Mother Tongue

by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi

  The sun’s rays gradually began to dissolve and fade the quilt’s hundred-year-old fibers. I thought of taking it down and preserving it in a dark closet. But I couldn’t hide away the quilt’s beauty or rescue it from time’s burn. Each year that Clare and Paolo and I live in Parma, we explore a little further Emiline’s invention.

  What else did you bring for Clare?

  I had set aside a pair of pillowcases embroidered by her great-grandmother on her father’s side. They were made of muslin. They had pale green tendrils and blue forget-me-nots. I met this grandmother once. Her husband was a farmer and she had large, work-worn hands. She made the linens as a wedding gift. I kept them for Clare. I had nothing from her father’s other grandmother, and nothing from Ruth, her father’s mother. When I remarried, Ruth gave me a wedding gift, one of the first personal things she’d ever given me. It was a lacy, frilly slip, in two pieces. In its strangeness, I feel that she tried to express participation in what women share and go through.

  I also tucked in two magical blackish-green mother-of-pearl fountain pens. They are Parker pens and come from the 1920s. One is fat and squat and on it is written the name Rosa Jenkins. On the other, which is longer, is the name May Jenkins. Both have gold tips. The two pens belonged to a mother and daughter, my mother’s grandmother and mother. I have nothing else of theirs. I have to imagine their full voices. May Jenkins was a Phi Beta Kappa and married my grandfather, the one who became a U.S. senator. I wanted to pass the pens on to Clare, although they came unaccompanied by their histories of exchanges and observations. I have a few letters: “We are sitting on the porch, watching the dark heat of an August storm move in across the lake.” “May, we are glad you are having such a good time at college and we count the days to your return.” The pens, mother’s and daughter’s, mysteriously remaining a set, possess intrinsic strength.

  I had a gold watch with a date on it—July 3, 1892—that belonged to my father’s mother. It was given to her on her graduation and had a wonderful set of spidery hands, two oyster-sized gold doors with a girlish scene of birds and flowers engraved on them.

  A robber broke a window in my study soon after we moved to Parma. He hurled a stone through a back window, stood on a bicycle, put his muddy feet on my papers on the desk, left a dark handprint on the wall, crossed the house, dropping two burnt matches on the marble floor and, from the bureau in the bedroom, took this watch that had held a place in my family for one hundred years. The watch was probably melted for a few days of drugs.

  I brought across a sketch of my unknown grandmother. My father worked it out in pen and ink when he was an art student. In the cross-hatchings I can recognize a look I’ve seen in some photos of me. It is a look of martyrdom in my eyes, when they are feeling motherly and unheeded. I never knew Eda. She died in the same hour I was born.

  I have no stories to tell Clare about Eda, except the one about the harrowing hour when our lives crossed. That hour lies at the center of my life. As my grandmother died, sitting in my grandfather’s La Salle in Milwaukee, I was born three hundred miles away. Soon after, I was found in my crib covered with blood. After three days of transfusions and the last rites offered by nun nurses, the small-town family doctor said that he had read that on the European front they were using vitamin K for men with deep wounds. Could he try its clotting powers on me?

  My birth was marked by Eda’s sudden death and the great good fortune of having been saved by a doctor in Chippewa Falls who had continued to study. My father wrote me about that day eighteen years later. The hour once again flew off the page.

  “The day of mother’s death was the most difficult of my entire life. I know your life will not in any way be an ordinary one. You possess great gifts. It will also be touched by that hour where life as we know it begins and ends. I know that you will realize the dreams your grandmother had for you and that she went along her path supremely happy at having met her princess at long last.”

  My father, who unveiled precious little of himself, trusted words too much. Yet a perceptible unspoken space slipped in between the lines of his Victorian tome. The depth of feeling was quite similar to his sensitive, mild eyes. It didn’t belong to the legislation regulating the reform of the judiciary and later the foreign policy speeches he wrote for my grandfather in the Senate. His intellect was far-ranging, thorough, and placed ethics well above art. It didn’t emanate from Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher, who often took over our dining-room conversation, in applications that hampered our behavior. It didn’t belong to his American rhetoric about history and citizenship and Oscar Wilde, who inexplicably was his sole literary reference. Father’s own lost connections with painting were intrinsic in his hopes for my unordinariness. But inside the hour he described—chaos fighting with order—real life surged through. Losing his mother was the most difficult experience he had ever had. In that frightening hour, his sweet, suffocated life came clear and his conflictual feelings were flung beyond his careful observance of the duties, responsibilities, and control that dominated his large creative spirit. In that hour, too, my life was seen as itself, governed from elsewhere, unique—like all lives under the sky.

  From your own mother, what did you bring?

  Not much in the way of things. By the time we moved to Parma, my mother, Fritzi, was struggling with so much loss in her own life that for some time she had not been in a mood to reach out. Her husband, my father, had died. My son had died. Her second husband had died. The romantic world she believed in had been cruel. Years later, she gave me a silver pitcher, and worried about all that we didn’t get in divisions of her family’s property. The pitcher is friendly and has four legs and a colonial puffed belly. She didn’t want to give it away when I asked for it when Paolo and Clare and I left America. When she gave it to me and I could put its incongruous shape on the table and pour water from it into all the Venetian glasses Paolo’s sister had given us, I told Clare that I had always wanted it for her.

