Toni loved his mother, but his voice sounded thin and lemony when he talked about her.
“You don’t respect her,” I ventured.
“How can I?” whined the lemony voice. “She lets him beat up on her, her poor bones are frozen in a cowering position. And when he used to beat up on us, she would just stand there and cry and wring her hands.”
“He doesn’t hit the children anymore?”
Toni looked over at me. “Can I have a drink? I mean, a real drink, whiskey. Do you have any?”
Since I had been a “success,” I’d taken to keeping a bottle of rye on a shelf. I poured a drink for each of us.
Toni settled down again in the old shabby armchair facing the equally old shabby couch. He sipped.
“I studied to kill my father,” he said.
“When I was ten, I was short for my age. The neighborhood we live in, in Dayton, is blue-collar, rough enough without being really dangerous. When I was about ten, I told my father I wanted to take boxing lessons. I was small for my age, and I told him I wanted to do something to protect myself. That was the one thing I ever did that pleased him. He signed me up at the local Y, and I trained myself to fight. I worked hard, for years. I ran, I jumped rope, I learned judo; later on, I did a lot of weight lifting, to strengthen my muscles….”
(So that’s how he got those arms, that chest!)
“I worked out every afternoon after school for a couple of hours. My father was surprised at my dedication. He started to talk about my possibly training to be a fighter—bantamweight, that’s all I’d ever be able to be. But he didn’t know the real reason I was training. I wanted to turn myself into a superman so the next time my dad started in on my mom, I could level him. I knew it would take years—you’ve seen my dad.”
Antoni weighed over two hundred, although he was only about five feet ten. Toni was no taller than that now.
“As it turned out, though…” he wiped his hand across his face, “I didn’t defend her, I defended myself. I’d done something he didn’t like—I can’t recall now even what it was—he didn’t like most things I did. Maybe I’d dared to defend my friend Brian. My dad hates everybody who isn’t Polish—and lots of people who are Polish, too—but the people he hates the most are the Irish, I guess because there are a lot of them in our neighborhood, and they were moving up a little faster than most of the Poles. Anyway, he didn’t like something I said, and he swung his arm out to deck me, and without thinking, without even realizing what I was doing, I grabbed his arm and turned it back. It happened so fast…it made him fall right out of his chair. I was thirteen.
“It’s funny. You can hate your father, but there’s something—I don’t know—a mystical taboo on him. I felt terrible, seeing him on the floor like that, I was overcome with guilt and terror, I felt that God would reach down from heaven and strike me dead on the spot. My dad saw all this on my face as he sat there on the floor staring at me. He looked at me—the only word to describe his expression is malevolently. And I must have looked terrified, so he knew he could get away with what he did next.
“He stood up real slow and started to take off his belt. ‘Hit your father, will you?’ he said. I stood there. I didn’t say a thing. My mother didn’t say anything either. Her face was dead white. I guess she thought he’d kill me.”
Toni gulped some rye.
“He reached over and grabbed me by the hair and pulled me down the cellar stairs and told me to let down my pants. Then he threw me over a low table and began to belt me. I didn’t try to stop him, I felt he had the right to do this after what I’d done. But I wouldn’t cry out either, and he kept hitting me, he said he was going to hit me until I cried. And I wouldn’t cry.”
There were tears in my eyes, and I wanted to go over and hold him, but I didn’t move.
“My mother had come downstairs too, I don’t know when. She walks silently and speaks in a soft low voice. But suddenly, along with his grunts and the whack of his belt, I heard her voice, low and sad.
“‘You will kill him, Antoni,’ she said. No crying, no tears at all. His arm held for a moment. I was half out of it with pain, but my heart was whirling, I thought, yes, and then he’ll kill her, but he didn’t. He stopped. He walked upstairs.
“I was sick after that, for quite a while. I couldn’t go to school. But he never raised his hand to me again. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought the next time I’d feel justified in killing him. And the next time he started in on my little brother, I just stood up and looked at him, and he stopped.
