Fierce Attachments E-Book

Vivian Gornick

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 293

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

'The best memoir of the past fifty years.' -- New York Times 'Why can't you find a nice man to be happy with?' my mother is saying. We are walking down Ninth Avenue after a noon-hour concert at Lincoln Centre. 'Why do you pick one schlemiel after another? Do you do this to make me miserable?' Vivian Gornick's relationship with her mother is difficult. At the age of forty-five, she regularly meets her mother for strolls along the streets of Manhattan. Occasionally they'll hit a pleasant stride – fondly recalling a shared nostalgia or chuckling over a mutual disgust – but most often their walks are tinged with contempt, irritation, and rages so white hot her mother will stop strangers on the street and say, 'This is my daughter. She hates me'. Weaving between their tempestuous present-day jaunts and the author's memories of the past, Gornick traces her lifelong struggle for independence from her mother – from growing up in a blue-collar tenement house in the Bronx in the 1940s, to newlywed grad student, to established journalist – only to discover the many ways in which she is (and always has been) her mother's daughter. Fierce Attachments is a searingly honest and intimate memoir about coming of age in a big city, and the perpetual bonds that keep us forever linked to our family. 'Admired, rightly, as "timeless" and "classic" . . . Fierce Attachments demands honour as the work of a breathtaking technician.' -- Jonathan Lethem 'The story of an abiding, difficult love, full of grace and fire.' -- New York Times Book Review 'Brimming with life . . . Fierce Attachments is a work of emotional cartography.' -- Los Angeles Times 'One hesitates to traffic in such stock reviewer's adjectives as "brilliant", "an American classic", but there are only so many words with which to say how very good this book is.' -- Washington Post

Leseprobe

‘Admired, rightly, as “timeless” and “classic” … Fierce Attachments demands honour as the work of a breathtaking technician.’ Jonathan Lethem

‘A fine, unflinchingly honest book … The story of an abiding, difficult love, full of grace and fire.’ New York Times

‘Brimming with life … Fierce Attachments is a work of emotional cartography, charting influences and mapping out a proximate territory of the Self.’ Los Angeles Times

‘One hesitates to traffic in such stock reviewer’s adjectives as “brilliant”, “an American classic”, but there are only so many words with which to say how very good this book is.’ Washington Post

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Fierce Attachments

VIVIAN GORNICK

DAUNT BOOKS

Contents

Title PageFIERCE ATTACHMENTSDaunt BooksAbout the AuthorAlso by Vivian GornickCopyright

FIERCE ATTACHMENTS

3

I’M EIGHT YEARS OLD. MY MOTHER AND I COME out of our apartment onto the second-floor landing. Mrs Drucker is standing in the open doorway of the apartment next door, smoking a cigarette. My mother locks the door and says to her, ‘What are you doing here?’ Mrs Drucker jerks her head backward toward her own apartment. ‘He wants to lay me. I told him he’s gotta take a shower before he can touch me.’ I know that ‘he’ is her husband. ‘He’ is always the husband. ‘Why? He’s so dirty?’ my mother says. ‘He feels dirty to me,’ Mrs Drucker says. ‘Drucker, you’re a whore,’ my mother says. Mrs Drucker shrugs her shoulder. ‘I can’t ride the subway,’ she says. In the Bronx ‘ride the subway’ was a euphemism for going to work.

* * *

I lived in that tenement between the ages of six and twenty-one. There were twenty apartments, four to a floor, and all I remember is a building full of women. I hardly remember the men at all. They were everywhere, of course – husbands, fathers, brothers – but I remember only the women. And I remember them all crude like Mrs Drucker or fierce like my 4mother. They never spoke as though they knew who they were, understood the bargain they had struck with life, but they often acted as though they knew. Shrewd, volatile, unlettered, they performed on a Dreiserian scale. There would be years of apparent calm, then suddenly an outbreak of panic and wildness: two or three lives scarred (perhaps ruined), and the turmoil would subside. Once again: sullen quiet, erotic torpor, the ordinariness of daily denial. And I – the girl growing in their midst, being made in their image – I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me thirty years to understand how much of them I understood.

