better than them Everyone else on the block had been here for like ten, twenty years, they really thought they were something Not everyone was like that, though. The Czinaskis, over on the next block, they took in kids from the orphanage, sometimes right off the street. And they had money like we had money, which is not a lot. I remember once a girl came to live with them, thirteen, fourteen years old, she had already been working down by the Gowanus Canal for years You know, a hooker. Were these people ever in an uproar! I mean, the Pokowkis, you can imagine Even I wasn’t allowed to talk to her. But she was a very bright girl, she did well in school and went on to college. I think she’s a lawyer now Oh my God, would you look at that, that’s Frank Heinerman.”
A man in a white undershirt and saggy, no-color pants is taking out a messy bag of trash from a house across the street. I have rarely seen my mother smile so broadly as she does now She calls out hello and pulls me across the street toward him.
I know the story of Frank Heinerman, the village idiot savant of Windsor Terrace Here they called it the sickness. People use the definite article more in Brooklyn than they do in Manhattan; in Brooklyn the world is not made up of generalities but of specifics Incapable of choosing his own pants, in the eleventh grade Frank gave the chemistry demonstration for the professors at the Brooklyn College. After high school he went to the University of California on the science scholarship, but dropped out after three months because of the sickness. Frank went to the doctor, who gave him the pills, but the pills fogged his mind so he couldn’t do the science So he stopped the pills, turned his back on the doctors, moved back home, and set up the laboratory in his mother’s basement As it turned out, he didn’t need college anyway, by his mid-twenties he was publishing regularly in the top international chemistry journals. And from the looks of it, he still can’t choose his own pants.
“Frank! It’s Evelyn! Evelyn Kowalski!”
Frank squints for a second, mouth agape, before he answers.
“Oh, Evelyn How ya doing?” He acts as if he’s seen my mother every day since 1961, when she moved. Evelyn takes his hand and he smiles.
“Good, Frank, good. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m okay. Busy. I got a guy from Harvard coming tonight and Mom says I gotta clean my room ”
“How is your mother?”
“She’s okay. She’s got the arthritis in her hips now, she don’t get around too good.”
“This is my daughter, Frank Mary.”
Frank breaks a big smile I’m a bit scared
“Your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Well, go figure. How old is she?”
“Twenty-nine,” Evelyn says. I smile and try to look cute
“She’s yours?” Frank asks. He seems a little confused.
“Yes,” says Evelyn. “You remember I was married. Her father died when she was a girl.”
“She’s a beautiful girl,” Frank says. “You must be so proud.”
Evelyn looks weepy for a second, and then changes the subject.
“How’s everything around the neighborhood?”
“Eh. I don’t know anyone who lives here anymore Everyone moved away, like you. The couple next door is nice. The husband, Ed, he’s a science teacher at Midwood. I’m gonna let him come over and see my lab.”
“Well, it was nice to see you, Frank.”
“See you later, Evelyn.” As if he sees her every day. But then he adds “I can’t believe she’s your daughter. I just can’t believe it”
The next stop is the flower shop on Eighteenth Street. We each get three bouquets, one for each of my mother’s parents, one for Eva I try to pay for my own flowers but my mother won’t let me Greenwood Cemetery is damp and feels like a movie set All kinds of minor celebrities are buried here and on our way to the Kowalski family plot we stop and point like tourists.
“Ooh, look, it’s Margaret Sanger ”
“Oh, give me one of your lilies, it’s Leonard Bernstein ”
Finally we reach the Kowalski graves My mother’s parents’ tombstones, which she selected herself, are plain and gray and dignified. Name, dates, just the essentials. Eva’s, which Evelyn’s mother chose, is absolutely purple Angels, roses, scrolls, biblical quotes, poetry. Our Beloved Daughter We put down our flowers and look at the graves for a minute or two.
“Well,” says my mother, “that’s it,” and we turn around and leave
Walking from the cemetery to Eagle Appetizers all Evelyn wants to talk about is Eva, the girl who came to live with them in 1946.
