Well!
Here is a diagram of our family structure before and after my father’s death.
Before he departed (brain tumor, malignant) we were such a sweet little family: two loving parents and three healthy children.
Our father was Director of the Agricultural Institute where his work on hybrid grains was universally recognized (honorary degrees from Guelph and the University of Iowa), and after his retirement, never one to be idle, he wrote a weekly horticultural column for the Ottawa Recorder. My mother was a full twenty-three years younger than my father; that age-gap became her hobby and profession, being a young wife to an older husband—it kept her girlish, made her a kind of tenant in the tower of girlhood.
There she remained, safe, looked after. She stayed home and looked after her children and sewed and cleaned the house—even though she could have afforded help—and did the garden. That garden of hers, it functioned like a kind of trope in her daily life, and in ours too. She made suppers—roasted meat, boiled vegetables, pies and puddings or molded Jello things for dessert. These meals were planned, they didn’t just happen. Our family sat down at a table that was set. My mother was always concocting new centerpieces, she was part of that mid-century squadron of women who believed in centerpieces. We children had agreeable table manners. We kept our voices low. Always, after the dishes, Joanie and Warren and I got down to our homework without reminding.
We took piano lessons on Wednesday evening from a woman named Myrna Rassmussen, the Royal Raspberry we called her behind her back—and the mildness of this epithet says a lot about who we were and what we were capable of. On Saturdays we went for family walks—no one else we knew went for family walks—and were taught by our parents, but unobtrusively, how to identify the various shrubs, trees, plants, and flowers that grew in our neighborhood or in the woods of the Experimental Farm.
After my father died—and even during the months following his diagnosis—things changed fast. Supper was late, or else early.
Sometimes it was served in the kitchen instead of the dining room, and we had things like corned beef hash out of a can or toasted cheese sandwiches. My mother never seemed to take her apron off, we had to remind her or she would have dashed out of the house like that. She got way behind on the vacuuming. Everything.
Even her beloved African violets dried up, even her ferns. Part of this household neglect can be explained by grief or disorientation, that would be only natural, but something else occurred to create all this change. A mere two months after my father’s funeral, our mother took over the horticultural column at the Recorder, becoming Mrs. Green Thumb. She was, suddenly, a different person, a person who worked. Who worked "outside the home," as people said in those quaint days, though, in fact, she did her writing under our own roof, and mailed her column into the paper, walking down to the corner of Torrington Crescent on Wednesday afternoon to pop it into the mail box in time for the Saturday paper. Whether the editor of the Recorder invited her to take on the column or whether she volunteered I have never known, but all of a sudden there she was, sitting at a desk in a corner of the living room, our father’s old desk, laboring over her articles, scratching away with her ballpoint pen, looking up occasionally and rubbing her forehead like someone scouring her senses for an answer that would please her readers’ sensibility but remain faithful to botanical truth. Sometimes she would rise, drift over to the window for a moment, then return to the desk, settling her widening hips comfortably in her chair, ready to begin again. It appeared she had a knack for this kind of writing. It surprised everyone. It was as though she had veered, accidentally, into her own life.
Then Cousin Beverly from Saskatchewan arrived on the train, six months pregnant, big as a barn, and moved into the storeroom on the third floor. The plan was that Beverly was going to put the baby up for adoption, but this never happened. The subject was not raised. Victoria was born, a beautiful full-term baby, and she just stayed on with the family. She slept in a basket in my room at first, but then Beverly turned the downstairs sunroom into a nursery, papering over the old ivy pattern with lambs and milkmaids.
All this happened fast. In 1954 we were a nice ordinary family, Mr. and Mrs. Barker Flett and their three tractable children.
Then—it seemed like a lightning flash had hit our house—there was just one parent (distracted, preoccupied) and an unwed mother and a baby with colic and three teenagers: devious Joan, sullen Warren, and mean-hearted Alice.
You’d have thought my mother would be wildly unsettled by all this, but you would be wrong. She let the chaos that hit our household in 1955 roll right over her like a big friendly engulfing wave.
She came bobbing to the surface, her round face turned upward to the sunlight, happy.
