“You think I’m some old lady to drink coffee in the middle of the day? Get me a beer.”
He sat down at the end of the small table. Martha moved to the refrigerator, which stood immediately to his side, and took a Pabst from the bottom shelf She poured it carefully into a glass mug and put the can in the trash.
“I’ve been visiting Louisa,” I said to him. “I’m sorry she’s in such bad shape. But her spirits are impressive.”
“We suffered for her for twenty-five years. Now it’s her turn to suffer a little, huh?” He stared at me with sneering, angry eyes.
“Spell it out for me, Mr. Djiak,” I said offensively. “What’d she do to make you suffer so?”
Martha made a little noise in her throat. “Victoria is working as a detective now, Ed. Isn’t that nice?”
He ignored her. “You’re just like your mother, you know. She used to carry on like Louisa was some kind of saint, instead of the whore she really was. You’re just as bad. What did she do to me? Got herself pregnant. Used my name. Stayed in the neighborhood flaunting her baby instead of going off to the sisters the way we arranged for her to do.”
“Louisa got herself pregnant?” I echoed. “With a turkey baster in the basement, you mean? There wasn’t a man involved?”
Martha sucked in a nervous breath. “Victoria. We don’t like to talk about these things.”
“No, we don’t,” Ed agreed nastily, turning to her. “Your daughter. You couldn’t control her. For twenty-five years the neighbors whispered behind my back, and now I have to be insulted in my own house by that Italian bitch’s daughter.”
My face turned hot. “You’re disgusting, Djiak. You’re terrified of women. You hate your own wife and daughter. No wonder Louisa turned to someone else for a little affection. Who was it to get you so exercised? Your local priest?”
He sprang up from the table, knocking over his beer stein, and hit me in the mouth. “Get out of my house, you mongrel bitch! Don’t ever come back with your filthy mind, your vile tongue!”
I got up slowly and went over to stand in front of him, my face close enough to smell the beer on his breath. “You may not insult my mother, Djiak. Any other garbage from the cesspool you call a mind I’ll tolerate. But you ever insult my mother again in my hearing I will break your neck.”
I stared at him fiercely until he turned his head uneasily away.
“Good-bye, Mrs. Djiak. Thanks for the coffee.”
She was on her knees mopping the floor by the time I got to the kitchen door. The beer had soaked through my socks. In the entry way I paused to take them off, slipping my bare feet into my running shoes. Mrs. Djiak came up behind me, cleaning my beery footprints.
“I begged you not to talk to him about it, Victoria.”
“Mrs. Djiak, all I want is Caroline’s father’s name. Tell me and I won’t bother you anymore.”
“You mustn’t come back. He will call the police. Or perhaps even shoot you himself.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll bring my gun the next time I come.” I fished a card from my handbag. “Call me if you change your mind.”
She didn’t say anything, but she took the card and tucked it into her apron pocket. I pulled the gleaming door open and left her frowning in the entryway.
5
I sat in the car for a long time before my anger cooled and my breathing returned to normal. “How she made us suffer!” I mimicked savagely. Poor scared, spunky teenager. What courage it must have taken even to tell the Djiaks she was pregnant, let alone not to go to the home for unwed mothers they’d picked out for her. Girls in my high school class who hadn’t been as resilient returned with horrifying tales of backbreaking work, spartan rooms, poor nourishment as a nine-month punishment meted out by the nuns.
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.”