by Carole Maso
“Tulips,” she says again and again, “tulips,” until somehow she sees the heads of her children, our heads, blossom red and yellow, and she is satisfied.
“Oh, my!” she exclaims. “You two are so beautiful!” To see our heads blooming in brilliant color makes us dearer to her; she understands us better in that moment, loves us more. I w ill gladly make my head a petaled top for her, I think, my arms the green leaves of tulips, my body a stem she might pluck and hold close to her breast; something she needs, finally.
Sometimes I think I have heard the fluttering of wings. Sometimes I think I have seen something: a tip of a tail, a piece of beak, a leg, one thin leg of that incredible bird. Sometimes I see the bare branch of a tree swaying in slow motion in my sleep and I know what that means. I try to get myself past the tree to see what’s beyond it—the held that opens like a great hand, the w ide breath of sky. I search for a trace of the Topaz Bird. Only moments before it was perched on that bobbing branch. I am getting closer. I follow the horizon line of my dreams. I watch. My mother’s robe is shining and gold. I listen. Her voice is sweet and low. I close my eyes in the dark and ieel her warm breath. I try to picture that bird in my mind. But it’s so tiny, so hard to see.
“You must not be afraid,” she says in her lovely night voice. But still I must be. Still I can’t see it, not even now as I fall into this twenty-year-old sleep, this grown-up sleep.
“Mother,” I whisper, though she is far away now, “help me, please.”
I wait for the leap—the way to see past the tree to that place—her voice. I will wait forever, if I must, for that wonderful flapping, and me right there, on the wings of it.
“Gently,” her biography reads, “gently in recollection, Colette led her visitor to the bedroom she had known as a child; she showed him the cat-door, through which at dawn, the vagabond cat had ambled in and fallen on the bed, ‘cold, white and light as an armful of snow.’ Finally she led him into the garden.”
Her voice sails on the air, skimming it. “Quelle surprise, Sabine!” she says. She is delighted to hear from her friend who is so far away. It is a miracle, she thinks—and she says so—how one can sound so near, how one can be so far and so near at the same time.
My mother’s voice is a small boat being tossed on the waves. Giddy and light. It gets bigger and moves steadily through the water. “Absolument,” she says, “oh, absolument.”
She is so charming. “N’est-ce pas?” she laughs. “Evidemment. Oui, maintenant, je suis très heureuse—oui.” She is glowing. She laughs again. I close my eyes and pretend I am the woman on the other end of the phone. I concentrate on her voice. She is so delightful. “I would not hesitate to love her,” I sav to mvself. “I would not hesitate to love that voice.”
“They dined on mince,” she sang, “and slices ot quince—” Her eyes lit up. “Which they ate with a runcible spoon,” we said together. “And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon. They danced by the light of the moon.”
“The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company,
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.”
“The Daffodils!’” I yelled.
“By whom?” my mother asked, smiling.
“Wordsworth!” I screamed.
“For oft w hen on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
“You must never forget,” she would whisper, leaning over me, after all the bedtime poems had been recited, all the bedtime songs had been sung, as she covered me with her night and shut out the light and kissed me on the forehead, “that the Topaz Bird means us no harm.”
“It’s even more beautiful than a swan,” I said, my head feathery with sleep.
“We are lucky to see it,” she said. “You must not be afraid.”
The women wake early. It’s misty; there’s a smell of dew, of damp mushrooms, of nuts—chestnuts. They lie in the wet herbs, say nothing, listen to the odd two-note whistle of a bird. It’s spring.
Slowly the garden awakes, the world awakes—le jardin, le monde. They look down the Rue de Beaujolais where the milkman comes in his cart. Christine frames him with a stone wall off in the distance, puts lilacs in the foreground, a border of lavender.
They drink café au lait from cracked pink cups and eat tiny blocks of chocolate. They pet the cats. They open Le Matin and Vogue. Sabine looks up.
“Grand-père laid slabs of wet chocolate out on the roof at night to dry,” she smiles, “and in the morning there would be the most wonderful flower-petal designs on them.” She giggles. “They were the paw prints of cats!”
In the distance they can see the sunlit slopes where the grapes that have been in Sabine’s family hundreds and hundreds of years grow. It’s fall now. All is burnt orange, and yellow, and scarlet. The earth smells so lovely—the smoke, the leaves. The silence is thrilling. They walk into the dark woods together, pretending it is a virgin forest that no one has ever dared walk in, though an hour before they watched the woodcutter disappear into that leafy darkness.
“I’m cold,” Christine says.
“Maman used to carry a small metal box of coals and ashes to school to keep her warm,” Sabine says, running through the leaves in her boots. They laugh and laugh at the thought of Sabine’s mother and hug each other, fall into the leaves, get up and run back to the house for sweaters. “There were always wonderful winter roses on the Christmas table,” Sabine says, rosy cheeked, smiling, looking around the room. “Maman always saw to it.
“Come with me,” she whispers, taking Christine’s hand. Slowly they descend the dark steps to the apple cellar. The smell fills them. Thev lie on the cool dirt floor. My mother takes off her thick sweater. Their breathing grow s heavy. They move closer. They close their eyes.
