Her Mother's Daughter
Then I said, “I have an idea! They have Thanksgiving dinner early, at midday, don’t they still?” He nodded. “So you go to them in the morning, stay until about five or six, and come home and have Thanksgiving here at night. I’ll make dinner for around eight, or seven.” My mind was whirring: how would my mother feel about that, a big dinner late at night? Not good.
“Sure,” he said uneasily.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t think we can eat that much.”
I burst out laughing. “Of course you can!”
I cooked Thanksgiving dinner downstairs. I had never had Thanksgiving before, we always went to Mom’s. But I didn’t want to leave Pani on Thanksgiving, and it was just too hard for her to go out. Mom was just as glad not to have to cook. But was I nervous, cooking a turkey! I got a twenty-two-pounder and roasted it five hours. Mother said it must have been frozen (it was) because it was dry. “And,” she said in a tone of voice that suggested I had done this to persecute her, “the gravy is burnt!” (It didn’t taste burnt to me—but what do I know?) She had me nearly crying at the table. I had tried so hard to please her—no one else was fussy.
She never hesitated to criticize my cooking—or my appearance, or anything else about me—but there was animus in her voice that day, she was angry with me. She saw instantly that Toni and I were involved, and she didn’t like it. Toni didn’t notice. She was polite to him, and he wasn’t used to polite families. He was used to people screaming and shouting when they were displeased, upending tables, throwing crockery. He didn’t realize people could smile at you and still hate your guts. He was my sweet innocent baby. Not that she hated him. She was indifferent to him, personally. She was angry with me for taking up with someone so unsuitable, someone without money or status, someone I could not marry, who couldn’t support me.
But he loved her, loved the way she sat like a grande dame, dressed so beautifully, her hair so elegant, sipping a scotch and soda, expecting to be waited on. It was unique for him to see a woman in such a position, and he gloried in it. I’m sure he wished he could see his mother treated that way. To him, my mother was a creature from a more exalted world than he had known, and his voice crowed with delight every time he spoke to her. He didn’t notice that she never addressed a remark to him. I did.
I did, but I said nothing. I hadn’t expected her to like it. And I knew she’d be polite, and that if he didn’t see her often, he would go on not seeing her coolness. But when, at Christmas, he broke out his bank account and bought her a silver gravy ladle, I had to say something. We were at her house. Toni and I had carried Pani, bundled in blankets, out to the car and set her in the front seat. The kids and I sat in back with the presents that wouldn’t fit in the trunk. Pani was extremely excited at going out, and I worried a bit about her. But she was settled in high state in my mother’s living room, and Toni had two queens to wait on—three, if you count me. He was overjoyed.
Mother and I were in the kitchen, preparing to set out the Christmas Eve feast that followed the giving out of presents, and I whispered into her good ear: “Toni is sweet, isn’t he?”
She squirmed. “Ye-es. He’s sweet,” she admitted, very reluctantly.
“He spent most of his savings buying you that ladle,” I said, knowing what hit my mother’s core.
Her eyebrows rose.
“He adores you,” I added, finishing the job.
Eyebrows remained raised, shoulders shrugged. “I don’t know why.” It was a question.
“He just does. You’re probably very different from his mother.”
“Oh, Polish men…!” my mother exploded in soft-voiced contempt.
She has a gift. She can convey so much in a phrase, in a tone of voice. All of it was there, years of watching men bully and abuse their wives, of watching the women, her own mother, shabby and shapeless in old housedresses, bent into postures of servility, smiling and cringing simultaneously.
“Yes, he hates his father,” I agreed, “who is terrible.”
My mother nodded. And she did act a little warmer to Toni after that.
I discovered that the kids knew that Toni was my lover when Arden came down with scarlet fever. She woke up around midnight, one Tuesday night, felt hot and feverish, then was seized with nausea and couldn’t make it to the bathroom. She cried out as the vomit propelled itself out of her throat, and I leaped up from bed naked, threw a robe around me and ran to her. Toni grabbed his jeans and followed. The poor kid was crying, she was humiliated and upset at fouling her room, and I had to calm her down as I helped her into the bathroom. Billy woke too and Toni pressed him into service cleaning up the mess.
