Dry Your Smile (59 page)

They all leave you alone sooner or later … they go off and become somebody else … “You have the pulse of life in you,” he said, roaring in my Mayan wrists in my Klimt throat booming like the silence when the clapping stops and the house is empty … empty without her, the set dim now and my face slick with tears and my body slick with sweat from her, heavy jewel in the casket of my heart, and I'm still
so far
away, so far from the phone across the room high
up up up
on the table …
trying
to reach you. But you waltz away, lilacs in your arms, hibiscus in your hair,
te amo
you say, touching my forehead in farewell, you turn your face from me,
whore
you say, you leave me
leave me
leave me alone, you don't want to share a bedroom with me, golden girl the lucky one, you follow the weak ones the men who send flowers but never mean to stay, the brothel-keepers where your own mother puts you …

Wait—What? Oh
where
… I don't care, I don't need anybody! A whore? Then I'll be Queen of the Whores! Roomfuls of flowers sprouting right up from the dust! Fame, wealth, applause, brothel-keepers rabbis surgeons begging for my favors … 'cept it's so cold, see? If only … if I could hear the
words
to the song.

Fragments, snatches of melody, never coming together whole anymore …
J'y vais pour mon enfant
. Where's that from, some opera? That's why it has to be different for the baby. You don't need college, what's college? Avraham got sent all through and still wasn't half so smart as me, he never had a fortune like me and my baby will. You got to work hard to get a fortune, it's the only way out … and then you got to burrow it away and watch the entrances so nobody—But then, all the time your head hurts like it's knotted up, so tired …

Crying in here, but … way
up up up
there
on the surface
, no … Better there's no tears, better you smile and have courage.
Think about happy things
. Momma loves to hear Julian singing, David plays the piano for me every time we go to Mexico, we'll have star billing on the door of an elevator apartment … I'm not like everybody else, I'm not thousands of women, I'm
me!

Shema Yisroel, adonai elohenu
…

I know those words
. Someone's
singing
, is that my voice? If only,
oh if only
—if I could speak to you.
Trying …
did the best I could, all I knew how. No need for her to suffer. Why should she ever learn
any
body in the world wouldn't want her, my baby, my filthy-faced muffin, my anemone, why?
No more suffering
, I thought,
klayne libe
. Why did she hate me for that, how could—

There you are again, faint echo—Who?
Julian?
Julian came home? I always knew … Could you, oh … hard to say, hardest thing ever, could you …
trying
to reach you,
hear me
, could you
forgive … all my transgressions have been of love
, can't you see that, Baby?

'Course you always loved me, don't be silly. Come on, dry your smile, honey, we can do this hand in hand
I feel you
, may the angels watch over you …
Anges radieux …
See, Momma? I wasn't a whore, I was the best mother in the whole world.

Yis-ga-dal ve-yis-ka-dash she-may raba …
Oh, listen! Somebody's saying Kaddish for you, Momma, somebody's lit a candle. I can see it! Way high up, far off …
Momma, I love you Momma
, just like Julian loves me. Can you—Can you forgive, too?

Where are you, Momma? I can hear you now! Through the plumes of … of crematoria smoke, the clapping, the echo, the hooves—Momma I can hear you calling!

Help me, Momma! I want to put the burden down now.
Klayne Hokheleh
—yes, sing down to me—
klayne libe, meina tokhter
. I'm coming up to you, Momma, trying to smile, be a real American. So sleepy now. Too tired to keep climbing this staircase that spirals up and up and never seems to end. Call me again, Momma! I'm scared. Help me get there, honest I'm reaching, but it's so heavy right under the heart.

Don't be afraid, I'm with you, you have the strength, I'm sending it down to you
. That's you Momma calling down
I hear you
I feel you now, touching me, warmer, better and better, yes!

I can get there,
I can do it
. See? Oh! There's the candle, getting brighter … lots of candles? Light—Light streaming down to me … Somebody singing clearer now,
lullaby and goodnight
no more hurting,
no more being alone
. The stairs wind up and up but I can get there now
I feel you with me I know you're here
.

