Modern American Memoirs (12 page)

 

As for me as a child, I was no braver than I was beautiful, nor, up to the age of ten, did I have anything out of the ordinary to be brave about. But at the same time, for a child—especially a bookish, rain-loving, inward-looking child—even the ordinary can at times require bravery enough. The hearth broom with the face of a malevolent dwarf. The servant's child, floating face down in the canal in front of the shingled house one morning—fished out and resuscitated, but appalling, shameful somehow, as it lay there puddling the weathered planks of the dock with the water that ran from its nose and mouth as the breath came rattling back. The circus horse, white as milk and brilliantly bridled, balking outside the great tent with a man beating it about the face and eyes with a stick. The green frog that some cousins and I tossed back and forth by one of its legs like a green toy until at last it broke like a toy and the slippery life came spilling out. The unexplored rooms on the third floor, and the new nurse who did not understand her instructions and thus did not know that it was all right for my brother and me to stay up an hour or so later to dye Easter eggs, but packed us off to bed at the usual time where we lay in the dark aghast at the sudden knowledge that much of the time we lived at the sufferance of strangers.

But if strangers and strange sights can shake the world of children, it takes the people they know and love best to pull it out from under them like a chair. Into the same Georgetown garden where Mrs. Taylor showed me the tough, white gristle of a soul, my other grandmother came one day. Naya was the name I had given her for reasons long since lost to history. She was as different from Grandma Buechner as a lamp to read by is different from the twilight of the gods. She was a superb solver of crossword puzzles
and a reader of French novels. She smoked cigarettes in white paper holders and watched the world go by. She played wistful tunes with one finger on a Steinway grand. She held me enraptured by tales of the past, evoking in dazzlingly spoken paragraphs a whole world of Dickensian freaks, relations and friends, like adopted cousin Nelly Dunbar, with her oiled ringlets and Armenian blood, who would filch pink soap from the family linen closet and peddle it on street corners; and Tante Elise Golay, who carried a watered silk reticule to restaurants so she would have something to empty the sugar bowl into when the meal was through; and Naya's step-grandfather, Amasa Barret, who was blind as a bat and told her—when as a child she asked him what the name
Amasa
meant—that what it meant was “a burden,” and she could have bitten out her tongue. If Grandma Buechner was a rock with the rough seas of her life all but inundating her at times and yet immovable, impermeable, intractable to the end, then Naya was the old gray gull who rode it all out on the skin of the storm. The waves might rise like Everest above her or sink like the Valley of the Shadow beneath, but with her back to the wind and her wings tucked tight, Naya rarely ruffled so much as a feather. I see her knitting a scarf in a wicker peacock chair with the Blue Ridge mountains blue behind her, or under a beach umbrella in pleated white linen with her brave old Indian eyes on the far horizon, or, when she was well into her nineties, writing, after we had taken our first child to see her for the first time, “It was a noble deed to make the long journey down here, and the joy of seeing you two and your bewitching little fairy daughter more than compensates me for the ignominy of substituting an old crone in a dark little room for the Naya of legend.”

In any case, of all the giants who held up my world, Naya was perhaps chief, and when I knew she was coming to Georgetown for a visit that day, I wanted to greet her properly. So what I did at the age of six was prepare her a feast. All I could find in the icebox that seemed suitable were some cold string beans that had seen better days with the butter on them long since gone to wax, and they were what I brought out to her in that fateful garden. I do not remember what she said then exactly, but it was an aside spoken to my parents or whatever grown-ups happened to be around to the effect that she
did not usually eat much at three o'clock in the afternoon or whatever it was, let alone the cold string beans of another age, but that she would see what she could do for propriety's sake. Whatever it was, she said it drily, wittily, the way she said everything, never dreaming for a moment that I would either hear or understand, but I did hear, and what I came to understand for the first time in my life, I suspect—why else should I remember it?—was that the people you love have two sides to them. One is the side they love you back with, and the other is the side that, even when they do not mean to, they can sting you with like a wasp. It was the first ominous scratching in the walls, the first telltale crack in the foundation of the one home which perhaps any child has when you come right down to it, and that is the people he loves.

