What My Mother Gave Me (17 page)

Truths in a Ring

SUSAN STAMBERG

“Oedipus, schmedipus,” the old joke went. “As long as you love your mother.”

And I did. As did my father. But did he love her more than he loved me? I was much too young, when he gave her that ring, to understand that there were different kinds of love, different kinds of loving. I was an only child, adored and pampered. When he handed her a small package for her birthday, I thrust out my five-year-old hand and grabbed it.

“Oh, no, darling.
Th
at's not for you. It's for Mommy.”

“Yes, sweetheart. Today is my birthday. Daddy's giving me a present.”

What?!
Th
is was impossible. Every brightly wrapped and ribboned box I'd ever seen had been for me. And not this one?! With her lilting, lovely voice (which taught me so much, and read me so many books, and drilled me, years later—again with such attentive love—on boring French verb endings) she was carefully giving me an early, difficult lesson in relationships and possession and consideration.
Th
ese lessons always were her greatest gifts to her only daughter.

But on that September 3, 1943, when my father handed the pretty box to her, I bawled. Bawled more. And more. Enough so that she took me on her lap and cuddled me while she opened her present. It was a massive pale purple amethyst ring. A rock, really. She loved it, and wore it for special occasions all her life.
Th
e last time was at her ninety-fifth birthday party, at the nursing home in Washington, D.C.

She'd moved to Washington from her beloved Manhattan, at our urging, when she was sixty-eight years old. Her large family had scattered. Friends were dying or moving away.

“Come watch your grandson grow up,” I said. And she did. She became a fixture in our lives. For thirty years, her presence helped to square off our small triangle of a nuclear family. We Stambergs were three only children under the same roof. Not the easiest combination. My husband, Lou, had Mom's sweetness, but also the determination to excel that propels many only children. Our son, Josh, was strong-willed pretty much from birth. And I, of course, was totally pampered and adored, thanks to those loving parents. Triangles are always tricky, and while we three Stambergs worked and played well with others, we certainly had our tensions, our juggling for attention. When my mother moved into an apartment building (“just a seven-minute bus ride away,” as she frequently pointed out), her presence helped smooth out a number of squabbles. And, eternally tactful, she knew when not to interfere or opine.
Th
at's one gift I wish she had given to me!

When I turned sixty-eight, I thought back to what it must have been like for her to have changed her life so radically at that age.
Th
e very thought exhausted me—the notion of breaking so many connections built up over a lifetime, and moving to a new place. But she did it with conviction and good humor, because family meant everything to her.

Mom was the youngest in a family of
eight.
A cosseted, adored, beloved little girl, she grew up in Washington Heights—her father (she would proudly tell) was
the
leading designer of women's coats and suits in Manhattan. Fashion was always important to her. She had beautiful, wonderfully made clothes and looked terrific in them—slim and nicely groomed. White gloves always in summer (even for backyard barbecues in Washington). Black leather gloves in winter. And for special occasions, that amethyst ring from Dad was always a perfect adornment.

We were so different, my mother and I. She with all those brothers and sisters. Me, the only child. She learned sweetness and getting along, from those many sibs. I learned contrariness, and how to get away with it. So, because fashion meant so much to her, I wore what we then called dungarees, growing up in the '50s. I always had a weight issue, and was rarely “groomed.” Little of that has changed for me. Although, over the years, I've come to look more and more like her. Sometimes, glimpsing a mirror, the resemblance is startling. And gives me deep pleasure, because it's an evolving way I can keep her with me.

TOWARD THE END,
she became snappish at times—a tone came into that lilting, beautiful voice that I'd not heard before. She was old and achy, and it made her impatient. I now understand how age can do that to you. I snap, too, from time to time.

But I remember Mom's snappishness, because it was in such contrast to her basic nature.

She was, quite simply, a lovely and lov
ing
woman.
Th
at was the gift of her life, and her gift to everyone who met her. She greeted you with shining eyes, a tilt of her head, and a wide smile. She caught your face in her hands, to
really
look at you. And put a world of caring into a simple kiss on the cheek.

