“How many children did you have?” he asked.
“Four. By four different men. Three girls and you. You went to the finest couple I knew: Jerome’s sister Emily and her husband Ennis. They couldn’t have children of their own. They treated you well, I imagine.”
“Very well,” said Harold. “You’re a Disciple of Christ now. Have you mended your ways?”
“I have. Most whores do when they reach a certain age. It’s either that or death by drink or injection.” Sadie swept her hand through the air to indicate the tiny sea town around her. “Not so terrible a place to pass the remaining years of one’s life. Quite churchy, but very quiet. Even in the summer. Not like Rehoboth and Ocean City. So, you see, I haven’t come to a tragic end. I’m relatively happy in my final chapter.”
Harold pulled back. He wanted to take in every crag and wrinkle upon his mother’s face, to see his own reflection in her eyes.
“Do you want to know anything about me?” he asked.
Sadie shook her head. She watched the seagull take wing to seek scraps at some other doorstep. “Whatever good has happened to you in your life will only make me regret the fact that I wasn’t there to share it. Whatever bad will only make me feel guilty that I couldn’t offer support in your times of difficulty.”
“So you feel guilty? I mean, about having given me up?”
“Some days I feel terribly guilty. But the feeling doesn’t cloud my every hour. I was a selfish woman, Harold. I wouldn’t have made a very good mother. This was for the best. At the same time, I’m not the worst creature that God has ever placed upon this Earth. I’ve had my charitable moments. Some might say that my giving you and your sisters up was a charitable act in its own way.”
“I didn’t come here to judge you. Only to meet you.”
“And what will you take away from our visit, Harold?”
“This won’t be my only visit. I’d like to see more of you, with your permission.”
Sadie shook her head. “Let’s limit ourselves to this one time, shall we?”
“Why?”
“I brought you into this world. And then I sent you away. That was my choice. I reconciled myself to that choice many years ago.”
“And do I have no choice in this? It’s my choice that I should see you again. I choose as well to find my sisters and give them the chance to meet their mother while she’s still among the living.”
Sadie laughed. “A man of purpose. What do you do for a living, Harold? Are you a politician of some sort?”
Harold shook his head, his cheeks mantling over the precipitancy of his outburst.
There was music now, coming through the window of Mrs. Grosbard’s second-floor lodgings. It was a song that had been made popular by the Brox Sisters several years earlier. Mrs. Grosbard had put the record on her Victrola. Mrs. Grosbard could not possibly let this momentous encounter between long separated mother and son go without appropriate musical commentary.
The three songbirds from Tennessee sang in sweet harmony:
Tie me to your apron strings again.
I know there’s room for me.
Upon your knee.
Bring back all those happy hours when
You kissed my tears away…
“Mrs. Grosbard has slightly missed the mark,” said Sadie with gentle amusement. “That song. It’s about a child that leaves its mother but then comes back again. There’s a history there — a history that you and I don’t share.”
“I’d like to see you again. I live in Philadelphia. I’m not so far away.”
“And what if I don’t wish to see you again? What if to me you are only a reminder of something I’m ashamed of?”
“Are you ashamed of me?”
“Only of having given you up.”
Please take me back tonight,
Where I belong.
Sing a cradle song to me and then
Won’t you tie me to your apron strings again?
There had never been apron strings. Harold knew this.
The final matter to be decided was whether there should be a parting embrace. Sadie put her son’s mind at ease. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. There were tears in his eyes as he walked away. He wanted to turn and look back but he held himself steady and did not.
Late that night Sadie walked in the moonlight to the ocean’s edge. She stood before the lapping sea and then stepped into it. She moved slowly through the waves and finally disappeared beneath them.
The ocean was kind.
Harold would return. That was certain.
She didn’t want to be there when he came back.
1931 AWED AND WONDERING IN CONNECTICUT
Let’s start with that actor with the big ears. Clark Grable or something like that. He played a gangster in A Free Soul and he slapped Norma Shearer, who played his girlfriend. And then there was that other gangster picture The Public Enemy. And James Cagney is sitting at the breakfast table in his pajamas and he smacks Mae Marsh in the face with a grapefruit, just like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be doing first thing in the morning (although she seems pretty shocked when he gives her the business). And just last spring there was that big dinner at the Metropolitan Club in New York where Theodore Dreiser slapped Sinclair Lewis in the face. Twice. He probably would have done it a third time if somebody hadn’t intervened. And I just read about this thirty-hour face-slapping competition they had in Kiev just a few weeks ago.
Seems like everybody’s slapping everybody else’s face this year. It’s an absolute mania. So the fact that I slapped Hank’s tonight shouldn’t have been any big stop-the-presses kind of surprise. But you couldn’t tell that from the way he looked at me with those “Say it ain’t so, Joe” droopy peepers of his — giving me the kind of hangdog look that can nearly tug a person’s heart right out of her chest.
I stared right back at my husband, my hand still hanging in the air like I just might do it again, just like that talented yet pugnacious American novelist, Theodore Dreiser.
This is when Hank calmly took my hand and brought it down to my side, using his other hand to rub some of the sting out of his cheek.
“Well, why’d you say it?” I asked matter-of-factly, my rage having fled just as quickly as it came.
“You asked me a question and I answered honestly. Why’d you ask it if you didn’t want me to give you a truthful answer?”
Hank walked over to the icebox. He took out a bottle of milk and held it up to his cheek.
“I didn’t hit you that hard. Are you trying to make me feel bad?”
Hank shrugged. He got a glass from the cabinet and poured himself some milk. He returned the bottle to the icebox and sat down at the kitchen table. He stared at the glass of milk and I stared at him. The window was open, and through it we could both hear Eddy Cantor’s crooning voice wafting down from the Petersons’ new Atwater Kent upstairs. It reminded me of our own RCA Radiola 60 Super-Heterodyne tabletop, which my parents bought us for Christmas last year, but which we had to sell through the want ads this past summer when Hank lost his job with Merchants’ All-Risk.
Generally speaking, I like Eddie Cantor’s voice, but now for some reason it grated on my nerves. I closed the window.
I sat down across from my husband. “I suppose I asked you that question because I was expecting you’d answer a different way.”