by David Rakoff
If it weren’t so tragic, it could have been farce—
Her daughter no longer her charge, now her captor,
She screamed in her face, then she shook her, she slapped her.
“Don’t dare close your eyes, Miss. We’re nowhere near through.
I asked you, now tell me. Just. What. Did. You. DO?”
“Enough!” Kovacs cried. “The poor girl is senseless.
What kind of monster would beat a defenseless…
I come … as you asked me … to see to the boys.
I heard what I thought was a fight over toys,
But clearly, I come upon Frank unawares,
Who quickly shoved past, nearly pushed me downstairs.”
“Where was Frank going?” her mother began,
But Kovacs just stopped her, “Believe me, yer man
Won’t be back no time soon. And I tell you myself
If he does, I will call the cops. Look at her … Twelve!”
But to look at her daughter she now was unable.
Everywhere else—be it cupboard or table—
Seemed fine, as before, neither sullied nor tainted
But one look at Margaret, she knew she’d have fainted.
She sighed, “Filthy water will seek its own level,
What did I expect, with that hair o’ the devil …”
She turned from her child, shook her head with a mutter,
“And so, as I feared, I’ve a girl from the gutter.”
It took seven days until Frankie came back.
He’d drunk that whole week, and he’d gotten the sack.
Mrs. Kovacs never did end up calling the law
Since Margaret was five days gone, burrowed in straw
Of a western-bound boxcar, past Denver by then.
And nobody ever saw Margaret again.
Well, speaking quite strictly, not technically true.
But no one back home, no one whom she once knew.
The Margaret of Now left the Margaret Before
On a train hugging close to Lake Michigan’s shore
Before peeling off on its way to the coast
Margaret, alone, with two dollars at most
Scrounged up by Mrs. Kovacs; a rye loaf with seeds,
Some sausage, a knife which, “Please God, you won’t need.”
About two hours out, in her iron-wheeled home,
And Margaret found out that she wasn’t alone.
A man, dark and thin and about twenty-two-ish,
She pegged him as either a Bohunk or Jewish.
Too weak to feel fear (she was halfway to dead),
He stayed where he was, though he bowed down his head
In a gesture of most polite, courtliest greeting
As though in the dining car’s first-class, first seating.
The only thing he did with any persistence
Was offer her food. Otherwise the short distance
Between them might have been the deepest of moats,
They kept to their sides, bundled up in their coats.
Until one night, rolling across the white flats
Of a snowy Dakota, the barely-there slats
Of the car were no match for the blizzard outside.
Margaret was simply unable to hide
From the cold so severe she feared she might die
And there was the man now beside her. “Let I …”
He said, stuffing straw into all of the cracks,
He lay down, pulling Margaret in, molding her back
To his front, then enfolding her, so that she’d feel
His warmth while he whispered, repeated, “Sha, Schtil…”
And soon Margaret slept in the train’s gentle quaking,
But warm and relaxed and no longer shaking.
His song was a comfort, a womb she could bundle in.
But no meaning at all: “Rozhinkes … Mandlen…”
She woke the next morning, the train briefly parked
To take on supplies. Her friend had disembarked.
From then on until Margaret reached her destination
The cold didn’t manage the same penetration.
If in ’28, you had chanced by the water
Of Seattle’s harbor, you might spy three daughters
Working alongside two sons and a mother
And dad, you would see something lovely and other:
The father, a raven-haired man, Japanese,
The mother, with hair like the autumnal trees,
And children just Western enough so’s to pass
With tresses the color of bright polished brass.
The wife wraps your fish, gives you one of her smiles,
But her eyes tell a journey of thousands of miles.
And in the Midwest, a babe pulled from the loins
Has a head full of curls shining like copper coins,
And the midwife is twigged to a child from years back
But there’ve been so many babies, by now she’s lost track.
“To pay for what crime, what malfeasance, what sin?”
Clifford’s mother mused, picking her blouse from her skin.
“Malibu’s breezy, Hollywood’s shady
But Burbank? He might as well’ve brought us to Hades!
I could just yip when I think of the crime it
Was moving me out here ‘because of the climate.’ ”
The fan in her hand the scene’s sole, languid motion,
“I once heard it said that there was an ocean
Not terribly distant from where we sit here,
But, I suppose that was just a bum steer.
Escaping me now are the details specific,
But could it be named something like ‘The Pacific’?”
Her voice was dramatic, befitting her role
Of a truth-telling wag: witty, gin-dry, and droll.
