by Diana Altman
My mother arrived. The patch was off her eye, the bruise was gone, and her vision was restored. Though Leo told me I was glowing, I saw how I really looked when my mother caught sight of me. Her gaze turned shallow as she appraised the disheveled fatso, groggy from lack of sleep, who stood before her in a shapeless nightgown. “You know,” she said, “it’s very important not to let yourself go after you have a baby. This is the time when a man’s eyes stray.” That too? I was supposed to be earth mother and glamor puss all at the same time?
I brought her upstairs to see Hannah sleeping in her cradle. I whispered, “Isn’t she so beautiful?”
Mother hesitated then said, “Now, you were a pretty baby.”
“So is she!” Anger roiled my middle at the same time a warning voice said don’t get upset, you’re not strong enough right now. How could she not think Hannah was beautiful? Didn’t she have eyes in her head?
She did cook for Leo and me but she didn’t make the decisions about the menu and deciding what to have was, for me, the hardest part of making dinner. I seldom thought about food and didn’t want to think about food. “Well,” she said as I sat nursing Hannah, “we could have lamb chops. Does Leo like lamp chops? Is there a good butcher around here? Or I could make a lasagna. Should I make lasagna? Do you have the right kind of noodles? Or maybe I should try to make a chicken stew from that leftover chicken. Should you be nursing her again so soon? Didn’t you just nurse her? You know the breasts sag after you have a baby and nursing certainly doesn’t help that.” She left after four days.
Much of the time, she spoke about the houses she’d seen, how none of them appealed to her. Only one real estate agent stuck with Mother long enough to understand that what she really wanted was the opposite of what she said she wanted. Mrs. Adler did NOT want to live near her daughter Joan and did NOT want to babysit her grandchildren. The broker began to show Violet houses forty minutes from Manhattan—Bedford, Rye Brook, Harrison. Then an hour away, Rhinebeck, Kingston, New Paltz. Then two and three hours away in the Catskill Mountains where there were dairy farms and the closest entertainment was the grange hall.
After transferring the car seat from my car to the broker’s car, an ordeal that almost snapped me in two with impatience, I drove with Nancy and my mother to see the house that my mother loved. “It needs a lot of work,” Nancy said from behind the wheel, giving me a look in the rearview mirror that seemed to mean don’t faint when you see it. She was a beige person in her fifties who tuned her car radio to the easy listening station. It was late summer, a warm day, and the meadows were full of cows grazing. Horses standing in mud in paddocks next to red barns turned their heads to watch us drive by as they swatted flies with their tails.
The road didn’t even have a name and was so obscure that we passed it, turned around, passed it again even though Nancy and my mother had been there before. We stopped at a general store so Nancy could phone the local broker for directions then retraced our path until we came to an antique lamppost next to a stone wall. We turned from a road of well-kept farms to a dirt road that Nancy said was once used for logging. Canopied by ancient oaks that kept the surface in eerie shadows, the bumpy road went on and on through thick woods then stopped, a dead end. As if out of a fairy tale, there appeared an entrance gate made of wrought iron spears, sentinels standing vertically. Intruders would be gored trying to climb over. Nancy got out of the car, unlocked the gate, got back behind the wheel, and drove us up a winding overgrown driveway. The house was a grand Italianate villa with a roof of red clay tile and balconies on the second floor. Invisible from the road, it sat on ten acres of what used to be cleared forest but was now a tangle of vines and new growth. Though the house had been empty for years, it wasn’t easy to vandalize because the entire ten acres was enclosed by a tall fence topped with barbed wire. Nancy explained that the previous owner, a railroad magnate named Huntington, encircled the property with barbed wire because his children were young at the time that Charles Lindberg’s baby was kidnapped.
“What do you think?” my mother said breathless with excitement. I was speechless. “I know,” she said. “It’s breathtaking.” I strapped Hannah to the front of me and we explored the house.
On the wall next to a grand marble staircase were hunting trophies, mounted heads of stags with huge antlers laced with cobwebs, a tiger head covered in dust, a brown bear with a missing eye. “I’ll get rid of those, of course,” Mother said.
“But isn’t it sort of big?” We walked along the dusty upstairs hall and went in and out of six abandoned rooms with the remains of broken chandeliers hung from the cracked ceilings.
“No, not at all. There’s a room for you and Leo, Hannah can have her own room, Joan can have a room, Josh and Jenny can each have their own room. Here, let me show you my room.” We entered a corner room with large windows made of antique glass that wasn’t flat like modern glass but wavy. The view was thick forest. “Of course you can’t see it now,” my mother said, “but eventually the view will be an orchard. I’m going to grow apples and pears.”
In the old-fashioned kitchen, with linoleum curling up from the floor and pellets of mouse poop in the corners, was a leftover bottle of Aunt Jemima syrup with a rusted cap. Outside, we stood on a flagstone patio with tall weeds between each of the stones. “Now here is where I’m going to have the rose garden,” Mother said. “What do you think? Isn’t it magnificent?”
“It seems sort of big and out of the way. You’ll be all alone in the woods.”