There were other cracks, of course. My brother and I had misbehaved at lunch for days, and at last, for the sake of having a peaceful meal by herself for once, my mother dressed up in a coat of my father's and one of his hats and had word sent up to us that a little old man had come to eat that day. So we stayed upstairs, needless to say, too timid to think of lunching with a stranger, and I remember looking down through the bannister and seeing at the dining room table somebody who was both a little old man yet somehow also my mother; and again what had always seemed solid as a rock showed signs of cracking in two. Or the time my father was sick in bed for a day or two. That was all it took: my father sick, on whose health the foundations of the world were based; my father in bed when I knew that unless he stayed on his feet, the winds would die and the crops fail. Or, later on, my father coming in to say good-night and standing there at the foot of our beds with his hands on his hips and his face clammy and gray as he threw back his head and laughed in a way that made me know as surely as I knew anything that something had gone terribly wrong with his laughter. Something had gotten broken in it. Something in it was in danger of breaking him, breaking all of us. And the time he wanted the keys to the car, and my mother gave them to me and told me that he had had too much to drink and not to let him know where they were, no matter what, so that I lay in my bed with my pillow over my head and made no reply to his endless pleading because I could think of no reply that I could possibly make.

I no longer know what my father looked like, it has been so long since I saw him last, and have only photographs to remember his face by—a young man in a sailor's uniform, or sitting behind a desk in his first office, or lying in the sand in his swimming trunks and striped jersey top. But from somewhere deeper within myself than memory, and from what I have been able to find out over the years from people who knew him much longer and better than I, I can still summon up something of the feel of who he was. He was a gentle man, as my grandmother said, handsome and conscientious and kind. He was a strong swimmer who played water polo at college, and a good dancer, and could go nowhere, the family joke was, without running into at least six friends. He knew Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald from his Princeton days and knew waiters and barbers by their first names. People I doubt he would have remembered remember him still. As the oldest of four children, he was the one who shepherded the others through Central Park to school and from the start seems to have been given responsibilities beyond his years. Even in pictures of him as a small boy, he looks harried, seldom if ever smiling, as though he knew that as soon as the shutter snapped, it would all begin again—my grandmother saddling him with more, I suspect, than a small boy's share of her own dark burdens, his younger brothers and sister looking to him for some kind of strength, some kind of stability, which he must have had to dig deep into himself to find, having barely enough at that age, I can only imagine, to get by on himself. And then when he got married, and his two sons were born, and the crash of '29 came, there was a whole new set of things to be harried by as he moved from job to job and place to place, always bent on doing better by us, establishing us on some surer, more becoming ground.

He worked long hours and he worked hard at whatever minor executive job he happened to have at the time, but on weekends at least he found time to be a father. In an inlet full of jellyfish that stung, he taught me how to swim. He taught me how to ride a bike by running alongside with his hand on the handlebars till I started to get the hang of it, then taking his hand away and letting me roll along on my own till I wobbled finally into a hedge but knew how to do it from that day on. When at the age of nine or so I asked a pretty girl named Virginia with shampoo-smelling hair to go to the
movies with me (it was Eddie Cantor in
Roman Scandals
), he drove me to pick her up and explained on the way that she would probably keep us waiting a little because that was what pretty girls did, and he was right. When he came to say good-night, he would give my brother Jamie and me what he called a “hard kiss,” which was all sandpapery whiskers and snorts and struggle. I remember sitting in the back seat of a car, with him and my mother up front, singing songs like “Me and My Shadow” and “That's My Weakness Now,” remember eating dark Swiss chocolate and salty French bread with him on the long drives he took us on sometimes, remember one winter drive back over the Allegheny mountains from Pittsburgh when it was so cold that he gave the only blanket there was to us in the back seat and had to stuff newspaper under his coat to keep warm himself. I remember seeing the movie of
Green Pastures
with him—the great fish-fry in Heaven with De Lawd and his black angels—and driving down to the Quogue beach afterwards to see the moon rise like an angel over the incoming tide.

