A Woman of Uncertain Character: The Amorous and Radical Adventures of My Mother Jennie (Who Always Wanted to Be a Respectable Jewish Mom) by Her Bastard Son

by Clancy Sigal

  Venus, at Rest

  Jennie died alone, and I let strangers bury her. “She’s gone!” crackled Charlotte on the phone from Los Angeles. “Yes, a heart attack. Coming back from, where else, the beauty parlor. It’s taken days to track you down. Where are you, lost in Camelot? It doesn’t matter. We took care of it. We buried her—Dinah and me and a few friends from the shop. Where is she? In the ground at Workmen’s Circle, of course, among her friends. God, you piss me off sometimes.” She hung up.

  A minute later the phone rang again. Charlotte. “Borrow some money and start therapy. You’ll need it.” And hung up again.

  I hadn’t seen Jennie in the three years since I’d been away from America.

  For a while I tossed the phone from one hand to the other, then put it down in the stone-cold living room of the old slate house in Halifax, Yorkshire, and turned to the other people staring mutely at me. They included some of the best friends I’d made in England. Until interrupted by the phone call, we’d been having one of those intense political meetings charting the future of the known universe.

  I said, “My ma just died.”

  No one got up to put an arm around me or say how sorry they were. Most of them looked acutely embarrassed, as if I’d farted in public or mistranslated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Somebody cleared his throat impatiently. I didn’t expect or receive sympathy; we had a vision more important than feelings, so I walked upstairs to my room and sat on the narrow bed and stared out at the frosty Yorkshire moors, beautiful and austere in the moonlight.

  I missed my mom. We couldn’t live together and we couldn’t not be together and her apron strings stretched all the way across the Atlantic and I had a startling lightness of heart. How could this monstrous reaction be? The thing I’d most dreaded had happened. It was all over, the decades-long worry over when and how and if. I wouldn’t ever again have to fret about her dying; it was done, over. At first, I felt no grief, shed no tears. Iced up. I was like those English people downstairs, armored against emotion and fixed on the life of the pamphlet. More than anything, I wanted my father to be with me now, take my hand, do something. Was he even alive?

  Charlotte had it nailed. I was lost in Camelot. For two years, as an illegal alien on a canceled U.S. passport, I’d been living in half shadows in England, moving from place to place, humping my old canvas GI duffle bag stencilled “Sgt C Sigal 36929935” and a twenty-year-old Corona portable typewriter, all my equity in the world. Before the British police acquired computers and CCTV cameras on every street corner, it was a snap to hide in England if you kept on the hop, the habit Jennie had taught me. Like Dad, I seemed to have been bred for a life on the run, fading into the general population, scuffling and skiffling and collecting raw experience—except that I still couldn’t write. To fill up time and pay for a Rowton House (workingmen’s hostel) room, I took off-the-book jobs here and there, digging clay trenches for McAlpine on South Bank, messengering merchant bank transactions on a Vespa along Threadneedle Street, washing dishes at Nick the Greek’s in Soho. Some nights, I slept under Charing Cross Bridge; days I kept on the move, shaving in public toilets. I lived in alleys or on the hospitality of kind women. Clippies on the big red “doubledekka” Routemaster buses liked chatting me up and taking me home and I waited to be arrested and deported or for literary lightning to strike, whichever came first. I was strung out on the adrenalin of gambling on myself and, so far, it was not paying off.

  Living like a bum was an insult to Jennie. For this she had worked at a machine her whole life? I could almost see her shaking her head as she often did, “What will it take you to learn?” I was so glad she couldn’t see me now.

  Up in Halifax, I don’t know how long I sat on the cot in the narrow freezing-cold room, minutes or hours. I was sure only of one thing. My life as a boy was over.

  A voice from downstairs. Oliver Rossiter, the sturdy little ex-commando veteran of the Dieppe and Norway landings, was one of the few London lefties who actually liked Americans. “We’re going out cavassing in the North End ward. Feel like coming along?”

  Later, when they came back, Oliver sat on the bed next to me. “Don’t be too hard on us,” he said. “The war. The English. Somehow a feeling you expect more of us than we can give.”

  I turned to Oliver. “I’m not going to cry,” I said.

