Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (49 page)

Sometimes, then, there is a room; and the room is a conglomerate of rooms I saw her in; memory fills it, but with stuff from different years, different eras, different times of day, so that the light is different where she stands from the light that surrounds me, the observer, the one who has returned to this room that never existed in this form, to this compendium of rooms. Sometimes one’s own inner voice speaks—I have an announcer who often speaks during my dreams, and who, when I am awake, makes various pronouncements from time to time:
Boy, are you worn out
—things like that. And he sometimes speaks for the gray-lit figure who is saying things inaudibly—he speaks for her as she once spoke for me when I was an infant; he will say something like
“One thing I’ll say for myself
—” which was one of her phrases at a certain stage in her life; and then maybe something like a flashbulb goes off, and all the grayness turns swiftly to color—maybe a little washed out by glare but close to actuality; and I may grasp, or almost grasp, the sound of my mother’s voice, its actual notes, and some single speech in her real tones rather than the usual laundry-hamper jumble of dozens of her speeches spoken over the years and mixed up together without the music and inflections they once had. Then if I work with this glimpse, if I go over and over that glimpse, I may find in my memory a chair she sat in when she had that voice and not a later one: then I seat her in it like a doll, and all at once I am very small and walking toward her: she is wearing a gray tweed skirt and a white blouse, maybe silk, maybe just shiny cotton, or a black dress with very large, modernist, smeared-yellow-and-green flowers on it; one hears something—not her voice but a weird mental echo, a recording, almost, of a younger woman’s voice, the words unclear but supplied, tentatively, contingently, by the announcer a moment later—by the announcer who is the master of ceremonies of my dreams, of the instruction one receives in dreams. Occasionally, the words are of this sort: she says, “Sometimes I like to lie.”

“They say
—” That’s a phrase she used very often:
“they,”
in
“they say,
” are the keepers of respectability; there were at least three different respectabilities she was interested in—that governed by certain Orthodox or nearly Orthodox old Jewish women, ancient aunts, or second cousins; that governed by our neighbors; and that governed by the two or three social levels of Jewish “society” she moved in in the nearby city when I was young and we lived in a small town not yet turned into a dormitory suburb, a small town maybe sixty miles away from The City.
“They say
a woman is who she marries: there’s something in that, but
I never went that far. But I will say it makes a difference who your husband is, and I wasn’t lucky in the one I picked.”

M
Y ORAL
history of her—
mine,
of
her
—will begin, then, with my father speaking: with frequent interruptions.

My father, S. L. Cohn—usually called S.L.: when people who spoke Yiddish wanted to make trouble they called him
Esel,
or donkey or ass—my father was in his thirties when I first met him. When I was adopted. I should say that when I write an “oral history of my mother” I mean an oral history of a time when Leah, or Leila, Cohn—she renamed herself—was my mother; and only part of that time, at that. Really, not the whole of her life except as it was implied—it was always implied that there was more than I knew or would come with my best efforts (which I might never make) to know.

I think my father was generally considered a splendid-looking man, largely apricot-colored—skin and hair—and with chestnut eyes. He was big, muscular—“a war hero,” Leila often pointed out.

Now, I want to use the voice of a woman, Leila, from a time a long ten years after the end of this story, when she existed only for a little while in an avatar or stage in a life cycle so brief, so well lit, that that stage—to switch meanings—seems to tilt, to explode with flames, to be illuminated by collapse. She spoke with melodrama—it was a matter of style, language, and conviction; she spoke like popular fiction when she told a story; she was not talented, or an innovator, verbally; so, in her account, lives are compressed, often for a reason having to do not with her vision of things so much as with her wish to be interesting or her fear that things might be actually what she melodramatically said they were. Faces, houses disappear: a pear tree in flower is never mentioned; rages, ground traversed, thoughts while lying in bed become synopsized in an intake of breath and a cliché—“S.L. wanted a son.” If I wanted, I could dilute the melodrama, push toward what I consider verisimilitude, but I want not to do that for a moment; I will try to do that in a little while.