* * *

My mother and I are out walking. I ask if she remembers the women in that building in the Bronx. ‘Of course,’ she replies. I tell her I’ve always thought sexual rage was what made them so crazy. ‘Absolutely,’ she says without breaking her stride. ‘Remember Drucker? She used to say if she didn’t smoke a cigarette while she was having intercourse with her husband she’d throw herself out the window. And Zimmerman, on the other side of us? They married her off to him when she was sixteen, she hated his guts, she used to say if he’d get killed on the job (he was a construction worker) it would be a mitzvah.’ My mother stops walking. Her voice drops in awe of her own memory. ‘He actually used to take her by physical force,’ she says. ‘Would pick her up in the middle of the living-room floor and carry her off to the bed.’ She stares into the middle distance for a moment. Then she 5says to me, ‘The European men. They were animals. Just plain animals.’ She starts walking again. ‘Once, Zimmerman locked him out of the house. He rang our bell. He could hardly look at me. He asked if he could use our fire-escape window. I didn’t speak one word to him. He walked through the house and climbed out the window.’ My mother laughs. ‘That fire-escape window, it did some business! Remember Cessa upstairs? Oh no, you couldn’t remember her, she only lived there one year after we moved into the house, then the Russians were in that apartment. Cessa and I were very friendly. It’s so strange, when I come to think of it. We hardly knew each other, any of us, sometimes we didn’t talk to each other at all. But we lived on top of one another, we were in and out of each other’s house. Everybody knew everything in no time at all. A few months in the building and the women were, well, intimate.

‘This Cessa. She was a beautiful young woman, married only a few years. She didn’t love her husband. She didn’t hate him, either. He was a nice man, actually. What can I tell you, she didn’t love him, she used to go out every day, I think she had a lover somewhere. Anyway, she had long black hair down to her ass. One day she cut it off. She wanted to be modern. Her husband didn’t say anything to her, but her father came into the house, took one look at her cut hair, and gave her a slap across the face she saw her grandmother from the next world. Then he instructed her husband to lock her in the house for a month. She used to come down the fire escape into my window and out my door. Every afternoon for a month. One day she comes back and we’re having coffee in the kitchen. I say to her, “Cessa, 6tell your father this is America, Cessa, America. You’re a free woman.” She looks at me and she says to me, “What do you mean, tell my father this is America? He was born in Brooklyn.”

* * *

My relationship with my mother is not good, and as our lives accumulate it often seems to worsen. We are locked into a narrow channel of acquaintance, intense and binding. For years at a time there is an exhaustion, a kind of softening, between us. Then the rage comes up again, hot and clear, erotic in its power to compel attention. These days it is bad between us. My mother’s way of ‘dealing’ with the bad times is to accuse me loudly and publicly of the truth. Whenever she sees me she says, ‘You hate me. I know you hate me.’ I’ll be visiting her and she’ll say to anyone who happens to be in the room – a neighbour, a friend, my brother, one of my nieces – ‘She hates me. What she has against me I don’t know, but she hates me.’ She is equally capable of stopping a stranger on the street when we’re out walking and saying, ‘This is my daughter. She hates me.’ Then she’ll turn to me and plead, ‘What did I do to you, you should hate me so?’ I never answer. I know she’s burning and I’m glad to let her burn. Why not? I’m burning, too.

But we walk the streets of New York together endlessly. We both live in lower Manhattan now, our apartments a mile apart, and we visit best by walking. My mother is an urban peasant and I am my mother’s daughter. The city is our natural element. We each have daily adventures with 7bus drivers, bag ladies, ticket takers, and street crazies. Walking brings out the best in us. I am forty-five now and my mother is seventy-seven. Her body is strong and healthy. She traverses the island easily with me. We don’t love each other on these walks, often we are raging at each other, but we walk anyway.

Our best times together are when we speak of the past. I’ll say to her, ‘Ma, remember Mrs Kornfeld? Tell me that story again,’ and she’ll delight in telling me the story again. (It is only the present she hates; as soon as the present becomes the past, she immediately begins loving it.) Each time she tells the story it is both the same and different because each time I’m older, and it occurs to me to ask a question I didn’t ask the last time around.

