Ma & Me (eBook)

1 Tirza the Wine Bath Girl

After I brought the car around to the gate to pick Ma up, I found I had half an hour to spare, so I walked down to the river through the pine flatwoods and the grove of old live oaks. I made my way through the brambles to the end of the little spit by the collapsed boat dock. I sat for a spell above the lip of the current, a thick quiver of willows between me and the climbing sun. Then a fat wind came suddenly around the southern bend, stalled in a stand of red bay where a hammock of oak and palm scythes into the stream, in a moment recovered and brushed the last smoke of morning mist out of the backwaters, lifting and freshening the air.

Who is happy? Who is afraid?

This morning I heard these questions on the wind—out of the wind’s silence—as the wind lifted the heavy and sweet wetness from the air.

We drive into town, Ma at the wheel, Yashoda and I crouched in our seats, protesting at every lurch and swerve. But Ma is unperturbed by the terror she provokes. And it is small comfort that she always talks her way out of tickets either with a pugnacious innocence or by beguiling the officer’s manhood with her wholly bewildering purity, as if she were both the girl of his dreams and his mother. Today we end up astride County Road 510 in Wabasso directly under a red light, blocking all westbound traffic.

She will not take the least criticism.

“Don’t tell me how to drive or youse can both get out here.”

“But Ma,” I choke, “back up at least and let the truck…”

“Truck? What truck!” (Her language is a good deal rougher than I care to represent it.)

A lorry with several tons of Indian River grapefruit looms at the right window. From here I can see the rifle latched above the dash. The light changes, and Ma surges forward, savagely cutting off a tow truck. Ma has always been a formidable driver. Savage but impeccable, she drives with flawless mastery and complete abandon.

As her passenger for the best part of twenty years, I am sometimes given to wonder, after my professorial fashion (I was once a professor of Old and Middle English), if there is a particular theology to her driving. If so, it is all grace and no doctrine. It must be a lawless theology of absolute presence, in which all attention is miraculously gathered into the present moment. Only a driver fully abandoned to the here and now, the sanctity of the actual and immediate, could ever escape alive and unscathed by such wildness. And for that matter only a passenger safely buckled into an eternal present could ever ride willingly at her side without an overwhelming panic of the kind that overtakes me now, provoking flurried thoughts about first and last things.

As we hurtle south toward Vero Beach through the dense orange groves, pumping in the sudden heat before spring the gorgeous perfume of their blossoming, I notice the whites of my knuckles on the door handle, and wondering where God is now, I reflect with misplaced and improvident calm, born of deep panic, that it was a car crash which landed us in Florida—in this mess, this sublime mess—in the first place. Not that it was her fault. She has truly never hurt a soul.

But it’s a long story. A long and scarcely credible story how Christ came to her and how her hands bled on Good Friday and again on Easter Sunday when she was trying to serve spareribs to her family in spite of the blood trickling down her forehead; how he told her to turn her back on everything and walk away and share her love for God—that crazy, impatient, blaspheming God, so full of tricks and tall stories, who never stopped bothering her, pulling at her sleeve, tripping her up with unannounced ecstasies, filling her house in Brooklyn with spiritual riffraff, bankers and druggies, professors and gun molls, priests and whores; how her husband Sal, whom she loved to distraction, fell apart in a motel in Montauk, and the judge broke down when she sang in court; and how, swerving to avoid some newlyweds in front of her on the highway, she flipped the van over on the Long Island Expressway, striking her head on the dash; how after three years of trying to share it all and keep her family, of giving it all away even to people who didn’t want it, she hopped on a plane to Miami, alone and battered, and Sam at the car rental tried to take her home to Coconut Grove and have his wife patch her up—“Lady, you ain’t going nowhere like that!”

A long story, and who would believe it?

But not for now. Now the cool musk of the blossoming oranges drenches our minds and our senses.

“Don’t tell me how to drive!”

“Did I say anything?” Yashoda protests. “Did I say anything?” She is sitting cowered in the backseat, the cooler on her lap for a buffer, her face as white as orange blossoms, the bright floss of her blond hair shocked with fright.

A few miles south of Wabasso, between the Indian River and US 1, there is a wild orchard. Passing by a month ago I saw a road gang of county prisoners buckhorning the trees where a hard frost in February had burned them back. Now to my astonishment the stumps are already sprouting, and around them the healthy trees are full, heavy, and fragrant. Most of their blossoms will fall chastely to the ground. But from an abundant few the infant fruit will soon issue.

A southeast wind sweeps across from the beaches and the barrier island, runs through the orchard, and spills the pregnant musk of its blossoming onto the roadway, flooding the car.

We are late for Ma’s appointment.

* * *

This is the story of a holy person, but from the start I should make it clear that I am not writing about someone who pretends to be particularly good or wise. Though I once believed in the refining of such qualities, and even in the possibility of their perfection, I have come to believe that the refinement of virtue is almost always a presumption, and that perfection of any sort—intellectual, moral, spiritual—is not a human property. And since it is not human, it cannot be divine either, and to hearken after it is a kind of folly. Even Christ was troubled and afraid and angry, and though you wouldn’t know it from the Gospels, I am sure he played tricks on people and told tall stories and laughed. And where there is fear and trouble and laughter, there cannot be perfection, or the affectation of goodness and wisdom. If we seek perfection we should look to that supremely confident and credible fellow who tempted Christ in the wilderness. He never laughed or faltered. His performance was perfect. If anything is truly evil, it is the plausible clarity of such perfection, which proceeds from a limitless pride and denies the infinite humanity of God. Instead of perfection, I have come to believe in the possibility of fulfillment—and that is quite another thing. It is less a matter of goodness and wisdom than of joy—of that fulfillment of our natural capacity for happiness which Christ promised John: “That my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. ”3

Ma was always very full, and full of joy, and entirely without scruples. She was always happy and bad and passionate. From the start I saw that she was wild, that she would stop at nothing, that she had her own rules and always broke them. I saw that there would never be an end to her tricks and her makebelieve and her show. Her language would make a sailor blush—a talent she learned from her mother Anna, who had also instructed her at an early age to “talk all day but say nothing” and to “never leave well enough alone.”

From the moment I met her I have never known her to give a direct account of herself or of any of the amazing consequences of her wildness and her crazy love. Everything has to be blown up and embellished, even when it is already beyond the bounds of belief. Everything, that is, this side of her silence.

Whenever she falls silent, the world stops, and with it all her show, and then she can never keep a straight face. In the end, she gives herself away. She always gives herself away. But she could be very rough, and I, as an Oxford don whose life had been sheltered from the criminal world (though I had encountered the peculiarly base criminality of the High Table), I was often and for a long time shocked by Ma’s happy savagery. She had been brought up in poverty, in a cellar on Brighton 8th Street, under the Boardwalk, and on the back streets of Coney Island and Brighton Beach. She had joined a gang when she was ten, quit school at fifteen, and married at fifteen into a Sicilian family. Before she was out of her teens, every door in Redhook and Green Point was open to her.

She sold seconds and closeouts in her garage, and in order to inflame the demand she promoted her goods as hot off the trucks. At one time she had forty-five women working for her. Everyone adored her. No one messed with her, ever.

Her father Harry was a gambler, and after her mother died, when Ma turned thirteen, she was pretty much on her own. So she was streetwise, tough, a law unto herself.

“You have to eat everything and everyone life puts in your way,” she has always said, and she lived this cannibalism. Seeing her consume the bigotry of southern sheriffs, I understood where she had learned to make the offal of their hatred delicious—in her savage childhood, on the other side of the law. She once hauled me in front of one such...