MY MOTHER HAD two sisters, Christina and Lorraine. We lived on the east side of Hebron, they on the south side. The east side had many churches, the south side few. But they did have road houses and ethnic clubs, or “halls,” where dances were held Friday and Saturday nights. I knew my aunts by name only, uttered when my father wished to cast aspersions on Mother’s family. If I inquired about her mysterious sisters, Mother’d refuse to answer. Father would say they were in business.
“What kind of business?”
“They peddle fish,” he’d guffaw, and Mother would leave the room.
He had a sister and a brother whom I also never saw. Uncle Mark traveled the States with the Mills Brothers Circus. Father said he was a lion tamer. To which Mother would retort: “And a whoremaster.”
Agnes, his sister, even my friends knew, danced on stage Saturday evenings at the local BPOE. The family seldom talked about her either.
So when birthdays, Thanksgivings and Christmases were celebrated, it was just the three of us. No cards or gifts or even trips to the homes of my uncles and aunts. I found it very peculiar, inasmuch as I thought that’s what relatives were for. Places to visit and get presents from. Also, I knew there were cousins whom I’d never met.
But it was Christina for whom Mother held a soft spot. Father clearly had dismissed his siblings, even to the point of crossing the street when either of them approached. And Lorraine, well, she lived in a cellar with a tar-paper roof (she was saving money, ostensibly to build a house on top of it), and stole meat from the local A&P. While Christina, Mother said, lived in a fine white brick home in the hollow with some Polish gentleman and drove a new Mercury sedan.
We clearly didn’t have the kind of money she did. Father’s car was twenty years old and periodically I’d paint whitewalls on its tires before he’d go out on a summer evening. Mother was an avid churchgoer and the only time she dressed up fancy (an iris dress and black cloth coat with buttons as large as silver dollars) was on Sundays for morning service and then again at vespers. Father dressed fancy Friday and Saturday nights to return early the next morning, stumbling drunk up over the banks of our front yard.
Even at that early age, I’d detected a puzzling incongruity operating between them. Mother, a pious woman who seldom wore makeup and prohibited foul language or alcohol in the house, kept our bungalow, its sparse furniture, and her person pathologically clean. She and the house smelled of Clorox, Lysol or Oxydol. Father, on the other hand, who fancied himself a forties Lothario, had an easy laugh. When he spoke warmly about Mother, it was only in the context of what an “extraordinary mother” she was, and that she’d missed her calling: “She should’ve run an orphanage.”
For years I thought that was a compliment. Until adolescence when I understood it was an additional way to wound her. Like he’d shame her by bringing up Christina or Lorraine’s names. And herein lay the incongruity.
It had been cloaked in childhood ignorance. A conundrum that nagged at me but resisted clarification. (Early on I had seen the word “sex” printed in the Sunday paper. I asked her what the word meant. She replied that it was a word I wasn’t to use.) On Saturday or Sunday morning, if I happened to be up before the two of them, I might glance into their bedroom. I’d see Father naked, lying askew with the cover off him, his arms akimbo, as if he’d thrashed through the night and was utterly spent, and Mother primly “mummied” up on the edge of the mattress, stiff and wound tight in a blanket. The face of the incongruity.
But what mystified me then was Father’s two seemingly contradictory taunts to Mother. I soon understood the she-should-never’ve-gotten-married dagger. Her talents as a mother are beyond reproach. I’d kind of liked him until I understood what he really meant. It did hurt her. Often when he went out on Friday and Saturday nights, she lay up in the bedroom crying. Her telling me “sex” was a dirty word, and now understanding that he thought it was the spring in a windup mouse. A secret even bigger than Santa Claus that didn’t turn out to be a lie. As if she’d been born missing a leg or an eye, swindled him into believing she was a “woman” when it turned out she wasn’t . . . only a mother. I began to hate him for this rancor towards her. His belittling her feminine attributes.
That was on the one hand. On the other . . . his causing her humiliation by bringing up the names of her sisters, Christina and Lorraine, in a derisive manner, my mysterious aunts—well, what the devil was that all about? He laments he married a mother and not a courtesan, but then castigates her because her sisters might be ones? I just didn’t get it. I don’t think Mother did either.
Until I came home from school one fall day and found a note on the kitchen table.
“I’ve left your father,” it said. “I discovered he’s been seeing other women. When he goes out to play poker on Friday and Saturday nights? Well, maybe he does, but now I know he sees women, too. And in particular one woman—Ethel James. (She was my mother’s best friend whom I considered my surrogate “aunt.”)
“Westley, ask him what the phrase ’Til Death Do Us Part means.
“You take care, Son. Once I get settled somewhere I’ll call you. Be a good boy. Love, Mom.”
When Father came home that evening, I handed him the note and it was the first time I saw him lose heart.
“What are we going to do?” I said.
“I don’t damn well know.”
“Who’s going to cook?” I asked.
“Me and you, I guess.”
