Her Mother's Daughter (9 page)

Eventually, the kitchen door opened. Momma was crying softly now, and she could hear Poppa's heavy unsure step tramping down the hall past her room. She stiffened herself even more and squeezed her eyes shut, but he didn't open her door. She heard him go into his bedroom. After a long time, she heard Momma go past slowly, as if she was tired. Bella lifted her head then to peer at Euga, but the baby was still sound asleep. The next day, Bella was careful not to look at her mother's face.

Then something else began to happen, something worse, so bad she could not think about it at all. The noise was terrible and she would lie there trembling and rigid at once. She would try to put the pillow over her right ear so she could not hear, but the noise came through anyway. She would always glance at Euga, but the child always slept. Bella wondered how Euga could sleep through such sounds. But this happened only once in a while. Still, she never knew which it would be that night, when Poppa was out late: the noise, the noise and the crying, or the other.

One night when Poppa was out and Bella had fallen asleep, she was wakened by hearing Momma's light step running down the hall past her room. She got up and opened the door a crack, then wider. Momma was in the boys' room and she was screaming softly, almost crying, telling them to get up, get up, quickly. Bella peered toward the kitchen: the light was on, but there were no sounds from it. She stepped into the hall just as Wally, his hair all tousled, his eyes half-shut, stepped into the hall. Behind him Eddie stood, eyes wide and alarmed, as Momma pushed them from behind. She grabbed Wally by the arm and pulled him toward their one closet, which she opened. She pulled open the white laundry bag that lay on the floor, half-full of dirty clothes, and nodded to Wally to step inside it. She helped him, because he could barely see to do it himself. Then she pulled the string at the top and pushed him swiftly inside the closet, under the bottom shelf. Then she looked around wildly, and Bella drew back, expecting to be reprimanded for standing there. But Momma didn't even see her. She pushed Eddie toward the girls' room, and pointed to the corner, where their clothes were lying in a heap. He ran to the corner and crouched down, pulling the clothes over him. Momma arranged them so they covered him. Bella could hear her breathing loud and fast. Then Momma saw her and hissed, “Get back in bed,” and ran out, closing the door. Already, before Eddie had been concealed, Bella had heard the stumbling step on the stairs. Poppa was at the door before Momma could get back in the kitchen, but she might have been there before he got it open.

Then the usual noises began, the shouting and cursing, and then he stormed down the hall, and Bella breathed a little, thinking this might be one of the nights he just went to sleep. But no: she heard him in the bathroom, and it was not for doing that (at night he forgot to close the bathroom door, something he'd never do in the daytime), it was the other, he went to get it, and then he slammed open the door to the boys' room, and a moment later yelled, “Where are they? What have you done with them?” and tramped back to the kitchen and began yelling at Momma. And the kitchen door was open and Bella could hear Momma saying, “Go to sleep, Michal, you're tired, you had too much to drink,” and Poppa roaring, “The little bastards, I'll show them, where are they, what have you done with them?” and the slapping noise as he hit it against the doorframe, and Momma weeping, but still saying, “Go to bed, Michal” and the slapping noise again, and then silence, and then he staggered back down the hall and threw up in the bathroom and then the long stream while he did that with the door open, and then he staggered toward the bedroom.

It was quiet. Bella let her body go a little, still listening. She heard Momma's soft step in the kitchen, and pans rattling, as Momma put things away. She waited until Momma had passed her door, slowly, heavily for her, walking toward the bedroom. She waited and waited. Then, after everything had been quiet for a long time, the pile of rags in the corner moved, and noiselessly, Eddie pulled himself out from under them. He stood up and crept to the door and opened it. Everything was dark. Bella watched him, and after he had closed her door, she got up and ran to it silently, and opened it a little. He was at the closet, holding the laundry bag in his arms, pulling it from the cramped space under the shelves. He loosened the string, and whispered into it. Wally came out, slowly, and Eddie retied the bag and put it back in the closet. He put his hand on Wally's little shoulder and guided him toward their bedroom. She heard the door shut, very softly. She stood there. She stood for what felt like a long time. Then she crept across the hall toward the bathroom, and tried to see in the darkness. The only light came from a transom high up over the bathtub and that faced another building, so the light was faint. Still, she could make out Poppa's razor strop lying on the bathroom floor.

