Faithless: Tales of Transgression Read online

  Part Two

  FAITHLESS

  The last time my mother Cornelia Nissenbaum and her sister Constance saw their mother was the day before she vanished from their lives forever, April 11, 1923.

  It was a rainy, misty morning. They’d been searching for their mother because something was wrong in the household; she hadn’t come downstairs to prepare breakfast so there wasn’t anything for them except what their father gave them, glutinous oatmeal from the previous morning hastily reheated on the stove, sticking to the bottom of the pan and tasting of scorch. Their father had seemed strange to them, smiling but not-seeing in that way of his like Reverend Dieckman too fierce in his pulpit Sunday mornings, intoning the Word of God. His eyes were threaded with blood and his face was still pale from the winter but flushed, mottled. In those days he was a handsome man but stern-looking and severe. Grizzled side-whiskers and a spade-shaped beard coarse and streaked too with gray, but thick springy-sleek black hair brushed back from his forehead in a crest. The sisters were fearful of their father without their mother to mediate among them; it was as if none of them knew who they were without her.

  Connie chewed her lip and worked up her nerve to ask where was Momma? and their father said, hitching up his suspenders, on his way outside, “Your mother’s where you’ll find her.”

  The sisters watched their father cross the mud-puddled yard to where a crew of hired men was waiting in the doorway of the big barn. It was rye-planting season and always in spring in the Chautauqua Valley there was worry about rain: too much rain and the seed would be washed away or rot in the soil before it could sprout. My mother, Cornelia, would grow to adulthood thinking how blessings and curses fell from the sky with equal authority, like hard-pelting rain. There was God, who set the world in motion, and who intervened sometimes in the affairs of men, for reasons no one could know. If you lived on a farm there was weather, always weather, every morning was weather and every evening at sundown calculating the next day’s, the sky’s, moods meant too much. Always casting your glance upward, outward, your heart set to quicken.

  That morning. The sisters would never forget that morning. They knew something was wrong, they thought Momma was sick. The night before having heard—what, exactly? Voices. Voice mixed with dreams, and the wind. On that farm, at the brink of a ten-mile descent to the Chautauqua River, it was always windy—on the worst days the wind could literally suck your breath away!—like a ghost, a goblin. An invisible being pushing up close beside you, sometimes even inside the house, even in your bed, pushing his mouth (or muzzle) to yours and sucking out the breath.

  Connie thought Nelia was silly, a silly-baby, to believe such. She was eight years old and skeptical-minded. Yet maybe she believed it, too? Liked to scare herself, the way you could almost tickle yourself, with such wild thoughts.

  Connie, who was always famished, and after that morning would be famished for years, sat at the oilcloth-covered table and ate the oatmeal her father had spooned out for her, devoured it, scorch-lots and all, her head of fair-frizzy braids lowered and her jaws working quickly. Oatmeal sweetened with top-milk on the very edge of turning sour, and coarse brown sugar. Nelia who was fretting wasn’t able to swallow down more than a spoon or two of hers so Connie devoured that, too. She would remember that part of the oatmeal was hot enough to burn her tongue and other parts were icebox-cold. She would remember that it was all delicious.

  The girls washed their dishes in the cold-water sink and let the oatmeal pan soak in scummy soapsuds. It was time for Connie to leave for school but both knew she could not go, not today. She could not leave to walk two miles to school with that feeling something is wrong, nor could she leave her little sister behind. Though when Nelia snuffled and wiped her nose on both her hands Connie cuffed her on the shoulder and scolded, “Piggy-piggy.”

  This, a habit of their mother’s when they did something that was only mildly disgusting.

  Connie led the way upstairs to the big bedroom at the front of the house that was Momma’s and Papa’s room and that they were forbidden to enter unless specifically invited, for instance if the door was open and Momma was cleaning inside, changing the bedclothes so she’d call out Come in, girls! smiling in her happy mood so it was all right and they would not be scolded. Come in, give me a hand, which turned into a game of shaking out sheets, fluffing out pillowcases to stuff heavy goosefeather pillows inside, Momma and Connie and Nelia laughing together. But this morning the door was shut. There was no sound of Momma inside. Connie dared to turn the doorknob, push the door open slowly, and they saw, yes, to their surprise there was their mother lying on top of the unmade bed, partly dressed, wrapped in an afghan. My God it was scary to see Momma like that, lying down at such an hour of the morning! Momma who was so brisk and capable and who routed them out of bed if they lingered, Momma with little patience for Connie’s lazy-tricks as she called them or for Nelia’s sniffles, tummyaches, and baby-fears.