The first time my mother told me that her uncle Sol had tried to sleep with her I was twenty-two and I listened silently: rapt and terrified. The background I knew by heart. She was the youngest of eighteen children, eight of whom survived into adult life. (Imagine. My grandmother was pregnant for twenty years.) When the family came to New York from Russia, Sol, my grandmother’s youngest brother and the same age as her own oldest child (her mother had also been pregnant for twenty years), came along with them. My mother’s two oldest brothers had preceded the family by some years, had gone to work in the rag trade, and had rented a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side for all eleven of them: bathroom in the hall, coal stove in the kitchen, a train of dark cubbyhole inner rooms. My mother, then a ten-year-old child, slept on two chairs in the kitchen, because my grandmother took in a boarder. 8

Sol had been drafted into the army during the First World War and sent to Europe. When he returned to New York my mother was sixteen years old and the only child left at home. So here he comes, a glamorous stranger, the baby niece he left behind now womanly and dark-eyed, with glossy brown hair cut in a stylish bob and a transforming smile, all of which she pretends she doesn’t know how to use (that was always my mother’s style: outrageous coquettishness unhampered by the slightest degree of self-consciousness), and he begins sleeping in one of those cubbyholes two walls away from her, with the parents snoring loudly at the farthest end of the apartment.

‘One night,’ my mother said, ‘I jumped up from sleep, I don’t know why, and I see Sol is standing over me. I started to say, “What is it?” I thought something was wrong with my parents, but then he looked so funny I thought maybe he was sleepwalking. He didn’t say a word to me. He picked me up in his arms and he carried me to his bed. He laid us both down on the bed, and he held me in his arms, and he began to stroke my body. Then he lifted my nightgown and he began to stroke my thigh. Suddenly he pushed me away from him and said, “Go back to your bed.” I got up and went back to my bed. He never spoke one word about what happened that night, and I didn’t either.’

The second time I heard the story I was thirty. She repeated it nearly word for word as we were walking up Lexington Avenue somewhere in the Sixties. When she came to the end I said to her, ‘And you didn’t say anything to him, throughout the whole time?’ She shook her head no. ‘How come, Ma?’ I asked. Her eyes widened, her mouth 9pursed. ‘I don’t know,’ she puzzled. ‘I only know I was very scared.’ I looked at her, as she would say, funny. ‘Whatsamatter?’ she said. ‘You don’t like my answer?’ ‘No,’ I protested, ‘it’s not that. It just seems odd not to have uttered a sound, not to have indicated your fears at all.’

The third time she told the story I was nearly forty. We were walking up Eighth Avenue, and as we neared Forty-second Street I said to her, ‘Ma, did it ever occur to you to ask yourself why you remained silent when Sol made his move?’ She looked quickly at me. But this time she was wise to me. ‘What are you getting at?’ she asked angrily. ‘Are you trying to say I liked it? Is that what you’re getting at?’ I laughed nervously, gleefully. ‘No, Ma, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying it’s odd that you didn’t make a sound.’ Again, she repeated that she had been very frightened. ‘Come off it,’ I said sharply. ‘You are disgusting!’ she raged at me in the middle of the street. ‘My brilliant daughter. I should send you to college for another two degrees you’re so brilliant. I wanted my uncle to rape me, is that it? A new thought!’ We didn’t speak for a month after that walk.

* * *

The Bronx was a patchwork of invaded ethnic territories: four or five square blocks dominated by Irish or Italians or Jews, but each section with its quota of Irish living in a Jewish block or Jews in an Italian block. Much has been made of this change rung on the New York neighbourhood register, but those who grew up running the Irish or Italian gauntlet, or being frozen out by Jewish neighbours, are not 10nearly so marked by their extra portion of outsidedness as they are levelled by the shared street life. Our family had lived for a year in an Italian neighbourhood. My brother and I had been the only Jewish children in the school, and we had indeed been miserable. That’s all: miserable. When we moved back into a Jewish neighbourhood, my brother was relieved at no longer having to worry that he’d be beaten up every afternoon by kids who called him the Jewish genius, but the outline and substance of his life were not fundamentally altered. The larger truth is that the ‘otherness’ of the Italians or the Irish or the Jews among us lent spice and interest, a sense of definition, an exciting edge to things that was openly feared but secretly welcomed.

Our building was all Jewish except for one Irish family on the first floor, one Russian family on the third floor, and a Polish superintendent. The Russians were tall and silent: they came and went in the building in a manner that seemed mysterious. The Irish were all thin and blond: blue eyes, narrow lips, closed faces. They, too, were a shadowy presence among us. The super and his wife were also quiet. They never spoke first to anyone. That’s the main thing, I guess, about being a few among the many: it silences you.

