by Jan Cherubin
My mother told me to go help Aunt Sadie and Grandma, so I gave Gertie back to Vivian and went into the kitchen.
“You always defend Ruth,” Aunt Sadie was saying to Grandma Cohen.
Ruth was my mother. I didn’t like Aunt Sadie talking behind Mama’s back.
“I don’t take sides,” said Grandma Cohen. “Have some pity for your sister.”
“Pity? She has two boys stuck in an orphanage, while she’s riding around in taxi cabs like Lady Astor!”
“Sha. The children,” said Grandma Cohen.
“Who does that? I ask you?” Aunt Sadie said.
Aunt Adele cleared the soup plates and carried them in. “Does what?” she said.
“She always defends Ruth,” said Aunt Sadie.
“Ruth is my daughter,” said Grandma Cohen. “Hand me the seltzer in the icebox.”
“I’m your daughter, too,” Aunt Sadie said.
“So I defend you, too,” said Grandma Cohen.
Aunt Sadie found the seltzer bottle and rattled the icebox shut. “New hats she buys,” Aunt Sadie said. The kitchen was small and wherever I turned perfumed bosoms cushioned me in flowery prints.
“It wouldn’t hurt you should buy something new,” said Grandma. “Maybe a man should look at you.“
“Here, Clyde, take the seltzer, put it on the table.”
When we visited the Aronson side of the family, my father wasn’t even mentioned. I’d been thinking lately how I used to put the things I did with my father in the category of last year. Last summer, my father and I built a balsa wood model of a Curtis Jenny biplane, or last summer he was supposed to take me swimming, or last Christmas, my father came home with a box of Christmas-tree lollipops given out by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and my mother laughed about bringing treyf into the house, but she let us eat them. This year, though, when I thought about what happened last year, I realized none of it had anything to do with my father. Most of it didn’t even happen in the Bronx, or with my mother, either. Last year happened on Tuckahoe Road. Last year I was already in the orphanage. My father had disappeared. I couldn’t pretend anymore. He wasn’t coming back. This would keep getting more and more true.
For eight days, my mother tucked us into bed and kissed us good night. She smelled like Nurse Flanagan. At the end of the week, Harry and I were returned to the orphanage.
CHAPTER 24
“Is it true Daddy didn’t speak to you for two weeks after I was born?”
“Who told you that?” My mother was sitting on her navy-blue velvet sofa having a cup of coffee. I’d just come in after being at the hospital all day.
“Aunt Vivian,” I said. “She said it last week when she came to Sinai. And the time I saw her before that. She always says it.” I threw my bag onto a chair and took off my coat.
“Aunt Vivian exaggerates,” my mother said.
“Is it true?” I said.
“Your father had a habit of not talking to me when he got mad,” she said. “He still does. Hang up your coat.”
I glanced down at her manicured toes squishing luxuriously in the shag carpeting. My commie mother fled the suburbs for a less bourgeois life downtown, but then she went and got pedicures and decorated her pad like a mafia wife—mirrors behind the velvet sofa, lime-green shag, chandeliers. “So then it’s true,” I said.
“Why bring up that old history? Tell me about the x-rays.”
“An MRI is not an x-ray,” I said. “And I told you the results on the phone. I’m bringing it up because I saw Liz and I was telling her how Da went bat-shit crazy because I wasn’t a boy.”
“Your father certainly doesn’t feel that way anymore.”
“The damage is done,” I said. I put my coat on a hanger and forced it into her packed closet. Her boyfriend Marty was keeping some of his jackets in there. I was grateful to Marty for staying away when I slept over. It was bad enough I had to deal with Brenda.
“What damage?” my mother said. “You look perfectly fine to me.”
“I can’t believe you’re a therapist,” I said.
“Now you’re going to insult me?”
“God, Ma. Can we stick to the subject of me for at least ten seconds?”
My mother and I could gossip together for hours—not really gossip, just laugh about the weird things other people did, hoping to make sense of it, knowing we were inclined to agree—and neither of us could do this with Susan. My sister wasn’t going to waste time on annoying people. So parsing personalities along with stories about the past was an important bond between my mother and me. But when we landed on the emotional landscape of my childhood, my mother shut down.
