by Ruth Reichl
But as a very little girl I understood that despite all this Hermine was a person to be pitied. As the door closed behind us my mother always sighed and said, “What a waste! Poor Hermine is a spinster.” And each time Mom met an unmarried man she’d look him speculatively up and down and ask my father, “Do you think he might like Hermine?”
I was almost twelve before a man who did like Hermine came along. Mom had introduced them, and she was very proud when they got married.
Joe moved into Hermine’s apartment, and before long the lovely aroma of flowers and sugar was overwhelmed by a heavy fog of tobacco that hung in the air. Joe didn’t want his wife working outside the home, so Hermine quit her job. And one day when Mom and I stopped in we found that Mildred was gone. “Oh, darling,” said Hermine when I asked, “Joe didn’t like having a strange woman in the house. And he didn’t see any reason to pay someone to clean when I am perfectly capable of doing it myself.”
Walking home, I knew that Mom was having second thoughts about the miracle she’d wrought. “Her shoes weren’t even shined!” she cried. “In my whole life I’ve never seen Hermine looking so unkempt.” She sighed unhappily. “Do you think she would have been better off if she hadn’t gotten married?”
Mom said nothing more on the subject, at least to me. But when I found this note I realized she had written it upon returning from our final afternoon at Hermine’s. “I am so sorry I did not pursue a career. If I teach Ruthy nothing else, I must make her see this. In the end, it is meaningful work—serving people—that matters most. It is what we were made for.”
Mom made new friends, and I was especially fond of Flora. Her husband had been a manufacturer of girls’ dresses until he dropped dead at the age of thirty-two, leaving her with two small children. “She had never even been inside the factory,” my mother told me, “but at the funeral one of the men came up to ask if she planned on closing down.” Seeing how frightened he was about losing his job, Flora tried to reassure him. She told him that the factory would carry on. He asked who was going to run the business. “To her surprise,” Mom said, “Flora said that she would.”
“And then what?” I always asked. I loved this story.
“The next day she went into the factory and told the men that she would need their help, but that together they were going to keep the factory going. And it turned out that she was a wonderful manager and an even better businesswoman; today the business is four times the size it was when Lou was alive. The funny thing is that if Lou hadn’t passed away she would have been just another bored housewife.”
I remember exactly where I was when my mother said that, and I can hear her tone of voice. But what I remember most is what she didn’t say: “A bored housewife like me.”
My other favorite among Mom’s friends was also a widow. But Claudia had no children, and she had not gone to work because she needed money. She had gone to work strictly for the fun of it.
The first time Mom told the tragic story she whispered it into my ear as if it were too terrible to say out loud. Long ago Claudia had fallen in love with a wonderful man, and they had been married in a wedding at the Plaza. It had all the trimmings—an organ, an aisle, a father’s arm, clouds of white lace and a cake of many tiers. They had honeymooned in Spain.
“But Bert was a producer,” said Mom, “and one night as he was coming home from the theater a taxi veered out of control, jumped onto the sidewalk and hit him as he stood waiting for the light. He was killed instantly. Claudia thought her life was over. She was so devastated that she took to her bed and stayed there for months. It was awful. None of us knew what to do. We tried to lure her out of her apartment, but she wouldn’t budge.”
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“Not a thing,” Mom said. “One day I called and she wasn’t there. She had gone back to work. She had been an acting coach before she married, and she decided that the only way to get over her sadness was to pick up where she left off.”
And so Claudia worked with the stars. She was very busy, traveling endlessly around the world. Each time Mom returned from lunch wearing the scarf, or the pin, or the gloves that Claudia had brought back from her latest sojourn to Rome or Paris, she always seemed slightly wistful. “Claudia has a career. She does exactly what she wants and answers to no one but herself,” she told me on one of those afternoons.
That was all she said. It was enough.