These were the bright times, the happy once-below-a-time times, but for a child even the bright times have, like the moon, their dark side too; and even below the time when time starts, the time to come can still cast a shadow. Any house where my father and mother were was home to me, but for that very reason, whenever they left—even for a day, even for an evening—it was home no longer but a house with walls as frail as paper and a roof as fragile as glass. My fear was that they would never come back.

I knew nothing more of death then than what I had learned of it from the slippery green frog, and nothing more of darkness than the night. I had never lost anything that I was not sure would be replaced if I really needed it by the people I loved, and I had never been hurt beyond the power of a word of comfort to heal. But whenever my father and mother left, taking home with them, I knew that hurt, loss, darkness, death could flatten that house in seconds. And to a degree that I had no way of knowing, and in ways that I could not possibly foresee, I was right.

Vivian Gornick, born in New York City, attended City College, and took her M.A. at New York University. For nine years she was a staff writer for the
Village Voice.

She wrote
In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt
(1973)
, The Romance of American Communism
(1977)
, Essays in Feminism
(1979), and
Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition
(1990)
.

Her striking memoir,
Fierce Attachments
(1987), describes her ongoing vexed and deep relationship with her mother, and recalls her childhood in the Bronx in the 1940s. In this section, Nettie, a Ukrainian gentile, is her family's neighbor
.

 

from F
IERCE
A
TTACHMENTS

A
year after my mother told Mrs. Drucker she was a whore the Druckers moved out of the building and Nettie Levine moved into their vacated apartment. I have no memory of the Druckers moving out or of Nettie moving in, no truck or moving van coming to take away or deposit the furniture, dishes, or clothes of the one or of the other. People and all their belongings seemed to evaporate out of an apartment, and others simply took their place. How early I absorbed the circumstantial nature of most attachments. After all, what difference did it really make if we called the next-door neighbor Roseman or Drucker or Zimmerman? It mattered only that there was a next-door neighbor. Nettie, however, would make a difference.

I was running down the stairs after school, rushing to get out on the street, when we collided in the darkened hallway. The brown paper bags in her arms went flying in all directions. We each said “Oh!” and stepped back, I against the staircase railing, she against the paint-blistered wall. I bent, blushing, to help her retrieve the bags scattered across the landing and saw that she had bright red
hair piled high on her head in a pompadour and streaming down her back and over her shoulders. Her features were narrow and pointed (the eyes almond-shaped, the mouth and nose thin and sharp), and her shoulders were wide but she was slim. She reminded me of the pictures of Greta Garbo. My heart began to pound. I had never before seen a beautiful woman.

“Don't worry about the packages,” she said to me. “Go out and play. The sun is shining. You mustn't waste it here in the dark. Go, go.” Her English was accented, like the English of the other women in the building, but her voice was soft, almost musical, and her words took me by surprise. My mother had never urged me not to lose pleasure, even if it was only the pleasure of the sunny street. I ran down the staircase, excited. I knew she was the new neighbor. (“A
Ukrainishe
redhead married to a Jew,” my mother had remarked dryly only two or three days before.)

Two evenings later, as we were finishing supper, the doorbell rang and I answered it. There she stood. “I…I…” She laughed, a broken, embarrassed laugh. “Your mother invited me.” She looked different standing in the doorway, coarse and awkward, a peasant with a pretty face, not at all the gorgeous creature of the hallway. Immediately, I felt poised and generous. “Come in.” I stepped courteously aside in the tiny foyer to let her pass into the kitchen.

