Babcia: an Easter recollection
Skarga, Peter
BABCIA AN EASTER RECOLLECTION PETER SKARGA Babcia was a simple woman. She was born a peasant and she would die a peasant. She had married grandpa late in life, after grandpa had lived wifeless...
...I sat looking out her window, staring at a line of colorful clothes some neighbor had out that blustery morning...
...No one went back...
...With my parents I had been attending the new liturgies at the suburban church...
...An old parishioner took his umbrella out of his baby carriage and returned to the streets...
...She must have washed the windows in the house every day, because they were always sparkling...
...A miracle had happened to her that day...
...And she told us about the most beautiful thing she knew in this world...
...Every tree on the way to the cemetery in Queens was beautiful...
...My parents and I had no desire to visit that Easter morning...
...For three hours we slept, and rose at five to drive through the tunnel, through the Midtown, into the sleek, black, rainy streets of Brooklyn, block after block, mile after mile of despair and ruin...
...She had married grandpa late in life, after grandpa had lived wifeless for some years...
...It was naive, small, filled with statues, loaded with pots of lilacs...
...We stayed for hours, and decided that she should move out to the suburbs, to be with us...
...she was stronger, more robust than anyone I knew...
...The church was full of old people, mostly women, of every shape and size...
...She seemed oblivious to the ugliness of her surroundings...
...We do this because it means this, that because it means that...
...Old women with stockings like potato sacks, old women with ancient feet-bearing furs, old women with blue hats and white pearled pins, old women with shopping bags, all joined the procession, limping, ancient, stooped, following the monstrance, the priest around the church...
...We left the church dazed...
...It was bread for the hungry...
...The harder it was to live with grandpa, the more she lavished her affections on his children and grandchildren...
...And with faith, devotion...
...Then she added her favorite saying - "Czem hata, to bogata" - "If you've got a roof, you're rich...
...When she was a young girl, early teens, a rich Jewish doctor and his wife from America returned to their town in Poland and took her back to America as a servant...
...On the table was an Easter hyacinth and a full spread of kielbasa, eggs, ham, rye bread, babka...
...Her husband died...
...It would be easy to say grandpa had been brutalized by immigrant life...
...Maybe it went back all the way to Cain...
...The holy word of God was being spoken here...
...The crocuses and daffodils of suburbia were mostly plastic here...
...She rang the opening buzzer...
...She was clutching her handkerchief, patient, quiet, crying, resigned, somehow sad that the monster she had lived with and served had died...
...They were all the family she had, and they were hers...
...The silk canopy, the priest with glowing gold monstrance, incense burning, and the procession of the old women...
...I remember walking into the kitchen, which was also the bathroom, as it housed the bathtub, and the dining room...
...We drove off...
...Still, we were determined to have the post-Vigil feast...
...The high baroque altar behind him became a wall of burning gold, his mouth the only opening, a holy opening, in an iconostasis...
...That was what was missing, this was what I had not seen, no, not in Hawaii, nor in Stockholm, not at Harvard nor any suburban mall - faith, simple, burning, abiding faith...
...She would give you a glass of tea, and then unable to control herself, grab you from behind and smother your neck and head with kisses, tears falling on your hair while she prayed God would bless you...
...We ate and we drank, and we drank more than we should have, well into the morning, a fragment of a large family huddling in a suburban house, drinking for something missing...
...Nothing seemed to get her down for long...
...It was eerie the way the ghetto can be in a rainy pre-dawn blackness...
...Of course, I had been too far to visit for most of that time, too busy with other things the rest of the time...
...They huddled in tiny apartments, living in terror, amidst the boarded-up shops, the burned-out houses...
...The priest came out of the sacristy...
...Oh," she said, "I guess I can understand that...
...We walked down to her kitchen...
...I am eternally grateful...
...It was a strained Holy Week...
...They began the procession...
...She stood up against the window as if she had just seen a vision...
...Oh, my people...
...It was a tree which grew somewhere between her house and the dock where she had first gotten off the boat here sixty years before...
...She was right...
...She had a special cake for the children...
...They were good to her...
...I myself hadn't been back in years...
...I see beauty in the line of clothes...
...It was unbelievable...
...She had prepared the entire Easter feast, and set it out, knowing that no one would come, perhaps that no one cared, but she cared, and she was the grandmother of the family, blood or no blood, and if we all disappeared into America, she would still be there with food and the painting of our Lady of Czestochowa weeping with her...
...I was uncomfortable in the church...
...Then grandpa died...
...It was like a child, she said, the only thing she had in America, but thank God, she had something...
...I remember her wedding...
...The priest gave the sermon...
...It was as far from New Jersey as from California, and her beloved family was scattered that far...
...They were all Polish, the old women who had been left behind when their children moved out to the Island or to Jersey or even further into the distant reaches of America...
...It was hard to go back from the suburbs...
...She recovered from her heart attack in time to visit her grandchildren in distant New Jersey, riding by bus, climbing through a window when they weren't yet home from shopping, and then, as if to prove to all the world that nothing would get her down, grabbing the shovel and mixing cement while the men were taking a break...
...PETER SKARGA is a pseudonym...
...She began jumping up and down, up and down, saying: "Oh, thank God, thank God, I'm so happy, I'm so happy, thank God, thank God...
...If you have to explain a symbol it's not a symbol...
...A month later she was dead...
...The lame, the halt, the blind were seeing with faith, led forward in a march of faith...
...She was overjoyed...
...The word was speaking, not being spoken about, not analyzed, just spoken...
...His cruelty was deep, deep in his black eyes...
...Once she had a heart attack...
...The liturgy was wordy, the people vaguely hungry for something they weren't getting, so many ideas, explanations of everything...
...The idea to go to dawn Mass in Brooklyn came to us then, back to an old Polish church where my parents had been married, a different neighborhood from Babcia's...
...She loved children with the ache of a woman who had never had any of her own...
...Every Sunday she would walk ten miles, across the Kosciuszko Bridge, to visit the cemetery in Queens...
...She called the burning oil refinery her "Christmas Tree," lighting up the night with its ominous flame...
...As we left, she blessed us and said, "Your family has always been very good to me...
...We rang the front doorbell of the three-story frame building...
...The last straw came when the Holy Saturday midnight Mass was held at eight, the Easter Vigil over at ten...
...I found her just sitting in a chair, her blue print dress, her apron, her stiff kerchief across her unwrinkled head...
...She excused herself and cried for a minute, just shaking her head, and then took our coats...
...Then she married and lived in Brooklyn...
...The only ones left were the retarded cousin, the alcoholic uncle, all stories of sadness left behind in the move to the bright world...
...We were overcome with joy...
...Way down, through two lace curtained doors, her face peeped out...
...Suddenly, melted, reminded, we decided to stop in on Babcia...
...It was all like a strange dream...
...Perhaps she was afraid that with him gone, no one would visit her...
...It had been spring, and the tree was in bloom...
...It was unlike anything I had ever seen before...
...She asked: "What makes you so pleased out there...
...Oh God, I thought, a small foreigner, what will this be like...
...That was her way to get to the country...
...She married grandpa...
...She took care of grandpa lovingly, tenderly at first, until his cruelty and brutality wore her smile off her face, and she would quietly put the plate of soup down in front of him and turn around to wipe the tears from her eyes with her immaculate apron...
...Somehow every year, in the spring, she had managed to get back to her tree, even if she had to walk there...
Vol. 109 • April 1982 • No. 7