Dear Dr. Portnoy
As Mom grew older her despair deepened and she became increasingly erratic. Sometimes she was so filled with manic energy that she didn’t sleep at all. Waking in the middle of the night, I’d hear her fingers tapping on the typewriter, or the vacuum cleaner sucking up dust in the dark. But other times she’d refuse to get out of bed, lying prone for weeks on end, unwilling to leave her room. Dad was puzzled, and he watched her with anxious eyes, wishing he had some way to make her happy.
I could sense his relief when she was in a good mood, and he always chose to be amused by her giddier schemes. He laughed when she painted the bathroom gold, even though every bath left us slightly gilded. He thanked her for each outrageous meal, loyally insisting that she was a wonderful cook. And when she bought a painting we could not afford, he said, as he took on extra work, that it was sure to be a good investment. But when she stayed in bed for months he gently suggested that she see a psychiatrist.
“Doctor Portnoy says ...” became a common refrain around our house, and I came to hate the sound of his name. The man seemed to have opinions on a startlingly wide range of subjects, and Mom used him to justify every action.
“Doctor Portnoy thinks this party is a very good idea,” she announced as she informed us of her plans to celebrate my brother’s engagement. Bob, who was twenty-six and working on Wall Street, was horrified to learn that Mom intended using the occasion to raise funds for her latest cause, UNICEF. She had invited two hundred paying guests to meet his new family at our shabby house in the country. “I’m going to cater the whole thing myself,” she cried enthusiastically. “That way I can raise more money for the needy children!”
“No experiments,” Bob groaned, “please!”
“Don’t worry,” Mom promised, “you’ll be able to recognize every single thing I serve.” She neglected to mention that in the interests of efficiency she was going to prepare the food ahead of time; we lacked adequate refrigeration and it was the height of summer.
The whole affair was a horrible nightmare. Bob and I spent the party running from table to table, doing our best to keep people from eating the scariest dishes. But despite our efforts the party ended with a couple of dozen people in the hospital; they were having their stomachs pumped.
“Nonsense,” said Mom when Bob called to inform her that his future in-laws were ill. “We all feel fine.” Then she locked herself in the bathroom and plunked herself into the tub. Over the sound of the running water she shouted, “Doctor Portnoy will be so pleased by all the money I’ve raised.”
I thought the episode had moved seamlessly from disaster to family legend, one of those stories repeated yearly at Thanksgiving. I did not know that Mom had ever given her party another thought. But a few days afterward she wrote this letter:
Dear Dr. Portnoy:
It seems to me that sometimes a psychiatrist, like another kind of doctor or a dentist, might say, “This is going to hurt. It has to be done sometime or other, so we might as well do it now.” I don’t know whether such a warning would break the shock, I do know that I haven’t come to since last Tuesday. The time was ripe, I agree, even overripe. But there ought to be some kind of anesthetic for times when you cut so pitilessly deep into pride, ridicule, etc. I don’t have to spell it out for you. For it wasn’t done impulsively or hostilely. It was a planned, necessary part of the treatment.
To make matters even more difficult after such an eye-opening, revealing portrayal as you painted, you can’t allow silence. That would be considered hostile on my part. After silences you’ve
chided me with, “I’ll keep silent and see how he likes that,” or “Of course you can talk, you’re talking when you say I can’t talk.”
Sometimes it’s a privilege to keep silent, to be allowed to crawl into one’s shell and lick one’s wounds in private. But thank you for your effort—which I know it was. It was a most rewarding session.
And I’ve dredged several things out of me since. One-that dignity is jeopardized by these episodes which make one feel ridiculous, and which I haven’t been able to put a stop to.
Two—Sometimes it will be worth my while to appear ridiculous. But it won’t be those impulsive actions, it will be a considered risk.
And three—sometimes fifty people are better than four people and 200 people better than 50. If one is trying to raise money for a movement.
Is that defiance?
