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Authors: Vivian Gornick

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So there were the Kerners, riddled with hate, secretly locked together in sexual spasm, and there were my parents, loving each other, while their bed rode chastely about in open space. Downstairs the house was a shambles, the husband exiled to the living room, the wife a half-mad dreamer; upstairs all was barracks-clean, the husband at the fixed center, the wife impassioned and opinionated. These differences refused to imprint on me. They felt neither striking nor crucial. What did register was that both Mrs. Kerner and my mother adored romantic emotion, and both were married women.
 
 
We’re walking up Fifth Avenue. It’s a bad day for me. I’m feeling fat and lonely, trapped in my lousy life. I know I should be home working, and that I’m here playing the dutiful daughter only to avoid the desk. The anxiety is so great I’m walking with a stomachache. My mother, as always, knows she can do nothing for me, but my unhappiness makes her nervous. She is talking, talking at tedious, obfuscating length, about a cousin of mine who is considering divorce.
As we near the library an Eastern religionist (shaved head, translucent skin, a bag of bones wrapped in faded pink gauze) darts at us, a copy of his leader’s writings extended in his hand. My mother keeps talking while the creature in gauze flaps around us, his spiel a steady buzz in the air, competing for my attention. At last, she feels interrupted. She turns to him. “What is it?” she says. “What do you want from me? Tell me.” He tells her. She hears him out. Then she straightens her shoulders, draws herself up to her full five feet two inches, and announces: “Young man, I am a Jew and a socialist. I think that’s more than enough for one lifetime, don’t you?” The pink-gowned boy-man is charmed, and for a moment bemused. “My parents are Jews,” he confides, “but they certainly aren’t socialists.” My mother stares at him, shakes her head, grasps my arm firmly in her fingers, and marches me off up the avenue.
“Can you believe this?” she says. “A nice Jewish boy
shaves his head and babbles in the street. A world full of crazies. Divorce everywhere, and if not divorce, this. What a generation you all are!”
“Don’t start, Ma,” I say. “I don’t want to hear that bullshit again.”
“Bullshit here, bullshit there,” she says, “it’s still true. Whatever else we did, we didn’t fall apart in the streets like you’re all doing. We had order, quiet, dignity. Families stayed together, and people lived decent lives.”
“That’s a crock. They didn’t lead decent lives, they lived hidden lives. You’re not going to tell me people were happier then, are you?”
“No,” she capitulates instantly. “I’m not saying that.”
“Well, what are you saying?”
She frowns and stops talking. Searches around in her head to find out what she is saying. Ah, she’s got it. Triumphant, accusing, she says, “The unhappiness is so
alive
today.”
Her words startle and gratify me. I feel pleasure when she says a true or a clever thing. I come close to loving her. “That’s the first step, Ma,” I say softly. “The unhappiness has to be made alive before anything can happen.”
She stops in front of the library. She doesn’t want to hear what I’m saying, but she’s excited by the exchange. Her faded brown eyes, dark and brilliant in my childhood, brighten as the meaning of her words and mine penetrates her thought. Her cheeks flush and her pudding-soft face hardens wonderfully with new definition. She looks beautiful to me. I know from experience she will remember this afternoon as a deeply pleasurable one. I also know she will not be able to tell anyone why it has been pleasurable.
She enjoys thinking, only she doesn’t know it. She has never known it.
 
 
 
 
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 toward 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.”
BOOK: Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
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