Her Mother's Daughter
So I was shocked when Toni met me at the front door, and even more shocked by his face. Immediately I thought something had happened to one of my kids.
“What is it?” I gasped.
He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s all right. The kids are fine.”
I held on to the molding of the doorway, which looked as if it were moving. “Then where’s my car?”
Nice, selfish question. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night. The fun of it—the night itself—had completely vanished from my memory.
He grinned a little. “I cleaned out the garage. Thought it was stupid for you to have to park in the street with a perfectly good garage back there. Some of that junk was old when my grandfather collected it. Why don’t you come inside?” he laughed, grabbing my duffel bag and camera case.
I stepped into the small hallway. “Well?”
“It’s Gramma.”
I could feel my face grow cold. Pani! Sweet good Pani!
“Had a stroke. It’s not too bad, they think she’ll recover, she’s in the hospital now. Her right side.”
It was only because I was tired and still had alcohol in my blood, but I burst into tears. This—it occurred to me later—gave Toni a perfect excuse to embrace me, and placed our relation in a slightly different mode—but I swear, I insist, that wasn’t on my mind at the time. (I’m almost sure.)
The kids came out of Pani’s apartment at the sound, and they began to cry too, and embrace me, and we all walked back in there as if it were our home, and pushed away the Scrabble board and Toni brought me a drink (I didn’t tell him how little I needed it), and we sat together until dinnertime as they told me the horrible details of the day before.
Pani recovered, but she would never be the same. The right side of her face drooped a little, giving that sweet accepting visage a cast of malevolence. Her right eye protruded slightly, and she had almost no vision in it. And for months, she could not walk. She needed a permanent caretaker.
Her sons arrived to visit her in the hospital and decide what to do with her. Knowing how little they cared about her, I was sure her sons would stick her in a nursing home for the rest of her life and sell the house and split the proceeds. I would have to move. By now I had some money in a bank account, but I was saving it because I didn’t believe that my job, my good fortune, would last. I would need it again, I felt, to tide me over after World bounced me, until I found another way to earn a living. And I didn’t want to move—my kids liked this town, had friends nearby, would be unhappy moving. But all that was secondary.
I was terrified for Pani. I went to see her every day; I talked to her even though she didn’t seem to hear me; I stroked her hands, I told her everything the kids were doing. If one of her sons were there, he would glare at me, sitting in a corner, reading a newspaper. She improved. It was obvious she could get better, to some degree anyway. But she wouldn’t get better in a nursing home.
And a nursing home is precisely where the family intended to send her, I discovered later. Toni stopped them. He argued—passionately—I know because when he described the arguments to me later, he was still passionate—how much they owed her, how good she was, and how she deserved a chance at whatever life was left her. They countered that she would need continual care, that that was expensive, that they could not afford it (having so many car payments, so many kids in college; one was still paying off a new swimming pool; another had two little ones with braces on their teeth), and besides, who could they trust? They would have to send checks, the woman would have to be able to cash them, how could they be sure she wasn’t boozing it up and leaving Momma to rot in her own pee? Who would take care of the house, see to it that the leaves were raked, the snow shoveled, the oil delivered, that the roof didn’t leak?
Toni had an answer: himself. Would they trust him? He wanted to write, he hated his job, it was mindless, and it left him little time for writing. For a stipulated monthly payment, he would take care of Pani, and be able to write. Her Social Security check would continue to keep up the house, with his help. They were aghast. It would have been different if he’d been a girl, a woman. Then they would have given her the bare essential in payment, and gone home and forgotten her. “They would have gone home, boozed it up, and let her rot in her own dust,” Toni said bitterly, later.
But Toni was male, the first child in the entire family to go to college, and this was what he proposed to do with his splendid masculinity, his college degree? What in the name of heaven and hell was wrong with him? Was he a man or wasn’t he?
