The old farm-property had been sold, the “new” ranch house had been appropriated by strangers, my parents Fred and Carolina had been living in attractive quarters in an assisted-living residence in Clarence, for several years until my father’s health deteriorated in the late winter of 2000. Now my dear mother was a widow, who had so long been dependent upon my father; for this she compensated by seeming to believe, or perhaps even believing, that “Freddy” was living in another wing of the nursing home, where “everybody knew him.”
My father had been so dominant a personality, Fred Oates had been so marked a “character” among the circle of people who knew him in Lockport and northern Erie County, it would seem quite likely that, though no longer living, he was yet an individual whom “everybody knew.”
My brother Fred had brought me to visit my mother. My brother, living near my parents, had become their caretaker, their overseer, and their protector; to Fred, Jr., I owe an enormous debt of emotion, gratitude, reverence. What a kind person your brother is!—one of the nursing staff told me.
Perhaps there is no higher value, when we think of it, than kindness.
We’d taken Mom outside, to sit in a sunny courtyard. It was not so difficult to speak as one might imagine, but I have no idea now what we spoke of; mainly, we looked at one another. We smiled, we looked at one another searchingly. We may have been breathless, giddy, with the exquisite wonder of simply being where we were—together. We may have talked of a dog at the facility, for the elderly nursing patients enjoyed the company of an obese, friendly Labrador, and my mother had always been fond of animals. We may have talked, or tried to talk, of the many cats and chickens on the old farm, perhaps even Happy Chicken—so long ago, who could remember a lone Rhode Island Red that had “bowed” when a child petted her—or, rather, him . . .
Though Mom’s short-term memory had generally deteriorated by this time, my mother was ever alert to social subtleties; instinctively she tried to protect my brother’s and my feelings, by disguising the degree of forgetfulness with which she was afflicted. To be extra cautious my brother said to her, when we’d first sat down in the courtyard, “This is your daughter Joyce, Mom. You remember Joyce.”
And our mother smiled and replied with these words that haunt me through the years—“How could I forget Joyce?”
NOT LONG AFTERWARD, MY mother would die in her sleep also, of a massive stroke. When the phone rang, and my brother told me the news, it seemed for a moment that all of us had been stricken by this single terrible blow.
In this way ended my long romance of over sixty years with my beloved parents Carolina and Fred Oates.
MY MOTHER’S QUILTS
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.
The 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.) How many years have passed since my mother gave the quilt to me and my husband Ray Smith, I can only estimate: thirty years? Thirty-five?
The beautiful little quilt in all the colors of the rainbow has followed me from one residence to another. The same bed, 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 nearly twelve years.
Twelve years! That 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.
Of course, there are numerous photographs of my mother and father in this room, on windowsills, bulletin boards, and walls. My dear friend Gloria Vanderbilt did a collage of my most precious family photographs several years ago, incorporating snapshots of my grandmother Blanche (as a young woman in an elegant fur-trimmed coat), my parents and my husband Ray and me.
In this room, which is my writing room, thus my sanctuary, all times are present-tense. The past is not vanished but now.
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 we would prepare meals together, while my father 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. The lovely afghans, sweater-coats, pullover tops and blouses, skirts, suits which for years I wore for “author’s photos . . .” All 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.
If you know me, you have seen me in my mother’s clothes. Indeed, there is nothing so comforting as wearing clothes your mother has made for you.
In his seventies, in a burst of creative energy and enthusiasm my father began making Tiffany-inspired stained-glass lamps in a crafts class at SUNY Buffalo. (One of these, in subtle blues and reds, is on my piano; the very piano Daddy so enjoyed playing.) From a photograph Daddy painted a remarkably lifelike portrait of me, quite unlike anything he had ever done.
And Daddy’s violin, purchased long ago by my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern in the early 1920s in Lockport, New York, is safe in my study, displayed on a shelf, a beautiful richly burnished red-brown, that always looks smaller than I expect it to be. After it became clear that my father would not be able to keep the violin much longer, after he and my mother had moved into smaller quarters in an assisted-living residence, he gave the violin to me with the enigmatic words, “I can’t use it, where I’m going.”
How those words echo, years after Daddy’s death! He had never been one to speak with drama or urgency, which would have seemed to him excessively self-conscious, self-aggrandizing.
I can’t use it, where I’m going.
It is a relief to me, that my father’s violin had not become lost. Yet it is a loss of a kind, that this violin has played no music for fifty years.