Momma! I can see you now! Up there on the landing against the light! It glows right through you. How beautiful you look, Momma! Strong and laughing and loving, walking toward me, holding out your hands, your fingertips radiating crescent moons. What's that behind you …
Oh!
A door … what a big room! A secret sacred room filled with people, sitting, rocking, standing in groups, talking quietly. Why do they one by one turn and look at me, smiling, Momma? Why do you call to them, “This is my belovèd daughter. Take her in love”? See, Momma? They point at me, they smile, beckon, nod to me and to each other. There's Poppa and Yetta and Essie and Avraham, too. Such light in there, all golden and singing. The light
sings
.

Can I rest on the landing, Momma? Behind me … all those winding stairs … But this—it's not a landing. It's the top of the stairs … Momma?

Now you can let it all go
. This time,
meina tokhter
, you can
release it
, set the burden down, memories falling from the flower's center.
It's time
. No more heaviness.
Only this lightness now, forever
.

Momma, is it finally true? Honest? And you always knew anyway?

Always,
klayne libe
. I always knew you'd come home.
This is the threshold
. This is what you'll always see now—this warm, singing light that you can touch, feel, hear. This is what you'll never stop seeing. Turn and look down one last time,
meina tokhter
.

Zeit gazunt
hibiscus, anemone, lilac, Mario David whole world waltzing and curtsying, everyone applauding each other, everybody scared, separate and hurting, hiding, crawling for help, crying and being tired,
farewell. Zeit gazunt
suffering, smoke, bone, wealth, blood, water, fame, war, flesh, echo, dust, wisdom, hope.
Zeit gazunt
.

Yes, that's right
, set the burden down,
you're letting go
. All radiance and warmth and singing light now, here and forever, yes.
I love you. I've always loved you
.

Now, Momma? Now can I come in?

Now you can enter the light
.

PART SIX

June, 1986

Writing the novel failed to reassure me.

For one thing, Ashley or Leigh—or whatever I would eventually wind up naming the real-life Julian character—still didn't love herself. She had learned to like herself a bit. But in that cavernous maw of the heart, that secret desert where not all the terraced gardens of ego so shallowly rooted can conceal aridity, there she still failed to comprehend what loving herself could be.
I
had learned to love her. But then, she was my only child, my belovèd daughter in whom I was well pleased.

But here it was, already June. Completion of the novel was an alarming prospect, publishing it a terrifying one. Every woman has her own story like this. But I would be ruining my credibility by telling the truth.

I made myself another cup of tea, prudently saving the leaves to spread over the rosebush bases upstairs in the garden. “Upstairs in the Garden”—not bad for a book title, that. Sipping the tea, I wandered back toward my desk. There had to be some way to end it. Or at least to begin it.

A breeze from the open window fluttered a clipping pinned to the wall free, and it drifted to a landing on the desk. That lovely W. H. Auden quote: “In an earlier age … the real meant ‘sacred' or ‘numinous.' A real person was not a personality but someone playing a sacred role, apart from which he or she might be nobody. A real act was some sacred rite by the reenactment of which the universe and human life were sustained in being, and reborn.”

Take the tea
, I told myself as I would a character, and
go up to your hortus conclusus, your sanctuary
. Fortunately, I obey myself when I give me a direct order—unlike my characters, who have vexingly independent minds of their own. I shuffled toward the door, weaving through the cats—Lynn Fontanne, Katharine Cornell, and Floppy Disc.

The garden.

Not an imitation of the Laurence-and-Julian roof; not an approximation of the Iliana country weekends; not a mimicry of the childhood public park or the Sutton Place longed-for window boxes or the plants in other people's apartments. The garden.

A cloud of finches and sparrows rose in noisy dispersion, deserting their bird-feeder as a human appeared on the roof. Through their circling flutter and across the low neighboring buildings, an orange-hyacinth sunset was beginning to glow above the Hudson River, I sat down on one of the lawn chairs.

