Modern American Memoirs

by Annie Dillard

  I knew nothing more of death then than what I had learned of it from the slippery green frog, and nothing more of darkness than the night. I had never lost anything that I was not sure would be replaced if I really needed it by the people I loved, and I had never been hurt beyond the power of a word of comfort to heal. But whenever my father and mother left, taking home with them, I knew that hurt, loss, darkness, death could flatten that house in seconds. And to a degree that I had no way of knowing, and in ways that I could not possibly foresee, I was right.

  VIVIAN GORNICK (1935- )

  Vivian Gornick, born in New York City, attended City College, and took her M.A. at New York University. For nine years she was a staff writer for the Village Voice.

  She wrote In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt (1973), The Romance of American Communism (1977), Essays in Feminism (1979), and Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition (1990).

  Her striking memoir, Fierce Attachments (1987), describes her ongoing vexed and deep relationship with her mother, and recalls her childhood in the Bronx in the 1940s. In this section, Nettie, a Ukrainian gentile, is her family’s neighbor.

  from FIERCE ATTACHMENTS

  A year after my mother told Mrs. Drucker she was a whore the Druckers moved out of the building and Nettie Levine moved into their vacated apartment. I have no memory of the Druckers moving out or of Nettie moving in, no truck or moving van coming to take away or deposit the furniture, dishes, or clothes of the one or of the other. People and all their belongings seemed to evaporate out of an apartment, and others simply took their place. How early I absorbed the circumstantial nature of most attachments. After all, what difference did it really make if we called the next-door neighbor Roseman or Drucker or Zimmerman? It mattered only that there was a next-door neighbor. Nettie, however, would make a difference.

  I was running down the stairs after school, rushing to get out on the street, when we collided in the darkened hallway. The brown paper bags in her arms went flying in all directions. We each said “Oh!” and stepped back, I against the staircase railing, she against the paint-blistered wall. I bent, blushing, to help her retrieve the bags scattered across the landing and saw that she had bright red hair piled high on her head in a pompadour and streaming down her back and over her shoulders. Her features were narrow and pointed (the eyes almond-shaped, the mouth and nose thin and sharp), and her shoulders were wide but she was slim. She reminded me of the pictures of Greta Garbo. My heart began to pound. I had never before seen a beautiful woman.

  “Don’t worry about the packages,” she said to me. “Go out and play. The sun is shining. You mustn’t waste it here in the dark. Go, go.” Her English was accented, like the English of the other women in the building, but her voice was soft, almost musical, and her words took me by surprise. My mother had never urged me not to lose pleasure, even if it was only the pleasure of the sunny street. I ran down the staircase, excited. I knew she was the new neighbor. (“A Ukrainishe redhead married to a Jew,” my mother had remarked dryly only two or three days before.)

  Two evenings later, as we were finishing supper, the doorbell rang and I answered it. There she stood. “I…I…” She laughed, a broken, embarrassed laugh. “Your mother invited me.” She looked different standing in the doorway, coarse and awkward, a peasant with a pretty face, not at all the gorgeous creature of the hallway. Immediately, I felt poised and generous. “Come in.” I stepped courteously aside in the tiny foyer to let her pass into the kitchen.

  “Sit down, sit down,” my mother said in her rough-friendly voice, as distinguished from her rough I-really-mean-this voice. “Have a cup of coffee, a piece of pie.” She pushed my brother. “Move over. Let Mrs. Levine sit down on the bench.” A high-backed wooden bench ran the length of one side of the table; my brother and I each claimed a sprawling place on the bench as fast as we could.

  “Perhaps you’d like a glass of schnapps?” My handsome, gentle father smiled, proud that his wife was being so civil to a Gentile.

  “Oh no,” demurred Nettie, “it would make me dizzy. And please”—she turned ardently toward my mother—“call me Nettie, not Mrs. Levine.”

  My mother flushed, pleased and confused. As always, when uncertain she beat a quick retreat into insinuation. “I haven’t seen Mr. Levine, have I,” she said. In her own ears this was a neutral question, in anyone else’s it was a flat statement bordering on accusation.