  I told her how Mother had difficulty parting with it, but how years later she admitted she had been too unhappy to give it away. It held happy memories of her first years of marriage. The pitcher sits gleaming in the center of the table when guests come. The gift, a memory from my childhood, doesn’t stand in for the senator’s daughter. Or the widow. It is an object that has left behind its past and been revised. It now holds a new, invisible link, a spirit of love, small and domestic, that no one besides Clare and me imagines or sees. The water shines. In pouring it out, I feel the severe, odd safety of the oval table I knew as a child. I feel Clare taking up the handle, and glimpsing her grandmother’s house while my father was alive, and yet its meaning falls into the present. The capacity to say I hurt and I can change is the offering and the secret carried across the generation and the ocean itself.

  The water pitcher, as if celebrating its beauty, showed up as an inscrutable lump in five airport screens. It was unwrapped over and over before it reached its shelf in Parma.

  Other treasures?

  I brought my aunt Betty’s master’s thesis. I didn’t bring my aunt Rosemary’s Ph.D. work from Harvard. Rosemary’s research covered an aspect of Mexican independence and the five-year economic plans of the 1930s. Her promise, so much intellect and a real drive to live in the masculine world, was crushed. The first female instructor of economics at Harvard, she retired to the house, two children, and tending a husband who didn’t get tenure. One copy of the thesis lies under the double bed at the lake in Wisconsin, yellowed, watermarked with molds, waiting for an acceptable burial that will never come. Left in the family summer house, with “brilliant” scrawled on many pages, it seems a Freudian cry, a plea for someone—mother, father, brother, or sisters—to mourn or deal with this aborted and abandoned chance.

  On the other hand, the black cloth-covered sixty-page thesis produced by my aunt Betty, who divorced after a year of marriage, is a toolbox for independence. It is a work of the heart and feelings of someone going her own way. Betty
wrote a master’s thesis using prose poems to describe the difficult lives of emotionally troubled students whom she counseled. She abandoned her own image, didn’t look for parental approval, let go of class as an identity, and lived in an open and modest way the truth of her life. She continued to follow life in prisons. She looked at love and protested the deforming chaos inside many families. This forthright woman, who was as round as an opossum, with permanents that made her hair look like grapes on her head, bought a new black Ford convertible every two years. She had women friends and they left each other gifts in their wills. They climbed mountains. They traveled along the Mississippi. In her retirement, my aunt took up farming and worked forty acres with her partner. She wrote a farewell for her funeral and said after two years of suffering with cancer, “Do not weep for me. I have led the good life.”

  Those two aunts held poles open. One lived independence and American self-invention. The other, who tried to use her intellect in a straightforward way in the establishment, became, in the America of the 1940s and 1950s, voiceless and defeated. At some level she rationalized her life, accepting the givens of femininity, and decided not to try.

  You can see why I rebelled. Just look at the colors for the married women. Not one full-blown flowered scarf; or a moment considering meeting another man even to pour out one’s own loneliness; not a woman friend to sob to; not a set of projects or a new degree or reading the want ads; not an aspiration or need to work or volunteer; not one trip to see the crocodiles and cockatoos; not a search at night to have ones thirst slaked by a god; not a protest against segregation or the war; not a clove of garlic or a deep-fat fried carp, not one bottle of wine. No words about penises or vaginas or flesh. What did it entail, this life of being a woman?

  The difficulty of reconciling feeling and intelligence and femaleness was not easy for women raised in Protestant puritanical homes in the desultory cultural pressures of Midwestern backyards and the contradictory twentieth-century American idea of promise. My own mother was confused about her intelligence. She was terrified of using it and preferred resorting to her beauty. Mother instead took on motherhood optimistically, without admitting to herself that it can be strange, difficult, and even soul-destroying. She put it on four times like a wonderful and sought-after dress. When it grew too tight and she began to notice its uncomfortable feel, she started, unsuccessfully, to remake and remodel each of us. She worked on surfaces, not without reason—flat chests, nearsightedness, good manners, the art of conversation devised from self-help books—but often didn’t really establish where her fears of failure ended and we began. It led to some bad mistakes and distances that were difficult to overcome.

  In her own life, she unquestioningly put on girdles, “for that bit of extra control.” When she was alone, she napped. She didn’t interfere. She let us go. Independence is part of her nature, but she couldn’t admit it openly. It was a conflict for her as much as it was for her two husbands. After she took the years of painful mothering off, she was one of the few women in her group of friends to still have a tiny waist. The word waist is defined as something that “grows, increases, augments.” Hers remained, persisting like a diamond engagement ring.

  In Thoreau’s chapter on reading in Walden, he makes a negative distinction between written and spoken language. He describes the difference using an analogy from gender:

  There is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.

