Dry Your Smile (7 page)

Then
let
me die! Let both of us die. Wipe us out, God. If I die, oh if I die and it lives, then what? Who'll take it? Yetta or Esther? Over my dead body. But that's what it'd be, big joke. Him and his thin-blooded Viennese fiancée? Then he'd be sorry. Dear Führer, let me and the baby both die?

Oh, you are good to ease the pain a little.

Oh yes,
yes
.

Thank you mighty Tsar, bless You, bless Yourself.

I'm so tired …

I never thought anybody could be this tired and still live.

So sleepy …

The smiles of all the Cossack host of angels there above me …

Too tired to keep climbing this staircase. It never ends. Step after step, and this sack like lead on my back, hauling it up and up and up. Wait. No. Yes. There's a landing. I can get there. I can do it. See? This door, opening … all this light streaming through it, where is this place? Who are they all in there, a vast room filled with old people, sitting, rocking, standing in groups, talking quietly.
Anges radieux
… Such light, golden … the light actually
sings
. Momma, is that you, walking toward me through the light, smiling? You always
knew
I was different, I wasn't a whore, Momma you did love me after all! Let me come in, Momma, please? Let me put down this burden and come into the room? But you put out your hand to stop me. Arm straight, palm up, your fingers radiating crescent moons. “No, my Hokhmah, you can't come in yet. It's not time yet, my daughter. You have more flights to climb. And you must carry your burden with you.”

“Mercy, have mercy. Listen to me. Momma, I'm saying Kaddish for you:
Yis-ga-dal ve-yis-ka-dash she-moi ra-ba be-al-ma
… I'm saying Kaddish for myself, Momma. Let me in? Let me enter the light?”

“Go away, Hokhmah, it's not time. Turn and pick up the bundle again and go on.”

“Don't push me out, Momma. Look how I remember, see, I can say it:
I am abashed and ashamed of the wicked deeds and sins I have committed. Please accept my pain
, dear Momma,
please accept my suffering
, mein Führer,
as atonement, and forgive my wrongdoing, for against You alone I have sinned.
”

But she stands with her hand against my entering. She stands with her hand set against me, only her rain of crescents, like the holy
yods
Poppa would tell us about, falling on me.

“Klayne libe, klayne Hokheleh, uber itst du gayn. Itst
. Now.
Meina tokhter, zeit gazunt, meina tokhter.”

So I turn. You can never make Momma hear you, never. I turn from her radiant crescents and her Yiddish farewell. I hoist it up, the bundle, and sling it back over my shoulder. My face is slick with tears and my body is slick with sweat and I turn and place my right foot on the first step of the next flight. And I look ahead and the stairs wind up and up and I can't see any landing or ending or place to rest, ever. And the left foot goes up. And then the right again. Shelter me in the shadow of Your wings:
Ve-i-me-ru
Amen. And I leave the singing light behind me and rise up into the dark.

“Miss Baker? Miss Baker? There now. Goodness, I almost thought we'd lost you. You can't give in like that, dear.”

Who is this woman? Why is she all in white? Is she one of Them, from the room that glows and sings?

“Who are you, Lady? Can I come in?”

“You
are
in, dear. You must have dozed off and had a dream. It's good to rest between contractions, but you overdid it. Lost consciousness for a few minutes. Gave me quite a fright when I looked in. You were out like a light.”

Out like a light.

The green walls.

The mocking ceiling.

The spark of hurt, catching and smoldering back toward a blaze of pain.

“Now you mustn't cry, dear. Oh my, we've soiled the sheets a little. Here, we'll just fix you up a bit. Where's your sister gone? Out for some coffee? Aw, you're having a hard time of it, I know. Doctor will check on you in a while.”

“It's
been
a while. It's been a hundred whiles. Can't you give me a pill? Or a shot?
Anything
to put me out or dull the pain?”

“Miss Baker, you know I can't do that without Doctor ordering it. Let's not pity ourselves, dear. Millions of women have gone through what you're going through, and even worse.”

“I'm not millions of women, damn you, I'm
me
. This baby is murdering me, can't you see that?”

