Mama went to work five weeks after my father died. He had left us $2,000. To work or not to work was not a debatable question. But it`s hard to imagine what would have happened if economic necessity had not forced her out of the house. As it was, it seemed to me that she lay on a couch in a half-darkened room for 25 years with her hand across her forehead murmuring, ”I can`t.”
Even though she could, and did.
She pulled on her girdle and her old gray suit, stepped into her black suede chunky heels, applied powder and lipstick to her face, and took the subway downtown to an employment agency where she got a job clerking in an office for $28 a week. After that, she rose each morning, got dressed and drank coffee, made out a grocery list for me, left it together with money on the kitchen table, walked four blocks to the subway station, bought the New York Times, read it on the train, got off at 42nd Street, entered her office building, sat down at her desk, put in a day`s work, made the trip home at 5 o`clock, came in the apartment door, slumped onto the kitchen bench for supper, then onto the couch where she instantly sank into a depression she welcomed like a warm bath. It was as though she had worked all day to earn the despair waiting faithfully for her at the end of her unwilling journey into daily life.
Weekends, of course, the depression was unremitting. A black and wordless pall hung over the apartment all of Saturday and all of Sunday. Mama neither cooked, cleaned nor shopped. She took no part in idle chatter: The exchange of banalities that fills a room with human presence, declares an interest in being alive. She would not laugh, respond or participate in any of the compulsive kitchen talk that went on among the rest of us: me, my aunt Sarah, Nettie, my brother. She spoke minimally, and when she did speak her voice was uniformly tight and miserable, always pulling her listener back to a proper recollection of her ”condition.” If she answered the phone, her voice dropped a full octave when she said hello; she could not trust that the caller would otherwise gauge properly the abiding nature of her pain. For five years she did not go to a movie, a concert, a public meeting. She worked, and she suffered.
Widowhood provided Mama with a higher form of being. In refusing to recover from my father`s death she had discovered that her life was endowed with a seriousness her years in the kitchen had denied her. She remained devoted to this seriousness for 30 years. She never tired of it, never grew bored or restless in its company, found new ways to keep alive the interest it deserved and had so undeniably earned.
Mourning Papa became her profession, her identity, her persona. It elevated her in her own eyes, made of her a spiritually significant person, lent richness to her gloom and rhetoric to her speech. Papa`s death became a religion that provided ceremony and doctrine. A women-who-has-lost-the-love-of-her-life was now her orthodoxy; she paid it Talmudic attention.
Papa had never been so real to me in life as he was in death. Always a somewhat shadowy figure, benign and smiling, standing there behind Mama`s dramatics about married love, he became and remained what felt like the necessary instrument of her permanent devastation. It was almost as though she had lived with Papa in order that she might arrive at this moment. Her distress was so all-consuming it seemed ordained. For me surely, it ordered the world anew.
The air I breathed was soaked in her desperation, made thick and heady by it, exciting and dangerous. Her pain became my element, the country in which I lived, the rule beneath which I bowed. It commanded me, made me respond against my will. I longed endlessly to get away from her, but I could not leave the room when she was in it.
I dreaded her return from work, but I was never not there when she came home. In her presence anxiety swelled my lungs (I suffered constrictions of the chest and sometimes felt an iron ring clamped across my skull), but I locked myself in the bathroom and wept buckets on her behalf.
On Friday I prepared myself for two solid days of weeping and sighing and the mysterious reproof that depression leaks into the air like the steady escape of gas when the pilot light is extinguished. I woke up guilty and went to bed guilty, and on weekends the guilt accumulated into low-grade infection. She made me sleep with her for a year, and for 20 years afterward I could not bear a woman`s hand on me. Afraid to sleep alone, she slung an arm across my stomach, pulled me toward her, fingered my flesh nervously, inattentively. I shrank from her touch: She never noticed. I yearned toward the wall, couldn`t get close enough, was always being pulled back. My body became excited. Certainly I was repelled.
For two years she dragged me to the cemetery every second or third Sunday morning. The cemetry was in Queens. This meant taking three buses and traveling an hour and fifteen minutes each way. When we climbed onto the third bus she`d begin to cry. Helplessly, I would embrace her. Her cries would grow louder. Inflamed with discomfort, my arm would stiffen around her shoulder and I would stare at the black rubber floor. The bus would arrive at the last stop just as she reached the verge of convulsion.
”We have to get off, Ma,” I`d plead in a whisper. She would shake herself reluctantly (she hated to lose momentum once she`d started on a real wail) and slowly climb down off the bus. As we went though the gates of the cemetery, however, she`d rally to her own cause. She would clutch my arm and pull me across miles of tombstones (neither of us ever seemed to remember the exact location of the grave), stumbling like a drunk, lurching about and shrieking: ”Where`s Papa? Help me find Papa! They`ve lost Papa. Beloved! I`m coming. Wait, only wait, I`m coming!” Then we would find the grave and she would fling herself across it, arrived at last in a storm of climactic release. On the way home she was a rag doll. And I! Numb and dumb, only grateful to have survived the terror of the earlier hours.
One night when I was 15 I dreamed that the entire apartment was empty, stripped of furniture and brilliantly whitewashed, the rooms gleaming with sun and the whitenss of the walls. A long rope extended the length of the apartment, winding at waist level through all the rooms. I followed the rope from my room to the front door. There in the open doorway stood my dead father, gray-faced, surrounded by mist and darkness, the rope tied around the middle of this body. I laid my hands on the rope and began to pull, but try as I might I could not lift him across the threshold. Suddenly my mother appeared. She laid her hands over mine and began to pull also. I tried to shake her off, enraged at her interference, but she would not desist, and I did so want to pull him in that I said to myself, ”All right, I`ll even let her have him, if we can just get him inside.”
For years I thought the dream needed no interpretation, but now I think I longed to get my father across the threshold not out of guilt and sexual competition but so that I could get free of Mama. My skin crawled with her. She was everywhere, all over me, inside and out. Her influence clung, membrane-like, to my nostrils, my eyelids, my open mouth. I drew her into me with every breath I took. I drowsed in her etherizing atmosphere, could not escape the rich and claustrophobic character of her presence, her being, her suffocating suffering femaleness.
I didn`t know the half of it.
One afternoon, in the year of the dream, I was sitting with our neighbor, Nettie Levine. She was making lace, and I was drinking tea. She began to dream out loud. ”I think you`ll meet a really nice boy this year,” she said.
”Someone older than yourself. Almost out of college. Ready to get a good job. He`ll fall in love with you, and soon you`ll be married.”
”That`s ridiculous,” I said sharply.
Nettie let her hands, with the lace still in them, fall to her lap. ”You sound just like your mother,” she said softly.
