A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (24 page)

Sometimes, when I was little, my mother would tell me about her childhood in faraway Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, where I’d never been, and the images she described played out in my mind like scenes from an old black-and-white horror movie, sepia-toned like the photographs she kept in an envelope at the bottom of her writing desk.

When she spoke about her sister Nora, a dreamy gaze came into her dark blue eyes. They looked alike. They’d shared a room. When Nora contracted polio the girls were separated. Never one to follow rules, my mother managed to sneak in and cuddle with her sister. Nora had a child-sized upright piano. Even after she got sick, despite her heavy steel leg braces, she played all the time. She played, my mother said, right up until the end. My mother never learned the date of Nora’s death; children were not told such things, they were left in the dark, “for their own good.”

After that, her father gave her a kitten, Hortensia, a longhaired Burmese. She trained Hortensia to ride around in her bicycle basket, and to wait quietly under the table so my mom could sneak her meat. My mom hated meat and Grandma Bertie would make her sit at the table until she’d eaten every bite. Later, when my mom went to school, Hortensia would follow her and wait outside until the bell rang. Hortensia had a litter of tabby kittens, and one day my mom came home from school to find the basket empty. Hortensia paced, mewing and wailing. Grandma Bertie said she’d had them put in a gunny sack and drowned in a bucket of water. As if this wasn’t bad enough, when my mother vomited all over herself, Grandma Bertie laughed.

Why? Why? I wanted to know. Why would Grandma Bertie do such a thing?

Because she hated me, my mother said.

There was a brother, named Tony, like the father, who died when he was two, also of polio, on Christmas Eve. In my child’s mind, I pictured him lying dead in his pale footy pajamas under a glorious tree, among the gifts. My mother said that her father, overwrought, threw all the presents out the window.

Uncle Bud, a hunchbacked drunk, brother to Bertie, was the handyman. He lurked in dark corners of the garden, and would leap out and grab my mother and pull her ears and hair. She eventually told me that Uncle Bud had been the one, on Bertie’s orders, who’d put the kittens in a gunny sack and drowned them in a bucket of water.

But, but, but—where was your father? I asked, outraged. Why didn’t you tell him?

My mother would only shrug. The answers changed according to her mood: he was busy; she hadn’t wanted to distress him; it was a question of honor—in her family, no one told on anyone.

Her proud, handsome, Italian father, whom she adored, was an immigrant who’d started off with a Lucky Strikes concession, pushing a cart around town. By the time he married Bertie, a local Irish beauty, he owned the two breweries, a coal mine, and the steam heat company. To say that he’d not amassed his fortune through entirely legal means would be a polite understatement.

Only two children survived—my mother and an older sister, Janie, who was severely mentally disabled. Janie had gone through puberty as a hulking, silent girl, whose only act of rebellion was at dinner one night. Alone for a moment in the kitchen, she put rat poison in the Sunday tomato ragú, which left everyone violently sick. My mother came home from a dance to find Janie sitting coyly at the dining room table, her food untouched, while all around her the family convulsed. Janie was retarded, my mother would say, but not so stupid as to eat that spaghetti sauce herself.

Their father died of a heart attack on New Year’s Eve when my mom was sixteen. That spring, she graduated from Most Holy Rosary School and left the next day with one suitcase, and Hortensia, now twelve, in a carrying case, taking the bus to New York City. Her father’s brother, Uncle Peter, put her through New York University, while she danced in dinnerclub acts at night to make ends meet.

My mother once admitted to me, her mouth drawn tight and curving stubbornly at the corners, that she’d hated her mother since she’d been capable of thought.

The rainstorm was passing as we approached Gibbsville from the county road that curved around a mountain and then swooped down to the banks of the Skuylkill River. Above us, two- and three-story, weather-beaten houses and low brick factories with broken windows spread up from the riverbed to several steep, greening hills.

My mom’s face softened at the sight. “My father picked this place of all the places on the East Coast because of the hills. He said Gibbsville was built on seven hills, just like Rome. Plus, it was perfect for the bootlegging business, with all the Germans around. They knew how to make beer. This town used to be rich,” said my mother. “Until they closed the coal mines.”

