Face to Face Read online

  There, at last, was Charles, the well fed and much beloved: tall, athletic looking, and mustached, a soft-spoken man of few words, who smiled a lot. We all felt we knew him already, and I imagined he felt the same. He greeted the children by name and immediately began talking to them, more, in fact, than he talked to my husband and me. Perhaps he was shy, or perhaps he knew us so well by proxy that there was no need for small talk. Whenever we met him afterwards he was quiet, not a chilly but a placid, benign quiet. Perhaps he let Mattie do the talking for him, as she did so many other things.

  We returned Sunday evening, having relished our rare solitude, to find the children in no hurry to be reclaimed, but hovering around Mattie in the kitchen as they did at home, while Charles watched a ball game on television. Besides Charles, they had made the acquaintance of Mattie’s sister Thelma, and of Cora, a friend, as well as several neighbors. Mattie showed us Polaroid snapshots of the girls posed with Charles, with her, with both of them, in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen. Some of these eventually got hung up alongside photos of a niece down South and the baby in Boston.

  That outing emboldened us: we decided to go to London for a real vacation alone, something we hadn’t had in recent memory. Mattie and Charles came to stay in our apartment for the week so the children could keep going to school, and we flew away. From across the ocean, I reveled in images of Mattie and Charles sleeping in our bed, eating in our kitchen—Charles’s plate being fixed right at our table—hearing the creakings of the floorboards and the hum of the refrigerator, watching “our” sunsets from the front window, grumbling over the slowness of our elevator—in short, being us, taking over our children and our domestic lives. It made me feel I could be in two places at once.

  There were times when I did need to be in two places at once, such as the long day I spent in a hospital lounge, waiting for the outcome of my father’s operation for cancer. It had begun at noon and six hours later was still not over, with no word of its progress. I had lurid fantasies of the doctors and nurses going out for a snack and forgetting my father, his innards bared on the table—nothing in their manner indicated this was impossible. Mattie had gotten to know my parents and was fond of them; still, I knew she would be wanting to go home and fix Charles’s plate. When I called and explained, she said, sure, she’d stay another hour. An hour later—no report yet—I called again, to find that my in-laws were in town and had dropped in. How fortunate, I thought. “Mattie has to leave,” I told my mother-in-law on the phone. “Could you stay with the kids at least until I know whether my father is dead or alive?” “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “We’re supposed to go visit Aunt Rose.”

  Mattie had of course overheard half this exchange. Back on the phone, before I could speak, she said with a steely indignation that exceeded even my own, “Don’t worry, I’m going to stay.” When I got home—my father survived and was to live another seven years—she announced with a sniff and a toss of the head, “I told them they could leave and they did.”

  I can’t remember whether she accepted money for those extra hours. Perhaps my memory has tossed out the fact because it is unimportant; perhaps the transfer of money is not as decisive a factor in human relations as I once thought. Surely that day was one of the many instances when the unlovely categories of employer and employee—always tenuous in our case—fell away to leave a fluid connection responsive to simple need. For more and more I see that far beyond running the household, our shared endeavor—half unwitting and only half successful—was to have our relations shaped spontaneously by nature and circumstance rather than by predetermined roles, to leap past the chafing strictures of class and race into a free state.

  Later that year my father-in-law died suddenly. We had, in our shock, less than a day to organize a funeral and prepare food for a large group at our house afterward. Mattie said not to worry, she would take care of everything. When we returned from the funeral, the table was laden with the foods Jewish families like to eat after funerals and on less momentous occasions as well: bialys, cream cheese, lox, whitefish, baked salmon, sable, radishes, tomatoes, cucumbers, tea, coffee. … Perhaps she had learned all this from Mrs. Zimmerman, who was finally serving some purpose in my life.

  Generosity of spirit was not in Mattie’s job definition as it might have been formulated by either of us. No, I thought, this was done out of friendship. For friends we were, at least it is the closest word for what we were. In fact my musings at this very moment arise because there is no satisfactory or ingenuous word to label what we were, just as it was not a satisfactory or ingenuous condition. Because even as I was overwhelmed at how a burden could so easily be lifted, in a more callous part of my mind I was finally appreciating the age-old allure of having servants, something my high-minded social theories had not let me imagine. So this is how the rich must feel! So this is what money can buy!

  Bought or not, it was friendship as I felt it. And it wasn’t Mattie’s competence or generosity that made us friends; she was generous because we were friends. Nor was it the gratitude on either side, mine for having someone to be a mother with, hers for having children to mother. No, what made us friends was what makes any two people friends—emotional affinity or some great passion shared. Our great shared passion was the children. As for the emotional affinity—we felt the same way about many things. We told each other, as friends do, about our parents, our past, our present, our plans. We trusted; we knew what the other was likely to say or do or feel, and we knew what irritated each other—often the same things: dirty dishes, lateness, incompetence, injustice, too many simultaneous demands. We liked peace, but we also liked speaking our minds, being righteously indignant about people who didn’t meet our standards, who didn’t try hard, didn’t almost wear themselves out with effort for the things they cared about, as we did and as we recognized and esteemed in each other.