My mother might have been silenced, too, had she remained living among the Italians, might have snatched her children up in wordless anxiety when a neighbour befriended one of us, just as Mrs Cassidy did whenever a woman in our building smoothed the hair of one of the ‘Irish blondies’. But my mother was not one among the many. Here, in this all-Jewish building, she was in her element, had enough room between the skin of social presence and the flesh of an 11unknowing centre in which to move around, express herself freely, be warm and sarcastic, hysterical and generous, ironic and judgemental, and, occasionally, what she thought of as affectionate: that rough, bullying style she assumed when overcome with the tenderness she most feared.

My mother was distinguished in the building by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner. Although our apartment door was always closed (a distinction was made between those educated enough to value the privacy of a closed door and those so peasant-like the door was always half open), the neighbours felt free to knock at any time: borrow small kitchen necessities, share a piece of building gossip, even ask my mother to act as arbiter in an occasional quarrel. Her manner at such times was that of a superior person embarrassed by the childlike behaviour of her inferiors. ‘Oy, Zimmerman.’ She would smile patronisingly when Mrs Zimmerman, beside herself over some slight, real or imagined, came to tell her of the perfidy of one or another of our neighbours. ‘Such foolishness.’ Or, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she would rap out sharply when a tale she considered base or ignorant was repeated to her. She seemed never to be troubled by the notion that there might be two sides to a story, or more than one interpretation of an event. She knew that, compared with the women around her, she was ‘developed’ – a person of higher thought and feeling – so what was there to think about? ‘Developed’ was one of her favourite words. If Mrs Zimmerman spoke loudly in the hall on a Saturday morning, we, sitting in the kitchen just behind our apartment door, would stare at each other and, inevitably, my mother would shake her head and pronounce, 12‘An undeveloped woman.’ If someone made a crack about the schvartzes, my mother would carefully explain to me that such sentiments were ‘undeveloped’. If there was a dispute in the grocery store over price or weight, again I would hear the word ‘undeveloped’. My father smiled at her when she said ‘undeveloped’, whether out of indulgence or pride I never did know. My brother, on his guard from the age of ten, stared without expression. But I, I absorbed the feel of her words, soaked up every accompanying gesture and expression, every complicated bit of impulse and intent. Mama thinking everyone around was undeveloped, and most of what they said was ridiculous, became imprinted on me like dye on the most receptive of materials.

The apartment was a five-room flat, with all the rooms opening onto each other. It was a tenement flat not a railroad flat: not one window looked into an airshaft. The apartment door opened into a tiny foyer that gave directly onto the kitchen. To the right of the kitchen, in the foyer, stood the refrigerator, propped against a wall at right angles to the bathroom: a tiny rectangle with a painted wooden door whose upper half was frosted glass. Beyond the foyer stood two rooms of equal size separated by a pair of curtained glass doors. The second of these rooms faced the street and was-flooded with afternoon sunlight. Off this front room, at either end, were two tiny bedrooms, one of which also faced the street, the other the back of the building.

Because the front room and one of the bedrooms faced the street, ours was considered a desirable apartment, an 13apartment ‘to the front’. A few years ago a man who had also grown up on my block said to me, ‘I always thought you were richer than us because you lived to the front.’ Although living to the front usually did mean that the husbands made more money than did the husbands of those living tief, teier in draird (deeply, dearly in hell) to the back, we lived to the front because part of my mother’s claim to a superior grasp of life’s necessities rested on her insistence that, unless we stood nose to nose with welfare, an apartment to the back was not within the range of domestic consideration. Nevertheless, it was ‘to the back’ that we – that is, she and I – actually lived.

The kitchen window faced the alley in the back of the building, as did the kitchen windows of the building next to ours, and those of two other buildings whose entrances were on the opposite side of the square block these apartment houses shared. There were no trees or bushes or grasses of any kind in the alley – only concrete, wire fencing, and wooden poles. Yet I remember the alley as a place of clear light and sweet air, suffused, somehow, with a perpetual smell of summery green.