“You were an infant when Daddy went on that jag. You had no idea what was going on.”
I glared at her, not sure I wanted to get into an argument over infant cognitive development, a concept she didn’t believe in, apparently. I was always left feeling foolish for bringing up slights from the past and so I didn’t do it very often. My grievances were childish, both my parents said so. But they couldn’t keep the images from flitting through my mind: Susan’s fair curls in a velvet bow, her poufy party dress filling the frame and blocking me out, flashes of color, the smell of fresh paint, the woods, the lake, the blonde curtain of Nola’s hair blocking me out. After hours in the hospital at my father’s side, naturally my head filled with scenes from the past. “Why did you save Susan’s school projects and not mine?” I asked.
My mother tried to suppress a laugh, not expecting such a small complaint. “What, you mean the stuff from Ireland?”
She didn’t appreciate how much that year meant to me. I’d been a mere child, she said enough times. It was her adventure, her creation. She was the one who urged my father to apply for a Fulbright. But Ireland was significant for me in a different way. Being a mere child, it was the year I discovered the world. In America, I had known only the sleepy house and the windy yard. My mother would go back to bed after she got Susan off to school and I waited hours, it seemed, for her to wake up. Only then in the sunlit day she put a ruffled apron over her shirtwaist dress and ran into the street to stop the Rice’s Bakery truck calling “Wait a minute! Wait a minute!” We sat at the red kitchen table with the wrought-iron legs dreamily eating white powdered donuts from the Rice’s man, watching the silky line of smoke snaking up from her cigarette in the ashtray. Then poof, without much notice, I was launched down the gangplank and into the rough, raw streets of Belfast under a coal-blackened sky to play among ragamuffin children with dirty knees, castles, and a queen. Ireland was a transitional place, both real and made-up. I was born yearning for the past and then I got on a ship and time-traveled to it.
“You’re talking about the stuff from primary school?” my mother said.
“Yes.” For other families—wealthier, well-connected families—living abroad for a year didn’t amount to much, but for us, it was a big deal, and everyone else on dinky Cedar Drive thought it was a big deal, too.
“Susan was older,” my mother said. “Her schoolwork was more interesting. You were only in first grade. Sit down. You want some coffee?”
“Coffee? Who drinks coffee this late? I should go to bed.” I doubted Susan ever looked at the workbooks they saved, or read the letters her classmates wrote and presented to her as a farewell gift. For Susan, Ireland was a nightmare best forgotten.
“I’ve got herbal tea,” my mother said.
“No thanks,” I said. She was wrong. My Nature Studies would have been interesting, even thrilling for me to look at. The children in the first grade at Orangefield Primary School gathered twigs, leaves, berries, and feathers from the boggy park to bring to class for Nature. We pasted the treasures into booklets and labeled the pages. I drew my T’s curled up at the bottom like the other children in Northern Ireland, and “to-day” with a hyphen, as I first learned to read and write there. We slithered on our bellies in the loamy bog on the wooded edge of the park and reached our jars into the cold pond water to scoop
up jelly eggs from the muddy bottom, then watched the eggs grow into frogs in the back of the classroom. “There was plenty that was interesting,” I said. “Sums. Spelling. Religion.”
“Religion, yeah. We tried to get you excused from that but they wouldn’t have it. Look, Joanna, I had a lot on my mind over there. Things were going on you didn’t know about.”
I got a 92 in religion for correctly naming scenes depicting the life of Jesus painted on giant cards. “I was looking at the letters you wrote to Shana,” I said, “and you hardly mentioned me or Susan, as if we weren’t even conscious, when we were the ones who came home with Irish accents, not you. We were the ones who absorbed everything like a sponge, force-fed gruel, and hit with a ruler.”