The roses were in riot. White Queen, fine as bleached linen. The palest saffron of New Dawn. Double Delight, in its spirals of carnelian and cream. And—
luxe, calme, et volupté
in perfume, shade, and texture—the Crimson Glory. Wisteria vines trailed up the overhead trellis, in places twining with burgundy clematis climbing from the far side. The silver jasmine bush was in first bloom, generously exhaling its essence on the summer air. The cascade azalea was in last bloom, dropping blossoms almost as languidly as the hanging basket of fuchsia. Trumpets of tangerine-colored hibiscus—which everyone warned me couldn't be grown in a pot on a roof—blared their final exuberance before folding themselves in for the night. Across from them, climbing the chimney, the morning glories were prepared to do the opposite—reveal their sapphire and indigo cups later, when night would melt toward dawn, then shyly tuck themselves under again in the glare of tomorrow.

Peach-brazen snapdragons exulted next to hardy petunias; the basin with gypsophila and cornflowers rallied a miniature women's suffrage garden—white, green, and purple. Strawberries, tomatoes, zucchini, watercress, sorrel, and green snapbeans promised a lush harvest. The cactus collection bristled its spines with pride. Rosemary, parsley, basil, the mints, thyme, catnip, bay leaves—I could smell the herbs' pungency green on the river breeze.

“To us, little garden,” I toasted aloud with my teacup. “To this moment.”

If it were possible to immerse oneself wholly in the present, tragedy couldn't exist. Tragedy requires the past and the future. Tragedy requires history.

So I offered another toast. “To Laurence. And to Iliana. And to Hope.”

Goodbye, I thought, goodbye to all my loves and selves and masks and the loss of them, there, where they recede in rose-lavender light bled by the sunset. Goodbye …

I was not surprised to see them appear from the three other corners of the roof and slowly approach me where I sat, behind the nonexistent fourth wall of the set.

Out from behind the hibiscus, the little girl, a tattered book under her arm, her dress torn and muddy, her face grinning beneath a long scratch from under the eye to the chin.

Out from behind the jasmine, the young woman in a jade-green suit, clutching a piece of paper and carrying beige high-heeled shoes but walking in stockinged feet, hair touseled as if by a high river wind.

Out from behind the rosebush exclaiming crimson glories, the middle-aged woman clasping the Tibetan Book of the Dead in one hand and hefting a suitcase in the other, looking as if she hadn't slept much lately.

“Welcome,” I said to them. “Welcome to the garden. Thank you for coming in person to say goodbye.”

The child broke her formal advance and ran straight into my arms so we could burst into tears together, the blood and dirt on her small round face smudging onto mine. When she finally wriggled back to peek at me, I thought with a shock:
Why, she's shy!

Then she smiled, and it was her own smile, one I'd never seen before. Wordlessly, she shoved her book into my lap. I looked down at the flyleaf. “For Bunker,” she had scrawled, “with love, your friend, Julian Travis.”

My child. My real child, hiding your loneliness, secreting your rebellions, laughing where you can, making it up as you go along. My littlest, fighting self.

When I looked up to thank her, she was gone.

But the young girl stood near now, hair parted in the middle and brushed loosely back, the way her mother had worn her hair when she too had been young. Chin tilted proudly upward, shoulders squared, feet sure-footed on the roof surface, free of their rejected shoes.

Neither of us knew quite what to do, embrace or shake hands. Then, in a gesture at once obsequious and imperious, she thrust at me the paper she was carrying. It had a city registrar's seal on it, the words Birth Certificate printed across the top. Just underneath, she had neatly lettered: “Notes for a Novel.” The rest of the page was blank.

My daughter, learning as you go, seeking the phantoms and slaying the ghosts, fearing your life ahead but wanting desperately to get on with living it, already loving words on a page.

When I glanced back to thank her for her long-ago clues left so painstakingly about, she too had disappeared.

The last of the three trudged with a weary step. But even as I reached to help her with her suitcase, she moved past me unseeing, her eyes fixed on how color died along the sunset, darker amethyst now slashing the heliotrope of the lower sky. Intent on placing one foot in front of another, she didn't acknowledge me, her twin, her doppelgänger, her double, unreal as her shadow cast on a moonless night.