  “Momma?”—Connie’s voice was cracked.

  “Mom-ma?”—Nelia whimpered.

  Their mother groaned and flung an arm across one of the pillows lying crooked beside her. She was breathing hard, like a winded horse, her chest rising and falling so you could see it and her head was flung back on the pillow and she’d placed a wetted cloth across her eyes mask-like so half her face was hidden. Her dark-blond hair was disheveled, unplaited, coarse and lusterless as a horse’s mane, unwashed for days. That rich rank smell of Momma’s hair when it needed washing. You remember such smells, the sisters would say, some of them not-so-nice smells, all your life. And the smell in their parents’ forbidden room of—was it talcum powder, sweaty armpits, a sourish-sweet fragrance of bedclothes that no matter how frequently laundered with detergent and bleach were never truly fresh. A smell of bodies. Adult bodies. Yeasty, stale. Papa’s tobacco (he rolled his own crude paper cigarettes, he chewed tobacco in a thick tarry-black wad) and Papa’s hair oil and that special smell of Papa’s shoes, the black Sunday shoes always kept polished. (His work-boots, etcetera he kept downstairs in the closed-in porch by the rear door called the “entry.”)

  In the step-in closet close by the a bed, behind an unhemmed length of chintz, was a blue-speckled porcelain chamber pot with a detachable lid and a rim that curled neatly under, like a lip.

  The sisters had their own chamber pot—their potty, as it was called. There was no indoor plumbing in John Nissenbaum’s farmhouse, or in any farmhouse in the Chautauqua Valley well into the 1930s, or in poorer homes well into the 1940s, and even beyond. One hundred yards behind the house, beyond the silo, was the outhouse, the latrine, the “privy.” But you would not want to make that trip in cold weather or in rain or in the pitch-black of night, not if you could help it.

  Of course the smell of urine and a fainter smell of excrement must have been everywhere, the sisters conceded, years later. As adults, reminiscing. But it was masked by the barnyard smell, probably. Nothing worse than pig manure, after all!

  At least, we weren’t pigs.

  Anyway, there was Momma, on the bed. The bed that was so high from the floor you had to raise a knee to slide up on it, and grab onto whatever you could. And the horsehair mattress, so hard and ungiving. The cloth over Momma’s eyes she hadn’t removed and beside Momma in the rumpled bedclothes her Bible. Facedown. Pages bent. That Bible her mother-in-law Grandma Nissenbaum had given her for a wedding present, seeing she hadn’t one of her own. It was smaller than the heavy black family Bible and it was made of limp ivory-leather covers and had onionskin pages the girls were allowed to examine but not to turn without Momma’s supervision; the Bible that would disappear with Gretel Nissenbaum, forever.

  The girls begged, whimpered. “Momma? Momma, are you sick?”

  At first there was no answer. Just Momma’s breath coming quick and hard and uneven. And her olive-pale skin oily with heat like fever. Her legs were tangled in the afghan, her hair was strewn across the pillow. They saw the glint of Momma’s gold cross on a t
hin gold chain around her neck, almost lost in her hair. (Not only a cross but a locket, too: when Momma opened it there was, inside, a tiny strand of silver hair once belonging to a woman the sisters had never known, Momma’s own grandmother she’d loved so when she was a little girl.) And there were Momma’s breasts, almost exposed!—heavy, lush, beautiful almost spilling out of a white eyelet slip, rounded like sacs holding warm liquid, and the nipples dark and big as eyes. You weren’t supposed to stare at any part of a person’s body but how could you help it?—especially Connie who was fascinated by such things, guessing how one day she’d inhabit a body like Momma’s. Years before she’d peeked at her mother’s big milk-swollen breasts when Nelia was still nursing, jealous, awed. Nelia was now five years old and could not herself recall nursing at all; she would come one day to believe, stubborn and disdainful, that she had never nursed, had only been bottle-fed.

  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 wonder 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 grown-ups 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 we’d wakened Papa 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. Papa 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.”