by Lori L. Lake
I want to ask her about her life there, the turmoil and tumult of the war, a brief passing reference to being thought a German spy. She didn’t say by whom or whether it was a passing comment or a serious accusation.
I WAS A daughter when I left home, off for college at eighteen, on the cusp of adulthood, not yet fully there. When I came back to care for her, when the cancer came back, I was a daughter who had become an adult, but my mother was ill, racked with the pain of a cancer that had spread to her bones. She took morphine every four hours for the pain. The questions I wanted to ask, thought that I would have decades to seek the answers, were lost in the tangle of her illness. Instead, our intimacy became one of physical necessity, washing her, the scarred place where her breast had been, placing suppositories in her vagina, my hand gloved, not to be clinical but to show respect even as I invaded this private place, also aware that it was the lesbian daughter with my hand there. Changing the bag of urine, emptying the bedside toilet, ointment on the sore where her chin rested on her collarbone, her head too weak to turn away.
Then the day came when I couldn’t wake her. I walked outside to watch the sunrise, knowing soon that I would call the doctor. She lived a week beyond that. I never asked what finally killed her, her failing kidneys, the calcium from her bones overwhelming them, or the fragile bones breaking, her neck, her ribs into her lungs.
And I wondered, if my father and mother are both dead, am I a daughter anymore?
WHEN MY SISTER and I cleaned out the closets, in the back, on the top shelf, I found the poetry that she had written as a young woman, as a woman of my age then. I also found the journal she kept after the diagnosis, when she knew that the days she had planned to have, after retirement and my sister going off to college, would not come. The dream deferred and deferred, so faint, until it could only be a bare flicker passed down to the next generation.
I want to ask her what she dreamed of writing, I want to ask her how she got that dream from the Indiana farm she grew up on. I remember the books she read to us as children, but I want to ask her about the books she read as an adult, which ones inspired her, spoke to her, changed her life.
I want to tell her that she passed her dream on to me.
I had written some things, a few short stories, some plays, but never sustained it. Not in her life did I ever show the will to sit down and write and write and write and re-write until a book appeared. And then another book and then another. Even the few scraps that I did produce remained scattered sheets of paper, haphazard piles in a battered old file cabinet. I published nothing in her lifetime.
I STOOD AT her grave, with my third book in hand, the one I thought she would be most proud of. The one with the inscription that says, To N. Ruth Redmann, February 1, 1921 – February 29, 1984. Too late, of course. The lesbian daughter, the lesbian book, would she have been proud?
The grass was green, the sky gray, the only sound the wind.
***
ABOUT JEAN STEWART
Jean Stewart is the author of one stand-alone novel and (so far) five installments of the “Isis” sci-fi/fantasy series. She has twice been a finalist for Lambda Literary Awards and has had several short pieces published in anthologies.
Jean was born and raised in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She says, “My sixth grade teacher, Bill Redfern, told me, ‘You could be a writer.’ That simple expression of his confidence in me changed my life.”
Jean loves books, music, movies, dogs, and people who laugh. She was a teacher and a coach for a while, but now she writes. She now lives near Seattle with her partner, Susie, two badly behaved dogs, and a reclusive Maine Coon cat named Emily Dickinson.
World Without End
Memoir by Jean Stewart
MY MOTHER WAS named Henrietta, after a character in a book. Neither of us ever knew what book or character that was. My grandmother had come across a story she liked, and so the name was there in her head in mid-March of 1920, when my mother was born.
My mother never liked her name. She thought it old-fashioned and even more than the polysyllabic length, she disliked the inevitable nicknames, Henny or Etta. I always thought it was an interesting name. Henrietta; it sounded musical and a little amusing. People smiled when they said my mother’s name, and that seemed somehow quite fitting. My mother was that kind of person; a person who, without much effort on her part, made people smile. The uniqueness of her name suited her.
My mother spent her childhood and youth in southern Delaware, about twenty odd miles or so from the Atlantic Ocean. She had three brothers and two sisters. George, the brother born before my mother, died of diphtheria before he reached his third birthday. Coming into the world a year after his death, my mother was the last child. My grandfather was a telegrapher for the B&O Railroad, a secure job of skill and expertise in those days when radio was in its infancy. Yet in the months after Black Friday, he and every other man in town ended up out of work. Their family began to move from place to place, as my grandfather went anywhere he could to earn a wage, and the Great Depression settled over the nation like the sub-zero temperatures of an Arctic wind.
Mom told me once that they moved eight times in the course of three years, usually just staying ahead of the creditors. At one point, my grandfather tried to start his own business, and made gin in the bathtub, but my grandmother was a staunch Methodist. She pulled the stopper one night, sending the profits down the drain, and that was the end of that enterprise. At this time my mother had two dresses and one pair of shoes. My Aunt Stella and Uncle Bill went around to the finer addresses in town with their red wagon, picking up and delivering the baskets of clothes that my grandmother washed and ironed for an income. My grandfather had a rifle and spent most of his unemployed days “traipsing around” the pastoral southern Delaware countryside, hunting rabbits, squirrels, and quail. The family made meals of whatever he managed to bring home. My mother said my grandfather was not a good shot. There were many meals that consisted of canned beans and bread. Surprisingly, Uncle Bill, a teenager himself, learned to shoot incredibly well. It was a good thing, for during the worst years of the Depression, while Hoover was still President, they had no other meat than what sat on the table laced with birdshot.
