“She’s as sarcastic as me about all the stupid people at school. When we want to ignore them, we speak French.” By junior year, we would name ourselves the Sarcastic Bitches of Princeton High School. Billie Jean was different than the Glendale black girls I’d gone to elementary school with. She seemed more serious, and more confident.
I looked at Jo. “I wonder what it’s like to grow up around just Negroes. Even the mayor and police are Negro.”
She paused, thinking. She looked at me. “I bet it’s a relief. Our country is a really hard place to live if you are Negro.” We all nodded, feeling sobered.
She asked with a little smile, “Anyone want ice cream while we watch Laugh-In?”
“YES!”
“On one condition: you clear and wash dishes. My scar is really hurting. I need to rest.”
We leapt to our feet. “No problem.” We cleared the table and put dishes in the dishwasher. She sat at the table cradling her right side with her arm while she read the paper.
That winter I had spent a lot of time sitting next to my mother on her bed after school. She threw up a lot and lay curled up, her belly in pain. She had headaches, had dark circles under her eyes that started to look yellow. The doctor kept sending her home, saying nothing was wrong. I was only fourteen but I knew something was wrong. I sat on my parents’ bed with my biology book. I asked her to show me exactly where she hurt. I puzzled over the overlapping clear pages of the organs. I was sure her gallbladder was causing her problems, but her pain wasn’t on the right, it was on the left side over the pancreas, an organ I didn’t understand. I peeled back the page and showed her the picture. She murmured, sounding far away, “Pancreas. That’s what sweetbreads are. What we eat for Christmas breakfast. Sautéed in butter and white wine. Such a strange thing...”
A few days later, when we were at school, an ambulance wailed by, taking her to the hospital. They discovered she had pancreatitis from a blocked gallbladder duct. Her numbers were dangerously high. Only a few months before, a man in our town who lived across from the church died suddenly from pancreatitis. Somebody told me my mother’s numbers were worse than his. I walked by his house, thinking about his wife and little children. I prayed, “Please don’t let my Mommy die.” Though I couldn’t know it then, she did nearly die.
There was a day when the pain was so bad, she slipped out of her body and floated up to the ceiling. It was so easy. The pain was gone, worries evaporated. She didn’t think about us at all. She saw her body down on the table and thought nothing of it. Then a nurse, in the strong black Ohio accent, commanded her: “You are not going anywhere. You come back. You are not going to leave your children all alone.” My mother felt sucked down a tunnel and slammed back into her body. The pain was stunning.
She was in the hospital a long time. Once the infection was down, they would take out her gallbladder. When the surgeon set the date, my father said, “Make sure she’s better by this summer because we are going to Mexico.” He had a big building under construction, a college of nursing at the university, and Sander Hall was in the design stages at the office. He was working long hours. He stopped by to see Jo on his way home. Friends offered to bring us food, but he said, “No, we are doing fine on our own.”
The boys and I missed our mother so much it scared us. Dad always seemed mad and in a hurry, if we saw him at all, before we went to sleep. At home, we didn’t talk much when Mom was in the hospital. I made dinners and Dad ate in town near the office. The boys and I ate cube steaks and peas night after night. We were listless, waiting. Was Jo ever going to get better?
I washed clothes, packed our lunches, and got us off to school. I was worried and tired trying to keep up with homework from ninth grade. The house was cluttered and dirty. One morning, when I walked across the field and stepped into Linda’s perfectly clean kitchen, her mother told me, “I’ve noticed your clothes have been on the clothes line for eleven days.” I felt I’d done something wrong. “Oh, gosh, I haven’t been able to get the clothes in.”
When Jo got home in the spring, her long scar was painful and it took months to get better. Even as she started to cook and get groceries, something was different about her. She was with us but also seemed far away. Someone had given her a copy of Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. She told me that when Frankl lived in a concentration camp, he paid attention to what happened to people, how some became bitter and lost, while others found meaning. She carried it with her everywhere, reading in the car while she waited for me at ballet, or Wood at piano.
