Free Her Mother's Daughter by Marilyn French Page B

in her face. Whatever spirit she had is gone.
    Not my mother’s though. It is in the pictures of her as a child that defeat and terror dominate. Her old face is disappointed and angry, but not defeated, and in between, well, there she is, a young flapper, hamming it up for the camera, posed coyly with one well-shod foot on the running board of my father’s first car, an Olds V-8 or, hair streaming, arm in arm with Miss Poland of 1927, in a bathing suit.
    Perhaps it is in my genes, the way I feel now. My grandmother was a fucking saint, and I’m turning into one too. Renunciation: it’s not a fate I admire. But it is inevitable when there is nothing you can have that can ease your pain, you stop wanting anything. For my mother, for my grandmother, the moment when wanting stopped was the same: May 26, 1913. On that day, my grandmother was widowed, and she and my mother began their sojourn in hell. My mother says, “My father died when I was nine years old,” as if she had not told me that hundreds of times before. She utters the statement with a tragic import—like someone saying a loved one was living in Hiroshima in the summer of 1945—as if she is saying the world ended then. As hers did.

III

1
    W HEN THE KIDS AND I first moved into Pani Nowak’s house on Powell Avenue, my mother came to help me move in. She unwrapped dishes from newspaper and washed them, dried them, piled them on the counters until I had papered the shelves where they would stand; she hung clothes in closets. She was sponging off my few china knickknacks while Arden and I unpacked our bathroom supplies and tried to squeeze them in the medicine chest. Arden spotted a thing hanging from a hook beside the bathroom door.
    â€œWhat’s that, Mommy?”
    I peered. It was leather, a strap of some sort, about two inches wide and fourteen or so inches long. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a razor strop. The former tenants must have left it behind. We can throw it out,” I suggested.
    â€œOh, no! It’s beautiful!” Arden breathed. It was the carving she liked. The entire surface had been decorated.
    â€œOh,” I said absently, and forgot it.
    It was hours later when my mother came staggering down the hall (I could hear she was upset by her walk) into the kitchen, where I was lining the shelves, sitting on a counter, contorted around a cabinet, trying to get the damned paper to fit.
    â€œAnastasia!” she cried, and I turned and saw her white face. “What is that thing in the bathroom?”
    I stared at her. Then understood. “It’s a razor strop, I think, Mom.”
    â€œWhy do you have it!”
    I shrugged. “It was here. Left behind. Arden likes it. She thinks it’s pretty.”
    She stared at me, incredulous, angry, but said nothing. I imagined her refusing to use the bathroom, and considered throwing the thing away. But Arden liked it, and Arden had to come first for me, even though I understood.
    Business was going well for Michael Brez and in the fall of 1910, soon after Isabella entered first grade, he moved his family a few blocks, to Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. The new apartment was also a railroad flat, but the living room was a little bigger and they had a kitchen all to themselves. There were some new pieces of furniture in the living room, carved wood with mother-of-pearl inlays. Bella would tiptoe into the room when the servant girl wasn’t looking and run her fingers over the smooth cool nacre, tracing the patterns of its colors. There were new lace curtains at the window, but Bella rarely stood inside their comforting obscurity. She was a big girl now, she went to school.
    She went every day, and dutifully copied what the other children were doing, but when she left, she tried to push the thought of school out of her mind. She never did homework; she didn’t know such a thing existed. But she did know that she was stupid, and that the