She loved to talk, and walk, and visit. She loved music (her voice was full of music when she spoke). And she
sang
wonderfully—harmonized when I played the piano and friends stood around singing the great old songs every
Th
anksgiving. Music was another gift from her. I visited the nursing home one afternoon and found her and the other third-floor ladies sitting together watching a Nelson Eddy – Jeanette MacDonald movie on the big TV. Mom was singing along with them—just as she had with Judy Garland and
Easter Parade,
the week before.

I sang to her as she died. It was a song she had taught me. I just discovered, from the baby book she kept, that it was the very first song I learned. I love the words, because they're emblematic of
her
—her light grace, her lovely ways.
Th
e name of the song is “Alice Blue Gown”—from the 1919 show
Irene
(Mom was thirteen when it opened on Broadway).
Th
e lyrics are by Joseph McCarthy (not the witch hunter of Communists; this one could rhyme!). Harry Tierney wrote the music. And Alice blue was the color named for Alice Roosevelt—President
Th
eodore's daughter.

In my sweet little Alice blue gown,

When I first wandered down into town,

I was both proud and shy,

As I felt every eye,

But in every shop window

I'd primp, passing by;

Th
en in manner of fashion, I'd frown.

And the world seemed to smile all around,

Till it wilted I wore it, I'll always adore it,

My sweet little Alice blue gown.

Anne Rosalind Rosenberg Levitt died in 2003, three months short of her ninety-seventh birthday. Going through her things—papers, clothes, jewelry, all the stuff of life—I came across the amethyst ring in the bottom of her jewelry box. Mom had had some simple diamond jewelry, which I've passed along to my daughter-in-law. And her pretty but not very expensive costume things I distributed to family and friends. But the amethyst ring rests in my bureau drawer. I've never worn it—it's not my style at all—but it sits there like an old story, a lesson in the loves (and losses) of life. And most important, the ring is a reminder of the major things she gave me: kindness, attention, affection, a lifetime of love.

Quilts

JOYCE CAROL OATES

My favorite is always on my bed. Even in warm weather.

It is not a large quilt but very beautiful, I think: comprised of numerous brightly colored knitted-wool squares of every imaginable color—red, yellow, green, blue, purple, magenta, brown, cream.

Th
e pattern is neither simple nor complex. It isn't, like some quilts, a labyrinthine design.

From the start, I loved this quilt. Just to look at it is to feel comforted.

Several generations of cats have slept on this quilt. (Even as I write this, my little gray cat Cherie is probably sleeping on it, asprawl in a patch of sunshine.) I can only estimate how many years have passed since my mother gave the quilt to me and my husband Ray Smith:
Th
irty years?
Th
irty-five?

Th
e cherished little quilt in all the colors of the rainbow has followed me from one residence to another—in different bedrooms in different houses in different phases of my life.

In this most recent phase, in which the bright-colored quilt is laid on a pale blue comforter on my bed in a house in Princeton, New Jersey, into which I moved in 2009 with my second husband, Charlie Gross, my mother has been absent from my life for nine years.

Nine years!
Th
at seems so long, yet my memory of Mom is so vivid, I can glance up and see her in the doorway of my study—I can see the expression on her face, and (almost) hear what she is saying.

My mother never visited this house. She would love it, I think—especially the large curving flower beds, so like the flower beds she'd tended in our yard in Millersport, New York, years ago. When she'd visited Ray and me in my former Princeton home, less than five minutes from this house, Mom had always helped out in the garden, as in the house; we would garden together and prepare meals, while my father, a gifted amateur pianist/organist, played piano in the living room.

Whenever my parents came to visit us in Princeton, my mother would bring gifts for us: mostly items she had knitted, crocheted, or sewn. We have several lovely afghans, including one that is entirely white, with a subtle, delicate design, and another, large and heavy as a comforter, that's made of orange, brown, and white wool. She'd knitted me several sweater-coats, one of them in a vivid crimson wool; she'd sewn the most exquisite blouses—a white long-sleeved blouse in raw silk, which I used to wear often; a pumpkin-colored silk blouse; a dove-gray silk blouse with a fine-stitched collar. For years I wore these blouses, and dresses and jackets my mother had sewn; in many of my “author photos” I'm wearing Mom's clothes.
Th
ose I no longer wear are enshrined in my closets—I look at them often, marveling at the fine stitching and hemming, the exquisite small touches, mother-of-pearl buttons, pleated bodices. Dresses, skirts, vests, shawls. Often I wear the shirts she'd sewn for me—white, pink, red, magenta; one of my favorite sweaters is a pink sweater-coat with a knitted belt.