The alley caught the morning sun (our kitchen was radiant before noon), and it was a shared ritual among the women that laundry was done early on a washboard in the sink and hung out to dry in the sun. Crisscrossing the alley, from first floor to fifth, were perhaps fifty clotheslines strung out on tall wooden poles planted in the concrete ground. Each apartment had its own line stretching out among ten others on the pole. The wash from each line often interfered with the free flap of the wash on the line above or below, and the 14sight of a woman yanking hard at a clothesline, trying to shake her wash free from an indiscriminate tangle of sheets and trousers, was common. While she was pulling at the line she might also be calling ‘Berth-a-a. Berth-a-a. Ya home, Bertha?’ Friends were scattered throughout the buildings on the alley, and called to one another all during the day to make various arrangements (‘What time ya taking Harvey to the doctor?’ Or, ‘Got sugar in the house? I’ll send Marilyn over.’ Or, ‘Meetcha on the corner in ten minutes’). So much stir and animation! The clear air, the unshadowed light, the women calling to each other, the sounds of their voices mixed with the smell of clothes drying in the sun, all that texture and colour swaying in open space. I leaned out the kitchen window with a sense of expectancy I can still taste in my mouth, and that taste is coloured a tender and brilliant green.

For me, the excitement in the apartment was located in the kitchen and the life outside its window. It was a true excitement: it grew out of contradiction. Here in the kitchen I did my homework and kept my mother company, watched her prepare and execute her day. Here, also, I learned that she had the skill and vitality to do her work easily and well but that she disliked it, and set no store by it. She taught me nothing. I never learned how to cook, clean, or iron clothes. She herself was a boringly competent cook, a furiously fast housecleaner, a demonic washerwoman.

Still, she and I occupied the kitchen fully. Although my mother never seemed to be listening to what went on in the alley, she missed nothing. She heard every voice, every motion of the clothesline, every flap of the sheets, registered 15each call and communication. We laughed together over this one’s broken English, that one’s loudmouthed indiscretion, a screech here, a fabulous curse there. Her running commentary on the life outside the window was my first taste of the fruits of intelligence: she knew how to convert gossip into knowledge. She would hear a voice go up one octave and observe: ‘She had a fight with her husband this morning.’ Or it would go down an octave and, ‘Her kid’s sick.’ Or she’d catch a fast exchange and diagnose a cooling friendship. This skill of hers warmed and excited me. Life seemed fuller, richer, more interesting when she was making sense of the human activity in the alley. I felt a live connection, then, between us and the world outside the window.

The kitchen, the window, the alley. It was the atmosphere in which she was rooted, the background against which she stood outlined. Here she was smart, funny, and energetic, could exercise authority and have impact. But she felt contempt for her environment. ‘Women, yech!’ she’d say. ‘Clotheslines and gossip,’ she’d say. She knew there was another world – the world – and sometimes she thought she wanted that world. Bad. She’d stop dead in the middle of a task, staring for long minutes at a time at the sink, the floor, the stove. But where? how? what?

So this was her condition: here in the kitchen she knew who she was, here in the kitchen she was restless and bored, here in the kitchen she functioned admirably, here in the kitchen she despised what she did. She would become angry over the ‘emptiness of a woman’s life’ as she called it, then laugh with a delight I can still hear when she analysed some complicated bit of business going on in the alley. 16Passive in the morning, rebellious in the afternoon, she was made and unmade daily. She fastened hungrily on the only substance available to her, became affectionate toward her own animation, then felt like a collaborator. How could she not be devoted to a life of such intense division? And how could I not be devoted to her devotion?

* * *

‘Do you remember the Rosemans?’ My mother asks as we are walking up Sixth Avenue in the Forties. They were the family who lived in the Zimmerman apartment our first two years in the building.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Now they were an interesting couple.’

Mrs Roseman was a Jewish Colette: fat and swarthy, with long dark eyes in a beautiful fox face and an aureole of grey-black kinky hair. She played cards obsessively, chain-smoked, and was openly uninterested in her family. There was always a card game going in her house and, as my mother said, ‘a pot of some kind of shit cooking on the stove all day long, by the time her husband came home from work it tasted like my grandmother’s old shoes’. But my mother’s voice was affectionate not indicting. She was attached to Mrs Roseman because she, too, had been a member of Tenants’ Council Number 29 ten years earlier in a building three neighbourhoods away.

I had known since early childhood that my parents were fellow travellers of the Communist Party, and that of the two my mother had been the more politically active. By the time I was born she had stood on soapboxes in the Bronx 17pleading for economic and social justice. It was, in fact, part of her deprivation litany that if it hadn’t been for the children she would have developed into a talented public speaker.