  Would she so readily have called us friends? I sometimes wonder. Yes, of course: she was no casuist, she would not have indulged in finicky analyses to define the obvious. But at other times I think, of course not: she knew better than I, knew in her bones, the palpable boundaries drawn by class and race and money, cutting mercilessly across the landscape of delicate feelings. Maybe as Mattie saw it, she had simply landed a good job in a household where she could feel genuine affection for her employer and her charges. Or maybe she would have comfortably felt yes and no—she was clear eyed and worldly enough for that. People in her situation learn to be, of necessity.

  We did not, as ordinary friends do, go to the movies or arrange to meet on the weekends, but we did do what was ritualistic among friends in those days, which was to get high together, though we did it inadvertently: on a patent medicine aptly named Cope, advertised to relieve what was euphemistically called premenstrual tension—the periodic inability to Cope. I was home that afternoon, wandering around fretfully, and announced I would give Cope a try. “Let me have some too, would you,” said Mattie. “I have the same thing.” We popped a couple of Copes, sat around in the kitchen, and within twenty minutes were buoyant with hilarity, floating above our chairs, light and loose and dreamy. No one cooked dinner that day, or did any dirty dishes, only laughed and floated, the neglected children watching in wonder. “This stuff sure does work.” Mattie remarked with a throaty laugh, as we sat at the table giggling and telling raunchy anecdotes and sipping tea. When it began wearing off we were a bit flustered at its power. Maybe we should take it one at a time, at least when the kids were around.

  Besides the fact that she was my paid employee with all the attendant uneasy nuances, there was something more bothersome, almost shameful, about our friendship, and this was that she persisted in calling me Ms. Schwartz while I called her Mattie. We had started off this way, unthinking. (Today it sounds appalling even to me, but it was the way things were done in those distant days.) Though I quickly asked her to call me Lynne as soon as I had an inkling of how things would be between us, she never did. (I partly blame
Mrs. Zimmerman for this.) I asked her several times, but she would only nod and look uncomfortable and end up calling me nothing at all, so I gave up.

  To make matters worse, Mattie had begun working a couple of mornings a week, while the kids were in school, for a friend of mine downstairs, who also had two young children. Since our kids played together, Mattie had often had to deal with Dale, and since the kids and I called her Dale, Mattie did too. Now that Dale had begun employing Mattie, it galled me that they were on a first-name basis, especially as they were not friends, which I well knew from Mattie’s detailed reports. It seemed inconsistent at the very least, even unjust. I mentioned it to Dale, a person with a rather strong will, who said, “Yes, well, when she started working she suddenly switched to Ms. Lambert. But every time she said it I stopped short, stared at her, and repeated loudly, ‘Dale!,’ until I got it through her head.”

  “Mattie,” I confronted her. “You call Dale Dale. So … ?” “Uh-huh,” she grunted, and got busy with something. I had a pretty powerful will too, but I could not force Mattie to call me something she didn’t want to call me. I couldn’t stop and stare every time she said Ms. Schwartz, and say firmly, Lynne, until she succumbed. It would feel like appropriating her as part of the family; it would be worse than her calling me Ms. Schwartz.

  Much as she loved and depended on Charles, whom she spoke of and cared for as though he were a large child, buying his clothes, speaking for him, whipping up delicacies and fixing his plate, Mattie fell into frequent conversation and soon flirtation with a cop pounding the beat in our neighborhood. She would run into him coming to and from work, going to the park, taking the kids to school. At first they merely passed the time of day, and then it became clear he was keeping an eye out for her. As their talk gradually slipped into a kind of teasing banter, she gave me periodic progress reports: it soon reached the point where the cop was urging her to meet him somewhere, indoors.

  “Well, are you going to do it?” I asked. “I don’t know, maybe.” But nothing much happened. “Did you see him today?” I’d ask when I got home. Yes, in the park, or near the bus stop, and she would recount their conversation. Things moved at such an imperceptible pace that I was convinced the affair was going nowhere and stopped asking. One day when I returned from work she sat me down at the dining-room table while the kids were in another room. From her gravity I assumed she was about to relate some troubling incident—maybe the girls had quarreled and she had had to adjudicate, or one of the mothers in the cooperative nursery school had looked at her sideways, for she was sensitive to every shade of behavior and there were several mothers whom she judged were “not stitched together too tight.”

  Instead she said, “Well, I went to the hotel with him.” “You did? So what happened?” She wouldn’t say right away but kept up the suspense with her hemming and hawing; she had me itching with anticipation. “So we got undressed and laid down.” She paused. “So?” “So that was it.” “What do you mean, that was it?” “There was nothing there,” she said. “It was like a pencil.” “A pencil?” “A pencil, I’m telling you.” It was like a re-enactment of the Cope episode, but without Cope this time. “You mean small,” I said. “I’m not talking ‘bout small. Small’s not the issue here,” she said with haughty indignation. “I said a pencil.” It seemed the cop had not developed properly, had had some illness or injury that left him physically like a young boy. “So what did you do?” “I said to him, You drag me all the way up here for this! I swear, what some mens won’t do.”

