Little Casino

A nice surprise

ON MOTHER’S DAY SHE TAKES HER MOTHER to the Paris on 58th Street to see Olivier’s Hamlet. Afterward, they go to Rumpelmayer’s for ice cream and coffee, and then stroll over to the Plaza and then down Fifth Avenue. All these small, thoughtful, and seemingly loving acts are really instances of an anemic contempt for and patronization of her mother, who, she is sure, absolutely sure, would much rather have seen a Bette Davis double feature in the neighborhood rerun house, the Stanley, and then have enjoyed a melted-cheese sandwich and a cup of tea in Holsten’s Ice-Cream Parlor. Her mother had little to say about the movie other than a comment on Olivier’s bleached hair. Well, why would she even begin to understand it? Her mother had gone to Manual Training High School, and was unaccountably proud of the commercial diploma that she had earned. God! They walk down to 34th Street, chatting and window-shopping, and then prepare to separate, she to board a bus for the Village, her mother to take the subway to Bay Ridge.

Thanks, her mother says, so much, thanks so much, sweetie, I really enjoyed our day, it was such a nice surprise. They stand and wait for the daughter’s bus, which is just down the avenue, and her mother kisses her on the cheek and moves away. Really wonderful, dear, she says, so lovely to be up near the Plaza again, it’s been such a long time, and I remembered the hotel, too, perfectly. Talk about a long time! What? her daughter says. The Plaza, her mother says, the beautiful Plaza and the week I spent there, oh, long before I was pregnant with you. A couple of thousand years ago. What? her daughter says, and then she gets on the bus, and as she sits down, sees her mother walking west down the street, heading for the subway.

The Plaza? A week at the Plaza? And before she was pregnant. Her father was not the sort of man who would take her mother to the Plaza. A week alone at the Plaza? Why? She sees, in her mind’s eye, her mother as a young woman. This is intolerable. She’ll call her tonight. A week at the Plaza, but not with her father, surely not. She must have misunderstood her mother, she was always doing that. Did she say a beautiful week?

Children are often surprised to learn that before their births their parents lived secret, complex lives from which these children are wholly excluded. There they are in old photographs, dressed in odd clothes, their curiously unfamiliar faces in the foreground of strange streets and obsolete automobiles. This young woman, for instance, thinks of her mother in her remodeled gray Persian lamb coat, or sitting down to a plate of cream of chicken soup in the Bay Terrace Lounge and Restaurant, or scrambling eggs while she sings “Poor Butterfly.” What she cannot imagine is her mother, her clothes in disarray, being fucked from behind by a lover.

“I think, although I only caught a quick glimpse of these women, that the older one might have been Annette.”

The older woman was not Annette, but Linda Piro. Had she been Annette, there would have been here proffered a clean juxtaposition, across time and space, of two different years and two different parks. I might even have had the pleasure of seeing Annette, once again, holding down her light beige skirt, which the wind is lifting, slightly, above her knees. Oh well, another time, perhaps.

The young woman, Linda’s daughter, Isabelle, has been dead for many years, as you know.