  He got up to go. “More’s the pity,” he said.

  Oliver’s father was a world-famous psychoanalyst and a close collaborator of Freud. I’d never gone to a shrink, but Charlotte had suggested now was as good a time as any. I asked Oliver, “You ever been in, um, therapy?”

  He smiled. “No, it would be like going into the family business. I skipped that stage and went straight on to the loony bin.”

  One of the things I most liked about England was that half the people I knew had broken down and they treated it like any other domestic chore, without drama or self pity, just something that happens.

  Back down in rain-whipped London, I locked myself in my Swiss Cottage basement bedsit (rented under an assumed name—here we go again!), and sat cross-legged in the middle of the frayed carpet, trying to feel what I was supposed to feel but feeling only numb and addle-headed and an emotion that at first I couldn’t pinpoint: who was this woman who had just left me? It didn’t feel as if she were dead, never would; she just wasn’t here anymore, that’s all, and it was hard to breathe. There was nobody I could ask or appeal to, no family or rabbi or priest. My father, for all I knew, lay dead in a pauper’s grave or in a block of cement at the bottom of the Hudson River.

  Without checking in the mirror nailed to the wall over the Valor paraffin heater, I carefully, blindly shaved my head with an old-fashioned straight razor—the kind Dad used—that I’d bought at the local Boots. Then I turned the mirror and my posters to the wall and sat perfectly still, as empty-minded as I’d ever been. Something unfamiliar took possession of me. My shaved head kept bobbing up down up down, the way I’d seen the old-timers in Lawndale schuls pray, and to my astonishment, but not surprise, words from somewhere bubbled up, “Baruch Elokeinu melech haolam, dayan ha’emet …” I felt porous, transparent, stranded in my heart.

  Several days later—not sure how long, no eating—as if awakened by a pistol shot, I straightened up, dry-eyed, got dressed, and went to my typewriter on a table in the corner. Fasting, or Jennie’s ghost, had unjammed the memory machine and my fingers flew over the keys. (God bless Mrs. Craig of Jones Commercial!) The piece that rattled off the roll of yellow copy paper, a trick I picked up from Jack Kerouac, had nothing to do with Jennie but came easily and fast, a short story out of nowhere. I copyedited it and slipped it into an envelope, walked down to the corner red pillar box, and mailed it to the magazine New Statesman and Nation. A day later, such was the efficiency of the British postal system then, the editor rang with an acceptance. Did I want my cheque in pounds or guineas? “What’s a guinea?” “A pound plus a shilling,” he replied. A guinea, of course, I said.

  And I was on my way.

  Jennie’s death, which even today I have a hard time believing in, took a weight off me that I hadn’t even known was there and gave me a sense that I was now and forevermore alone in the world and therefore had to make something of myself. I owed her that. Other writers have told me that they, too, feel they “bought” their talent upon the death of someone close to them, including J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter’s creator, who kick-started her first book when her mother died.

  Not even for a moment have I doubted that Jennie is alive within me, watching me work out my life, including this story. It was my first literary lesson, that sometimes there’s a body buried in any writer’s skull, a sacrifice as primitive as any Aztec’s. Jennie’s death, the sum of her life, was giving me the push to go where I had no faith in myself to go, but where with all my heart—the heart that belonged to her—I knew I had to.

  Jennie neither discouraged nor inspired me to write, except that her silent guidance system—the ar
ched eyebrow, the invisible nudge, a tone of voice—unmistakably conveyed her acknowledgement that writers and poets were valuable. She read widely and joyously, everything from Gorki to Sholem Asch to P. G. Wodehouse to Mrs. Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns; she devoured the literary pages as well as the “Bintle Brief” advice column letters in the Jewish Daily Forward, which was her version of going to the public library. Names like Zola, Sinclair Lewis, and Tolstoy—whether she had read them or not—were her common coin. Despite my “low normal” IQ, she never lost faith in me, and even when she disapproved she signaled that it was okay to go beyond myself and to strive for that which had been denied her, a chance to fly as high as dreams could take us. I could not let her down.

