Motherland

by Elissa Altman

  Susan came home to Connecticut after more than twenty years away, living first in brownstone Brooklyn and then in a sprawling eighteenth-century farmhouse in the countryside near Philadelphia.

  “Why did you come back?” I asked her one night, not long after we met. There was no work in this part of northern Connecticut for a graphic designer. “Why didn’t you stay where you were?”

  “Because,” she said, “my mother was getting older. I had come home for a visit, and she was too thin. She’d had cancer twice. She wasn’t eating. I lived with her for two years before I bought this house.”

  Moral obligation; the dedication of daughter to mother; age and illness trump history.

  * * *

  —

  There had been two mostly consecutive long-term relationships: one with Judy, an older Jewish Manhattan Gestalt therapist Susan had been with for thirteen years. And one with Kathleen, a beautiful, dark-haired Irish American painter who was not entirely convinced of her breakup with Susan, two years after it happened.

  “We loved Kathleen,” Helen said to me one summer evening, while sipping a vodka tonic on Susan’s deck. “She was so funny, and so beautiful.”

  “And so Catholic,” Susan added.

  “Yes,” Helen said. “That’s right.”

  These were the two things that Susan assured me were of key importance to her mother, a devout Catholic, and her mother’s array of sisters, who all still lived in the area: beauty and devotion. There were Ethel, Sophie, Millie, Stephanie, and Phyllis, who comprised a portion of the siblings born to Susan’s grandmother, widowed at forty and left with eleven children shortly after the end of World War I. Up and down the narrow hallway that led from Susan’s kitchen to the guest room hung a dozen old family photographs framed in the ornate carvings of the times: There are all the sisters and their mother, every one of them blond and blue-eyed, together at a wedding. There are all the young girls in prim white confirmation dresses, leaning up against the family Model A, a spaniel running around at their feet. There are the handsome, chiseled brothers in cutaway morning suits and all the sisters in white fur stoles and a priest lined up in a row from big to small, low to high. There are engagement photos and a formal Marine shot of Susan’s father in 1943, and a picture of Helen in a long tweed skirt, standing on a rock protruding from a stream, looking away from the camera, fishing pole in hand.

  There are only two pictures of Susan in her home. One is a professional studio portrait taken before her first birthday, six months after her adoption: Susan will often look like this, preoccupied, her attention cocked elsewhere, lost in thought, distrait. She gazes up at the camera, her gray-green eyes distracted by something out of frame, something we cannot see. In the other picture, taken at three years old, she is wearing a tiny dress, standing on the broad sill of a massive picture window at her aunt Millie’s new house. She grasps for the disembodied feminine hand of a woman who reaches in to the shot to assure the child that she is not alone, that she is safe.

  7

  A PHOTO I HAVE NEVER seen before:

  She is needle-thin, dressed in a short black shift with three-quarter sleeves. Her platinum pageboy is ironed straight. There are a charm bracelet, important wedding pearls, crossed legs, a cigarette in her hand. She gazes at the camera—my father’s beloved Hasselblad, I reckon, and his treasure—with a shy, coy glance, a combination of yearning and resignation.

  The red date stamp on the edge of the photograph says that it is 1962, September.

  I imagine the traffic rattling by twenty-one stories below on First Avenue and Seventy-Ninth Street. My father’s turntable plays Johnny Hodges and Billy Strayhorn’s “Your Love Has Faded.” My mother is pregnant—I was conceived on their wedding night, and there are the pearls—but these are the days long before maternal fret, back when there was no anxiety about smoking while carrying a baby. Hanging on the wall behind her is my father’s ersatz Jackson Pollock, painted for him by the art director at his ad agency, where he is vice president of creative. If I close my eyes, I can feel the painting’s bumps and rivulets of thick color that run down the canvas in heavy streaks, like blood.