“But he kept on beating my mother. I wasn’t able to stop that. He’d come in late at night, after a boozing session, and just whack her. For no reason. She always cried softly, so as not to frighten my little brother and sister and me. Sometimes I’d hear something and go running downstairs, but by then he’d have stopped and fallen into a chair, passed out. Once I went over to wake him up—I was about sixteen, and as tall as he by then, and a hell of a lot stronger, even if he had sixty pounds on me. I was going to wake him up and punch him out. But my mother wouldn’t let me. She held on to me, weeping, begging. I gave up then. I was going away to college soon, and I vowed I’d never return to that house, that craziness.”
He wiped his face again; I could see it was damp. Not with tears, just with sweat. “Summers I got jobs far away from Dayton—I’d do anything. I worked on a ranch—funny, because I’d never been on a horse in my life, I’d hardly ever seen one. I even worked on an assembly line, just like my old man. But not in Dayton.
“After the fall I left for college, I never went back except for holidays. And I didn’t always go back for them. I can’t stand that house. I’ll never go back. They can have it, they seem to like it. Fucking insanity!”
He put his hands over his face and cried a little. I did not move. I didn’t want to embrace him that way, as a mother. Soon, he raised his face, apologized, got up and went into the bathroom. He came out with a washed face, eyes moist and deep, and walked toward me. I stood up and walked toward him, a few steps, and we closed each other in our arms as easily and naturally as a morning glory closes up at night. Then we went to bed.
5
BELLE SMOOTHED THE MERINGUE carefully over the pie, sprinkled granulated sugar on it lightly, and put it back into the oven. She set the minute timer, and sat down on a kitchen chair and lighted a cigarette. She did not like to sit in the kitchen, but browning the meringue took only a few minutes, there was no point in going out to the porch. She was making this pie for Mr. Campanella, her piano teacher. Every time she took him a pie, he became ecstatic, he started to speak Italian, he said he and his wife believed Mrs. Stevens made the best pies of anyone in the world.
She smiled a little, thinking of it.
Her lesson was at three; the pie would be cool by then. And between now and then, she had nothing to do: nothing to do! She would practice her lesson again, and take a bath, and remove the pins from her hair and comb it, spend time on her makeup. She would make a toilette, she, Belle! Just like a lady of leisure. She liked to look nice when she went to Mr. Campanella’s, they were such cultured people, Mrs. Campanella sang at the Met even though she was over fifty and very fat, and he—oh, he was so elegant, and their house was full of antiques, all the tables covered with photographs of famous people they knew, and that wonderful piano….Bosen…Bosensomething.
She felt always a little let down when she returned from her lesson. She would go over and over everything in her mind—the way he looked and sounded, the way he looked at her, everything he said about her performance. He was very kind to her, but she knew she wasn’t good. After all, she’d listened to the girls practicing for years. Here she’d been taking lessons for three years, and she still couldn’t play any of the pieces Anastasia was playing after two. She was too old. Fifty-six. The girls had started at seven. But maybe she’d never have been a good pianist, even if she’d started young. She lacked something….
Still, he was kind to her. He k
new she knew she would never be good. She just wanted to play some songs, songs she liked, play them really well. But she could never seem to get the songs to roll out from under her fingers, the way they did when he played them. They were easy enough. She must do exercises, he said, get her hands strong. But she practiced her Hanon every day, and her scales too. Arpeggios were harder.
Anastasia hadn’t practiced in years, but sometimes when she came to visit, she’d sit down at the piano, and she could still make the piano sing, play Chopin so beautifully, it was beautiful even if she screwed up her nose when Belle told her so. She didn’t like the way she sounded, she didn’t know how Belle wished she could make the piano sound like that, well, Anastasia always looked down her nose at things….
Anastasia. Belle’s mouth set in a grimace. Her birthday was in two weeks, Thanksgiving. What to give her. A book on growing up. She loved lemon meringue pie. Belle sighed. She would probably bake one for her, but she didn’t want to.
