I felt fiercely proud of my mother for standing up to her righteous neighbors. I remembered the night they marched in front of Louisa’s house, throwing eggs and yelling insults. Gabriella came out on the front stoop and stared them down. “Yes, you are Christians, aren’t you?” she told them in her heavily accented English. “Your Christ will be very proud of you tonight.”
My bare feet were beginning to freeze inside my shoes. The cold slowly brought me back to myself. I started the car and turned on the heater. When my toes were warm again I drove down to 112th Street and turned west to Avenue L. Louisa’s sister Connie lived there with her husband, Mike, and their five children. While I was churning up the South Side I might as well include her.
Connie was five years older than Louisa, but she’d still been living at home when her sister got pregnant. On the South Side you lived with your parents until you got married yourself. In Connie’s case, she lived with her parents even after she married while she and her husband saved money for a house of their own. When they finally bought their three-bedroom place she quit her job to become a mother—another South Side tradition.
Compared to her mother, Connie was quite a slattern. A basketball lay on the tiny front lawn, and even my untutored eye could tell that no one had washed the front stoop in recent memory. The glass in the storm door and front windows gleamed without a streak, however, and no fingerprints marred the wood on the frame.
Connie came to the door when I rang the bell. She smiled when she saw me, but nervously, as if her parents had called to warn her I would be stopping by.
“Oh. Oh, it’s you, Vic. I—I was just going to the store, actually.”
Her long, bony face wasn’t suited to lying. The skin, pink and freckled like her niece’s, turned crimson as she spoke.
“What a pity,” I said dryly. “It’s been over ten years since we last saw each other. I was hoping to catch up on the kids and Mike and so on.”
She stood with the door open. “Oh. You’ve been to see Louisa, haven’t you? Ma—Ma told me. She’s not very well.”
“Louisa’s in terrible shape. I gather from Caroline there’s nothing they can do for her except try to keep her comfortable. I wish someone had told me sooner—I’d have been down months ago.”
“I’m sorry—we didn’t think—Louisa didn’t want to bother you, and Ma didn’t want—didn’t think—” She broke off, blushing more furiously than ever.
“Your mother didn’t want me coming down here and stirring the pot. I understand. But here I am, and I’m doing it anyway, so why don’t you put off your trip to the store for five minutes and talk to me.”
I pulled the storm door toward me as I spoke and moved closer to her in what I hoped was a nonthreatening, persuasive manner. She backed away uncertainly. I followed her into the house.
“I—uh, would you like a cup of coffee?” She stood twisting her hands like a schoolgirl in front of a hostile teacher, not a woman pushing fifty with a life of her own.
“Coffee would be great,” I said bravely, hoping my kidneys could handle another cup.
“The house is really a mess,” Connie said apologetically, picking up a pair of gym shoes that stood in the little entry-way.
I never say that to visitors—it’s obvious that I haven’t hung up my clothes or carried out the papers or vacuumed in two weeks. In Connie’s case, it was hard to see anything she might be talking about, other than the gym shoes. The floors were scoured, chairs stood at right angles to each other, and not a book or paper marred the shelves or tables as we went through the living room into the back of the house.
I sat at the green Formica table while she filled an electric coffee maker. This small deviation from her mother cheered me slightly: if she could make the switch from boiling water to percolator, who knows how far she might go.
“You and Louisa were never much alike, were you?” I asked abruptly.
She blushed again. “She was always the pretty one. People don’t expect so much of you if you’re pretty.”
The poignant gaucherie of her reply seemed almost unbearable. “What, didn’t your mother expect her to help out around the house?”
“Well, she was younger, you know—she didn’t have to do as much as I did. But you know Ma. Everything got cleaned every day whether you’d used it or not. When she got mad at us we had to scrub the underside of the sinks and the toilets. I swore my girls would never do any of that kind of thing.” Her mouth set in the hard line of remembered grievance.
“It sounds rough,” I said, appalled. “Do you feel Louisa left you holding the bag too often?”
She shook her head. “It wasn’t really her fault as much as the way they treated her. I can see that now. You know, Louisa could talk back and Pa’d think it was kind of cute. At least when she was little. He wouldn’t take it even from her when she got older.
“And Ma’s brother liked Louisa to sing and dance for him when he came over. She was so little and pretty, you know, it was like having a doll around. Then when she got older it was too late, of course. Too late to discipline her, I mean.”