by Ruth Reichl
Could the message have been clearer? And so I began traveling through the box, trying to answer my mother’s questions. As I sorted out the handwriting I got to know my grandparents, who both died when I was small. I discovered that my father was an ardent lover, a wonderful writer, and deeply romantic. But mostly I met my mother—as a little girl, a hopeful young woman and an increasingly unhappy older one. And the more I came to know this woman, the more grateful I became that I did not have to live her life.
Mom turned out to be very little like the comic character of the Mim Tales. She was more thoughtful, more self-aware and much more generous than I had ever appreciated. Getting to know her now, I realized how much I missed by not knowing her better when she was still alive.
But there was something more. As I came to know this new person, I began to see how much I owe her. Mom may not have realized her dreams, but that did not make her bitter. She did not have a happy life, but she wanted one for me. And she made enormous emotional sacrifices to make sure that my life would not turn out like hers.
What Girls Can Do
The earliest letter in the box comes at you like a slap. Even after eighty-four years its heartless candor leaves a bruise. Had my father written me a letter like that when I was sixteen I think I would have burned it on the spot. I know I would not have kept it. But Mom had carefully filed her father’s letter away, and reading it now I tried to figure out why she had hung on to these brutal words for her entire lifetime.
“You are a dear girl,” my grandfather had written, “and you have a fine mind. But you will have to resign yourself to the fact that you are homely. Finding a husband will not be easy.”
It was a kind of curse that followed her always. In those few sentences he had hit on all the major issues that were to plague her life: She was smart but it did not really matter. She was handicapped because she was not pretty. And she would be a failure if she never married.
My grandparents, Emil and Mollie Brudno, were the children of immigrants who had come to Cleveland in the late 1800s, and they had exalted aspirations. By the time my mother was born in 1908 Emil had turned himself into a well-to-do doctor and Mollie was running his rather grand and extremely orderly house. But what connected them and defined their lives was a shared and absolutely insatiable appetite for culture. They were wild for music, books and art (in that order), and they traveled widely. Throughout their lives they shared their thoughts, writing letters almost daily even when they were not apart.
When Mom was sixteen my grandmother took her two daughters to spend the year in Switzerland. I had always known that my mother was educated abroad, and I had always imagined that it was because my grandparents were pretentious snobs who wanted to emulate the “grand tour” of the aristocrats. I was wrong. Reading the letters I discovered that my grandmother was a prodigy who had been offered a scholarship to study music in Switzerland at the age of sixteen. Had she been a boy her parents would have let her go, but she was only a girl, so they made her turn it down and go to work so that she could put her only brother through college and then medical school. Now, with a devastated postwar Europe affordable for Americans, Mollie hoped to offer her daughters the experience that she herself had been denied.
Mom was not musical but she was a dutiful daughter, and she tried to be grateful. She wrote daily letters home to “Dadsy-boy,” her unformed handwriting offering an eloquent picture of her days. She read good books. She took long walks. She played golf. And she practiced the violin for six hours full every day.
It is hard for me to imagine Mom screeching away at the violin; I never heard her play. Didn’t she resent those long hours of practice? In a rare show of spirit she wrote, “I wish that man Kreutzer had never lived to write such horribly difficult exercises! I hate him.” But not until Mom was in her fifties did she permit herself to give vent to her true feelings. “I was not musically gifted like my mother,” she wrote then. “All I ever wanted was to be a doctor like my father. I was no good at the violin and I knew it. Why couldn’t they let me be? I will never do this to my daughter.”
But at seventeen she was still eager to please her parents, and so when her mother sailed home with her sister, Mom stayed on in Paris to pursue a doctorate in music. It sounds like such a lonely life: She had no friends and spent all her time practicing her violin and spending long hours at the Bibliothèque Nationale doing arcane musical research.
In her letters home she does not complain but endlessly thanks her parents for “the wonderful opportunity you are giving me.” Mom’s relentlessly saccharine letters are maddening: Being a teenager alone in a foreign country studying a subject you don’t much like cannot have been fun, but she is humble, grateful, virtuous. “I have decided to read at least one classic book a week,” she wrote to her father, “so that I can improve my mind.” Meanwhile her sister, only a year and a half younger, is writing breathless letters about all the wonderful parties she’s been invited to, and the great fun she is having at home.
“Why did I let my parents push me so?” Mom lamented in later life. “Why did I let them rob me of the chance to go to college in order to study something that I had no background in? Why didn’t I listen to myself instead of them?” From this distance it is easy to see what was going on, but Mom was well into middle age before she came to the conscious realization that what she had been pursuing was her mother’s dream.
“We are so proud of you!” her parents wrote when she passed her oral exams. And they were exultant when she breezed through the written ones and received her doctorate. She was nineteen.
What she was expected to do with this is anybody’s guess. The America my mother returned to in 1927 was still a polite turn-of-the-century society entirely dominated by men. I scrambled through the letters looking for some mention of the Nineteenth Amendment, some intimation that it had changed their lives, but there was nothing. Women might have earned the right to vote in 1920, but the amendment passed by a single vote and it actually changed very little. Lindbergh and his flight were dominating the news when Mom returned to America, and newspapers were running headlines like “Woman Suffrage Declared a Failure.” And so once again my mother proved what a good girl she was. She returned home to live with her parents and search for a husband.
