by Ruth Reichl
Mom repeated this story to me again and again when I turned into a pudgy, awkward teenager. “You’ll see,” she said, “once you find out who you are you will find your beauty. You have to grow into your face. But I promise you this: you will.”
Anyone who has been an ugly adolescent—and we are legion—knows that the hopeless feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never really goes away. No matter how much we are able to transform ourselves in later life it is always there, lurking right beneath the surface. No mother can banish that particular pain from her child’s life. But my mother, who had been told as a teenager that she was too homely to be successful, was determined to try.
“How could I feel good about myself when the self-image my mother gave me was that I was sloppy, inefficient, homely, ungraceful and ungracious?” she wrote on one of her scraps of paper. “I carried that person around for so many years. I want to protect Ruthy from that.”
At the time I was too mortified by my appearance to be aware of the gift that my mother was offering. With my squishy blob of a body and untamable hair I felt like the Pillsbury Doughboy topped with a pad of Brillo, and when I looked in the mirror I hated myself.
Mom understood. “It is so hard to watch Ruthy going through this,” she wrote, “because I know exactly what she’s feeling. I wish I could send her to the hairdresser, have her nose fixed, or buy a dress that will make her graceful. But I know that none of that will work. All I can offer her is hope. It’s one thing my parents didn’t do for me.”
Idle Aptitudes
Mom enjoyed her newfound freedom, but she spent the rest of her life regretting how little she had done with it. Even at seventy she was still lamenting that she had not used that time more productively. “When Ernest left me and I thought about building a career, why didn’t I do it? I wanted to study psychiatry. Imagine how that would have changed my life! Why was I in such a hurry?”
Reading that, I muttered, “Why are you always so hard on yourself?” She was a single mother with very little money; how could she have possibly managed medical school? As it was, Mom was barely able to make ends meet.
Although it was the late thirties and the country was still mired in the Depression, Mom had found herself a small job in publishing. She told her parents that the work was “fascinating,” but to her friends she admitted the truth. “I am a secretary, and a very inexperienced one at that,” she wrote. “And my boss wants a very experienced one. I don’t know how long he will keep me. The publishing business is very precarious. And I am only making $25 a week.”
The rent on her apartment was $77 a month, and although Ernest sent her $50 a month in child support, she had to scrimp. Once the early thrill of independence wore off, Mom began to chafe at spending time in a dull, low-paying job. She wanted a real career. In 1940, she took action; buried in the bottom of the box I found an official-looking document from the Human Engineering Laboratory of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.
The report is filled with technical jargon that a long-lost booklet (“An Objective Approach to Group-Influencing Fields”) apparently explains. Her test results indicate that she was terrible at both inductive and analytical reasoning and that she lacked all aptitude for accounting. But her creative imagination was high and her tonal memory almost perfect. “You have made 47 correct answers out of a possible 48,” concluded the tester, Evelyn C. Wight, as she suggested that Mom consider work that combined her talents for words and music. “You must use your most outstanding characteristic in choosing a career,” she cautioned. “Idle aptitudes cause restlessness and may detract from a woman’s success and happiness.”
In conclusion Ms. Wight suggested that Mom seek work with an agency doing public relations for musicians. The irony was not lost on Mom, but it was too late for her go into business with her mother.
When the Depression ended, so did my grandmother’s fabulous career. She told her family that she folded her business because no woman worked unless she had to. “She didn’t want people to think that Dr. Emil couldn’t support her,” Mom told me. I think that my mother believed that, but it was not the truth.
There were a few cryptic letters from famous people in the box, and as I struggled to find out what they meant I discovered that Mollie did not walk away from her job—it was wrenched out from under her. Culture is not an easy sell in hard times, and at the start of the Depression Cleveland’s impresario went looking for a more lucrative career. (His daughter thinks he survived by selling nasal preparations.) When prosperity returned, he wanted his job back. And despite my grandmother’s success, he got it. “Did my father play on sensibilities at the time that he had a young wife and three little children to support and Mollie didn’t?” his daughter wonders. “I don’t know.”
My grandmother fought back, trying to create a business without the blessing or backing of the big New York organization. “What a pity that the cancellation in your course is such a problem,” wrote Ezio Pinza. “I would love to help you out of your difficulty ...” Other artists offered help as well; Rudolf Serkin even offered money. But it was an uphill battle, and after a few more attempts Mollie gave up. Her career was over, and although whining was not her way, I don’t think she ever recovered.
But things were finally looking up for Mom. Just after her excursion to the Human Engineering Laboratory she met my father at a party and fell instantly in love. Ernst Reichl was a quietly elegant intellectual who had fled his wealthy German-Jewish family because he had absolutely no desire to go into any of the businesses they owned. Lacking any talent for money, he persuaded his family to let him get a PhD in literature. And then he came to America to pursue his passion for books. When he met Mom he was convinced that she was a kindred spirit, and immediately began planning a life with her.
“Terribly busy and happy,” Mom wrote giddily to her parents in the first month of their marriage. “I’ll write tomorrow.”
