Saturday's Child (3 page)

I now realize that Sally suspected I only pretended to love her, while most of the time I detested her. She was the hands-on operator of my childhood career as first a model and then an actor, so she functioned in my mind as the blameworthy stage mother. I've often suspected that the idea of putting the baby me to work as a professional model in the first place originated with Sally's seeing in my infant prettiness and toddler precocity her own second chance, albeit vicarious, at a stage career. To make matters worse, she'd adopted her mother's dictatorial style. My mother, on the other hand, had a wider repertoire, choosing confrontation only when manipulation failed (except in certain circumstances against which you could never prepare yourself for the shock of her full frontal attack). Poor Sally. In style and substance, she came to represent in my mind everything crude.

When I think of her, what comes to mind are the cast-and-crew jokes about her thick body's profile blocking everyone's view of the set monitor, and her sycophantic apologies before sidling up to it again. In one of those so unfairly preserved moments of perfect recollection, etched deep by the acid of embarrassment, I will never forget one particular Saturday. We were at home, in the little third-floor walk-up apartment she, Mommie, and I shared, when my teacher dropped in unexpectedly. Mommie was out, but Aunt Sally didn't tell me to entertain Miss Wetter while she made herself presentable. No, whether in a state of innocence, indifference, or
defiance, she received the visitor just as she was, without flinching. Her hair stood in peaks stiff with peroxide bleach foam, reeking of ammonia that dripped onto the frayed towel around her shoulders. She sat large-bodied at the kitchen table in brazen undress: the heavily boned bra, pendant from the weight of her large breasts, hung from soiled straps that cut dark pink grooves deep into her shoulders; the batwing flesh rippled and hung from her bare arms; the huge underpants showed their outline under her faded pink half-slip. And all the while, she continued busily squashing the bright orange “Flavor Dot” into a brick of white oleomargarine—oleo for short—and kneading it with her bare hands through the oily blob until the whole pound marbled into one pale yellow. Miss Wetter managed to carry the moment off, but soon recalled another appointment and rushed away. I wanted to die. I swore silently with the intensity of a nine-year-old to
will
myself into forgetting the moment ever happened—which is doubtless why it remains so crystalline almost half a century later. Time may have lent me some insight into my childish snobbery and some understanding of the class context in this moment, but neither time nor understanding has quite erased the mortification.

As a child, I had a lively imagination, but like most children's it was centered on myself and the worlds I created in my mind; an imagination singularly lacking in the generosity that might extend it toward other people in real life—especially those who had power over me. So I couldn't imagine Sally young, slender, or talented; couldn't visualize her, face contorted with grief, bending over the empty crib that might have cradled her lost twins, or slowly folding her dead husband's shirts one last time before giving them away. I thought her grotesque. I loathed her coarse features, her facial moles that sprouted tiny hairs, her jowls, her neck wattle, her guttural Yiddish, her peasant ways. I blamed her for everything I could, and she obligingly fed me a glut of behavioral details to fatten my dislike. No matter how I struggled against it, she would spit on a hankie or tissue to clean my face—and the memory of her sharp spit smell can even now raise my gorge to nausea. I knew she was engaged in a guerrilla war with my mother for possession of me, and I reveled in the knowledge that my genteel, perfumed, delicately featured, porcelain-skinned mother would, if pressed, turn tigress to wrest control of her daughter's life from this
interloper. (She would do the same to wrest control of it from her daughter, too—an insight I was mercifully spared at the time.)

The worst memory I have of Sally is of the one real beating, a spanking, I ever received. I was seven years old. It was a test of wills about a particular cotton dress I hated, which Aunt Sally insisted I wear two days running. With the powerless fury of a child, I screamed at her that I would never
never
forgive her for hitting me when my mother had forbidden it, that I hated her with all my heart, that I hoped she would die. Later that night, and nights after for weeks, instead of secretly reading by flashlight under the bedcovers as usual, I prayed for her death or disappearance with an intensity I recognize today on the faces of anti-choice picketers outside abortion clinics: that fanaticism able to bridge devout hatred with devout faith in a god merciful enough to answer one's prayer to destroy others.

