Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (5 page)

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Authors: Vivian Gornick

BOOK: Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
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“What do you mean?” I would ask loudly. “What’s wrong with the way she acts? There’s nothing wrong with the way she acts. Why are you talking like this?” They would become silent then, both of them, neither answering me nor talking again that day about Nettie, at least not while I was in the room.
One Saturday morning I walked into Nettie’s house without knocking (her door was always closed but never locked). Her little kitchen table was propped against the wall beside the front door—her foyer was smaller than ours, you fell into the kitchen—and people seated at the table were quickly “caught” by anyone who entered without warning. That morning I saw a tall thin man with straw-colored hair sitting at the kitchen table. Opposite him sat Nettie, her head bent toward the cotton-print tablecloth I loved (we had shiny, boring oilcloth on our table). Her arm was stretched out, her hand lying quietly on the table. The man’s hand, large and with great bony knuckles on it, covered hers. He was gazing at her bent head. I came flying through the door, a bundle of nine-year-old intrusive motion. She jumped in her seat, and her head came up swiftly. In her eyes was an expression I would see many times in the years ahead but was seeing that day for the first time, and although I had not the language to name it I had the sentience to feel jarred by it. She was calculating the impression this scene was making on me.
 
 
 
 
It’s a cloudy afternoon in April, warm and gray, the air sweet with new spring. The kind of weather that induces nameless stirrings in unidentifiable parts. As it happens, it is also the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. My mother wants to attend the annual memorial meeting at Hunter College. She has asked me to come with her. I’ve refused, but I’ve agreed to walk her up Lexington Avenue to the school. Now, as we walk, she recounts an adventure she had yesterday on the street.
“I was standing on the avenue,” she tells me, “waiting for the light to change, and a little girl, maybe seven years old, was standing next to me. All of a sudden, before the light changed, she stepped out into the street. I pulled her back onto the sidewalk and I said to her, ‘Darling, never never cross on the red. Cross only on the green.’ The kid looks at me with real pity in her face and she says, ‘Lady, you’ve got it all upside down.’”
“That kid’s not gonna make it to eight,” I say.
“Just what I was thinking.” My mother laughs.
We’re on Lexington in the lower Forties. It’s a Sunday. The street is deserted, its shops and restaurants closed, very few people out walking.
“I must have a cup of coffee,” my mother announces.
My mother’s wishes are simple but they are not negotiable. She experiences them as necessities. Right now she must have a cup of coffee. There will be no sidetracking
of this desire she calls a need until the cup of steaming liquid is in her hand being raised to her lips.
“Let’s walk over to Third Avenue,” I say. “There should be something open there.” We cross the street and head east.
“I was talking to Bella this morning,” my mother says on the other side of the avenue, shaking her head from side to side. “People are so cruel! I don’t understand it. She has a son, a doctor, you should pardon me, he is so mean to her. I just don’t understand. What would it hurt him, he’d invite his mother out for a Sunday to the country?”
“The country? I thought Bella’s son works in Manhattan.”
“He lives in Long Island.”
“Is that the country?”
“It isn’t West End Avenue!”
“Okay, okay, so what did he do now?”
“It isn’t what he did now, it’s what he does always. She was talking to her grandchild this morning and the kid told her they had a lot of people over yesterday afternoon, what a nice time they all had eating on the porch. You can imagine how Bella felt. She hasn’t been invited there in months. Neither the son nor his wife have any feeling for her.”
“Ma, how that son managed to survive having Bella for a mother, much less made it through medical school, is something for Ripley, and you know it.”
“She’s his mother.”
“Oh, God.”
“Don’t ‘oh, God’ me. That’s right. She’s his mother. Plain and simple. She went without so that he could have.”
“Have what? Her madness? Her anxiety?”