The chippie, all she can do is stuff towels under me and straighten the sheets.

Eva Braun herself, she must enjoy this.

“Look, Miss Baker, honest, I'd give you something but I don't dare to without his permission. And he's gone to dinner. You'll be all right, just hang on. You're not going to die. You'll have a fine baby, I'm sure. Grip the bedrails when it gets too bad, like I showed you, and try to think about other things, happy pleasant things … Oh you poor—Look, I'm really sorry. I know this is a bad one.”

And the chippie spins on her squeaky rubber soles and leaves.

Just like that.

Eyes teary, the hypocrite. Who does she think she is, Eleanor Roosevelt?

You won't die, she says—her personal guarantee.

The guarantee of a hypocrite who just said “We almost lost you for a while.”

A fine baby, little miss crisp starched white predicts. Then she goes off.

All right. Go ahead. Leave me alone. I can do it. I'll show all of you. I'm special and always will be. Meant for something great and shining, like—

Oh
there it goes again, coiling around my bowels and slicing up through my spine—

—think of something else something
oh
pleasant—

Virtuoso pain, coloratura pain sustaining it
oh
high note nothing in the world but that sound
demon
Hitler Goebbels extracting me from myself teeth bone hair skin with his light shading through it, a whole choir of pain melting me down and spilling me out over the packed house of all my cells
God David Momma!

There
…

There. Bring it down. Slowly, pull it back in the throat lovely throat he said Klimt and wrists like a Mayan princess
linda
not a whore the good daughter a real American soft now like Momma's lap after school,
pianissimo
. There.

I'll make it through. His firstborn son, his one hope for the future of his family name. Then he'll change his mind. Avraham graduated college, became an accountant. Gold-glinted hair he'll have, like you, David, and hazel eyes. I'll save this baby. I'll bring you into the world, little jewel burning in the casket of my body. I'll show you, Momma. He'll love me more than I ever loved you. More than I ever loved
you
, David. You hear, both of you?

Oh God God
God
there it goes again so fast now let me die
let the baby die
and I
promise
I'll love him, this golden creature all my very own
see?
Doctor if he wants to be—

—
think of happy things
—

—yes, yes, a great surgeon, a genius in the operating room, they'll whisper. Or the finest tenor or baritone of the century. How they'll weep at his Cavaradossi, scream for his Don Giovanni! Or a world-famous artist maybe, yes, beyond your feeble Klimt and Rubens. In the finest museums, all the different portraits of his mother. Followed by women everywhere and traveling the world but always returning to the one woman he knows understands every particle of his being. He'll love me better than anyone has loved me. And I'll deserve it because I'll be the best mother the world has ever seen, you hear that Momma?

Hold on hold on
grip the rails think about—

Then
David will beg me to marry him, mother of his firstborn son. But I'll make him wait, make him crawl through the sewers before I accept. Then Essie and Yetta will be lovey-dovey to their baby sister the doctor's wife, mother of the prodigy. No no no
I hate it
I want it to
die let me live free
no yes I have to do it together you and me. Us against the world. How they'll envy us with the God-given talent pouring out of you like light spilling from some secret room filled with radiant angels watching only over you and me—

Yis-ga-dal ve-yis-ka-dash she-moi ra-ba

—you will be my aria, my masterpiece,
vissi d'arte, ve-i-me-ru
I hate you, tsar nazi devil glittering in my bowels, fiend
I'd kill you if I could
. God of my fathers, decree that I shall die of this affliction grant me Thy perfect healing—Rot in hell—
Heilige Führer take them all into Your fiery bosom—consume them in Your ovens
Momma David Poppa who rocked and stared and mumbled his wisdom
weak
never aloud
coward
never saved us dragged himself left foot right foot from the
shul
to the hardware store and Yetta and Essie and Madam Betrothed Vienna—
cleanse me of their filth, take them
, they're Yours.
I don't need any of you
. I'm creating my own miracle. Full American he'll be, peasant strength and aristocrat's elegance blending in his tiny veins. Someone who
belongs
to me. My son, to seize the whole world in his little fist! And I'll love him. Damn you all
I want this baby now
. Do you hear, Momma? Do you understand, David? Waltzing together through that room washed with light,
you're dead
—one of you dead inside and the other dead everywhere. But
I'm alive
and I'll live in spite of you! Up and up through the darkness, carrying my own light inside me, my casket of jewels, my little Mayan prince, my tiny Cossack to crush them underfoot and avenge his mother. My son, my life, my voice, my secret shining self, my future, my weapon!
Mine
. See? Even the Tsar has come to offer his respects to us. See how he beams down at me from under his high pearl-encrusted crown? White, so white! So tall! He wants me to marry him now, my little princeling, see? The Tsar himself has come to ask forgiveness, to pay homage! The Tsar …

