Zabelle

by Nancy Kricorian

  There was a grapevine growing up the back of the house and over the back porch. We had missed the season for picking grape leaves to stuff and cook, but I pulled off a few of the vine’s small green tendrils, which were crisp and sour. Soon the grapes would ripen, with purple skins and sweet flesh.

  In the morning, when Toros headed down the block to the store, I went to the garden. Carrying a child had temporarily exempted me from Vartanoush’s scolding. She had no interest in the yard, so I was free of her as long as I stayed out of the house. In the August heat, the end of pregnancy was a drug that made time flow like syrup. After the sidewalk and the marble stepping-stones were swept, I rested in a wicker chair under the pear tree. I read the newspaper, to sharpen my English, but I couldn’t concentrate. I watched the passing clouds, and waited. A car drove by. A dog barked. I shut my eyes and drifted back to my early days in Hadjin.

  My mother sang in the garden as she hung the freshly washed clothes. A voice said, “Button, button, who’s got the button?” My grandmother, my two cousins—Shushan and Anoush—and I held on to the red yarn and passed the white button from under one fist to the next. Who hid the button in her hand?

  Occasionally Moses’s face flitted across my mind’s eye, but his life in Worcester was remote and unimaginable. Most likely he had forgotten me already. Maybe he was married. I kept a small room for him in the house of memory, but as the months passed, he seemed like someone I had invented in my loneliness.

  I couldn’t keep myself from resting my hands on my enormous belly. The baby rotated like a planet on its axis. He kicked so hard, my dress jumped. He elbowed my ribs and pushed up against my lungs. There seemed to be barely enough room in my body for the both of us. I was afraid of the pain, but more than anything I wanted the baby out of me.

  My mother-in-law fussed over me more with each passing day. Don’t touch that laundry basket. Have another lahmejun. Why don’t you go lie down, honey. Maybe I should have been flattered and enjoyed the pampering. Instead I felt like a calf being fattened for the slaughter.

  I sensed something change between me, my husband, and my mother-in-law. It was not a leap, but several small steps. Toros made a stool for me to put my feet on in the evening. He brought fresh halvah. One time when the three of us were sitting together on the porch, he briefly put his hand over mine.

  When we moved into the new house, Toros and I took the large bedroom on the second floor. The room across the hall was reserved for the baby. Vartanoush had her pick of the three bedrooms under the eaves on the third floor. She knew she had been banished to a distant colony.

  In the last weeks before the baby was due, the heat was unbearable. I slept alone on a daybed on the screened front porch. I lay on my side, staring out at the tall pines that framed the house, trying to imagine the baby’s face. I wanted him to look like me so that it would be clear that he was mine. I was worried that Vartanoush would claim the baby the minute he emerged.

  In early September, one morning toward dawn, I woke up with pains. I lay on the daybed, watching light filter through the trees, as the pains gripped me every so often. When the spaces between them grew shorter, I went to find Toros. He raced to the midwife’s house and left me with Vartanoush. I sat in the armchair in our bedroom, shut my eyes, and pretended that my mother-in-law was a buzzing fly bumping against the ceiling.

  By the time Toros arrived with the midwife, the contractions felt like I was being squeezed by an enormous fist. The pain pressed all the words out of my body, and I was only pain. In a moment between two contractions, I managed to get across that I wanted Vartanoush out of the room. Toros shepherded her out, over loud protests, and the midwife shut the door.

  I climbed a steep mountain peak, where the air was so thin it tore at my lungs. The stones under my feet were sharp and unyielding. There was nothing to do but struggle to the summit. It was unspeakably lonely up there, so far from the town.

  The midwife said, “Push,” and I did. And I did again.

  The boy was small, wrinkled, and red, with a lopsided head and the puffed and folded features of a gnome. What was I supposed to feel for this thing? The midwife cleaned him, wrapped him in a blanket, and placed him in my arms. Half human, half animal, the little creature I held latched on to my breast with a strong, insistent mouth. Then he looked into my eyes.