The timer buzzed. She got up and put on a mitt and removed the pie from the oven. Perfect—golden brown tips on waves of white meringue. She set it carefully on the cake rack to cool. Then she rinsed the soiled dishes and put them in the dishwasher. She loved her dishwasher. It was still new. They had remodeled the kitchen last year, put in lovely new cabinets and drawers that slid open easily, and a new floor, a special kind of linoleum—or maybe they didn’t call it linoleum anymore—that stayed shiny all the time without being waxed. Except once in a while. Ed did it two or three times a year. It was very pretty, shades of white and ivory and cream in little boxes shaped like mah-jongg pieces.
Ed didn’t like her to put pots in the dishwasher, so she scrubbed them by hand and laid them on the drain. Then she smoothed cream on her hands. They weren’t bad, considering what she’d done with them all these years. She wished they were as white and slender as they had been years ago, but still, they weren’t bad now. Setting her face in a smile, she went upstairs and drew a bath.
Nowadays, she took a long leisurely bath several times a week. She even had bath salts Joy had sent her for her last birthday. She leaned back and let the water lap around her. When it stopped, she moved, to set it in motion again. The water sloshed high up at the tub whenever she moved her body. There was more of her than there used to be. She watched her weight, and all the salesgirls said she had a wonderful figure for a woman her age, but she wished she could be thin again, as thin as she had been, of course her legs and hips had never been what you could call thin, but since they’d been playing golf, her legs were thinner, Anastasia commented on it, she said Belle’s legs looked good. But Anastasia would say anything to make her feel good. You couldn’t believe her, she was always trying to get Belle to do things. Joy too: always telling Belle to go out and meet people and play bridge at the church on the corner, not understanding, not knowing.
Playing golf was good. You were out in the air, in the sun, and walking over greenness, that was nice. And the other people on the golf course were nice people, well-dressed, not fancy of course, you don’t get dolled up for golf, but it was nice to wear neat cotton wraparound skirts and light jersey tops, to have soft-soled low-heeled shoes on your feet, it felt good, and she had several outfits and three different cotton golf hats, and some neat poplin jackets, white, pale blue, and yellow, they were comfortable too. She looked just like the other women out there, and they all always smiled and waved, and Belle and Ed smiled and waved, and sometimes they even stopped and chatted, and they were beginning to make some friends, Peggy Helder, she was an interesting woman. She didn’t get married until she was fifty, and then she kept her own apartment! She lived on the West Side of Manhattan and he lived on the East Side. Anastasia laughed when Belle told her about it, she cried “How to keep a marriage happy!” Her husband was an important man, he imported something, something like machinery. And Peggy had a little house in Long Beach, that was how she came to play golf at Jones Beach. Her daughter lived there, grown daughter, nearly Anastasia’s age. She must have been married before, then….
Her husband didn’t mind if she went to Long Beach every weekend, well, he traveled a lot himself, and besides, they didn’t even see each other every night, she went home from work to her apartment on what was it? Well, Eighty-something Street, and he went to his. I wonder if he cooks his own dinner, or if he eats in a restaurant every night? He must be very rich. And Peggy liked Belle and Ed, and invited them to have drinks one evening after golf. The house in Long Beach was small, but it was a summer house, how many people could afford to have two residences?
Peggy had been to Europe many times. Belle sighed and splashed herself up and out of the tub. So many years she had dreamed of it, seen it in her imagination! And there were beautiful things, that square in Brussels, the Rhine River, the castles. But she wasn’t impressed by London, it was dirty and grey, depressing, all that rain! And Paris was so cold it was a nightmare. Anyway, it was all too much for her. Anastasia said you shouldn’t see thirty countries in fifteen days, well, she was exaggerating of course, looking down her nose as usual, they only went to six countries that time, not everyone could do what Anastasia did, she just went and stayed someplace, but she had jobs to do and people to meet her and take her around. She didn’t understand how hard it would be to go by yourself if you couldn’t speak a language. When Belle and Ed went, the tour people made all the arrangements and did the tipping and handled the travel from one place to another. How would they have gotten around without the tour? They couldn’t read the signs or tell the taxi drivers where they wanted to go.