After my mother died in 2003, for a long time I would imagine Mom 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. My mother 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 and who lives on in our memories.
In the novel, when the daughter discovers some disturbing facts about her mother’s early life, she thinks—It just made me love Mom more.
In February 2008 when my husband Ray Smith was hospitalized with pneumonia, and after Ray died unexpectedly a week later, often I lay in bed too exhausted to move, beneath the rainbow-colored quilt. The bed became my haven, my refuge, my sanctuary, my “nest”—with my mother’s quilt predominant, a sign of how love endures in the most elemental and comforting of ways. Warmth, beauty, something to touch.
On a high shelf in this room is one of my father’s stained-glass lamp shades, pearly-white, minimal
ly ornamental, not attached to a lamp but simply set on the shelf like a work of art. And this too has been a solace to me.
Grief is a kind of illness. Severe grief, severe illness. The wish to do harm to oneself as penance for having survived the loved one, or as a way of joining the loved one, is very strong, and because it is totally unreasonable, it is difficult to refute with reason. At such times I could summon my parents to me—though I would not have wanted them to know that Ray, whom they had loved as a son, had died, yet I needed their counsel. My mother’s calming voice, my father’s chiding voice—these were the voices that carried me along, in a dark spell that lasted approximately four months.
In extremis we care very little for the public life—the life of the “career”—even the life of “literature”: it is emotional comfort for which we yearn, but such comfort can come to us from only a few, intimate sources. I know that I have been very fortunate, and I never cease giving thanks for my wonderful parents who bequeathed me their love and their hope for me, that did so much to make my life as a writer possible; for this quilt on my bed, as singular and beautiful now as it was in the late 1970s when my mother gave it to me.
AFTERWORD
The root of the word memoir is memory. When memory is cast back decades it is likely to be imprecise as a torn net haphazardly cast that may drag in what is irrelevant as well as miss what is crucial. Our lives are enormous waves breaking on the shore, retreating and leaving only a few scattered things behind for us to contemplate—before the astonishing fact of a single day in our lives we are rendered speechless, if we are honest. And yet, as we are human, and our species’ greatest achievement is speech, we are never speechless for long.
No one, especially a child, lives a life that can be summarized in a few deft words—“happy”—“unhappy.” The most immediate fallacy of the memoir is that, from a perspective later in time, it seeks to cast a coherent emotional aura over the minutiae of life; perhaps unwittingly, it makes of the memoirist a kind of “character” as in a story. But our lives are not stories, and to tell them as narratives is to distort them.
The most reliable memoirs are those comprised of journal or diary entries, or letters, that attest to the immediacy of experience before it becomes subject to the vicissitudes of memory. As soon as you shift from the tense I am to I was, still more to I had been you are entering the realm of what might be called “creative recollection.” My first memoir A Widow’s Story (2011) was composed primarily of journal entries recording approximately four months following the hospital admission and the death of my husband Raymond Smith in February 2008. The memoir was not intended to present my subsequent life but to focus upon the raw, unassimilated, blindly head-on plunge of experience in medias res after an unexpected death; this is the great, the truly extraordinary adventure most of us will have to undergo at some point in our lives, though it is very difficult to speak of it coherently afterward. Not the phenomenon of grief as it might be calmly assessed and analyzed, but an evocation of grief itself—that which is unspeakable.
The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age is an entirely different project. Except in two chapters about my parents that are, in fact, based upon journal entries, all of the chapters are “recollected”—with what that entails of the incomplete and abbreviated, the rounded-off and the summarized. In the midst of writing about “Joyce Carol” at the age of four, I might find myself leaping forward five decades to another landscape entirely. Such knowledge, and the irony of such knowledge, isn’t available to those living in time—only to those casting their thoughts backward. If this is an advantage of the recollected memoir, it is also a disadvantage. In life, we don’t see the shadows of things-to-come. It is always high noon, and we are likely to be blinded by such brightness.
Gazing back at more than six decades is a vertiginous feat but it would be impossible if the memoirist tried to be assiduously faithful to the immediacy of past experience. There are no written records in my family, probably not more than a dozen letters; in this era before computer technology, Americans did not trail much information in their wakes; “anonymity” was a blessed possibility. Until the early 1970s I did not begin to keep a detailed journal and have virtually no access to my younger life except by way of family snapshots, school yearbooks, a few extant anecdotes, and my memory.
