Perfidia: A Novel - Brossura

Judith Rossner's novels include Looking for Mr. Goodbar, August, Attachments, Emmeline (the basis of a new opera that received its world premiere in 1996), and Olivia.  She lives in New York City.

I was five in 1976, when my mother packed me and her other possessions  into our station wagon, said goodbye to my father and drove me away from  our home in the cool, lush little town of Hanover, New Hampshire. We rode  around and across the country for months before we came to rest in Santa  Fe, where we met Wilkie at the first restaurant we went to. She must have  gotten pregnant with my brother about two hours later. I think she and  Wilkie broke sexually early on, but they never stopped being involved,  one way and another.

My father was--is, I imagine--a professor of American history at Dartmouth. A true academic. I was an excellent student. A model girl, when I was in school. My mother said later she'd thought I wouldn't know the difference if she took me away from my father, he cared so little about me. We don't always remember things the same way. Didn't always. In fact, she remembered things differently from one time to the next. Some of her stories had a sad version and a funny version, with such a difference between the two that you had no idea of what had actually happened.

She was raised on a farm west of Montreal, ran away from home when she was sixteen. In 1965. She packed her knapsack with some clothes and necessities, plus she stole her favorite two of her father's 78's that the two of them listened to together on the phonograph in the kitchen. "Perfidia" and "Remember." Her mother had no use for music and they'd never bought a more modern system. She stayed with the first man who gave her a hitch until she lied about her age and got a job as a waitress. She'd changed her name a few times, but I think that she'd settled on Anita by then. She always insisted that she wasn't pretty, though I thought she was beautiful, and she was terribly sexy, with a big bosom, great legs, and a lively, teasing manner with men. She had no trouble connecting with them in those days when even the middle class had begun to think that sex was free and easy. After a couple of years in Montreal, she hitched to Toronto, which she'd say she eventually left because it was too clean. She had stories about the café and restaurant owners she worked for and slept with. She called them Pierre One, Pierre Two and so on, though they mostly weren't French. (My given name was Madeleine. She claimed it was one of the few things my father ever insisted upon. She didn't like it because it was French.) When she told the umpteenth Pierre that she was leaving Toronto, and he said she had to stay until he found another waitress, she suggested he bring in the cow who was his wife, it wouldn't hurt for her to know what it was like to work for a living.

My mother told stories like that more readily than she told ones in which  she did something nice. Nor did she ever make any effort to conceal her  sexual adventures from me, though she was occasionally surprised or  amused that I knew as much as I did.

After three years she hitched down to the States with a Dartmouth student, worked in a luncheonette in Hanover where, one day, she waited on my father. She asked him whether the snow was lightening up, said she didn't have snow tires on her car and she was afraid she wouldn't be able to get home. (She was boarding in a room in someone's house. She didn't have a car.) My father asked if perhaps she'd like to have dinner at his place. It was only a few blocks away and he'd made a good stew.

She said, "A man who can cook? I'll go anyplace with you."

Or so she said she said.

Rupert Stern was a thirty-seven-year-old bachelor who owned more books than she'd ever seen in one place, including her school's library. She liked the way they looked. She didn't care about the way he looked, one way or another. He was a little taller than she, a bit chubby. His brown hair had more kinks than she'd seen in the whole city of Montreal; she always said, Thank God I had inherited her hair. His study was the only room where he smoked his pipe, although there was no woman around telling him he couldn't do it elsewhere. He'd furnished the house on his own, mostly at auctions. There were a lot of old sepia photos on the walls, none of his family or anyone else he knew. For her birthday, he gave her a working Victrola and a carton of 78's that he'd found at an auction.

