The Mother of Good Fortune

When I was six years old my mother left my father, and she took me to another city to live on expectations. She had been a handsome and quick-witted girl, the secret darling of her family, but they also had lived on expectations—that they would inherit money from a rich uncle or a brother’s ranch, or have a clever son—and so when my mother was married twice and twice disappointed, she left her husband to go someplace where once again she could wait for her fortune. But to wait, and to receive nothing, had become a habit of life for her, and even though she could not say this to herself, she believed that she had received unhappiness for her share; her life had failed, she had lost her chances, and she did not believe she could make it good by her own will. She did not even have a son, someone in whom she could place her hopes as her mother had; only a daughter, who was moody and talkative, already damaged by the broken marriage.

It was a prosperous year when she left my father, and with a little money and some lies she managed to buy a house. She had not wanted to do this; she had wanted to do as her sisters had suggested: put me in a boarding school and find an apartment and a job for herself. But the school proved to be an unlucky choice, for I was mistreated there. I was too stupid and frightened to complain, but during Christmas vacation my mother happened to ask me if I was anxious to get back to school, and I said no, that the women there teased me and humiliated me and told me that my mother didn’t want me. My mother was humiliated by this, then, as well. She did not send me back to school, and within two months she found a house and a public school where I could go in the daytime.

The house she bought was really too large for her means. When she had spent what money she could, she found she had nothing left to make a proper lawn or buy enough furniture or a refrigerator. In the neighborhood of the house the young husbands, who had been in the army, took great pride in their gardens, bought secondhand cars for themselves and their wives, wrote letters to the city government demanding pavements and sewer systems, and devoted all their attention to their homes and their children. I could share this household affection; I was included in all vague, enthusiastic invitations to the children at large to share a picnic or a marshmallow roast, and now and then my mother and I found ourselves in the back of a crowned station wagon headed for some park or unfenced countryside. My mother looked in the newspapers for public outings: picnics for families from Iowa or Ohio, Baptist or Catholic socials, civic excursions. She took me to these and made friends for the afternoon, for she was still clever and handsome, and her failure made her ready to agree to any opinion or praise anything another person took pride in—but afterward she would mock the people we had met.

I became unhappy whenever I measured the difference between our house and the houses of my friends; and even though these children came to visit all day, I was afraid and ashamed that they would notice that the furniture was secondhand. We did not have a car to take the other children on picnics or trips to museums (but my mother would take me and one or two others by bus), and after school I made the long walk with her to the market and then walked hack empty-handed because she would not allow me to carry groceries. I suspected that my friends came to the house because my mother was less strict than their own mothers, and I became very animated and pushy so that they would come lor my sake alone; but reflected in my mother’s open gaiety, I saw myself changeable and awkward. The only excursion I enjoyed wholeheartedly was going to the movies; the only theater close enough to walk to was a drive-in, but they kept some benches in the front for people without cars, and on warm nights we sat together in a darkness that smelled ol dry earth and looked up at the enormous screen with its enormous voices.

An Atlantic First by Judith Rascoe

When I was ashamed or unhappy, my mother felt it like a splinter under her nail—the shame especially, since she had fought against her shame of herself for so long. She gave me whatever I knew how to ask for: a paper-doll book, a plastic toy, praise: but I did not know many things to ask for, and at times I stared at her with a look of dumb greed, which frightened her because she recognized a greediness like her own for something wc could not name. These moments passed and returned and passed again, and meanwhile night after night we sat across from each other at the supper table, talking in a lively, courteous way like two strangers who have struck up an acquaintance on a bus. I liked this companionable relation best; of all things in our lives, it alone gave me a sense of being a solid, separate person. For a time I convinced myself that she was not my real mother but a woman who worked with a group of kidnappers, and hoping to find some clue to this conspiracy, I continually asked her to tell me stories about her life and her family. She liked to tell these stories. Site did not even mind telling them again and again. Sometimes she sang me to sleep, but I was afraid ol the song she liked best, and the words gave me a stifled feeling:

I always believed that the song was about her brother who had been in the war.

My mother looked for work, and although she had gone to college and had been trained to do several things—had in fact worked before marrying the second time—she now had no confidence in herself and avoided jobs suited to her experience. She made excuses for herself: that she did not have a car, that these jobs were scarce and demanding and badly paid in this city, and that they would leave her too little time to take care of the house and me. Instead she sought whatever appealed to her at the moment: temporary jobs or work that seemed to associate her with “interesting people.” She told lies to get these jobs, lies far too complicated even for her to remember. She would work for a few weeks at a time and then tell another lie that would allow her to leave; increasingly she urged herself that we needed little more than the money her husband sent for my support. She had not asked for alimony. Out of pride site insisted that we were really well off, that we had easy expectations of my father, and that he was in fact generous if he was tricked into being so. Money would come as certainly as a ripe apple from its branch. Sometimes I used all this against her and wrote to my father, asking him to take me away.