“Have life. Plain and simple. She gave him his life.”
“That was all a long time ago, Ma. He can’t remember that far back.”
“It’s uncivilized he shouldn’t remember!”
“Be that as it may. It cannot make him want to ask her to sit down with his friends on a lovely Saturday afternoon in early spring.”
“He should do it whether he wants to or not. Don’t look at me like that. I know what I’m talking about.”
We find a coffee shop on Third Avenue, an upwardly mobile greasy spoon, all plastic wood, vinyl leather, tin-plated chandeliers with candle-shaped bulbs burning in the pretentiously darkened afternoon.
“All right?” my mother says brightly to me.
If I said, “Ma, this place is awful,” she’d say, “My fancy daughter. I was raised in a cold-water flat with the toilet in the hall but this isn’t good enough for you. So okay, you pick the place,” and we’d go trudging on up Third Avenue. But I nod yes, sit down with her in a booth by the window, and prepare to drink a cup of dreadful coffee while we go on with our weighty conversation about children and parents.
“Hot,” my mother says to the heavy-lidded, black-haired waiter approaching our table very slowly. “I want my coffee hot.”
He stares at her with so little expression on his face that each of us is sure he has not understood. Then he turns
toward me, only his eyebrows inquiring. My mother puts her hand on his arm and cocking her head to one side smiles extravagantly at him. “Where are you from?” she asks.
“Ma,” I say.
Holding the waiter fast between her fingers, she repeats, “Where?”
The waiter smiles. “Greek,” he says to her. “I Greek.”
“Greek,” she says, as though assessing the value of the nationality he has offered her. “Good. I like Greeks. Remember. Hot. I want my coffee hot.” He bursts out laughing. She’s right. She knows what she’s talking about. It’s I who am confused in the world, not she.
Business over, she settles back into the argument. “It’s no use. Say what you will, children don’t love their parents as they did when I was young.”
“Ma, do you really believe that?”
“I certainly do! My mother died in my sister’s arms, with all her children around her. How will I die, will you please tell me? They probably won’t find me for a week. Days pass. I don’t hear from you. Your brother I see three times a year. The neighbors? Who? Who’s there to check on me? Manhattan is not the Bronx, you know.”
“Exactly. That’s what this is all about. Manhattan is not the Bronx. Your mother didn’t die in her daughter’s arms because your sister loved her more than we love you. Your sister hated your mother, and you know it. She was there because it was her duty to be there, and because she lived around the corner all her married life. It had nothing to do with love. It wasn’t a better life, it was an immigrant life, a working-class life, a life from another century.”
“Call it what you want,” she replies angrily, “it was a more human way to live.”
We are silent. The waiter comes with the coffee. She has the cup in her hands before he has fully turned away. She sips, looks scornfully after his retreating back. “You think it’s hot?” she says. “It’s not hot.”
“Call him back.”
She pushes the air away with her hand. “Forget it. I’ll drink it as it is, the devil won’t take me.” Clearly the conversation is depressing her.
“Well, all I can say is, if he wasn’t her son Bella would never lay eyes on him again.”
“That makes two of them, doesn’t it? He certainly wouldn’t lay eyes on her again if she wasn’t his mother, would he?”
My mother gazes steadily at me across the table. “So what are you saying, my brilliant daughter?”
“I’m saying that nowadays love has to be earned. Even by mothers and sons.”
Her mouth falls open and her eyes deepen with pity. What I have just said is so retarded she may not recover the power of speech. Then, shaking her head back and forth, she says, “I’ll tell you like the kid told me, ‘Lady, you’ve got the whole thing upside down.’”
At this moment the waiter passes by carrying a pot of steaming coffee. My mother’s hand shoots out, nearly unbalancing him. “Is that hot?” she demands. “This wasn’t hot.” He shrugs, stops, pours coffee into her cup. She drinks greedily and nods grudgingly. “It’s hot.” Satisfaction at last.
“Let’s go,” she says, standing up, “it’s getting late.”
We retrace our steps and continue on up Lexington Avenue.