“Ugh! Ugh!” cried my fastidious son. “Why should I clean up her vomit?” The her was dyed in all the venom of sibling rivalry.
“Because she’s sick and upset and your mother is busy helping her and I need you to help me,” Toni said firmly, and without a word, Billy went for the paper towels and the liquid cleaner. I should be able to command obedience like that!
She was so hot I was terrified. I cleaned her up and led her back to bed and got a basin of warm water and alcohol and washed her face and neck down with it. I kept this up for an hour or so until she felt cooler. I was afraid to give her an aspirin until I knew what was wrong.
For the next few days, things were chaotic in the house—the doctor’s visits, medicine to be administered, chicken soup to be simmered, the busy unsettled quiet of a house where someone is ill. I sat for long periods beside Arden’s bed bathing her with alcohol as she swam in and out of delirium. I kept Billy home from school; it figured he’d be carrying the stuff as well, and a few days later, he came down with it too. But he didn’t run such high fevers, and I worried less about him.
It was a few weeks before they were more or less normal again, sitting around in the living room in pajamas and robes watching the tube, complaining about boredom, getting into arguments with each other at the least thing. During Arden’s illness, I made Toni stay downstairs at night. He’d come up in the afternoons and—blessed relief—play chess with Billy and read poetry to Arden, allowing me a couple of hours to go to the market or just sit in my room working. And he ate with us. But I wouldn’t let him come back up later on. I don’t know why, exactly. Superstition—if I had sexual pleasure, my kids would die?—or maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for sex with two sick kids in the house. So one night Arden turned to me during a commercial and said, “How come Toni doesn’t come up at night anymore?”
Billy looked over too, adding his look to me question.
I know I must have changed color. “What do you mean?”
Arden gave me a knowing look. “Come on, Mom, we know Toni comes back up at night after we go to bed.”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. I was trying to protect you from that knowledge.”
They both laughed. “Us or Pani?” Arden chirped nastily.
I shook my head. “You kids are too much.”
Then we all laughed, long and hard, out of relief, I guess.
“Why doesn’t he just stay up here with us after dinner, and go to bed when you do?” Billy wondered.
“Because you-all like to watch television and he likes to read.”
“You read. In your room.”
“Yeah, but there’s only a hard-backed chair in my room and I have to read in bed. It wouldn’t be comfortable for two.”
They gave each other a long considering look. I understood what it said, and was amazed: they so much wanted Toni to spend his evenings upstairs that they were considering giving up evening television. I held my breath.
“Maybe you could put the TV in one of our rooms,” Arden ventured.
I just looked at her.
“Yeah, you’re right. We’d fight about which room.”
“And the one whose room it was in would start to treat it as if it was his—or hers.”
“And there’s not much room in our rooms either, Arden.”
??
?What about the kitchen?”
“On top of the stove?”
“Mmmm.” Heads were busy. No solutions.
“Couldn’t he read while we watch TV? We’d keep it low.”
“It’s hard to concentrate. But you can ask him.”
“We only watch till nine. Then you could both read.”
“I’ll ask him,” I smiled.
The outcome, of course, was that the kids got exactly what they wanted. We all watched television until nine, then they went to bed and we read for a couple of hours. We did this every night. We were a family.
It wasn’t until spring that Brad found out. In the middle of March, I was sent to Algeria, where the OAS—the secret revolutionary organization of the Algerian army—had declared open war against the French. Terrorism and bombings had mounted, and the French were arguing among themselves about what to do. During a lull in the action (some sporadic guerrilla action was still going on), World sent me over to get some pictures against the future—for they expected either a full-blown war or the granting of independence soon. It was a dismal assignment, it turned out. As a woman I was denied entry to the male councils of the OAS, and I ended photographing mainly French buildings that had been or might be destroyed by the rebels, the souks, and the wonderful dark cobblestoned alleys of the Algerian quarter. But I did make some important Algerian contacts.