“I think what happened was, my grandmother had known her grandmother back in Poland Then they lived on the same block as us here in Brooklyn I don’t know what happened to her parents I think they died from the flu No, the mother died, but then the father couldn’t take care of her. He was a drunk. I know he died
young, I don’t know if it was before or after her. I don’t know. When she first came to stay with us she only spoke Polish, so I decided my job was to teach her English We were five. Every night after dinner I would sit on the sofa with her and tell her the English words for the Polish: mother for matka, father for ojeice and so on. That’s all the Polish I can remember now. When she started to speak a little English I was so proud, I thought it was my little lessons Really it was probably just living in the house with all of us speaking it all the time I always felt so responsible for her I guess I thought that if she became too much of a burden my parents would get rid of her Of course they wouldn’t have but with us being so poor, I thought maybe they would She was so cute, everyone who saw her just fell in love with her After a while I was jealous, because my grandmother used to give her candy and little presents all the time She felt sorry for her She always blamed me. The evil eye. We had gotten in a fight the night she died ”
“I know.”
“It’s funny, the things you remember, it’s always what you think you would forget. The people in the apartment upstairs, the Sukoskies, they had a little yellow cat we used to play with. Eva and I would drive that cat nuts We would dress it up in dolls’ clothes, sit her at the table with us for a tea party—we could do anything to that cat, she never complained.
“You know, I remember everything about the night she died. It was something silly like marbles. Whose marbles were whose. And it was so stupid because we never fought, we shared everything, just once we had a fight over these stupid marbles ”
“Mom, it was not your fault No one thinks you gave Eva the evil eye She had the heart condition. She could have gone at any time. They found that out after she died. Even if she had been to the doctor, they couldn’t have done anything.” After only a few hours in Brooklyn, I’ve picked up the the.
“I know I never would have given her the evil eye. I didn’t even know what that meant. We made up before we went to bed, every night we said ‘I love you,’ in Polish, before we went to bed.”
“Your grandmother was a crazy old woman.”
“Eva was like a sister to me. Can you imagine, putting an idea like that in a child’s head, that she had killed somebody? I loved her.”
“Yes, but Mom, even if you were mad at Eva, even if you tried to, you could not have killed Eva with the evil eye. There is no such thing as the evil eye She had the congenital heart disease You know that, right?”
“Of course I know that. Of course I never would have hurt that girl I didn’t even know how to do the evil eye. It’s ridiculous.”
By now we’ve reached Eagle Appetizers and so the conversation is over and Evelyn still thinks she killed Eva. We each get two small golden smoked chubs and a jar of pickles to take home At the subway my mother kisses me on the cheek and says, “Next time, honey, we’ll do something you want to do.” So I guess this will be a regular event now, seeing my mother.
Chapter 12
By February 14th, the day of my mother’s retirement party, the doctors still haven’t decided on a diagnosis. I imagine the whole lot of them, the entire AMA, sitting around a prefab conference table in a carpeted, windowless room, scratching their heads, ordering in sandwiches, trying to reach an agreement After an afternoon of pharmaceutical-salesmen jokes and difficult-patient stories, they have a few cocktails and say fuck it, let’s just say we need more tests. Psychiatric evaluations, orthomolecular blood analysis, live dark-field microscopy—we’re out on the fringe now, and we’re still not seeing results
On the morning of the fourteenth I call Veronica I’ve invited a crowd of people to the party tonight, but Chloe and Veronica are the only two I care about And now Veronica says she’s not coming
“But you promised.” I know I sound like a baby. I can’t help myself.
“I know, I’m sorry, but it’s a totally spur-of-the-moment thing. This producer is in from Greece for the weekend and he wants to see a tape of what I have tomorrow afternoon. I’ve got to get the tape together tonight”
“Don’t you have one already?” I ask “What do you show other people when you want their money?”
“Of course I do,” Veronica says, huffy. “It’s just that I taped over the last one by mistake.”
“Fine. Forget about it” I slam the phone down and after two minutes of repeating shanaishwaraya I call her back to apologize.
“It’s important,” I tell her “I know it’s important Producers are a big deal. I was being a bitch ”
“No,” she says. “Your thing is more important. And Evelyn’s been like another mom to me.”
“Funny, she’s never even been like a first mom to me I don’t know why I’m getting so upset about this It’s nothing. Make your tape ”
“No, I’m coming,” she insists. “I’ll make the tape in the morning.”
“But you’ll never be able to get it all done before noon. Especially if you go out tonight. Besides, she’ll be so busy she won’t even miss you tonight.”
“I’m coming.”
“No,” I tell her. “You’re not”
Finally I convince Veronica to stay home and we’re both miserable. I’m whipping up a honey-and-olive-oil hair conditioner when Chloe calls. She’s not coming either I’m furious.
