Fierce Attachments

by Vivian Gornick

  Suddenly, I am miserable. Acutely miserable. A surge of defeat passes through me. I feel desolated, without direction or focus, all my daily struggles small and disoriented. I become speechless. Not merely silent, but speechless. My mother sees that my spirits have plunged. She says nothing. We walk on, neither of us speaking.

  We arrive at Sixty-ninth Street, turn the corner, and walk toward the entrance to the Hunter auditorium. The doors are open. Inside, two or three hundred Jews sit listening to the testimonials that commemorate their unspeakable history. These testimonials are the glue that binds. They remind and persuade. They heal and connect. Let people make sense of themselves. The speeches drone on. My mother and I stand there on the sidewalk, alone together, against the sound of culture-making that floats out to us. “We are a cursed people,” the speaker announces. “Periodically we are destroyed, we struggle up again, we are reborn. That is our destiny.”

  The words act like adrenaline on my mother. Her cheeks begin to glow. Tears brighten her eyes. Her jawline grows firm. Her skin achieves muscle tone. “Come inside,” she says softly to me, thinking to do me a good turn. “Come. You’ll feel better.”

  I shake my head no. “Being Jewish can’t help me anymore,” I tell her.

  She holds tightly to my arm. She neither confirms nor denies my words, only looks directly into my face. “Remember,” she says. “You are my daughter. Strong. You must be strong.”

  “Oh Ma!” I cry, and my frightened greedy freedom-loving life wells up in me and spills down my soft-skinned face, the one she has given me.

  Nettie gave birth on a miserably hot day in August after a fifty-hour labor that ripped her nearly in two. The baby was a twelve-pound boy. She named him Richard. From the moment my mother and I helped bring him back from the hospital, we began raising him alongside of and sometimes instead of Nettie herself. We gave him sustenance of various kinds, and from time to time we gave him his very life. He was a sickly infant, repeatedly developing an asthmatic croup that could be relieved only through the inhalation of steam heat. Invariably, it was my mother or my brother who sat under the improvised vaporizer (a towel-tent held over a pot of boiling water) with the gasping Richie, never Nettie who was rendered useless by all such crises. She would pace the floor and tear at her hair as soon as the baby began to wheeze.

  Nettie, it quickly developed, had no gift for mothering. Many women have no gift for it. They mimic the recalled gestures and mannerisms of the women they’ve been trained to become and hope for the best. But Nettie had been trained to attract, not to domesticate, and was at a permanent loss. She could not master the art of mashed-up food, boiled diapers, baths in the kitchen sink. Her fingers remained clumsy, her movements inefficient, her mind unable to absorb the simplest scheme of organization. The kitchen stank of used diapers, the baby was wet and filthy, the sink crowded with unwashed pots coated in burnt milk. Nettie herself looked perpetually stunned. She was always turning around in the middle of the kitchen—legs bare, pompadour coming undone, brows drawn together in a frown, forefinger laid across her lips—trying to remember where she had mislaid some necessary thing or other … Now let me see, where did I put that baby?

  Richie survived in a welter of muted confusion. I have this memory of him up in Nettie’s right arm, his diaper full of shit, his face smeared with the remnants of the last two meals, his tiny fingers clutching a strand of red hair, holding on for dear life while she whirls about in silent alarm. Because she is silent it takes him awhile to become alarmed himself. There is in his face puzzled interest only slowly crumbling into panic.

  Nettie’s silence. That was another thing that separated her from the other women in the building. Among the others the first response to confusion or need was an explosion of high-decibel speech. Not so with Nettie. Her incapacity would have ingratiated her with the women, created a natural opening into their world—“Oh, teach me, tell me, is that how you do it, thank you, Mrs. Zimmerman-Roseman-Shapiro-Berger, you’re so wise, I’m so ignorant, so glad to learn what you have to teach”—but she couldn’t do it, didn’t even know where to begin. She felt exposed before the women, remained silent, unconfiding, hiding her need from all of them. All except my mother.

