The Woman in the Photograph Page 2

  Dad said nothing. He turned his back and retreated to his woodshop in the basement. I followed him and watched. He tightened the vise on a shelf of the bookcase he was constructing. He tenderly wrapped his fingers around the knob of the hand plane and ran it along the surface of the wood. The air filled with a fragrant, woody aroma as the curly shavings piled up like discarded ribbons.

  We were the only Jewish family on the block and the Italian girls across the street frequently told me that I killed Christ. While the Navaretta sisters saw me as Jewish, I didn’t feel particularly Jewish and was restless and bored with the Hebrew chanting I had to sit through when my father took Tom and me to the synagogue for the high holidays. But there was one day a year when I felt connected to my ancestors—the holiday of Passover.

  On Passover, we all participated, even my mother, who claimed to be an atheist. She and Aunt Pearl chopped apples and nuts to mix with honey, a dish called harosis to represent the bricks of straw and mud our ancestors made when they were slaves in Egypt. They patted together sticky balls of Matzo meal and dropped them into hot chicken broth, where I watched them boil and bubble until they expanded to twice their original size. Then I helped Tom set the table in Nathan and Pearl’s dining room with a carefully ironed white linen cloth and wine glasses for everyone, even me, because on this one special night I could take a few sips of the ceremonial wine. I carefully placed a polished silver goblet, brought all the way from Germany, at the head of the table so the prophet Elijah could mysteriously empty it sometime during dinner, unseen by my innocent eyes.

  As the youngest child, I was trained to say the first of the four Passover questions—Why is this night different from all other nights? I could expect Uncle Nathan to reward me with a chocolate Easter bunny when I found the matzo cracker, called the affikomen, hidden between two books on the bookshelf or behind the couch cushion. Until I was eight, I still had a father who would carry me down the stairs to my bedroom at the end of the evening because I drank too much of the sweet, sticky Manischewitz wine.

  The best part of Passover was the feeling of connection—that we were not just an isolated family of foreigners who were neither German nor American. For just this one evening, I had a sense of belonging to something beyond myself and the small circle of relatives sitting at our table. We were part of a tradition that started long before we existed.

  At the time, I couldn’t have known how much the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt resembled the escape of my own parents from Nazi Germany. In hindsight, I wonder if, when they dipped the hardboiled eggs in salt water to represent the tears of our ancestors, they were also grieving for the people and the life they left behind.

  3

  Widowed

  Eight years older than me, my brother Tom remembered happier days when the whole family used to pile into a 1940 black Studebaker that required a sand bag in the back to stay balanced on the road and go for picnics on Long Island or a week in the Catskill Mountains. I too had some distant memories of a young mother with sparkling black eyes who laughed as she reached her arms toward me to lift me onto the dresser and twirl my chestnut hair into ringlets, a woman with long bare legs wearing a white bathing suit, her fingers wrapped firmly around my little hand as we ran into the waves at Jones Beach. These small, contented moments came to an abrupt end with my father’s death.

  Just after I started third grade, my father went into the hospital. I never saw him alive again. Uncle Willy, who was married to Mom’s sister Erika, told me, “He’s gone on a long journey.” Other than that, no one ever talked about him. I didn’t know why he died or where he was buried, though a few days before he went into the hospital I had a kind of premonition of what was to come.

  We were watching the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night. Mom was on the easy chair, Tom was stretched out in front of her on the floor, and Dad and I were sitting together on the couch. I leaned my head against his shoulder and he brushed my hair from my face. I slid my face against his chest, feeling the woven texture of his sweater as it rubbed my cheek. I inhaled the earthy smell of wool mixed with the slight perfume of aftershave lotion and sweet tobacco. Even though my neck got stiff, I didn’t want to move, afraid I’d break the spell of our connection. The thought crossed my mind that this was the last time I would be close to him like this.

