House Under Snow (19 page)

I put my hands over my stomach, as if I was protecting my baby. I had never done anything exceptional in my life, and carrying this baby, even though I was only six weeks pregnant, felt exceptional. I wondered how Austin would react when he learned I was pregnant. The sun slowly sank into the horizon, coloring the sky with an intensity so original and fundamental, I felt immobile watching it.

“Well then, maybe we should tell Mom,” Louise continued.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “What good would that do? I don’t want to worry her.”

I listened to the sound of metal against the tracks as the Rapid
made another turn. I thought of the anonymity of the city as we rode beyond the maze of buildings at the edge of downtown. I thought of all those people who lived in cramped apartment houses, and ate meals in tiny kitchens and didn’t even know one another. Didn’t even feel they had to nod when they passed on the street. I thought of all those men and women dressed in suits on their way home from their offices, sitting with us on the Rapid, and I longed for that feeling of being unknown as I watched the birds skit from tree to tree outside the transit window. I sensed that years from then I’d be able to read the situation I was in. But then I hadn’t a clue what I was doing.

Louise and I were sitting behind two women whose overflowing shopping bags from Halle’s crowded the aisle. I hungered for the simple pleasure of shopping.

“If Mom finds out she’ll blame it on Austin,” I said, still trying to convince myself I was doing the right thing.

“So what,” Louise said.

“Louise, promise you won’t tell Mom.”

“You know I won’t, Anna. I’m just worried about you.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to me.” I began to feel nauseous and opened the window.

“Anna, take it easy,” Louise said. She pulled the hair back from my face. “Sit back. You look pale as a ghost.” Below the tracks, rock crumbled under the motion of the iron wheels. By the time we arrived at the end of the transit line and boarded a bus home, the birds had quieted.

It was essential for Max to feel idolized, adored, and in control. It pissed him off that he had no persuasion over Ruthie. That even his simple gesture of offering to fix her bike had seemed
to her a violation. But, unfortunately, Max was not the kind of man who was able to look past his own hurt pride, and consider that Ruthie’s behavior might have nothing to do with him, that she was simply not willing to give up our father so easily.

To apologize for slapping her, Max went out and bought Ruthie a brand-new, top-of-the-line ten-speed bicycle. “I didn’t realize the strength of my own hand,” he told her. But Ruthie could not be bought. She kept the new purple bike in the back of the garage and continued to ride her old one.

The war between them escalated. One day Max asked her to answer the phone. He was fixing a stopped-up drain in the downstairs bathroom. She turned up the volume on her stereo and pretended she didn’t hear him.

From down in the cool basement, where Louise and I were playing cards, I heard Max yell up the stairs to Ruthie. Lilly was out running errands. “Goddamn it, Ruthie, I said answer the goddamn phone.” His temper shook the house.

Max stormed up the stairs, opened the door to Ruthie’s room. Louise and I heard a blast from her stereo, then instant quiet, except for the incessant ringing of the telephone, and the sound her body made on the hard wood as Max dragged her into the hall.

“Next time you goddamn answer the phone when I tell you to, do you understand?”

“You can’t tell me what to do!” Ruthie hollered.

“You bet your pretty ass I can,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of your prima donna routine. Who do you think you are?”

“Ruthie Crane,” she said. “No relation to YOU.”

“As long as you live in this house, you do as I say, do you hear me, young lady? I’m not standing for any more of your bullshit, understand? It’s about time you girls were disciplined.”

“Take your hands off of me!” Ruthie shouted.

The phone rang and rang.

Ruthie’s screams were piercing. The phone continued to ring until Max kicked the stand where it perched and it fell to the floor.

When Lilly came home Max was in a foul temper.

“I’ll talk to Ruthie,” Lilly said. “She’s having a hard time adjusting.”

“A good slap in the face would teach her a thing or two,” Max said.

“Please, Max, don’t,” Lilly said. She caressed his back. “She’s just a kid. She needs a little more time.”

Lilly went to sit in his lap, the way she used to when they’d first gotten married.

“Get away from me,” Max said. “I don’t feel like it now.”

“Please give Max a chance,” I heard Lilly plead to Ruthie, after she went upstairs to console her.