  The midwife bundled the afterbirth in newspaper, wound up the bloodied sheets, and called to Vartanoush and Toros. They were beaming when they came into the room.

  “What a fine boy!” said the father.

  “What will you call him?” asked the old woman of her son.

  I answered before Toros, and almost without thinking, “Moses.” I paused for a second, knowing that to seal this thing I had to offer an explanation. I said, “He is chosen to be a great leader.”

  What could Toros or Vartanoush say in the face of biblical prophesy? I rubbed my cheek against the baby’s soft, tawny hair. It was a secret baptism. Now he was mine.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ways of the Wicked

  (BOSTON, 1931)

  The first weeks after Moses was born, everything was pared away, leaving only me and the baby. I slept when he slept, losing track of whether it was day or night. I knew he was hungry before he cried, because the milk let down, spreading wet circles on my dressing gown. My clothes smelled of sour milk and spit-up, my hair was always coming undone, and there were purple circles around my eyes. But I didn’t care. Holding his tiny foot in my palm while he gazed up at me was my greatest pleasure.

  Mewing kitten, squealing piglet, bleating kid, a barnyard nursery in the bassinet next to our bed. When he cried, he opened his throat and let out ear-splitting yowls. Poor Toros, who worked long hours at the market, groaned and shifted in the bed, pulling a pillow over his head. Soon I moved Moses into his room across the hall, where the two of us slept on a single bed. Sometimes, in the blur between wake and sleep, drunk with the warmth, softness, and sweet smell of the baby, I felt myself cradled in my mother’s arms.

  Eventually Moses slept in his crib and I returned to the double bed I shared with Toros. Sometimes my husband and I stood together, admiring our sleeping baby, who, to us, was the most beautiful boy in the world. For a few moments, this singular child was a wooden bridge linking two banks of a river.

  Other things changed as well. I no longer felt that Vartanoush was perched on our headboard like a glassy-eyed crow. She found room in her flinty heart for little Moses. She bathed him in the kitchen sink, not complaining when he splashed water on her dress. She took him into her lap and whispered into his ear. Vartanoush and I were never friends, but Moses softened the air between us.

  Soon the boy was walking, then chasing the neighbor’s cat up and down the yard, calling, “Gadu, gadu.” He followed me around the garden and the house, watching everything I did with big eyes. He was neat and precise, even as a toddler, insisting on changing his clothes if they were the least bit soiled. My little old man, I called him.

  One Sunday when we rode the streetcar to the Armenian church on Shawmut Avenue in Boston, Moses, who was almost three, sat in my lap, looking out the window. I saw myself in the glass, holding a solemn, fair-haired child. Toros was next to me in his Sunday best, his black-clad mother across from us. This is my family, I said to myself.

  We arrived early, which was the Chahasbanian way, and so had our choice of pews. Toros liked to be a little more than halfway back, on the left side and on the aisle. Minutes after we were seated, Moses and Vartanoush closed their eyes and slept through the liturgy and the prayers.

  Toward the end of the service, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a woman across the aisle, waving to me. I turned to look at her. She had a heart-shaped face, framed by black hair under an emerald hat. Gesturing toward the door, she mouthed, “Outside.” She wanted me to join her in the vestibule. Without thinking, I followed her up the aisle and out of the sanctuary.

  “Zabelle, honey, don’t you recognize me?” the woman
asked.

  Before my eyes flashed Arsinee and Sarkis waving goodbye to me on the day they left the orphanage. Then Arsinee giving Sarkis water from my tin cup. Our three sets of dirty feet in the sand. Black tents.

  When I opened my eyes, my head was in Arsinee’s lap as she fanned me with a lace-edged handkerchief.

  “I don’t know how you got along without me,” Arsinee said.

  “I don’t either,” I said.

  She wiped the tears from my eyes with her handkerchief.

  “How long has it been?” she asked.

  “A hundred years,” I said. “The last time I saw you, you were as thin as a stick, with a head full of lice.”

  “Those were the days,” Arsinee said with a sigh. And we both laughed.