After a long while Sabine opens one eye. From a small window she sees the face of a young goat looking in at them. “Look!” she cries, and they are doubled over in laughter. It seems that they have never seen anything funnier in their whole lives.
“Enough of this!” Sabine says, running up the apple cellar stairs. “A Paris,” she writes on blue paper and leaves it on the table of the w inter roses.
“Paris,” Sabine sighs, “finally!” They make a stop for cologne, a stop for blue paper, stamps, cherries, champagne.
“Oh, Paris!” my mother sighs. “Les fêtes, les soirées, les salons.” “ht beaucoup de femmes!” Sabine laughs. “Grand-mère told me that Mata-Hari danced her Javanese dances entirely in the nude once, for the women. Can you picture it?” She laughs and laughs.
My mother walks slowly, dropping her gloves, catching a falling scarf, stalling for time. Beautiful, vibrant Paris turns to watercolor sadness.
“Don’t worry,” Sabine pouts, “one day when we are old we’ll Join traveling circus and be together lower They mbrace, kiss good-bye lor the thousandth time.
“Au revoir, ma Pans. Au revoir, ma Sabine,” Christine say. She walks slow ly, turns once more.
“We’ll be tightrope walkers,” Sabine says.
My mother smiles and waxes good-bye.
She is dozing off now with the other little girl, her sister, in the cramped room. The tat man reads about New Orleans to them trom the newspaper’s travel section.
“New Orleans—that sounds, that sounds,” she murmurs, tailing asleep. What she means to say, what she would have said, was “that sounds so nice.”
In her dreams the notes of saxophone slide out of the windows &she is sure she has never heard anything like it before.
Creoles—was that those people were called? There are feathers and fans,
men dressed as women, women dressed as lizards and birds, laughter, and a drink called bourbon. All of it follows her into her dreams.
And the fat man, too, leaving for work, dreams his wav into the dark mill.
“The rainbow-colored Painted Desert of Arizona sweeps in a great crescent from the Grand Canyon southeast along the Colorado River to the Petrified Forest.”
“The Petrified Forest!” Lucy cries.
“Go now,” my mother says. “There is no other way.”
The apartment is warm and dark. I turn in bed toward the wall and hug the cat. “But Mother,” I say.
“Go,” she urges me.
But I hesitate here. I would prefer to forget.
“There is no other way,” she says.
And so I go, in my mind, back to college where I will spend a little more than one semester. First to that strange, sad room, then to the beautiful library, and then beyond that, too.
“It‘s time,” she says. And I know she is right.
Part Three
I decided to forgo all the initiation rites of freshmen and went instead to the library. Eleanor Cove, the librarian, in response to my question, lifted her arm, pointed to the stacks on the second floor, and looked up. In her raised face I saw what I had seen so often in my mother. Here was a lover of books, a woman dizzied by them, transformed in some way. She smiled. Quietly she explained to me how things were arranged, where the periodicals were located and the reference room. I thanked her and climbed the stairs.
The library was empty. Classes had not yet begun and people were still stuck somewhere in summer, I assumed—on the wavy lake or the tennis court with its green hum.
It was cool and dark and I felt safe here. In the context of such coolness and sense and order it seemed that the events of the night before could not have happened; walking to the shelves I telt strangely free of them: that odd room on the top floor, Marta and her sad, sad story, and the needle I watched sink into my arm. I had changed into a long-sleeved shirt before going to the library, hoping to disown that arm somehow.
I loved the order of libraries. I felt at ease here among the old and new books, lined and numbered on the shelves. I found what I was looking for easily. When I was done I would put those books back in the same place, and on another day I would be able to find them again. Most people would think little of such a simple thing, but this afternoon the thought of every book having its place and no book being lost gave me an overwhelming sense of pleasure.
It was the pleasure of square dancing with my brother at the Blue Goose in Moose Point, Massachusetts. We loved the reliability of it, the certainty. We knew when we unlocked hands to allemande left or turned our backs on each other to honor our corners and do-si-do we were not losing each other; wewould reunite in the end—it was in the design of the call—and it made letting go possible. We always knew that for the final promenade we would be together.
I lined up the books on the table, starting with the earliest—the first book on the left and, six books later, the last one on the right. I turned them all over so that I could see the photographs of the writer, my mother. Watching my mother slowly age on the back of her books always had a calming effect on me. I wanted to linger this afternoon at each stage, tracing the shape of the years. I had studied these photos often, but now, missing her more than I ever had, I wondered what secret her face might give up. She had always left me—trips to France, summers in Maine, readings all over the country—but this time I was the one who had driven away, and it was she who stood at the edge of the driveway, stationary, growing smaller and smaller, and it made my longing more acute. Over the years I had stayed home from school often, not wanting to leave her. And when the young teachers came, as they inevitably did, I would run and hide.
“Vanessa?” my mother would say to those earnest women, “why, Vanessa could be anywhere. I can’t keep track of her.” And then she’d whisper, “She’s like the air, you know,” and motion out into the world and laugh her long lovely laugh.