“He’s crazy,” Ruthie said. “Just because you like him, doesn’t mean I have to.”

“Ruthie, you have to look at it from Max’s side. He’s not used to a house full of girls,” Lilly said.

Louise and I opened Ruthie’s door and plopped down on her floor.

“Ruthie, please forgive me,” Lilly said. She tucked her face in the palm of her hand and began to cry.

“He’s no good, is he?” Lilly said.

“He’s not so bad,” I countered.

“Mom, maybe you shouldn’t have married him,” said Louise.

Lilly wiped the tears from her face with the sleeve of her sweater. “Don’t worry, girls,” she said. “I’m going to make this
work. I’m not going to let you down.” She gave each of us a kiss.

“I have to go,” she sighed. “I have to go make Max happy.”

After Lilly went back downstairs, we heard occasional loud wails of laughter break the silence in the house. Max was downstairs with a six-pack of Canadian ale and bowl of the big salty pretzels he liked, watching
The Red Skelton Hour
.

Later that night, before I drifted off to sleep, Lilly came back upstairs and wandered into our room like a restless child. She sat down at the foot of my bed.

“Is everything okay, Mom?” I asked.

“Louise was right, Anna,” Lilly whispered, glancing over at her. Louise pretended to be asleep. “I didn’t want to admit it in front of Ruthie because she’s having such a hard time. But I never should have married Max.”

I didn’t want to hear what my mother was saying. “He doesn’t know how to touch a woman,” Lilly said. “He’s always so rough. My mother never would have approved of Max. She didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t Jewish. Can you keep a secret, sweetheart?” Lilly said.

I felt a knot form in my stomach.

“When my mother was in hiding from the Nazis, the priest forced himself on her. He made her sleep with him once a week, after Sunday Mass. My mother whispered the story when I went to sleep at night. She wanted me to make sure I understood how important it was to tolerate a man’s needs.”

Did Lilly mean that Max was forcing her to have sex with him against her will? I don’t think my mother really understood what she was saying. All I knew was that she’d gotten in over her head with Max, and she didn’t know what to do or how to handle him.

“My mother never told my father what she’d done in hiding. She was afraid, if he knew, he wouldn’t want her. She told no one. Until she couldn’t keep it quiet anymore.”

“Mom, you’re not in hiding,” I said. “You can escape.”

Lilly just looked at me.

“You have my mother’s eyes,” Lilly said, like there was no fleeing our history.

Despite my mother’s confession about Max, I had begun to form an attachment to him. Their marriage wasn’t perfect, but my mother was functioning. She wasn’t living in a dream world. That night my loyalty began to shift. I harbored fantasies that Max would take me away with him. We’d move into our own apartment, without my mother or my sisters. I hadn’t been around men very much in my life, except for the parade that had come in and out of our house, and Max fascinated me. I liked the way he could take me out of myself, make me forget who I was or where we came from. Even when Lilly tried to distract us or console us, you could still feel the weight of her troubled history in every word she spoke. There was always a dark undercurrent of feeling when we were with our mother.

When we were
younger, Lilly had taken us for long drives in the car. As we drove along the Chagrin River, I smelled the rusted scent of the Ohio wind through the windows. In the winter it was too cold to walk barefoot in the high, scratchy grass, play in the fields, feed an apple or a handful of sugar cubes to the horses that ran in the fenced-in yards we would pass on the way to school; they were mostly under blankets, boarded inside the barns. But no matter what season, there was
always the river—I tasted it in the drinking water, felt it in the damp air as I bathed. I felt blessed by it when there was nothing else, and came to think of the river like a lost father—a soul or spirit. I loved the richness of the countryside, the acres and acres of wooded land, the falls and the river; I felt them in my flesh and bones, their freshness crept into the color of my face and folded itself inside the clothes I wore. I used to dream of following the creek, moving through the brush and pine, using a branch as a walking stick, until I arrived at the great heart of the river. On the other side I imagined a secret paradise different from what we could glimpse of the river from the gazebo, built on a small incline in our backyard, where I kept watch. Sometimes I imagined our white house, with its black shutters, to be a marooned boat, flooded and warped, rocking in a turbulent sea. I’d pretend that my family was stranded, then I’d make up stories about what we did, how we lived, and when we would be rescued. I’d imagine the house, a private sanctuary, floating along the water in good weather and bad, to the other side of the river, where we’d all be welcomed by a tall, handsome man with outstretched arms.