My one tender memory of Sally goes back to my being four years old. We had been out getting groceries while Mommie was at work clerking lingerie in the Lerner store, and in one of the shops a radio bulletin had announced the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The grown-ups were all shocked and saddened, but I was indifferent until we got outside and Aunt Sally did something I'd never seen her—or anyone else—do. She took a few steps, stopped still in the middle of the street, and burst into tears. Mumbling about how “he cared, that man cared about little people,” she dropped her shopping bags and sank to her knees on the sidewalk, hunched over with weeping. I stood watching her, awed. She was unrecognizable. I actually felt sorry for her, so I knew something major had happened.

When I turned eleven, the power struggle between Faith and Sally broke into the open. Sally lost. She was exiled to Florida, to a bungalow that, Faith announced between clenched teeth, “We bought for her, to set her up like an empress.” Sally went bitterly, my mother quit her job to work full-time on my career, and she and I moved into Manhattan, just the two of us. Sally and Faith barely spoke for a while and never reconciled fully, not even when Sally lay dying of a cancer that, left ignored as a breast lump, colonized her spine. By then, she was deep into Christian Science, but her attempt to “pray away” the cancer was notably unsuccessful. In retrospect, though, that may not have been its real purpose: one final self-punishing
gesture of revenge, instead, aimed at her mother's conservative Judaism.

Sally's guilt trip of choice was a refrain borrowed from her idol Sophie Tucker: “You'll be sorry when I'm gone; you're gonna' miss me then.” She repeated this frequently, in her own variation of Tucker's delivery. Unfortunately for her, it was not a self-fulfilling prophecy. When she was dying years later, I went—a grown, married woman—to Florida to visit her. She was being tended by loyal Sophie, by then widowed and relocated there as well. It was a hideous week, one of those entries into virtual childhood when the adult personality finds itself astonishingly shrunk, rendered powerless by old patterns, choked, cramped, and wild with frustration. But although I can now grieve for the emptiness of Sally's life and try to remember her as a woman who mourned the New Deal, the truth is that I was not sorry when she was gone, and I haven't missed her since. (Admitting this was a lesson in how self-deluded predictions that “history will absolve me” can be.)

I forgot Sally most of the time, but I never forgave her, even when my mother took over the stage-mothering, thus overturning my assumption that everything would change for the better if
only
Aunt Sally could be got out of the picture and if
only
Mommie took charge. Possibly the dirty little secret is that I never forgave Sally for removing, however reluctantly, her convenient, scapegoat self—because after her departure I soon was forced to see Mommie plain, the Infanta without the court dwarf to make her appear fairer by contrast.

Mommie. Traces of her influence run like dark threads through even the brightest patches of my life; sometimes I think her influence is the fabric, and only the cut is of my devising; sometimes I feel I'm the material, but she's the cutter and the pattern is of her devising. Her effect remains stronger than I can always notice or acknowledge. And when I was a child, her power over my life was as unquestionable as my centrality was to hers.

Unlike Sally's stage yearnings, Faith's sole lifelong desire, she claimed, was to have a daughter just like me. (No pressure
there
.) It wasn't until I was an adult, going through chaotic shoebox “files” of hers after final-stage Parkinson's disease confined her to a hospital, that I discovered the notebook. She'd kept it during her two semesters at college—before she'd
been hauled home to care for her mother after her father died, since the sisters were married at the time and the brothers were, well, brothers. The little notebook is touchingly filled with grammar basics and “tips for writers,” such as explaining what a cliché is and why it should be avoided. She'd wanted to
write
, I realized, and then I was distracted by hearing someone murmur “Oh god, oh god” over and over—until I recognized my own voice. I'd been so certain my love of writing not only was independent of her but was the route to liberation away from her. It
was
the latter—but independent of her it apparently was not.