Not that we didn’t grieve for my father.
He was a tall, hunched, good-looking man who, right into his seventies, kept his thick head of hair. This hair he combed straight back from his forehead in an oddly continental manner. His brow was smoothly polished, white, stony, and clean. He had a breadth of neck that took well to a collar and tie, but his long arms and legs and his rather lumbering rectitude reminded you that he had once been a country boy, raised in rural Manitoba, born in another century. Despite his gentleness, his patience, I had found him an embarrassing father, too polite, too given to clearing his throat, too uncomfortable in his body, too old, much too old, but when he died I missed him.
My mother missed him too. In the days immediately following his funeral she went slack and heavy as though she were gasping for air through an impermeable membrane, her history, her marriage, everything gone down the chute. But then, presto, she became Mrs. Green Thumb. Her old self slipped off her like an oversized jacket.
For years now she has sat down at her desk every morning, still wearing her robe and slippers, writing out her column in longhand, a first draft, then a second, then a third, and then checking over Cousin Beverly’s typed copy. Her rusty-gray frizz fluffs out over her forehead and ears—sometimes she brushes her hair before settling down to work and sometimes she doesn’t. She gets lost in what she’s doing and doesn’t even hear the phone ringing; none of us ever guessed she had this power of absorption. She’ll do, say, the propagation of lobelia one week and how to air-layer your rubber plant the next. When she isn’t actually writing, she’s answering mail from her readers—she averages at least twenty letters a week—or else she’s thinking up ideas or filing away gardening information in my father’s old filing cabinet. She’s done this for nine whole years, but now, suddenly, it’s over.
She’s lost her job. A man named Pinky Fulham has taken over the column, and my mother, fifty-nine years old, has been given the heave-ho. She got her walking papers. She’s been fired—and thrown into a despair deeper and sharper and wider than she ever suffered over her husband’s death or her children’s misbehavior.
A year ago she was sitting at that desk with her hair buzzing around her head like something alive and her pen scrambling across the paper. She was Mrs. Green Thumb, that well-known local personage, and now she’s back to being Mrs. Flett again. She knew, for a brief while, what it was like to do a job of work. The shaping satisfaction. The feel of a typescript folded into an envelope. And then the paycheck arriving in the mail. Now she’s like some great department store of sadness with its displays of rejection and inattention and wide silent reflecting windows, out of business, the padlock on the door.
I live thousands of miles away in England—Hampstead to be precise—but I’ve left my darling husband Ben for three whole weeks, also our two little sprogs, Benje and Judy, and I’ve come all the way home to see how matters stand. I find my mother seated in the garden, gripping the arms of a wicker chair, her chin oddly dented and old, her mouth round, helpless, saying, "I can’t get used to this. I can’t get over this."
Fraidy Hoyt’s Theory
You don’t expect Alice Flett Downing to believe in her mother’s real existence, do you?
It’s true she loves her mother, and true she’s a good daughter—didn’t she come all this way across the drink to try to jolly her out of her current state of the blues? The trouble is, Alice doesn’t know where to begin. In a curious, ironic way, she hasn’t known her mother long enough, hasn’t known her the way I’ve known her, since childhood in Bloomington, Indiana, when we were two eleven-year-old brats in pigtails—well, in point of fact, I was the one in pigtails and Daze had the naturally curly hair. Which she hated—Lord!—an ambulatory fuzzball, she called herself. Later, when the poodle-cut came into fashion, she was grateful, but by that time, the late forties, she was living up in Canada, married to a man named Barker Flett and the mother of three children, the oldest being Alice.