  My mother was Nettie’s lifeline during that first year of Richie’s life. It wasn’t so much what Mama did for Nettie, although all the small bits of help (bringing home extra bread and milk, taking Richie for an hour, giving him a bath or a feed now and then) certainly eased Nettie’s day. Mainly it was just that Mama was there to receive her anxiety. Periodically, Mama would wade into Nettie’s kitchen and in two or three hours of concentrated labor make order and shining cleanliness. Then she’d turn to Nettie as though to say, “Now you’re all set. Start your life.” Nettie would beam at her, embrace and kiss her, and in three days the place would be exactly as it had been before. Nettie accepted my mother’s labor not as a young woman might watching an older one in order to learn how to do it herself, but rather like a child being temporarily saved by a somewhat officious older sister. And indeed, Nettie sheltered with Richie as though they were both orphaned children: crooning at him, snuggling with him, hiding for days at a time with him under the bedclothes on the double bed that took up most of what was supposed to be the living room but wasn’t.

  Nettie’s apartment was the smallest, darkest, most sparsely furnished in the building. The kitchen, which shared our view of the alley and our morning light, was the only pleasant room. Beyond it were two rooms of uneven size whose windows stared at a brick wall. One of these should have been the living room, the other the bedroom, but Nettie didn’t know how to make a living room. The larger room held a double bed, a chest of drawers, a bit of shelving, and a rickety end table. The other room became a junk room, a large closet where the worst of her hopeless disorder could be pushed out of sight.

  Yet to me the apartment, like Nettie herself, was touched with promise and allure. I didn’t know the word beauty, would not have been able to say beauty was missing from our house; I only knew that small bits of visual pleasure transformed Nettie’s tiny apartment, made me feel happy and expectant when I walked through her door. Motherhood had deranged her, upset her odd and lovely nesting habits, pitched her into chaos, but still: the bed was covered with a paisley spread of thin Ukrainian wool, a silver candelabrum stood on the rickety end table, an icon hung on the wall, the cardboard bridge table in the kitchen was hidden by a startling geometric-print cloth, and on the windowsill stood a large geranium plant always beautifully trimmed, its earth wet and black, its leaves deep green. On the darkest of days the brilliant red, black, and green of the plant was an excitement. It wasn’t the objects themselves—we had a wonderful brass samovar in our living room I didn’t notice until I was twenty-five—it was the way Nettie placed and arranged things, a gift she had for creating grace and beauty where there had been none before. And then of course there was the lace, everywhere Nettie’s lace.

  Nettie was a talented lacemaker. She had in fact been working in a lace factory when she met Rick Levine. She could make dresses and coats, cloths and spreads, but she never undertook such major enterprises. She only made doilies, pillow covers, antimacassars, small bits and pieces to brighten the tiny apartment. She never had a specific idea or a fixed design in mind when she sat down to make lace, she just worked at lace. She would sink into a chair at the kitchen table whenever Richie finally keeled over late in the afternoon or at night (he was never put to bed, he simply went unconscious), wind a length of the smooth, silky cotton thread around her wrist and forefinger, pick up the fine steel crochet hook, and begin. She worked to comfort herself, to entertain and mollify her ruffled spirits (there was no moment when Nettie wasn’t recovering from motherhood). She did not take her talent seriously. If you watched her working you could see that it interested her—the designs seemed to emerge from her hook, they took her by surprise, she wanted to know how a piece of work would come out—but the interest was not sustained: one moment inte
nt and concentrated, the next shrugged off, discarded, easily forgotten. Lacemaking was only a mildly valued companion, company when she was nervous or relaxed or hopeful or tense, winding up or winding down.

  If I counted the hours I sat at the kitchen table while Nettie made lace, they would add up to a good two or three years. I was usually there in the late afternoon, and often in the evening after supper. She worked at the lace and I watched the movement of her hook, and we fell into a way of being together. She would fantasize out loud as she worked, and I would listen, actively, to her fantasizing.