I found the worn paperback shoved under the seat with paragraphs underlined in pencil. I wanted to find out what she was thinking. I read, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” In her handwriting she’d written, “What will I choose?”
In mid-April on a Thursday night, Wood and I were doing homework at the kitchen table while our mother took Hubbard to a fourth grade program at school. We heard the VW drive up the drive and then there was a strange sound. Someone was crying. We looked at each other scared. Was our mother sick again? Hubbard was holding onto her as she stumbled up the stone stairs to the front door. When she came inside her face was streaked with tears. “Someone killed Dr. King.” She ran past us to turn on the television in their bedroom.
Hubbard’s little face was pale. “We were driving home listening to music when a voice interrupted to say Martin Luther King had been shot. Mommy started crying.” He looked at us. “I didn’t know what to do.” We went in and sat next to her on their bed as she stared at the flickering screen. Underneath our seemingly secure lives, my mother was haunted with questions about injustice. What would she choose?
Her searching questions would begin to propel her out of our father’s solar system, into a universe of her own. We had always rotated around his life, his interests, his rules. Almost dying had changed her, breaking the magnetic pull toward all the projects our father dreamed up. She still followed his orders, carried out all the landscaping tasks he put on the list each weekend, but underneath she was thinking, starting to imagine a life with interests of her own. Eventually, when he discovered she had begun to create her own life, he saw it as an absolute betrayal.
AFTER WE CLEANED up the kitchen that Monday night in May, we scooped peppermint and chocolate chip ice cream into bowls, and headed into my parents’ room to watch Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Our father was adamant that we would never watch television on school nights, only on Friday and Saturday nights. Jo wasn’t following his rules to the letter anymore. We started sneaking what we wanted to do and made sure he didn’t find out. She settled into bed in her nightgown, and we sat in a line along the edge of the bed, mesmerized from the first line, “C’mon Dick, let’s go to the party.” The characters became part of our lives: the Farkel Family, Tiny Tim, Lily Tomlin as Miss Ernestine at the phone company, Henry Gibson the poet, a weird little guy riding a tricycle and falling over, and a Nazi soldier saying “Verrry Eeen-ter-es-ting.” By the time it was over, my brothers were bouncing on the bed saying “Everybody look alive, ’cause here come de judge! Here come de judge!”
Jo called out, “Okay guys, brush your teeth. Get in bed, and lights out before your father gets home.”
As my brothers and I lay in our beds, our rooms in a line, we heard his car rumble up the gravel drive. The garage door opened, the Jag drove in below us. A last double rev of the engine before he turned the key. My brother Wood called out in a loud whisper, “Hey listen to this. Yo mama so poor, I saw her kickin’ a can down the street. I ask her what she was doin’. She said, ‘Movin’.’”
I lay in my bed, thinking about a poor woman walking across the street kicking a can. I was trying to figure it out as fast as I could. I heard the garage door crash shut, then the basement door closed, and my father’s feet were brushing up the limestone steps.
Wood called out, “D
on’t you get it? The can, that’s all she has. She’s moving.”
“Okay, now I get it. Great joke, now shush, here he comes.”
The solid wooden front door slammed shut. We turned on our sides in the darkened bedrooms and pretended to be asleep, as we heard our mother ask, “How was Literary Club tonight?” His footsteps were heavy. I could hear her bare feet as she hurried to kiss him.
“What’s wrong, Woodie?”
“It’s terrible. There was a fire in a dorm up at Ohio State.
Two girls died of smoke inhalation in a high rise dorm tower. It’s a damn shame.”
I lay in bed, stunned. From my bedroom I could see into the Great Room, a dark cavern except for a spot of light over the entry.
“Oh, Woodie. That’s awful.”
His voice was determined. “That won’t ever happen in my dorm!”
He paced back and forth in the living room, turning on the grid of spotlights. “We’ve made it so safe. No one will ever die in my dorm!”
“I believe you, Woodie, I do.”
His footsteps stumbled on the wooden floor as if he didn’t know where to go.
