Clinging to his arm, she led him into the apartment. The living room was tiny and dark and he recognized the furniture from the apartment on Vanderhoff Street. It had been old and worn-out then. Now it was practically in ruins. Through an open door he could look into an adjoining room and see a desk, a single bed, books everywhere.
If he can afford to buy all those books, Thomas thought, he sure can afford to buy some new furniture.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said excitedly, guiding him to the one threadbare easy chair. “What a wonderful day.” Her voice was thin, made reedy by years of complaint. Her legs were swollen, shapeless, and she wore wide, soft, invalid’s shoes, like a cripple. She moved as though she had been broken a long time ago in an accident. “You look splendid. Absolutely splendid.” He remembered those words she used, out of Gone With the Wind. “I was afraid my little boy’s face would be all battered, but you’ve turned out handsomely. You resemble my side of the family, that’s plain to see, Irish. Not like the other two.” She moved in a slow awkward flutter before him as he sat stiffly in the chair. She was wearing a flowered dress that blew loosely about her thin body. Her thick legs stuck out below her skirt like an error in engineering, another woman’s limbs. “That’s a lovely gray suit,” she said, touching his sleeve. “A gentleman’s suit. I was afraid you’d still be in a sweater.” She laughed gaily, his childhood already a romance. “Ah, I knew Fate couldn’t be so unkind,” she said, “not letting me see my child’s face before I die. Now let me see my grandson’s face. You must have a picture. I’m sure you carry one in your wallet, like all, proud fathers.”
Thomas took out a picture of his child.
“What’s his name?” his mother asked.
“Wesley,” Thomas said.
“Wesley Pease,” his mother said. “It’s a fine name.”
Thomas didn’t bother to remind her that the boy’s name was Wesley Jordache, nor did he tell her that he had fought Teresa for a week to try to get her to settle for a less fancy name. But Teresa had wept and carried on and he’d given in.
His mother stared at the photograph, her eyes dampening. She kissed the snapshot. “Dear little beautiful thing,” she said.
Thomas didn’t remember her ever kissing him as a child.
“You must take me to see him,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Soon.”
“When I come back from England,” he said.
“England! We’ve just found each other again and you’re leaving for the other side of the earth!”
“It’s only for a couple of weeks.”
“You must be doing very well,” she said, “to be able to afford vacations like that.”
“I have a job to do there,” he said. He was reluctant to use the word fight. “They pay my way.” He didn’t want her to get the idea that he was rich, which he wasn’t, by a long shot. In the Jordache family, it was safer to cry poverty. One woman grabbing at every cent that came into the house was enough for one family.
“I hope you’re saving your money,” she said. “In your profession …”
“Sure,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.” He looked around him. “It’s a cinch Rudy’s saving his money.”
“Oh,” she said. “The apartment. It’s not very grand, is it? But I can’t complain. Rudy pays for a woman to come in and clean every day and do the shopping for me the days I can’t make the stairs. And he says he’s looking for a bigger place. On the ground floor somewhere, so it’ll be easier for me, without steps. He doesn’t talk to me much about his work, but there was an article last month in the paper all about how he was one of the up-and-coming young businessmen in town, so I suppose he’s doing well enough. But he’s right to be thrifty. Money was the tragedy of the family. It made an old woman of me before my time.” She sighed, self-pitying. “Your father was demented on the subject. I couldn’t get ten dollars from him for the barest necessities of life without a pitched battle every time. When you’re in England you might make some confidential inquiries, find out if anyone has seen him there. He’s liable to be anyplace, that man. After all, he was European, and it would be the most natural thing in the world for him to go back there to hide out.”
Off her rocker, he thought. Poor old lady. Rudy hadn’t prepared him for this. But he said, “I’ll ask around when I get over there.”
“You’re a good boy,” she said. “I always knew deep down that you were essentially a good boy, but swayed by bad companions. If I had had the time to be a proper mother to my family, I could have saved you from so much trouble. You must be strict with your son. Loving, but strict. Is you wife a good mother to him?”
“She’s okay,” he said. He preferred not to talk about Teresa. He looked at his watch. The conversation and the dark apartment were depressing him. “Look,” he said, “it’s nearly one o’clock. Why don’t I take you out to lunch? I have a car downstairs.”
“Lunch? In a restaurant. Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely,” she said, girlishly. “My big strong son taking his old mother out to lunch.”
“We’ll go to the best place in town,” he said.
On his way home, driving Schultzy’s car down toward New York late in the afternoon, he thought about the day, wondering if he would ever make the trip again.
The image of his mother formed in adolescence, that of a scolding, perpetually disapproving hard woman, fanatically devoted to one son, to the detriment of another, was now replaced by that of a harmless and pitiful old lady, pathetically lonely, pleased by the slightest attention, and anxious to be loved.
At lunch he had offered her a cocktail and she had grown a little tipsy, had giggled and said, “Oh, I do feel naughty.” After lunch he had driven her around town and was surprised to see that most of it was entirely unknown to her. She had lived there for years, but had seen practically nothing of it, not even the university from which her son had been graduated. “I had no idea it was such a beautiful place,” she kept saying over and over again, as they passed through neighborhoods where comfortable, large houses were set among trees and wintry lawns. And when they passed Calderwood’s, she said, “I had no idea it was so big. You know, I’ve never been in there. And to think that Rudy practically runs it!”
He had parked the car and had walked slowly with her along the ground floor and insisted upon buying her a suede handbag for fifteen dollars. She had had the salesgirl wrap up her old bag and carried the new one proudly over her arm as they left the store.
She had talked a great deal in the course of the afternoon, telling him for the first time about her life in the orphanage (“I was the brightest girl in the class. They gave me a prize when I left.”), about working as a waitress, being ashamed of being illegitimate, about going to night school in Buffalo to improve herself, about not ever letting a man even kiss her until she married Axel Jordache, about only weighing ninety-two pounds on the day of her wedding, about how beautiful Port Philip was the day she and Axel came down to inspect the bakery, about the white excursion boat going by up the river, with the band playing waltzes on the deck, about how nice the neighborhood was when they first came there and her dream of starting a cosy little restaurant, about her hopes for her family.…
When he took her back to the apartment she asked him if she could have the photograph of his son to frame and put on the table in her bedroom and when he gave it to her, she hobbled into her room and came back with a photograph of herself, yellowed with age, taken when she was nineteen, in a long, white dress, slender, grave, beautiful. “Here,” she said, “I want you to have this.”