She reasoned it thus: that it surely beat weeping
And couldn’t help smiling with how out of keeping
It was with the truth of her fate-handed cards
Her down-at-heel block with its sun-roasted yards
She found it amusing and helped pass the day
To speak like a guest at a fancy soiree,
She battled the hours without end with a heightened
Insouciance, like whistling when, truly, one’s frightened.
With steely resolve she kept up this appearance
Her husband no more than a mild interference
The way one might greet less than optimal weather.
His half-palsied body? As light as a feather!
Diminishing powers of speech, what a scream!
Feeding and grooming (hours each), such a dream.
It might take all morning to just get him showered
And yet one might think she had married Noël Coward
Such teddibly juicy, just-so bits of news
With witty, urbane, comme il faut aperçus.
Even though it was usually just she and her son
Who, though six, proved a rapt audience of one.
She sat on the porch with her thousand-yard stare
And spent each day parked in her old wicker chair.
The yard a brown painting of motionless calm
The packed, ochre dirt and the lone, scraggly palm.
No sway to its fronds nor the measly dry grasses,
Immobile and baking in air like molasses.
Nearby was the car, having one was a must,
A ’38 Packard, near silver with dust.
Her husband had needed it when he was traveling
But that, too, was part of the wholesale unraveling
Of what had once been a not-horrible life,
But now here she was, neither widow nor wife
Like flies trapped in amber, the three of them stuck
Like so many others dealt cards of rough luck.
Clifford, attempting to shake off her blues,
Might draw her a ha
t or a new pair of shoes:
A bonnet fantastic, bombastic, and huge, he
Appended three veils and a tiny Mount Fuji.
Pumps clasped with diamonds and marabou trimming
And thick soles of glass, housing live goldfish, swimming!
His mother surveyed his designs with a laugh,
“If I wore these both, I would be a giraffe.”
He lived for her laughter and after that how
She might rustle the fine hair that fell ’cross his brow.
“You have scads more talent, beyond any other
Kid I’ve ever seen, and I’m not just your mother.
I’m a good judge of art.” With her fingers she gaveled
The armrest. “I’ve seen things. Remember, I’ve traveled.”
Remember she’d traveled? As if he’d forget.
Her life before him was the thing that beget
His voracious desire and unquenchable fond-
ness for all the world’s beauty that lay just beyond
Their veranda enclosed in its old fly-flecked screen.
Cliff sometimes felt like the one who had been.
The Great War concluded a scant two years prior.
They’d sailed to a Europe no longer on fire,
“Our trunks bore initials with golden embossing
A French tutor booked for each day of the crossing
And Father tipped porters with whole silver dollars!
I had a wool coat with a beaver-fur collar,
And dresses! A new one for each day at sea
Not counting the outfits we’d change after tea
And for each ensemble, a different purse!”
(Clifford had memorized chapter and verse.)
“He was so profligate, heedless, and rash.
It’s quite a feat how, with no help from the Crash
How easily parted our gold from that fool
By ’26 Sally and I had to leave school.”
As with all else, she would choose to be funny
About how her father had squandered his money:
“And all of us crammed in that one narrow row house.
If not for our wages, there would have been no house.
Last I heard, Father was down on the Bowery,
A whole mess of bother and woe was my dowry.
Your grandfather, Clifford, could sure make a mess
Of a perfectly good situa … I digress.
Fish knives and cake forks, and gleaming tureens!
Truly, your aunt and I ate like young queens.
New Year’s on board was all revel and roister-
ing. Crackers with prizes, and champagne with oysters.”
Each knot from the shore, she could feel adolescence
Depart in the wake’s churning, green phosphorescence,
And churning in her was, as if by duress,
An appetite—bone deep—a need to transgress.
The evenings were worse, once the supper bell rang,
The darkness, the wine, well, her blood fairly sang.
“A dark Turkish ensign gave me my first kiss,”
And then she paused, “Should I be telling you this?
Ah, might as well learn,” she went on with a shrug,
“His tongue in my mouth was a slimy, fat slug.
I remember I thought to myself, ‘Holy Jesus,
This will not be worth it unless Father sees us.’ ”
With deepest conviction she found near hilarious
Clifford stopped viewing the trip as vicarious.
Studying programs, the postcards, the scraps,
He fingered the flyers and mangled the maps
An El Greco folio she’d kept from the Prado
A stub from the D’Oyly Carte’s thrilling Mikado
She’d tied to a Soho-bought gilt ivory fan,
(He counted the two as a stop in Japan).
Above all, the thing that had captured his heart,
And opened his world: reproductions of art.
Bernini and Rubens, Poussin and David
They filled Clifford with a near-physical need
To render as best as he could all he saw
The only desire Clifford had was to draw,
To master the methods the artist commands
That translate a thing from the eye to the hands.