  The moment my fingers touched the Corona portable keys to commence serious work it’s fair to say I experienced Ma’s rage as well as her beneficence. Her strength had a dark side that fed into, but also propped up, my weakness. For all her life she had maintained, at great cost, her steely self-control. Now, it seemed as if all that anger, resentment, and pent up fury she could never articulate, for fear of being consumed by it, shot straight into my veins. I don’t believe in the transmigration of souls, but this sure came close. Insofar as I have a “personality” as a writer it is, at least partly, something I borrowed from her. All this time she was teaching me how to be a writer.

  At no point while she was alive did it look as if we’d even come close. Her most conscious worry, voiced time and again, was that her little prince would end up in Cook County jail or even like her acquaintance, Homer van Meter, gored by police bullets in a snowy alley, or just an ordinary tramp with his hand out. Yet, at my worst she never gave up on the “something” in me that neither of us could exactly define. She let me be, and if I wanted to go to hell she would have to let me, except with this proviso communicated by a toss of her brilliant red hair: I am really afraid for you but don’t you dare be afraid for yourself. Do what I and your dad have not been able to do. Be better than us.

  I chose my mother wisely. Her hands are on these keys.

  No guilt, no shame, just a job to do.

  “I’ll Be Seeing You in All the Old …”

  Shortly after Jennie “passed on”—a phrase I used to laugh at but don’t anymore—I began seeing her in all the old familiar places, and some unfamiliar ones, too. Her death not only liberated me to write but had the strange side effect of triggering hallucinations, visions, mirages, and delusions, where I could swear that she slept side by side with me in my Swiss Cottage bedsit, strolled a deux along a Regent’s Park canal path, and jiggled my elbow at the Prince of Wales pub. At such moments, she appeared so lifelike, so real, so human and spontaneous that I reached out to touch her. That’s when my public behavior began crossing the line. My magazine editor or BBC producer would eye me warily when I mumbled to myself and gesticulated with strange body language (actually, like Dad, pounding my fist into my hand to make an angry point) when all I was doing, really, was arguing with Ma, who was there. Occasionally, from the top of a crowded Big Red bus, I’d audibly point out the sights to her, the Houses of Parliament, Soho’s Gay Hussar café—formerly Karl Marx’s home—Whitechapel Road, where one of her favorite authors, Jack London, wandered in the fog with gold sovereigns sewed into the lining of his shabby pea jacket, anything that might interest her.

  Instead of going gently into her grave Jennie began to loom larger in my life in some way more real than ever before; now, when I spoke to her, she answered back, the start of a process of my withdrawing from social reality into a private world of my own. A great benefit of this “craziness” was that I’d never felt so close to Jennie or felt her so near at hand. We achieved an intimacy that was impossible when she was alive. Ma, though intensely maternal, had never been a great toucher. So, even in her death, we maintained a respectful physical distance which stays with me to this day. Proprieties must be observed on either side of the shade.

  My son Joe, who knows almost everything I know about Jennie, is also in the habit of “seeing” her, as I do. He’ll step out of the shower and wrap himself in a towel and look over my shoulder and say quite conversationally, “Hi Grandma, want to see my spitball?!”

  I want to get into Jennie’s head, to think what she thinks, to keep her with me, but even in death she resists. The closest I can come to it is my own attitude to Joe when I look at him as she used to look at me, with a mix of love, admiration, amazement, disapproval, anxiety, and an only half-successful effort to keep his strong-willed personality separate from mine. In Chicago’s Lawndale there weren’t many “nice” kids Jennie could unfavorably compare me to since we Rockets bonded at the lowest level we could sink to as a matter of pleasure and pride. But today, like Custer at Little Big Horn, I’m besieged by bright, chirpy, homework-focused, get-the-class-project-done-on-time, “creative” children sometimes enjoying private tutors or sent to expensive schools who are clearly headed to a Nobel Prize, or at least a law firm partnership. By contrast, my Joe is working hard on his Mariano Rivera sinker-slider and loves hip-hop. Secretly, I long to put up a bumper sticker, “My Child is Scholar of the Month at Snootyville Elementary.” What hypocrisy. I don’t know how Jennie or Joe put up with me.

  It comes full circle. I am the mother I spent my life escaping from.

  16 Percy Comes Home

  1963:—President Kennedy murdered in Dallas. Chicago Cubs come in seventh in National League. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” civil rights march on Washington, D.C.

