The Mistress's Daughter (13 page)

At Catholic school the nuns told Ellen very little about the birds and the bees and a lot about sin and all that could go wrong. Almost everything already had gone wrong for Ellen, but no one acknowledged that. She was surrounded by people who didn't want to know, and quickly learned that faith got her nothing—in fact her belief that something would save her got her into trouble. At Catholic school she protected herself by insisting—at least to herself—that she was Jewish. Her mother was Catholic, her father was Jewish, and she always described herself as her father's little girl.

Pin money. Her mother didn't have much—whatever she had she got from her new husband, and she didn't want to share. Ellen got a job working in the dress shop—one night, weekends, and holidays, and a good discount. She liked working, liked acting like a grown-up—helping the ladies with their shopping. They treated her in the motherly sort of way that she wished her own mother would.

Ellen opened a bank account—vowing to save half, or at least part, of what she earned. She had a future. The boss offered her a ride home—she accepted. In the car they talked. Again, her boss offered her a ride home, she accepted, and he asked if she wanted to go out for dinner.

And then again her boss offered her a ride, took her out to dinner, and after dinner they parked the car somewhere where they could talk. She asked him about what he hoped to be, what dreams he had—he found that appealing. He appeared interested in her—she found that appealing. She was practicing on him—being girlish and tempting. He took it as an opportunity. Imagine the fumbling. He wants it but doesn't want to say what
it
is; she doesn't want
it
but has no idea how to set a limit.

Where did it start—in a car, in a hotel, in the back of the store, in a borrowed place? What did he say to her? Did he believe it himself, did she believe him? How often did it happen? Does he think he's stealing something—sampling something he shouldn't? What part of her is his favorite? Imagine her newly formed figure, fresh, tender, perfect. Imagine him. Does she worry about getting pregnant—does she even know how girls get pregnant? Does he worry about it?

This is their courtship; she is waiting, she is waiting for him, she is waiting while he is at work, while he is with his family. While she is waiting she does mischievous things; she tells her friends, she makes sure her mother finds out, she thinks there is cachet in the fact that she is the younger girl of a much older man. She wants something else, something more—more than she wants him—but what she gets is sex, and then he's gone. He has her in ways his wife would never allow, gets from her things he would otherwise never think to ask.

They go for drinks—martinis, gimlets, or Tom Collinses, mai tais, Singapore slings, and sea breezes. They snack on salty cocktail nuts and have prime rib and salad of iceberg lettuce with Maytag blue cheese dressing.

He offers to set her up in a place of her own—she's thinking they're setting up house, he's thinking it's a place to be alone with her. She's thinking it's a way out, an escape from her mother—and her mother's husband. She accepts defiantly, half in anger, half wishing her mother could stop her—knowing she will not allow herself to be stopped.

At seventeen she is the boss of herself; she is glad to be getting out from under her mother's coldness, the years of opposition, out from under the eye and hand of her stepfather.

“He's nice to me—he cares about me,” she tells her mother.

“He doesn't care about you—married men don't care about girls like you,” her mother says.

“He's getting an apartment for us.”

“He's never going to leave his wife.”

“He's going to marry me.”

“He's already married.”

She starts to pack a suitcase.

“There is something wrong with you,” her mother says.

“You are what's wrong with me,” Ellen says.

“I would send you to boarding school, but now that you're ruined the nuns won't take you—no one wants used goods.”

Her mother grabs the suitcase. “It's my suitcase, I never said you could use it.”

Ellen gets paper bags, grocery sacks from the kitchen. She packs her clothes in the paper bags. Her mother goes through her dresser drawers throwing things at her. Ellen goes into the attic and finds an old traveling bag that had been her father's—later she finds a dead mouse in it, a shriveled furry husk. She stuffs her bags with clothing, with the trinkets from the top of her dresser, with the stuffed animals her father gave her long ago. She goes out to the door.

“If you go out that door, don't think you're ever coming back,” her mother yells after her.

He is not waiting for her outside—he is afraid of her mother. He is down the street, around the corner. She toddles off, dropping things on the sidewalk as she goes.

 

The apartment is in a big building on Connecticut Avenue, a small one-bedroom in the back, with a view of another apartment. It is “furnished.”

Whose furniture was it? The woman who lived there before—who finally got married, who took a job in Ohio, who went home to live with her mother, who died lonely of old age at forty. Whose was it really? It was a little of this and that, what people left behind, what no one wanted.

They have fun together—he is able to play with her, to joke and push in a way that he has never been able to before. He has always been the one teased. She tolerates it because it is familiar, and she gives it back to him and then some. He teaches her to drive—he teases her, she gets mad, and he laughs all the more.

When he is not there, she sleeps with the stuffed animals she brought from home.

It is incredibly quiet. She has a radio and then a secondhand television set, and later a phone. There are a few mismatched dishes in the kitchen cabinets, things he's taken from his mother's basement, telling her it's for the kids to play with or needed at the house. There are crocheted rugs on the floor—all of it is a little nubbly, a little dark and depressing, an echo of World War II, but she gets plants and sometimes she gets flowers and she feels like a grown-up, a woman with a home of her own. She sleeps with the light on. If she has one of her high school girlfriends over—they lie and say they are going to someone else's house—they roast marshmallows on the gas stove, eat candy for dinner, and go to the movies and drink coffee for breakfast. There are other times when she goes to a friend's house—and is reminded of what most girls/other girls are doing, living at home with their mothers and fathers, eating dinner in the dining room, wearing clothing that is washed and ironed for them, feeling protected. The mothers feel sorry for her and worry that she might be a bad influence. She walks to the zoo, she takes the bus downtown, and she works in the clothing store.

