House Under Snow (3 page)

When I recall my childhood, I’m not sure if I remember an actual event, or whether what seems like a memory comes from a story my mother or one of my sisters or Aunt Rose told me or whether I’ve blurred events together. But if memory can also be a feeling, I can still feel the extravagant warmth of our Sabbath dinners at Aunt Rose’s house before my father died; the smell of Aunt Rose’s brisket simmering in the kitchen, mingled with the powdery smell of the rouge she brushed on her cheeks; how my grandfather squeezed my hand, sometimes so hard I felt my knuckles crack.

After we had sat at the long table and Aunt Rose served us bowls of matzo ball soup and plates full of brisket, potatoes, broccoli, and farfel with onions, our grandfather took us into
his study and gave us each a shiny, brand-new copper penny. To us it was worth a hundred dollars.

From the kitchen we could hear Aunt Rose talking to Lilly while they did the dishes. My mother and Aunt Rose could not begin a conversation without rehashing the stories of my mother’s family in the old country before they’d been decimated by the war. It was a connection they shared strong as the current of a river. My father would be in the bedroom watching the news on Aunt Rose’s portable television.

My mother told us that after her mother died, my grandfather did not allow his wife’s name to be spoken in his presence. He dealt with his grief by routine: Every day he went to work at the bank where he was a bank teller; at night he returned religiously at five-fifteen to have dinner with Aunt Rose and Lilly. On Saturdays he meticulously manicured his lawn and garden.

Aunt Rose was the only person Lilly dared talk to about her mother. I remember catching snippets of their secret conversation. (If my grandfather happened to walk into the room, it was as if a door slammed shut. The room went silent.) One Friday I had crept into the kitchen to tell my mother something, and stopped in the hallway.

“An aneurysm?” Lilly was saying. “But, Aunt Rose, she was so young. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Your mother and I were so close. We were like sisters.” I could make out Aunt Rose, around the corner. She always dressed modestly. Her skirts and blouses were ironed perfectly, her hair braided on the top of her head and held together with one long hairpin. “She had no one in America, except us and your father.

“None of the doctors would confirm it, but what do doctors know anyway?” Aunt Rose finally said. “The aneurysm was
caused by what your mother endured in the war. How could it not catch up to her?” She shook her wet hands before wiping them on her apron, then brushed a wisp of salt-and-pepper hair from her face. “Imagine, all those months living in a basement alone, in hiding.”

“What was my mother like?” Lilly asked. “It’s hard to remember.”

“Like you, Lilly,” Aunt Rose answered in her sturdy voice. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

Aunt Rose had never married. My mother told us that she was once engaged to a man who was in the army. They planned to marry when he returned on leave. But years went by, and she never heard from him. Aunt Rose eventually tucked away his photograph, which used to sit on the nightstand by her bed, but when I grew older I could tell, when I went out to visit my aunt and we watched a sad love story on television and her face filled with shadow, that her heart was broken. When it became clear she wasn’t to marry, my grandfather arranged a job for her as a secretary at his bank. After Lilly’s mother died Aunt Rose had devoted her energy, when she wasn’t working, to making a home for my mother and grandfather. Like other immigrants, she lived modestly, never expecting more from the world than enough money for a hot meal on the table and clean clothes for her family. In her presence I always felt like I had room to be myself, because she demanded so little of me. Maybe she expected so little from others because she liked herself.

Dora Rosenberg, my mother’s mother, had endured the invasion of the Nazis in Lithuania. She was the only member of her family to survive. After the war the priest who had kept her in hiding arranged for her to live with a family in Switzerland. Eventually the family orchestrated Dora’s passage to America. She met my grandfather on the boat to America. Their first home was in Hoboken, New Jersey.

I remember, as the Sabbath candles burned low in the dining room, listening to my mother and Aunt Rose talking. I couldn’t take in the reality of the Holocaust. I couldn’t believe that Lilly had lost her mother when she was eight.