“You and Joan will always be welcome. You two can spend the summers here. The children will have plenty of space for running around. Leo could set up an archery range over there.”
“An archery range?”
“Yes. He was in the navy, wasn’t he?” Then she said in a whisper, “You won’t believe how cheap this place is. I don’t think Nancy has any idea what she’s selling.”
“How much is it?”
“The bank owns it. They tried to auction it off but no one bid on it. Not one person! I can get it for a song.”
The town center was miles away, a bank, pharmacy, general store, post office, and tack shop that sold saddles, bridles, horse blankets, and feed buckets. There was no mailman, just post office boxes so in winter my mother would have to drive on icy roads to fetch letters and bills.
Uncle Alan said it was an absurd purchase, a woman alone in the middle of the woods with no neighbors. He could understand her wanting to get out of New York but the only sensible thing, she wasn’t getting any younger, would be to buy a house close to me in Newton. An old mansion in the middle of nowhere was not a sound investment. Had it been inspected? It was probably riddled with termites. Bats were probably living under the roof. No, he would not release the funds.
Then Alan sold the foreign branches of Greenstone Enterprises and Mother’s share was two million dollars. That money, he said, had to last the rest of her life. He intended to be very careful with it. He would invest in mutual funds. Their father put him in charge, and he intended to protect his sister from once again making a wrong decision.
She consulted a lawyer, he consulted a lawyer, and soon the lawyers were talking and Violet and Alan were not. Grandma, in Florida, heard about Violet’s choice and wanted me to talk some sense into my mother. “A woman all alone in the middle of the woods,” Grandma said, “is a woman in danger. Not only from an intruder but what if something happens to her? Who will find her if she falls down?”
Alan flew from Chicago to New York for their day in court. Joan had dinner with Uncle Alan one evening at Tavern on the Green. She said that he did not mention the lawsuit but the distress rash on his face was the color of a baboon’s bottom. The next day, hearing both sides, the judge determined that Mrs. Adler was competent, indeed intelligent, and the trust was dissolved. Alan had no authority over her money.
Her sister Dovey Lee was now living in Florida on the edge of a golf course with her husband Jack who was blissfully retired after sel
ling his poultry business to Agricolo Lazlo for several million. My mother expected Dovey Lee to take her side against Alan. Dovey Lee thought Alan had no right to control Violet’s money, no right to insist that his sister itemize all her expenses and submit them for approval, but she did not think that Violet should move so far from her children and live like a hermit in the woods. “Like a hermit!” my mother said to me on the phone. “Who does she think I am? I have no intention whatsoever of living like a hermit.” Misunderstanding that hermit to Dovey Lee probably meant an isolated person, Mother said, “If anything I am going to live like a queen in that house.” Nor did Dovey Lee agree to demean Alan by belittling him in the role of financial expert. “He can be full of himself sometimes,” was all she said. “No,” my mother said when I asked if she’d spoken lately to Dovey Lee. “I don’t have anything to say to Dovey Lee.” She was no longer speaking to Alan, either.
Masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, roofers, pavers, and landscapers set to work. Violet never phoned to ask about Hannah but did phone Leo at his architecture office several times a week for advice—were the bills her contractor presented fair, was flagstone the best material for a front path, should she put in electric heat or leave in the oil furnace, would he mind talking to the carpenter about trusses in the garage? She rented a room in a roadside motel several miles away and drove to her property every day to supervise the workers. She bought a tractor, a rototiller, and a pickup truck. She took down trees with a chainsaw and made sawdust in her own wood chipper. She planted apple trees, and pear trees. She germinated seeds in cold frames. She planted a rose garden and a perennial garden and a vegetable garden. She bought a greenhouse and delighted in the possum that had babies under there then she felt sad when her cat caught one of the babies and dropped it proudly at Violet’s feet.
When she wasn’t busy outdoors, she was learning how to invest. She did not sink her money into mutual funds but bought stock. She read books by Peter Lynch and Warren Buffet, watched the Nightly Business Report and Wall Street Week. She subscribed to ValueLine, Barrons, and the Wall Street Journal. She had a formula for investing: the company’s PE ratio had to be fourteen, the company had to be debt free, and it had to show growth for the last five years. She thought computers might turn out to be popular so she bought two unknown start-ups, Microsoft and Apple. She entered the management of her money in a ferocious and private way. “Dad treated me like I was stupid,” she said, “because I acted like I was stupid.” Now she would show her father that she was as sharp as he was. When a stock price rose she turned her eyes up to her father who was always hovering above her and said, “Ha!” in a gloating way as if he’d advised against it.
The news spread among the six hundred residents of the village of Gideon that someone bought the dilapidated mansion at the end of the logging road. Probably they saw her at the post office and the grocery store. Maybe they noticed her in her new truck. The first intrepid visitor was the local minister.
He pressed the intercom on the entrance gate. “I didn’t know what that sound was at first,” Mother told me. “I thought maybe it was the toaster.” Her visitor was man in his late forties who invited her to a church supper. “He suggested I join the Episcopal church.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said I didn’t really believe in religion. He said why? I said I thought it was the root of everything wrong with the world, the cause of wars and the cause of ignorance and priests were in it just to line their own pockets.”