He and she are a good match, except that he is already married and is not going to divorce his wife, and she is already emotionally on edge. They are two people who lost their childhoods, two whose parents abandoned them to one degree or another, two people a little bit lost. I see her entertaining him, tempting and teasing him. I see him as being fatherly and calming and temperate, and I see the two of them having drinks and going wild. I see him excusing himself, washing up, and going home. I see her being angry and taking it out on him—she is dramatic and an actress.

I see her in cashmere sweaters. I see her body, new and fresh and entirely unmarked. I see her and him simultaneously discovering themselves. I see them going out on the town. I see a certain amount of swagger and bravado.

And sometimes he doesn't have time—his wife needs him, his kids need him. Sometimes he brings one of the kids. His oldest boy waits in the living room while they talk privately for a few minutes in the bedroom; the talking involves giggling and sighing. And then he tells her he can't do it anymore, it's too hard on his family. He tells her he means it this time.

She cries. She thinks she will die. She is sure she will die, she feels sick, and she feels pain in her chest. She is up all night. She drinks. She calls a friend of his, his buddy—she cannot bear to be alone.

He returns, promising that soon he will be hers completely. She pretends she is not going to take him back—she pretends she has fallen for his friend. The friend gives her some money—he also gives her something that itches.

She is lonely. She goes out at cocktail hour, to get back at him, to remind him that she is alone and he is married with children. Men buy her drinks, sometimes they buy her dinner. He is irate. He is trying to be in two places at the same time. His wife has found out. She tells him that the girl can't work at the store anymore.

When she is alone, she eats peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinks the liquor he has left behind. At night, when she's sleeping, she sometimes hears the sound of the men who brought her father home—she hears their voices, their footsteps. She remembers being asleep when it happened, waking up, being afraid to open the door. She remembers looking through the keyhole—seeing her father's arm hanging limp. She remembers being terrified.

His wife has told him to stop. He has told his wife that it is over and done—he tells Ellen that it is over and done. He sneaks around. He is angry with both of them for wanting so much—for wanting more, wanting it all.

There are times she wants to leave him. She tells him she has met someone new—it is a little bit true. She tries, she attempts to replace him, but it never lasts long. She spends time with friends of his—maybe they have wives, maybe not. Once she spent the night with a friend and his wife.

I picture Norman furious and jealous.

She and his wife are at the same holiday party—they see each other across the room, they know who they are. He is there with his wife, and he ignores Ellen—or tries to. She drinks too much and throws up on the new sea green carpet in the dining room. Someone has to drive her home.

“What was she doing there?”

“She was invited.”

“She should know better.”

“He should know better.”

Red faced.

What is she thinking? She wants to be a little girl, she wants to be taken care of, loved—she thinks his wife could take care of her if only she wanted to. It's a strange thought but it makes a measure of sense to her—she wants to be part of a family.

And then she is pregnant.

Does she know she is pregnant, or does someone have to tell her?

Does she confide her symptoms to a girlfriend who says, You're pregnant!

Does she go to the doctor thinking she's ill?

Does she know that his wife is pregnant too?

She waits to tell him. The day he calls to tell her that his mother has died, she blurts, “We're going to have a baby.” She wasn't exactly planning on doing it this way, but it just comes out.

She is thinking that it is good news, that it will make him happy, that now finally they will be together.

He is speechless.

His mother is dead, his wife is pregnant, and now she is too.

What was supposed to be a moment that would inexorably bond them—sharing the grief of his mother's death, sharing the news of a baby on the way—is all too much.

She is angry with him for not being pleased. He is angry with her for not being more careful.

They fight.

She is angry with herself and she is justifiably angry with the world. Is she angry with her baby?

He sends her to Florida, promising to follow. She waits for him; he never shows up. When she moves back to Maryland they get an apartment together; he stays for four days before going home.

He offers to take her shopping to buy things for the baby.

His wife finds out that she is pregnant and lays down the law.

At some point she tells her mother, or maybe her mother just figures it out. Her mother looks at her and says, “You're pregnant, aren't you?”

She nods, wishing someone would have something nice to say. She likes being pregnant, likes the feel of this baby growing inside her, but has no idea what to do. She talks to her baby—she asks the baby, What should I do?

More pregnant and now unable to find work, she moves in with her mother, who has divorced the second husband.

In the end, in labor, she is alone at the hospital. And she still has the fantasy that he will come, that he will snap out of it and rush to her side. She wants to call him. A hundred times she wants to tell the nurse to dial his number.

“Where is your husband?” someone asks, and she cries hysterically.

The baby is beautiful. The nurses encourage her not to hold the baby. “After all, you'll never see her again,” one of them says.

 

“You're making it up,” someone says to me. Maybe and maybe not. I'm certainly imagining it. The only other option is for someone to tell me how it was, what really happened.

 

I think of Ellen and Norman before this, I picture them in the spring driving along the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., in a powder blue Cadillac convertible, the radio playing, wind blowing through their hair, and thinking, This is it, this is the life.