For You Mom, Finally (2 page)

I have never known so many unhappy people. They were smart, they were educated and they were bored. Some of them did charitable work, but it wasn’t fulfilling. Their misery was an ugly thing, and it was hard on their families. It was a terrible waste of talent and energy, and watching them I knew that I was never going to be like them.

Every night, when my father came in from work, he’d set his briefcase down in the hall, and I saw the little transformation that occurred. I realized that his secret life, the one he had when he was away from us, nurtured him, fed his soul. I watched him leaving in the morning, wishing that my mother could go to work too. I thought if she had her own secret life she would be a happier person. And I determined, when I was very small, that no matter what, nobody was going to keep me from having a work life. I thought then—and I still think now—that it is the key to happiness.

And so today, when people ask, “Why do you work so hard?” I think of my mother, who was not allowed to do it, and say, “Because I can.”

This was not a Mim Tale, but Mom’s story had struck a nerve and over the next few weeks I began getting letters from people I did not know. They all began the same way: “My mother was just like yours ...” The letters kept on coming and several people suggested that I write a book about Mom’s generation. The idea intrigued me, and I began interviewing other women, taking notes about their mothers and their thwarted lives.

But when the time came to start writing, I found I couldn’t. For months I sat staring at the notes with absolutely no idea of where to begin. I went to the library and perused old newspapers. I read the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution and tried to imagine what it must have been like, belonging to that first generation of women who had been granted equal rights. I studied the work of suffragettes. But each time I tried to write about emancipated women I found myself going in circles, uncertain of what to say.

Why did it take me so long to figure out that I had been handed the perfect opportunity to write my mother’s book? Only later did I understand how frightened I had been, how scared of what I might find out.

Like most women, I decided who my mother was long ago, sometime during childhood. The comic character of the Mim Tales was safe now; I had spent many years making peace with her. Her voice was no longer inside my head and it was a relief to have all that behind me. I was reluctant to replace the mother I thought I knew with someone else. Why go looking for trouble?

But I owed it to my mother, and I knew it. Still, every time I headed toward the basement where the box of diaries might be I turned away, experiencing an urgent need to bake a pie, run an errand, wax the floors.

In the end I managed to persuade myself that the box was very likely to be lost. That gave me the courage to finally open up the basement door and creep slowly down the chilly stairs.

Feeling like Pandora, I picked my way through outgrown skis, discarded tools, old menus and ancient typewriters, peering into the dusty cartons that towered over me. The one containing Mom’s notes was nowhere to be found, and I was beginning to breathe easy when I stumbled over a once-shiny white box held together with pieces of twine. Blowing off the dirt, I read “Miriam’s Life and Letters” penciled in my father’s calligraphic script, the writing almost obliterating the stamped B. Altman & Co. beneath it.

The top crumbled in my hand—it had been years since anyone had touched it—and opened to reveal a huge collection of letters, notes and clippings. Looking down I caught sight of my mother’s bold handwriting and inhaled sharply. It was as if she were suddenly with me, there in the basement, and as I bent to pick up a sheet of paper covered with her vivid scrawl I could almost hear her voice. I sat down on the cold cement floor and let the words flood over me.

“I hope Ruthy won’t rush into marriage the way I did that first time. I felt so desperate, and I wanted someone to lean on. I pray she’ll never feel that way. My parents thought that I needed to be married, but was that really true? What if I had never married? Would my life have been better?”

I felt a little sick; with these first words I had discovered something new. Mom’s first marriage had been a true disaster—I had always known that—but I thought that she had loved my father. But this note, written ten years into their marriage, holds a definite note of regret. Was I prepared to find out why?

I dropped the letter and picked up another, written in a safely unfamiliar hand. The script was tight and slightly cramped. Dated 1925, it began “Dear Dadsy-boy,” the brown ink wavering uncertainly on cream stationery. Mom’s sister, I thought, the one who died long before I was born. “I’m glad I’m over here and not at home. It’s so hard to keep pure ideals at home when all anybody talks about is society.”

The letter went on, a virtuous little screed about living an upright life. This sister sounded like such a Goody Two-shoes, so different from my dynamic mother, that I began to wonder why Mom had loved her with such fierceness. Still trying to picture this long-dead aunt, I spotted the signature and realized that it did not belong to her after all: My mother, seventeen, had signed the letter. This was not the young Mom I had imagined, and I released the letter, heart beating, to peer down into the box.

It was utter chaos, a jumble of voices belonging to people who died long ago. Letters from dozens of different friends and family members, shopping lists, unused prescriptions and newspaper clippings were crammed in, helter-skelter. Time telescoped around me as I pulled out the yellowing bits of paper and began to read, rocketing dizzyingly from 1924 to 1988 and back again.

Mom did not keep what any normal person would call a diary, but constantly wrote notes on scraps of paper. They were threaded through the pile of letters like shouts from the past, eager to be heard. Who was she writing to? What was she trying to say? And would I have the courage to listen?

I wasn’t sure. Looking for a sign, I closed my eyes and picked up a note at random, the way you open up a fortune cookie or consult a Magic 8-Ball. If the words told me to, I would close the box and let the past lie undisturbed. But if they beckoned me forward I would follow them and go searching for my mother.

I opened my eyes and looked at the note in my hand. Mom had been an old lady when she scrawled these words across the paper. “Who am I? What do I want? Why do I stand in my own way so often? It’s not good enough to say that my mother thought self-analysis was self-indulgent. She’s been dead for 25 years. I need to find me.”