  “No, you haven’t.” Nettie smiled. “He isn’t here. Right now he’s somewhere on the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Oy vay, he’s in the army,” my mother announced, the color beginning to leave her cheeks. It was the middle of the war. My brother was sixteen, my father in his late forties. My mother had been left in peace. Her guilt was extravagant.

  “No,” said Nettie, looking confused herself. “He’s in the Merchant Marine.” I don’t think she fully understood the distinction. Certainly my mother didn’t. She turned an inquiring face toward my father. He shrugged and looked blank.

  “That’s a seaman, Ma,” my brother said quickly. “He works as a sailor, but he’s not in the navy. He works on ships for private companies.”

  “But I thought Mr. Levine was Jewish,” my mother protested innocently.

  My brother’s face brightened nearly to purple, but Nettie only smiled proudly. “He is,” she said.

  My mother dared not say what she wanted to say: Impossible! What Jew would work voluntarily on a ship?

  Everything about Nettie proved to be impossible. She was a Gentile married to a Jew like no Jew we had ever known. Alone most of the time and apparently free to live wherever she chose, she had chosen to live among working-class Jews who offered her neither goods nor charity. A woman whose sexy good looks brought her darting glances of envy and curiosity, she seemed to value inordinately the life of every respectable dowd. She praised my mother lavishly for her housewifely skills—her ability to make small wages go far, always have the house smelling nice and the children content to be at home—as though these skills were a treasure, some precious dowry that had been denied her, and symbolized a life from which she had been shut out. My mother—secretly as amazed as everyone else by Nettie’s allure—would look thoughtfully at her when she tried (often vaguely, incoherently) to speak of the differences between them, and would say to her, “But you’re a wife now. You’ll learn these things. It’s nothing. There’s nothing to learn.” Nettie’s face would then flush painfully, and she’d shake her head. My mother didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain.

  Rick Levine returned to New York two months after Nettie had moved into the building. She was wildly proud of her tall, dark, bearded seaman—showing him off in the street to the teenagers she had made friends with, dragging him in to meet us, making him go to the grocery store with her—and she became visibly transformed. A kind of illumination settled on her skin. Her green almond eyes were speckled with light. A new grace touched her movements: the way she walked, moved her hands, smoothed back her hair. There was suddenly about her an aristocracy of physical being. Her beauty deepened. She was untouchable.

  I saw the change in her, and was magnetized. I would wake up in the morning and wonder if I was going to run into her in the hall that day. If I didn’t, I’d find an excuse to ring her bell. It wasn’t that I wanted to see her with Rick: his was a sullen beauty, glum and lumpish, and there was nothing happening between them that interested me. It was her I wanted to see, only her. And I wanted to touch her. My hand was always threatening to shoot away from my body out toward her face, her arm, her side. I yearned toward her. She radiated a kind of promise I couldn’t stay away from, I wanted…I wanted…I didn’t know what I wanted.

  But the elation was short-lived: hers and mine. One morning, a week after Rick’s return, my mother ran into Nettie as they were both leaving the house. Nettie turned away from her.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother demanded. “Turn around. Let me see your face.” Nettie turned tow
ard her slowly. A tremendous blue-black splotch surrounded her half-closed right eye.

  “Oh my God,” my mother breathed reverently.

  “He didn’t mean it,” Nettie pleaded. “It was a mistake. He wanted to go down to the bar to see his friends. I wouldn’t let him go. It took a long time before he hit me.”

  After that she looked again as she had before he came home. Two weeks later Rick Levine was gone again, this time on a four-month cruise. He swore to his clinging wife that this would be his last trip. When he came home in April, he said, he would find a good job in the city and they would at long last settle down. She believed that he meant it this time, and finally she let him pull her arms from around his neck. Six weeks after he had sailed she discovered she was pregnant. Late in the third month of his absence she received a telegram informing her that Rick had been shot to death during a quarrel in a bar in port somewhere on the Baltic Sea. His body was being shipped back to New York, and the insurance was in question.

