Then she turned to William and said, “And where were you, young man, while your poor wife was getting molested?”
William shrugged. This is how he was with his mother. Playfully rude.
* * *
—
Catherine bought me clothes. Frequently she bought clothes she liked, but sometimes she let me buy something I liked: a striped shirt to wear with a pair of jeans, a blue-and-white dress with a dropped waist that I loved. Once she wanted to buy me white loafers. “You will live in these,” she said. I asked her not to buy them, I would never have worn them; they were something she would have worn, this is what I thought but did not say, and in the end she did not buy them.
She did, a few months after William and I were married, get rid of a coat that I loved. I had bought it in a thrift shop for five dollars and I loved the huge cuffs and the way it swung when I walked, it was navy blue, I just loved that coat, I thought it was me. And Catherine threw it away one day after taking me to buy a new one. I don’t remember watching her throw it away, I only remember that she laughingly said that she had done so when I asked where it was. “You have that nice new one now,” she said.
The funny thing to me, I mean funny-interesting, is that the new coat she bought for me came from a store that was not where they sold especially nice things. I did not know that for a number of years, until I began to sort out the different stores. But it was almost a store where people went who had little money. In my youth we had never gone to such a store; we went to almost no stores at all. But my mother-in-law had money; she had it partly because her husband Wilhelm Gerhardt, William’s father who became the civil engineer, had left her a very good life-insurance policy, and she got that money when he died. A few years later she got her real estate license and she sold many houses in nice neighborhoods. So she did have money. That is all I am saying here.
She gave me her old nightgowns; they were nice, white with embroidery on them. I wore those.
* * *
As I contemplated her now, I understood why William, when he had his nighttime terrors of Catherine, would think of me as comfort. It is because—except for our girls who were eight and nine when Catherine died—it is because I am the only person left who had known his mother. Joanne does not count. She moved to the South after they divorced. She never got remarried. I think she never did, I am not sure.
* * *
Catherine asked me one day early on—William and I were not yet married—to tell me about my family, and I opened my mouth and then tears came down my face, and I said, “I can’t.” And she stood up from where she had been sitting in a chair and she came and sat next to me on the tangerine couch and put her arms around me and said, “Oh Lucy.” She kept saying that, rubbing my arms and my back and pressing my face to her neck. “Oh Lucy.”
She said to me that day, “I get depressed too.” And I was amazed. No one I ever knew, no grown-up, had ever said that—and she said it sort of casually—and she hugged me again. I have always remembered that. She carried within her that kindness.
Catherine always smelled good; there was a certain perfume and this was her scent. It was because of this that eventually I began to wear a certain perfume—though not hers—and have my own scent. It seemed I could never buy enough body lotion of this scent.
That lovely woman psychiatrist said one day with a shrug, “It’s because you think you stink.”
She was right.
My sister and my brother and I were told on the playground almost every day at school by the other children, while they ran off with their noses pinched, “Your family stinks.”
* * *
Right before William turned seventy-one, Chrissy told me she was pregnant. I felt a burst of happiness I had not known I could feel again since David had died; William and I spoke on the phone about this—a grandchild!—and he seemed pleased, though not as ecstatic as I was; this is how he is, it is just his nature, is what I mean. But then two weeks later Chrissy had a miscarriage. She called me from home early in the morning, and she screamed, “Mom!” She was on her way to the doctor’s. So I went immediately to Brooklyn—I took the subway because at that time of day it is the fastest way to get there—and I went to the doctor’s office and then I went to her home and we lay on the couch together while she wept; oh, I had not known Chrissy could weep in such a way, and she—taller than I am—lay with her head on my chest until she finally slowed in her crying; her husband was home, he had been at the doctor’s office too, but he left us alone in the living room. I did not tell her she would get pregnant again; I did not think that is what she needed to hear. I just held her, and pushed her hair gently away from her face. “Mom,” she said, looking at me, “I was going to call her Lucy if it was a girl.”