Chasing Daisy

– this is very out of character for my mother – but I go along with it.
    We’re silent on the elevator ride down to the lobby, and silent on the walk along the street. It’s only when we’ve turned the corner and are out of sight of our apartment block towering up above that my mother begins to speak.
    ‘I left your father once.’
    I turn to her in surprise. She’s staring off into the distance, as though lost in her thoughts.
    ‘When?’ I ask.
    ‘It was before you were born.’
    ‘When you were living in England?’
    ‘Yes. Although I went back to Italy.’
    ‘To stay with Nonna?’
    ‘And your grandfather, yes. They welcomed me back. They didn’t want me to marry him in the first place. They said he had bad blood.’
    I know what they mean.
    ‘Why did you marry him?’
    She sighs. ‘I thought I loved him. I think I just loved the idea of him. I was at university in England on a scholarship.’
    ‘I didn’t know you went to university?’ It strikes me that I don’t actually know an awful lot about my mother. ‘What were you studying?’
    ‘English.’ She waves me away, a touch impatiently. I’m sidetracking. She continues. ‘I had this one friend, a well-meaning girl from a wealthy family who took pity on this poor soul from the mountains. She dragged me out one night to her father’s private members’ club and we got dressed up to the nines – me in a borrowed outfit. We sat on high stools at the bar while drinking martinis in cocktail glasses.’ I glance at my mother to see her smiling wistfully as she remembers. ‘Your father walked in. He was so handsome and well dressed. He took . . . an interest in me, I think you could say. He wanted to take me out on a date. I was flattered. I agreed.’
    ‘Then what happened?’ I prompt. I’m utterly intrigued by this story.
    ‘We got. . . carried away,’ she says, with difficulty.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    She takes a deep breath.
    ‘You had sex with him?’ I ask. She looks at me sharply. We never speak about intimate things. I’ve never had that sort of relationship with her. ‘On the first date?’ She doesn’t answer, but suddenly I see it clearly. ‘And you fell pregnant with me,’ I say dully. So I’m the reason she ended up in an unhappy marriage. But her next words shock me.
    ‘Not with you,’ she says.
    I stop on the sidewalk and stare at her, unable to walk any further.
    ‘Then with whom?’ I ask, the words threatening to choke me.
    ‘Perhaps this isn’t the place.’ She indicates the street around her, the sidewalk, the nearby canopy from a cheap Italian restaurant.
    ‘You can’t stop now,’ I warn, feeling sick to the pit of my stomach. ‘Tell me.’
    ‘I miscarried at twenty-two weeks. Five and a half months,’ she explains, when she sees me trying to calculate it in my head. ‘It was a boy,’ she says sadly.
    ‘I almost had a brother?’ I ask.
    She nods.
    ‘Were you married to my father by then?’
    ‘Yes. Only a month before. I wasn’t even showing yet. Your father was devastated. He always wanted a son.’ She glances at me apologetically, and in that instant I remember something my father said to me when I was only about five or six.
    ‘ At the very least you could have been a boy . . .’
    ‘Didn’t you try to have any more children after me?’
    She looks off down the street. ‘Yes. I miscarried them all.’
    ‘All?’ I look at her in horror.
    ‘Six in total, but all in the first trimester. I never knew the sex of the others.’
    ‘What about me? Why didn’t you miscarry me?’ It’s a crazy question, and I don’t really expect her to know the answer, so I’m startled when she suddenly looks on edge. ‘Mother?’
    ‘Let’s keep walking.’ I hurry after her down the sidewalk, waiting for her to continue. Eventually she does. ‘I felt like your father hated me.’
    I glance at her in confusion as she continues.
    ‘I lost him his son.’
    ‘It wasn’t your fault!’
    ‘But he didn’t see it that way. He wanted to try again. Straight away. But I had another miscarriage. I didn’t fall pregnant again for some time after that, and he just became bitter and resentful.’
    ‘But how did you cope with that? You must’ve been devastated yourself.’
    ‘I was,’ she says simply. ‘More devastated than I could ever describe. And to live with his hatred. . . It was too much.’
    ‘So you left him?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And you say this was before I was born?’ I’m