  My first memory, preverbal: I am being held over my mother’s shoulder, so close to the massive canvas that even now, more than half a century later, the smell of acrylic paint sets off a primal response in me, like the first taste of sweetened milk touched to the tongue of an Italian newborn, which, they say, lingers until his last breath. From the time I am born in Manhattan in 1963 until we move to Forest Hills a year later, my mother will give me a bottle three times a day, measured perfectly to the ounce, no more, no less, and burp me against her husband’s prized painting in quiet defiance.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NIGHT I FIND THIS photo, more than half a century after it was taken, my mother’s accident is two years away. By day, she is still a flaneuse, traversing the city from east to west and north to south. Borders: She won’t go below Twenty-Third Street or above Eighty-Sixth, lost in a pyschogeographic reverie that will take her in and out of bookstores and tchotchke shops, coffeehouses and small grocers, boutiques and jewelry stores and Bergdorf Goodman. Here is Steinway Hall, where she performed at fifteen. Here is the small independent bookstore with the café that used to give her little squares of dark Belgian chocolate for free—for free! she tells me, because they love how she looks—and here is the Clinique kiosk at Bergdorf, where they hoard samples for her to try because she buys so much from them, spending hours there at least twice a week.

  Every day, my mother, made up for the camera, will walk and walk, dragging along a soft navy blue canvas tote bag badly embellished with silver and red spangles sewn on in a slapdash modern design. Long-handled and flaccid, the bag is filled with necessities for the day: her makeup bag; a small zippered Vuitton key case in which are stuffed her identification, credit cards, and cash; two copies of the CD she recorded in the late nineties, along with a sheaf of her reviews from Time Out New York; a few pieces of dog-eared sheet music for her favorite songs transcribed into the key of B flat in the event that she is called upon to perform; her cell phone; her tiny red leather Filofax filled with scrawled-upon diary pages five years old; and a small plastic bottle of water, its neck coated in fuchsia lipstick, as though she’s shoved the entire thing into her mouth like a baby who is just learning how to drink without a nipple.

  My mother is ballasted by these essentials of life; all that she could possibly need or want is carried with her each day on her excursions. Walking is mapping with your feet, says Lauren Elkin. It is how my mother locates herself in time and space. It provides context, sets her down in the world, and organizes her place in the center of it. When she arrives home, she is exhausted, not only from the five or six miles she has walked in high heels with her navy canvas tote bag, but from the sheer drunkenness that comes from stimulus overload. The city is an assaultive drug, a high.

  Why would you ever go? she asks when I leave New York to be with Susan. And don’t give me that I-moved-for-love garbage.

  The city is life, and where there is life, there can be no death. Solvitur ambulando, the Latin expression goes: It is solved by walking. And so, until her accident, she walks and walks; she solves and she lives.

  * * *

  —

  I have driven in from Connecticut to take her out to dinner; she has spent the day on her feet and doesn’t want to go far, so we eat at Café Luxembourg, our favorite bistro down the street from her apartment on the Upper West Side, where she has lived since marrying Ben in 1981. Her walk today has been truncated—she has fought with a friend, she is aggravated and tired—and so we don’t go far.

  “I’m so sad, Lissie darling,” she says on this evening when I arrive at the apartment.

  “I know you are, Mom,” I say, “but you look so beautiful.”

  “Like shit, darling,” she
says, standing in front of her living room mirror. “Pure shit.”

  She pulls her full-length mink out of the closet—too heavy to walk long distances in, she wears it only for show; it’s ancient now, and she sews it up with needle and thread like Sally Bowles when the skins dry and split—and ties the belt so that it’s slung low around her hips, like a bathrobe. She plants her feet wide apart, and the bottom of the coat swirls around her in a whirlpool of fur at which she is the center. A modeling trick that she was taught to do in the nineteen-fifties, when men bought their women coats to show their love and to keep them happy: Hold your place, give the coat a shake so that it just grazes your shoulders, make it come alive.

  * * *

  —

  We have a meal of memory and regret and heavy silence punctuated by the compulsive click of the silver Art Deco Tiffany compact I gave her on her birthday twenty years earlier, shortly after Ben’s death, after we discovered that there was little left beyond the roof over her head.