Dad was endlessly admiring. He thought Mom was the smartest, kindest, most generous and most passionate woman he had ever met, and he never stopped telling her so. His letters are filled with the incredible joy of having found her; he could not believe his luck and she blossomed beneath his appreciation.
“I wish,” he wrote, “that I had your jubilant self confidence, your supreme assurance that what is good for you and yours is the right, the good, the only thing to do. I am going to lean heavily on your strength.”
The war years were a good time for strong women. Dad was too old to be called up, so he moved into her small apartment, squeezing in with my brother, then eight, and his little dog, Tippy. My parents pooled their resources, found an investor and created a small publishing company to produce handwritten literary books.
In the first photograph taken in their new office Mom looks so happy. Her dark hair is pulled straight back, and she wears perilously high heels, seamed nylons, a slim skirt and no makeup as her fingers fly across a typewriter. They had very little money but they didn’t care. They were together, doing work that they both believed in, and for the first few years the letters are ecstatically happy.
But the calligraphy series did not do very well, so they changed directions and produced a twelve-volume series called The Homemaker’s Encyclopedia, which was written entirely by my mother. It included volumes on needlecraft, home repairs, gardening, housekeeping, entertaining—even personal beauty and charm. How my mother, who could not cook, had never sewn a single garment, gardened not at all, despised cleaning and used no makeup, managed to produce this vintage gem still baffles me. “It was a challenge,” she said proudly. “But I have always been good at research. And”—she could never resist adding this—“it made a fair amount of money.”
They finished the series just after I was born, and then they started a magazine for brides. But that did not do very well either, and by then their financial needs had become pressing. My father’s parents, who had escaped Hitler by fleeing to Shanghai, had finally made their way to America and w
ere exhausted, ill and destitute. Desperately trying to support them, my parents sold their company. They thought that Dad could earn more doing the work that he was known for—designing books. And I can’t help thinking that after his stint with homemakers and brides Dad must have been secretly happy to return to the literature that he loved.
Mom ran his office for a while but she knew nothing about typography and could do little more than answer phones and type invoices. Before long she realized that she was back where she had been when they met: doing dull, routine chores that neither exploited her talents nor engaged her mind.
Dad encouraged her to find other work, but after the war jobs for women were not easy to come by. In fact, women who worked were considered unpatriotic. “You women and girls go home, back to being housewives as you promised to do,” trumpeted an army general in a widely televised speech. In the background you can hear the men cheering wildly. Little wonder, then, that by the time I was old enough to notice, Mom was not working at all.
And, with the exception of a couple of widows and the women she pityingly called “career spinsters,” none of her friends were either. All of those smart, competent women sat at home, twiddling their thumbs and telling their daughters how much they had enjoyed working during the war.
Chaos
Whenever my mother’s parents came to visit our cramped apartment my mother flew into a panic. She would go rushing through the rooms like Hurricane Miriam, flinging things from every drawer and closet. Playing with my toys I would find myself surrounded by heaps of clothes, piles of linens, stacks of books and towers of plates, while my mother, her now-graying hair tied up in a scarf, madly ran the vacuum cleaner through the clutter as if that could somehow make it magically disappear.
“They’ll be here in three hours!” she’d cry, terror in her voice. Even at four I understood that “they” were the old people who appeared on our doorstep from time to time. Mom always undertook a cleaning binge right before her parents arrived, a kind of mad last-minute frenzy that never left enough time to repair the mess that she had made.
When the bell rang, Mom’s eyes always went wide. And there they’d be, my grandfather with his elegant shock of white hair and my impeccably regal grandmother. They would stroll in, look at each other in dismay and sadly shake their heads. From the floor I’d look up, hating them but not really knowing why.
I resented my grandmother and dreaded her visits. I used to think it was because they made our crowded apartment feel even smaller than it really was. But now I know that whenever she showed up our apartment turned into a battleground where two deeply disappointed women waged a war that was especially fierce because it had been such a long time coming.
The combatants themselves were conscious of the struggle, and they knew exactly where the lines were drawn. After one especially acrimonious visit Mom wrote this letter to my grandmother.
“Mother Darling: You and I always laughed when everyone told me that I acted like a little girl towards my parents. That, at my present middle-age, I can no longer do.
“You continually reproach me when I don’t live up to your expectations. Please try to treat me as a passably intelligent adult who should be mature enough to manage her own, and her children’s lives.”
She was forty-five years old, and she had spent her entire life trying to win her parents’ approval. She had gotten a doctorate just to please them, she had married a suitable man and she had borne her due allotment of children. And yet none of that had been enough. Her mother demanded unconditional admiration, holding herself up as the ideal model and expecting Mom to follow in her footsteps. Mom had certainly tried. The problem was, she was not equipped to do it.
My grandmother did not—or could not—see this. “Thank you for your explanation of your attitude to me,” she wrote back. “I always try to understand, and some of it may be my fault. I am very hard on you because I loathe disorder and just can’t take a harsh voice. I have given you the very best that I know how ... and you aren’t grateful enough for what you have.”