“Who’s going to wash our clothes?” I asked.
“Same,” he said.
“Is she ever gonna come back?”
He shrugged, sat down at the kitchen table, lit a cigarette and stared out the kitchen door over the back yard. It was muddy out there and bleak. The house felt cold and dark. After a while he said,
“Whadaya want to eat?”
“I don’t know. How ’bout you?”
“You like sardines?”
“Fish?” I said.
“Little ones in mustard. They make good sandwiches.”
“I ain’t ever tried them,” I said.
“Well, let’s pretend you and me just went fishing and we pulled these out of Pymatuning Lake (a big one 100 miles from Hebron; we never went there). And you can make the Kool-Aid.”
So I pulled out a loaf of Wonder Bread and we didn’t even put a tablecloth on the Formica-and-chrome table. He slathered one piece of bread with yellow stadium mustard and opened the tin of sardines that I didn’t even know we had. Laid four headless ones out on my mustard bread and on his, then covered them over with a clean white slice. And he cut them in two with a butter knife. Oil and mustard began to bleed up through the white bread and out onto the grey spackled Formica. I poured two large glasses of cherry Kool-Aid and we sat across from each other eating quietly. Kind of like friends. And he smoked.
We did this for five nights straight. It was on a Monday Mother left us. Friday night he didn’t go out. Read the Hebron News in the living room after dinner, then went to early bed. On Saturday after work, he came home and said maybe we should change our menu.
I agreed. Though I had grown to like the sardines, especially when on the third night he cut up some onions on them. It helped cut the oily taste that lingered long after dinner was over. So I said, “Well, what can we eat now?”
“Eggs,” he said. “Saturday night is a good egg-supper night. Go down to the corner store and buy a dozen. And get another loaf of bread. We got plenty of margarine she left us, and buy some more Kool-Aid. Any color you want.”
When I returned home with the groceries, Pap had made up the table real nice. He had dressed it with Mother’s hand-embroidered tablecloth, the one she used for Sunday meals. He even had napkins under the silverware and placed a knife inside the spoon on the right side and a fork on the left-hand side of the plate like Mother had always done it. (I still hadn’t heard from her; had no idea where she was.)
“We like them scrambled,” he said. I thought it was OK, and he began breaking the eggs into a black iron skillet, two at a time until he had the whole dozen bubbling almost to its rim. He poured in a lot of pepper and salt. And asked me to hand him the ketchup.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“Hell,” he answered. “We put it on em after; why can’t we do it while they’re cookin’? Gives em color, too,” he boasted.
That’s when I noticed he was wearing Mother’s apron. And when the eggs were ready, he proudly spooned them onto our plates as if he’d done something real special. He stood over me as I took a fork-full . . . seeing if they were done to perfection. But the toast had begun to burn, and he dropped the plate of eggs before me and rushed over to the toaster like I’d seen her do on Saturday or Sunday morning.
Soon we were both sitting across from each other again, and it was real pleasant, him and me, eating eggs with red veins in them. Then we doused them with even more ketchup and watched the margarine melt into the toast. We drank grape Kool-Aid . . . and both were real quiet and enjoying our meal . . . when halfway through he looked up and said:
“You heard from your mother?”
I said I hadn’t.
“Oh,” he said.
“You seen her?” I asked.
He didn’t raise his head, but shook it. The moths were beating against our screen door. I told him I’d wash the dishes that night and clean up the kitchen. He seemed appreciative and went in and read the paper. We both retired early. And that’s the way it went for nearly three months. Sardine sandwiches through the week. Eggs and toast on Saturday evening. Sunday evenings he took me to Coney Island Lunch where we each had buttermilk and two chili dogs with everything on and then went to a movie at the old Paramount Theater. There was always a double feature there and since it was war time, most of the movies were about Nazis.
I was glad I was seeing them flicks with him. Sometimes the Nazis did terrible things to the women in the pictures. If I’d have seen them with Mother, it would have unsettled me more. But with Pap and me riding back in the dark to our empty house, I kind of felt better about it all. He was my father and I wasn’t afraid they were going to come and take him away. Whereas they might’ve stabbed Mother with her scissors.
Father ceased going out alone at all. And as far as I could tell he didn’t touch a drop of liquor. He came home from work promptly each night and there were never any mysterious phone calls from women. It was almost as if we were camping out. I’d watched and helped Mother wash clothes long enough that I knew how to do it. So, just like she did, Mondays became wash days. I hung them down in the cellar on the clotheslines . . . his and my shorts, socks, handkerchiefs, bedclothes. He said he’d take his white shirts to the Chinese Laundry. On Tuesday evenings I’d iron what I’d washed the day before. Sunday morning . . . neither of us ever went to church . . . we shared dusting and vacuuming the house.
“Just in case she ever comes back,” he said. “Neither of us can be ashamed.”
Actually she would have been proud. And that was another incongruity, for after all that time, coming out of school one Monday as I was crossing the street, there she stood on the other side waiting for me.