  With his absence, our house felt cold and empty. Except for practical necessities, it seemed like all conversation stopped. I remember thinking, What do I do now? But no one answered my silent query. When I thought about my father, I got an image of his fingernails, always clean and carefully manicured, almost like a woman’s. That’s what I pictured distinctly, his pale long fingers.

  On the first Passover after Dad’s death, we didn’t celebrate the holiday upstairs with Pearl and Nathan. Instead my mother bought a box of matzo and placed it on the table with a plate of sliced ham. I knew that pork was not kosher and explicitly forbidden in the Jewish religion. She served it with string beans and mashed potatoes. Tom argued with her about the ham, then we all got silent.

  “It was her defiance,” Tom said when we talked about it later as adults.

  “But who was she defying?” I asked him. He had no answer.

  Uncle Nathan let us continue to live in the house, but since my father left no savings, my mother had to go to work. She taught herself to type and was hired by a German Jewish immigrant who felt sympathy for a widow with two children to support. She practiced shorthand standing pressed against other commuters on the subway during the forty-minute ride on the E train to downtown Manhattan. She came home from work exhausted, threw her purse on the kitchen table, and went straight to the bathroom to cleanse her hands of the grime of the city and eight hours of taking orders for apple cutters and cheese graters at Wall International Trading Company. She complained of having to walk from the 23rd Street subway stop through a bad neighborhood, about the dirt in the subway, or the rude man who grabbed the only empty seat.

  After putting some vegetables on the stove, my mother would unclip the rubber garters from her nylons. I marveled at how carefully she cradled the silky folds in her palms as she rolled each stocking down her leg and over her heel without causing it to run. Then she settled onto the couch and put her feet up. “A little puschelkatzchen?” she asked me, as I hovered around her. That was her pet word for scratching her legs like a little pussycat. I sat on the end of the couch and ran my fingers up and down her calves as she requested. I hated the feeling of brushing against the fine hairs on her legs. Mom closed her eyes and sighed. “You’re the only one who understands me,” she told me.

  Tom, already in high school, jumped up from the table after supper, put his plate in the sink, and rushed off to the Jamaica Jewish Center where he worked in the bowling alley. “Eat and run,” Mom called after him as he picked up his jacket. “All you ever do is eat and run.” I wanted to defend him but didn’t know how.

  I knew it wasn’t easy to be a widowed, single woman in the fifties, but my mother put on a brave face. She still played tennis on Saturday mornings. She followed the news and, despite having so little money, she made a contribution to Adlai Stevenson’s campaign for president because he was a mensch. On rare occasions she went out to dinner with someone or other I didn’t know, first Simon, who was Orthodox and didn’t carry money on the Sabbath so Mom ended up paying the bill, and then Stephan, who wrote some book on politics but was too busy for her. I never understood how she met these people and I was never introduced to them. While she was out, I watched the slow movement of the clock and sat up in bed to stare out the window every time I heard the motor of a car coming down the street. Finally, when our 1950 Plymouth creaked up the steep driveway that wound past the bay window, I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

  I knew my mother from the inside. I watched the aspirins she took from the medicine cabinet when she had a bad headache, and the vial of phenobarbitol she kept in her bedside table so she could get some sleep. She hated to be bothered by c
ooking, or even eating, so I had to remind her to mix two tablespoons of malt powder and a raw egg in a glass of milk because the doctor said she had to gain some weight.

  One night as I was drying the dishes, I started to tell Mom about a boy in my class who spit on my desk. She looked away for a moment, then turned back, though she didn’t really look at me. “If you only knew how little your problems are compared to mine,” she said.

  After that conversation, I invented a game called I’m-the-parent-and-you’re-the-child. When my mother climbed into bed, often ahead of me, I fixed her a tray with a cup of Lipton’s tea, adding just a little schwoops of milk. I lit the table lamp and she turned the radio to WQXR, the classical music station. “Ah, La Boheme,” she sighed as she sipped her tea and listened to Rodolfo and Mimi singing their final farewells in a world too cruel to let lovers survive. She was no longer my mother; she had dissolved into the operatic strains of the heroine’s last aria.

