“In the old country we drown children like you,” Grandpa Sarkis muttered as they left the studio. “Turk-breath,” he cursed, and my mother cried harder. “Turk-breath,” he said, getting angrier and angrier until he too started to cry; just that morning he had received a telegram saying that his wife had taken another turn for the worse.
During the long, lonely trip back to Paterson, my mother sat crumpled in the back seat, barely moving, refusing to talk.
I imagine that she refused to talk. My mother never told me if this trip to California actually happened. What she did say was that they were poor and the bills were high and her father had once thought she should be a movie star. But it is not enough, Mother, what you have not said. It is not enough — your sadness with no explanation, your life of solitude, your retreats.
This must have been why my mother hated rides in the car so much. This, too, must have been why she would never go to the movies with Father, Fletcher, and me. She could still see the producer, fat forever in her mind, chewing on his cigar, whispering his rotten breath into her ear, “Don’t cry, sweetie, there, there, don’t cry. What the hell is this about sheep?”
I have seen my mother in a series of dime-store photographs as a teenager wearing black horn-rimmed glasses. She must have gone into Woolworth’s for a pair, wishing, I suppose, to appear more studious, to be taken seriously, to change the image of herself her father had given to her, as if it were a gift. I can see her sitting alone in that black photo booth, the velveteen curtain pulled, she positioned in different somber, intelligent poses. She liked the way she looked in glasses. She looked like someone to listen to. She looked like someone who had something to say.
My mother was always sure to tuck her glasses away in a safe spot after school so that her father, who was home by dinnertime, would not see them. But one day when he and his friends were let out early from work because of a power failure, he saw his daughter from the back on the way home from school.
“My daughter,” he told the men, “my American daughter.”
She was caught in a serious discussion with one of her classmates and did not see her father as he pulled up alongside her in his beat-up blue Chevrolet.
“What do you think you’re doing, Christine?” he yelled from the car window as he passed her. The brakes, which did not work well, left the car a good distance in front of her. “Come here,” he said in his old-world voice. His face grew red as she walked to him. “Why are you covering up those beautiful eyes?” his small black eyes said to her. “It’s unheard of. It’s not right what you’re doing.”
She stepped back, refusing to get into the car. She recalls that day perfectly: her friend, her father’s angry face, the people peering out from the dark car.
“What do you think you’re doing?” He could see her eyes, even behind the glasses, turning violet. Her stare was incandescent.
“It’s to keep men away,” she whispered, “men like your friends, men like you.”
“Four weeks,” he shouted to her as she ran down the street. This, she knew, meant no school, no friends, nothing but the sad, dark house as punishment. It did not matter. Her father could not hurt her anymore. She had said it. “Words,” she thought, shaking uncontrollably, “words.”
My grandfather knew, too, after that day that despite evervthing, all the dance lessons at the Y, all the trips to Atlantic City, all his encouragement, that there would be no Rockette to dance through his old age, no high kicks, no lifted bosom, no spangles or sequins to relieve sadness.
When my mother was eighteen and her sister Lucy was seventeen and their mother had been dead many years already, my grandfather left his daughters, every American hope dashed, every bloated dream deflated. The movies had tricked him. No quiet, beautiful daughter had ever resisted stardom in them. No wife died of a rheumatic heart at the age of thirty-five. No family was broken into pieces.
Does he show a photo of his American daughter in a square in Russia, in a desert in Syria, as he looks everywhere for his old Armenia? No telling. Does he dream her over? In his mind, does she dance through the sorrowful landscape, Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, full screen, larger than life?
Does he hold her photo up to the Turks? I wonder. Can she alter the bloody past for him — my beautiful, stubborn mother? A defense against the death force? A survivor? Transformed now — proof of something.
Now you move westward, Fletcher, leaving this old life far behind, as if it were possible to do so, and for you, even now, I would like to believe that it might be. Months ago your angry messages scrawled across picture postcards of Massachusetts, of Michigan, of West Virginia stopped coming. Did your anger end finally or only change form, become wordless, incommunicable? I must say it straight out — I am lonely for you. Write to me if you still can.
I always wanted to believe you, Hetcher, wanted to think that somehow we could live side by side with the sadness. It was your example I tried to follow: you, with your blue blanket slung around your shoulders, dreaming of flight; you, fast asleep on top of your leaflets, your thousand prayers for the earth; you of the civil rights rally, the peace march; your armbands, your food for the poor, vour large, burning heart.
Today you burn with a different fire, and everything you see as you cross the country burns in it. You level the land with your stare. You turn forests into ash, cities into ash, even houses where people live, even yourself.
This cannot go on, Fletcher — you, an old man carrying your bitter root across the country in a jute sack. Let it go. Bury it deep in the sand. Let it grow downward into darkness now as it curls from the bag into your arms and crawls onto your back, as it wraps all around you. I always believed you, Fletcher: that somehow we might forgive them. Now you face your greatest test, to take that faith of yours when you need it most, and use it.
Last I heard from my father he was nearing some neutral country like Sweden or Norway where they are just about to enter their season of darkness. Anyone who knows him would hope a Vivaldi concerto or a Bach fugue still runs through his head.
“…there’d been the biggest motorcade from the airport. Hot. Wild. Like Mexico and Vienna. The sun was so strong in our faces. I couldn’t put on sunglasses.…Then we saw this tunnel ahead, I thought it would be cool in the tunnel, I thought if you were on the left the sun wouldn’t get into your eyes.
“They were gunning the motorcycles. There were these little backfires. There was one noise like that. I thought it was a backfire. Then next I saw Connally grabbing his arms and saying no, no, no, no, no, with his fist beating. Then Jack turned and I turned. All I remember was a blue-gray building up ahead. Then Jack turned back so neatly, his last expression was so neat…you know, that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million pieces they have in a rocket, just before he’d answer. He looked puzzled, then he slumped forward. He was holding out his hand…. I could see a piece of his skull coming off It was flesh-colored, not white — he was holding out his hand…. I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap, his blood and his brains were in my lap…Then Clint Hill [the Secret Service man], he loved us, he made my life so easy, he w as the first man in the car…. We all lay down in the car…. And I kept saying, Jack, Jack, Jack, and someone was yelling he’s dead, he’s dead. All the ride to the hospital I kept bending over him, saying Jack, Jack, can you hear me, I love you, Jack. I kept holding the top of his head down, trying to keep the brains in.”
Jacqueline Kennedy