By May she was pregnant with me. He told her he knew a woman who'd had a very easy abortion by a doctor in town. She said she'd do anything he wanted her to, including leave town, but she couldn't take a human life. He went for it. He married her and she stayed with him, we stayed with him, until 1976, the five years I remember as the good ones in my life. I'm still not sure why it had to end. She said he didn't love me or anybody, but I don't think I could tell when I was little. For a long time I thought of him sweetly. By the time my mother and I settled in Santa Fe, his study was the only part of the house I remembered. Book-lined walls, huge desk with orderly stacks of paper, maroon-background Oriental rug. When she was busy, I would stay in there with him, drawing, looking at picture books, being read to, taking my nap. (I could read by the time I was four but I still wanted him to read to me.) Someone gave me a wooden puzzle map of the United States. Each state was one piece. I think my mother learned where the different states were from doing that puzzle with me. I don't know how much more she knew about any of them when she picked me up and left.

In the months that we were on the road, I would dream that I was in my  father's study, but it was all right when I awakened because my mother  was next to me in bed. Once we got to Santa Fe, my mother was in bed with  Wilkie, and when I awakened, nobody was there.

* * *

My mother would have been twenty-seven, Wilkie about ten years older,  this huge, soft-voiced teddy bear with wavy brown hair and bushy brows,  his eyes set so deep under them that they looked trapped. He got by  because he'd had an inheritance of maybe forty thousand dollars and,  bumming around the West, he'd landed in Santa Fe several years before the  real-estate boom. His then artist-girlfriend persuaded him to buy a  crumbling adobe house on a large lot on Canyon Road. Outright. She left  before long, but there were always other artists (artist mostly in  quotes) ready to move in with him. The males and maybe some of the  females paid rent. He had good offers for the whole piece of real estate  but he turned them down. He couldn't imagine where he'd go afterward.  Wilkie was one of the few people I've ever known who didn't need to  do anything, even when he was sober. He could sit at home or in  the coffee shop for hours without even looking at the newspaper, waiting  for people to come by and talk. Or not talk. Just drink coffee at his  regular table. Sober, my mother could do that for five or ten minutes.  Even drunk, she didn't stay still for long. Anyway, I wasn't so much  aware of the difference between drunk and sober, in those days. And she  wasn't drunk so much of the time.

They struck up a conversation in the Pink Adobe, called by regulars the  Pink. His girlfriend had just left. A couple of hours later, we moved  into his room. No mystery about how my mother got pregnant; the marvel is  that it didn't happen more often. She loved babies. She loved anything  that didn't talk back.

She did not love Wilkie's two remaining woman-artist tenants. She kicked  them out and persuaded Wilkie to get financing to develop the place into  the Sky Galleries, later usually shortened to the Sky. She dealt not only  with the bankers, but with the architects, contractors and tenants. All  this while she was pregnant. My mother was too angry and restless to sit  in a classroom and absorb information, but she built the Sky into a major  tourist trap because Wilkie let her use her brain.

The new building was shaped like half a hexagon that went right to the outer edges of the property. In the center was a lovely courtyard with plants and flowers at the edges, benches in the middle. The stump of one huge tree they'd cut down had become a bench; part of its great trunk was now a table inside for the cash register. Some of the stores changed over the years but the art gallery was at the center and dominated. On its left, facing you as you entered the courtyard, was a store called Farolito, which carried pottery and a lot of Santa Fe souvenirs--chili-pepper key chains, Santa Fe T-shirts, postcards. My mother had a mug made up, sky blue with a big white cloud and Sky Gallery, in Santa Fe turquoise and fuchsia, printed on the cloud. They sold a fantastic number of those mugs over the years in both the gallery and Farolito. (At one point my mother had the mugs taken out of the gallery because she felt people who might have bought a painting were copping out and just buying the mug. Nothing much happened and after a few months, she brought the mugs back in.) Then there was a small jewelry store with a lot of good Navajo jewelry and other silver. To the right were Wilkie's Coffee Shop (my mother's idea, from his nickname; his given name was Philip Wilkerson) and the tiny place first occupied by Rahji Cohen, Photographer.

When the buzz about the Sky began, artists looking for a gallery started to come by. She was very pregnant, by this time, but she must have tuned in to the social possibilities of running a gallery in a town full of artists who wanted their work shown. She told Wilkie she was going to manage the gallery and set out to learn what she needed to know. It wasn't much, beyond the size and shape of the artists she liked. The gallery had p...