During the Depression the Communist Party sponsored and ran the Tenants’ Councils, organisations formed to fight eviction for non-payment of rent. My mother became the head of Tenants’ Council Number 29 in the Bronx (‘I was the only woman in the building who could speak English without an accent, so automatically I was voted head’), and continued to act as head until shortly after I was born, when my father made her ‘stop everything’ to stay home with the baby. Until then, she said, she ran the council. Mama running the council was a childhood classic. ‘Every Saturday morning,’ she would tell me, the way other mothers told their children Mary had a little lamb, ‘I would go down to Communist Party headquarters in Union Square and receive my instructions for the week. Then we would organise, and carry on.’ How she loved saying, ‘Then we would organise, and carry on’. There was more uncomplicated pleasure in her voice when she repeated those words than in any others I ever heard her speak.

Tenants’ Council Number 29 was made up of most of the women in the building my parents were then living in: immigrant Jews, coarse and energetic. Tenement intimacy among them was compounded by political comradeship. When we had moved into this, our final building in the Bronx, and my mother found Mrs Roseman living next door, it was as though she had unexpectedly come across not an old friend but a member of a family in whose presence 18she had once been surprised by complicated stirrings of her own mind and spirit. She and Mrs Roseman each appreciated the other’s ability to understand political activity that had tapped a reservoir of strong feeling.

One particular memory of their time together in the council, remarkably unpolitical by their own lights, held them both, and they reminisced often about this incident, always with much head shaking and in an atmosphere of shared wonderment. In the middle of the Depression the women of the council rented rooms one summer, for themselves and their families, in a bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains. Most of the families had taken two rooms in the main building (one for the husband and wife, one for the children), although some could manage only one. The women shared the kitchen, the men came up on weekends.

They were fifteen women, and as my mother said, there in that kitchen she got to know them better than in the two or three years they’d been working together in the Bronx. There was Pessy, she said, ‘so stupid, put shit on the table she’d call it honey, but a good comrade, no matter what I told her to do she did it without hesitation or complaint’. There was Singer, ‘the delicate type’, she hated the vulgarity of the others. There was Kornfeld, ‘a dark and passionate-looking woman, never offered an opinion, always waited until everyone else spoke, then had to be asked what she thought, but always had something intelligent to say’. And, of course, there was Roseman, shrewd, easy-going Roseman, who never missed a trick. Her eyes were everywhere at once, all the while she was dealing cards. 19

That summer my mother discovered that Pessy had ‘a real appetite, you know what I mean?’ And Singer turned out to be a pain in the ass. ‘She was always fainting. No matter what happened, Singer’s eyes would start rolling, and she was going under.’ And Kornfeld, well, Kornfeld was another story.

On Saturday, late in the morning, Pessy would come down in her nightgown, yawning and rubbing herself. The others would start laughing. ‘Well, Pessy,’ someone would say, ‘tell us what you did last night. You did something good?’ Pessy would snort, ‘What’s to tell? You do what you have to do, then you turn yourselves ass to ass, and you go to sleep. What do you want me to tell you?’ But she’d be red-faced and smiling like she had a secret. Singer would turn her face away. And Kornfeld, she’d be sitting in a corner of the kitchen (she was one of those too poor for two rooms, they slept in one room with the three children), she would get more quiet than usual.

One Sunday night, after the men had gone back to the city and the women were all sitting on the porch, somebody suddenly said, ‘Where’s Kornfeld?’ They looked around, sure enough, no Kornfeld. They started calling, ‘Kornfeld, Kornfeld.’ No answer. They went into her room, the children were sound asleep, but no Kornfeld. They got frightened and began to search for her. They fanned out, two by two (‘My luck,’ my mother said, ‘I got Singer’), each with a flashlight (‘You know how dark the countryside was in those years?’), and started yelling into the world, ‘Kornfeld, Kornfeld.’

‘An hour we must have been running around,’ my mother said, ‘like crazy people. Then I take a look and there, we’re 20maybe half a mile from the farm, lying across the middle of the road, a black shape, not moving, you couldn’t tell what it was. Right away, Singer starts fainting. I look from the road to Singer, from Singer to the road. “Shut up, Singer,” I said. Then I turned to the thing in the road and I said, “Get up, Kornfeld.” Singer’s mouth opened and shut, but she didn’t make a sound. The thing in the road didn’t move. Again I said, “Kornfeld, get up.” And then she got up. I turned Singer around and walked her back to the farm.’