My mother said she had eaten terrible things in those days. Luckily, she’d been made to eat so much spinach and okra that she never in my entire life served it to us. She said she had even eaten muskrat once; the meat was black and tasted awful. My grandmother taught her how to season with a little salt, a little pepper, or dill—or, if you could barter for it, butter—cooking long and slow, so that the toughest old rabbit melted in your mouth. She always said the simplest food could taste like a royal feast if you seasoned it well and let it cook long and slow. And she said if you were hungry enough, you’d try to eat just about anything.
When I was in college, she told me once, “At least my kids never knew what it was to go to bed hungry.” It did not strike until years later how much of her early experience was revealed in that remark.
Even more clearly, I remember the wonder in my mother’s voice when she described how her family had moved to a town with a free library. From then on, no matter where they moved, she was always on the lookout for the closest library. In the library she could sit and read, and let the worries and uncertainties slip away from her. As a child, she was afraid she would come home from school one day and find her family’s meager furniture and belongings stacked up on the street. She saw families all around her being evicted for rents owed or defaulting mortgages, and she knew anything worth a few dollars was being repossessed by banks when loan payments weren’t made on time. But in the library, poor as she was, my mother was truly free. She filled her head with stories and history and dreams. She read her books and convinced herself that if she worked hard she could survive hard times.
My grandfather moved the family to Philadelphia in the late Thirties, and my mother left high school with a year unfinished. She took a series of clerk and salesg
irl jobs, then qualified to be an operator for Bell Telephone. She was a working woman in the Forties, independent and goal-oriented, and steadily becoming increasingly well read. Though later in life she pronounced that she didn’t believe in “Women’s Lib,” she was a feminist frontrunner. According to my Aunt Stella, my mother did what she wanted and went where she pleased. She was an attractive woman, but uninterested in men, because according to her they only wanted someone to cook and do laundry and clean up after them.
Then she met my father.
He was a Scot who emigrated to America after serving Britain in World War II. He was looking for a new life and a job, and had fallen into a habit of watching my mother coming home each night, walking along the alley that ran along the back of his sister’s row house. Intrigued, he asked my Aunt May to introduce them. According to Mom, my father and Aunt May had stood by the picket fence, my father dressed in a suit and wearing a wide tie. Mom was with her mother, passing by on their way to the 69th Street trolley. My mother thought nothing of the meeting at the time, though she was caught by the soft Glasgow brogue and his dapper attire. A few days later, on her way home from work in a driving rainstorm, my father unexpectedly appeared at her side and walked her home. My mother said he was wearing that suit and tie again, and this time he was soaked through. She learned years later that he had been circling the block for a half an hour, trying to make their meeting appear to be a fortunate accident, when it began to rain.
My mother loved my father. There was no other person in her life who meant what he did to her. I did not understand the connection until I found my own love, but that’s the way of monumental things, isn’t it? You have to find out for yourself.
They married and began working to build a life together. My mother left her job when she became pregnant with my older brother. Then fourteen months after my brother was born, I arrived. My parents had saved up enough money to make a down payment on a little Cape Cod style house in the Philadelphia suburbs, near Swarthmore. It was a peaceful green section of the world filled with grassy lawns, tall old oaks and maples, and children. My younger brother came a few years later and completed our family. My mother told me she was surprised to realize how happy she was. With a home and her own family she had stumbled upon something she had always been searching for, without ever knowing it. She spent the next three decades settled in that one place, putting down roots she had not known she wanted.
She told me many times that those were the best years of her life.
During the Fifties and Sixties, for one week each summer, my family went to the southern Delaware seashore for a vacation. As we drove along in the ’49 Ford, and then later the ’57 Pontiac, with the windows rolled down and the hot, moist summer air swirling in, Mom stared at the passing scenery and grumbled aloud. She found it hard to accept that the Delaware she saw before her was not the same place she had known as a girl. The landscape had changed. The flat, dusty roads were paved. Long, narrow tomato fields and small truck farms were giving way to vast fields of corn and soybeans. She didn’t like the honky-tonk of the boardwalk, the junky tourist shops selling seashells and Coppertone, the kiddie carnival rides, the sno-cones and cotton candy. She would tell my Father, my brothers, and me of how, when she was young, Rehoboth, Lewes, Fenwick Island or Bethany were each just a cluster of fisherman’s houses and a gas station or two. She missed the quiet serenity of the old towns, where small houses of white-washed clapboard had been perched at the brink of the Atlantic for the past two centuries, enduring hurricanes and hot summer sun without much change. We thought she was crazy. We liked the jazzy-feel of the resort town that Rehoboth was even then becoming, and we loved the adventure of traveling to somewhere that seemed to exist simply as a place for people to go have fun.
Mom would say that all she needed to enjoy herself was a place to sit and watch the water rolling up on the shore.
