What My Mother and I Don't Talk About

  “I need you to go out for dinner,” she says seriously. “Please don’t do this now.”

  By now I’m aware every day that my mother is scarily smart. She got only halfway through college and never says why. But she talks about Turgenev, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Pritchett, both Eliots, Pound, Lessing, Chekhov, Céline—and she reads books by literary critics. Something inside drives her through books. She says it drove her mother too—Esther, who only got to third grade in Russia before she had to go to work, rolling cigarettes in a factory with other children, bare-fingered in the freezing cold.

  I’ll never be able to read all those books, I don’t want a PhD, and I am doomed to disappoint my intellectual parents. So I do what I’m good at: hanging out with boys, especially boys in their twenties with long hair and cars and drugs.

  “I’m late,” I say. “And that checkbook is just stupid.” And we are off, arguing over a figment we can’t even name.

  My mother struggles with the numbers on clocks, with left and right, with counting out change at Grand Union. But balancing the checkbook is part of her job. She stays at it, poking the adding machine with the eraser end of a pencil till she gets it down to the penny.

  She is a housewife.

  The next morning, my father takes me into his office. It’s a beautiful room—red walls, cedar ceiling, deep leather Eames chairs where the shrink and patient sit.

  “Take it easy with Erica,” my father says gently. “She’s having a rough time.”

  Later that day, when they are out, I search my mother’s dresser. I don’t know what I’m looking for because I don’t know what the question is, but I do find the answer: a small cardboard box with a gold lid. It’s hidden under a scarf and filled with Seconal—maybe twenty red capsules, bright as blood.

  So I am not the only one filching downers from my father.

  Hours after I bring him her suicide stash, she takes one careful step into my room. “I am really sorry,” she says somberly, “you had to find that.” She says, “I don’t know why I felt compelled to stockpile those pills. But I want you to know I never planned to take them.”

  It’s a speech, and she has come to the end of it.

  She has one hand on the doorknob, and I don’t know how to swim to her or if I even want to.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  * * *

  It is 1947 and my mother is twenty. She has quit the University of Miami and moved to New York, and for an easy few months she lives rent-free on West 114th Street, in a building owned by her father, Ulrich. Once he managed Miami hotels and Borscht Circuit resorts; now he is in a wheelchair. He depends on his second wife, who dislikes my mother, to feed him, bathe him, help him to the john. And Ulrich is weak in other ways. He has never stood up for his baby girl. When Erica was little, and asthmatic, her mother would charge to her bed at night with a hairbrush in her raised hand and hiss, “Stop. That. Coughing,” until her daughter learned to choke it back.

  Esther’s violence was a force as unstoppable for him as his own stroke. But he’s told Erica, I’ve made it up to you, sweetheart. When I’m gone, you’ll be set.

  And so my mother is shocked to find herself homeless, cut off, on his death a few months later. “Because my daughter, Erica Ellner, has displeased me in ways she will recall and understand,” the lawyer says, eyeing her over his glasses, “I leave her the sum of four thousand dollars.” The rest of the estate—and there is a lot of it, including the building where she lives—goes to her stepmother.

  It’s a new will.

  “She forced him to sign that,” my mother says through her fingers. “Can I sue?”

  “Not if you’re already in his will,” the lawyer says. “That’s the purpose of the four thousand dollars. You understand? Now you can’t say he disinherited you.”

  * * *

  Thanksgiving 1976. Erica is in her study, sorting through papers, which somehow creates a mess she cannot corral, which utterly confounds her. Then her daughter asks if she can take the oil portrait for her dorm room.

  “Please do,” says Erica. “I’m so tired of looking at it.” It’s that tinge of regret in the painting that gets her. She’s moved on, but the woman in the picture has not.

  She adds, “When I was a young woman, I modeled for the Art Students League.”

  “Really,” her daughter says. She has an encouraging way of hanging on Erica’s stories without prying. “Did you save any of the work?”

  “No. But I did walk by once and see my portrait in the window.”

  As she talks, she moves a sheaf of brown envelopes from a manila folder into a liquor carton and tucks them into place. She does this as if this were meaningless household work and not the concealment of a dozen unopened—never mind uncashed—Medicare reimbursement checks for her husband’s psychotherapy work.