Toni won, but not because they ever accepted his case. He won because they didn’t want to be bothered. They had wives who wanted them to come home, jobs or businesses to attend to. None of them wanted to take the time to search for a nursing home, or a companion—in fact, one of the brothers, Louis, came up one evening and asked me if I’d do that. I would have, of course, if Pani had been alone and in need of that, but I was furious.
“I have a job, Louis! Surely you owe her this!”
He sat there, a beer can in his hand, chewing on his thick lower lip. “Well, you owe her too. You used her enough, I guess. Baby-sitting.”
“I always paid her.”
“Uh-huh. Fair recompense for her time, on the open market, I suppose?”
God, I hated him.
“I paid her ten dollars a day for every day or partial day I was away.”
“Barely covered their food, I’d think.”
“I paid for their food.”
“Where I come from, we pay our baby-sitters fifty cents an hour to stay with them when they’re asleep. Don’t sound like fair recompense to me. A lot of responsibility she had, watchin’ kids all days long.”
“My kids sleep too. Ten hours a night. And they are in school for five. That means I was paying your mother over a dollar an hour for the hours they were awake. And they were often not here.”
“Yeah. That’s a worry, ain’t it.” Louis’s grammar did not come from ignorance—the other brothers were well-spoken enough except the one who worked at the GM plant near Detroit, who spoke in a calculatedly tough “masculine” way. Louis put on the folksy accent to disarm. He’d probably adopted it when he moved to Missouri where he sold real estate—adopted it to hide the fact that he was a Yankee. He was the most prosperous of the brothers. “Worryin’ about where they are when they’re not here?”
I stood up. “It appalls me that you are trying to shunt the responsibility for your mother onto me. I guess you’ve noticed that I care about her. I guess too that’s more than you do—given the way you’ve all ignored her for years.”
“Well I guess we don’t need you, little lady, to tell us what we oughta do. Any good woman’d be honored to repay some of what you owe her.”
I couldn’t control myself then. “And the problem with you is you’ve had too many good women in your life: you’ve learned to be a bastard! Get out!”
He rose lazily, heaving his great belly out of the chair. “Yeah, well I guess you’re throwin’ me out of a house I own, little lady, at least one-fifth of,” he chuckled in his folksy way.
“You don’t own this apartment as long as I have a lease and am paying rent on it. And she isn’t dead yet!” All my life I’d read about people talking “with gritted teeth,” and I never before understood what that meant. Now I was doing it.
I flopped in a chair after he’d gone and I’d noisily locked and chained the door behind him. I sat there trying to relax my neck and shoulder muscles. I could hear them arguing downstairs. They were really yelling; they’d subside, then one voice would rise through the floorboards like a sonic boom. I knew it was Antoni, Toni’s father, and I knew that he was showering contempt on his son as a pansy and a weakling, and I understood why Toni did not want to go back to Ohio. The argument rumbled and roared for nearly two hours. The voices began to sound drunk. The front door slammed. I guessed it was Toni, gone out just to get out of there, and
I ran to my front window. He was walking, head down, hands in his pockets, fast. Where could he go? I felt awful for him, I wanted to throw open the window and tell him to come upstairs and sleep in my bed with me, warm and safe.
Suppose the kids had heard and were lying in bed in terror? I got up and tiptoed to their doors, pushed each one open a crack and peered in. They seemed asleep. I whispered their names; neither one moved. Asleep.
I poured myself a drink, formally, something I do when I am preparing to Think. I flopped in the chair again. Would Pani hate the way I treated her son? I know she would have hated the way he treated me. How could it happen, this good woman, this saint, this sweet loving person, how could she have sons like Louis and the others?
I knew her husband was domineering. I could hear it in her voice when she talked about him, even though he’d been dead for over twenty years, and I’d seen it in her posture when I bullied her into submission about her language. He may have been brutal, cruel, to his sons, probably was. But that would not account for the way they treated her, the way they must feel about her.