But she had to admit the tours were exhausting. Up at six, suitcases outside your door by seven, all that waiting in the lobby, the bus never left until eight, and then so many hours on the bus, driving, driving, all day sometimes, the guides spouting into the loudspeaker, she couldn’t understand a word they said, and sometimes it was so hot, or else it was cold, Paris was very cold, she froze, she hadn’t brought a warm jacket, she was miserable. Even the hotel was cold, oh it was a beautiful hotel, all three-star hotels the travel agent had said, but freezing, and the coffee! horrible! she couldn’t drink the coffee, and the bed was hard and lumpy and the pillows felt as if they were made of board. The second time they went she wanted to take her own pillows but hard as he tried, Ed couldn’t make them fit into the suitcases, only two apiece they were allowed.
Tired, so tired all the time, from getting up so early and those long bus rides. She was too old for Europe, for travel. But she had wanted to see it. The Eiffel Tower, well, it wasn’t pretty, not really, although she tried to make herself feel it, she said to herself, the Eiffel Tower, the Eiffel Tower, I am in Paris, but it didn’t do any good, she was cold and the food was awful, tour food Anastasia said, but it seemed like any food to her, just meat with gravy on it and french-fried potatoes and overdone vegetables, it wasn’t as good as Howard Johnson’s. She hardly ate it, Ed always finished her dinner and her ice cream, every night they had ice cream for dessert. She could see other people in the restaurants having interesting-looking pastries but they never got one. The Arc de Triomphe, that was nice. They took an elevator up, she wouldn’t have walked, she couldn’t, she was too tired, and stood there, and the whole city was laid out below them, broad avenues like spokes emerging from an axis, tree-lined. Beautiful. And there was a woods nearby, right in the middle of the city, the Bois de Boulogne, something like that, she couldn’t really hear, her hearing was so awful…. She sprinkled perfumed talcum powder—good quality talcum, with a lovely scent, Joy had sent it with bath salts and cologne—over her damp body, and padded barefoot into her bedroom in a long heavy white terry-cloth robe. So nice to have a robe just for when you’re wet. She let it fall off her shoulders as she sat at her vanity table looking into the mirror. She raised her chin a little. Not bad. Not good. She examined her body. The flesh on her upper arms was thick and flabby.
Arden: she was only four, maybe even younger. I was wearing a sundress, my arms exposed, I m
ust have been in my late forties. She was sitting beside me, and she turned and looked at my arms and lifted one of them up and jiggled the flesh of the underarm, and sat back appraisingly, and said, “Not yet. But soon.” Funny kid. Smart.
She opened the drawer that held her girdles and bras, immaculate, folded neatly, in piles, and chose her undergarments. In the next drawer were underpants, and the one below held slips, all ironed and folded neatly. The new chest of drawers was wonderful, so much room, and so beautiful. She gazed around her. She’d done the room in a Chinese style, because of the Chinese lines and fittings on the furniture. She’d bought a jade green rug, and made drapes and bedspreads of a darker green damask. Her prize possession was the white Kwan Yin lamp that stood on her vanity, but there were other lovely Chinese pieces in the room, prints, bowls, ashtrays. It was lovely and cool. It could have been in the house of a wealthy woman. Her old habits of watching pennies still worked to her benefit—she’d done a great deal on a little money. Anyone seeing how they lived now would think Ed made much more than he actually did.
Throwing a Chinese satin robe Ed had given her for Christmas over her underclothes, she walked into Anastasia’s room. The one problem with the house was closet space. She used the closet in Anastasia’s room, and Ed the closet in Joy’s room, and he had put up a rack in the lower part of the hall linen closet for his jackets, but even with the big closet in their own bedroom, their clothes were a little crowded. She opened the closet door and surveyed her dresses and suits. She liked to look nice for her piano lesson. She chose a classic beige wool knit three-piece suit; the jacket was trimmed with black. She’d wear her new camel’s hair coat and black heels and carry a black bag. Yes.