“The press is hounding me, questioning my dorm. Got calls all day. Asking me, ‘Will this happen here?’ It’s a nightmare.”
“Oh, Woodie, I’m so sorry. Why don’t you come to bed?”
“I can’t, not yet.”
I heard him drop into his Eames chair and pile records on the stereo. Even on low, Miles Davis’s trumpet played a driving blues river with Coltrane’s sax the undercurrent, pulling us into a troubled sleep. Those girls, I kept thinking, those poor girls who couldn’t escape the smoke in a glass tower.
Woodie rally racing, 1952
RACING CARS AND WINE
1968
The relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a romantic one:... their domestic buildings were conceived as stage sets for actors in an idealized drama about contemporary existence.
—ALAIN DE BOTTON, THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS
THE SPRING I WAS FOURTEEN, MY PARENTS INVITED our German friends Frank and Ushi Laurens to dinner. My father had a surprise to share with them, and we all knew it had to do with wine. Their Mercedes pulled up our driveway and we hurried down to meet them. Ushi’s voice greeted us like her fine perfume. “Oh Voodie, your home and your gardens are so bea-u-ti-ful this evening.”
Hours before, we had dumped cartloads of weeds on the compost pile, before parking the muddy tractor and rototiller under the overhang. Now we saw our work through her European eyes as the golden light of early evening softened the raw edges of the landscaping. We saw the spreading ground covers and not the patches of bare earth. The fruit trees we’d planted looked like pert school girls in flowering dresses, and a fresh crop of buckwheat gave the illusion of grass, hiding the rough clay and stony soil my father sculpted with his bulldozer.
My mother had told me they were Jewish and had barely escaped from the Nazis. In Germany, Frank had worked for a firm involved in retooling machinery that had business dealings with a company in Cincinnati. Someone here sponsored their coming to this country in 1939. They were the only people in their families who survived the Holocaust. Arriving in this country with nothing besides Ushi’s fur coat, jewels sewn in the lining, Frank now had his own company. They had become friends with my parents after they asked my father to design a modern renovation for their apartment. Frank and my father loved talking about wine and art.
When I was five, Frank and Ushi took me and their granddaughter to dinner at La Maisonette, Cincinnati’s finest French restaurant. We little girls were invited to have a taste of wine along with our dinner. When I took a sip of the French Burgundy, I declared with a quiet sincerity, “I prefer German white wines.”
This was met with waves of appreciative laughter and Frank declared, “You are your father’s daughter.”
Standing in our rough driveway, Ushi wore a tailored light wool suit, her coiffed hair like brandy swirling in a glass. I thought Frank looked dashing in his cashmere vest, dark shirt with gold cuff links, and silk tie. Older than my father, almost sixty, they looked like they had stepped out of Vogue. Connoisseurs of everything fine, their contained nods and discerning smiles seemed to anoint our labor with their approval. Standing on limestone slabs my father had set into place with chains, crow bars, and the bulldozer, they looked petite, both wearing the most stylish leather shoes I’d ever seen. As they admired the glossy leafed magnolia sporting its first blooms, my father’s voice boomed, recounting how many bales of peat mulch and carts of composted oak leaves he needed to turn clay soil acid enough for his magnolias to thrive. Even though my father sounded confident and certain, I was sure he waited for their blessing. Next to them he was a rough-hewn bull of a man bursting out of his Mexican striped shirt and khakis, his feet naked in sandals.
My mother, in her late thirties, wore a sleeveless fitted dress made from a Simplicity pattern she had sewed on a little Singer at the kitchen table. She had remembered to scuff off her mud-stained Keds at the last moment and slipped on dressy sandals. Her Mexican silver necklace, like chain mail, wreathed her long neck. Her tan face was lovely without a trace of makeup, and her dark hair was stylishly short.
