Besides "VISIONS OF GLORY," among Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's published books is "AN ACCIDENTAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY." On pages 92 through 95 she relates a little story of her mother.
- - - begin quote - - -
Her religion had delivered her from the fate she feared: she was no longer a cipher. She no longer bore any resemblance to her own mother. She had escaped the claustrophobia of Main Street and the activities she found idiotic for the glories of a theocracy.
But - oh my poor mother! - this road was not safe for her either. All roads led, for her; to the home of her hoarded sorrow and her contained rage. Her beauty and her fervor and the haze of martyrdom that surrounded her made at least one man mad. And he placed her in profound danger (no net). This is what happened:
It is evening in Brooklyn (there is honeysuckie in the air; and a light fog rolling in from the ocean), and I am going from door to door with Chas, whose dynamism has made him the object of many girls' desire. He is a young man with blunt features, a blunt manner, flying hair; and a bullish passion for proselytizing equal to my mother's own vampish/vampira passion; her enticing passion runs parallel with and at last crazily headlong into his virile passion. Chas had recently been released from prison, where, as a "minister;" he had spent the duration of World War II, an incarceration that seemed glamorous and dazzled gaggles of girls. In a moment of silliness (it was hard to be a pretend grown-up all the time) I asked him who, of all the girls, he "liked." "Don't ask me that, it's too painful," he said. (I was
used to people's emotions being painful; emotions didn't seem to be good
for anything but pain.) No alarm bells went off in my head, for in spite of the fact that I was unnaturally good and serious, I was a child.
One night soon after; at dinner; very calmly under the circumstances, Daddy says to Mother - in Italian dialect, which I am not expected to understand, but which I do - that his mother saw Chas and my mother walking mano a mano, hand in hand, on Sixty-sixth Street, where the two were preaching door to door. An intake of breath. Mine? Hers? I do not remember what she said, if she said anything at all. I was suspended in his terrifying calm. I remember a laugh, I don't remember whose. Not mine. (Mrs. Rochester's laugh.) I believe it was soon after this that he tried to kill me, I was insufficient to his needs. Whatever happened around that table (about which I am quasi-amnesiac), seemed in some odd way to release them both to act out their
cherished fantasies. (He tried to kill me.) Soon Chas appeared in our sunny kitchen almost every day when Daddy was at work. He knelt at her feet and polished her toenails red. They studied the Bible together; their heads and hands touching. Sometimes they danced; she was surprisingly clumsy, she danced with grim flat-footed determination as if dancing were something over which to gain dominion and control. (She hated it that I danced; and when I danced in the kitchen with a girlfriend she insisted I scrub the floor with bleach, to remove the skid marks our heels made. . . . I love to dance still; I dance well.)
Chas said to me, "I am your real father. You must obey me." My response to this was to give my brother a vicious pinch and to exercise a kind of tyranny over the little boy.
He followed behind me on the way to school, poor little boy, his crayons and pencils dribbling from his clutch, his orthopedically shod feet making heavy weather of it. I sprinted ahead, at school I was a star; I disregarded my little brother (storing up guilt).
I hated Chas.
When I approached the thought of the danger my mother had placed herself in, I swooned; the world fell away from me. I did not know how to guarantee her safety; I sensed, through a scrim of inarticulate denial, that her peril jeopardized whatever security I had.
I hated my father.
One day I found, in the book bag that my mother carried her Watch Tower literature in, the Bible she and Chas consulted. There was a long letter from Chas in it, which I read. It was a doctrinal thesis: They were
married in fact and in the eyes of God if not in law, he wrote (citing
Scripture to prove his arcane point); they were affianced - which was
tantamount to marriage; and their marriage would be fully consummated after Armageddon, after birds had plucked the eyes from my father's ruined body. In the meantime, they would spiritually love... and love... and love. And hold hands.
(continued next message)