The photo of my mother on the back of her first book remains the most constant in my mind. It is the one least altered by memory for I cannot ever remember my mother looking the way she does there. I love to look at her at twenty-three: the yellow-blonde hair, the smooth egg of a forehead, the softness of her face which, at this age, still seems to be forming. She looks like someone else almost, a young beauty, an actress perhaps, caught strangely off guard in the moment before she raises her hand to block her face from the camera or to put on sunglasses, shielding herself from a demanding public. She looks unfocused, nervous, as if she has already lost her way, though she has just barely begun. She seems to be moving slightly in the frame, but she does not know where she is going or why.
At times when I look at that photo of my mother on the back of Winter, her first book of poems, I think I can see Sabine, who took that picture, reflected in my mother’s eyes. “Smile,” Sabine is saying. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. This won’t hurt at all.” I imagine she lifts her polka-dotted dress to her thighs, bends her knees slightly, and does a little dance for my mother. Other times when I look at this photograph I think I can see a shadowy figure, quite small, standing behind my mother, caressing her shoulders, dark eyes lowered; and that, too, is Sabine.
Every time I look at this picture of my young mother I see what drew people to her and held them so long. Looking at her that afternoon in the library, I thought, we’re nearly the same age—and I studied her closely, as if with enough concentration I might see what to do next.
The second portrait of my mother is the most troubled. She is thirty-two here and it has been a long time between books. In that time Fletcher and I have been born. She carries our births in her face in baffled, dramatic lines. I know just by looking at her here that loving us was never easy for my mother. In this photograph, though it ends at the shoulders, I see Fletcher asleep in her arms and myself curled around her leg like a cat. My mother looks impatient, her eyes are more heavily lidded than before, and her face is strained. She could never have guessed that it would take so long to go such a short distance. As a child, this is the face I memorized. I knew every line, the way her hair curved around her face, the eyes, always dissatisfied, and the pale color of despair that, no matter how much praise she received or how many awards she won, never left her. In her poems she was interested only in saying what could not be said. “There must be a way,” I would hear her say to Sabine long distance, half in English, half in French.
She looks out from this book vacantly at an audience she can neither see nor imagine. She’s too tired. It’s been so hard.
The few people in the library were leaving now for dinner. The quiet seemed to deepen. I felt alone with my mother here where she herself might have sat years before, reading or staring out into the pines.
I was well accustomed to quiet. The word itself carried great significance, for it was nearly the only instruction ever given in our house. It had the gravity of a sole reprimand. We grew to accept it as one of the necessary ingredients of creativity We respected it, lived in it. “Quiet,” my father would say, “your mother is working. Don’t forget, it’s very important. Your mother needs quiet.”
My father was comfortable in the quiet. It made the silence in him seem not so strange. People thought he had cultivated it, worked on it, restrained himself because it was so necessary for my mother. But that was not the case. Had loquaciousness and vivacity been demanded for my mother to write, my father could not have done it. For years his speechlessness, his hushed tones, his silence have been legitimized by my mother’s art. It was not a heroic effort; he never even tried to talk to us.
I looked to the third photograph in an attempt to quiet my brain’s unexpected noise.
On the book jacket of To Vanessa is my favorite picture of my mother. She is in profile and she looks as serene as I have ever seen her—content, happy. The light is beautiful and she is smiling. I would have stopped her in my mind in this position
forever if I could have, but that is the photographer’s art, not the daughter’s. My mother cannot stay still in my mind. A lovely profile turns full face, slowly the smile dissolves, and the vision breaks. Her hair grays, then changes back. She grows young, wanders through the quiet house of her childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, a little girl on tiptoe, looking in on her own sleeping mother or sitting in the dark listening to the Sunday stories of her father. I looked again at her smiling profile on the back of To Vanessa, my book. She will not hold still for me.
I remember the picture on the back of her fourth book being taken on the front porch of our house in summer. This must be the reason I cannot see the photo more clearly. I keep seeing beyond the picture’s perimeters, beyond the reach of the lens. I know what my mother saw the moment the shutter clicked. I see the lilac bush just feet away from her. I smell the honeysuckle still. I hear bees, a whole sweet tree buzzing. The photographer, talking to her in his quiet way, lifts her chin and says, “You have lovely children, Christine,” and she, looking absently in our direction, says, “Yes, I suppose they are.”
My father turns the glass knob of the porch door and comes over to where Fletcher and I stand, looking on, and we all wave to her. She sits still as a stone and smiles back.
On her latest book her face seems to have completed itself. There on her brow her first and last poems meet. The difficult second book has brought severe lines around her eyes. The middle work hollows her cheeks. The latest poems chisel her features, refining them. This was the mother I had left for college. She looks weary, I think, preoccupied, lost in her solitary craft.
I want to look like her: the high forehead, the feverish, full lips, the wild, graying hair.
Dreamy, she stares back at her invisible audience. We can’t know what she’s thinking. We look harder. We try to see how she gets where she goes and, every time, she loses us. The watery eyes seem to float back away from her face into her luminous head where something opens, and she sees far, far off. We pursue her and she eludes us.