“It's all over now, Miss Baker. You had a very difficult labor, Nurse says. And I can certainly tell you it wasn't an easy delivery. High forceps. Frankly, you almost lost the baby and we almost lost you. But you'll be all right now. And congratulations. You've given birth to a fine baby girl.”

PART THREE

May, 1981

But how could Julian write about herself? Julian is only a figment of her own imagination—or of mine—she thought, reclining in an armchair forty thousand feet above land. Julian is only a character, an illusion. God knows who Julian really is. Hope was another matter. She knew Hope better than she did herself. Hope was as large as life. Larger. She was in a lifelong obsessive affair with Hope even when, perhaps especially when, she was able to forget her.

But what could she say about some mythical Julian-self on an evening in May, sitting in a plane after more than a decade of sitting in planes, on the way home from a speech after more than a decade of speeches, marches, demonstrations, meetings, and press interviews, a decade of trying to reach women like the one who sat next to her now? Her sister passenger.

Peculiar, how often that word “sister” felt contrived, even after years of public usage. Because of residual convent or labor-union-solidarity associations? Or because such a word grazed against internal wounds, provoking an anxiety of recognition which, no matter how proselytized, trivialized, or denied, did vibrate between women? A recognition that could still annunciate itself as shock or terror, anger or humor or even hope—another maddening word for which there was no precise synonym, so Julian could never avoid using it, despite its being
her
name.

Nonetheless, she thought with a sidewards glance, a true-to-life sister passenger this seatmate was, a woman she knew as well as herself: a white woman in her mid-fifties, nondescript in careful home-permanent hairdo, brown polyester pantsuit, yellow blouse, a woman immersed in reading the airline copy of
Good Housekeeping
. Her sister, Polly Esther incarnate, who was happily married and had been for years, a full-time homemaker and mother, the kind of woman who resolutely tried out all the recipes
Good Housekeeping
fed her, went to church every Sunday, had voted for Ronald Reagan. The kind of woman who deferred to her husband—even if she did sometimes find herself crying into her pillow soundlessly in the middle of the night without knowing why.

Polly Esther, unscathed by any “women's revolution,” taking a plane ride as a big occasion, maybe to visit her own mother in some other city, or to see her grown children off now at college. Polly Esther, buckled into an aisle seat next to a Julian Travis who once would have deftly engaged her in conversation, moving from the casual through the personal to the political, so that by the time they landed in New York at least a flicker of feminist interest would have been kindled. Nor would it have been one-way, either. Polly Esther would have touched something in herself and Julian would have retouched something in herself—and retouched Hope.

Was that old organizer now just a character, too? Julian wondered. Yet she could still get inside that character so deeply the adrenaline coursed in her veins as she and other women assembled for a march, or as the energy hit her fingertips in the parry-and-thrust of a question-answer period after a speech. She still loved to throw herself, an emotional ventriloquist, through the façades of other women, into motivations familiar, articulable, more moving than her own. Yet they were her own. Who, then, was the ventriloquist?

Julian poured the second half of the miniature in-flight vodka bottle into the remains of her Bloody Mary, swirling it with a plastic stirrer and watching the clear liquor cloud and then vanish, absorbed by tomato juice. Her own motivations? What were they? Once, they had such clarity, such intoxicating certainty. Now everything felt muddled. Where had they gone, those convictions earned the hard way—by trying to question everything?