‘How did you know it was Mrs Kornfeld?’ I asked the first time I heard the story. ‘I don’t know,’ my mother said, ‘I just knew. I knew immediately.’ Another time I asked, ‘Why do you think she did it?’ My mother shrugged. ‘She was a passionate woman. You know, Jews weren’t so bold forty years ago, like some people I could name, they didn’t have sex with the children in the room … Maybe she wanted to punish us.’ Another year my mother startled me by saying, ‘That Kornfeld. She hated herself. That’s why she did it.’ I asked her to explain what she meant by ‘hated herself’. She couldn’t.

But what I have always remembered most about the Kornfeld story was that Mrs Roseman, who gave off more sexual shrewdness than all the women in the building put together, and considered my mother a working-class romantic, had respected her because she’d known the thing in the road was Kornfeld.

‘Do you remember the girls?’ my mother asks now, as we are approaching the Time-Life Building. ‘The two daughters she had by Roseman?’ Mrs Roseman had had a lover when she was young, an Italian Communist who had died and left her pregnant. Mr Roseman had adored her, married her, 21 raised the child (a boy) as though he were his own, and had then fathered two children himself.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I remember the girls.’

‘Do you remember that during the war the younger one, she must have been seventeen then, got pneumonia? They thought she was dying, in those years people died of pneumonia, and I bought her. After that she always called me Mama.’

‘You did what?’ I stop walking.

‘I bought her, I bought her. You know, Jews believed that if someone you loved was in danger you sold them and that warded off the evil eye.’ She laughs. ‘If they weren’t yours what could happen to them?’

I stare hard at her. She ignores my stare.

‘Roseman came to the door and she said to me, “The girl is dying. Will you buy her?” So I bought her. I think I gave Roseman ten dollars.’

‘Ma,’ I say, ‘you knew this was a peasant superstition, an old wives’ tale, and still you took part in it? You agreed to buy her?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘But, Ma! You were both communists.’

‘Well, listen,’ she says. ‘We had to save her life.’

* * *

My parents slept, alternately, in either of the two middle rooms, some years in the back, some years in the front, whereupon the unused other room became the living room. For years they dragged a huge Philco radio and three 22monstrous pieces of furniture (an overstuffed couch and two chairs covered in maroon cloth threaded with gold) back and forth between the front room and the back room.

When I grew up I puzzled over why my parents had never taken one of the little rooms for themselves, why they slept in open territory, so to speak, and when I was in my twenties I asked my mother why. She looked at me just about thirty seconds too long. Then she said, ‘We knew that the children each needed a room for themselves.’ I gave her back the same thirty seconds. She had made such an intolerable romance of her marriage, had impaled us all on the cross of my father’s early death, and here she was telling me that the privacy needed for sexual joy was given up for the good of the children?

My mother had been distinguished in the building not only by her unaccented English and the certainty of her manner, but also by her status as a happily married woman. No, I haven’t said that right. Not just happily married. Magically married. Definitively married.

My parents were, I think, happy together, their behaviour with one another civilised and affectionate – but an ideal of marital happiness suffused the atmosphere my mother and I shared that made simple reality a circumstance not worthy of respect, definitely not what it was all about. What it was all about was Mama’s worshipful attitude toward the goodness of her married life, accompanied by a sniffing dismissal of all marriages that did not closely resemble hers, and the single-mindedness of her instruction to me in hundreds of ways, over thousands of days, that love was the most important thing in a woman’s life.23

Papa’s love did indeed have wondrous properties: it not only compensated for her boredom and anxiety, it was the cause of her boredom and anxiety. Countless sentences having to do with all in her life she found less than satisfactory began: ‘Believe me, if I didn’t love your father’, or, ‘Believe me, if it wasn’t for Papa’s love’. She would speak openly of how she had hated to give up working when she got married (she’d been a bookkeeper in a Lower East Side bakery), how good it was to have your own money in your pocket, not receive an allowance like a child, how stupid her life was now, and how she’d love to go back to work. Believe her. If it wasn’t for Papa’s love.