She signed the letter “Miriam” in a savage, slashing hand. As far as I can tell it was never mailed. Or maybe Mom typed up another copy and kept the original as a warning to herself, an attempt to prevent future episodes. The letter made me ache for her, and I reread it over and over, wondering what she meant about the considered risk. Who would ever want to be consciously ridiculous? How could that ever be worth anyone’s while? What was she talking about?
If Dr. Portnoy asked those questions, she did not note it. But he was clearly not a doctor who sat silent as his patients rattled on. In another one of her notes Mom wrote: “Psychiatrists seemed to feel anyone could be cured by psychoanalysis if one stuck with it and was cooperative. So one went year after year. One year, two, three, four, five and six. He berated, ridiculed, teased and scolded using every torturous weapon at his command. ‘Other people get well; why can’t you? Why do you have to repeat the same monotonous pattern over and over? I’m so bored with it.’ He assured you that he knew what you were going to say at each session before you said it. How tiresome you were!”
Would he have been equally condescending if Mom had been a man? And how many more years would this treatment have continued if Mom had not read an article about a new field of medicine? Psychopharmacology was still in the experimental stages, but she was intrigued by a cure that required no talking, and eagerly offered herself up to science.
“How comforting it is to hear that I am not to blame for my difficulties!” she wrote after the first visit. “Dr. Malitz believes that they are beyond my control. And he assures me that he will give me medication that will help.”
What he gave her was lithium, a drug not approved by the FDA until 1970. She also took dozens of other drugs—Elavil, Ritalin, Atavil, Thorazine, Librium, Doriden, Norpramin, Vivactil, Aventyl, Tofranil... Over the next fifteen years she visited half a dozen different doctors, each attempting to cure her with various combinations of drugs. One doctor, she wrote, was extremely kind and called her daily to check up on her progress. One reminded her of Dr. Portnoy. And another ran what she called a factory. “He has so many patients waiting for their five minutes with the doctor that the staff can’t keep our medicines straight. I am always worried that they are going to give me the wrong pills.”
None of this came as a surprise to me; my mother never minimized her mental problems. “This is no way to live,” she told me over and over as she apologized and downed her pills. “I don’t want you to think that this is normal. Remember this: Just because I am this way, it doesn’t mean that you will be.”
Mom was not the only one on pills; she was just one of the millions of drugged mid-century Americans. A fifties ad for Dexedrine pictured a sad, pretty young woman holding a dishtowel and surrounded by dirty dishes. “Why is this woman tired?” asked the copy. “Many of your patients—particularly housewives—are crushed under a load of dull, routine duties that leave them in a state of mental and emotional fatigue. For these patients, you may find Dexedrine an ideal prescription. Dexedrine will give them a feeling of energy and well-being, renewing their interest in life and living.”
A sixties ad for Dexamyl depicted a woman wearing an ecstatic smile as she vacuumed her house. “Mood elevation is usually apparent within 30 to 60 minutes,” it enthused.
These were far from temporary remedies. My mother-in-law was given Benzedrine to help her cope with the tragic death of her young husband when she was in her early twenties. Betty was still dutifully taking the pills when I met her; by then she was in her fifties and her first husband was just a fuzzy memory. She had been remarried for more than twenty years, and she had two grown children. She was a conservative, churchgoing Midwesterner who thought of her daily pills as little more than vitamins; she would have been shocked to learn that she was a drug addict.
Drugs did help some people, but they brought my mother no peace. Although she was eventually diagnosed as manic-depressive it is impossible to know if she was clinically ill or merely a victim of what the woman at the Human Engineering Lab had called “idle aptitudes.” Was she crazy, or was she crazy because she had nothing to do?
I don’t know. I do know that she worried that the same fate would befall me, and she protected me in the only way that she knew how: by being honest. “I am so sorry,” Mom kept repeating. “I know it is hard on you that I do such ridiculous and foolish things.”
