My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress

by Christina McKenna

  I will always remember John as a quick, restless little man who shot words like bullets, ran at life like a prize sprinter, jumping over the days, kicking all those ‘gaddamn’ obstacles out of sight. America had made him bold, eager for tomorrow, hungry for change; the bigger picture always beckoned, the never-ending possibilities of a wide, unlimited future.

  Only my mother could make him stop and take a breather. I’d hear them well into the night, John reclaiming the past from a shuffle of memories that only the drink and nostalgia could call forth. He had never returned ‘home’, preferring to remember Ireland through the eyes of the young man who had left all those years ago – the picture-postcard Ireland, all misty and green – which he’d coloured and added to as the years flew past.

  We left California as changed people. Brother and sister, knowing that a continent and an ocean would soon separate them again, cried and hugged each other with the awful sense of finality that only such partings can bring. Those three short weeks were a flash of pure joy in their beleaguered lives, like the joining together of a precious vase that had been broken, its shards scattered in separate rooms. They had at last met, had managed to match the motifs and fit together the pieces of their lives, making the patterns merge again into a design of familial love.

  When together for that brief time they had lived and laughed and loved every precious minute of every precious day; they were living life as it should be lived, because they feared that there were only so many tomorrows left to them.

  That adventure affected me too, adding to the slim sheaf of experiences I carried in my head. When I stepped outside the boundaries of my homeland I became aware of the boundlessness of my own possibilities. There was a wider world out there, surging with life, where people ran and jumped into the gush and swell of things with arms open wide and faces turned towards the sun. There were people of all ages who cried ‘yes!’ to the universe and took chances, who accepted me for who I was and didn’t look for failings. There was a zingy spirituality in California I’d experienced through John Henry; its citizens had locked fear and inhibitions firmly away and replaced them with unconditional acts of kindness, gaiety and love. In California I came close to seeing how wonderful life could be. The experience took away a chunk of fear and replaced it with hope. My abiding memory of America is of a fearless, generous and open people.

  I hoped that one day I could live sequestered from the mundane in a foreign land, just as John had done, reinventing myself as I went along, free from the verdicts and reproofs of others, and finding my own way. For the first time I was made aware of the sheer freedom that goes with anonymity. I knew, however, that living abroad for me was nothing more than a hopeless dream. Every time I imagined it the image of my mother came rushing in to quell it, proving that my love for her was stronger than any need I had for independence. Conversely that love she had for me was keeping me bound. So I held my dreams in check and put the exotic picture to one side for one day in the future.

  But my spirit, ever mindful of my plight, dealt with my dilemma in the only way it could. One year later, suddenly and without warning, my mother was taken from me. I stumbled, grief-stricken and helpless, to face the enormous void she left behind, the void that only a mother can fill and which from that day forward would for ever remain empty.

  I got up; the chilly sun

  Saw me walk away alone.

  FACING THE VOID

  Iexperienced her leave-taking as a sequence out of time. In her absence the world stopped.

  Did she see the end coming? I believe she did. In the preceding weeks there had been an air of great sadness about her, as if she were winding down, preparing to go. As though she wanted to. She’d had enough; had flailed her way through the torturous ocean that was her married life. Single-handed she’d loved and nourished us all into the maturing light of adulthood, had fought our battles for us, had stood between our father and us as our protector and champion.

  The lines on her hands and face mapped the deepest troughs of that exhausting journey. Her body bore the scars of childbirth and heartache – the heartache she strove to quell by the only means she knew, eating to dull the anguish and drive the pain away.

  Seen in hindsight, she appeared to begin her preparations some weeks before. She redecorated a bedroom, the very one where Great-aunt Rose had rattled and banged for our attention a decade earlier. Mother gave the portentous warning that this would be the room that would hold her coffin; when she went she didn’t want the neighbours to see an untidy house. We’d laugh and tell her not to be talking nonsense, but she’d just give us a mournful smile and shake her head. It was as if God had let her in on a secret, as if they’d fixed the date and set the time, and she was beginning to feel the act of that epiphany in the quiet of her heart. Her mind was made up and there was no going back.

  A month later the secret was out. She died at breakfast while sipping her coffee. The heart she’d told us so often was breaking finally did just that. I was not with her at the time but from all accounts the heart attack was swift and, one hopes, painless. There’d been no struggle or gasping to hold on to life, just a dignified withdrawal, a carrying off on a now-restful sea towards the peace that was hers.

  Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas;

  Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.

  I’ve often wondered since about the thoughts that must have rushed at her then, battering their wings against the dying light before she moved towards that astonishing calm and a voice that soothed: ‘It’s time.’

  At last a lifetime’s invocations had been answered; all that imploring at the gates of heaven with novena books and rosary beads had been rewarded.

  I was at a friend’s house in Draperstown when I got the phone call. That journey home – on the road I’d travelled so often to school – was the hardest I’ve ever made. On that cold November morning I found her laid out on the bed in the freshly painted bedroom. All the colour had been leeched from the scene. She looked as still and tranquil as the monochrome image of her wedding picture, with the calmness of the proud bride; the serenity on the face of the lifeless wife and mother held no clue to the drama she had acted out in the interim.