Judith Rascoe is a Stanford graduate and a doctoral candidate at Harvard’s Department of English.

My mother had wealthy friends who spent the winter in a hotel in the city: Agnes and Harry Fay. She had known them since childhood. They had been poor when they married, had worked hard and bought land. After the war the land became very valuable and their business prospered. They had a beautiful daughter, Betty, who had just finished high school, and they had lots of friends who had become rich as they had in the same boom times; every few weeks they would call my mother to ask her to dinner or to a party, and they would find men to go with her. She became attached to a man who could not marry her, but despite this, and despite the fact that I made fun of the man (I called him “the pumpkinhead” because he had red hair), she was happy in her own way for a while and believed that at least tlie expectation of some little change had been fulfilled; but then the man left the city, and just as she was reconciling herself to this, a Diesel truck ran over Harry Fay and killed him.

At once my mother was eager to help, and she threw herself into the macabre excitement of her friend’s troubles. The beautiful daughter was turning crazy and abusive—they must conspire to stop this. Old friends were trying to buy the business and the hint! at a loss to the widow—she must encourage Agnes to take over the business alone and make a go of it. Her friend was foolish with grief and terror—she must be made to see the good that surely lay ahead. All the force of will that site could not use for herself, all the force that would taint the purity of her own expectations, she could find on her friend’s behalf. Many mornings, even school mornings, my mother carefully dressed herself and me. She put on her best suit; and instead of the blue jeans I wore to school, I wore my best plaid skirt, a freshly ironed blouse, and my Easter coat. Agnes Fay gave us money for a taxi, and we would ride to the hotel where she had stayed on after the funeral, the taxi driver outwitting the hesitant and shabby secondhand cars that belonged to the neighbors and people like the neighbors on their way to work.

The hotel was old and grand—not in any absolute sense, but in relation to the city, which was new and gaudy—just on the point of decline, like a coin tossed in the air, pausing, about to descend. That year a larger, more modern, and more ostentatious hotel had been built on the other side of the downtown area; but all the money in town was new money, and those who had just had time to settle into the old iiotcl were waiting for a while, testing their fortune, and enjoying the chance to mock the newest money that went straight to the newest hotel.

In the morning, men in carefully cut ranchers’ suits and hand-stitched boots would go down to the coffee shop, then buy the papers and sit in the lobby, where large and misshapen leather chairs were placed shoulder to shoulder around the imitation Spanish pillars. The bellboys anti clerks here still made as much in tips as those in the new hotel, but here they had to know the names of the men who tipped them, and there was a ritual of good fellowship, compounded of gifts of whiskey anti financial advice from the guests and the appearance of ingenuity from the employees: “I know as where I can get that little thing for you, Mister Bolam,”a bellboy would say. “No need of you goin’ around there. I was just on my way out to get this fellow in 218 a bottle of aspirin. No, don’t give me any money. I always have to carry money. Ell trust you, Mr. Bolam. Isn’t everybody I’d say that to. Just you wait a minute.” And the bellboy would return with a watchband or undershirts or a bookie’s receipt or the telephone number of a clean girl.

When my mother entered the lobby with me, she straightened and drew in a little breath of relief, as if she were stepping off a train into a town where everybody knew her name. Years before, between her marriages, she had insisted that her beaux meet her in the lobbies of expensive hotels; she would arrive early and finish combing her hair and settling her collar in the rest rooms of such hotels, where there was always a colored woman in uniform and gold mirrors, and then she would go out and sit on some wine-colored chair, smoking and secretly studying women’s dresses and the faces of the men. Now, here, she was known as Mrs. Fay’s friend, Mrs. Windus, and when she crossed the lobby she smiled at laces she recognized, acknowledged the stetsons touched for her, and led me past them with fussy motions of her hands. I was always excited by this progress, and it was not until we were inside the elevator and my mother was chatting with the elevator man that I realized that I dreaded these visits.

As we turned along the corridor, the image of Agnes Fay’s daughter, Betty, came into my head: a fiercely pretty brown face and shoulders drawn up and a hard, drawling voice: “Didn’t your mama ever tell you you weren’t supposed to mess with other people’s things? Get out of there!” I had opened a closet where there were party gowns and a fur coat and jersey dresses embroidered with pearls, and I had been pulling them out, wrapping their skirts around me, when I was caught. After that I brought crayons with me and used the hotel stationery to draw pictures of princesses, but this was dangerous too, since once when Agnes Fay showed Betty a drawing of mine, Betty made a face and said, “Swell. Listen, I could draw too when f was her age. I won a prize at Immaculate Heart, if you remember.” My mother told me that Betty was unhappy and confused, but this only made me hate her the more.