W
HAT AM I TO
make of this Michael Brez?

Whenever she spoke of him, whenever she told me stories about when she was little (“and what was your mommy like? and your daddy?”), she depicted her father as a monster, a terrifying incomprehensible vehicle of violence and cruelty. But always, something else would slip in, and I would garner these other things, hoard them, amass them toward some final understanding. What slipped in was that he spoke seven languages; sometimes, it was that he was big, important, successful. She sounded proud when she talked about his fine shop. She always said “Momma,” and “My father.” Her tales were always black and white—no, not exactly. “Momma” was always a saint, the complete victim, and “my father” was always cruel and violent, but the undertones held something red, something proud and fierce, like the line around the sun that seems sometimes to encompass it and sometimes to be something the blinding sun is blanking out. I was adult before I could understand it with my mind, although it was long since engraved on my psyche: he was admirable because he was intelligent and successful; he had power. Admirable evil, he represented, while poor “Momma” was virtue unrewarded. I felt all that.

I was adult before I began even to think of him as a person, rather than as an incarnation of evil. I had never seen a picture of him until I was adult, married myself, going through a yellowed box of even more yellowed photographs. And there he was, with her.

No one even knows his real name. He entered the United States on a Hungarian passport in the name of Michael Sczyunz, which seems to be neither Polish nor Hungarian. But there is no question that he was Polish by birth. Probably, he could not find work in partitioned Poland, and like thousands of others, emigrated to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which owned one-third of his native state. But did he go alone? Where were his parents? Did he write to them? Where did they live? And when did he go? He apprenticed as a tailor: who knows how, stranger that he was. Perhaps there were many Poles in Hungary, willing to work in their sweatshops for below-standard wages. His passport says he was born in 1875, and he arrived in America in 1900: so he was young when he went to Hungary and learned what he learned. Seven languages: Polish, German, Russian, Magyar, Lithuanian, Yiddish, English: did he learn them in Poland and Hungary? Because by the time he went to Germany, he spoke like a native, and when he came to America, he adopted a German-sounding name, Brez.

He married Frances in 1901 and their first child, Edmund, was born in 1902. By the time the next one, Isabella, arrived in 1904, he already had the fancy shop, the staff of employees, the swallow-tailed coat and striped trousers. How did he manage that, this twenty-nine-year-old immigrant?

His face in the wedding picture is fine and sensitive, even noble. He is handsome and proud, with a certain fierceness of eye that makes me think of the Polish cavaliers who charged Hitler's tanks on their horses. Crazy pride, the kind of self-image so consuming as to lead men—and nations—to suicidal acts of bravado. Still, I like his face. The fierceness in his eyes rests in the back of my mind along with the fierceness I feel: hidden, but hot. He has something of the same quality my mother's face shows in early pictures—otherworldly, romantic, ethereal. But where her face advertises an absence, expresses a removal caused by yearning, the yearning itself doesn't show—the eyes are blank, the expression nullified; his, on the other hand, shows all that romance in service to some drive, some ideal. It is present, and vital.

By the next picture, however, the ideal has blown up, and all that is left is an aimless fire. It was taken in his shop and shows him surrounded by his salesmen, who are attired almost as elegantly as he: But his clothes do not suit him now. Here he's a stereotype, an angry man, thick and cruel, a redneck sheriff, a sergeant in the army, any army, a tough, a bully. He radiates complacency, knowledge of tightness, the sense that one is part of an institution so powerful it can confer legitimacy on all one's deeds, no matter how despicable they are. My grandmother does not appear in this picture, although she worked hard in that shop throughout his life. Like the wife of the Chinese rice-cake maker, she was relegated to the back room, behind the curtain that separates the legitimate from the illegitimate, the user from the used.

This picture was probably taken around the time my mother was born, because the next one, in which the three older children appear, could not have been later than 1907, and in that one he is far fatter, and his face has undergone further change. It is the face of a tyrant, a bully, and the eyes stare out madly even as the chin juts over the full-fleshed neck and broad-fronted body. He is the full paterfamilias, except he lacks a beard. He looks insane.

