Close Relations (12 page)

“You have to live somewhere,” Aunt Estelle countered. “And in Queens, you’d be much closer to us, and Marcia would have a much better class of friends. I mean it, Hilda, look at Barbara’s friends. A lovely bunch of girls. And almost all their fathers are professionals.”

I wanted to point out, from the foyer in which I was lurking, eavesdropping, that my father was a professional, an accountant, albeit a dead one, whereas Julius Lindenbaum was a furrier with a mere two years of high school, a man who said “erl” for “oil,” a man who always smelled a little like a fox pelt. My mother must have known that too, but she merely sighed. She could never summon the energy to confront her sister.

“And before you know it,” Estelle continued, “she’ll be ready for college. Right? Look, I don’t have to tell you what her I.Q. is.”

“I know,” my mother breathed.

“And do you think boys from the fine families will want to hear she’s from Brooklyn?” Hardly. “Hilda, look at your face. Don’t worry. Would Julius and I let anything happen to you?”

Of course not. So we moved to Queens, to a dank rent-controlled apartment in Forest Hills. “Very good schools,” Aunt Estelle noted, and my mother gratefully bent her head, as though about to receive a pat or a benediction. The apartment had one small bedroom which my mother let me have, while she slept on a couch in the living room. This arrangement suited me, although when I got older, her snoring often disconcerted my dates when they brought me to the door to say good night.

“What’s that?” they would whisper, their eyes darting about the hallway, as they heard my mother’s regular, chesty snores, interrupted occasionally by a moan or frightened dream whimper.

“Oh, that. It’s my mother. She sleeps in the living room.”

Aunt Estelle and Uncle Julius took care of us. They invited us to their house for dinner every Wednesday night. Often, there would be enough food left over for my mother to take home, a packet of brisket or chicken. And, living in Queens, it was only a ten-minute subway ride back to our apartment, so the meat was often still warm by the time we’d return home. Wordlessly, we would wolf it down in our kitchenette.

I received the cream of my cousin Barbara’s wardrobe: camel’s-hair coats and lamb’s-wool sweater sets and ruffled blouses only one year out of style and three sizes too large. And each Chanukah, there would be a box of white handkerchiefs with pastel “M’s” for me and a stiff new hundred-dollar bill for my mother.

“Look, Hilda, I took care of the funeral, didn’t I?” Uncle Julius demanded when my mother finally came to him, seeking more help. “But I don’t want you to be dependent on us. It would affect our relationship, wouldn’t it? I mean, you and Estelle are sisters, and it wouldn’t be healthy.”

“What did your mother say to him?” Jerry demanded. We were walking through the Central Park Zoo, past the yak with its mangy brown fur—not the sort of line my Uncle Julius would carry.

“What could she say?”

“She could tell him to go fuck himself. She could tell him that they were the hotshots, the ones who got her to uproot you and move to Queens, so they goddamn better get up some of the rent money.”

“Right. Sure.” It was a warm afternoon and the air was full of rank animal odors. “And then what would have happened?” Jerry moved his jaw, began to reply, but at these conversations I was much quicker. “I’ll tell you. She would have been left alone. She would have had no one, nobody, zilch.”

“Wrong, Marcia. They would have respected her.”

“You’re wrong. She had no money, no friends, no power. If they couldn’t pity her, they didn’t need her.”

Jerry wiped the back of his neck with his hand. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

“Well, I know,” I snapped. His demands for fresh confidences made me edgy; I had to balance my ravenous need for understanding with a vague sense of obligation to protect my family’s good name.

As usual, Jerry allowed time out for crankiness but then persisted toward his goal of knowing all there was to know. He took my hand, kissed it lightly, and demanded, “Did your mother ever have any boyfriends?”

“No.” After my father died, she showed no interest in men. Her manner never changed when a man came into a room. She never flirted, never reached up to stroke her hair, never even smiled. Men did not interest her. Actually, I don’t think they interested her before my father died. I don’t recall my parents ever touching, kissing, whispering, or even exchanging knowing looks.

“Any women friends?”

“Not really. She’d say hello to a few ladies in the building, but I think she lost touch with all her old acquaintances once we moved to Queens. So there was just my aunt. And a few cousins, but she only spoke to them about once a month. Most of them lived in New Jersey, and it was too expensive for her to call.”