(The novelist must have a considerable, elastic memory to retain even the “memory” of a single novel as it is in progress. You might think of a vacuum cleaner bag—filled to bursting with the necessary and the unnecessary alike. After completing a novel, this bag is emptied—to a degree. In life, something of the same principle might prevail, though it will not apply to the earliest decades of the life, most deeply imprinted in the brain; these memories, as they are our first, will be the last to vanish.)
The first principle of the recollected memoir is “synecdoche.” A symbolic part is selected to stand for the whole. The reader should not expect anything like a full disclosure of a life but should understand that memoirs, like works of fiction and poetry, must be highly selective. (Unless one sets out to write an autobiography in many volumes, as some have done. But a memoir is not an autobiography, and should not be heavily footnoted.) By its very nature selectivity is distorting because it oversimplifies the complexity of our lives. “Helen Judd” was not the only girl whom I knew who was abused and victimized by members of her own family in that long-ago world of rural western New York State, but I chose to write about this girl because I knew her best; “Cynthia Heike” was not my only close friend in high school, but writing at length about Cynthia more or less nullified writing at length about my other friends, who did not commit suicide. (Writing about another high school friend who’d been the victim of “date rape”—a term that did not exist in 1956—was made redundant by my novel We Were the Mulvaneys [1996].) Writing about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass precluded writing about many other childhood books that were close to my heart. Writing about a pet chicken, I could not reasonably write about pet cats though I have had many, many more pet cats than I’d had pet chickens. To charges of distortion I can only say—mea culpa.
It should also be disclosed: while each chapter of this memoir focuses upon events, circumstances, and persons from the author’s life, several chapters contain material that is too painfully personal, even after decades, to be set forth transparently. In these, you will find composite characters given fictitious names: “Helen Judd,” “Jean Grady,” “Reverend Bender,” “Cynthia Heike,” “Lee Ann Krauser,” “Emmet Heike.” Knowing how painful such material would have been to my parents, who wished always to think, and perhaps always did think, that my sister Lynn Ann might one day “improve,” I have chosen not to include much detail about this phase of my parents’ lives; nor did I linger on their illnesses, and the last weeks of their lives. Nothing is more offensive than an adult child exposing his or her elderly parents to the appalled fascination of strangers, even with the pretense of openness, honesty.
In A Widow’s Story, fictitious names for some persons might have been a good idea for it has never been my intention to write anything that disturbs, offends, or betrays any other person’s privacy. Not individuals but rather events and occasions—prevailing “themes”—are what engage me most as a writer, for nothing merely particular and private can be of more than passing interest. In setting out to write The Lost Landscape I understood that in several chapters I would be obliged to write about excruciatingly painful subjects—the sexual abuse of young girls, including father-daughter incest (“‘They All Just Went Away’”); the suicide of a high school friend (“An Unsolved Mystery: The Lost Friend”). Yet I could not bring myself to write of these individuals except obliquely, changing as many specific details as seemed required to disguise the persons about whom I was writing, and I could not find a way to represent myself in their stories except as a quasi-fictitious character named “Joyce”—who is almost entirely an observer of the girls’
lives, more emotionally detached (and more naïve) in the memoir than I had been in actual life.
These quasi-fictitious chapters gave me the most difficulty. Each contains verbatim remarks made by individuals decades ago—(Cynthia Heike’s aggressively friendly bully-father Dr. Heike, for one)—but to record these remarks necessitated imagining the (likely) context in which they were made, and this required invention. Memory is a patchwork in which much, if not most, is blank. Emotion is a sort of flash photography—if you feel something deeply, you are likely to remember it for a long time. But where emotion is not heightened, as in most of the hours of what we call our “daily” lives, memories fade like Polaroid pictures. The memoirist is one who has impulsively picked up a handful of very hot stones—and has to drop some, in order to keep hold of others.
A problem inherent in writing about childhood abuse of any kind, not exclusively sexual, is that such a theme may stand out to readers in a way that distorts its actual significance in the subject’s life. For not all “abused” persons register the abuse profoundly; to a degree, we are haunted by things we are conditioned to be haunted by, through the expectations and admonitions of others. That my parents knew relatively little about the extent of my misery at the one-room rural schoolhouse may have saved me from a protracted reliving of it. That there were no “therapists” in the rural world of my childhood and girlhood may have saved me from a similar reliving. It is possible to consider such childhood experiences as “educational”—in a way—as well as “traumatic.” Certainly I would not want to relive these experiences but, paradoxically, I would not want to have not lived them, for I would feel that my life was less complete; most importantly, my life as a writer, for whom the most crucial quality of personality is sympathy.
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