From the backseat of the car, I watched my mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror. She always got nervous on the way to Nonie and Papa’s house. To calm herself she filled the drive with small talk.

“Girls,” she told us, “the Indians came up the river in canoes expecting to find a waterfall the size of Niagara, but instead, they found just the little waterfall in the middle of town, which wasn’t nearly as grand.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Ruthie asked.

“Let me finish, Ruthie, and you’ll see,” Lilly said. “Your father told me this story once. I want you all to hear it. I have so little of your father to share.” She gazed off for a second as if
she were lost in a deep reverie. “When the Indians went back to the reservation to tell the chief of their disappointment, he insisted upon seeing the falls for himself. So they all got into canoes and paddled back up the river. When the chief came upon the falls, however, he was so overcome by their beauty, he let out a cry that rang through the trees, and shook the black leaves and the pines.”

“You’re making this up,” Ruthie said.

“The chief made the Indian braves drink from the river until their stomachs almost burst, because he thought they had been blinded by vanity.” Lilly rapped her nails on the steering wheel as she talked.

“What’s vanity?” Louise asked.

I watched my mother adjust her shoulders and straighten her back. “Vanity means caring too much about appearances. The Indians didn’t appreciate the humble beauty of the tiny falls. The river of shame,” Lilly said sadly, as if her mind had drifted to something else entirely. “That’s how Chagrin Falls got its name.”

“It’s easy to feel ashamed,” she said, when we reached a stoplight. “Especially around people who are more privileged. But it’s much more difficult to look for the beauty in things. Come on. Let’s get out and stretch. Follow me,” she said. She pulled the car over and parked. She reached out her arms, lifted her chin, and closed her eyes, as if she were praying to the open sky.

She was trying to tell us that we shouldn’t feel ashamed at Nonie and Papa’s just because our aunt and uncle had lots of money, our cousins had expensive new clothes and the carefree attitude of those who have never felt out of place and alone.

“Why do we have to go to Nonie and Papa’s?” Ruthie said. “They don’t care about us.”

“Because they’re your father’s family,” Lilly stated.

After the visit she spoke to us again. “Girls, I have to tell you something,” she said, once we were back in the car. “It’s not because Nonie and Papa don’t love you that they rarely call or come see us. When they came over on the boat from Russia, they wanted your father to marry one of the rich girls, like Evelyn Horowitz, whose father owned a dress factory. I was just a poor bank teller’s daughter. Nonie blames me for your father’s death,” she continued. “She’s never approved of me.”

I didn’t understand how Nonie and Papa could blame Lilly. It wasn’t her fault that our father had died. Sometimes I didn’t know what to believe. I tortured myself, trying to decipher the truth, when there really wasn’t any single truth to be found. Truth was in the eye of the beholder.

With Max, I
could forget that we had this strange, uncomfortable history behind us. As a girl I just wanted to be like everyone else. I craved normality. I didn’t want to feel singled out or special because something bad had happened to my family.

When Max took us on car rides, he popped in a Frank Sinatra or Burt Bacharach tape. He bellowed and rocked in his seat, and we all started singing with him. As the car filled with our voices, we were taken to a place not compromised, still salvageable, and the sun bounced off the windshield until we could see nothing ahead or behind us.

On the car ride to the Hunt Club, I remember exactly what Max wore: lime-green pants, a navy V-neck sweater, and polished loafers. “Move over here, sport, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said as he ruffled the top of my hair. “I would never hurt my princess.”

The day after Lilly had confessed her reservations about Max, I went alone with him on a father-son weekend to his Hunt Club to take part in a hunting trip. As we settled in the car, Max pushed the recliner button so that his seat went back, then turned on his Frank Sinatra tape and began singing.
I’m king of the hill, top of the heap
—He grinned from ear to ear. I sat pressed against the passenger door and opened the window. The smell of the new leather seats in the long silver Lincoln made me nauseous.