She is speaking—in a chatty, sort of pushily intelligent voice: she is playacting intelligence. She is perhaps mimicking Tacitus without knowing it, or rather, at her social level, some local style of aristocratic concision as she understands it, and combining that mimicry with what she knows of soap opera and movie plots: “We took you in when you
was about a year and a half.” She often said “you was.” “You were in terrible shape. Your mother was dying in the Jewish hospital, in Xton”—the nearby city. “S.L. had left me. I don’t blame him; I wasn’t easy to get along with; I hadn’t married him for love—the man I loved was no good, selfish, but I always liked that type. I never was religious, but I didn’t believe in divorce. Are you old enough for me to tell you why S.L. left me? Well, partly the bloom was off the rose, but I’d had two sons who died—in infancy. I wasn’t home either time; I always had a life of my own. One time, maybe the infant was neglected. And your sister [her real daughter, Nonie]—she was too young; it was all my fault, to leave her in charge: but that was once. The truth is, the deaths were unexplained: they hurt me. But S.L. didn’t pity me, he blamed me. One death, you see, was bad, but two—my God. I said then it was just dumb luck, but S.L. wouldn’t believe me. S.L. didn’t like Nonie, either. He left us both; he went to live with a trashy woman. To tell you the truth, I’d had my eye on you for a long time; I offered your mother money for you; I thought she’d do anything for money—she was crazy about money. She was a good mother to
you
: she liked you; she loved you; but she was terrible to your brother; she didn’t like him. You see, no adoption agency would put me and S.L. on the list except at the bottom, because we weren’t a religious household and those adoption people are all religious. Well, to tell you the truth, that’s partly a lie—that’s what I always said to people—but, of course, what it was, they interviewed me and S.L. and they took a look at Nonie, and they didn’t like us: we were having too good a time: those people were jealous: I was too pretty; S.L. was too selfish. And Nonie was like S.L.’s family, not smart: she was a year behind in school, and she had a bad temper. To tell you the truth, she was like S.L.’s mother: S.L. used to say that between the war and his mother it had done him in; all he wanted was a little peace. One thing I’ll say for myself, I’ll speak out, I’ll tell the truth: it hurt S.L. that people thought we were unfit to be parents—of course, he wouldn’t believe he was; he blamed it all on me; he always blamed me for everything: he was dependent on me. But I’ll tell you the truth—we
were
no good as parents, but he wanted to have children; and other people aren’t such hot parents, either. My father was O.K., but my mother was just what S.L. always called her—a pip. I never thought of myself as a mother, to be honest with you. But we had money then, and I knew which schools were good, and I knew a lot of nice people; I could hire a good maid—a kid wouldn’t have it so bad with us, and if he did—look,
your father was illiterate, he was a junkman, a brawler; in those days, he drank. He was no good—he was a gambler and a bully; he never even kept himself clean; he was crazy—you know, he had very nice brothers and sisters, clean, good people, and his father was a very strict whaddayoucallit, an impressive man—I didn’t like
him
—the father: if you ask me, he was cold and mean. And who was your mother? She was a nobody. I happened to like her; I thought she had a lot to her, a lot to offer, but she was an immigrant, she spoke with an accent, all she cared about was running that godforsaken junkyard in a little town and making money: she knew nothing, and maybe she would learn, but who could tell? I’m a real learner. She was from the old country—a tinhorn, a greenhorn. She was superstitious; her father was some kind of rabbi—a crazy kind, not the regular kind; he put a curse on her if she ever stopped being Orthodox, and she was scared of the curse. And what was she doing, a bright woman like her, marrying someone like your father anyway? People warned her; she wouldn’t listen. I liked her; I asked her; she said she wasn’t afraid of nothing. She was sure he would appreciate her; she didn’t want to marry a man who would be doing a greenhorn like her a favor—she wanted to do all the favors. She said she wanted a toehold—a business. So she married a crazy man. Why wouldn’t you be at least as well off with us as with people like that? I’ll tell you one thing: she was a genius as a businesswoman; my brother Henry said so, and the one thing Henry knew was business and money; she won everybody’s respect, and it wasn’t just because she was so tough; she didn’t care what people thought of her; she didn’t flirt; she cared about two things—you and money. But you were the reason. Well, she used to come to see me, and S.L. was crazy about you; you and your mother were so close, and you were beautiful—beautiful. S.L. always went by looks, always. So when she got sick—I’ll tell you the whole story. Your father couldn’t stand it; he was like a child, a mean child; everyone respected your mother; she hid money from him; so one night he beat her up and took her by force and when she found she was pregnant she said she’d get an abortion, God or no God; but she believed in that curse; and she got sick. Then she started asking people to take you in—she didn’t care what happened to the other boy: your mother wasn’t sentimental; she crossed him right off, but she worried about you; only nobody would take you. See, some people, her people, had been jealous of her because she’d made money—and maybe she hadn’t shared it with them. And maybe they were jealous because she’d loved you—you
never know how ugly people are going to be. But other people, nicer people, were scared of your father—he’d killed people—I forget who: some man, two men; it was self-defense, so he didn’t have to go to jail, but he was really violent—and they were scared of the blood you had in you; they were scared you were a jinx, and anyway everyone thought you would die anyway: you cried a lot when your mother disappeared and your father slapped you around; your nurse was drunk; you wouldn’t talk or walk anymore—you wouldn’t eat. Your mother didn’t want me to have you—she said I wasn’t serious—but what choice did she have? I went and got you anyway. My God, you were covered with sores, bruises—I threw up. I had my mother with me; she washed you; I couldn’t bear to touch you; the nurse was there, drunk, shouting, she tried to hit me—I outshouted her, I put the fear of the penitentiary into her for child murder: it was some scene, let me tell you; my heart was
pounding.
I knew if I took you in, if S.L. heard I had this sick child, he’d think I had a good heart, that he was wrong about me, and he’d want to help—he was very sentimental; he lived for sentiment, if you ask me. Well, he did come running. He came back to me. But everything misfires—there’s always a surprise. He came back to me, but he loved you. Oh, how he loved you.…”