“But didn’t she try to meet people? Join a club or—”

“No. She was more interested in what was going on in a book than in what was going on around her—unless she was at her sister’s. But in our apartment she’d sit in this old, lumpy green chair in a corner of the living room with just one small light focused on whatever she was reading.” It was as if it were a spotlight. The book was the real show, the action; everything else was shadowy. I knew I was. I’d wander into the living room and ask her a question and she’d startle, as though I’d shocked her by demonstrating there was another world besides the one on the page she was reading. “Sometimes I’d walk in after school, and even before I had a chance to close the door she’d say ‘shhh’ instead of ‘hello,’ like she was irritated that I insisted on breaking into her perfect world.” Jerry shrugged. “It’s true. Books were her only passion.”

“Didn’t she play Mah-Jongg?”

I began to laugh. “That’s not funny.”

“Of course it’s not funny,” Jerry concurred. “Four or five little old Jewish ladies sitting around a table is serious business.”

“Don’t little old Irish ladies play Mah-Jongg?”

“If you had any idea how absurd that idea is, Marcia—”

“What do they do with themselves? I mean, once you’re finished with mass, you have a whole day in front of you.”

“They don’t spend it playing Mah-Jongg.”

“Canasta?”

“No.”

“Filling up the ice cube tray for happy hour?”

“Marcia, come on.”

“I will not come on. You know, I really resent your remarks about Mah-Jongg and all that. Just because you see your mother as Saint Agnes …”

“I do not.”

“… the patron saint of widows …”

Agnes Morrissey was a truly noble soul, a fine lady, a good Catholic with a grand heart. I hated her. We’d never met.

“Hello,” I’d answer our phone.

“Is Gerald Morrissey there?” this twinkly little Emerald Isle voice would say. Never How are you. Never Oh, I’ve heard about you, Marcia, and I look forward to meeting you even though you’re a Jew.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrissey, he’s not in right now.”

“Thank you,” she’d say briskly, as though I were Jerry’s answering service. “Please tell him I called.”

I would ask him, “Why can’t your mother say hello to me?”

He would answer, “Beats me. Why don’t you ask her?”

After her husband’s death, Saint Agnes rolled up her sleeves and went right to work, refusing to condemn her three darlings to subsistence on her widow’s dole. She taught herself to type and got a job as a secretary to the owner of a local funeral parlor. And after an eight-hour day, she’d dash home to cook the three darlings a good hot meal—probably oatmeal—and bathe them and sing to them and make sure they knew their catechism.

“Jesus, Marcia, she’s a nice lady. Why are you so hostile? Because she doesn’t say hello? Maybe she’s shy,” Jerry would say. “Anyhow, I’d think you’d respect her. I mean, she was a working woman and all that.”

“Boring.”

“What do you mean?”

“Boring. I find saints boring.”

“Come on, she wasn’t a saint. She was always so ambitious for me, wanting me to be somebody—a priest, a lawyer. And she always let me know she was just a little disappointed. But she was a good mother. She worked so hard at it. You’re just upset because your mother didn’t—”

“You better stop it, Jerry.”

Every so often, I kept myself busy wondering why my mother never got a job. Unlike Saint Agnes, she had worked before her marriage and had what she called secretarial skills. A couple of times she mentioned being able to do something at seventy words per minute, but I’m not sure if she was referring to typing or shorthand. She certainly didn’t talk at that speed. Her voice came out slow and weary, and generally her conversation was limited to “Do you want milk in your tea?” or “Well-bred people wear gloves when they go to the city.”

But back to work. We had a little insurance money, a small allotment from Social Security, and Uncle Julius’s annual hundred. We padded our food budget with a lot of potatoes and twice a week ate something my mother called “fish stew,” which she concocted from the bones and heads of fish—which the fish man bestowed upon her gratis—and a carrot and a can of tomatoes. It was horrible, and while I ate it, I breathed through my mouth.

“More?” She held the chipped china ladle carefully, so none of the thin, reddish liquid would dribble on the table.

“No thanks.”

There was no money for college, but I was offered partial scholarships to Goucher and Cornell. I was offered a full scholarship to Pembroke.