We’d only visited Grandma Bertie twice. The first time, when Billy and I were six, the stately, red-brick mansion and surrounding bright green gardens had seemed elegant and inviting to us. There was a fountain with huge goldfish that would surface and wait to be fed. They liked frozen green peas, and Grandma Bertie let us feed them a whole bag. She was nothing like the gruesome witch I’d created in my mind. Bertie was a kind, fat old lady with a pleasant smile, who smelled of fancy old-lady powder.

Our parents left us with Bertie for the afternoon and went off to visit Uncle Peter in his nursing home.

Her pantry was stacked with Hershey’s bars, marshmallows, and graham crackers. Grandma Bertie let us have a cook-out right in the kitchen! We held long branches with skewered marshmallows on the tips over the flames of a portable charcoal grill. Billy ate so many Hershey’s bars that day, he vomited through the entire night.

“What the hell’s the matter with that woman? Letting a kid eat four boxes—four BOXES—of Hershey bars!” my father shouted, pacing the bedroom where Billy had just barfed all over the sheets. We were in an upstairs apartment in the old mansion, one that Bertie usually rented out. There were huge, dusty crystal chandeliers on every landing.

“I like Grandma Bertie,” I admitted to my mother and father as we listened to Billy retching in the bathroom.

“I don’t care, you can like her if you want to,” said my mother in a vague, distant tone.

The second visit, when we were ten, was for the funeral of Uncle Peter, who in his younger days had spent six years in Sing-Sing for tax evasion. Like all good Irish and Italian Catholic wakes, it was a festive affair. The only clear memories I retain from this visit were the shining silver platters, bowls, and six-branched candlesticks laid out on a white tablecloth on the long dining room table, and Grandma Bertie sitting in the kitchen, smoking a thin cigarette with some kind of pinkish long-stemmed drink in her pudgy, freckled hand.

“None of these guinea-wops,” she confided to me, “ever learned to speak proper English. Thirty years, your grandfather Tony was in this country, and every time it rained, he’d say, ‘Where isa my
umberella
?’ Can you believe it?
Umberella!”

“Grandma Bertie,” I said, figuring this was the only chance I’d ever get, “tell me about my mother when she was little.”

“Your mother?” she said absently. “Your mother was a horror. If I said black, she said white. Not like you. You’re not a horror. You love your old grandmother, don’t you?”

“Did you really drown her kittens?”

“Oh, good Lord.” She threw up her fat little hands. “She told you about that, did she? Well, they were mangy, sickly little things. Uncle Bud got rid of them, I don’t know how—I never asked.”

There was a tight pinch to her lips and an evasiveness in her eyes that made me see her in an entirely different light.

“You’re mean and I hate you,” I said to her, and ran off to find my mother.

When my mother, father, Billy, and I came in an hour later to say goodbye, my grandmother was still holding court at the kitchen table. She looked up from her pink, long-stemmed drink, her eyes shiny and out of focus, and said to my father in the warbly voice of a much put-upon martyr, “I can’t show my face around this town anymore, with all the dirty, filthy, low-class books you’ve written! People say, ‘There she goes, Bill Willis’s mother-in-law.’ I’m a prisoner in my own home!”

And my mom replied, “And you can go fuck yourself, you sanctimonious old cow,” turned on her heels, and marched out the door.

My mother directed me to the Gibbsville Hospital without the slightest hesitation, as if she’d been there this morning and was returning after a short break.

“I was born at home, did you know that? We all were,” she said as she stepped out of the car.

Ahead of us, two elderly people carrying a picnic basket between them and wearing matching yellow parkas and white tennis shoes, were climbing the cement ramp toward the smoked-glass sliding doors.

“They look like they’re going to the high-school football game,” my mother said. In her burgundy-colored, light wool suit and beige silk shirt, high-heeled pumps, and Chanel purse, my mother looked elegant and dignified, as if she’d just left some classy Fifth Avenue tea party where there were a lot of expensive cats.

“You’re not dressed properly,” she said, looking me over nervously. I didn’t look any different than on any other day of the week, in black jeans, black boots, and an oversized cotton sweater.

“Who are we trying to impress?” I asked, a sardonic edge in my voice.