Frank turned his kind attention to my younger brothers with their matching bowl haircuts, button-down shirts and their good jeans, and asked about their plans for summer vacation. Wood, at twelve, with a sensitive face, said he was reading the Captain Hornblower series about life at sea. Turning to nine-year-old Hubbard, already as tall as his older brother, our father recounted how Hubbard had accidentally driven the front bucket on the tractor right through the fiberglass garage door.
My father said, “We were furious with him. ‘How could you do this?’”
My mother added quietly, “We had forgotten he was only six years old.”
Then Frank turned to me with a kind smile, speaking in his German-accented voice. “And you, young lady. I think soon you will be needing your first ballroom gown. I promise to give that to you when the time comes.” I was tall, and awkward, yet in his presence I felt lovely. I blushed with pleasure.
My father interrupted and led us up the slate steps to the house above. From now on he would be the conductor of the evening with the house as his symphony, and we each performed as if responding to his baton. The sunlight poured across the oak floor and reflected on the walnut cabinets. Chinese red panels circled the room. Pre-Columbian Mexican statues lined shelves next to the fireplace, their Mayan and Olmec stone faces watching us next to my father’s small crucifix. Glinting over the piano was a five-foot-long bronze Bertoia ‘Cloud’ sculpture. With the sliding doors open to the breeze, the house felt like an airy pavilion. The Swedish designer Bruno Mathsson’s teak banquet table was set with Mexican woven placemats, German Arsberg china, and paper-thin Finnish wine glasses.
My mother had been anxious about preparing a meal fine enough for Ushi, Frank, and my father’s expectations. My brothers and I had picked peas, fresh lettuce, and herbs from the garden. I’d helped Jo blend leeks and add cream to the soup, and while she marinated steaks in Côtes du Rhône and garlic, the wooden salad bowl overflowed with greens tossed with our father’s favorite oil and vinegar dressing. The Danish enameled bowl, black with a red interior, brimmed with chilled Vichyssoise sprinkled with chives.
Over dinner, between careful spoonfuls of soup, Ushi asked, “Voodie, Frank tells me you once had a Bugatti. How have I not heard this story?” She turned her lovely face toward his. We all looked up eagerly, as my father beamed with pleasure.
My father always drove sports cars and he had raced cars before I was born. His style was rally racing on gravel roads cross-country, not on a paved circular racing track. As children we learned to recite the names of the cars he’d raced. The Alpha Romeo 2C was an old-fashioned, one-seater racing car. He’d bought the first Jaguar XK 120 roadster to arrive in the U.S. after the war. We had a big black and white photograph from a
race called the Bellfontaine Hillclimb, with his Jaguar in the air with only one wheel on the gravel road. Even though he was wearing a helmet, I could see he was smiling.
His favorite car was the last one. He smiled at Ushi. “That was my true love, my purple Bugatti.” When I was a baby, he had to stop racing to have time for his family and work. His last Bugatti he would eventually sell to a museum.
His voice filled the room and he gestured with his arms. “Bugattis are truly a work of art. I’d been searching for one for years.” He told us the history of the Bugatti family, Ettore and sons, and their skills in design and engines. As he spoke about them he picked up an Italian accent and quoted Le Patron. “‘What kind of cars inspire this devotion? Are they dead silent, smooth riding as mobile featherbeds, quick to start in the blackness of zero mornings, so easy to drive that a child can manage them? They are not! Most Bugattis are noisy in every way a car can be noisy.’”
Our father had carried a photo of a Bugatti in his back pocket for years. Finally he found one for sale from a guy who had to sell it to save his marriage. Our parents flew to Philadelphia to pick it up and drive home. “We thought it would be a joy ride.”
Our mother shook her head and smiled.
Woodie pretended to pull off a tarp and his face looked like the car was in terrible shape. “I was worried your mother would doubt my sanity, but she was loyal.” They left an hour later, the car paid for, with an owner’s manual in French, even though my father didn’t know a word of French. They started on the long drive back to Cincinnati.
Our mother smiled at Woodie. “Within a few miles my feet were burning from engine heat.” Green oil started streaming down the fender to her right, and she was scared. “Woodie, what in the world are we going to do?’”
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