  Nettie became intertwined in the dailiness of our life so quickly it was hard later for me to remember what our days had been like before she lived next door. She’d slip in for coffee late in the morning, then again in the afternoon, and seemed to have supper with us three nights a week. Soon I felt free to walk into her house at any hour, and my brother was being consulted daily about the puzzling matter of Rick’s insurance.

  “It’s a pity on her,” my mother kept saying. “A widow. Pregnant, poor, abandoned.”

  Actually, her unexpected widowhood made Nettie safely pathetic and safely other. It was as though she had been trying, long before her husband died, to let my mother know that she was disenfranchised in a way Mama could never be, perched only temporarily on a landscape Mama was entrenched in, and when Rick obligingly got himself killed this deeper truth became apparent. My mother could now sustain Nettie’s beauty without becoming unbalanced, and Nettie could help herself to Mama’s respectability without being humbled. The compact was made without a word between them. We got beautiful Nettie in the kitchen every day, and Nettie got my mother’s protection in the building. When Mrs. Zimmerman rang our bell to inquire snidely after the shiksa my mother cut her off sharply, telling her she was busy and had no time to talk nonsense. After that no one in the building gossiped about Nettie in front of any of us.

  My mother’s loyalty once engaged was unswerving. Loyalty, however, did not prevent her from judging Nettie; it only made her voice her reservations in a manner rather more indirect than the one to which she was accustomed. She would sit in the kitchen with her sister, my aunt Sarah, who lived four blocks away, discussing the men who had begun to appear, one after another, at Nettie’s door in the weeks following Rick’s death. These men were his shipmates, particularly the ones who had been on board with him on this last voyage, coming to offer condolences to the widow of one of their own, and to talk over with her the matter of the seaman’s life insurance, which evidently was being withheld from Nettie because of the way in which Rick had died. There was, my mother said archly, something strange about the way these men visited. Oh? My aunt raised an interested eyebrow. What exactly was strange? Well, my mother offered, some of them came only once, which was normal, but some of them came twice, three times, one day after another, and those who came two, three times had a look about them, she must surely be wrong about this, but they looked almost as though they thought they were getting away with something. And Nettie herself acted strangely with these men. Perhaps that was what was most troubling: the odd mannerisms Nettie seemed to adopt in the presence of the men. My mother and my aunt exchanged “glances.”

  “What do you mean?” I would ask loudly. “What’s wrong with the way she acts? There’s nothing wrong with the way she acts. Why are you talking like this?” They would become silent then, both of them, neither answering me nor talking again that day about Nettie, at least not while I was in the room.

  One Saturday morning I walked into Nettie’s house without knocking (her door was always closed but never locked). Her little kitchen table was propped against the wall beside the front door—her foyer was smaller than ours, you fell into the kitchen—and people seated at the table were quickly “caught” by anyone who entered without warning. That morning I saw a tall thin man with straw-colored hair sitting at the kitchen table. Opposite him sat Nettie, her head bent toward the cotton-print tablecloth I loved (we had shiny, boring oilcloth on our table). Her arm was stretched out, her hand lying quietly on the table. The man’s hand, large and with great bony knuckles on it, covered hers. He was gazing at her bent head. I came flying through the door, a bundle of nine-year-old intrusive motion. She jumped in her seat, and her head came up swiftly. In her eyes was an expression I would see many times in the years ahead but was seeing that day for the first time, and although I had not the language to name it I had the sentience to feel jarred by it. She was calculating the impression this scene was making on me….

  It rained earlier in the day and now, at one in the afternoon, for a minute and a half, New York is washed clean. The streets glitter in the pale spring sunlight. Cars radiate dust-free happiness. Storefront windows sparkle mindlessly. Even people look made anew.