My quiet mother became crazed. “How do you expect to get from here to Providence?” she yelled. “Sprout wings and fly? Do you have any idea how much bus fare costs? And clothes! The clothes you’d need there, at an Ivy League school.” Our apartment was not used to such loud noises. I was afraid the walls might crack from sympathetic tremors to her screaming.

“But why—” I began

“You just be quiet! And what would you pack your fancy college clothes in? Shopping bags? You’d need suitcases or a trunk. Do you have that kind of money, to buy matched luggage?”

As she yelled that last one, I imagined with unusual clarity a set of red leather luggage: pullman, two-suiter, round hatbox, even a cute little makeup case. All in rich-to-the-touch leather. And I shrieked back, “Then why the hell did you let me apply? You sat there, with me and the guidance counselor, and you said it was okay if I got financial aid. I heard you, damn it, and now I have it.” I picked up the letter with the Pembroke seal and shook it in front of her face. “This is it. This is the most money they give to anybody! They say they think I’ll be an asset to the student body—”

“Get out.” Her voice was normal again, thin and lifeless.

“What do you mean?”

“Get out of this house right now.”

I didn’t know quite what to do. People in our family never shouted; we knew only lower-class people did that. We made neither scenes nor idle threats. I stomped to the closet, grabbed cousin Barbara’s exloden coat, and bellowed, “Fuck!” It frightened me nearly as much as it did my mother, since I had never heard it said aloud before. It was a killer word.

And then I left and walked up and down Queens Boulevard for a couple of hours before wandering over and ringing the chimes at my boyfriend Barry’s house—the same Barry I was later to marry. I told him what had happened, and after a heated, whispered discussion with his mother in their kitchen he emerged with a dinner invitation. And while his mother, Sheri, wore her tightest mouth during the meal, I dined on veal chops and asparagus and heaps of salad and rice casserole and raisin cake and baked apple. Sheri managed to part her lips after dessert to ask, “Had enough, sweetie?” Barry, when he walked me back to the apartment later that evening, squeezed my hand and said, “Don’t be angry with your mother. She means well.”

When I returned home my mother nodded at Barry. When he left, she said nothing, not even to express mild curiosity at what I’d been doing for five hours, although I suspect she thought I was doing something dreadful with Barry, something that would make him lose his respect for me. And him going to Columbia, premed. Actually, she never said another word about higher education until my first day at Queens the following September, when she murmured, “Good luck at college.” Queens College was free to New York City residents. Queens College was a fifteen-minute bus ride from our apartment. I did not need suitcases.

But I still wonder why she didn’t work. Had I bus fare and luggage for Pembroke, I could have met a boy from even a finer family than Barry’s. But she stayed home.

Of course, in those days, the nineteen fifties and sixties, most people’s mothers did not work. They were housewives. But my mother had only a three-room apartment to clean, and while she did it well—rubbing the faucets until they gleamed silver, washing the floors and covering them with newspapers so they would not get dirty immediately—it could not have taken all day. She chatted with my Aunt Estelle each morning, but for no more than ten minutes. She shopped for the cheapest toilet paper, the least extravagant bag of onions, but she was never gone for more than an hour. She had no friends, suitors, hairdressers, manicurists, tailors, or stockbrokers to spend time with.

I do not believe my mother rejected the notion of working because of her desire to care for me. At ten, I required little care, being able to bathe and dress myself and prepare hard-boiled eggs. She did not need to hover about, urging me to study, because I was a natural grind, highly motivated to prove to my classmates that beauty and wealth weren’t everything.

Nor was she mad for me, calling me her ootsie-wootsie lambie and pleading with me to keep her company. Rather, I sensed she found me a little unappealing, although I’m not sure why. While no young lovely, I was at least prettier than she, but that was hardly a contest. I had no vile habits on public display except for cuticle chewing, and she broke me of that long before my father died, by slapping my hand down from my mouth and saying “Stop it.” And since I was nearly as quiet as she, I can’t think that she found my personality offensive. But perhaps she wanted a jollier child, like my cousin Barbara, who could win an extra Mallomar by merely grinning at the adult nearest the cookie jar.

Jerry could not accept this. “Marcia, she had to have loved you.”