“This is great. Veronica just canceled too You know—”
“Mary, I-”
“No, forget it It’s fine. I—”
“Mary. Mary Listen to me. I’m pregnant.”
I put down the whisk and sit at the table. “Oh my God.”
“I’m pregnant. And I’m going to have the baby.”
“Oh my God. Congratulations’ Brian must be thrilled.”
“Uh, yeah. Thrilled. Surprised, you know, but definitely thrilled”
So. The day is off to a roaring start.
The party is at Alex Lidell’s house on Sutton Place. He’s an old friend of Evelyn’s and the editor of a literary quarterly that published Michael’s first essay, a little piece on Edgar Allan Poe. Lidell’s got more money than almost anyone else in New York, even though the full-color quarterly must lose close to a million a year. No one knows where the money comes from. At the townhouse on Sutton Place, it’s twenty minutes before I find my mother, crying in a bedroom on the second floor. She sits on the bed sobbing, flanked by Allison on one side and Erica, who’s come down from Connecticut for the weekend, on the other. The three of them look inspiringly beautiful, middle-aged women in black cocktail dresses and dark stockings, lolling on the bed like a slumber party. Allison and Erica and I coo to my mother Come on, and I love you, and Aw, honey A gaggle of such consoling girls, you would think she’s just broken up with her steady in fifth period, but I feel sorrier for myself than for her. Evelyn gets to relive the best moments of her life every day. I’m stuck here, in this Upper East Side bedroom with its lone armchair, a simple wood dresser, a locked closet door, a big beautiful bed with a real Pennsylvania Dutch quilt spread across it, my seriously ill mother, and her two best friends.
The crying subsides a bit
“I, I, I’m so sorry.”
Oh no, don’t be sorry. We’re happy to be here for you. We want to be here for you More than anything else in the world, we want to be in this room watching you cry
“It’s—fuck. You know Thirty-three fucking years, for Christ’s sake. I don’t even remember what I did with myself before I went to the office every day ”
“But it’s not like you’ll never go there again,” says Allison.
“You can go whenever you want,” says Erica.
“I know But it’s not just leaving work I always knew that would happen someday. I’ve kind of been looking forward to it, actually.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t know that”
“Oh, yeah,” my mother says, crying subsided. “For a few years now I’ve thought about it It hasn’t been so much fun the past few years The business has changed so much I read the submissions, every year there’s more an
d more shit It’s because everyone has one of those computers now. If some of these people had to actually type a manuscript before they sent it in, most of them wouldn’t even bother That should be my last editorial: why typewriters made for better writers.”
“Honey, you already did your last editorial. But I’m sure you could do another one,” says Allison.
“They’d love it if you would do another one,” says Erica
“Oh, it’s not that. It’s not that I’m sick of those fucking editorials. It’s just that I’m so worried, not that Kevin won’t do a good job, I just don’t know if it will be the same I worry that he’ll say the wrong thing and piss off an advertiser, or some great foreign writer will send something in and he won’t know who it is or ..”
I’ve been downing gin and tonics since I walked in the door and I’m finally a little drunk. I wander out of the bedroom and back downstairs, and if Evelyn notices my leaving, she doesn’t let on. Downstairs in the living room I see an ex-boyfriend I’d like to avoid so I go to the bar in the kitchen where I run into Amy Kazinski, film critic and ex-babysitter.
When my father died, Evelyn was determined that GV wouldn’t die with him, and I got a string of Jennifers, Karens, Brigittes, and Stacies. The Stacies were the best, neighborhood girls, children of the few Italian-American holdovers in the Village Stacies knew how to cook and knew a little about children They were happy to let me read myself into oblivion while they talked on the phone to their boyfriends and looked for the liquor cabinet. The Brigittes were the worst, foreign-exchange girls and other women’s au pairs who needed extra cash. The Brigittes were a snippy bunch who ordered in expensive meals and looked out the window a lot and chain smoked. A Bngitte would get testy if I invaded her privacy by asking for a glass of water or a book off a high shelf The Karens were okay, no-nonsense NYU students with years of babysitting under their belts who knew their way around a child and could probably locate a bandage in any home in America within two minutes The Karens charged more and were worth every penny, but they were in high demand and had to be reserved weeks in advance