The Dark Lady From Belorusse
Saturday, July 05, 2014
We would walk the streets, a prodigy in
short pants and his mother, so defiantly beautiful that all transactions
stopped, and we’d enter a slow-motion world where women, men, children, dogs,
cats, and firemen in their trucks would look at her with such longing in their
eyes, that I felt like some usurper who was carrying her off to another hill...
It was a darkly romantic time. The Bronx sat near the Atlantic Ocean without a proper seawall, and there was talk of attack squads arriving in little rubber boats off some tricky submarine, getting into the sewer system, and gobbling my native ground. But I never saw a Nazi on our walks. And what power would any of them have had against the shimmering outline of my mother in her silver fox coat? She was born in 1911, like Ginger Rogers and Jean Harlow, but she didn’t have their platinum look: she was the dark lady of Belorusse.
The Dark Lady From Belorusse – Jerome Charyn -
1997
