When Julia had agreed to be my mother’s helper, there had been a question in my mind about the way my mother might behave with her. In the 1940s, when I was growing up, women of color were regarded by white women in the wealthier communities primarily as servants. Most of the families of my friends had a “colored maid”—or “colored girl,” as it was generally said—to clean their homes and take care of their children. And, no matter how close they might come to be to one another (and the mothers of my friends talked incessantly, it seemed, about how much they loved their maids and how grateful to them they’d become), their relationships, of course, had been dramatically unequal.
My mother’s relationship with Julia was unequal too. My mother remained the boss within her home; Julia had been hired to take care of her. But something had changed within my mother’s attitude and understanding through the years. I’ve noted, for example, the kindness and affection she displayed to the children I would bring with me to visit her when I was a teacher. The civil rights era had a gradually transformative effect on both my mother and my father, and my direct involvement in the racial confrontations here in Boston had won my mother’s strong support and, in time, my father’s.
Still, Julia was not one of those little kids I used to teach, with whom it had been easy for a woman of my mother’s race and class to empathize. I asked Julia, therefore, to be candid with me if, along with my mother’s customary crankiness, she also picked up hints of any of those racially charged attitudes I remembered from my childhood.
“Don’t worry,” Julia told me, “I can take it. I grew up in the old days too. If I sense it, I’ll know where it’s coming from.”
But I didn’t want her to be obliged to “take it.” So I felt a great sense of relief when Julia described to me the depth of the relationship that had evolved between them in those final years and, at a time of special need in Julia’s life, the consolation and support my mother gave her.
“Your mother had a rare ability for someone of her age to put aside her own concerns when she could see that I was suffering. She tried so hard to comfort me when my husband died”—my father was in the nursing home when Julia’s husband passed away—“and she talked with me for hours of ‘the price we pay for love,’ which was one of the ideas she kept returning to. When I needed to, I would cry in front of her. She would say, ‘Pull up the chair. Sit right here beside me.’ If I kept on crying, she would hold me in her arms. She was still so strong in spirit. I felt stronger when she spoke to me….
“If now and then she hurt my feelings, she would recognize it right away. ‘I’m sorry, Julia,’ she would say. If I’d gone into the living room, she would call to me. ‘Julia, would you come back here to the bedroom? I need to apologize to you.’ ”
Perhaps the greatest cause of sorrow Julia underwent during those years was the mental illness of one of her grandsons and then his sudden suicide. She never recovered from that loss and, when she needed to unburden the emotions she was bearing and the sense of guilt that she was feeling, my mother, she said, would speak to her of other people she had known who had lost someone they loved to suicide and the way they blamed themselves for having been unable to prevent it.
“This helped me more than I can tell you,” Julia said, “because I’d known, of course, that he was sick. He’d been away at college when he fell into depression. He couldn’t keep on with his studies. He dropped out. I told him to come home and I would take him in to live with me.
“For a while after that, I thought that he was getting better. He’d been put on medication and he seemed to be more stable. Then, for some reason—I don’t know why—he decided not to take his medicine. That was just before he killed himself. Even though I had no way to know this, I put the blame upon myself. I would tell this to your mother. She couldn’t relieve me of the pain but she helped to take away the guilt that I was clinging to.
“ ‘Julia,’ she would say, ‘I understand a lot about depression. I will not allow you to believe this was your fault or your responsibility.’ She was very firm with me….”
Julia underwent another painful loss when her mother died, two years before my mother’s death. Again, she said, my mother put her own concerns aside. “She’d reach out for my hands and ask me to sit close to her. ‘Julia,’ she said, ‘I know the loneliness you feel. You’re going to miss your mother for a long, long time. But you’ll be able to talk with me. I will be your mother now. I’ll help you to get through this.’ ”
I was grateful to have heard these memories described in Julia’s words. She was by now—I don’t think this overstates the truth of things—probably my mother’s closest friend and, certainly, most trusted confidante. The sense of loyalty between them was rock solid.
My mother was one hundred years old when Julia’s mother died. Throughout that year and in the beginning of the year to come she continued to get out of bed each day to go into the living room to have her lunch, sometimes tea, and usually supper at the dinner table, and to go into my father’s bedroom every night or two to stand there by his side, watching him in silence, then leaning down to kiss him. She remained clearheaded, for the most part, in her conversations with Silvia and Julia. If I visited on a night when she was in a cranky mood, she continued to be every bit as bossy and assertive with me as she’d always been.
One evening she studied the pin-striped shirt and dark blue necktie I was wearing. “I like that shirt….” She tested the fabric with her fingers. “I want you to buy more of them.”
Another night she asked me, “Did you have a haircut?” I’d been working on a writing deadline and I hadn’t had a haircut for more than a month, until the day before.
“Don’t let it get too long again,” she told me. “You look younger when it’s short. Keep it that way!”
