have asked him anything. What kept me quiet that day? Fear of admitting that I was scared for our future and what we might pass on to our children? Anxieties about not having the right language for our racial and cultural differences? Naïveté and my assumption that everything would be fine because we loved each other?
* * *
HERE IS A list of what I carry: One of my father’s cousins killed himself when he was twenty-four. One of my father’s cousins lived in an institution most of her adult life. One of my father’s cousins died of cancer but took pills every day to quiet the voices. One of my father’s cousins mixed cyanide with orange juice and fed it to her son, to her dog, to herself.
Some of the survivors whisper that the disease followed their parents from the shtetl. Some of the survivors whisper that the disease can’t be traced because it died in the camps. Some of the survivors whisper that the disease started after the war. Some of the survivors whisper that it lingers now in our blood.
One of the survivors called me when our first son was born and told me that now my worries would really begin.
7
THANKSGIVING 1998. My sister kept me company in my mother’s upstairs bedroom in the house on State Street, where we’d grown up. She was laughing and telling stories as we waited for the cue that the wedding could begin. I looked in the mirror and pretended to check my hair, but really I watched the room behind me and the memories it held. The big white bed I slept in most nights for most of my childhood, afraid that if I wasn’t with her, my mother would die in the dark. The old pine bureau that made me smell mothballs just looking at it, where I knew the neatly folded wool sweaters were waiting their turn to be pulled over her head. The windows were cracked open a bit, letting in the sounds from the street below, busier now than it was when I was little. And then Nan’s pretty face smiling at me, holding up the dress she helped me choose and telling me it was time to put it on. As I stepped in and she zipped it up, I heard the click of a camera and saw that my sister-in-law had come in, all smiles and warm embraces and loud laughter.
“What’s the holdup?” Michele called from behind the camera, loud even though I was right there, in front of the mirror attached to the inside of the closet door. When I was little, what I loved best was that my mother’s closet was a tunnel that led to the other side of the house. A much shorter walk from my bedroom to hers, the push of hanging clothes rough then smooth against my face, the smells of the silks and wools and velvets she hadn’t worn, even then, for years and years.
“James isn’t here yet,” I told Michele, naming the one guest on Ngoni’s side besides his best man, the only other African in attendance, one of twenty people at that small wedding at my mom’s house. We had no money to bring his family over from Zimbabwe for this day. We told ourselves we’d celebrate there as soon as we could. “The bus from Boston is late,” I said. “We’ll wait.”
I looked out the window and saw it was getting dark, saw we should be married by now. I could hear the sounds of the gathering party downstairs and wondered what Ngoni was doing, who he was talking to, if he was nervous like me. The women around me laughed and told stories, and I loved them but they were far away. Something was missing, and it wasn’t until I said it that I knew what it was.
“Can someone get Mom?” I hadn’t seen her all day.
She came up trailing the smell of the white lasagna she was cooking, her lavender dress creased where the apron strings were tied. She was filled with family, happy to have all of her people there, excited for an excuse to celebrate.
Mom said, “Yes?” as she walked toward me, in the way she used to say, “Yes?” when I’d called to her from my sixth-grade bedroom wondering if the laundry was clean.
“I just thought you might want to say something to me before . . .” It was hard to say the words. She looked at me and smiled. Her sea-blue eyes were clear, open, guarded. I wondered how my hazel-greens matched up.
She paused before saying, “I do.” And then it was too late to stop her. “I want to tell you that you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
This wasn’t what I meant, this wasn’t the story I wanted to hear, but of course it was the only story she could tell me in that moment, and I should have known better before asking. I’d heard this story so many times I could have told it to myself.
“No one ever said that to me before I got married, and I want to make sure someone says it to you. Do you want to do this?”
WHEN MY PARENTS met at the Riviera, a bar in the Village, early in 1967, they were both still married to other people. Mom was a “copy girl” at the publication she still calls Sporty Illustrations, and Dad was an editor at Tower Books, a “factory of paperback originals.” He saw contracts go out to writers he was sure he could best, and he soon hatched a plan to get one himself, to fund a trip to Africa and Europe where he could become “a real writer.” It had worked for Hemingway. He got my mom a contract, too, and they typed their way across the Atlantic on a freighter with cheap fare. I have a picture of them leaning against the railing, the wind blowing my mom’s long straight hair across her face, my dad’s white shirt flapping against his tan skin, his sunglasses dark on his face.
They spent some weeks living in Tangier before settling in Rome, where they wrote novels to fulfill the first contracts and got new contracts to write more. It seemed this could be a great way to make a living. Letters from Mom to her parents from that time reveal plans to live there indefinitely. Those letters don’t mention the annulment my mother’s father helped her organize before she left, but they do make it sound as if Mom and Dad kept separate apartments, as if it were a funny and sometimes irritating coincidence that George was also living in Rome. Really they shared a rooftop apartment above a restaurant. Had their mail delivered to the American Express office.
Six months into the trip, something happened and my mother returned to the U.S. alone. Sometimes she says she was expected home for Christmas. Sometimes she says she was fleeing a failing relationship. She says, “Anyway, your dad wanted to stay in Europe to confront his art,” using air quotes so I know it’s not her phrase. She says, “Anyway, I was just sure it wasn’t going to work out with us.”
But my father had another idea. Within a few months, he’d returned to New York with plans to win her back. She says when he emerged from the airplane “he was covered from head to toe with eczema,” and the implication is that this manifestation of his heartbreak on his skin softened her, broke her heart, brought her back to him.
By the time she took him to Albany to meet her parents, it was summer. Dad’s skin had cleared up and his position in her life was safe. My grandmother—black sleeveless dress, black stockings and pumps—stood tall in the doorway of her suburban home as my folks climbed out of the car. My dad had a good six inches on her, but that didn’t make her short. He approached slowly and stayed on the lower step. He bowed low before exclaiming, “My God, it’s Mrs. Robinson.” She loved him from the first.
I wonder what my trim, silver-haired grandfather thought of this charming stranger, his mop of untamed black hair, his thick rusty mustache. Was he as quick to hand over his firstborn again so soon? I can almost see him there, just inside the house mixing a gin and tonic and muttering to himself about this stranger’s saccharine words seeping through the screen.
After dinner that night—I picture smoked salmon on simple white china—Mom and Dad headed north. They landed at a motel on the shores of Lake George and eloped in the morning.
“I WANT TO do this,” I said to my mom in her bedroom. My voice was smaller and less confident than I intended.