  The idea is that she deposits each check in the bank, enters the amount into a business spreadsheet, and squares everything up. Debits, credits, categories. But she cannot square things up. So she buries the checks, like a squirrel.

  Her daughter gets excited. Well, of course, they both know the building. It’s beautiful, French Renaissance style, with tall and prominent display windows.

  “Did you go in and try to buy it?”

  “No,” says Erica. “I could use some help in the kitchen.”

  “You didn’t track down the artist?”

  “Not that interested, I suppose.”

  “In your own portrait?”

  Erica tucks in the flaps of the carton. It bears typed labels that say CLOTHES FOR DONATION. “Come help me cut green beans,” she says.

  The carton must have a thousand, two thousand dollars of checks in it by now. Soon she will start a new one. How does one get rid of such things?

  * * *

  The Bill Rivers story is a parasitical worm that swims beneath her skin.

  * * *

  In 1946, Bill Rivers comes to New York and studies at the Art Students League for three years.

  In 1947, my mother begins to model there.

  She is twenty-one, fatherless, and evicted. She moves as far from West 114th Street as she can get, to a town house smack where Minetta Street runs into Minetta Lane.

  The apartment is small and dark, but the building is a frosted cake. She gets a job selling ads for the Yellow Pages over the phone, and sells more ads than anyone in her office, using her bright-but-serious voice.

  For pin money, she models at the Art Students League.

  The studio smells deliciously of turpentine, though when she sees that most of the students are men, she stands quite still holding her pocketbook. Then the instructor sees her and says, “Thank you for coming to our workshop,” as if she were a visiting artist.

  He hands her a folded white sheet and directs her to a standing screen.

  My mother takes off her clothes quietly. Nude modeling for the purposes of art is not erotic. She knows this. It’s a job. She knows this. She looks down at her body, which is sexy and curvy when she’s dressed but maybe not so lovely when she’s naked. Her breasts are perky, but the nipples are inverted—slightly pursed at the tips. Her doctor says she will have to bottle-feed when the time comes.

  My mother wraps herself in the sheet and walks out with her shoulders erect.

  She is good at holding a pose. She is good at finding the pose again after a break. She is good at noticing, from the corner of her eye, how the young men might as well be medical students the way they study her body, probing with their gazes for line, light, shadow.

  And maybe she thinks that one of them notices through his eyelashes when she robes herself; and because she thinks he is exceptionally handsome, she takes her time arranging the sheet, and stops to look at how he’s portraying her.

  Not till it’s finished, he says, and blocks her view. Haywood Rivers. Call me Bill. He holds out his hand. A pleasure painting you, Erica.

  My mother closes her eyes. Let me guess, she says. She watches films like a critic
and has an uncanny ear for accents. Just by listening at the movies, she’s erased her own New York twang. One of the Carolinas, she says, and that is just the first time she cracks him up.

  * * *

  It’s April 1992, and the magnolia in my parents’ side yard is showing off blossoms big as salad plates. My little boy is in the living room playing with trains, ignoring the narrative my father is trying to concoct.

  Upstairs, my mother tells me and my husband what sounds like the end of the Bill Rivers story. We’re in her cluttered study. It’s cozy, my mother’s version of gathering around a hearth.

  She tells us he gave her a painting.

  “You had a Bill Rivers painting?” My husband looks almost covetous. He is interested in African American art—very interested; we have begun, at a low level, to collect it. He knows exactly who Haywood Bill Rivers is. “Where is it?”

  “After we lost touch,” my mother says, “I tried to sell it.”

  We are amazed, my husband because he can’t believe my family would let go of such a thing, me because when you and your friend are so close you have pet names for each other, why would you turn around and sell the painting he gave you?

  My mother goes on: “I read that Harry Abrams had a big collection of work by black artists. So I called him. I told him what I had, and he said, Bring it in.”

  She recognizes many of the artists whose paintings hang in Harry Abrams’s office. She works now at the Metropolitan Museum, in Permissions, and spends her lunch hour strolling through the galleries.