On the surface she was serene, but there was one significant sign of the rebellion to come: She put down her violin and never played another note. And then she finally did something that she wanted to do: She opened a bookshop. Why? “I was so lonely, and I longed for a life full of people,” she wrote to a friend. “And I have always loved to read.”
It was a bold move for the time. The day the shop opened her mother’s good friend, the Reverend John Haynes Holmes, sent a note of encouragement and congratulations: “I admire the intelligence and courage that you are manifesting in the venture. You are showing what girls can do in this, our age.”
Sitting at her desk Mom carried on a lengthy correspondence with some of the most interesting minds of her day. When I was a little girl I would sometimes surprise her in the living room, silently crying as she read those letters, over and over. She would not tell me why, but now I know that she was remembering her first step into independence, and a time when authors such as Christopher Morley had discussed their books with her and critics like Max Eastman told her their troubles. She corresponded with all kinds of people. There are dozens of letters from the leftist labor lawyer Aaron Sapiro about a scheme to change the way California farmers sold their fruit. Authors thanked her for her critiques of their books. And publishers flirted charmingly as they suggested titles for her shop. (“The Red Badge of Courage, just published this week, is a wow and is selling very well. I suggest that you push that and the Time Machine, which will be coming out in a fortnight. And by the way, are you married, single or contemplating?”)
She was not contemplating, and it worried her. Time was passing. “I don’t want to be one of those spinsters, those unmarried Aunts who are always an object of pity,�
� she wrote. And then she added wistfully, “How I wish I were as pretty as my sister! I wonder how I will ever find someone to love me?”
And then in 1929 the tone of her letters got abruptly dark. The Depression, of course, changed life for everybody in America but Mom had gone into business on a lark, and she was fretting about receipts and sales and desperately trying to keep her little bookshop going. And then there was a worse disaster. Her sister fell precipitously ill with a diseased spleen and was dead within the week.
Finding Mr. Right
“I was smart and she was pretty,” my mother always said when she spoke about her sister. “I never had the slightest doubt that as far as my parents were concerned, pretty was better. From the moment she was born people stopped them on the street to admire their beautiful baby. They were convinced that Ruth was going to make a brilliant marriage, and they never worried about her. Her death was such a blow!”
When Rabbi Stephen Wise heard the news he tried to console my grandparents. “It is too terrible to be true, that lovely radiant child fallen upon sleep!” he wrote. “I have always felt that to give up a loved child to death must be like being buried alive.”
He obviously knew the family well. “After Ruth died we went into permanent mourning,” my mother told me. “My parents felt that it would be a crime to enjoy ourselves without her. We never celebrated another birthday, holiday or anniversary. It was a particularly bitter blow for my folks, because she wasn’t there, and what could they expect from me? I was useless; I couldn’t even find a husband.”
But now they had other worries; when the stock market crashed, the family lost everything and their financial situation grew increasingly precarious. My grandmother, with her husband’s blessing, decided that it was her duty to help out. She became an impresario, the Cleveland representative of the Hurok organization, renting theaters and bringing great musicians from around the world to perform in them.
“She was beautiful, well organized and charming,” Mom always said of her mother, and I could not miss the mingled notes of envy and admiration in her voice. “She could do anything, easily. She was very good at business, and she was soon surrounded by musicians—Yehudi Menuhin, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Rubinstein. It was her dream come true.”
Mollie not only presented the artists but also entertained them in her home. Dozens of letters mention her spectacular hospitality. It must have been quite a salon, for even Clarence Darrow wrote, “What a delightful time I had at your house. I was just telling Arthur Garfield Hayes that I don’t know when a whole family has made such a hit with me before.”
To Mom, who was living at home, her mother’s new business offered distinct advantages. Tall, slim and darkly intense, she may have felt that she paled beside her dazzling mother, but others saw her differently. After an evening at the house one man wrote, “Go ahead into life, full-blooded, courageous and leap for the adventure. But you must do it soon—before the summer of your youth has cooled off into caution. You are magnificently charming—and you come like a torrent. But you will be spent on the futility of little things. You are not a watercolor. You are carved out of life—and there can be no petty hesitancies about you.”
When Mollie brought Bertrand Russell to lecture in Cleveland he felt much the same and was so taken with Mom that he quickly made plans to return. Embarking on this subsequent tour he wrote in his small, precise handwriting, “I wonder whether you realize that the strongest hope I had in coming to America this time was the hope of getting to know you better? I have loved you from the first moment I saw you, and more each time.”
Mom never got over the fact that Bertie Russell had been in love with her, and I immediately recognized the handwriting on those square blue envelopes. I can’t remember a time when Mom was not reading and rereading his letters, trying to reassure herself that she was the same person who had fascinated the great philosopher. But at twenty-two she was merely flattered: Russell was nearing sixty, and although they became lifelong friends and correspondents, he was hardly marriage material. And her parents were turning up the pressure.