“Mother,” I cried. “What are you doing here?” She was all dressed up like she was a lady working in a downtown office, maybe even a bank teller, or the lady who took the electric-bill payments at West Penn Power offices.
“I wanted to see how you were getting along, Westley.”
“Oh, I’m fine, Mother. And you?”
“I’m OK,” she said. And she put her hand through my hair.
“You eating all right?”
“Oh, yeah, Pap and me . . . we’re doing all right. When are you coming home?”
“You ask him that question,” she smiled.
“Will it be soon, Mom?”
“Don’t know,” she says.
“Where you staying?”
“With your Aunt Christina,” she said.
For the first time . . . I looked at her differently. In my mind I saw only that mummified woman swaddled in the plaid blanket wrapped like the Torah or some rolled-up manuscript lying stiffly next to my naked, arms-and-legs-akimbo, fun-loving father. But she didn’t look that way now. There was rouge on her cheeks and she’d had her hair marcelled. She wore a pair of fancy shoes with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons, and the heels were especially high. Not the “sensible” kind she was used to wearing.
“Well, I must be going,” she said. “I miss you, Westley.”
“I miss you, too,” I said.
“Did you ever ask him about that saying I asked you to?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What’d he tell you?”
“It means ‘Two people live together until one of them kills the other,’ he said.”
She laughed haughtily. Again unlike her. In the past it was usually a sniff at one of his wisecracks. Like she resented doing it. And while she was laughing she pulled me to her. Now I knew what Aunt Christina smelled like.
“You tell Daddy I seen you today,” she said.
I watched her disappear up the side street and step into the rear seat of a fancy burgundy sedan.
That evening over dinner I told Pap. He appeared particularly interested. I wasn’t sure he would be. We seemed to be getting along just fine. I liked it because there were no more rancorous fights between them. The house was very peaceful. He and I had become friends. Buddies kind of, like we enjoyed each other’s quiet company. And we both got excited about looking forward to movies on Sunday night. We’d talk about these over dinner often.
But this night he grilled me about Mother. What’d she look like? What was she wearing? Did she look happy? Did she laugh? What did she say about me? Did she ask if I’d been drinking, going out every night? Every question he could think of. And when I told him she queried me about the ’Til Death Do Us Part saying, and that’d I given his retort . . . he seemed to settle back in his chair as if he’d just won some big prize at the carnival. Or hooked a giant trophy fish . . . even though he never went.
Long after dinner nearly a week later, maybe nine o’clock, the dishes all cleaned up and Pap is still sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. I am on the kitchen floor trying to repair an old toaster I’d salvaged from the cellar. I had my tool chest out and had the toaster all apart and was seeing how the coil was working. It was glowing a bright orange in my hands when I heard a knock at the kitchen door.
Father and I both looked up. I could see her face in the window.
“It’s Mother!” I cried. He lifted the paper back up to his face. I opened the door.
“May I come in?” she said.
She was carrying this chrysanthemum-stenciled valise, and I took it from her as she stepped into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. I stood back, watching the two of them. He didn’t lower the newspaper. She stood there wearing a strange grin and Aunt Christina’s ankle-length fur coat, a black fox. Her lips were painted magenta as were her cheeks and her hair had a reflective dressing that caught the overhead light. It was Christina’s perfume that quickly invaded the room. Some kind of incongruous magnetism was occurring between these two people that I didn’t fully comprehend. I understood a lot by now about men and women—but I still hadn’t understood everything.
“How have you been, Westley?” she said in a seductive manner. When I knew she was really speaking to Pap.
“Have you come back home, Ma?” I said.
“Well, it all depends,” she replied.
“Depends on what?” I said.
“You ask him,” she said.
I turned to Father. “Pap?”
He slowly lowered the paper, never looking at me, but studying her, from her high heels right up her stocking-free legs through the opening in the borrowed coat, then onto her hopeful face.
“Mother wants to know if she’s welcome to stay.” Attempting to broker this fractured affair.
“It depends.”
“Depends on what, Joe?” She smiled.
“Depends on how fast you’re willing to climb those stairs,” he replied.
Without answering, Mother took off her wrap, leaned over to give me an aromatic kiss, and climbed the stairs to their bedroom. Moments passed after both of us heard the door being softly drawn shut. Father stood, said goodnight, asked me to be certain to turn off all the lights, and followed her up.
I fiddled with the toaster on the floor, going through the motions actually, awaiting the latch to engage the strike plate.
Then the real incongruity struck me, just as his barbs once did her. Hadn’t she said I was the real man of the house over and over again? Hadn’t I professed to her indeed all those years I was growing up ’Til Death Do Us Part, Mother? Yet, Aunt Christina’s fox lay draped over the dinette chair and the scent of jasmine lingered in our kitchen, more intoxicating than the onions and sardines.
Or even the red-veined eggs.