My mother got up and brought her dishes to the sink. She let out an exasperated sigh. “What was I supposed to write? You were little kids. And you’re correct, you weren’t conscious. Children don’t come into consciousness until what? Nine or ten. I remember when you turned eleven, you started to be more interesting. You were funny, too.”
She waited for my reaction to her flattery and when I didn’t warm to it, she ran the water in the sink, rinsed the dishes, and put them in the dishwasher seemingly lost in thought. After she finished wiping off the counter with a sponge and washed and dried her hands, she came back to the sofa where I had stretched out. She lifted my legs and sat down with my stocking feet in her lap. “I’ll admit a lot of it was my fault,” she said. She sighed, sadly this time, and closed her eyes. I perked up. Did she just say a lot was her fault? Was my mother suddenly taking responsibility for her neglect? I was deluded for a second, soothed by her warm hand holding onto my foot. But she wasn’t referring to anything having to do with me, as I should have known. She and my father spoke about their lives in such epic terms, and I took this so much to heart, there seemed to be no way my own life could be as important as theirs. They lived through the romance of world war and radical politics. Their great love was forever entwined with history. My mother wasn’t thinking about me, she was thinking about her marriage. She meant Caitlyn Callaghan was her fault, and the affairs that followed. I had to admit, my mother’s story was a good one, and while I doubted she’d ever admit it, in some ways, it was my story too.
Caitlyn was her fault because my mother was the one who wanted to experiment. She was the one who wanted to live abroad. She wanted to lead an exciting life. She craved experience. She wanted Clyde and Evie Aronson to be like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, sitting in cafes all night discussing philosophy and literature, and most importantly, having an open relationship. It was my mother’s idea, one of her utopian schemes, and with it came the slow, steady demise of our family.
“You know, Joanna, I’ve told you this, but after you were born, I was sure my life would never be anything more than washing diapers, ironing Susan’s dresses, and oh my God, listening to the two of you fight. So I lobbied for going overseas. I got Daddy to apply for the Fulbright. He never would have done it on his own. I was adamant—we were going to live in swinging London for a year. It would be an adventure, and I figured in a far-away location I could apply my Marxist ideals, if not to society at large, then to my own marriage. Can you blame me? I was a virgin on my wedding day! I saved myself for your father, God knows why, but I was chaste for the three years he was away in the war.”
“Chaste? No other boys from the time you were sixteen?”
“Well, not exactly. I told you. I went to dances at the YCL, the AYD, the USO. I kissed boys. We fondled each other. But nothing more. And then as soon as Clyde comes home from the war, we get married, have children, I give up my political life, move to the suburbs, and Joanna, time was passing me by. I wanted to be a part of the world. I wanted the freedom men had. I thought if we lived abroad away from my judgmental family and our nosy neighbors, we could have affairs without the usual gossip. Unfortunately, there was only one option on the Fulbright application for exchange teachers requesting placement in London. What a joke. I brought your father a No. 2 pencil and I stood over him and watched as he filled in the bubble next to Great Britain. We waited weeks and weeks, and the letter finally came and he was accepted! It was very exciting getting that letter. But we were not sent to swinging London. Oh no, we’re sent to Belfast, a city celebrated for its shipbuilding.”
“I know. I was there.”
“You were six years old. You knew bubkas. Anyway, I figured even in uptight Belfast, after a year I would come home to the US with some experience, having changed in some way. But then—and isn’t it always this way for women? All I can manage is a one-night stand with that taciturn friend of Nora Trimble’s in the backseat of an Austin Seven. I can barely remember his name. Well, that’s not true. Jim Harkins. But I hardly even remember what he looked like. Whereas your father—what does he do? Your father goes and falls in love. Do you know how small the backseat of an Austin Seven is?”
My mother documented the year in letters, posting one to Shana Bloom in Baltimore every week. “We set sail on August 17, 1961,” my mother penned in her forward-leaning handwriting, the pages of which Shana typed up and inserted into a binder. “The passengers flung colored streamers off the SS United States into the milky green water of New York harbor and the band played and the foghorns blew and the people on deck were laughing and waving to the people on shore who were getting smaller and smaller until we couldn’t see them anymore and our attention turned to the Statue of Liberty.”