  I have stepped into the role of spouse and giver of gifts. This is sometimes self-serving, a form of protection: I want to make her happy, to dilute the indignation that bubbles inside her like a fountain, always triggered by the commonplace and trivial. The French sailor shirt I’ve grown fond of results in a night of her glaring at my stomach and offering me the name of a diet doctor who used to work with Tarnower. My horn-rimmed glasses instead of contact lenses. She stares at my head: a too-short haircut. Banality is the devil, and terrible enough to shove her over the edge of reason. Gifts are a momentary deflection.

  Over dinner at a place where the food is consistent and the lighting kind, my mother is wistful and smiles sadly as she speaks of the past as if it were yesterday. Her recently highlighted blond hair, cut into an angular inverse Sassoon bob—the same long-in-front, short-in-back style she’s been wearing since I was a child—is flawless. Beneath it, her kohl-lined eyes, rheumy and unfocused, betray her. Hers is a world seen through a web of dreams and time, a lamentation for what should have been the better life she deserved had the choices she made been different. Everyone got what they wanted, she says, except for her. The Talmudic dictum that she be content with her portion is elusive.

  “Everyone deserves a good life, Mom,” I tell her while we wait for the server to arrive. “Everyone.”

  “Not as much as me, darling,” she says, flipping open her compact. “You don’t even know.”

  She bites her lip and shuts her eyes and shakes her head. She begins The Telling; her work, her life, who she once was before I was born.

  I let her speak without interruption. I order a glass of wine and then, a second. She stops talking and snaps to attention, as though she has been issued a small electric shock, more surprising than damaging. Her eyes dart from side to side.

  “Women,” she says, “don’t drink like that.”

  “I do—” I say.

  “It’ll make you fat—”

  “I’ll risk it—” I say.

  She puffs up her cheeks and like Marcel Marceau pantomimes a massively big belly, as if she were carrying twins.

  Other diners eavesdrop and strain to hear her. They stare. The maître d’—a young gay man in stiff Selvedge jeans and a tight blue-and-white gingham shirt—fawns over her outfit: the Hermès purse, the baby-lotion-pink lace blouse opened nearly to her birdlike rib cage and exposing most of her left breast (forgoddsake, nobody cares, she says, when I motion to cover herself up)—the tight black leather agnès b. jacket bought on a whim one afternoon in SoHo in the eighties, when I was working across the street at Dean & DeLuca; Seaman Schepps shell earrings in a hazy apricot; an abundance of burly statement bracelets procured everywhere from the diamond district to the street vendors on Lexington Avenue.

  My mother opens her purse and rummages through an old scuffed Vuitton makeup bag exploding with color, its zipper frayed and useless. She dumps out onto the table two different blushes, a massive wooden-handled brush, four silver metal tubes of lipstick, four eyeliner pencils whittled down to stubs like grade school crayons. She opens her silver compact again; she glances at it and draws dark brown circles around her eyes, over and over, until tiny dots of brown wax fleck her cheekbones. She clicks the compact closed and slides it back into its threadbare blue felt case and into her purse. One by one, the makeup items—the blush, the lipstick, the pencils, the brush—go back into the bag.

  “What do you do?” the maître d’ asks her. “You look so familiar.”

  “I am a performer,” she says, with the faux-British lilt popular among nineteen-fifties movie starlets. She recounts her singing and modeling history as though it were yesterday. The radio shows. The silver loving cup she won on a local television competition when she was eleven. My Oscar, she calls it. The show on national television. The famous boyfriends. The Copa. The people who stop her in the street every day.

  “And then,” she says with a smile, “I had my daughter.”

  She nods across the table at me, past a litter of half-drunk lipstick-rimed wineglasses of Sauvignon Blanc and the French wire basket of artisanal rolls vaguely picked over despite her recently acquired gluten allergy.

  “This is your daughter?” the man says. “How nice to meet you.”

  I look up.