  We’re walking down Eighth Avenue into the Village. At the corner of Eighth and Greenwich is a White Tower hamburger joint, where a group of derelicts in permanent residence entertain visiting out-of-towners from Fourteenth Street, Chelsea, even the Bowery. This afternoon the party on the corner, often raucous, is definitely on the gloomy side, untouched by weather renewal. As we pass the restaurant doors, however, one gentleman detaches from the group, takes two or three uncertain steps, and bars our way. He stands, swaying, before us. He is black, somewhere between twenty-five and sixty. His face is cut and swollen, the eyelids three-quarters shut. His hair is a hundred filthy matted little pigtails, his pants are held up by a piece of rope, his shoes are two sizes too large, the feet inside them bare. So is his chest, visible beneath a grimy tweed coat that swings open whenever he moves. This creature confronts us, puts out his hand palm up, and speaks.

  “Can you ladies let me have a thousand dollars for a martini?” he inquires.

  My mother looks directly into his face. “I know we’re in an inflation,” she says, “but a thousand dollars for a martini?”

  His mouth drops. It’s the first time in God knows how long that a mark has acknowledged his existence. “You’re beautiful,” he burbles at her. “Beautiful.”

  “Look on him,” she says to me in Yiddish. “Just look on him.”

  He turns his bleary eyelids in my direction. “Whad-she-say?” he demands. “Whad-she-say?”

  “She said you’re breaking her heart,” I tell him.

  “She-say-that?” His eyes nearly open. “She-say-that?”

  I nod. He whirls at her. “Take me home and make love to me,” he croons, and right there in the street, in the middle of the day, he begins to bay at the moon. “I need you,” he howls at my mother and doubles over, his fist in his stomach. “I need you.”

  She nods at him. “I need too,” she says dryly. “Fortunately or unfortunately, it is not you I need.” And she propels me around the now motionless derelict. Paralyzed by recognition, he will no longer bar our progress down the street.

  We cross Abingdon Square and walk into Bleecker Street. The gentrified West Village closes around us, makes us not peaceful but quiet. We walk through block after block of antique stores, gourmet shops, boutiques, not speaking. But for how long can my mother and I not speak?

  “So I’m reading the biography you gave me,” she says. I look at her, puzzled, and then I remember. “Oh!” I smile in wide delight. “Are you enjoying it?”

  “Listen,” she begins. The smile drops off my face and my stomach contracts. That “listen” means she is about to trash the book I gave her to read. She is going to say, “What. What’s here? What’s here that I don’t already know? I lived through it. I know it all. What can this writer tell me that I don�
�t already know? Nothing. To you it’s interesting, but to me? How can this be interesting to me?”

  On and on she’ll go, the way she does when she thinks she doesn’t understand something and she’s scared, and she’s taking refuge in scorn and hypercriticality.

  The book I gave her to read is a biography of Josephine Herbst, a thirties writer, a stubborn willful raging woman grabbing at politics and love and writing, in there punching until the last minute.

  “Listen,” my mother says now in the patronizing tone she thinks conciliatory. “Maybe this is interesting to you, but not to me. I lived through all this. I know it all. What can I learn from this? Nothing. To you it’s interesting. Not to me.”

  Invariably, when she speaks so, my head fills with blood and before the sentences have stopped pouring from her mouth I am lashing out at her. “You’re an ignoramus, you know nothing, only a know-nothing talks the way you do. The point of having lived through it, as you say, is only that the background is familiar, so the book is made richer, not that you could have written the book. People a thousand times more educated than you have read and learned from this book, but you can’t learn from it?” On and on I would go, thoroughly ruining the afternoon for both of us.

  However, in the past year an odd circumstance has begun to obtain. On occasion, my head fails to fill with blood. I become irritated but remain calm. Not falling into a rage, I do not make a holocaust of the afternoon. Today, it appears, one of those moments is upon us. I turn to my mother, throw my left arm around her still solid back, place my right hand on her upper arm, and say, “Ma, if this book is not interesting to you, that’s fine. You can say that.” She looks coyly at me, eyes large, head half-turned; now she’s interested. “But don’t say it has nothing to teach you. That there’s nothing here. That’s unworthy of you, and of the book, and of me. You demean us all when you say that.” Listen to me. Such wisdom. And all of it gained ten minutes ago.