A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (26 page)

My mother was saying goodbye to her bartender friend, Gerry, promising to stop by again. By now we’d had a few on the house and I’d been sitting there in a state of self-absorbed gloom. I forced a smile for Gerry, thankful for the bellyful of White Russians, stood, and followed my mother out into the blinding sunlight. Fortified, she wanted to go back to the hospital. I put on my sunglasses and drove us there without a word.

Grandma Bertie was sitting up now, her makeup on, cheeks rouged, lipstick in place. Cousin Mary Margaret was putting away the makeup case as we came in.

“There you are,” said Grandma Bertie. “Did you have a nice lunch?”

“Very nice,” said my mother, her voice low and grainy from the booze. She sat down and lit a cigarette.

“Mom, you can’t smoke in here.”

She looked up at me as if she didn’t know who I was.

“What kind are those?” asked Bertie.

“Marlboros,” said my mother.

“I
hate
those,” said Bertie, making that pinch-mouthed face, which, suddenly, I recognized from my mother, and my blood ran cold, despite the White Russians. “Let me have one of mine, Mary Margaret,” said my grandmother, wriggling her fat little fingers toward her purse. Mary Margaret handed Grandma Bertie her purse.

Mother and daughter sat smoking in silence.

“I was thinking, Mother,” my mother began, “that you might be better off with me, on Long Island. We could get you a nurse—”

“What? Live with you? You’re out of your mind. What about my house? What about Janie?”

“Well—”

“Anyway, I don’t like your kind of people,” said Grandma Bertie. “Writers,
artists
…not proper people at all, and the way you talk—I’d rather be dead than live with you.”

My mother sprang to her feet. “We’ll find you an apartment, then,” she said in a subdued tone. I’d expected her to fight back, to tell Grandma Bertie off. “We…we have a lot to do. So we’ll be back tomorrow…” Like a sleepwalker, she wafted out of the room, pulling a cloud of smoke behind her.

My mother opened the front door of the red-brick mansion that stood on the highest hill in Gibbsville. In the early 1900s, the bankers, lawyers, coal mine owners, and other upstanding citizens had all built mansions on this street, and Grandfather Tony, when he made his millions, wouldn’t dream of living anywhere else. As soon as Tony died, the money vanished. The FBI came knocking, then the IRS. Grandma Bertie had been forced to sell everything she couldn’t hide, barely holding onto the house.

Now, Grandma Bertie occupied the ground floor, having crowded all the ostentatious marble statuary, vases of Napoleonic battle scenes, Chinese Colonial writing desks of carved, black wood, the crystal lamps and Persian rugs, into three large rooms.

A terrible ammoniac smell of urine rose from the anteroom rug and my mother cried out and stepped back. “God, how horrible. Mother peed all over the floor!”

I was about to ask her why it was that she could recognize pee on a rug here but couldn’t in her own house, but caught myself in time. My mother flicked the light switch on and off, but nothing happened. She wandered from room to room in the late-afternoon gloom, inspecting the furniture. “We need to call Christie’s,” she murmured. “Some of this stuff could be valuable.” She almost stumbled over a marble statue on the floor, of a smiling baby in a frilly bonnet. The eyes had been painted blue. She cried out, “Who painted my eyes blue? God, how awful!

“My daddy had that made of me when I was a baby,” she said in a high-pitched, childish voice that made me cringe.

She opened a door at the far end of a dark corridor. In the room were two twin beds, and against the far wall stood a child’s upright piano of dark, varnished wood.

“Nora’s piano,” my mother said, approaching it. I followed her, remaining a few feet away, as if physical distance could keep me emotionally detached. She pulled out the low bench, and kneeling, ran her hands along its surface.

“Here,” she said to me, “feel. The marks from Nora’s leg braces.” I stayed where I was, my knuckles turning white as I gripped one of the cold, metal bed rails.

She sat down on the bench and lifted the keyboard lid. Her fingers touched the keys in the semi-darkness, and she began to play some long-forgotten tune, a Negro spiritual that I’d heard somewhere, a long time ago. I never knew my mother could play. The piano sorely needed tuning; the notes rang out, clunky and uneven, but her voice was pitch-perfect, sweet and high, slightly gravelly from the cigarettes:

I sing because I’m happy

I sing because I’m free

My eye is on the sparrow

And I know he watches me…

After a moment, she stopped and the last chords echoed through the silence. She sat hunched, immobile, over the yellowing ivory keys.

“Sunday is Nora’s birthday. I knew, I just
knew
your father was going to die on that day.”

“Mom,” I said, my voice catching. “Mom…”

I took a few steps toward her and gingerly placed my hand on her trembling shoulder. It had been so long since I’d touched her; the soft give of her skin under the wool, the fragility of the shoulderblade, felt unfamiliar.

“I’m here, Mommy,” I said. “You’re not alone.”

We stayed like that for a long time, her shoulders heaving under my hands.

“Let’s take the piano home,” I said, pulling a tissue from a box on the bedside table and handing it to her.

“Let’s,” she said, straightening, blowing her nose. “And my statue, too.”

“I’m sure we can get the eyes fixed,” I said, and sat down beside her on the little bench.

“You think?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“I’ve always loved those crystal lamps.”

“Let’s take those home, too.”

“The Persian rugs are probably worth a fortune.”

“Not covered in pee, they’re not.”

“We can get them cleaned,” she said.

“Yeah, so your cat can piss on them all over again.” I laughed uneasily.

She turned her tear-stained face toward me. “Does it really smell that bad?”