In fact, the excuses my mother made for Betty Fay were rare and simple compared with the excuses she made for my presence. She did not let me go to school, since she would not be at home when I returned (and she knew that I was bored in my classes) ; and she refused to hire baby-sitters —she said that she could not trust them, that they might frighten or neglect me, and she was proud of her singularity in this attitude. But once in the hotel suite, once faced with her friend’s easy welcome, she was obliged to apologize for my coming, and for a few minutes she would admonish me to be good, not to roughliouse or get into things, not to interrupt or disturb so much as a pile of magazines. Some of these warnings were impossibly strict, and others were unnecessary and curiously unreal, as if she were not talking to me (I was usually cpiiet and careful around adults and avoided their conversation) but to some violent and noisy little boy. If a third person were present she might even speak of “the children,” a habit she had fallen into when speaking to strangers; but this falsity tormented me into speaking: “What children? I’m the only children!” “Teasing, teasing,” my mother would say, and catch hold of me affectionately, a thing she never did when we were alone.

One morning when we arrived, Agnes Fay was sitting on the bed, where she sat usually, although there were chairs and even a sofa in the room. I found some stationery and started drawing princesses; my mother sat on a footstool beside the bed. At once they began to talk about the untrustworthiness of Mrs. Fay’s accountant, and my mother brightened in the fullness of her malicious distrust—made jokes, told anecdotes, quoted magazine articles more or less to the point, casting all this at her friend’s complacent and unlettered suspicion.

“I’m just a farmer’s daughter,” Mrs. Fay would say, “but I know a crook when I smell one.” “There was an article, I forget where—”

“I don’t need to read any articles to know that fellow’s a crook. I knew it the first time he came in looking for Harry, wanting to get an advance on his salary because of family trouble. Family trouble and a new car. Everybody’s got family trouble. I told Harry. But Harry had a soft spot, you know.”

“Harry never never let anybody down, Agnes. Never in his life.”

“I know that—wlio’d know better than me?” Mrs. Fay began to cry. She took my mother’s hand. “Not like these sons of bitches, they’re always looking for a little easy money, they couldn’t do what they’re doing if Harry were here. It’s the rottenness in people where they treat a widow and her child like that. Honest to God, I wish Harry’d taken me with him. If I didn’t have Betty—there’s another thing to break my heart.”

“Agnes, don’t you talk like that—now don’t you ever let me hear you talking like that. You’re smarter than ten of these dumb old men, these dumb horse’s, well-you-know, put together, and you’re going to show them. Harry wouldn’t want to see you crying like this.”

“Oh, the good God knows he wouldn’t! But I’ve got to cry it out!”

“That’s right, you just cry now, nobody’s here but us. But I don’t want them to see you crying.”

“They’ll never see me crying. Believe you me, they’ll never see me with a tear in my eye. I’ll be the cold little widow woman. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.”

The tears dried, Agnes released my mother’s hand. They called down for coffee, and while they drank it, Agnes had my mother read letters from the lawyers. My mother read and commented, but it was Mrs. Fay who closed her eyes and figured in her head what mortgage payments would fall due in the next month and how much interest the bank would charge on a short-term loan.

It was, then, a morning like other mornings in the hotel—except that Betty was not there, and her absence, instead of leaving me at peace, made me more apprehensive: she could arrive at any moment, and then I would have no place to go; I would have to accept what she said about me. I drew two princesses—my mother and me. I didn’t like them. I drew more. With each new sheet of paper I said, This will be the best; but I wasn’t satisfied and kept drawing, and my nose ached with excitement.

At noon my mother told me to wash my face and hands and come to have my hair brushed; as a treat from Mrs. Fay, we were all to eat downstairs. When she was finished with me I sat on the edge of a chair and watched the women arrange themselves. Mrs. Fay decided all at once to change her suit, and my mother hung up the discarded garment, found a missing shoe, and buttoned the back of Mrs. Fay’s blouse; then she started to adjust her own blouse, but Mrs. Fay let out a little sob. “Let’s get out of here,” Mrs. Fay said. “If I don’t start down now, I do not think I’ll make it. I don’t care about eating these days, I’d just as well send for a sandwich.”

“I’ve just got to tuck in my blouse,” my mother said.