Julia, who was with us, couldn’t keep herself from laughing. “Mrs. Kozol, you keep on surprising me!” Later, in the living room, Julia said, “Your mother does the same with me. If I’m wearing something new, she’ll tell me that she likes it and she’ll even ask me where I bought it, or how much I paid for it!”
During that year, my mother and I had a number of long and lively conversations in which, at my prodding, she would fill me in on details of her childhood and college years and the European visits she had made throughout the decades with my father. In the period when they had made their earliest transatlantic journeys, she told me that you couldn’t make the trip by air. They traveled on old-fashioned steamships, packing their clothes in steamer trunks, which, she said, were fitted with drawers like those of a bureau. In one of her closets she still had a trunk like that, plastered with labels bearing the names of ships on which they’d sailed.
In subsequent years, when air travel to Europe came to be routine, they still preferred to travel on one of the famous liners of that era, the Liberté or Île de France or the old Queen Mary or a beautiful Italian liner called the Michelangelo. By the late 1950s and the 1960s, when my father’s practice permitted them to stay in more expensive and more elegant hotels than in the past, she told me they stayed at places like the Hassler at the Spanish Steps in Rome or the Plaza Athénée in Paris.
One night, she told me of a dream she had in which she was sitting at a table in the lobby of the Plaza Athénée. “I was all alone. I don’t know why. I think I was waiting for your father to arrive.” She said her dream was full of questions about choosing the room where they would stay and where she’d put her passport and why my father was delayed. She said she sat there in the lobby waiting for three days.
On the third night my father arrived. At last she was able to go up to their room. My father was getting dressed for dinner—“a black-tie event,” according to my mother. “He asked me to help him fix his tie.” Then, she said, they went downstairs. A French physician and his wife were waiting for them “in a little funny-looking car” outside of the hotel.
“It seemed so real to me!” she said. She also told me that, while she was drea
ming, she said to herself, “I think I’ve had this dream before….” She asked me if I’d ever had the same experience.
“Many times!” I told her. “I know I’m dreaming, but I keep on thinking, ‘I’ve been in this place before.’ ”
“That’s what it was like,” she said. The odd experience of waiting in the lobby for my father to arrive was the only part that had unsettled her.
Another night, she told me more about the years when she was growing up in Dorchester, in a mostly Jewish neighborhood which, however, was adjacent to an area where many wealthy Irish people lived. “President Kennedy’s mother, Rose Fitzgerald, lived about a mile from us in a neighborhood called Ashmont Hill. In the winter we would see her riding in a two-horse buggy with her father….
“We had gas lighting in our house when I was born and there were gaslights on our street. A man who had a long pole would come on a bicycle and turn them on at night.” She said she remembered how exciting it had been when electric lighting was installed.
Her father was a dentist and, she said, he had a busy practice by the time that she was born. He had been a member of the class of 1898 at Tufts University, to which he’d been admitted only two years after he’d arrived from Russia. Starting at about the age of ten, my mother used to go with him on Saturdays and help to clean his office and, if he had a Saturday appointment, she would stand beside him near the dental chair and hand him instruments he needed.
“We went together on the trolley. His office was on Tremont Street, near Jordan Marsh”—a well-known department store, now closed, that was a familiar landmark in the downtown business section of the city for more than a century.
My mother’s father, who would live until the age of ninety-two, continued with his dental practice up into his eighties. Grandpa, as I knew, had been an ardent socialist, but he never spoke to me of his political beliefs. He liked to talk about the books he read—nineteenth-century novels mostly, British and American. He had in his study a leather-bound edition of the novels of Charles Dickens. When I was eleven or twelve, he introduced me to The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times, and Great Expectations. He would let me take them home to read on summer nights and later gave me the entire collection.
My mother’s mother, who was a beautiful woman, had grown up in Budapest and had been steeped in the musical traditions of the end of the nineteenth century in Austria and Hungary. I remember, when I was five or six years old, listening to Nanny, as I called her, playing cheerful waltzes and light operatic music on the piano in her living room. It was she who had decided that my mother needed to take violin instruction, and my mother came to love the violin and regretted that she’d given up her lessons when she went to college.
Her early immersion in music, however, especially in chamber music, left behind an imprint that endured into her married years, as I remember from the time when I was starting elementary school and we had a phonograph—my mother called it “the Victrola”—on which she’d play the music she had come to know in childhood. Her favorite was a romantic piece, the piano quintet, opus 44, of Robert Schumann. She would sometimes hum its theme, introduced in the initial movement, while I was sitting with her in the kitchen.
After Latin School, my mother went to Wheaton, a small women’s college about an hour south of Boston. Her parents moved from Dorchester to Brookline, a fashionable suburb, while she was in her freshman year at Wheaton. Her younger brother entered Harvard two years later. As it happened, he was in the same class as my father and, in time, invited him to come home to Brookline with him for a Sunday dinner, which is how my father met my mother.
They married while my father was in law school, secretly at first, because her mother looked down on my father’s family, which was a great deal poorer and, from her genteel point of view, “less cultivated” than her own, which seemed, as far as I have ever learned, to be the only reason she opposed their getting married.