When it was time to go home that Sabbath evening, my father turned off the black-and-white television with the bent rabbit ears in Aunt Rose’s bedroom, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and came to collect us from the living room. I was very young, and looking back, it seems impossible that I could remember the details of that evening at Aunt Rose’s house with my father. Perhaps I had fused together the story of how Lilly’s mother had died with one of the only memories I had of my father. But still, the memory of the evening seems so vivid, as if I’d sealed it into my consciousness and willed myself to always remember.

In the winter, snow had often accumulated in the few hours we were at Aunt Rose’s. My father would get in the car, turn on the heat, and then carry each of us from the side door to the car if we had forgotten to wear our boots. Squished in the backseat, our mother yawning in the front, my sisters and I waited while my father cleaned the snow off the windshield. I felt sleepy and dozed against Ruthie’s shoulder. The winter could have lasted all year for all I cared. There was no reason to stay awake or keep alert, no fear or danger. There was no reason to want, or try to hope, or have to pray.

Lilly was nineteen when she married my father. She went from her aunt and father’s grief-ridden house to her husband’s without learning how to pay a bill, iron a shirt, make a pot of
soup, tidy a room. After her mother died, she had been treated like a little princess. Everyone, I suppose, tried to make up for the fact that she had lost her mother. Maybe you never recover from a loss like that. Maybe you’re always damaged.

After my father died we lived off the blue Social Security checks Lilly received from the government each month, a small life insurance policy, and occasional handouts from Aunt Rose or Nonie and Papa, my father’s parents.

I know that I had lost my father, but I couldn’t imagine losing my mother. Maybe because my mother was all that I had. After all, even if Lilly forgot about us for an hour, a day, or two, there was always the gentle sound of her voice humming at the sink, her different smells, her footsteps on the wood floor. I had learned to believe the mere physical presence of another person was enough. Sometimes at night after my father died, before I fell asleep, I used to worry that something would happen to my mother to take her away from us.

Lilly’s father had passed away from lung cancer the year before my father’s death. Aunt Rose had boarded up the house in East Cleveland, packed her bags, and moved to California to be with one of her girlhood friends who was recently widowed. With my mother married then and her brother gone, she felt free of her responsibilities. How could she have expected my father to die so suddenly, at the age of thirty?

We all missed Aunt Rose’s Sabbath dinners after she moved. Without them it felt as if a piece of our lives had fallen away. And after Aunt Rose had settled in California, at her age it was too much for her—the Cleveland winters made her arthritis flare up—to pack up again and move back, to help look after Lilly and us girls, when my father died.

My mother must have figured that we’d survive somehow.
It didn’t occur to her that it was up to her to put our lives together. She just preferred to drift off into a quiet, godforsaken place where nothing was demanded of her. She favored dreams and wind and sky.

One summer day Lilly was again cutting out things from magazines, laying them on the floor of the living room, as if she were a young girl playing with paper dolls. Again she was re-creating with her cutouts her own wedding scene, when Ruthie and Louise came barreling through the front door and the wind sent my mother’s menagerie flying.

Lilly laid her head in her hand and breathed heavily.

“Look what you’ve done,” she said. “I thought I told you to come through the back door.”

“Why do you cut things all day?” Ruthie asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with using your imagination,” Lilly answered defensively. Her hand reached down for the wedding photo, and she stuck it inside her brassiere. “But you’re right,” Lilly said. “I’m going to have to pull myself together.” She took us in her arms and hugged us, but we hadn’t any idea what she meant.

In that gesture I remembered another hand. A cool, coarse hand placed gently over my forehead. A hand that massaged my temples as I lay under the stars, on his lap, and he pointed to Ursa Minor, through the crown at the roof of the gazebo, not knowing this was what he might be remembered for. It was a touch I carried with me, wore like a second skin.

“Come on, I’ll make supper,” Lilly said, stepping over the remains of the wedding party, which adorned our carpet like scattered leaves.

Lilly’s dinners were simple: tuna fish or grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of soup she brought into the den on trays. The fancier meals had been boarded up in a past more spirited.

After supper that night Lilly said, “Girls, things are going to have to change.”