“Sit down, sit down,” my mother said in her rough-friendly voice, as distinguished from her rough I-really-mean-this voice. “Have a cup of coffee, a piece of pie.” She pushed my brother. “Move over. Let Mrs. Levine sit down on the bench.” A high-backed wooden bench ran the length of one side of the table; my brother and I each claimed a sprawling place on the bench as fast as we could.

“Perhaps you'd like a glass of schnapps?” My handsome, gentle father smiled, proud that his wife was being so civil to a Gentile.

“Oh no,” demurred Nettie, “it would make me dizzy. And please”—she turned ardently toward my mother—“call me Nettie, not Mrs. Levine.”

My mother flushed, pleased and confused. As always, when uncertain she beat a quick retreat into insinuation. “I haven't seen Mr. Levine, have I,” she said. In her own ears this was a neutral question, in anyone else's it was a flat statement bordering on accusation.

“No, you haven't.” Nettie smiled. “He isn't here. Right now he's somewhere on the Pacific Ocean.”

“
Oy vay
, he's in the army,” my mother announced, the color beginning to leave her cheeks. It was the middle of the war. My brother was sixteen, my father in his late forties. My mother had been left in peace. Her guilt was extravagant.

“No,” said Nettie, looking confused herself. “He's in the Merchant Marine.” I don't think she fully understood the distinction. Certainly my mother didn't. She turned an inquiring face toward my father. He shrugged and looked blank.

“That's a seaman, Ma,” my brother said quickly. “He works as a sailor, but he's not in the navy. He works on ships for private companies.”

“But I thought Mr. Levine was Jewish,” my mother protested innocently.

My brother's face brightened nearly to purple, but Nettie only smiled proudly. “He is,” she said.

My mother dared not say what she wanted to say: Impossible! What Jew would work voluntarily on a ship?

Everything about Nettie proved to be impossible. She was a Gentile married to a Jew like no Jew we had ever known. Alone most of the time and apparently free to live wherever she chose, she had chosen to live among working-class Jews who offered her neither goods nor charity. A woman whose sexy good looks brought her darting glances of envy and curiosity, she seemed to value inordinately the life of every respectable dowd. She praised my mother lavishly for her housewifely skills—her ability to make small wages go far, always have the house smelling nice and the children content to be at home—as though these skills were a treasure, some precious dowry that had been denied her, and symbolized a life from which she had been shut out. My mother—secretly as amazed as everyone else by Nettie's allure—would look thoughtfully at her when she tried (often vaguely, incoherently) to speak of the differences between them, and would say to her, “But you're a wife now. You'll learn these things. It's nothing. There's nothing to learn.” Nettie's face would then flush painfully, and she'd shake her head. My mother didn't understand, and she couldn't explain.

Rick Levine returned to New York two months after Nettie had moved into the building. She was wildly proud of her tall, dark, bearded seaman—showing him off in the street to the teenagers she had made friends with, dragging him in to meet us, making him go to the grocery store with her—and she became visibly transformed. A kind of illumination settled on her skin. Her green almond eyes were speckled with light. A new grace touched her movements: the way she walked, moved her hands, smoothed back her hair. There was suddenly about her an aristocracy of physical being. Her beauty deepened. She was untouchable.

I saw the change in her, and was magnetized. I would wake up in the morning and wonder if I was going to run into her in the hall that day. If I didn't, I'd find an excuse to ring her bell. It wasn't that I wanted to see her with Rick: his was a sullen beauty, glum and lumpish, and there was nothing happening between them that interested me. It was
her
I wanted to see, only her. And I wanted to touch her. My hand was always threatening to shoot away from my body out toward her face, her arm, her side. I yearned toward her. She radiated a kind of promise I couldn't stay away from, I wanted…I wanted…I didn't know
what
I wanted.

But the elation was short-lived: hers and mine. One morning, a week after Rick's return, my mother ran into Nettie as they were both leaving the house. Nettie turned away from her.