Yet he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish: he had a successful business, his wife was a slave to him at home and at work, and did her slaving well. He had three utterly intimidated children and a set of friends who deferred to his every opinion. Isn't this what he wanted? Did he think, when he set out to gain these things, that they would make him invulnerable, secure, on top of the heap of seamy humanity?

That he would want to get involved with other women is—to me at least—understandable. My grandmother may well have been worn out by childbearing: after Edmund and Isabella, she had Wallace in 1906, a stillbirth in 1907, and Eugenia in 1908. But even if they had had birth control, even if Frances showed no reluctance to make love, when the juices are running strong, it seems sinful not to let them run their course. It seems a waste of youth and vigor, and damming up of what should run free. But why did he have to hurt Frances, to act so that she would know what he was doing, and to use her miserably at the same time? Wasn't her servility enough? Or was he driven not by admirable heats of lust but by a need to prove himself to be…something. There are lots of men like that, and I know a bit about that myself.

And what drove him to become a drunkard? Oh, well, wine, women, and song, I know about that too. I remember playing a Strauss waltz by that name on the piano when I was eight, and catching from its lilt the world it expressed. I wanted to be in that world, but the title informed me it was for men only. Until I saw a movie of an operetta called
The Merry Widow,
about a gorgeous woman with a high-piled white wig, wearing a strapless black lace gown and holding a black mask over her eyes as she whirled gloriously, her hooped skirts swinging out, in a room full of men. And then I wanted to be her, too, but I didn't know how to go about it.

In time, of course, I found my way into that world—well, one of booze, people, and song, anyway. I am pleased that I did, and regret none of it. But an evening of drinking and singing is a prelude to a few days of abstinence, if you want to get any work done. And there is as much pleasure in the work as in the play, so one balances them. But not Michael. Why? What did he want from life that he could not then have achieved, if he had known what to want? By 1907, he was a tyrant. My mother would say, “My father sat at the head of the table.” It was a long time before I realized that round tables have no head, that wherever he sat became the head. Maybe he hated what he had become and did not know what else he could have become. Maybe he felt isolated in his eminence, lonely, without any way to bridge his loneliness. I don't know. I'll never know.

But the question of Michael is not academic for me, for of all my forebears he is the one I feel closest to, most like: Michael, the proud mad one. Is it possible that what drove him drives me?

B
ELLA WAS EIGHT WHEN
her parents changed. They didn't entertain so often, although Michael still stayed out most nights, and there was a kind of weight of worry in the house, a brooding silence that pinched Momma's forehead and made Poppa's mouth tense and hard. They had moved again, to Myrtle Avenue, to an apartment with smaller rooms. Business was bad—there had been a depression—and everywhere there were strikes, especially in the textile industry. And then there had been a terrible fire that had killed many women, in a Triangle, Bella thought, unsure what a Triangle was. Little as she understood of the little that was spoken before the children, Bella knew business was bad. She had no idea what that meant, but it comforted her that there was some reason for the way her parents were acting, a reason unconnected to her or the other children, or to her parents themselves.

The way she spent her nights left Bella exhausted in the days, and often when she came home from school, she would fall on her bed and sleep. But she developed in this time a stiff manner: her hands were always clenched into fists; when she opened them for some reason, her fingers and part of her palm were white. And she jumped with shock at any sudden noise. These were habits she would never lose.

If Poppa still stayed out late at nights, Momma baked and cooked less now that they entertained less. Still, she would sit in the kitchen at night watching from the window for the figure approaching on the sidewalk, trying to detect whether this was a night she should hide the boys. But there were few nights like that anymore. Poppa didn't even hit Momma much anymore. So sometimes Bella would sit beside her mother in the kitchen, the gaslight turned down so only a dim glow softened the room. But whenever the swerving or staggering figure appeared, Bella would get up and go to bed, and lie there rigid for a time, until the banging and cursing were over. She could not forget those things even though they didn't seem to happen anymore. For her, they were an intrinsic part of the night.