  The doors opened as the service ended, and we scrambled to our feet. We were swept along in a sea of people out into the sunny street. Toros, Moses, and Vartanoush made their way to us through the buzzing crowd. I introduced them to Arsinee, except I didn’t know her last name.

  “Manoogian,” she said. “And here comes my husband.”

  “Manoogian,” Toros muttered under his breath. “First time he’s been to church in years.”

  “Chahasbanian! How’s business?” said Arsinee’s husband. He was about the same age as Toros. Handsome, tall, with a fine suit and a mustache that curled neatly at the corners of his mouth. The thin old man at his elbow looked like a ghostly version of his son, all gray and shadows.

  My husband shrugged. “People have to eat. How about you?”

  “People need clothes on their backs,” Manoogian replied.

  I could tell the men didn’t like each other. They were two dogs, circling each other with bared teeth and bristling hair.

  Arsinee’s mother-in-law was round and squat like a tree stump, with dark hair on her arms and small mean eyes. She had Arsinee’s baby with her. Henry, who was about the same age as Moses, looked like he had dropped from his father’s nostril, as we say.

  Manoogian tapped on the face of his gold watch. “Alice, I think it’s time we were going.”

  Arsinee gave me a hug and whispered in my ear, “Don’t call me that odar name. My husband thinks Alice makes me more American.”

  “When can I come visit?” she said in a louder voice.

  I glanced at the frowning face of my mother-in-law. Then I looked at Arsinee’s mother-in-law, who could have been Vartanoush’s uglier twin.

  Arsinee suggested, “Why don’t we meet at the school park on Wednesday afternoon. Around three.”

  For me, finding Arsinee was like Jesus raising Lazarus from the tomb. When she left the orphanage, my last link to my childhood in Hadjin was gone. I was sure that she and Sarkis had died on the road to Mersin. Years later and thousands of miles away, she bloomed like a forgotten bulb in the garden. A scarlet tulip among the daffodils. I hadn’t known what I was missing until it was returned to me. Nothing—husbands, mothers-in-law, acts of war, natural disasters—would ever separate Arsinee and me again.

  After dinner that afternoon, as we were washing the dishes, Vartanoush started needling me about Arsinee. It was predictable. She couldn’t stand the scent of my happiness.

  “How do you know that Manoogian girl?”

  “She comes from the same town as my family.” I tucked the dish towel into the waistband of my apron and carried a stack of dishes into the pantry. I made a sour face at the shelves.

  “I’m not sure I like her,” Vartanoush continued. “Did you notice how short her skirt was? It barely came to her knees, and stuck to her like her own skin.”

  “It was almost to her ankles.” I looked through narrowed eyes at my mother-in-law’s shapeless black dress and lint-covered black sweater. She had a bunched-up, graying handkerchief dangling out of the sleeve.

  “Hmmph. Alice.” Vartanoush pursed her lips. “Some name for an Armenian girl. Her husband seems to think he’s a big shot just because he owns a clothes store. And that girl’s red cheeks aren’t from nature.”

  I watched the old woman’s nose twitch above her faint white mustache and downturned mouth. She had never looked more like a rat. “Her name’s Arsinee.”

  “You told her you’d meet her at the park? What kind of place is that to meet someone? There’s all types of riffraff on the streets these days. Are you embarrassed of your own home? What if she doesn’t come right away, and you’re sitting there all alone in the park? How will that look? Who’s going to watch Moses while you’re out?”

  “I’ll take him with me,” I said.

  “Of course not. I’ll watch my little angel.”

  Moses was my shadow in the garden and the house. I had wanted a few hours of freedom, which her jealousy would buy me.

  In the late afternoon that same day, the Melkonians, a young couple who had recently arrived from Aleppo, came by for coffee. Moses played under the dining room table with a little wooden train Toros had bought him. I set a plate of cheoregs I had made on the table, along with some string cheese and homemade pear jelly. Vartanoush carried in a tray of Turkish coffee and tea.

  It was Toros’s habit to read the Sunday paper from one end to the other. Then he would recount the most depressing items, with commentary. It brought out the Protestant in him, so we were treated to a second sermon. That day, he finished the catalog of ruin and disaster with a lecture on the financial and spiritual bankruptcy of the whole country—the corruption of politicians, the evil of bootleggers, the squandered lives of drinkers, and the sinful ways of Hollywood movie stars.