“Never mind. Nobody’s going to look at us anyway. Hell, I wouldn’t dress up for those sons of bitches down there.”

“You’re right, Agnes,” my mother said, but she was close to tears of disappointment: it was one thing, she thought, to be careless of expensive clothes, another thing if the clothes were old.

“That old suit,” Mrs. Fay said. “You should buy yourself a new one; make Arnold send you money for it. I’m fat, but you’d look real pretty if you’d take some time for yourself.”

“It is an old suit, I don’t know why I wear it,” my mother said in a strained voice. “Come over here, come here, let me fix your hair,” she said to me.

“You fixed it!”

“Let it go,” Mrs. Fay said. “She looks fine.”

“She can’t keep it in place. I won’t let her go downstairs with her hair in a mess. I won t disgrace you, Agnes. Site’s a good little thing, but these children, they won’t stay still.” She snatched at the brush and at me and began to brush my hair with short, painful strokes. I felt her anger and disappointment in her hands, and I began to whine.

“I’m going ahead,” Mrs. Fay said.

“Were ready right this minute!” my mother sang out, and pushing me ahead of her, she followed Mrs. Fay and meanwhile furtively adjusted her jacket. In front of the elevator I looked at my mother and said, “You’re crying.”

“I’m not crying, honey. I have something in my eye. See. Right here.” She whispered and bent close to me, pushing at her eyelid with her finger to demonstrate the nonexistent mote. “You be good now. Don’t upset Agnes.”

“I don’t want to eat lunch,” I said.

“Well you just sit and pretend like you do. I don’t want to eat lunch either.”

In the elevator she said fiercely, “They’ll write this hotel up for a magazine someday,” and Agnes Fay, hearing the tone and not the words, frowned. “I just said this hotel will be famous someday. What a historic old place it is.

“They’ll all be going over to the Skyhouse one of these days,” Mrs. Fay said, and then to the elevator man: “You too, Joe.”

“I’m too old for it, Miz Fay.”

“Harry always said you were our best friend in this hotel, Joe,” Mrs. Fay said, and with wet eyes she led us off at the mezzanine.

On that floor there was a private club: a small dining room, a bar, and a third room where there were slot machines and poker tables. My mother liked to eat there with her friend, for entrance implied that one knew the people who ran the city. Here my mother walked more selfconsciously, and when she spoke, it was in an artificial voice. Here she believed she was ashamed of nothing and that she recovered lor a while the attentiveness ami pride she had felt before she was married; but that attentiveness and pride, like this, had always sprung from shame and a fierce desire to surprise them all, her parents and their neighbors, with her luck that would be better than theirs or her brothers’. I saw stiffness and anger, too, in my mother’s look.

“Do you want a drink?” Mrs. Fay asked.

“I guess I’ll have something. One drink at lunchtime and I get tight as a tick, but let’s say this is a celebration.”

“I thought old foe was going to bawl when 1 told him what Harry said,” Mrs. Fay said with satisfaction.

“They all loved him, Agnes.”

“I’m going to have a Jack Daniels and water.”

“I think I’ll try a daiquiri.”

“Mixed drinks are too strong for me.”

“You know what Harry told me, Agnes, once. He said never drink mixed drinks. Plain old whiskey and water, that’s the stuff. You’ll never have any trouble with plain liquor.”

“Then why are you ordering that thing?”

“Oh. I didn’t think I liked the taste of whiskey. But you’re right.”

“For God’s sakes, have what you want.”

“I won’t change it now.”

“We haven’t ordered yet.”

“Oh, we haven’t have we! I was so carried away, I didn’t notice.”

I saw my mother’s expression: as it she were lost but still trying to keep the other’s spirits up; and I wished I had brought a comic book so that I would not have to listen—but it was likely that she would have taken it away from me, telling me just to sit and listen, listen in this sense meaning not to understand or to speak, but to seem to pay attention. Now, instead, I looked at the drawing on the front ol the menu. It showed a Spanish garden at night, where a moon was rising and the silhouettes of dancers appeared in open doorways. I imagined myself there, a cowgirl, the owner of the hacienda, inviting people to a ball and appearing in their midst in a cowgirl outfit of silver cloth (shining like the plated cream pitcher on the table), with white boots and a white hat.