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if …” was her ritual beginning. From this sentence she would spin out a tale of rescue involving love or money as easily as she unwound the silky thread from around her fingers. Like the plots of the paperback romances she read (her lips moving as her eye traveled slowly across the page), her fantasies were simple, repetitious, and boring. The ones that turned on money usually went: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if an old lady was crossing the street and a truck nearly ran her down and I saved her and she said, ‘Oh my dear, how can I thank you, here, take this,’ and she gave me the necklace she was wearing and I sold it for a thousand dollars.” Or: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I was sitting on a bench in the park and tucked between the slats was a brown paper bag nobody would touch, it was so crumpled and dirty, and I opened it and inside was a thousand dollars.” (In the late 1940s, in certain circles, a thousand was as good as a million.)

  The stories that turned on love were infinitely more appealing to her, and these she entered into with great elaboration: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I’m coming off the trolley car and I slip and sprain my ankle and they take me to the hospital and the doctor who comes to help me is tall and so handsome, and kind and gentle, and he looks into my face and I look into his, and we can’t tear our eyes away from each other, it’s as though we’re glued together, we’ve been looking for each other all our lives and now we’re afraid to look away even for a minute, and he says to me, ‘I’ve been waiting such a long time for you, will you marry me?’ and I say, ‘But you’re a doctor, an educated man, and I’m a poor woman, ignorant and uneducated, I’ll embarrass you,’ and he says, ‘I must have you, life is not worth living if I can’t have you,’ and that’s it, we’re together from then on.”

  Sometimes, after an hour or so of this, she would say to me, “Now you say what you’d like to have happen.” And I would say, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a flood or an epidemic or a revolution, and even though I’m this little kid they find me and they say to me, ‘You speak so wonderfully you must lead the people out of this disaster.’” I never daydreamed about love or money, I always daydreamed I was making eloquent speeches that stirred ten thousand people to feel their lives, and to act.

  Nettie would stare at me when I said what I would like to have happen. The sparkle in her eyes would flicker and her quick-moving fingers would drop into her lap. I think she was always hoping that this time it would be different, this time I’d come back with a story more like her own, one that made her feel good, not puzzled and awkward. But she must have known it was a long shot. Otherwise she would have asked me more often than she did to tell her what magic I longed for.

  When I was fourteen years old, Nettie’s lace figured strongly in a crucial development in my inner life. It was the year after my father’s death, the year in which I began to sit on the fire escape late at night making up stories in my head. The atmosphere in our house had become morgue-like. My mother’s grief was primitive and all-encompassing: it sucked the oxygen out of the air. A heavy drugged sensation filled my head and my body whenever I came back into the apartment. We, none of us—not my brother, not I, certainly not my mother—found comfort in one another. We were only exiled together, trapped in a common affliction. Loneliness of the spirit seized conscious hold of me for the first time, and I turned my face to the street, to the dreamy melancholy inner suggestiveness that had become the only relief from what I quickly perceived as a condition of loss, and of defeat.

  I began sitting on the fire escape in the spring, and I sat there every night throughout that immeasurably long first summer, with my mother lying on the couch behind me moaning, crying, sometimes screaming late into the night, and my brother wandering aimlessly about, reading or pacing, the only conversation among us that of barely polite familiars: “Get me a glass of water,” or, “Shut the window, there’s a draft,” or, “You going down? Bring back milk.” I found I could make myself feel better simply by swinging my legs across the windowsill and turning my face fully outward, away from the room behind me.

  The shabby tenement streets below our windows were transformed by darkness and silence. There was in the nighttime air a clarity, a softness and a fullness, indescribably sweet, that intensified the magical isolation I sought and that easily became a conduit for waking dreams. A hungry fantasizing went instantly to work as soon as I was seated with my back to the apartment, my eyes trained on the street. This fantasizing was only one step removed from Nettie’s “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” but it was an important step. Mine began “Just suppose,” and was followed not by tales of immediate rescue but by imaginings of “large meaning.” That is: things always ended badly but there was grandeur in the disaster. The point of my romances was precisely that life is tragic. To be “in tragedy” was to be saved from what I took to be the pedestrian pains of my own life. These seemed meaningless. To be saved from meaninglessness, I knew, was everything. Largeness of meaning was redemption. It was an adolescent writer’s beginning: I had started to mythicize.