Occasionally my mother mentioned the kids in her letters to Shana, as in “we went to a cocktail party for the Lord Mayor of Belfast and found someone to stay with the kids,” but in over fifty-two letters, the name Jo or Joanna came up a total of three times. Fortunately, I kept my own travel diary in my mere child’s head. I remembered well how I stood on deck with my father after dinner that first day at sea, as we glided through the black waves of the North Atlantic.
“This is the fastest ship in the world,” my father said. “And the safest. You don’t have to worry about fire.”
I wasn’t worried about fire.
“You see,” he said, “there’s nothing on board made of wood. Except for two things that absolutely must be made out of wood. Can you guess what they are?”
I couldn’t guess. I hadn’t even started school.
“The piano and the chef’s chopping block,” he said. He tried to light a cigarette but the wind kept putting out the flame. “The chef insisted. Everything else that looks like wood, like the railings lining the corridors, that’s all made of a new substance called Neotex.”
“You mean the ballet bars?”
“Yeah, the ballet bars,” my father said.
The ship’s prow cut through the waves at record speed. I held my father’s hand, smooth and dry as always. “The stars go all the way to the edge,” I said.
“The horizon,” said my father.
Our house in Belfast was at No. 19 Orangefield Gardens and our school was called Orangefield Primary School. I thought the name had to do with orchards and sunshine, but I never saw an orchard and there was no sunshine. Everything was orange for William of Orange, the king who staked claim to the North for the Protestants way back in 1690 during the Battle of the Boyne. In 1961, the northern province of Ulster was mostly quiet, except for kids throwing rocks, and a bomb in a van parked at the border. At Belfast Technical College, my father was assigned a student teacher called Caitlyn. A boy hit her with a rock because she was Catholic, my father said, and she had to get stitches. But the Troubles wouldn’t fully begin again for almost a decade, with the Battle of Bogside in 1969.
Orangefield, where we lived, was on the rich, Protestant side of Belfast, but it didn’t seem rich to Susan and me. No trees grew on our block and we were the only ones with a car or a refrigerator and nobody, including us, had central heating. All warmth came from the fireplace in the sitting room. My mother didn’t take her coat off for a year. In the morning, Susan and I put on our red or black Danskin tigh
ts under the covers. Susan was eight, so it was her job to go outside to the coal bin in the morning and fill the coal scuttle. I sat halfway down the chilly stairs on the cabbage-rose carpet, pleasantly half-awake, waiting for my sister to restart the fire while our parents slept. On the way to school, boys taunted us because we wore exotic colored tights instead of white socks like Irish girls. “Licorice legs! Licorice legs!” they hollered every day as we hurried down the lane.
At primary school, the teachers hit us for missing sums or spelling. I didn’t mind. The system was fair. Whoever got one sum wrong was called to the front and we held our hands out and Mrs. Graham went down the line and slapped each open palm once with a ruler. Two wrong came up together and got two slaps, and three and so on. Same for spelling. She whacked us hard and it stung, it really did, but you knew what you were getting and why. I minded very much though, when she whacked our knuckles, arms, and legs for misbehaving, because that was like getting hit just for being a child, and what else could you be? None of the beatings, though, compared to the torture of lunch for Susan and me. The other children were grateful for the midday meal, but Susan and I lived in mortal fear of it. The teachers ordered us to eat every gristly scrap of funky mutton and lard-reeking lump of congealed mash, to swallow every spoonful of watery pudding from seemingly bottomless bowls. You weren’t allowed to bring a bag lunch from home.
“In America,” I said to the kids in the food line, “you get fried chicken for lunch at school.”
“Nay,” they said.
“Aye,” I said. “My sister told me so.” The line moved inside and I spotted Susan at the third-graders’ table. Her face was grim. She held an oversized spoon to her mouth and barely opened her lips. I tried to get her attention, but she wouldn’t look at me. If our eyes had met she might have cried. And she couldn’t cry, not in front of the thick-skinned Ulster kids.