At last Momma snatched the cloth off her face. “You! Damn you! What do you want?” She stared at the girls as if, clutching hands and gaping at her, they were strangers. Her right eye was bruised and swollen and there were raw red marks on her forehead and first Nelia then Connie began to cry and Momma said, “Constance, why aren’t you in school? Why can’t you let me alone? God help me — always ‘Momma’ — ‘Momma’ — ‘Momma.’” Connie whimpered, “Momma, did you hurt yourself?” and Nelia moaned, sucking a corner of the afghan like a deranged baby and Momma ignored the question, as Momma often ignored questions she thought nosy, none of your business; her hand lifted as if she meant to slap them but then fell wearily, as if this had happened many times before, this exchange, this emotion, and it was her fate that it would happen many times again. A close sweet-stale blood-odor lifted from Momma’s lower body, out of the folds of the soiled afghan, that odor neither of the little girls could have identified except in retrospect, in adolescence at last detecting it in themselves: shamed, discomforted, the secret of their bodies at what was called, invariably in embarrassed undertones, that certain time of the month.
So: Gretel Nissenbaum, at the time she disappeared from her husband’s house, was having her period.
Did that mean something, or nothing?
Nothing, Cornelia would say sharply.
Yes, Constance would insist, it meant our mother was not pregnant. She wasn’t running away with any lover because of that.
That morning, what confusion in the Nissenbaum household! However the sisters would later speak of the encounter in the big bedroom, what their mother had said to them, how she’d looked and behaved, it had not been precisely that way, of course. Because how can you speak of confusion, where are the words for it? How to express in adult language the wild fibrillation of children’s minds, two child-minds beating against each other like moths, how to know what had truly happened and what was only imagined! Connie would swear that their mother’s eye looked like a nasty dark-rotted egg, so swollen, but she could not say which eye it was, right or left; Nelia, shrinking from looking at her mother’s bruised face, wanting only to burrow against her, to hide and be comforted, would come in time to doubt that she’d seen a hurt eye at all; or whether she’d been led to believe she saw it because Connie, who was so bossy, claimed she had.
Connie would remember their mother’s words, Momma’s rising desperate voice, “Don’t touch me — I’m afraid! I might be going somewhere but I’m not ready — oh God, I’m so afraid!” — and on and on, saying she was going away, she was afraid, and Connie trying to ask where? where was she going? and Momma beating at the bedclothes with her fists. Nelia would remember being hurt at the way Momma yanked the spittle-soaked corner of the afghan out of her mouth, so roughly! Not Momma but bad-Momma, witch-Momma who scared her.
But then Momma relented, exasperated. “Oh come on, you damn little babies! Of course ‘Momma’ loves you.”
Eager then as starving kittens the sisters scrambled up onto the high, hard bed, whimpering, snuggling into Momma’s arms, her damp snarled hair, those breasts. Connie and Nelia burrowing, crying themselves to sleep like nursing babies, Momma drew the afghan over the three of them as if to shield them. That morning of April 11, 1923.
And next morning, early, before dawn. The sisters would be awakened by their father’s shouts, “Gretel? Gretel!”
2
…never spoke of her after the first few weeks. After the first shock. We learned to pray for her and to forgive her and to forget her. We didn’t miss her. So Mother said, in her calm judicious voice. A voice that held no blame.
But Aunt Connie would take me aside. The older, wiser sister. It’s true we never spoke of Momma when any grownups were near, that was forbidden. But, God! we missed her every hour of every day all the time we lived on that farm.
I was Cornelia’s daughter but it was Aunt Connie I trusted.
No one in the Chautauqua Valley knew where John Nissenbaum’s young wife Gretel had fled, but all knew, or had an opinion of, why she’d gone.
Faithless, she was. A faithless woman. Had she not run away with a man: abandoned her children. She was twenty-seven years old and too young for John Nissenbaum and she wasn’t a Ransomville girl, her people lived sixty miles away in Chautauqua Falls. Here was a wife who’d committed adultery, was an adulteress. (Some might say a tramp, a whore, a slut.) Reverend Dieckman, the Lutheran minister, would preach amazing sermons in her wake. For miles through the valley and for years well into the 1940s there would be scandalized talk of Gretel Nissenbaum: a woman who left her faithful Christian husband and her two little girls with no warning! no provocation! disappearing in the middle of a night taking with her only a single suitcase and, as every woman who ever spoke of the episode liked to say, licking her lips, the clothes on her back.
(Aunt Connie said she’d grown up imagining she had actually seen her mother, as in a dream, walking stealthily up the long drive to the road, a bundle of clothes, like laundry, slung across her back. Children are so damned impressionable, Aunt Connie would say, laughing wryly.)
For a long time after their mother disappeared, and no word came from her, or of her, so far as the sisters knew, Connie couldn’t seem to help herself teasing Nelia saying “Mommy’s coming home!” — for a birthday of Nelia’s, or Christmas, or Easter. How many times Connie thrilled with wickedness deceiving her baby sister and silly-baby that she was, Nelia believed.
And how Connie would laugh, laugh at her.
Well, it was funny. Wasn’t it?
Another trick of Connie’s: poking Nelia awake in the night when the wind was rattling the windows, moaning in the chimney like a trapped animal. Saying excitedly, Momma is outside the window, listen! Momma is a ghost trying to get YOU!
Sometimes Nelia screamed so, Connie had to straddle her chest and press a pillow over her face to muffle her. If they’d wakened Pappa with such nonsense there’d sure have been hell to pay.
Once, I might have been twelve, I asked if my grandfather had spanked or beaten them.
Aunt Connie, sitting in our living room on the high-backed mauve-brocade chair that was always hers when she came to visit, ignored me. Nor did Mother seem to hear. Aunt Connie lit one of her Chesterfields with a fussy flourish of her pink-frosted nails and took a deep satisfied puff and said, as if it were a thought only now slipping into her head, and like all such thoughts deserving of utterance, “I was noticing the other day, on TV, how brattish and idiotic children are, and we’re supposed to think they’re cute. Pappa wasn’t the kind to tolerate children carrying on for a single minute.” She paused, again inhaling deeply. “None of the men were, back there.”