  Late in the summer a woman I had never seen before appeared in the neighborhood, and began to walk up our block, late at night, across the street from the fire-escape window where I sat. I never saw her during the day, but she appeared promptly every night at eleven. She was thin and white-skinned. A mass of tangled black hair framed her face. Her shoulders were narrow and bony. She wore makeup and high heels. Her nylon stockings were loose and wrinkled around her ankles, and there was in her walk some muscular disconnect, as though she had been knocked apart like a puppet and put back together again badly. Sometimes she wore a thin shawl of tropical print. She was an altogether peculiar creature to have appeared on those streets, brimful as they were with working-class respectability, but I accepted her appearance as unthinkingly as I did the other human oddities on the block. Or at least I thought I did.

  One night early in the fall as I was watching her walk jerkily up the block, I turned back into the living room where my brother was reading and my mother lying on the couch. I called my brother to the window and pointed to the woman in the street.

  “Have you seen her?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Who is she?”

  “She’s a prostitute.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s a person without a home,” my mother said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  In that moment I became aware that the woman on the street had moved me. I was stirred by her presence, her aspect. I felt her as a broken creature, broken and diseased, and I had begun to imagine myself healing her. This image now pushed through the scrim of half-conscious thought, and quickly developed itself. As I healed her she became changed, her shoulders widened, her skin cleared, her hair neatened; above all, her eyes became grave and purposeful. But still, the nights were growing colder and she shivered in her thin dress and torn shawl. I imagined myself draping her in some lovely material that was both warming and magically possessed of the power to increase the healing process. I couldn’t see the material clearly for the longest time. Was it thin or thick, solid or print, light or dark? Then one night I looked closely at it and saw that it was lace. A series of flash images confused me. I saw Nettie’s face cradled on a piece of her own lace. I saw myself and the prostitute and Nettie, all of us with our faces laid sadly against small pieces of lace. Not a mantle of lace for any one of us, only these bits and pieces
, and all of us sorrowing against the bits and pieces.

  We’re walking west on Twenty-third Street. It’s late in the day and hundreds of workers are streaming out of the Metropolitan Life Building. My mother, an expert walker in the city (not to mention seat-grabber on the subway), is elbowing her way free of the crowd, with me right behind her. She is making fair progress when a man places himself deliberately in her path. She moves to the left, he moves to the left. She moves to the right, he moves to the right. She stares into his chest and then quickly, like a frightened bird, up into his face: after all, this is New York. For a moment all systems of response shut down. She stops reacting. She is simply there. Then all at once she’s in noisy operation again.

  “Maddy!” she bursts out at the man. “Madison Shapiro. For God’s sake!”

  Now it’s my turn to shut down. I know the name Maddy Shapiro very well, but I do not know the face in front of me. Ah, it hits me. It’s not that I haven’t seen Maddy Shapiro in more than twenty years, it’s that Maddy Shapiro has had a nose job. I’m amazed that my mother spotted Maddy inside this newly arranged face of his.

  The man standing in front of us is fifty years old. His tight curly hair is brown and gray, his eyes are cold blue, his figure beneath the well-cut business suit is thin and sexy, and he is made beautiful by the straight narrow line of a lovely nose: a nose not too long, not too short, just right. In another life that nose was a painful Jewish droop, forever dragging everything in Maddy’s sad young face down down down to the bottom of his soul. His mother, Mrs. Shapiro, who lived on the third floor of our building, was always running after him in the street with the glass of milk he wouldn’t finish. The kids would scream, “Drink-your-milk-Maddy-drink-your-milk,” and Maddy’s nose would grow longer, and his mouth would pull downward into the sullen silence he adopted as a permanent means of survival.