“And he brought up
Hadassah, that is, Esther, his uncle's daughter: for she had neither
father nor mother, and the maid was fair and beautiful.”
Now that your eyes
are gone,
your visual anchors
that
brought you to
safety,
living alone for
twenty years or more
without the jealous
husbands and lovers
bewildered by your
beauty,
without the Daddies
who left you
or the ones you
left,
you became wise and
strong,
talking out loud to
God
in ironic
conversations,
--”Who are you
talking to, Mom?”
--”To myself! Who
else?”
until the lights
went out
and your photography
was gone
and the books by
Karen Armstrong
and all those faces,
gone gone
--”Do you realize
how much I love faces?”
And more than
anything else,
the safety that
light brings through the eyes
or at least the
illusion of it
is what macular
degeneration
took from you.
Your five-year-old
girl
wandered door to
door in Queens,
asking neighbors to
be
invited in for
supper
because your mother
was out again
schmoozing after
work,
and your sister, ten
years older
who was more
battered even than you,
was locked in her
room again,
brooding... so you
begged at doors,
and thank God, as
you say,
New York was still a
village.
You laugh proudly:
You knew when Mrs.
Drew had
made another pot
roast
and when the
neighbor down the block
was frying latkas.
You knew what
everyone
was having for
supper.
A man appeared a few
times
a year and brought
you presents,
took you places,
restaurants,
Broadway shows or
the zoo,
and you never
understood
until you were older
who this mysterious
uncle was,
Martin Schaeffer,
this man who sold
furs in Brooklyn,
and you asked your
mother
in your crisis
seventeen,
“Why did you never
tell me
he was my father?”
and her answer was
spit
at you in hatred,
“Because he was a
Jew.”
So many questions
leftover from your
childhood,
like why your mother
Adelaide
and her mother Lydia
Broll
spoke Yiddish in the
kitchen
under their breath,
why Lydia hid in the
closet
every time there was
thunder or
lightning,
why these women had
no love
for two beautiful
daughters.
Your other Daddy was
German
and a drunkard too,
but he loved you,
even if he was
afraid
to show you too
much,
afraid of your
mother,
that foul-mouthed
lush.
He worked for Ma
Bell
and paid for you to
take
accordion lessons,
and at six, small as
you were
(and I can only
imagine it
as you are still
small today)
how you lugged that
thing
six whole blocks to
your lesson
and back again.
And then you played
for him
as tears ran down
his face:
“Patty,” he would say,
“play it again.”
When he was dying,
unable to breathe
through the cancer,
you laid me in a
crib and
took care of him.
It was a small price
for me to pay,
the debt so big to
your Daddy.
Your mother was late
to his funeral
late from the
hairdressers
and then wouldn't
let you ride
in the limousine to
the cemetery:
You were devastated.
Many years later,
you wrote him an elegy
called “Daddy,”
and even if you gave
away
the only copy you
had of it,
you can still recite
parts of it,
calling him “the
Picasso of my
silent nights,”
the tears straining
from your chest
every time you try.
How much you have
given me,
the things that were
never given to you:
the books, the
typewriter,
the encouragement,
the cuddling,
the separation, the
pain, the becoming.
We didn't have it
easy, you and I,
and this long story
of two women is
no less poignant
than an Italian film
by Vittorio
De Sica.
I will be brave in the telling of it,
I will be as courageous as David.
Thus will it rest as a testament
to your faith and your strength
like psalms in the desert.