I was gone for two weeks during which Arden agreed, for once, to have dinner with her father—maybe because she missed me, but probably because he offered to take them to a restaurant, just the three of them, instead of having them to dinner at his house with Fern and Fern’s daughter and the baby. Normally, when I was at home, Brad rang the doorbell and waited on the front porch for the kids to come down. He didn’t like to encounter me. He had a grudge against me. You might even say he hated me.
Before she got sick, Pani usually opened the door to Brad, and he would stand chatting with her in the doorway. Since her illness, Billy ran downstairs to answer the door, ready to go, calling up to Arden that Daddy was there and to hurry up. But this time, Billy wasn’t ready; he answered the door in socks, and without his coat. And Brad, knowing I wasn’t there, followed him upstairs. And he found Toni ensconced in an armchair in the middle of a chess game with Billy, looking completely at home with his shoes off.
Brad darted him one look of hatred, then stood silent, stiff, angry-looking, until the kids got themselves ready. I know all this because Toni told me: and it puzzled me. Because Billy was always nervous when his father was coming for them; he began to wash and dress far ahead of time, nagging Arden to get started, and usually, building into a frustrated rage at her.
I arrived home late Thursday night, and Toni came up and insisted on heating some pasta for me—I was tired and would have been happy to eat it cold—and made a fresh salad with one hand, his other around my waist, crowing—oh, only the young can be so happy—delighted to have me back. I glowed, happy to see him, to be near him again, to be home, warmed by his happiness, as if already my heart had started to cool, harden, petrify, whatever it’s done, and needed warmth from the outside to get it pumping.
He was standing at the stove, turning the pasta with a wooden spoon, and he grinned at me, “I met your ex the other night.”
My heart may have trouble pumping, but it has no trouble whatever in stopping dead. I moved away from him and let myself down into a kitchen chair.
“You did?” Even the expression on my face did not faze him. He told me what had happened.
“Oh, god.” The voice was much deeper than mine, I didn’t even recognize it as my own.
Toni put the plate of linguine in front of me and sat down across the table. “Mangia, baby.”
But I couldn’t—I fussed with it, moved it around, put a few forkfuls in my mouth, but couldn’t swallow.
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“I’m going to hear about this. I just know it.” My body was seized with dread, the kind of fear that debilitates because it prevents you from thinking clearly. I felt as if my blood had stopped moving through my body, had clotted, clogged, and lodged in my brain. Toni laughed at me: I was a puritan after all, a good girl despite what I’d said about my college days, and once a wife always a wife, I was overcome with guilt, while Brad ran around even before we were divorced and remarried and had a new child and paid little attention to his other children and thought nothing of that.
It didn’t matter what he said. I knew Brad, I said, ominously.
But several weeks passed and nothing happened. Toni had the grace not to bring it up to mock me. I walked around holding myself tensely, expecting a disastrous phone call. Brad did call one evening to arrange a shopping trip with Billy—he was going to buy him a new spring jacket—but I didn’t talk to him. The Saturday afternoon of the shopping trip, Billy came in looking very disturbed. He was short with me, and spent the rest of the evening in his room. When I went to try to talk to him, he was withdrawn and sullen, reading, he said. He didn’t even come out to watch television that night, and my dread grew again, like a tumor that has started to shrink, but suddenly expands hugely.
Brad called Monday morning around ten. I knew he didn’t need to be at his office that early, but I also knew that is where he was—with the door shut no doubt against the possible arrival of a secretary.
“You bitch! You slut! You whore!” were his opening words.
My dread eased as adrenaline pumped in: the worst had arrived, there was no further need for fear. What I had to do now was act angry, outraged.
“This is an obscene phone call, and I am hanging up now to call the police.”