  4

  Central Park West

  When I was thirteen, my mother called me into her bedroom and told me she needed to have surgery.

  “Come sit down,” she said, “Do you want to feel the lump in my breast?”

  The lamp threw a harsh light on the fabric of her nightgown. I didn’t want to feel anything, but she reached for my hand and drew it to her body. I barely touched her breast but pretended I did just to get it over with.

  A few days later, Aunt Pearl took me to visit her at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. We got off the subway at Columbus Circle and walked the three long blocks to Amsterdam Avenue. Mom had a tiny room to herself. The walls were an institutional green and there was a screened window that faced a brick wall.

  Mom was sitting up in bed in her own bathrobe of ice-blue nylon with tiny glass buttons down the front. Her eyes had dark moons under them. Just visible beneath my mother’s gown was a large bandage that covered her entire chest.

  I stepped over and kissed her and then quickly moved back, afraid I might jar her or hurt her.

  In 1958 people didn’t talk as openly about breast cancer as they do now but my mother was very matter-of-fact about her surgery. When she came home from the hospital, she showed me the smooth, flat place on her chest with a straight line of stitches across the diagonal. She made herself a special bra with a compartment that she stuffed with soft lambs’ wool and immediately embarked on her exercises, squeezing a rubber ball in her hand as she stretched her left arm further and further up the wall each day.

  “Dr. Gillette says I’m his best patient,” she told me with pride in her voice. “He can’t believe how quickly I’ve gotten back my mobility. You know how stoic I am when it comes to pain,” she added, reminding me of how many times I heard her say she let the dentist drill her teeth without Novocain.

  Just a few months later, when I was in my sophomore year of high school, Uncle Nathan announced that he was planning to sell the house. In November, Mom told us that she was going to get married again.

  “George is Russian and speaks five languages,” she said. “He used to live in Tel Aviv and fought in the Israeli war for independence. He was very nice to me when I had my operation.”

  On Saturday, my mother took me to the city to meet George. In spite of my apprehension, I felt a surge of excitement the moment we got off the subway at 59th and Columbus Circle. The sun was shining, the trees were just turning many shades of red, brown, and gold, and the air was crisp and fresh. We walked up Central Park West, past the Mayflower Hotel where the doorman was whistling for a taxi, past stately, clean apartment buildings with uniformed doormen standing beneath deep blue or stone gray awnings. Mom turned to me and smiled; her eyes were twinkling and for a moment she looked like a young girl. I could see that she felt more at home in this neighborhood than in the drab section of Queens where I grew up.

  I don’t know exactly when they got married, but we moved into George’s apartment just in time to watch the huge helium-filled plastic turkey and colorful floats from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade pass right under our windows. It was hard to change schools, but I was excited to discover that I could walk to the Museum of Natural History or take the subway down to Greenwich Village.

  Tom moved to the 92nd Street YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) across the park on the East Side. I felt his absence more than I missed my father when he died. When I was younger, Tom and I watched Flash Gordon together before Mom got home from work. Sometimes he let me come along when he met his friends at a hamburger place on Union Turnpike. Once he and his girlfriend, who later became his wife, took me to Macy’s and bought me a shirtwaist dress with pink and white stripes and little plastic buttons down the front. I understood that he had to find his own way, but my heart ached for him.

  Mom and George settled into the master bedroom overlooking the park, and I got the smaller bedroom with windows on 66th Street. I made red corduroy slipcovers for my bed and had a low black table that made my room look more like a studio. I even had a private bathroom and a walk-in closet, things I had always envied in other girls’ homes. When I shut my door, I imagined that I was in my own universe that had nothing to do with my mother’s problems or George’s awkward efforts to have a conversation with me. I sat in my canvas butterfly chair and watched Father Knows Best on my black-and-white TV, wishing I had a real family with a father like Robert Young. I never invited a friend over.