Th
ere is nothing so
comforting
as wearing clothes your mother has sewn or knitted for you.

After my mother died in 2003, for a long time I would imagine her with me, in my study in particular, though
imagine
is perhaps a weak word to describe how keenly I felt Mom's presence. In writing the novel
Missing Mom,
I tried to evoke Carolina Oates—well, I'm sure that I did evoke her, not fully or completely but in part. Mom is so much a part of myself, writing the novel was the antithesis of an exorcism, a portrait in words of a remarkable person whom everyone loved.

In February 2008, when Ray was hospitalized, and after he died unexpectedly a week later, I often lay in bed too exhausted to move, beneath the rainbow-colored quilt.
Th
e bed became my haven, my refuge, my sanctuary, my nest—with my mother's quilt as a sign of how love endures in the most elemental and comforting of ways. Warmth, beauty, something to
touch
.

In extremis we care very little for the public life—the life of the career—even the life of literature: it is comfort for which we yearn, but comfort can come to us from only a few, intimate sources. I know that I have been very fortunate. I never cease giving thanks for my wonderful parents, who bequeathed me their love and their hope, and for this quilt on my bed, as singular and beautiful in 2012 as it was in the late 1970s.

Finding the Love Child

SHEILA KOHLER

My mother gave me many gifts. She was the sort of generous woman who would, if you admired a diamond ring or a fur coat, take it off and give it to you. Yet at her death in Johannesburg, at seventy-two, she did not leave to me, her only remaining child, the large fortune my father had left her. She had always said to me and my older sister, “Everything I have in the world is yours,” though toward the end of her life she had hinted that the money might go elsewhere: “I will have to take care of my own family,” she would say mysteriously. I wasn't quite sure what she meant and didn't dare ask.

A few years before her death, staying in her house on a visit from my home in the United States, I rose sleepless one night. I wandered barefoot through the vast, moonlit rooms, with all their heavy Victorian furniture. On a whim, I opened up the drop-leaf desk in what we called the lounge and found her will. I turned on a lamp and read it. She planned to leave much of her fortune to her brother and sisters. What remained was going to a man whom I didn't know. To me, she was leaving her jewelry, her furniture, and a Chinese figurine of a small Buddha. As I sat there in the moonlight, the whole room, with its familiar pink, chintz-covered sofa and armchairs, the drop-leaf desk, the thick, plum-colored wall-to-wall carpet, seemed suddenly strange, as though I had never seen it before. I was no longer, I realized with a dull ache, a much-beloved child, a privileged part of my mother's family, but in some way already an outcast.

By the time of her death, when I was in my early forties, I still didn't know who the mystery heir was, but I took the hurtful will for granted, particularly as my father had left a small part of his fortune directly to my sister and me. Yet when I told people about this, they were always most shocked and puzzled.
Th
ey asked why she would have done such a thing. And when I was not able to answer that, they asked to whom she left her money.

It was partly this extreme reaction that made me think the story of the will might be a good subject for a novel, one I eventually wrote, after I had gleaned additional and surprising information about my mother's life, which I shall recount, as Dostoyevsky says, in its proper place.

Initially, once I had mentioned the money she left her siblings, there was nothing else I could say.
Th
ere was so little I knew about my mother. We had spent so little time with her. As little girls we were brought up by an English nanny in a large house and garden. We slept in a nursery and were cared for by the nanny once for eighteen months when our parents went abroad on business. It was on their return that my father had a heart attack and died. Later, we had asked to be sent to boarding school, as most of the girls in our school were boarders, and our mother, though reluctant, obliged us. When I had finished high school, I left South Africa at just seventeen.