  A LONDON THERAPIST RAISED her skeptical eyebrow just as Jennie used to. “You start out talking about your mother but keep coming back to your father, so why don’t you find out if he really is at the bottom of the Thames with a fish in his mouth?” One reason I’d gone to the shrink was that I’d become obsessed with stalking dossers, homeless tramps, all over London, thinking they might be my Dad, grabbing them by the scruff, staring into their sunken alcoholic eyes. In the end, I simply looked up Dad in the telephone directory of his last known city, New York. American phone books were kept in the library of the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, which I had not dared enter until a Supreme Court decision freed up passports for “subversive” Americans.

  I found Dad’s name in the Bronx directory and, after procrastinating for days, called him but panicked when someone at the other end picked up.

  I shouted, “Is this Leo Sigal? This is, um—” Which name did he know me as?—Clancy, Clarence, Kalman? At the New York end the voice growls, “I’ve seen reviews. You’re the writer. So write me a letter.” And hung up.

  He was alive.

  And he knew who I was.

  All through that Cuba missiles autumn, Dad and I exchanged letters to arrange a high-level summit in New York. He kept postponing firm dates for us to meet, on this or that pretext, the last being that he had to clear it with a certain “Judge Goldfarb,” his consigliere. He added, “And I have to prepare certain other people.” What other people?

  “Percy, you’re not wearing shoe lifts, are you?” were his first words to me in twenty-three years.

  Percy who?

  This little old guy in his immaculately laundered shirtsleeves blocked the doorway and peered up at me towering over him. For just a second I thought he was going to wallop me with one of his rabbit punches. Cut it out, Clancy, you outweigh him by forty pounds.

  He had that same tight combative grin, compact fighter’s body, thick swept-back black hair almost hardly any gray, narrowed eyelids—the resemblance to the Chicago mobster, Sam Giancana, was amazing. Dad probably would not have objected to the comparison.

  A woman’s voice from inside: “You’re in his way, Leo.”

  He stepped aside.

  In his small cluttered comfortable Bronx apartment, he gestured me to a wooden straight-back chair opposite the soft chair he took. We hadn’t known whether to shake hands or hug, so we left it.

  A sturdy, pleasant-looking woman Dad’s age came in bearing a tray of cakes. />
  “Sarah, my wife,” Dad said quickly.

  She smiled a shy welcome. “You take tea?” I thanked her, and she disappeared behind a curtain into the kitchen, hardly to reappear that afternoon.

  “My second wife,” Dad added.

  “Counting Jennie?” I asked.

  “Listen, Percy—” he jerked his head toward the kitchen. “It hasn’t been easy putting all this together—”

  “Dad, I’m Clancy. Or Clarence. Or Kalman.”

  “Okay, Percy, have it your way.”

  “Clancy. It’s Clancy. Clancy Sigal.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Percy. I read about you in the New York Times. Your picture in the paper. I didn’t recognize you, but Percy did.”

  “You didn’t know it was me?”

  “Of course, Percy.”

  I gave up.

  Dodging and weaving, a Jack Dempsey of evasion, Dad fended off all my personal questions by constantly changing the subject to the British cultural scene—he was remarkably up on then-current British writing—just to let me know he wasn’t to be trifled with. His eyes sparkled with curiosity and malice. “That South African dame, the one who put you in her book, she really hooked it to you, didn’t she?” He bared his tobacco-stained teeth in an innocent smile. “How did you let yourself get sucker punched like that, Percy?”

  I slipped his jab.

  “Who,” I pressed, “is Percy?”

  Most of the afternoon was like that, an interview with a dodgy source more than the reconciliation I’d dreamed of. Stiffly, we chatted, sitting opposite each other, Kennedy and Khrushchev, while Sarah uneasily tiptoed around the cluttered flat on Nelson Avenue trying to stay out of the way. This thing was going wrong and I wanted to retrace my steps to start afresh.

  He leaned forward and tapped my knee. “Hey, put your notebook away. I don’t want to sue you for slander. I should have taken you to court what you said about me in your book. Your old man is no drunk in the gutter. What happened, you run out of inspiration?”