There might be a hint in the dry introductions
He’d flip back between them and the reproductions.
Clifford consumed them as if they were food;
He studied how color might render a mood
Skin tone and placement, drapery and flowers
Moonlight on lovers asleep beneath bowers
Torments endured with a saint’s skyward smile
Nuance, technique, composition, and style.
Landscapes with dream-like blue hills in the distance,
The Sabine’s dramatic, up-reaching resistance
Of strong Roman arms that were trying to rape her,
His greasy young fingers had yellowed the paper.
The jam smears and markings and smudges and rips
All left in the scrapbooks she’d kept of her trips.
Souvenirs treasured like they were his own,
He swore that he’d go there as well once he’d grown.
“Make sure to say yes, then, if anyone offers,
Since there’s not a sou in the family coffers.”
She gave up entirely the impulse to say,
“It’s lovely out, Cliffie, why don’t you go play?”
And play where, exactly? The yard was an eyesore,
(They’d seen in a newsreel, a famine in Mysore,
Identical dirt turned to similar mud,
A sacred cow chewing its sad, holy cud
Flies crawling over a child’s thin, dry face,
She heard Clifford whisper, “That’s just like my place!”).
He liked it indoors where, dark as a séance,
Hunched over his sketchbook with pencil and crayons
And sprawled on the carpet in front of the wireless
He filled up the pages, his output was tireless.
Amethyst asters on brown banks of peat,
Aloes with leaves thick and fleshy as meat.
Beryl-eyed lions and gray monkeys who so
Resembled the creatures of Le Douanier Rousseau.
Succulents’ paddles and dew-heavy fronds,
Tourmaline fish swam through indigo ponds,
Ivies that twined with a grip near prehensile…
All sprang alive from the tip of Cliff’s pencil.
Inspired by his Child’s Book of Fauna and Flora
And broadcasts of Rex Bond, Inveterate Explorer!
O Rex! Weekly captured or worse, left for dead
In faraway places that filled Clifford’s head
Rex could escape from the direst of rotten spots
Bloodthirsty tigers or cannibal Hottentots,
Meeting his end in the desert, the drink,
Tsetse flies, quicksand, or thrown in the clink
Left on a newly calved iceberg, adrift
But lately the perils had made a slight shift.
Fictional savages, strange voodoo mystics
Supplanted by dangers far more realistic.
Now Japs with their cunning, or Jerries with Mausers
Tried, but could not muss the crease of his trousers.
“For boys, just remember, the fieriest blitz
Is no match against our American wits!
Stay alert and stay wise to all foreign-born knavery.
Show grit and resolve and mimic the bravery
Of all of our men on the land, air, and sea
Who continue to fight so that we may be free!
When a threat rears its head, don’t shrink and don’t cower
Just rise to the challenge, like Amber Wave Flour!
Takes recipes meager and renders them rich,
If eager for
tender cakes, Mother should switch!
And remember, the dawn comes when things seem most bleak,
Good night, boy and girls, and please tune in next week!”
There’s little as scalding as juvenile ardor.
It’s quickening as hatred or anger, but harder
To parse, ’specially when one must feign not to covet
One’s heart’s one desire, one’s secret beloved
Since others might feel it was somehow unsuitable
So you become guarded, sphinx-like, inscrutable.
But sleep—free of judgment—knits care’s raveled sleeve.
In slumber, without so much as “by your leave,”
Was Clifford allowed certain muscles to flex
And truly be all that he could to dear Rex.
A Rex, needing rescue, who’d sent an alert
To Clifford, uniquely equipped to avert
A numinous, formless, Rex-threat’ning disaster
Conspiring to injure his muscular master.
He’d find Rex bound up in some old, empty warehouse
And carry him home (in the dream it was their house)
He’d bathe him and generally salve the abuses
By pressing his lips to incipient bruises.
Until, the repletion near up to the hilt, he
Would waken quite shaken and sweaty (and guilty),
To find that his mother was calling his name…
So back to the world of his clandestine shame.
“I may well be shrewd, but not ‘shrewish,’ ” she’d titter,
By which she meant not irretrievably bitter;
Twelve years and counting, still able to joke
Despite her sick husband, quite corkscrewed with stroke.
And truly she was shrewd, had practical knowledge
And worked in the local community college
Keeping the books, a quite valuable service
The dean told her numbers had made him quite nervous.
And thanks to her privileged employee’s status
She put Cliff in Life Drawing, totally gratis.
“It’s each Monday night for three hours,” she told