Could the message have been clearer? And so I began traveling through the box, trying to answer my mother’s questions. As I sorted out the handwriting I got to know my grandparents, who both died when I was small. I discovered that my father was an ardent lover, a wonderful writer, and deeply romantic. But mostly I met my mother—as a little girl, a hopeful young woman and an increasingly unhappy older one. And the more I came to know this woman, the more grateful I became that I did not have to live her life.

Mom turned out to be very little like the comic character of the Mim Tales. She was more thoughtful, more self-aware and much more generous than I had ever appreciated. Getting to know her now, I realized how much I missed by not knowing her better when she was still alive.

But there was something more. As I came to know this new person, I began to see how much I owe her. Mom may not have realized her dreams, but that did not make her bitter. She did not have a happy life, but she wanted one for me. And she made enormous emotional sacrifices to make sure that my life would not turn out like hers.

The earliest letter in the box
comes at you like a slap. Even after eighty-four years its heartless candor leaves a bruise. Had my father written me a letter like that when I was sixteen I think I would have burned it on the spot. I know I would not have kept it. But Mom had carefully filed her father’s letter away, and reading it now I tried to figure out why she had hung on to these brutal words for her entire lifetime.

“You are a dear girl,” my grandfather had written, “and you have a fine mind. But you will have to resign yourself to the fact that you are homely. Finding a husband will not be easy.”

It was a kind of curse that followed her always. In those few sentences he had hit on all the major issues that were to plague her life: She was smart but it did not really matter. She was handicapped because she was not pretty. And she would be a failure if she never married.

My grandparents, Emil and Mollie Brudno, were the children of immigrants who had come to Cleveland in the late 1800s, and they had exalted aspirations. By the time my mother was born in 1908 Emil had turned himself into a well-to-do doctor and Mollie was running his rather grand and extremely orderly house. But what connected them and defined their lives was a shared and absolutely insatiable appetite for culture. They were wild for music, books and art (in that order), and they traveled widely. Throughout their lives they shared their thoughts, writing letters almost daily even when they were not apart.

When Mom was sixteen my grandmother took her two daughters to spend the year in Switzerland. I had always known that my mother was educated abroad, and I had always imagined that it was because my grandparents were pretentious snobs who wanted to emulate the “grand tour” of the aristocrats. I was wrong. Reading the letters I discovered that my grandmother was a prodigy who had been offered a scholarship to study music in Switzerland at the age of sixteen. Had she been a boy her parents would have let her go, but she was only a girl, so they made her turn it down and go to work so that she could put her only brother through college and then medical school. Now, with a devastated postwar Europe affordable for Americans, Mollie hoped to offer her daughters the experience that she herself had been denied.

Mom was not musical but she was a dutiful daughter, and she tried to be grateful. She wrote daily letters home to “Dadsy-boy,” her unformed handwriting offering an eloquent picture of her days. She read good books. She took long walks. She played golf. And she practiced the violin for six hours full every day.

It is hard for me to imagine Mom screeching away at the violin; I never heard her play. Didn’t she resent those long hours of practice? In a rare show of spirit she wrote, “I wish that man Kreutzer had never lived to write such horribly difficult exercises! I hate him.” But not until Mom was in her fifties did she permit herself to give vent to her true feelings. “I was not musically gifted like my mother,” she wrote then. “All I ever wanted was to be a doctor like my father. I was no good at the violin and I knew it. Why couldn’t they let me be? I will never do this to my daughter.”

But at seventeen she was still eager to please her parents, and so when her mother sailed home with her sister, Mom stayed on in Paris to pursue a doctorate in music. It sounds like such a lonely life: She had no friends and spent all her time practicing her violin and spending long hours at the Bibliothèque Nationale doing arcane musical research.

In her letters home she does not complain but endlessly thanks her parents for “the wonderful opportunity you are giving me.” Mom’s relentlessly saccharine letters are maddening: Being a teenager alone in a foreign country studying a subject you don’t much like cannot have been fun, but she is humble, grateful, virtuous. “I have decided to read at least one classic book a week,” she wrote to her father, “so that I can improve my mind.” Meanwhile her sister, only a year and a half younger, is writing breathless letters about all the wonderful parties she’s been invited to, and the great fun she is having at home.

“Why did I let my parents push me so?” Mom lamented in later life. “Why did I let them rob me of the chance to go to college in order to study something that I had no background in? Why didn’t I listen to myself instead of them?” From this distance it is easy to see what was going on, but Mom was well into middle age before she came to the conscious realization that what she had been pursuing was her mother’s dream.

“We are so proud of you!” her parents wrote when she passed her oral exams. And they were exultant when she breezed through the written ones and received her doctorate. She was nineteen.

What she was expected to do with this is anybody’s guess. The America my mother returned to in 1927 was still a polite turn-of-the-century society entirely dominated by men. I scrambled through the letters looking for some mention of the Nineteenth Amendment, some intimation that it had changed their lives, but there was nothing. Women might have earned the right to vote in 1920, but the amendment passed by a single vote and it actually changed very little. Lindbergh and his flight were dominating the news when Mom returned to America, and newspapers were running headlines like “Woman Suffrage Declared a Failure.” And so once again my mother proved what a good girl she was. She returned home to live with her parents and search for a husband.