NORA EISENBERG
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or have her arrested, or both, if she ever touched another child.
With us standing beside her, she said, "Now
you
say you're sorry,
Mrs. O'Shea. Tell my children that you're very sorry."
Mrs. O'Shea, her red f.Ke now white, stared ahead saying nothing.
"Can't hear you," my mother said.
"I'm sorry," Mrs. O'Shea said weakly.
"Say it like you mean it," my mother snarled.
I'd never seen my naturally good-natured mother fight with anyone
besides my father, but she was licking her lips, a sign of pill-popping, and
for a brief moment, half panicked, half proud, I wondered if she was
going to laugh and spit in our principal's face. But she just glowered
until Mrs. O'Shea, her voice a little louder now, said, ''I'm really very
sorry."
On the way home, as we approached the Parkway, our mother be–
gan to cry. Our father wouldn't be home, she said. They'd fought and
he'd taken off. Nick and I were used to this and beginning to grow
indifferent, but we patted our mother's head. We were proud of her, we
said - she was strong, she'd stood up to O'Shea, she'd be OK without
him. We'd come
to
love him at times, but we wanted him gone, I
guess, so our old Tippy might return. But the next week he was back,
and the war, of course, was on again.
Sometimes now I try to imagine a better time for them. Though
both of them are long dead, I sometimes strain to imagine some time of
real peace - consolation that between their impoverished births and early
deaths they scraped together more than the awful fighting.
I imagine the end of the war, the first breaks of peace. His very first
day back on home ground. I see them returning to the little apartment,
walking through the door arm in arm, him in his uniform, tired but
dashing with his green eyes, bronze skin and blue-black hair. She's tired
too but content for the first time in years. I imagine her in a gray suit,
the pearl gray wedding suit she wears in their one wedding picture, her
hair in a low bun with wisps falling at her temples, ready to resume the
honeymoon that was interrupted by the World War. She kisses her
mother, who has watched sleeping baby Nick while she's gone down to
the pier, kisses the baby, and then turns to him and smiles that toothy,
open Rita Hayworth smile.
In
the two and a half years since he's been
gone, she's grown increasingly nervous, and many nights, she's stayed
awake with visions of death and dismemberment dancing in her mind.
But now seeing him before her, his khaki shirt tight against his firm
beating breast, she suddenly feels that everything will be wonderful. He
does too, and smiles back, his shy, sly smile, which both of them say is a