  I thought of the last time I had seen her, only the night before, wearing the last clothes she’d ever wear: a green skirt, a navy cardigan, the heavy stockings and suede shoes. She’d half-turned in the doorway to wave to me and beam a smile.

  ‘See you tomorrow then,’ she’d said. And with that inauspicious parting she’d walked out of my life. The words of Emily Dickinson come with such clarity of meaning to me now.

  We never know we go when we are going;

  We jest and shut the door.

  Fate – following – behind us bolts it,

  And we accost no more.

  When I thought of the warm presence she had been, now reduced to the cold, lifeless figure on the bed, all the love I had for her stirred and stretched and broke in me. I never knew I had so many discordant notes, or so many tears, or points and jabs of pain or questions of ‘why’. I had never experienced sorrow of such magnitude and felt certain during its onslaught that I would never experience the like of it again. It was a sliver of comfort amid the anguish, but a comfort none the less, that gave me the faintest, briefest hope. I was undergoing a rite of passage that everyone must go through. No indeed, I would never experience the like of it again; like all mothers she was irreplaceable.

  I had not been rehearsed in this part, did not know my lines or moves or how long before my stage cue. It was as though the orchestra had ceased playing, the welcoming applause had subsided and the audience had settled down in the rustling silence; I was left alone on the boards, in the wash of a single spotlight with no one to prompt me or show me what to do.

  My mother was no longer there to take my hand and lead me off into the safety of the wings, away from the glare. The hand that had released me at the school gate on that first day had come back and led me
home.

  The loneliness of those Sunday afternoons of my childhood, while she slept and I played, had always ended with her waking up and restoring me. In all the dramas of my life she’d been there, the alpha and omega of me. But this time she’d gone to sleep for good and I’d never feel her hand in mine again, never see her smile or hear her voice or tumbling laugh or be moved by her tuneless whistle when she stood behind me watching me apply paint to canvas. She was unaware of that whistling but I knew that it was her anthem of appreciation and it always made me smile.

  I wailed and cried and kept asking God ‘why’. Why take away my caring mother and leave me here alone, leave us all alone, with the heartless father? This swilltub of feeling made me want to race from the house of injury and just keep running; powered by my anger and pain until I got to the edge of the world where I’d launch myself off into the furious stillness and just keep falling, sweeping and diving and falling for ever. Freedom. Oblivion. Bliss.

  The sorrow of losing her returned me to childhood – as indeed all deep sorrow does – to the naked, wailing vulnerability of the infant. I remembered all the parts I’d never play again; all the delicious trivialities I’d taken for granted came back to me with the sharpness of a Dürer etching.

  I saw myself waiting on the other side of all those changing-room curtains; waiting with my ready praise, zipping her into dresses and helping her on with coats, coaxing her thinning, damp hair into rollers – ‘Be careful at the temples; I haven’t much left there’ – displaying a finished painting and hearing her adulation flow; sharing the binges, sharing the laughs, sharing the silence between the talk, and all the while being close enough to see what little joy she knew in life reflected in her eyes.

  The beautiful essence that was her had been spilled and could not be gathered up again. The finality of that separation was appalling. The loneliness she left behind was of an entirely different order, one that thrust me back into nothingness and made me clutch helplessly at invisibles.

  When my silent terror cried,

  Nobody, nobody replied.

  The rural Irish deal with death by holding on. For three whole days she lay in that room to be viewed and prayed over by visiting friends and neighbours. The curtains were drawn and the window opened to let her spirit roam free.

  Roses and candles ‘soothed the bedside’. She lay with a crucifix on her breast and rosary beads entwined in the opalescent fingers, as pure and immutable as the statues of virgins and saints she’d collected and assembled on the sills down the years. I looked at those hands that so often had washed dishes, knitted sweaters, kneaded bread. Hands that were made to clutch and grip and grasp; hands that without work had no meaning; hands that were meaningless now, stilled into serenity at last.

  People came with food and muttered condolences, the awkward clichés that surround death. I saw them glide through the darkened house, heard the echoing timbre of their voices.

  ‘She went very quick.’

  ‘She’s surely in heaven.’

  ‘She was a great woman altogether, had time for everybody.’

  My vibrant mother reduced so soon to a set of past tense verbs! I dearly wished I could be one of those strangers, with no burdens to carry save for their uneasy words of solace while I sat crushed under the weight of mine.

  She was buried on the stark crispness of a winter’s morning. The world had been pared back to its fictive bones, stripped and scrubbed bare of all meaning, a metaphor for my sorrow. The pale sun hung like a communion host in a Canaletto sky; ravens cawed and squawked at the invasion in the graveyard. I can still hear their raw refrain desecrating the silence. I can still feel the numbness of each modulated action of that morning; the weight of her coffin on my right shoulder, the unwilling legs that stumbled over the cold-stiffened soil towards the gaping wound of earth that was her grave, the sinking farewell of those nine roses that were scattered down upon her, our final acts of love before the heartless thud of stones and earth upon timber. Perhaps it was that last which upset me most that morning. The thudding upon the coffin lid; a most inelegant conclusion to her life.