She walked into the living room and in a manic heat began to pull out her boxes from the hall closet and folders of clippings from underneath the couch. “Here, you take this,” she said to Louise, and piled her up with a stack of bursting folders. I carried three shoe boxes, one on top of the other. “Come on,” Lilly said, and walked out the back door, down the grass, past the trees, to the rocky path that led to the gazebo.

It was nearly dusk. I could hear the familiar creaks coming from the wind in the rafters. After we put down our load, my mother drew us girls into a circle. We heard the sound of Chagrin Falls crashing in the distance. Lilly closed her eyes and inhaled. In the air I tasted the spray from the white water. She had us all hold hands, and motioned for us to sit down in a circle on the wooden floorboards of the gazebo.

“Something has happened to us,” Lilly said. “And we’ve got to change. We can’t continue to live like savages. Look,” she continued, holding out her hands. I noticed how pale they were, how lovely my mother’s unpainted nails appeared in the light of approaching dusk. “Look at us,” she went on. “When’s the last time you girls changed your clothes? You’re filthy. We can’t go on like this. Do you understand?”

Our eyes were planted on her.

“What I mean is, you have to start learning how to act like other children. Otherwise, we’ll always be alone.” Lilly’s voice was gentle, but it hurt to listen to her.

“Inside, you can be whoever you want. You can imagine yourself floating on a cloud, or that you’re part of the darkness
when you’re sitting in the shade, but on the outside you have to talk like other people, and pretend you belong with them.”

Not one of us said a word.

“I don’t want to see those sad eyes,” Lilly said. “We have to learn how to become dignified, all of us.”

“What’s that?” Louise asked.

“Being dignified means holding your head up high, no matter how terrible you feel. It means taking care of yourself when all you want to do is play in the fields and lie in bed dreaming. It means having lots of friends, and never letting anyone know how lonely you are.”

She paused. It was so quiet you could hear the sound of the river in the distance, its lap of endless promise and desire.

“We have to start acting like Aunt Adrienne, Uncle Ben, and your cousins. We have to pretend we’re like them,” Lilly said. “Even if we’re not.”

Lilly was referring to my father’s brother, his wife, and their children. They lived in Cleveland, in one of the very newest suburbs, not far from Nonie and Papa. After my father died we saw them only once or twice a year, for Rosh Hashanah or Passover. It wasn’t until I had long left home that I learned from Aunt Rose that, a few years after my father’s death, Lilly had refused a job that Uncle Ben had arranged for her, through a friend of his who was a dentist. Uncle Ben had offered Lilly a position as a receptionist in his friend’s office. Aunt Rose said that Nonie and Papa thought it was ungrateful for Lilly to refuse, but Lilly, she said, was intimidated by them, by their wealth.

That evening out in the gazebo, Lilly continued. “That’s the only way to grow up, to pretend you’re like other people.” Now I see she was trying to ignite her past into flames and pretend it had never existed, so she could move on. My mother tried to build us up, because inside she felt so small. But then
I was simply engaged by the purposefulness with which my mother spoke and the newfound confidence in her voice. She coaxed herself by coaxing us.

“Do you think your father would have fallen in love with me if I had sat around all day moping and didn’t brush my hair or wear a smile on my face?”

“Is that why he loved you? Because you were dignified?” Ruthie asked. From the very beginning, when it came to Lilly, she was a skeptic.

“Ruthie, when you don’t come from money, all you have is yourself. You must focus all your energy on becoming as beautiful as a blossom, as perfect as a piece of fruit. You must smell as fresh and clean as grass after a summer rain. I was raised to believe that for a Jew to fit in you had to make sure not to make your own needs or presence too visible. You’ll see. I’ll teach you how.”

“But what if we don’t want to?” Louise said.

“You don’t have any choice.”

“Who says?” Ruthie questioned.

“It’s my own fault,” Lilly said. She looked off, her face fine and girlish, in the watery wind. “You’ll see, darling. From now on everything will be different. I’m going to pick myself up and start a new life. After all I’m not yet even thirty.” I had no idea then what my mother meant. I was perfectly content with the life we had. But for the first time it dawned on me that my sisters and I weren’t enough for our mother: She needed a different kind of love to make herself feel alive. To insure she wouldn’t disappear.