“You said that?”
“I certainly did.”
“So what’d the poor guy do?”
“He said I would be pleasantly surprised by how congenial the people in his congregation are. There are many interesting groups to belong to. For instance I might like to join the local history group. They have quite a bit of information about my house.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said like what? He said the granddaughter of the original Huntington who built the house was an eccentric who died here and they didn’t find her for three days.”
“What a horrible thing to say!”
“Oh, it didn’t bother me. He was proving a point. If she’d gone to church, Jesus would have saved her.”
“What a creep!”
“Then he started talking all kinds of mumbo jumbo about how helpful Jesus was to him personally when he had a crises.”
“Why didn’t you just tell him you’re Jewish?”
“None of his business.”
The next person to venture down the rutted logging road was a woman from the Welcome Committee. Her welcome basket included a map of the area, a list of the activities at the grange hall, the church, and the 4H Club, and a pie made almost entirely of Cool Whip. Violet perhaps made a strong impression on the welcome woman because no one else rang the buzzer until several months later, when a man soliciting votes for school committee approached the gate and heard a staticky voice respond, “Thank you, I’m not interested.” The residents of Gideon got the idea
Gone were her high heels, fur coats, cashmere sweater sets. Her wardrobe was overalls, flannel shirts, and clumpy waterproof boots. She stopped dying her hair, and we saw she’d gone past gray to pure white. She was up at dawn planting, transplanting, shoveling, lugging bags of manure, peat moss, fertilizer. At night, she sewed curtains for all of the rooms from fabric she bought in Oneonta, the closest city. On Sundays, so she told me on the phone, she stayed in bed all day first reading the financial pages of major newspapers then enjoying one of her Clint Eastwood movies. He was her ideal man. Never an unnecessary word out of his skinny lips, he needed no one.
Chipping away day after day at the work that had to be done, Mother’s orchard grew, flourished, and dropped fruit in the fall that the deer shared. She made applesauce. Her basement shelves were lined with canned tomatoes from her garden and her freezer was stocked with soups made from vegetables she grew. In the summer, vases on every window sill were full of flowers from her annual garden. I stood awed, watching her back her tractor out of its shed, then drive to a space she had cleared with her chainsaw for a potato patch. Using the backhoe attachment, she dug boulders out of the ground then drove them in the lifted bucket to the place where she was creating a stone patio. Once lowered, the stones had to be adjusted. This pushing and twisting and leveling required muscle. The softness in her body, the rounded belly and ample hips, melted away. It was startling to see a buff white-haired woman with toned arms, and capable shoulders. Her eyes changed, too. That filmy quality was replaced by an attractive clearness that probably came from large doses of fresh air.
When she wasn’t outside, she was in her office following the stock market. After keeping careful notebooks of her buys and sells, she decided record keeping might be easier with a spreadsheet so she bought herself an IBM computer and set about trying to learn to use it. “You can’t learn that by yourself,” I said. “You should sign up for a class at the local high school.”
“I’ll get it eventually.”
“No. You won’t. There are all kinds of keystrokes you have to learn to make the thing work. One combination makes the word repeat, another erases the word. It’ll take you til the twelfth of never to learn all that by yourself.” But she did learn it. Probably if I’d watched her using her computer, I would have gone mad with impatience but she got the job done, had spreadsheets itemizing the rise or fall of every stock she bought. “You know,” she said to me, “when I was married I never knew how much anything cost. I didn’t care. I wanted steak, I bought steak. Now I know how much everything costs.” There was no apology to Seymour in this announcement, no acknowledgement that he was perhaps not a miser but a man with a ceiling on his income.
There wasn’t a trace of me or Joan or our children in any room and when Joan, in a display of how oblivious she could be, presented our mother with framed 8x10 school portraits of Josh and Jenny smiling against watery blue backgrounds, I wondered what Mother would do. She
stood the frames on her bedroom bureau until Joan drove back to Manhattan, then put them in a drawer in the basement where she left them until Joan, looking for a screwdriver on her next visit, found them in the tool cabinet, brought them upstairs and said, “What were these doing in the basement?” and stood them again on Mother’s bedroom bureau.
Mother hired a handyman named Carl, a taciturn old geezer who helped with mulching and spring clean up and in the winter plowed her driveway. The third winter she was there, she fell off her stepladder while trying to put up storm windows and broke her wrist. “Why didn’t you call Carl?” I asked when I saw her arm in a sling. “I don’t know,” she said. “Never thought of it.”
Watching her property change from a tangle of weeds into an estate with abundant gardens, and birds flitting their wings in birdbaths and pecking at feeders, and chipmunks scurrying across the deck, and deer peering cautiously from behind trees, and crows filling the air with their language, and troops of turkeys hunched in dark clothes like nuns walking across the snow, I was filled with admiration and confused at the same time. Her determination to be independent was understandable but, at the same time, it hurt because I was included in those she didn’t need. “I am letting go,” she said with pride, thinking that disengagement with the world was an enlightened position. At the same time, she often quoted Barbra Streisand’s song saying, “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.”