“What's wrong?” my mother demanded. “Turn around. Let me see your face.” Nettie turned toward her slowly. A tremendous blue-black splotch surrounded her half-closed right eye.

“Oh my God,” my mother breathed reverently.

“He didn't mean it,” Nettie pleaded. “It was a mistake. He wanted to go down to the bar to see his friends. I wouldn't let him go. It took a long time before he hit me.”

After that she looked again as she had before he came home. Two weeks later Rick Levine was gone again, this time on a four-month cruise. He swore to his clinging wife that this would be his last trip. When he came home in April, he said, he would find a good job in the city and they would at long last settle down. She believed that he meant it this time, and finally she let him pull her arms from around his neck. Six weeks after he had sailed she discovered she was pregnant. Late in the third month of his absence she
received a telegram informing her that Rick had been shot to death during a quarrel in a bar in port somewhere on the Baltic Sea. His body was being shipped back to New York, and the insurance was in question.

 

Nettie became intertwined in the dailiness of our life so quickly it was hard later for me to remember what our days had been like before she lived next door. She'd slip in for coffee late in the morning, then again in the afternoon, and seemed to have supper with us three nights a week. Soon I felt free to walk into her house at any hour, and my brother was being consulted daily about the puzzling matter of Rick's insurance.

“It's a pity on her,” my mother kept saying. “A widow. Pregnant, poor, abandoned.”

Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie's beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama's respectability without being humbled. The compact was made without a word between them. We got beautiful Nettie in the kitchen every day, and Nettie got my mother's protection in the building. When Mrs. Zimmerman rang our bell to inquire snidely after the
shiksa
my mother cut her off sharply, telling her she was busy and had no time to talk nonsense. After that no one in the building gossiped about Nettie in front of any of us.

My mother's loyalty once engaged was unswerving. Loyalty, however, did not prevent her from judging Nettie; it only made her voice her reservations in a manner rather more indirect than the one to which she was accustomed. She would sit in the kitchen with her sister, my aunt Sarah, who lived four blocks away, discussing the men who had begun to appear, one after another, at Nettie's door in the weeks following Rick's death. These men were his shipmates, particularly the ones who had been on board with him on this last voyage, coming to offer condolences to the widow
of one of their own, and to talk over with her the matter of the seaman's life insurance, which evidently was being withheld from Nettie because of the way in which Rick had died. There was, my mother said archly, something
strange
about the way these men visited. Oh? My aunt raised an interested eyebrow. What exactly was strange? Well, my mother offered, some of them came only once, which was normal, but some of them came twice, three times, one day after another, and those who came two, three times had a look about them, she must surely be wrong about this, but they looked almost as though they thought they were getting away with something. And Nettie herself acted strangely with these men. Perhaps that was what was most troubling: the odd mannerisms Nettie seemed to adopt in the presence of the men. My mother and my aunt exchanged “glances.”

“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 rained earlier in the day and now, at one in the afternoon, for a minute and a half, New York is washed clean. The streets glitter in the pale spring sunlight. Cars radiate dust-free happiness. Storefront windows sparkle mindlessly. Even people look made anew.

We're walking down Eighth Avenue into the Village. At the corner of Eighth and Greenwich is a White Tower hamburger joint, where a group of derelicts in permanent residence entertain visiting out-of-towners from Fourteenth Street, Chelsea, even the Bowery. This afternoon the party on the corner, often raucous, is definitely on the gloomy side, untouched by weather renewal. As we pass the restaurant doors, however, one gentleman detaches from the group, takes two or three uncertain steps, and bars our way. He stands, swaying, before us. He is black, somewhere between twenty-five and sixty. His face is cut and swollen, the eyelids three-quarters shut. His hair is a hundred filthy matted little pigtails, his pants are held up by a piece of rope, his shoes are two sizes too large, the feet inside them bare. So is his chest, visible beneath a grimy tweed coat that swings open whenever he moves. This creature confronts us, puts out his hand palm up, and speaks.