Daddy’s mother, as he’d told me once, had her reservations too. “She worried whether it was wise for me to marry when I had so little money to support myself. But when I told her we’d already done it, that we’d been married in New Hampshire,” and when they agreed to have a second ceremony in a rabbi’s house to appease her sensibilities, “she accepted everything….”
Their honeymoon turned out to be the trip they made to Switzerland in order for my father to obtain the meeting he had sought with Eugen Bleuler. Elegant hotels were far beyond their budget in those days. “We stayed in the most inexpensive inns that we could find. We counted every penny that we spent.” It was, she said, “the happiest time in my entire life. I was so proud of your father! And he was so handsome!” She told me they would take long walks along the lake when they were in Geneva. “He used to wear one of those hats you see in the old movies. He’d tip it to strangers as they passed.” When they arrived at the Burghölzli, which was Dr. Bleuler’s sanatorium in Zurich, “the doctor brought us to his home, which was in a pretty town outside of the city. He insisted that we stay and dine there with him and his family!”
My mother said they stayed in Zurich longer than they’d planned because of Dr. Bleuler’s graciousness to Daddy. “He invited him to sit in on consultations and go with the other doctors when they were examining the patients.” Once, while Daddy was preoccupied with these observations, “Dr. Bleuler took me off to see the different neighborhoods of Zurich.” At the end of the day, she said, “he took me to an ice cream parlor and he bought me chocolate ice cream. He was an elderly man by then, but he was so kind to me! When I dropped my handkerchief, before I could pick it up, he stooped down and handed it to me.”
When Dr. Bleuler learned that they were on their honeymoon, he told them about other places that he thought they ought to visit while they were in Switzerland. “We went to Interlaken. We traveled on the little boats that went across the lakes. We took one of those tiny trains that went right up the mountainsides. We spent a few days in Lausanne. Then to go to Paris and to meet Pierre Janet! Can you imagine how exciting all of this had been for me?”
Their marriage, however, as I knew, had not been consistently idyllic—nor, to put a finer point on this, anywhere near as perfect as I had, like many children, wanted to believe when I was growing up. Only a few months after she had spoken so nostalgically about those weeks in Switzerland, my mother startled me by letting me in on a secret that she said she’d never shared with anyone before. She told me she had fallen in love with two other men during her years of marriage, the first time in her early thirties, only eight years after she’d been married, the second time when she was in her forties.
The first of these men, whose name was Benedict Alper, had been my father’s closest friend in college. Ben had been a charming and good-looking man who cut a dashing and romantic figure and whose family had sufficient wealth to enable him to own a car—it had a “rumble seat,” my mother said—which he sometimes let my father use when he began to court her. She became much closer to Ben during a period of loneliness she underwent when Daddy was a resident at the Boston Psychopathic and had to be away from home as long as six weeks at a time.
It was all the harder for her, she confessed, because she knew my father was attracted to “the pretty nurses” (my mother’s words) who worked beside him at the hospital and with whom, as she suspected, he allowed himself more than a few flirtations and, as she would later learn, more than mere flirtations.
She wanted me to know that her relationship with Ben had never become sexual, but she gave me the impression she would not have minded if it was. She said she didn’t think Ben ever guessed how strongly she was drawn to him.
The second time she had “betrayed” my father—that was the word she used—things had gone much further. “I had a love affair,” she said, not at all remorsefully but in a voice of thrilling secrecy. She didn’t tell me the name of the man and she made it a point to tell me that, despite this episode of infidelity and the pain my father caus
ed her by his own more frequent acts of indiscretion, she had never ceased to love him deeply and to take tremendous pride in his career. All in all, looking back, she said, she was glad that she had married him.
I could not resist the urge to ask her if she felt no guilt at all in thinking back upon her infidelity.
“Not a bit!” she said. “He did it. So did I.” Abruptly, as was her habit, she brought the subject to an end. “Go into the other room and check up on the baby….”
That was not the last time my mother would surprise me by the candor and the tartness of her words. On another evening, early in December, when Julia was away and Silvia was sitting with me at my mother’s bedside and my mother seemed to have been drifting off, perhaps into one of the fantasies or daydreams she increasingly enjoyed, Silvia and I fell into a conversation of our own. A gregarious woman, and highly inquisitive, Silvia had come to know quite a lot about my private life and my career, but she was always curious to learn a little more.
She said she knew from looking at my books that I got a lot of pleasure out of spending time with children when I visited their schools. “Do you ever wish,” she asked, “that you had children of your own?”
My mother, as far off and distracted as she had appeared, was not as lost in daydreams as I had believed. The minute Silvia asked me about children, my mother’s eyes were open wide. I hesitated briefly. Then I answered Silvia that it was, in fact, one of my real regrets that I had no children, but I said I didn’t think it likely I’d be having children now, at this point in my life. This, as I probably could have guessed, was guaranteed to set my mother off.
The Theft of Memory Page 14
