Mother had not traveled since she took that long trip, twenty-five years ago, from Poland to America, to come to her husband. And now she was preparing to come from Soho—to us, to her first grandchild. We were excited as the letters from home told us that they were. Day after day, my sisters wrote to us, women came to mother, giving her messages to take to me, whom they had known so well as a child. They brought mother cake and jellies and wines, as if she were about to travel a year instead of one night. My aunts came to help her sew her clothes, my uncles came to pack her suitcases. It was as if all Soho were coming here to us in the person of mother. Father hurried back and forth securing mileages, a berth. He carefully explained to mother what a berth was, and warned her above all not to forget to give the black man, when he gave her her hat, a quarter. My sisters wrote such dear letters, describing it all there at home.
We could hardly wait. Our little boy asked every day for “grammy.” There came a deluge of telegrams to us, which clearly told us the haste and nervousness in the little home in Soho, and we knew that mother was on her way to us.
She came in the morning. She did not stop to kiss me, nor to look about her, but as soon as she entered my home she cried breathlessly, “Where is my grandchild?” And she held him to her, and the tears filled her eyes. “Such a boy! But a boy!” she cried. We had written to her that our boy was speaking now. She sat down beside him, and she crooned love-words to him.
Son is a friendly little lad. I felt that, if I left them alone together, he and mother would grow close in a day or two. I peeped one morning into the nursery. Mother was standing, looking dully at the spotless baby cot, the white wicker chairs, the little washable rugs on the floor, the gay pictures on the white walls. Her worn plump hands were folded one upon the other in a gesture that I know. Little son was in a corner, gravely building a tower. Little son has been taught that he must play without demanding help or attention from adults about him, that “son must help himself.” In Soho little boys are spanked and scolded and carried and physicked and loved and fed all day and all night.
Mother called to little son a quaint love name, and he turned to her with his bright smile, understanding her love tone. Then he quietly turned away from her to his toys again. And mother stood there in that strange white baby world which was her grandson’s. Perhaps she was thinking of what she had thought to find him, like one of the children of her own young motherhood, dear burdens that one bore night and day. She was afraid to touch the crib, to soil the spotless rugs. Here was her grandchild, they were together, it is true. And her grandchild had no need of her. She felt alien, unnecessary.
I felt the tears in my eyes. I ran in, called son to come to play with grammy and mother. He came readily, laughingly, speaking his baby phrases that are so adorably like the words we adults, his parents, use. I had been anticipating, even before she came, how much mother and I would enjoy his baby talk. But mother said in a very low voice, “You say he speaks, daughter. I do not understand the words he means to say now. And—he will never learn—learn my language.”
And mother’s first tears fell.
We had planned for every hour of her visit to us, even for the hours of needed rest between whiles. In those rest spaces she would come into our living room. She is not accustomed to sitting in living rooms. Her life has been a life of toil. And our living room is to her as strange a place as was to me the first sitting room I saw long ago.
She looked with a little smile about her. She glanced at the bookcase, filled with books she cannot read, and about things she does not know. Finally her gaze rested upon a certain place, and my eyes followed hers. There stood the old candlesticks which she had known in her father’s home in Poland, and which had stood in her own kitchen in Soho. And there, in my living room stands also, with its bronze curves holding autumn leaves—the copper fish pot! “In America,” said mother quaintly, with a little “crooked smile” only on her trembling, questioning lips, “they have all things—so different.”
There is no need for mother’s pot in my kitchen; it has become an emblem of the past, an ornament in my living room. Mother cannot understand our manner of cooking, the manner I learned away from home. She cannot eat the foods we have; her plate at meals was left almost untouched. She does not understand my white kitchen, used only for cooking. When she came into my kitchen, my maid asked her quickly, eager to please her, pleasantly and respectfully, “What can I do for you?”