  Many years later, digging through one of the boxes of Mom’s belongings that my brother had stored, I found the copy of a letter Alice had written to Betty Ford at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in 1974. Seeking to encourage the First Lady, who had just had a mastectomy, my mother wrote: “I am, and always have been an ardent tennis player, which I still do. I do calisthenics and yoga, and this operation has never in any way given me any psychological problems.” (The word “hang ups” was crossed out here.) “In fact, I got married after this episode for a second time without any anxieties. I only wish to demonstrate to you how well adjusted I am to help you and give you a lift…”

  I took a breath. My mother’s letter said she was so “well-adjusted.” But that’s not the way I remember that period. One evening when I was sixteen and in the last semester of high school, I was sitting at the dining room table typing a report on my portable Smith-Corona. George came in and told me to take the typewriter off the table and go do my homework in my own room. I felt intense resentment and shouted something about not having a home anywhere, and he couldn’t tell me what to do. Then I jumped up so quickly my chair fell over. I picked up my typewriter and turned toward the hallway, but as my body twisted, something in me just blew up. I half-threw, half-dropped the typewriter into his hands. The last thing I saw as I ran out of the room was his startled look as he clutched at the typewriter so it wouldn’t land on the floor.

  Mom heard the commotion and followed me into my room. Even before she spoke, I screamed at her, “Why don’t you do something or say something? This is my house too. This is my life too. What about me?” She sat down on the bed and began to cry. The more she wept, the angrier I became. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying, “I can’t help it. I don’t like him either, but I can’t do anything. I can’t. I’m as helpless as you are. You’ve got to understand.”

  I hated how she collapsed and begged. If she had fought with me instead, I could have tolerated it. But my mother was like a fragile, frightened child and I would always have to watch how I treated her—I would never be free to be myself or to disentangle myself from her suffering. I wanted to shake her, to run through the apartment screaming, smash the chandeliers, gouge the mahogany table, and stomp on the overstuffed couch. I got hard and cold inside and felt mean and guilty. I knew then, if I hadn’t already discovered it before, that my only choice was to get away as soon as I could, just as Tom had done.

  5

  Escape

  With a scholarship from the Jewish Foundation for the Education of Girls and some money my mother tucked away for me after George began paying the
bills, I left home at sixteen to go to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From there I continued as a wandering, seeking, spiritual child of the sixties, hitchhiking through Europe, then coming back to New York City to teach first grade in the South Bronx. While living in a seventh floor walkup on Thompson Street in the West Village, I met the man who became my first husband, Brendt—an artist with a bushy red mustache, spectacles, and a snake ring with a diamond for an eye. He had a ’52 Chevy panel truck and a loft over the bar at the corner of Broome Street and West Broadway. Now known as SoHo, in 1966 the neighborhood was an industrial area where artists hid from Fire Department officials, hoping they wouldn’t be evicted for living in the buildings.

  Between us, Brendt and I scraped together enough money to pay the rent, outfit a makeshift kitchen with an electric frying pan and toaster oven, and set up a fan that blew the heat into our sleeping area through a hole in the wall. We didn’t have a shower or a telephone, and the first time my mother came to visit was also the last. I felt bad that she was upset when she saw our rugged domicile but clear that I had intentionally chosen a different lifestyle for myself. We believed we were pioneers of a new consciousness, and at twenty-one the lack of comforts made me feel strong.

  Four years later, when I became pregnant, we moved to the country. We bought a house in Eastport, on the Maine coast. It had been advertised in the Village Voice for $750. Eastport was actually a little island attached to the mainland by a causeway, and the house was only a small cabin without plumbing. The old brick foundation collapsed the day we moved in. But once again I took the hardships of life in Maine as a chance to experience the elemental realities of existence and escape the superficial values of middle class life.