  “Shameless, godless creatures, I tell you. They swim in diamonds and furs while around them people are starving. And the lives they lead! How many marriages? How many children out of wedlock? The goings-on in that wretched town are too scandalous to mention before our good women.”

  Vartanoush murmured her approval. The Melkonians nodded in assent. I spread my hands on the table to examine my nails, which needed filing. It occurred to me that I might join Moses under the table to play with the train. My husband was a good father, with fine qualities, but his righteous diatribes annoyed me. He should have been a preacher or a politician, instead of wasting all that breath on us. But the Melkonians and Vartanoush seemed to appreciate his words.

  He went on, “Every God-fearing Christian man who goes to see these movies is giving his hard-earned money to support sinners in their wicked, wicked ways.”

  “Not to mention,” added Vartanoush, “that he is filling his head with thoughts unworthy of a good Christian.”

  Varsenic Melkonian said, “When Hagop and I were walking the other day, I saw a picture of an actress in front of the Coolidge Theatre. She was half-naked, and I had to look the other way.”

  “I told my wife to turn her face,” Hagop Melkonian boasted. “The movie was called The Tarnished Lady”

  I imagined Hagop’s tongue lolling out of his mouth as he stared at the half-naked woman, while his wife, following his orders, covered her eyes with pudgy hands and walked right into a street sign.

  “Shameless,” interjected Vartanoush.

  “That’s Tallulah Bankhead,” I said. What a wonderful name that woman had. It rolled on the tongue like a grape. At that moment, I was ready to take the next bus to join her in Hollywood.

  Everyone turned to look at me. Moses came out from under the table, and I lifted him into my lap. I closed my eyes and rested my cheek on the top of his head. He was growing as fast as a vine.

  Toros continued, “I see the names of the movies in the paper. Transgression, Laughing Sinners. They won’t be laughing so hard on Judgment Day.”

  On Wednesday afternoon I put on my best clothes, as though I were going to meet the president’s wife. Vartanoush had to get in a few snippy parting remarks. But I wasn’t going to let her bother me.

  “What are you all dressed up for?”

  “I feel like it.”

  “Pride goeth before the fall.”

  I didn’t say, “The mouth of a fool poureth out foo
lishness.” I had started memorizing verses from my English Bible. I recited them in my head in response to Vartanoush. I could have said them out loud if I wanted, because she never learned more than three words of English.

  As I headed down the stairs, I said, “If he’s not up in an hour, you should wake him.”

  “You act like I don’t know my own grandson,” she called after me.

  As soon as I was out the back gate, I felt like I had shed a heavy coat with stones in its pockets. My shoes skimmed the sidewalk. I passed the market on Mount Auburn Street, where Toros was at the cash register, giving change to a customer. He didn’t notice me go by. It was as if I were invisible or another person altogether.

  When I reached the park, I saw Arsinee coming across the open field. We both started running and met in the middle, breathless and happy. I felt young, not like an old married woman.

  “Come on,” said Arsinee, taking my arm, “let’s sit under the trees.”

  “Not on the bench?” I didn’t want to ruin my best dress.

  “It’s nicer over there in the shade.”

  Out of a carpetbag, Arsinee pulled a tablecloth. “I brought this for us to sit on. My mother-in-law will take the rug beater to me if she finds out, but there’s no reason she should know.”

  “She beats you?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it made me angry.

  “When she gets a chance. The old demon has a temper, but I stay out of trouble. Most of the time.”

  “What does your husband say?”

  Arsinee laughed broadly, showing the gold crowns of her teeth. “He’s happy to let her keep me in line.”

  Nobody did any hitting in our house anymore. Once in a while Moses got a swat on the seat of his pants, but that was it. Toros was the kind of man who shouted and banged doors. When he was truly furious, he glowered like a volcano. But no beating. Not even from Vartanoush, not since that time she knocked me down the stairs.