“It’s bad, Mom,” I allowed. She nodded curtly, tightening her mouth in that Bertie-like grimace. Having for once gotten her to admit she might be wrong should have been a victory, but I felt guilty and unsatisfied.

“To hell with Bertie, anyway,” I said. “And you know you can have my kidney any time.”

She smiled at me, her lips quivering, and took my hand in hers. “Here,” she whispered, “feel.”

Her hands felt warm, warmer than mine, and wonderfully soft. I was reminded of the Witch Hazel rubs she gave me when I was sick as a child, one of the great joys of my youth. I didn’t resist as she gently slid my fingers over the varnished wooden bench. From the edge toward the center ran two rough scars, exposing the raw wood. A splinter pricked my finger, but I did not remove my hand.

CITIZENSHIP

My brother Billy and I are now twenty-seven. He recently called me at my office in the private school where I teach French, to tell me that his naturalization papers had finally come through. He was calling from his bank, which he usually does when he has something personal or important to say to me. It is his armor—to be in his stuffy business mode and unable, due to the surroundings, to get emotional.

He asked offhandedly if I would accompany him next Wednesday morning to the courthouse downtown. I was so pleased I jumped out of my chair, shouting, “YES! Of course!” into the phone.

His papers had been so long in clearing that waiting for his citizenship had become an obsession with him. The government had taken his French passport away three and a half years ago, and since then he’d been, as he termed it, “a man without a country.” He had no identity papers and was not permitted to travel abroad.

It was because his adoption by our American parents, first in France in 1965 and then at home a few years later, had been completely illegal—the result of many bribes and many contacts in high places.

“Are you asking Mom to come, too?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“No,” he said vaguely. “It takes about four hours and she’d be bored to death.”

He is mad at our mom—she has a new beau, the first one since our father died. The beau is a jackass of the highest order, but we kept our mouths shut in the beginning. All our family friends said, “Give him a chance; he’s good for her; she needs a man.” Then a couple of months ago, the beau moved into our house on Long Island. Within two weeks he’d taken down seventy-five percent of the photographs of our father and replaced them with ones of himself at a Hamptons lawn party, dressed in his Australian outback attire and flanked by his two pet emus on leashes. In the photos, he is holding his hunter’s hat (complete with crocodile-skin hatband) against his chest, and he and the emus are wearing haughty expressions. Their eyes are crinkled up as though against a harsh desert sun, and their small heads are stretched high on thin necks. A few strands of hair on the beau’s balding head flutter about like the emus’ downy black feathers. They look so much like a family that the pictures are quite frightening.

My brother and I have always gone home for most weekends, especially in the summer. The recent change in the photographic decor caused quite a stir with us. In a rare display of emotion, Billy yelled at our mom. He told her that he’d never met such an arrogant, vain, foolish, childish son of a bitch in his life as this new beau.

“He’s eccentric!” our mom cried out defensively. “I have a right to go on with my life!”

I wouldn’t have said anything but the beau had taken to badgering us in front of dinner guests. There wasn’t a thing in the world Billy and I could do that he couldn’t do better. (“You were Phi Beta Kappa the second semester of your senior year? Well,
I
was Phi Beta the first semester of my junior year. The only one, too…”) So I put in my two cents: “He’s no eccentric, he’s a poseur. Face it, Mom. He’s so vain he’s varicose.”

After that, we stopped going home on weekends even though it was mid August and unbearably hot in the city. Our mother took to calling us Electra and Hamlet over the phone, which made my blood curdle and the beau roar with laughter in the background.

Our mother was mortified when she learned that Billy hadn’t invited her to his naturalization. She told me the beau told her that’s what she got for raising two spoiled rotten, ungrateful brats.

I admit I vacillated between feeling an evil pleasure and a terrible aching guilt over Billy’s coldheartedness. I did not want to interfere but finally, a few days before the big event, I called Billy at work and tried to get him to capitulate.

“Listen,” I said in a complacent, matter-of-fact tone, “tell her she can come if she wants but she has to leave the beau at home.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“No,” Billy said flatly.

I’d thought I might convince him to stop being angry at our mother just long enough to allow her to come to the ceremony, but no. I should have known better; he’d been stubborn since the day he entered our lives over twenty-two years ago.

As a child, the two aspects of our background that thrilled my brother the most were that our maternal grandfather Antonio Cappuccino had been a notorious gangster, and that our father had fought in World War II.

“Did you kill lots of Germans, Papa?” he asked one day, approaching our father gingerly. Our dad was sitting alone at the head of the long dining room table, having a hamburger for lunch. He took a break in his writing between one and two, and on the days we were home, we descended on him with a million obscure questions.

“I killed some Japanese,” our father said mildly. “But I never made it to Europe because I was wounded in the Pacific.” One thing about our dad was that you were certain to get a straightforward answer to your question, no matter how painful the Truth might be. This was scary, but consistent.

“Someone
shooted
you?” Billy asked, wide-eyed and enthusiastic.

“Shot. No, it was shrapnel from a bomb. I was wounded twice. Once in the head and once in the leg.”

My brother’s face sagged in disappointment.

“Killing is no fun,” our dad continued in that even tone. “It’s horrible. Once I had to stab a man with a bayonet. Poor Jap bastard was half starved to death but he was coming straight at me screaming with his bayonet out. I took his wallet, you see.” He put his palms together then unfolded his hands like a book. “There was a photograph of a young woman with a baby in her arms.” He pointed to his left palm. “I couldn’t read what she wrote on the back. It was in Japanese…Crazy bastard.” Tears fell from his olive-green eyes while his face remained hard-set and expressionless. He pushed the tears away indifferently while my brother stared at him, perplexed and slightly embarrassed.