For some long forgotten infraction I had been consigned to the dark of the coat closet to serve out a sentence. In I was four. My three-year-old sister, Holley, evidently not party to the crime, was spared. Mother had an ailing father at her childhood home in Ithaca, New York, and once accompanied my father on a one-month business trip to Texas. Mother would come to see us there from time to time.
I have many memories of mother from this early period, but none of real affection. Once in a tantrum I threw a fork as she stood in the kitchen doorwayβI see it still in the air over her head. The result was a rush to the bathtub where she ran the cold and put me in with my clothes on. Its supposed shock value was blunted owing to the slow tub filling. What would the future Dr. Spock have had to say about that? From then I have few memories of my father. Mother was a talented phenom.
Having studied the classics at Cornell and several years of art at Pratt Institute, she could create almost anything: watercolors, theatrical masks and backdrops, batiks, party games, and costumes galore. She produced our family Christmas card for twenty-five years. I do remember these as warm and pleasant moments. There were days of headaches in darkened rooms and visits to various doctors and practitionersβsome, my father was sure, were quacks.
As I grew older my relationship with her became more practical. I began to avoid closeness. She certainly noticed this change. I found myself experiencing relationships from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Mother died in October, after a years-long bout with invasive cancer. She was fifty-seven. I was twenty-two. During her final months I was home from college, but spent far less time with her than I could have. In retrospect, what I lost in not talking to her about her life seems immeasurable; what pleasure might that have given her?
And she given me? However, I felt little loss. Somehow, I was protected. Her death was an external event. I was an observer, not a participant. And because of that I felt guilty, especially in relation to my father who took critical notice of my affect. Later that year I attended a party of high school friends and fell into a long conversation with the hostess, mother of one of us, a psychiatrist teaching at Boston University.