I left for many reasons, some of them political; I was afraid that if I stayed I would be forced to protest and have to go to jail. But perhaps the most important reason was that I felt I needed to get away to find out who I was. Not knowing my mother well made it perhaps more difficult to find myself. For many decades, living, studying, and writing, first in France and then America, I explored this question of identity in three collections of short stories and seven novels. Some of these were historical, based on the lives of brave women, like the Brontë sisters, or the Marquise de la Tour du Pin, a French aristocrat who left France during the Revolution and became a dairy farmer in America; others were more autobiographical. I wrote again and again about my older sister's violent death. But for my most recent novel, I turned to the page to explore my mother's mysterious choices. Perhaps all my books have been attempts to understand them.

It could be that the most precious gift I inherited from my mother, the one which led me to become a writer, was not an object but her silence about so much of her life. It is interesting to note that the word
gift
in German means poison. Sometimes what might seem to take life, like the snake venom, can actually bring it forth. She cloaked herself in folds of mystery, giving us only brief tantalizing glimpses of her true self from time to time. As Friedrich von Hardenberg has said, “Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.”
Th
ere was so much I didn't know about my mother, this person who should have, after all, been the best known to me, that I felt obliged to turn to the page to attempt to discover it.

What I didn't know about my mother seems symbolized by the little Chinese Buddha that she did bequeath to me. A cheap figurine of a seated Buddha with a bald head, a smiling face, holes for ears, and a large bare stomach, he sits beside me on my desk, grinning implacably despite my shifting moods. In some mysterious way, he reminds me of my mother, with his fixed and inscrutable optimism. When I sit down to work or sometimes in moments of difficulty, I rub his fat stomach—I just did it now again!—for luck.

My mother, like all of us, was complex and mercurial. With the years, she became increasingly secretive and solemn, but as a younger woman she was vivacious, or as she would say, her highest form of praise: “full of beans.” As a mother she was most permissive, allowing us great freedom to come and go and do as we wished.
Th
is, too, surely was part of her gift to me, the feeling that anything was allowed in life and thus on the page.

When we came back from dances in the evening, she was usually asleep. If she woke, she was eager to find out only if we had been a success, if our dresses had been admired, not at what hour we had come home. “You ought to give us some chores to do,” I remember saying gravely. “What chores?” she said, puzzled by this demand.

I can still see her dancing the Charleston barefoot, on the parquet floor, her slim ankles flying in the air, her small beringed hands flapping delicately. She had a great capacity for enjoyment: she loved shopping, pretty clothes, jewelry; she loved to dance, to travel, to eat and drink in large quantities, and above all, to bestow all these good things on those around her. Going through an old trunk I found in my basement recently, I discovered menus from fancy dinners she must have attended with my father, postcards of places all over the world, many with the lines: “We are having a wonderful time.” She considered herself lucky, and indeed in many ways was fortunate, and liked to talk about her good luck.

“I have been so lucky all my life,” my mother would tell us proudly. She won at the horse races or any other game she chose to play. I think she was referring, too, to marrying my father (again in mysterious circumstances), a wealthy timber merchant who left her a great deal of money at his death when I was just seven years old. Perhaps my father suspected what my mother might do with his fortune, taking care as he did to leave a small portion of it in trust to his two little girls.

Before I discovered some of her secrets, my mother, like the little Buddha, always seemed relentlessly optimistic, always presenting us with a positive image, and keeping the lack of luck in her life hidden, as though it might harm us in some way. Her motto like Candide's seemed to be
“Tout pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes
.
”
All is for the best in the best of all worlds.

Rather like a good novelist, she would occasionally confide some small part of the truth to us in a tantalizing way. When my sister and I were twelve and fourteen, she sat us down at the dining room table and confessed rather solemnly that she had something she felt she had to tell us before someone else did. We sat obediently, side by side, at the round table with its bowl of fresh fruit in the center on the crocheted tablecloth, made by my mother who in her youth had done fine sewing, including dressmaking for what she called “pin money.”

We had never been treated in this formal fashion before and had no idea what she was about to reveal, though we realized she was nervous. Puzzled and curious, we waited for her to speak. She admitted that when she was seventeen, she had run away to the town of Kimberley and eloped with the love of her life, a young diamond evaluator who worked with her father at De Beers.
Th
is was Johannesburg in the twenties.