“How we pray for you to meet Him!” my grandmother wrote in 1928.
“Happy New Year,” she wrote again in 1931, “and may you find the Mr. Right. It is our one prayer and hope and we think of it every moment.”
“There was a new moon last night,” she wrote in 1933, “and I prayed and prayed for Him. I dream that you will find a mate.”
A few weeks later my grandfather weighed in. “Every woman needs to be married, and my dearest wish is that you will find the deep happiness that comes from having a partner to love and guide you.”
The condescending tone of that letter made me want to grind my teeth, and I went hunting for some evidence that my mother might—even once—have considered another option. Did it ever cross her mind that she might not marry?
Nothing, in all her notes or letters, gives any indication that she considered the possibility of staying single. She had been back from France for eight years, thirty loomed on the horizon and she was afraid that no man would ever marry her. And then, finally, a beau appeared. In 1935, there is a sudden flurry of letters from a man in Pittsburgh.
His first, written in an even, careful hand, begins, “I realize how terrible I am at writing love letters. I don’t know whether you should feel complimented or insulted at my evident lack of experience.” Mom was in no position to be picky; she chose to be complimented and before long there was talk of engagement rings. “Please remember, Ernest,” she wrote fiercely, “I don’t want one.”
Reading Ernest’s bland letters it is easy to see what disaster lies ahead. They had absolutely nothing in common and I found myself shouting, “Don’t do it!”
But of course she did. After a whirlwind courtship she closed her shop and moved to Pittsburgh. “People are still breathless over your sudden departure and fatal decision,” my grandmother wrote, in between descriptions of the latest concert.
Her parents must have known how wildly inappropriate this marriage was, but Mollie was all approval. “Music to our ears and the greatest wish fulfilled,” she wrote when she learned that my mother was, as she put it, “well and truly married.” She was even happier ten months later when the baby was born, enthusing, “Now you are a real woman!”
Mom wanted to name the baby for her sister, but Ernest persuaded her to forgo Rufus and settle for the more conventional Robert. He was a good baby, and she tried to be happy, but she was beginning to wonder if she had made a mistake. “I have everything I am supposed to want,” she wrote on one of her scraps of paper. “A presentable husband. A beautiful baby boy. A fine house. Why do I feel so sloppy, disgruntled and unattractive? I feel just like Orphan Annie.”
The months wear on and you can feel Mom’s spirits dwindle as she shrivels into the marriage. “I can’t talk to him!” she wrote. Instead she began writing letters to Ernest, pouring her dreams onto the paper. She wanted “a home filled with peace, a few understanding friends, books, music ... and above all deep understanding between ourselves. I need that to make life worthwhile.” She sounds so earnest, so wistful and so young.
But in his replies Ernest simply sounds baffled. All he wants is a compliant wife, and he releases a chorus of complaint. “I know your intentions are good but as I’ve told you before, you do not weigh your words carefully enough before speaking. I wonder if you will ever acquire this habit?” She is too reckless, too impetuous, too impatient. She does not keep a neat house. She must be more careful when she drives.
Reading their correspondence is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. She tries to conform to his pleasant respectability, but she always gets it wrong. Trying to serve food that will please him, she continually fails; his letters reproach her with forgotten gravy and invisible desserts. Before long he is stopping at his club to play tennis after work and staying on for supper.
In the end, Mom stopped apologizing. “I can feel myself growing more and more rebellious
,” she confessed to a friend. “Who cares about menus and the way they are cooked when there are so many more interesting things to think about?”
She described the marriage as “tempestuously unhappy,” but women of that time did not walk out merely because they were miserable. And they certainly did not leave when there were children. I had always wondered how Mom managed to extricate herself from this sad situation, and now I discovered the secret: He left her.
“I don’t think he ever loved me,” Mom lamented to her parents after Ernest declared that marriage was not for him. But to herself she admitted an even harder truth, one that reveals how thoroughly her confidence had been shattered. “I think he married me because he was in love with my mother,” she confessed. “She was so beautiful and so accomplished. What a disappointment I must have been!”
Her parents were shocked; divorce in those days was very rare. “Did you really try?” asked my grandmother accusingly when she found that Mom had taken the baby and moved to New York. “It was over so quickly!” The marriage had lasted less than two years.
But although Mom’s pride was wounded, she was relieved and she wasted no time on regret. “What a pleasure it is to be independent!” she scrawled across a piece of paper, the words so exuberant you can almost hear the “Hallelujah Chorus” blaring in the background. In short order she found a small apartment in Greenwich Village, a baby nurse and a job, and set out to create that life she had dreamed of, the one filled with books, music and understanding friends.
Talking about the time between her marriages, Mom always glowed. “I finally found myself in New York,” she said, “and I actually began to like myself a little. And for the first time in my life men liked me too. Then, one night ...” Mom’s voice always got dreamily seductive when she reached this point in her story. “I came home from a party and looked into the mirror. And then I looked again. I realized that a miracle had occurred: I was pretty!”