you,” I say.
Mama is excited to see us. She has news.
“Did you read about the monstrosity they want to build over at Darling Harbour? That place is getting uglier by the day.”
I didn’t read anything. I haven’t read the paper for years, instead trusting Mama to wade through the news for me and filter out the important from the trivial. Sam’s ready for a discussion; he loves any kind of drama, but she’s not really interested in talking more about it.
“Aren’t you kids working today?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“I’m not in the mood,” Sam says.
“What time do you start?” Mama asks.
“Oh, I’m not going to the gallery. I’m working at home.”
“You mean painting?” she says. It is unfathomable to Mama that I dropped out of university to paint. “Oh Lily, if it’s painting that you really want to do, well, nothing is wrong with that – you have plenty of time on the weekend for colouring in! But giving away your hard-earned place in medicine to draw pictures all day, well that’s insanity.” She turns to Sam. “Even he has a respectable job, right Sam?”
A respectable job for a poof, she means. A project manager, he sits in front of a buzzing computer screen all day and then has to drink and snort himself to oblivion each night so he can muster up enough strength to do it all over again the next day.
“You know I would have given anything to have gone to university. You don’t know how lucky you are.” Mama is the most educated person in her family even though she left her home economics high school when she wasn’t quite fifteen. “Us girls weren’t even expected to get our Leaving Certificate, darling. What for? It wouldn’t be long before we’d find ourselves husbands and in the meantime, we had better earn our keep.” It wasn’t that Mama was stupid. Not at all. That was the problem. If she had been, there wouldn’t have been a story. It’s that she knew exactly what she was missing out on. “You see, Sam, you probably don’t know this about me, but when Lily was a little girl, I went back to night school to finish high school, but then her father got sick again and it was all over. I had no help. We couldn’t afford it. I had to go back to work and keep us going.”
Sam nods understandingly. “Well, I think she’s talented. Have you seen what she’s done lately? What about talent?”
“What about talent? I’ll tell you about talent. Talent schmalent. If it were all about talent, then I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But darling, it’s a business. And a bad one at that. She’ll never make a cent, that is, until she dies, so she’ll be working at that silly little gallery for the next million years.”
“She’s gonna make you proud one day, Judy,” Sam says. I’m glad he’s here. I’m a ball of fire in front of the canvas, but I can never put two words together in front of my family.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Proud? I was proud the day she was born. I was proud when she was dux of her class. I was proud when she got into medicine. I’ll be proud again when she’s a doctor.” For weeks now Mama hasn’t been able to face her friends. For what? To chat with Susan (whose son just got into Harvard Business School) or Cathy (whose twin girls will be the youngest barristers in Sydney)? It has become unbearable for her. Even Elizabeth’s boy has a PhD. How’s Lily doing in her studies? When is she due to finish? When will she be a doctor? They used to ask. And now they’ve found out I’ve dropped out, they ask again. Only louder.
It is hard for Mama. She has her private disappointment and her public disgrace.
And then she has Anyu.
According to Anyu, my failure, like our financial situation and my father’s death, is Mama’s fault. So was last weekend’s bad weather, the traffic jam this morning and the fall of Rome. That’s what happens, Anyu says, when you marry peasants. I know Monologue Number 14 by heart: Peasants. Jewish peasants. That’s what they were. You know, there were a lot of them in Hungary. Butchers. Tailors. Shopkeepers. Couldn’t read or write, didn’t know Nietzsche from their neighbour. And every now and then, one or two of them had the luck to make it big. Not your Mama’s parents, of course. Don’t be silly. But you know the Berger family from next door to the Lowensteins? Like them. Struck gold making belts. Can’t read or write. His father was a schlepper for a tailor in Budapest, but when they came here, they made a fortune from little strips of leather. Well, everyone needs to hold their pants up, no? Good for them, I say, lucky break! But peasants nonetheless.
Mama’s father was a baker’s assistant, a far cry from the professors and doctors littering my father’s pedigree.
“Come on, Judy,” Sam tells her. “Where’s your sense of romance?”
“You think I don’t know about romance? You think I don’t know about art? I’m not an idiot. I’ve been taking Lily to galleries since she was a baby.” Mama loves the idea, in principle at least, of someone being a painter. There is something chic, something civilised, about being an artist, and in that affected, small–l liberal way of hers she fancies herself a bit of a patron of the arts, a member of the avant-garde. But while it’s terrific for others to live that kind of life, who would wish it on their own child? “Do you know what it takes to be a success? You think it’s about hanging around, smoking cigarettes, arguing politics and painting pictures? Come on, kids, don’t be so bloody naïve. Without an education, a woman is nothing. Trust me. You’re going to marry the first no-hoper who walks through the door and all of a sudden, your dreams are gone. And then when the kids are all grown up and out of the house, when the husband is gone, what have you got? Hey? What have you got?”
“Nothing.”
Nothing.
Just like her.
The food arrives and Mama spends the next few minutes complaining to the waiter about the scones, which are too hot, and the tea, which is too cold.
“Sorry,” I tell him, “we’re Hungarian.”
Sam throws him a knowing wink.
I’ve found my voice.
“I took Anyu to Frankie’s funeral,” I say.
“I know. I know. I just hope she bloody behaved herself. You’re a saint, Lily, did you know that? A saint. I’m sorry I didn’t come with you. I couldn’t, you know, you understand?”
“Sure.”
“He was a bastard,” she says from a mouthful of crumbling scone.
“I know.”
“I bet Anyu was awfully mad! Who else was there?”
“Everyone.”
“Mmm.”
Sam excuses himself. Out of the corner of my eye I catch him on his way to the bathroom, leaning on the counter talking to the waiter.
I take a deep breath. I reach for a cigarette. I change my mind. Not now. Just say it. Another deep breath.
“Mama …”
“Yes.”
“Mama, well …”
“Yes, Lily, what?”
“Umm, Mama …”
“For God’s sake, what is it, Lily?”
She picks up her newspaper and flicks through the sports pages.
“Never mind,” I say.
I reach for another cigarette. I see Sam flirting with the waiter. He looks across to me and winks. He gives me courage.
“Eva was there,” I finally tell her.
“Who?”
“You