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” I roll my eyes and shrug. “I got all my father’s genes.”

  The maître d’ now has permission to laugh, and he does. I am my mother’s court jester, her fool, the aggressively un-made-up, the plain to her striking, the wide to her narrow, the simple to her extraordinary. To be like her would have given her a fleeting moment of ease—the confirmation that I was merely an extension of her self, a younger reflection gazing back at her like Dorian Gray. It also would have been competition; it would have been too dangerous. We barely resemble each other and at least once during every meal at which I attempt to feed her—wherever we are: Balthazar, Starbucks, a diner—she pulls out a tube of her favorite Clinique lipstick in Red Red Red and thrusts it at me across the table. Desperate to please her, to keep the demons quiet, to give her a fleeting second of happiness because it’s my responsibility—make me happy, just this once, she begs; do it for me, please make me happy—I ask for her compact and swipe the bloody crimson across my lips. She stares. She smiles. She nods her head. She beams and claps her hands like a child.

  “Yes,” she coos—“Yes—look how great you look. Just look at you—”

  I am wearing her face. She engulfs me.

  I disappear.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE TELLING IS ALWAYS THE same. She talks not to me but at me, her gaze yogic and soft, floating over my shoulder to the mirrored wall behind me. I let her go on this night at the bistro. I interrupt her; the server is clearing our plates.

  “Do you want a cappuccino?”

  “Am I dead?” she says. “I’m speaking.”

  “I just asked if you wanted a fucking cappuccino—”

  “Forget it,” she says, taking out her cell phone. “It’s not important. And don’t use that foul language. Who the hell taught you to speak that way?”

  Years earlier, in her dimly lit Upper West Side office decorated with beige macramé wall hangings and antique Asian rugs, Anna, my therapist, would say, The rules are different for dealing with an unquiet mind, borrowing the words from Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir of mental illness and depression. It’s a pathology. It’s not you. You have to remember that.

  She’s never been diagnosed, I said. She’s just angry. She’s always been this way.

  She’s a walking DSM, my dear, Anna said.

  I believe that Anna is wrong. I believe that it is me. I believe it is me when my mother rifles through my bag one day, finds a therapy bill, and calls Anna herself.

  You’re turning my daughter against me, Anna Haffner. I’ll have you disbarred.<
br />
  * * *

  —

  I apologize to my mother for the interruption; she has already forgotten it.

  “You know, I was a very important singer—Jules Podell absolutely loved me. Everyone else, he terrorized—” she says of the Mafia-connected proprietor of the Copa, where she was a headliner and not, she makes sure I know, a Copa Girl “—but not me. Me, he loved.”

  I nod.

  “I got home every morning at four and I had to be in the showroom at nine. I couldn’t do it,” she shrugs. “I was exhausted, so I quit modeling to sing. But your grandfather, he wouldn’t pay for my lessons. Tight as a drum. Never even once came to see me on television. Wouldn’t even look at me.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “He only loved you. She has such smart eyes, he used to say about you, and you were just a baby. You loved to make him laugh.”

  * * *

  —

  By the time she’d finished her run at the nightclub, my mother had been a model, a television singer with a string of demo records, and an on-again off-again relationship with the songwriter Bernie Wayne, author of “Here She Comes, Miss America” and a man twenty years her senior with an office in the Brill Building down the hall from Leiber and Stoller.

  “We spent afternoons making out on his sofa,” she says, sipping her coffee. “People were always coming in and dropping things off, and we didn’t even look up.”

  When she and Bernie weren’t together, she enraged him by showing up at the Stork Club on the arm of every eligible bachelor in New York and then in Cholly Knickerbocker’s gossip column, where the boyfriend would read about it the next day. She talks obsessively about the clothes she wore, right down to the fabric and color—the Lanvin knockoffs, the Givenchy frocks—and the party that the television network threw for her at 21. The dress that her agent gave her right off her back—Can you imagine, she says, I still have her business card sitting on the piano!—in the ladies’ lounge at Le Pavillon, moments before a press event.