  The desolation she left in her wake was measured by the depth of our sorrow. The days and weeks and months could do nothing to assuage it. And, oh dear – how my father wept – all the unused love coming out in splashing tears. His servant had died. Who would ‘do for him’ now? Who would fill the famished hours with the endless cups of tea, the meals that were never right?

  I’d sit in the bedroom that had held her coffin and hope vainly to hear her tapping for my attention, just as old Rose had done. But in my heart I knew it was pointless. Her goodness in life, her compassion and suffering were the prayers that gave her rest in eternity. She had no need to ask for our help. She wasn’t coming back.

  For weeks afterwards the biggest regret I carried was that I had never hugged her or told her that I loved her and for the first time I understood the potency of the dictum which says that when we lose someone we love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when we did not love enough.

  My mother had not been in the habit of demonstrating her love with embraces. We lived in a kind of reciprocal alliance; my paintings were my tokens of love towards her, her admiration of them was hers.

  Such inhibition is a feature of the ‘Irish way’, so I took my cues from her. This shared shyness had made us incapable of expressing that most fundamental of desires. Each night I cried myself to sleep with the frustration of that neglect rioting through me. Why could I not have performed such a simple act? Why was the language of love so difficult to express? And now it was too late.

  But she heard my plea and came to me in a dream one night, quietly smiling, and gave me the biggest and longest hug I could ever have wished for; its strength melted away all the dereliction I felt inside. She was happy at last. I got up the next morning elated and healed. She’d come in the night at the sound of my cries and wiped all my tears away. Still the loving, dutiful mother, stepping over from that other world to take care of me in this one.

  OFFERING IT UP

  My life changed from that point onward. I realised that the coherent narrative I’d assigned to it had been altered beyond measure. My mother’s untimely death had warped the fundamental meaning of all I held dear. There had been no happy ending for her, no fanfares of applause or awards of recognition for her endeavour. She had lived and suffered the life a repressive rural society had moulded for its benefit but at her expense, and she died with all the injustice of it in her heart.

  Her own mother had been her sole example. It also followed that, with an inadequate education and no access to books, the acquisition of a husband – preferably a wealthy one – became the future prize she had to win. She had two attributes that gave her a head start in the race to attract a mate: she was slim and she was beautiful. It was ironic and cruel; the two factors that assured the near-certainty of marriage would swiftly be consumed and destroyed by marriage itself.

  The slim beauty met her handsome prince. The wedding picture is a potent reminder.

  How beautiful you were, and near, and young,

  So vivid, you might still be there among

  Those first few days, unfingermarked again.

  Their courtship was brief and father played the chivalrous suitor convincingly, reverting to form once the vows had been exchanged and the bride had been ringed and requisitioned.

  I wonder at what point she realised her mistake; was it as he rushed ahead of her down Grafton Street after the photo session, or in Bewley’s café when he thumped the chair with such alarming disapproval? The short answer is probably ‘yes, both’; knowing so little then, she dismissed those ungracious actions as shortcomings that could be worked on and changed. But as time passed she must have perceived the awful reality that lay beneath that which she’d placed her hope and trust in.

  The peaceful life she’d wanted and envisaged that day in the café remained, but the cherished snapshot of fa
ntasy – the peace and freedom that picture offered – hung for ever in the useless distance. All her life she strained towards it like a drowning soul for a branch, her fingers never quite grasping the hold that would pull her free.

  Each year of the first ten years of her marriage a baby appeared, yelling and screaming for the love and attention only she was prepared to give it. Each successive birth heaped yet more burden upon her suffering. We children did not bring her joy, we simply added to her pain and the torment of her unfulfilled self.

  Germaine Greer insists that motherhood is a never-ending condition, and that bearing children causes a woman to suffer more pain than she could ever have imagined. Her children, she says, will always cause her pain because they are of far more importance to her than she is to them.

  In my mother’s case that pain was multiplied by ten not nine, if one counts the ninth child who died aged seven months. She had very little choice available to her when that gold wedding band was slipped onto her finger; in fact she forfeited her right to freedom by her acceptance of it. My father caused her more pain than all nine of us put together. Only by changing the circumstances that were causing such anguish could she be liberated from her sorrow, and she could not change the circumstances because society had rendered her powerless.

  Women of her era had no choice but to remain captives. She had neither job nor money of her own to enable her to make more life-affirming choices. She grew up with a trenchant adherence to Luther’s axiom that a woman’s place is in the home and with the Church’s unyielding stance regarding the sanctity of marriage, and its inviolability, no matter what the situation.

  The law in those times did not favour disaffected wives, and this injustice was to endure up until recently, when finally the courage of the Women’s Movement shone a torchlight in the guilty face of Ireland’s blatant oppression. In rural Ireland we saw little of the feminist revolution that swept through Western society in the 1960s. The Church and the menfolk were having none of it.