Disorder and harsh voices were beside the point, and Mom knew it. But gratitude was something else. “I am ungrateful,” she wrote in one of her more desperate notes. “I know it. Everything is easier now. Our financial obligations have lessened and Ernst is finally making enough for us to live on. My children are healthy. But everything is such a mess. I hate keeping house! My meals are awful. I wasn’t cut out for this. I wish I knew what to do!”
Her unhappiness was palpable and it drove everyone from the house. My grandparents’ visits became less frequent. My anguished father tried to soothe her; I think he would have done anything to make Mom happy but their financial needs forced him to work longer and longer hours, and he often skipped dinner to eat a sandwich at his desk. My big brother begged his father to send him to boarding school. Long before Bob went off to college he was spending most of his time in Pittsburgh, and his visits home became rare treats.
Trying to keep herself occupied, Mom threw herself into entertaining. She rearranged our apartment, replacing all the beds with pull-out sofas so that each room was party-ready. “It’s so convenient,” she explained when I protested that I would prefer sleeping on a bed. “We can have cocktails in the living room, dinner in our bedroom and dessert in yours!”
Mom’s novel entertaining scheme involved more than a moveable feast: While her guests drifted from room to room, she served what she called “interesting dishes they would not forget.” To that end she tried turning herself into a cook, pouncing upon every unfamiliar food that crossed her path. She discovered sea urchins at the fish market, their bristles still sharp and dangerous, and brought them home along with a smooth cactus flower she had unearthed in Little Italy. She found slick, perfumed lychee nuts in Chinatown, and one morning I opened the refrigerator to find an entire baby piglet staring out at me.
The fact that Mom had no idea how to deal with these novelties did not worry her. She was, after all, the editor of The Homemaker’s Encyclopedia, and her creativity was endless: Once she managed to combine canned asparagus with mayonnaise, Marshmallow Fluff and some leftover herring to make an hors d’oeuvre. It was painful to watch people eating these dishes, and I soon appointed myself the guardian of the guests, intent on making sure that nobody got sick on Mom’s more outlandish experiments. When my exhausted father begged Mom to cease entertaining I was delighted.
For a few embarrassing months she became the leader of my Brownie troop. It began well: At first she organized us into a roving band of players who went around the city acting out the Bemelmans story Madeline in hospitals. But after the initial excitement wore off she lost interest, and when one of the other mothers reported what she had offered us as snacks, Brownie Headquarters asked Mom to step down.
She took on volunteer jobs—Mom would eventually end up doing stints at the Red Cross, the Girl Scouts, UNICEF, the Silvermine Guild of Artists, the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Public Library. But these jobs never lasted. She was not looking for something that would fill her time or make a little money; she was still in search of a meaningful career.
Like everyone else in the family, I did my best to avoid Mom. I would come home from school in the afternoon, put my key in the lock and pray that she was out. I dreaded the dead air in the apartment, which was heavy with unhappiness. I dreaded the endless questions about what I had done that day. The rest of the family had fled, and Mom sat at home like a caged tiger with a dangerously twitching tail. When I walked in, she pounced, demanding little pieces of my life.
It was on one of those leaden afternoons that Mom first told me that she had wanted to be a doctor. And it was then that she said, for the first of many times, “My parents said that if I went to medical school I would never find a husband. What a fool I was to listen to them!”
At the time I could feel the deep bitterness behind her words, and I understood how much she resented the limits her parents had put upon her life. But now I see that
she was not talking about herself. She was sending me a message, telling me not to make the same mistakes that she had. In an act of extraordinary generosity she was offering me another gift that she had been denied: She was giving me permission to defy her.
And although I did not know it then, I heard her loud and clear.
What We Are Made For
Mom drove her family crazy, but she was relentlessly social and a very good friend to a surprisingly broad spectrum of people. Among her many women friends my favorite, at least when I was small, was her childhood friend Hermine.
She was everything my mother wasn’t. An immensely successful businesswoman, she lived in a fabulous apartment just off Fifth Avenue. Tall, thin and elegant, she dressed gorgeously in handmade clothes that always looked as if they were being worn for the first time. Her shoes always gleamed with polish and her stockings never ran.
As a little girl I considered her sunken living room the utmost in sophistication and I’d jump up the stairs, just for the pleasure of going back down, imagining myself sweeping into a room the way Auntie Mame did in the movies. Sometimes I even recited her line “Life’s a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death” as I walked in.
Unlike the messy apartment in which my family lived, Hermine’s place was always serenely immaculate. Her housekeeper, Mildred, ironed the sheets, put clean towels in the bathrooms and made sure that the tables were polished to a luxurious sheen. Every time I walked through the door I inhaled deeply; I loved the way Hermine’s apartment smelled, an irresistible mixture of flowers, furniture wax, sugar and butter. I’d follow the aroma through the living room, admiring the beautiful bouquets nodding in their vases, into the old-fashioned kitchen, where Hermine could often be found baking her famous cookies. She was a legendary cook, and I was always hanging around, dropping desperate hints to be invited to stay for supper.