The air is sweeter than before, warmer, fuller, with a hint of rain now at its bright gray edge. Delicious! A surge of expectation rises without warning in me but, as usual, does not get very far. Instead of coming up straight and clear it twists about, turns inward, and quickly stifles itself to death; a progress with which I am depressingly familiar. I glance sideways at my mother. I must be imagining this, but it seems to me her face reflects the same crazy journey of detoured emotion. There is color in her cheek, but her eye is startled and her mouth pulled downward. What, I wonder, does she see when she looks at me? The mood of the day begins to shift dangerously.
We’re in the Fifties. Huge plate-glass windows filled with color and design line the avenue. What a relief it’s Sunday, the stores are closed, no decisions to make. We share an appreciation of clothes, my mother and I, of looking nice in clothes, but we cannot bear to shop, either of us. We’re always wearing the same few articles of clothing we have each picked hastily from the nearest rack. When we stand as we do now, before a store window, forced to realize there are women who dress with deliberation, we are aware of mutual disability, and we become what we often are: two women of remarkably similar inhibitions bonded together by virtue of having lived within each other’s orbit nearly all their lives. In such moments the fact that we are mother and daughter strikes an alien note. I know it is precisely because we
are
mother and daughter that our responses are mirror images, yet the word filial does not seem appropriate. On the contrary, the idea of family, of our being family, of family
life
seems altogether puzzling: an uncertainty in her as well as in myself. We are so used to
thinking of ourselves as a pair of women, ill-starred and incompetent (she widowed, me divorced), endlessly unable to get family life for themselves. Yet, as we stand before the store window, “family life” seems as much a piece of untested fantasy in her as it is in me. The clothes in the window make me feel we have both been confused the whole of our lives about who we are, and how to get there.
Suddenly, I am miserable. Acutely miserable. A surge of defeat passes through me. I feel desolated, without direction or focus, all my daily struggles small and disoriented. I become speechless. Not merely silent, but speechless. My mother sees that my spirits have plunged. She says nothing. We walk on, neither of us speaking.
We arrive at Sixty-ninth Street, turn the corner, and walk toward the entrance to the Hunter auditorium. The doors are open. Inside, two or three hundred Jews sit listening to the testimonials that commemorate their unspeakable history. These testimonials are the glue that binds. They remind and persuade. They heal and connect. Let people make sense of themselves. The speeches drone on. My mother and I stand there on the sidewalk, alone together, against the sound of culture-making that floats out to us. “We are a cursed people,” the speaker announces. “Periodically we are destroyed, we struggle up again, we are reborn. That is our destiny.”
The words act like adrenaline on my mother. Her cheeks begin to glow. Tears brighten her eyes. Her jawline grows firm. Her skin achieves muscle tone. “Come inside,” she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. “Come. You’ll feel better.”
I shake my head no. “Being Jewish can’t help me anymore,” I tell her.
She holds tightly to my arm. She neither confirms nor denies my words, only looks directly into my face. “Remember,” she says. “You are my daughter. Strong. You must be strong.”
“Oh Ma!” I cry, and my frightened greedy freedom-loving life wells up in me and spills down my soft-skinned face, the one she has given me.
 
 
 
 
Nettie gave birth on a miserably hot day in August after a fifty-hour labor that ripped her nearly in two. The baby was a twelve-pound boy. She named him Richard. From the moment my mother and I helped bring him back from the hospital, we began raising him alongside of and sometimes instead of Nettie herself. We gave him sustenance of various kinds, and from time to time we gave him his very life. He was a sickly infant, repeatedly developing an asthmatic croup that could be relieved only through the inhalation of steam heat. Invariably, it was my mother or my brother who sat under the improvised vaporizer (a towel-tent held over a pot of boiling water) with the gasping Richie, never Nettie who was rendered useless by all such crises. She would pace the floor and tear at her hair as soon as the baby began to wheeze.

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