Suddenly I remembered my favorite photograph of Faith, taken when she was seventeen, in Mexico City, during the one real vacation of her life. She is radiant in it. It was the sole free time she'd ever know, on a trip won as a student prize, when she could stand in front of the burnt-orange murals of Orozco, the Kahlo alizarin-splashed canvases, when she could break away from the Victorian shadows of the rabbinical home and pose in a bleach of lemon sunlight surrounded by trumpets of crimson hibiscus and toss back her hair and laugh into the warm breeze.

But in time I became the only one who remembered that long-dead seventeen-year-old, the sole repository of an existence she'd had to bury and forget, too busy becoming the living testament to her concocted image of me, the perfect child, smiling and curtseying. So we lived, each of us haunted by the girlhood of the other.

Faith had left college after that one euphoric year, forced to return home, seething to find herself again under her mother's constraints. Then Sally's triple tragedies hit, and, as a means to support herself in her childless widowhood, Sally opened a small corset and lingerie shop near Stuyvesant Town in New York City, where she and her husband had been living. A few years later, when my grandmother died, Faith moved north to New York, joining her sister to work at the shop and sharing Sally's apartment in Stuyvesant Town, one of the lower-middle-income “projects” in Manhattan.

By then it was 1940, and the war preoccupied everyone. Horror stories about the existence of concentration camps had begun to leak out to the world. Various American Jewish organizations set up programs under which Jewish refugees from Europe could emigrate to the United States, but each exile needed the sponsorship of a U.S. citizen. My mother, the
first “full real born-here American” in her family and newly a proud career girl in the big city, decided to sponsor a refugee.

When she mentioned my father, which she rarely did, Faith would talk about this period. How he had walked off the boat from Europe and she'd fallen for him on the spot, standing on the windy Manhattan pier, anxiously making small talk while his papers were being checked; how she'd stared at this tall, handsome Austrian Jew with wavy blond hair, hazel eyes “that penetrated your soul,” a wry smile, and “the devil's cleft in his chin.” He spoke excellent English—and French, and of course German. He was educated, sophisticated, European. And he was a
doctor
.

By the time he was temporarily ensconced on the rollout cot in Faith and Sally's living room, my mother was, as she later put it, “a goner.” Details of the paternal saga get vague at this point, but the overall plot goes like this:

Mates (Hebrew for Mattheus or Matthew) Morgan had been a young surgeon in Vienna when Austria welcomed the Nazis, and he had lost his entire family—my paternal grandparents, his siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins—to the camps. He himself had managed to escape from not just one but two concentration camps, relying on his wits to wend his way across Europe in an underground flight to survival, barely making it out of one country after another as they successively fell to Hitler's storm troopers. Although he'd already had a successful practice in Vienna, he still had to take his U.S. medical-board examinations in order to be certified here; this meant months of refresher study plus acquainting himself with U.S. medical procedures, which in turn meant he was unable to earn sufficient money to strike out on his own. So he stayed with Sally and Faith. My parents-to-be fell in love, had a whirlwind courtship, and got married. Somewhere in all this, Mates acquired U.S. citizenship, enlisted in the army, and was sent back overseas as a medical doctor with the rank of major. But it turned out my mother was pregnant, so she and Sally moved to Florida, to get away from the bombing target New York was feared to be. There, in the small town of Lake Worth, near West Palm Beach, on January 29, 1942, I was born. When I was less than two years old, my father was killed in action while giving medical aid to wounded soldiers at the front. I knew only his photograph.

Sally, experienced in the ways of widowhood, wrapped her life around
my mother and me like a mourning veil. The sisters closed ranks. To be in closer proximity with Sophie, Sally and Faith moved themselves and me back north to Mount Vernon, a lower-working-class suburb of Manhattan, where Aunt Sophie and her family lived. Today, Mount Vernon is almost exclusively a poor, African-American enclave. During the years we lived there—the heart of my childhood, from the time I was two or three until I turned twelve—it was racially mixed but always notches lower on the social scale than whiter working-class Yonkers or much whiter middle-class Bronxville, its neighbors. White Plains and Westchester were where the rich people lived (actually the upper middle class, but to us they seemed rich). The “millionaire types” lived farther away, in exotic places named Tarrytown, Scarsdale, or even Connecticut.