I thought about Pani’s sins. Not being honest, that was the main one: all that sweetness and all those smiles, when god knew what was going on inside. But I’d known Pani for quite a while now, and I had no sense that inside she was very different from outside. She wasn’t brittle and angry, covering it over with a smile like the glaze on pastry. She wasn’t calculating or mean or envious. She was really good: the only serious fault I’d ever seen in her was her bigotry. Maybe she whitewashed her sons’ behavior and blamed everything on other people, especially if they were not Polish, not Christian, not white. Was that enough to account for them?
I finished Thinking when I finished my drink. I always ended that way—since I could never find my way out of the mazes I built, I simply had to pull down the shades on them. But the questions didn’t disappear; they crumbled in a heap like cobwebs in an unused barn, dark, thick, frightening grey masses lying along the floor and climbing the wall in a corner of the room.
One by one, the sons left. Three of them were staying in a motel—the nearest one was in Rockville Centre—so they had to rent a car as well. That cost money they would prefer to spend otherwise. There was no one to cook for them, so the men had to eat their own cooking (hah!) or spend money to eat in restaurants.
Antoni left with a roar, slamming the front door with his heavy Gladstone bag, stamping down the front steps to the waiting cab. (Toni never, while they were visiting, asked to use my car. And I never offered.) Paul and Jan stayed to bring Pani home from the hospital. Toni told me when they were going to pick her up, so I was ready. I ran downstairs thinking This much I would do. Pani didn’t clean often and the men certainly hadn’t, and her room, the room she would be confined in for a long time, was filthy.
The curtains—I had known this and prepared for it—were too disgusting to be saved. First thing I did was take them down, dust flying out from them and making me cough. I bunched them up and tossed them in the garbage. Then I found a mop, tied an old towel around it, and mopped the ceiling, the tops of the walls, especially the corners, which had cobwebs as thick as those in my brain. I lugged my vacuum cleaner downstairs and it gulped up several years’ worth of dust from the faded rug; I got down on my hands and knees with a damp sponge and wiped up the wood floor around the carpet. I dusted every surface with lemon oil and washed the windows and the mirror. I checked the bed, but someone—Toni probably—had lain fresh sheets on it. Then, with a soapy cloth, I sponged all the knickknacks. I unwrapped the fresh curtains I had bought at Woolworth’s and hung them. Finally, I brought down a jug of chrysanthemums and set them on the chest of drawers across from the bed where she would see them. I ran back upstairs—I didn’t want to be there when they came in, and I was hoping they wouldn’t notice what I’d done. They’d think they had me; they’d think I was another one of those good women they could cozen into doing their work for them.
I watched from the window as they helped her out of the car; my cheeks felt as if they were bleeding, but it was just tears. She looked so frail, so tiny in the wheelchair, like a baby in a carriage. Her hair, which had been that colorless greyed brown, was almost white, and she was wearing the same shabby old black coat she wore every spring and fall. There was silence downstairs for a long time, and I smelled coffee. I would not go down until they left.
At last they did, and I went down and knocked lightly. Toni must have been expecting me because the door opened immediately.
He kissed me. “Thanks for cleaning Gram’s room. I wanted to do it, but my uncles were in there until just before we left. It was sweet of you.”
“It was nothing. How is she?”
“Sleeping. She’s exhausted. But she noticed the flowers. I told her you’d brought them.”
My eyes filled up. I was getting goddamned soupy with this business.
“You want to see her?”
He led me to her room and pushed open the door, which was ajar. “I want to be sure I hear her,” he explained.
A stranger with white hair and a twisted face was lying in the bed, making a high hump for such a little woman. The shades were drawn. The room smelled of soap and flowers. She was breathing evenly.
Toni and I sat for a while in the living room, talking in whispers. He told me a little about his uncles, and apologized for Louis’s intrusion on me. “I couldn’t stop him. They don’t listen to me.”
“I understood.” I sipped the coffee he’d poured for me. “So you’re really going to do it—take care of her?”
“If I can. She can use a bedpan. She only needs pills now, not shots. And if she needs a shot, a nurse will come. Mainly, she needs to be fed, kept clean, and kept company.” He smiled like a mischievous boy.