The ocean was the one constant: always the same, unchanging and ever present, for her and for us. After we arrived at the beach and moved the luggage and the brown paper bags of groceries from the car trunk into the little rented cottage, Mom let us run down for our first look at the ocean. One year—I think I was eight or so—I remember clambering up a dune at the edge of the roadway. When I reached the top I stood, breathless, struck absolutely through with what I found. My brothers rushed by me, intent on charging down to the water’s edge, and my father went after them, leaving me on my promontory of sand. The bright morning sun glinted on swells of jade-green water, and a fresh July wind gusted into my face, filled with that strange mix of brine and sun and intangible things. I remember feeling suspended in time, feeling pierced with some unknown poignancy. I think I knew, even then, that this was something precious, and I knew just as irrevocably that the moment would not last. My heart felt as if it had inflated like a balloon, filling up my chest and pressing against my ribs. Some part of my spirit was dying to get out and soar. At last, my mother came alongside of me and took my hand. We looked at each other, grinning, then both gazed at the sea. I felt so much it was painful, and I understood none of it. There were no words that would not diminish the power of the vast landscape before us, and so we didn’t speak. Instead, we just stood together and looked our fill.
I have all sorts of memories like that flickering through my head just now, images emerging from the shadows into light, and then disappearing again. Snapshots of moments when my mother stood with me and together we looked at something, long and deep, acknowledging the gems of glory that were tossed in our paths each day by whatever unseen Benefactor might be with us out there in the everlasting night surrounding our small planet. I understand, now, long after the gift was given, that my mother gave me the way I pause every once in a while and savor the world. She gave me the way I live my life, the way I open my heart.
We stood many an evening in my backyard on Villanova Avenue, among the clipped lawns and tall trees of what was then Rutledge. On hundreds, if not thousands, of occasions, we lingered to watch the setting sun hover in red and golden skies beyond tall trees. Sometimes, if my father hadn’t gone too crazy with the trimming sheers the autumn before, there were lilacs blooming nearby, and sometimes there were bumble bees buzzing among the clusters of sweet-smelling tea roses lining the picket fence. Sometimes my father was about ten feet away, checking the tomato plants. Sometimes my brothers were yelling at me to rejoin the game of wiffleball underway, and our wonderful, brown dog Candy was there, that happy grin on her face as she stood by my knee, waiting to see what I was up to and where I would go. This was the same back yard where the clothes blew on the line each afternoon for thirty years, where the robins hunted for worms, and where we children were sent on dandelion-digging details by my father when we misbehaved once too often.
In the summer, we swam in the three-foot blue pool, and my mother brought us Ritz crackers and glasses of Kool-Aid on a little tray when we had to get out at 4:30 or so, before my Dad got home from work. We played at being cowboys, or soldiers, or rustlers, or gladiators. The kickball world series was enacted every day. My mother often checked on what we were doing through the back window, her voice issuing through the dark, opaque screen like God’s when we were caught in some mischief. I can still hear the tone that would stop me in my tracks. One word. One command to obeisance. “Jean!”
In the autumn, my mother and father raked orange and red leaves into huge piles, enlisting us children to load our wagon with them and move leaves out to the curb. We usually lost control at some point and dove into the leafy stacks, rolling around laughing until we could barely catch out breath. When I look back on it my mother was always there, always the center of the fun, always laughing with us then organizing us back to work so that the job was eventually done. At the end of the day, we burned the monstrous piles of color by the curb. We would stand together, usually tired, cold and hungry, watching the little flames flicker over the leaves, consuming them. A mild autumnal breeze took the smoke up and away, into the deepening b
lue of a late afternoon sky.
In the winter, we built snow forts in the yard and pelted each other and the neighbor children for hours, or until someone who wasn’t a Stewart was crying. I developed a wicked sidearm. We weren’t allowed to take our coats or scarves off if we worked up a sweat, yet we always did, flinging our garments away with the mad amnesia and abandon only a very over-heated child has. I lost a lot of mittens in those days.
In the midst of it all, I knew I was happy, and I knew I was blessed. And I thought my beautiful childhood would never end.
But as I entered puberty, my father changed. In an effort to improve his weekly salary, he left a job he enjoyed and took a new job down in the city. The new job turned out to be a grinding and grim experience for my father. He didn’t like the hard men he worked with, and he didn’t like his bosses. He tried to find another job and could not. I am sure he felt trapped. Gradually, he became deeply frustrated. I only know he rarely smiled after he made this change. And he was angry all the time.
I am not sure when I became the catalyst for the anger his life circumstances brought him, but at some point I did. By then, I was beginning to suspect there was something different deep inside me, something the rest of the world didn't want me to be. Always talented in sports and fiercely competitive, I was given the message in a thousand of subtle, painful lessons: instead of besting the boys in my neighborhood, I would do much better sitting on the sidelines and cheering for them. An intelligent, fun-loving, insatiably curious, and adventurous girl, I was given the message that these were not ladylike qualities. At one point, it seemed like everything I was, I was not supposed to be. I read too many books, I was too good at games, I was too talkative with strangers. What started as a disheartening entry into adolescence became a nightmare as I realized that the rest of my life would be lived under these increasingly straitjacketing constraints.