F
ROM NOW ON
, I will run this history, this oral history; I will order it, arrange it.

A
T FIRST
, only my nurse, a woman they hired, an Alsatian Frenchwoman named Anne Marie, could get me to eat, could feed me without my being ill. Then Nonie could do it—she was small for her age and seemed like a child to me. Then S.L., and finally Leila. They had rented a larger house, too—quite a nice house—and everyone was nice to everyone else and kept the atmosphere pleasant as part of the attempt to nurse and restore the silent and stricken child.

They were very pleased when I first walked again, when I first tentatively smiled. I would say they experienced—oh, self-respect, and happiness.

There is little doubt that they saved my life.

In dreams, there is no loss without a happiness first.

N
ONIE BEGAN
to like me less when I grew stronger, and she and I became enemies, actually; and, either by accident or on purpose, or in some combination, when I was with her she managed to hurt me—physically, I mean. And I could endure the physical pain but not the pain in my mind that Nonie was such a person and that she was not struck dead. The physical wound on this one occasion was such that I had to have stitches. I was sick with gloom, perhaps even with childish despair, at the stink of medicines and the itching and stinging, the crust of perpetual discomfort, of the roughness, of the blood scabbed and stuck to gauze bandages and to me; and the eccentric no-footing, the no-safety-against-injury feeling that one has after the violation of physical assault and harm. I could not endure the world. I had no proof, no images of human goodness that comforted me enough to make up for what I felt. Anyway, there is anesthesia in despair.

S.L. tried often enough in those days to console me, but I would not listen to him. One afternoon, he woke me from a nap, an uneasy nap, lifted me out of bed—me, I consisted of stitches, scabs, and bandages, a head aching with bad dreams.

He dressed me himself.

At first, he kept his hat on. After a while, he took it off. He took me down the stairs. He held my wrist in his enormous, rough-skinned, slightly sweaty palm—a palm blankly suggestive of a meaning I could do nothing about, certainly not speak of, except stare at inwardly, blankly, from time to time—and dragged me along in a sort of chivying, let’s-play-this-game-and-you-be-excited way; but it physically hurt, the movements pulled the skin around the stitches; and furthermore I didn’t trust him anymore.