He was going to keep her clean? Empty her bedpans? Was he another saint? Ugh, the very thought…But of course I’d do such things for my children, had done them for years, without thinking…. Well, I wasn’t going to start pasting gold stars on his forehead. Maybe he was really strange, and got kicks out of things like that. A weirdo. Maybe his father knew him better than I did. I got up.
“Thanks for the coffee. And anytime you want to use the car, just yell. And if you need to get out, go to the market or anything, I’ll be glad to spell you.”
“Thanks. Mrs. D’Antonio and Mrs. Schneider have offered too. I think everything will be fine. They even brought over a casserole and a ham and a couple of cakes, so Gram won’t have to eat my cooking for a while.”
“Good.” Yes, women do gather round to help. “I have a pot of chicken soup on the stove, I’m making for her. I’ll bring it down later.”
“You all are saints,” he smiled.
“Don’t say that!” I cried out sharply, and frightened myself with the loudness of my own voice.
Toni quit his job, and settled in immediately as Pani’s caretaker. Little by little, she improved. At first she stayed awake only for minutes at a time; then she began to sit up for a half hour, so Toni carried the television set into her room and set it up on the bureau across from the bed. Then she began to stay awake for several hours at a time. She loved the game shows. The kids visited her every day, and on rainy days one of them would stay with her and play gin rummy or checkers. I visited her every day too, and her friends came in several times a week.
But she could not speak, and that grieved her. She would try to talk, she would gesture with her left hand, and roll her eye. But she would give up in frustration. Sometimes a tear appeared on her cheek after one of these efforts.
Because she went to sleep for the night around nine, Toni was free at night. And of course so was I. So it came to pass that he would come up or I would go down, one night out of three, one night out of two, and spend an hour or two chatting. He was writing well, he told me, putting in four to five hours a day.
We talked like friends, like women friends. After all, we were both “women”—we took care of the relatively helpless; we washed
dishes and did laundry, marketed and cooked, worried about others. We also both had work of our own, creative work which did not lend itself to discussion but was simply there, like validations of our personal existence. The current of desire that had struck up between us at our first meeting resurrected itself with this togetherness, this privacy; but of course Pani was always in the next room, or my kids, and just knowing they were there inhibited us. At the same time, the repression of our feelings acted as a great stimulus to them—for there is no aphrodisiac like tension, taboo. I’d be startled to find myself staring at his hands while he was talking; or catch him staring at my mouth—I could tell it was my mouth, not my face he was looking at. But something had to happen to carry us over the barrier we had created.
I had several assignments during this period, all of them in the States, none requiring me to be gone for more than four days. Each time, Toni took care of the kids, working it in easily enough with his care for Pani. He was upstairs and down, just as if we were all one family living in a two-story house; Toni slept downstairs so he could hear Pani if she wakened during the night, but left the door to our apartment open. The children adored him. He treated them more like an older brother than a parent; he taught them to play poker; he read Arden’s stumbling attempts to write poetry, and bought her some paperback books of poetry—Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost. He played ball with them, played chess with Billy, watched TV football games and talked sports with him. He was gentle and his authority was always couched in a tone of “C’mon guys, you know you gotta do this, you know I gotta do what I’m doing too.”
After a while, he told me something about his parents. He hated his father, hated his dominating, bullying manner with his children and his wife. Antoni was a table pounder, a bigot, and mean with money. He was already, only two months after Pani’s return from the hospital, dragging his feet about contributing to the small check the brothers sent Toni each month. But worst of all, he drank. Not every day or even every week—but when he drank, he drank until he was drunk, and then came home violent, beating his wife or any child who was handy. “My two older brothers got out of the house as soon as they could. They got the worst of it, he was younger and stronger, and there were only the two of them. My oldest brother just ran off when he was sixteen—after my father whipped him. The other one enlisted during the Korean War and never came back to Dayton.”