Alice can’t help herself, she’s got this fixation on work. She’s not like young girls were in our era, wavering between convention and fits of rebellion; she has serious interests of her own about which she is sometimes a little sententious. She’s twenty-eight years old, you’d think she’d be out there with the flower children, wouldn’t you, mooning about peace and love, and lolling around in public places, strumming a guitar and smoking grass and letting her life go sweetly to hell. But no, she’s got herself properly married to a teeny-weenie professor of economics, she lives in a little fairytale English house, she’s produced two perfect babes, and she’s published a moderately successful book called Chekhov’s Imagination and is working on another that explores Chekhov’s feminine side—this new project she’s outlined for me in a letter tucked into her Christmas card. That’s another thing about Alice:
she sends Christmas cards; she has a compulsion to hold her farflung family and friends in a tight embrace, and her charity extends to her mother’s old girlhood pals, chiefly myself and Labina Greene Dukes, who has recently moved down to Florida and who once described Alice to me as Her Holy Miss Righteousness.
Alice addresses me in her little notes and cards as "Aunt" Fraidy, and in that aunt-ish salutation I read proprietorial claims.
Also benevolent respect. Also love. The last time I saw her was at little Judy’s christening in Ottawa—that’s one more odd bump on Alice’s psyche: she’s an agnostic who nevertheless christens her children; she actually brings them across the Atlantic Ocean to be anointed by pure and holy Canadian water in the presence of pure and impure family and friends. Ceremony, she says, is society’s cement; ceremony paints large our sketchiest impulses; ceremony forms the seal between the cerebrum and cerebellum. Alice has a theory about every bush and button and human gesture, sometimes several theories.
After Judy’s ecclesiastical sprinkling in that wonderful Ottawa garden, Alice and I stood with our glasses of bubbly and had a good jabber about The Feminine Mystique. I could tell she was surprised I’d read it. Like many young people she believes we elderly types have long since shut down our valves and given way to flat acquiescence about the future. Her eyes widened when I began taking issue with Betty Friedan’s exaltation of work as salvation. "We are our work!" Alice cried. "Work and self cannot be separated."
Oh, dear. I opened my mouth to protest.
"Look at my mother," Alice interrupted, lowering her voice, but not quite low enough, and gesturing toward the blooming lilac where Daze was standing in a circle of friends, her body widened out now to a powerful size eighteen, little Judy nestled in the crook of her arm. "Before my mother became a newspaper columnist she had no sense of self-worth whatsoever. Whatsoever! Really, when you think about it, she functioned like a kind of slave in our society. She was unpaid. Undervalued. She was nobody. Now look at her. She’s become"—here Alice groped for words, waving her hand toward the nodding lilacs—"she’s become, you know, like a real person."
Work is work, I wanted to tell Alice, and don’t I know it. Work’s not just sitting in the corners of shadowy libraries and producing beautiful little monographs every couple of years. It’s the alarm clock going off on winter mornings when it’s dark and cold and you’ve forgotten to iron the green blouse that goes with the gray suit and the car’s not working right and you can’t afford to get it fixed this month because it’s been four years since the Official Board of the Monroe County Art Gallery thought of increasing your salary or even dropping you a word of praise, and on top of that there are whole mornings when no one comes into the gallery at all or if they do they stand around griping about the exhibitions and giggle and smirk at the abstracts, letting you know their kindergarten darlings could do just as well with a pot of fingerpaint, and furthermore (hem, hem) it’s taxpayers who support this kind of thing when what people really like, only they’re too damned intimidated to say so, is a nice landscape, fields and sky and a horizon line that looks like a horizon line for God’s sake. And what else?
Well, there are meetings with the board and the books to balance and the publicity that somehow always misfires and the fund drives that peter out and the misplaced grant applications and the catalogues coming back late from the printers, and the crazies who phone at all hours and beg you to take just one little peek at their portfolio, you owe it, you owe them, who the hell are you anyway but a glorified clerk.
And then—lately anyway, since Mel left—it’s home to a glass of bourbon and a scrambled egg, or maybe stopping by at the library to see what new they’ve got in, and going to bed early because you’ve got a splitting headache and sometimes just before closing your eyes you think about your old pal Daze up there in Canada with her kids and her days to herself, how she bustles along at her own speed, spreading the gospel of Good Housekeeping far and wide and getting her rewards through the accomplishments of others who will certainly crown her with laurels and tell her how grateful they are, in retrospect, that she was a real mother, that she wasn’t out working her tail off for the holy dollar like her old pal, Fraidy Hoyt of Bloomington, Indiana.