He ignored that. He poured it out. My filth, my whoredom, having a young lover in the house with my children. He spent several minutes lovingly mouthing the language all men know and secrete away in a back pocket, waiting for a chance to use it: the extensive vocabulary indicting the vileness of women. There was no time for me to say anything, but it humiliated me to stand there holding the phone listening to it, implicitly granting his right to use it, so I hung up. He rang back immediately. I didn’t answer the phone. It rang on and off for the next half hour, then stopped. But my dread now had returned. What next?
Next was a ring at the doorbell a few hours later. Why hadn’t I gone out? He was standing there white-faced, his features standing sharply on his face like a line drawing. I was amazed at how lined he was—he was only a year older than I, but he looked forty. He charged in when I opened the door, ran up the stairs, and went through the rooms searching, throwing open doors and slamming them shut. He even checked all the closets. Then he went into the kitchen and counted the dinner plates in the dish drain. There were four.
I followed him screaming. “How dare you! What the hell do you think you’re doing! I’m calling the police!” I went for the phone, but he leaped at me and grabbed my hand. Hard.
“You can’t call the police. I’m paying for this place, remember,” he gritted out between clenched teeth.
“You pay child support, not alimony! I support myself and I pay the rent here. This is my house!”
“The hell it is! Any judge in the country would grant my right to be here! And any judge in the country would grant me custody of the children after what you’ve done. And I’m just telling you, bitch, that I’m taking the kids away from you. You’re an unfit mother, whore!”
“Hah! You’ll take the kids and make Fern take care of them? She’ll like that, won’t she, oh righteous one! Who’s the adulterer around here, I want to know. If you’re going to invoke conventional morality, Brad, at least get your story straight.”
“I never brought her home. I was married to her before the kids ever saw her,” he hissed. “You bring a young boy into the house, it’s obscene! Are you reduced to robbing cradles? Or is it that you’ve finally found someone your own age!”
I had all along been a little uneasy about Toni’s age, but now I felt outraged. He was, after all, only eight years younger than I. Ho
w many men get involved with women half their age, or girls young enough to be their granddaughters? Hot running blood rushed to my head—a bad thing for me, because I lose the ability to think and fall back on mindless language.
“You fuck! You stupid asshole! Get out of my house! Get out now!” I reached for the phone again, and when his hand darted out to stop me, I thrust it off, hard, I pushed him as hard as I could. He was caught by surprise and rocked a little on his heels, and I shoved him toward the door. He caught his balance and began to move back toward me, but I gave him a huge shove—my arms are strong from holding and carrying heavy equipment—and he fell back against the front door and slipped down a step. It frightened him, although he caught himself, and he glowered and spoke like a movie villain, in a low threatening voice.
“Just you wait, bitch. I’m going to take your kids away. Any judge in the country would judge you an unfit mother. WHORE!” He turned and stamped down the stairs. He slammed the front door so hard the glass cracked. When I heard it, I ran down after him and threw the door open. He was about to get into his car.
“I’m sending you a bill for destruction of property! You broke Pani’s front door glass!”
He laughed. “Go ahead! Send all the bills you want! You won’t see another penny from me!”
I stood there, tears welling in my throat, and watched him drive away. I felt utterly defeated. I knew he was right—the cops wouldn’t have helped me if I’d called them, they’d defer to him without even checking when he said he paid the bills; and probably a judge would take my children away from me. And even if the whole thing was a ploy to enable him to stop paying child support—because that must be what he was up to, I couldn’t believe he really wanted the kids, or that Fern would agree to take care of them—even then, he wins. Because what could I do about it? Who would help me?
I ran upstairs and put in a call to Steven Sindona, who had handled my end of the divorce. He was out. I called Edna Lench, who lived down the block, whose husband was a lawyer. When I told her what happened, her voice froze. She said she’d ask her husband, but she sounded as if next time I met her on the street, she might very well cut me. I cursed myself, because her daughter Joyce was one of Arden’s best friends: would Edna stop Joyce from seeing Arden?