My mother was not hungry, but she moved her food around on her plate, lifting a forkful to her mouth when the widow looked at her. She knew that the widow would tease her for not eating, and she knew also that her thinness was something Agnes envied, even when she said, “You’re just skin and bones.” Agnes, however, took up the subject of her own daughter: how difficult she was, what the doctors said, what the nuns could do; and my mother kept quoting magazine articles and praising the daughter’s beauty, but rather sadly, as if it were something already lost. She could not have enough of her friend’s misfortunes, and without knowing it she was impatient for something worse to happen. She said to herself that she was being realistic, and that Agnes did not realize how seriously disturbed Betty was; my mother could expect nothing else, to be truthful, of this shiftless and fortunate family that had promised nothing from the beginning. My mother tore out and saved the pages on art from Life magazine, could play Traümerei and a half-dozen pieces in major keys on the piano, and had taught me to obey several commands in French: Politesse est une fleur, she used to whisper. Agnes understood money and collected Royal Doulton figures and used the wrong verb forms. Despite the crooked accountant, Agnes did not know how lucky she was to have good, loyal lawyers. This talk of business reminded my mother of the days when she left her first husband, before she had taken a job; imagining herself a career woman, something that frightened and excited her at the same time. She would fail at that, at this. It was as if she were posturing in a room where the floor was falling. She fell silent.

Agnes Fay said to me,” You’re a good little thing, minding your mother. I remember when Betty was just your age—she behaved so well. Do you want to get up?”

“She can sit here till we finish our coffee,” my mother said.

“She doesn’t have to sit here. Honey, let me give you something.” Mrs. Fay opened her handbag, spilled Kleenex on her lap, and took out a leather purse. “Hold out your hands, honey.”

I held out my hands, and Agnes Fay spilled a bunch of silver dollars into my hands. They were heavy and cold, like water from a rock.

“You can play the slot machines with these.”

“Agnes, she can’t do that.”

“She can win me some money. Stop fussing, Connie, you’re just like an old hen.”

“I’ll go with her.’

“You sit right here.” Mrs. Fay spoke to the headwater, and the headwaiter spoke to a man in a gray suit, and it was arranged.

I knew I was going to win. Slowly, holding the dollars against my stomach, I climbed out of my chair and made my way through the dining room, knowing that everyone was watching me.

In the next room where the slot machines sat on a shelf around the wall, 1 was alone. On the floor was a dark-blue carpet with silver stars woven into the fabric, and there were two eight-sided tables covered in blue felt, surrounded by heavy chairs. The loudspeakers in twm corners broadcast piano music: “Some Enchanted Evening,” and then “A Slow Boat to China” (1 knew the words to both songs), and the air had the electric smell of air conditioning.

By climbing onto a chair I was the right height to operate the machines. I spread the dollars on the shelf next to a machine, put one in the slot, and pulled the handle with both hands, remembering what Agnes Fay had said once about slot machines: pull slowly, count to two, and let it go. The numbers spun and clicked into place one by one. There was a chink of money falling, but it was inside the machine, and I lost the dollar.

When I lost a second dollar I considered going to another machine. There were six dollars left. I put the next one in the slot very carefully and then pulled the handle down fast, letting it go immediately; it flung back noisily, rattling the coins inside. The numbers were wrong. The dollar was lost. I started to pick up the remaining dollars, when from behind me Agnes Fay said, “No, you’ve got it warmed up, don’t leave it.”

I said, “Go away, go away, please!” because I knew I must win, and anything could be bad luck.

I pushed another dollar quickly into the slot, then paused before drawing down the handle, conscious now that I was being watched. I lost the dollar.

“Here,” my mother said, “you let Agnes play, honey. Agnes, go on. She’s had her fun with it.”

“Let her finish.”

I leaned close to the machine (its hen breast, its comic eyes), whispering to it, “Come on. Nice machine. Come on, comeoncoraeoncomeon,” rubbed a dollar between my hands and put it in the slot; then I pulled the handle. A bell. A bell. A bell.

The money inside seethed, and there was a click. Then there was a rushing sound, and silver poured out of the mouth of the machine, so quickly that I stopped breathing, and only after that did I begin to catch at the falling coins.

“Looky here, she got herself a jackpot!” the widow said.

“Look, I won!” I held out the coins in my skirt.

I was a fairy-tale child with a skirt full of silver. My mother was smiling and looking around the room.

“Thank you, honey,” Agnes Fay said. She picked up the dollars, putting them in her purse, but she left two in the skirt for me. “Come on,” she said to my mother, “we’ll go out and spend these.”

“From our lucky little girl,” my mother said.

“Remember that,” Agnes said. “You’re lucky. You’re always going to be lucky. Your mother was lucky when we were girls.”

“I won that prize when the Golden Rule had that contest, didn’t f?” my mother said. “Come to think of it. Do you remember that?”

“Aren’t I lucky?” I said to my mother.

“You’ve always been lucky,” my mother said. “Ever since you were born.”