  His general assumptions become imprisoning observations because he introduces the idea of lesser by using an analogy from gender. Otherwise Thoreau’s distinctions are interesting in relation to the phenomenon of reading. In his categories, it would seem that the father tongue represents culture and its logical representations. The mother tongue, nearly brutish, has to do with feeling, everyday telling, perhaps even who we are. Reading is nearly a rebirth, “select … too significant to be heard by the ear.” It is serious, distilled, and quite unnatural. Spoken exchange is transitory and undeveloped. Thoreau’s choice of using gender as the divide remains the crippling point. His type of assumption is what women generally met when they began to receive education in the English-speaking world. They were to be grateful for the chance of learning the father tongue. The mother tongue, the world of feeling and caring, assigned to them as their everyday duty as mothers, was asserted to be of little worth. However they moved, women who tried to fit themselves to external definitions of who they were were trapped and split. His words, perhaps, cast a beam of light on the Harvard aunt and Fritzi, my mother.

  Generally, books, especially literature and philosophy, were studies in walls—telling women that they were out of place. The white American mothers, who assumed they were a privileged group because of education and color, lived in the ghetto of the house and the eventual isolation of the suburbs. They took full responsibility for the children and were then devalued, especially in a society in which children were raised to leave home. The more educated women were often the worst misfits. Educated women, who were unable to assume roles in society, were also denied status and independence even in the home, where tasks ceased to be absorbing.

  Mother tongue, standing for mother, is seen by Thoreau as a split-off from the language of “maturity and experience,” of the world. Her language, insignificant and “almost brutish,” is her own feelings and intelligence miniaturized, suspected, and dismissed. What mothers had to teach must be reinterpreted by formal training. Mother tongue is not part of books; nor should its unformed authority exist there. The written tautologies are stupid as much as cruel. What is more terrifying, though, is that they were lived, often without questioning. In the unexpelled assumption of male superiority, women were often confined to passive and eternal doubt.

  Many white Protestant American mothers were also terrified of their femaleness. As an old friend and writer at Oxford used to say to me, “Thank God the Puritans decided to leave England for America. They were a real curse.” Mother told her old love stories over and over. They were moments of romance and passions, and she was greatly susceptible to both. But they had darker unresolved elements in them; they were childish stories, romances between the ages of ten and twenty. In a way they were about sex, but in another they were about possibility, freedom, some moment before the rule of law set in. Each of Mother’s three engagements led her, by her own accounting, closer to the forbidden edge. Mother retold a story perhaps one hundred times about how, when she was dressing for her evening as prom queen, her father stood between her and the mirror and, with a hard stroke, wiped the lipstick off her mouth. He told her not to be a hussy. That one gesture, since she adored her father, perhaps changed her entire life. O beloved father, O you whom I will not displease or disobey. She talked a lot about all the boys she had kissed on the back gate, and boys she had sledded with, and boys she had outskated and from whom she had snatched cigarettes and skated away. She used to stand in the door of my bedroom and talk too much, to the monstrously tall, skinny adolescent that I was. I found her once in a closet reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and, to my surprise, she commanded me not to tell my father. In those years, whatever it was that Mother sensed and missed and longed for, she failed to live.

  Mother developed no independence when we were growing up. She didn’t read, she didn’t play games, there was no gardening and snipping of roses. She lived within terrible limits without protesting. When, for example, Father told her she couldn’t join the church choir because he wanted her home at night, she agreed. She didn’t seem to know that she could have (a) cried or shouted, (b) asked Father to sight-read Bach as she could and afterwar
d volleyed, “Well, then?” (c) gone to choir by putting the key in her white Ford convertible and coming back at ten. I can hear Mother’s voice insisting, “Now I wouldn’t hesitate. But then, women just didn’t do those things. They just didn’t.”

  Betty made some tapes for Clare. The other night, after more than ten years, we listened to my aunt’s voice coming from a tape, from the dead, from America, from our own memories. The tape would be almost meaningless to anyone except us, who knew her. There was no art in her rendering. Her pauses, which would have seemed laborious to someone else, brought back her deliberate, factual relationship to words. A voice and a mind, wanting to reach us without any more meaning than that, unwound for more than forty minutes. She gave us sightings of chickadees and explained how she seasoned wood after she chopped it. The dull methodical process filled us with a sensation that Betty, who had divorced and was not a mother, was at home in a neat, physical mother tongue.

  We were glad for the truth in the tape, glad for the experience of place. Clare was happy that Paolo had listened. As we got ready for bed, Clare called from her room. “Betty was just talking about them. Mom, Dad, the Wauwataysee that Longfellow wrote about in ‘Hiawatha.’ Fireflies, Wauwatosa, that’s where you grew up. They’re everywhere.” Flickering in the dark of our Parma back garden, schools of Wauwataysee danced their strobic magic above the ground.

  [11]

  FATHER

  Fear etched his brow. His long body shivered, wrapped in blankets and tied to the gurney with khaki straps and military saw-toothed buckles, so unlike him. Snow had its shocks. Now, it was slow, icy going. The ambulance turned on its light but didn’t up its speed or use its siren. Fifteen miles an hour was the most we dared in the storm from Chicago.