  This was her foray into infidelity, and I suspected she was glad it turned out as it did. For weeks after, all she had to do was mutter, “Like a pencil,” to set us tittering like adolescents. All the same, here was another bad-faith trap, like a little patch of quicksand in a cheerful stretch of meadow. I knew that had anything like that happened in my own life I would not have told Mattie. I could not have given her that power over me, while her information, in my hands, was no power at all.

  One day Mattie came to work limping in pain: a woman on the crowded bus had stepped on her little toe, crushing it. She went to the doctor and continued to complain about the toe for a long time—excessively, it seemed to me, for a toe, and a little one at that. I didn’t know then what she knew all too well—the many and dire ramifications of diabetes; a common one is the danger of gangrene. In the end, Mattie had to go to the hospital to have the toe amputated. Though she wasn’t as naively incredulous as I, she couldn’t quite get over the nonchalant malice of fate: that some stranger’s misstep could have such a grotesque result. We went to visit her in the hospital, which happened to be in Brooklyn and quite near where I had grown up, next door to the people with a maid just like one of the family.

  Soon she returned to work. Knowing Mattie, I figured she would want to show me her toe, or the place her toe had been, and I dreaded it. When she did, I held my breath as she slowly removed her shoe, prolonging the action, I was sure, for dramatic suspense. But it wasn’t so bad—the little toe wasn’t there, that was all. The foot didn’t look deformed; it merely had a longer arc ending at the fourth toe. From then on she wore closed shoes—for safety, not vanity. I could not foresee, as perhaps Mattie did, that the lost toe would be the first of a series of side effects of diabetes coming to plague her.

  When the children were about five and eight Mattie mentioned now and then that Charles was talking vaguely of moving to Los Angeles, where he had family and thought he might find a better job. She was determined not to go and swore she’d refuse if it came to an actual decision, but I saw she was worried. She loved New York—as Charles did not—and liked her apartment, liked being near her sisters and her friends, liked her job, and loved the children. She couldn’t possibly leave them, she said. But I knew she could; of course she’d go with Charles if it came to that. Still, to myself I tried to dismiss it as idle talk—who, in the course of a bleak New York winter, has not had fantasies of moving to California?

  She talked more often of the possible move—first it was maybe, then someday, then some time next year. The talk became specific: Charles’s mother and stepfather were there, as well as a married sister. They had a job lined up for him in a Ford assembly plant.

  Much as I tried to ignore the inevitable, it was upon us in no time at all. Mattie was very depressed over the move. She didn’t like California, she said, and it did no good to point out she had never been there. I have completely forgotten her last few days. Repressed them, I suppose. One morning, despite all her vows to the contrary, she was gone. Ten o’clock came—her hour—and I was alone. It was almost four years that she had been helping me raise the children. I have no memory of how they responded, whether they were deeply upset or only mildly so. I have no memory of any good-byes. We promised to keep in touch, that I remember.

  The girls were about five and a half and nine now. I was teaching and writing a novel. Reluctantly, I looked around for another housekeeper and found a Haitian woman who seemed able and good-natured. The children liked her well enough; she was not Mattie, needless to say, but they no longer required a mother around constantly—they were in school all day, had their friends, the beginnings of independent lives. The new woman did her job but was hardly enthusiastic about it. I reminded myself that I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about taking care of someone else’s household either—Mattie was an exception.

  For several days in a row I came home to find the new woman sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. I asked what was the matter and she said, Oh, nothing. The children, when I asked, said she habitually sat that way when the housework was done. I felt sorry for her, but apart from being sympathetic, I couldn’t help her—we weren’t friends—and I equally couldn’t bear thinking of the children home alone with a despairing stranger sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. Probably it hinted at what I might have become had I not found Mattie. I asked her to leave.

  I never hired another cleaning woman. At that point I cou
ld manage on my own, with my husband’s “help,” a bitter word for working women. Over the years that followed, it would have made life considerably easier to have someone take over a goodly portion of the household tasks, but I could never get around to hiring anyone. I said it was my old principles about having servants, but that was a pretty transparent excuse.

  We kept in touch. Mattie and Charles settled in one of the towns clustered around Los Angeles, and though she kept saying, over the phone, that she didn’t like California, things seemed to be working out all right. Charles had his new job, they had a small house with a yard, and Mattie found work as a chambermaid in a hotel, where very soon she was promoted to head chambermaid. Still she complained, vigorously at first, weakly later. Like me, she had a complaining streak, and it showed most strongly in new situations and in adversity. To begin with, she wasn’t crazy about Charles’s family; back in the Bronx they had been surrounded by her family, whom she much preferred. And the house was in an all-black area—she liked New York, where there was a great mix of people, she said, and you didn’t feel so insulated or segregated. She had come up from Alabama partly to get away from that sense of separateness. Her job was all right but she missed the children painfully. I would call them to the phone for long conversations about school and games and friends and whatnot. She wrote them a few brief letters—correspondence was clearly not her medium, physical presence was—and they wrote back.