That could not have been easy to admit. Now I think it is what she meant by “the worthwhile risk,” the one that was not impulsive. As a little girl I had done my best to protect the world from my mother and my mother from herself. But as I grew older I began to resent cleaning up the messes that she made with her inept housekeeping, her poisonous food and her crazy parties. I wanted nothing so much as to be different from her. And that is exactly what she wanted too.
My grandmother had tried to turn her daughter into a carbon copy of herself. That had not worked out well. And so my mother did the opposite: Instead of holding herself up as a model to be emulated, she led by negative example, repeating “I am a failure” over and over, as if it were a mantra. “I am ridiculous. Don’t be like me. Don’t be like me.”
I can hardly imagine how excruciating that must have been. Parents yearn for their children’s respect; most of us want it more than anything else on earth. And yet my mother deliberately sabotaged my respect and emphasized her failings. She loved me enough to make me love her less. She wanted to make sure that I would not follow in her footsteps.
It was an enormous sacrifice. She made it willingly. And I never even thanked her.
Rainbows
I could not wait to escape from my mother’s unhappiness. At sixteen I took off for a college halfway across the country, and from then on returned home as little as possible. When I graduated I was so terrified of getting caught once again in my mother’s orbit that I applied to graduate school.
But in 1970 I finally went home. I was about to be married, and I thought the least I could do was introduce my future husband to my parents.
Dad was very pleased. He reached to pat Doug on the back—they were exactly the same size—and within minutes they had disappeared into the study and a conversation that would last for the rest of my father’s life. Meanwhile Mom and I went into the kitchen to start dinner, and as the lobsters crawled across the counter I noticed that her hair was now entirely white and she was thickening around the middle. “Isn’t this very old-fashioned?” she asked, coolly stuffing the creatures into a pot. “I thought that these days people your age just lived together.”
I was certain that Mom would eventually warm to the idea. She did not. She wouldn’t help me plan the wedding, and she refused to buy herself a dress. During the weeks leading up to the event she groused about every aspect of the affair, from the fact that we were planning to recite our vows on a stretch of unfinished highway (“Why do you want to do it in the road?”) to my insistence on baking my own cake (“You know I have no pans”). When ten friends drove across the country and pitched their tents on the front lawn, she was not amused. “Why didn’t you just elope?” she asked crossly.
I should not have been surprised. Mom had hat
ed being pressured into marriage, and she had scrupulously avoided doing the same thing to me. She had introduced me to her friends, shown me the drawbacks of a traditional marriage and offered me what she herself had wanted—permission not to marry. Now I was throwing it all away. Aggressively: Of all my friends I was the first to tie the knot.
She must have considered this an enormous rejection, and I suppose that was the point. She had trained me to be defiant, but this was an unanticipated consequence. Her response to my marriage was her way of jumping up and down, shouting, “This isn’t what I meant!”
Still, she saved the wedding announcement. On the front is a picture of Doug and me, standing on the bare dirt of the highway on which we were married. Earthmovers loom over us. My dress is a rainbow, there are colorful ribbons in my hair and I am clutching a bunch of wild daisies. Inside is the service that we had written together.
“Your marriage must be a vow to encourage each other to realize his own best qualities. You believe that you have found a person who will stretch your own limits, one who will provide a constantly challenging dialogue to encourage you each to grow in his own direction. You do not come to this marriage to find a resting place.”
Reading that, I thought how very sixties it sounded. But then I went back to the letter Mom had written, so hopefully, to her first husband thirty-five years earlier. She had wanted “an atmosphere of understanding,” a partnership, something very different than the “guidance” her father had so earnestly hoped a husband would offer her. There was an echo there, and it must have been bittersweet to watch me embark on exactly the sort of marriage that she herself had never achieved.
Mom apparently intended to send the announcement to a friend, because on the back she had written, “Ruth is now Mrs. Douglas Hollis. The wedding was completely unconventional. I hope the marriage will be too. But we all start off with such high hopes and look where we end up.”