Instead of being shocked, we were delighted by this romantic story and begged for more details. All she would tell us was that her parents did not approve, as she was so young and particularly as the man, not much older than she, was Jewish.
Th
e man's Jewishness in particular delighted us as we had the idea that all Jews were intellectuals, philosophers, writers, or musicians, which we, unlike our mother, aspired to be. Her parents had followed her to Kimberley, the diamond town in the Northern Cape, and had the marriage annulled.

Despite our many questions, she would not divulge more than this: the man was dead now, and he had been the one great love of her life. We were startled by this confession, as she had often told us that the ten years of her marriage to our father were the happiest times of her life. Now, it was clear that our father, a man twenty years older than our mother, who had died years before, had come second in her heart. Had she ever loved him? Had she married him only for his big house and garden, his fortune?

SHE NEVER SPOKE
again of this loss or above all of what, decades after her death, I discovered might have been an even greater loss. A few years ago, on a visit to South Africa, my nephew, my sister's only boy, invited my husband and me to lunch. As we sat under an awning in an elegant outdoor restaurant in the Cape, with its vineyards and blue mountains in the background, my blond-headed nephew lifted his eyebrows at me significantly, and said that my mother had stayed in Kimberley after the marriage, with her three maiden aunts. He paused and then added, “For nine months.” I understood immediately, of course, that there must have been a pregnancy. Perhaps it was at that moment that the seed for my book was planted, though it took some time to ripen and come forth. Certainly when I turned to the page, trying to create imaginatively a life for my mother, to discover why she had decided to leave her fortune to someone else, I was filled with sympathy and horror, imagining her as a young girl, pressured by her family, surely, to stay in seclusion in my great aunts' house and then to give up her baby.

I knew the house where she had stayed. It had made an impression on me during a childhood visit to the town of Kimberley, with its Big Hole, the huge empty crater where the prospectors had dug and the diamonds had been found.
Th
e three maiden aunts had fluttered around us, stroking our hair and our skin as though we were something precious and shining, diamonds perhaps, as we stood shyly in the half dark of the narrow house with its shotgun passageway and a fig tree out the back. It was in these reduced circumstances that my mother must have been obliged to hide her pregnancy, to hush up the scandal, and finally to give up the child for adoption.

When, almost thirty years after my mother's death, I wrote about this “love child” in a novel, the child was imaginary, though may have, indeed, existed—as my nephew seemed to insinuate. I have never gone to look for this person and have no concrete information of his existence or indeed any certitude that he corresponds to the mysterious man whose name I found in the will. I'm not even sure of the child's sex.

I felt obliged on the page, in order to distance myself from the truth, to change myself and my older sister into two boys who were intellectual snobs, as we were, but who had our father's gift for mathematics rather than our own with words. My sister and I were both avid readers, always immersed in a book while our mother tried to get us to look at life around us. I remember visiting Switzerland as a child and traveling through the snow-clad Alps by train. My mother exhorted us to look out the window, to enjoy the spectacular scenery, but we would not stop reading.

My fictional boys are estranged from their mother.
Th
ey play chess or puzzle over obscure mathematical conundrums, as we got lost in our eternal books and privileged upbringing. I had felt increasingly distanced from my mother before she died. She was drinking and taking large quantities of pills and had become silent, wrapped in her sorrow. After my sister's brutal death, I felt she had drifted away from the child who remained. Perhaps loving a child, any child, had become too painful for her.

It was only through writing, reaching back into my mother's past as well as my own, that I came to feel closer to my mother,
to feel
sympathy and compassion for this invented woman whose life was filled with
such
sadness and loss. Writing this book enabled me to invent and vicariously relive my mother's life. If Freud is right about our dreams being a fulfilled wish, in some ways even our saddest books fill this purpose as well. In the book, I was able to follow my mother on her imaginary voyage through her young love affair, her marriage to my father, and finally to give her the freedom to leave her money to this girl, the lost child of her youthful passion, someone she had kept a secret, someone as much invented as real.

Th
rough this process, I came to find again the vivacious, loving, generous person who must have been there at the start, long before all she had to leave me were her secrets—the source of much inspiration—and the little smiling Buddha on my desk, a source of hope.