  He looks at the painting, at her, at the painting, and, she says, lowballs her.

  “Thank you for your time,” my mother says, and takes her painting home.

  My husband and I eye each other. She knew the work had value.

  “So where is it?” I say.

  “It got damaged in a move,” my mother says vaguely, as if a move had inflicted itself upon the painting without her knowledge.

  “Damaged how?” I ask.

  “I don’t remember.” Her hand waggles through the air, indicating that the episode has dissipated like so much smoke.

  “How damaged?” my husband asks.

  My mother shrugs. “Probably badly.”

  My husband and I exchange looks again. “Paintings can be restored,” I say, and leave the rest hanging—you hung out with artists, you worked in a museum, you knew that. “So what happened to it?”

  My mother’s hand floats out again. So much smoke. “I threw it away.”

  * * *

  The Bill Rivers story is a parasitical worm that swims beneath my skin.

  * * *

  He’s been thinking about Paris almost since that sheet fell from her like a chrysalis. Half the painters he respects are in Paris or going there. Beauford Delaney. Ed Clark. Lois Mailou Jones, who has some balls for a woman, going alone.

  Often they go to Stanley’s. Erica fits right in. She’s a finely tuned listener, and when she has something to add, her intelligence glitters. There is talk of a new gallery being formed in Paris by some of the black expat artists, and he wants to paint modern paintings now, and be a part of it.

  He brings Erica’s painting to Minetta Lane. Do you like it? he says, and he genuinely wants to know.

  He watches her carefully study the intricate pattern but also the chunks of light, the blocks of color. This is the end of his figurative period, the churches, the aunts. The portraits from his classes. He’s aware of that.

  I love this, she says at last. And it means so much to me to have it.

  And then, or sometime after, one of two things happens.

  Either he asks her—and she blows it.

  Or else he never asks her at all.

  * * *

  In May 1983 I phone home with my news.

  My fiancé and I hold the phone together, in the bright doorway of our balcony. We live in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and we’re both reporters for the Times-Picayune—he’s investigative, I’m medical.

  He is black. I am white.

  He feels strongly that I should wait and do this in person. I don’t understand his reservations. I am twenty-seven years old. I love my parents. I can’t wait.

  I am ignorant.

  My father answers and I tell him and he says, “This is the best news you could give me, honey. If I had to handpick my son-in-law, I would pick him.” Then I hear him bellow up the stairs for my mother.

  To my amazement, when I tell her, she lets a long silence unspool till I am unsettled. This is a woman who fed me books by Alice Walker, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison—who brought me to the Broadway opening of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Maybe that does not mean what I thought it meant.

  Finally she says, “What about the children?”

  I am twenty-seven. I am ignorant.

  “What about them?” I say, angry and cavalier. “We aren’t going to beat them.”

  * * *

  In 1949, Bill Rivers goes to Paris, where he meets an American woman with a glinting mind and an incandescent smile. Her name is Betty Jo Robirds. She has a master’s in English and a Fulbright, which has brought her to the Sorbonne. She is white.

  Imagine that he takes Betty Jo to Les Deux Magots, where the expat writers and painters and musicians, black and white, drink excellent, cheap French wine. She fits right in, laughing along with everyone else, and when she talks she’s funny and smart.

  It is like being with Erica at Stanley’s, but better because it’s Paris, and he feels his artistic life opening here like a rare night-blooming flower.

  One of the expat painters says, Any word from Erica? and he puts his arm around Betty Jo, who doesn’t waste time worrying about what’s not in front of her.

  We’ve lost touch, he says.

  When he asks her to marry him, Betty Jo doesn’t ask, What about the children? But because France has laws against interracial marriage, they take a boat to England in 1951 and marry there. They have a son first, then a daughter. A perfect doll of a brown baby, reports Jet magazine. Is she still managing to take classes at the Sorbonne? Bill works with paint so thick now, in ambers, blues, and muted greens, that some of his canvases can’t even be rolled up and shipped back home.

  When Betty Jo looks back later on the Paris years before their divorce, one obituary will say, she recalls “poverty, beauty, and happiness.”

  * * *

  Or else he never asks my mother at all.

  * * *

  My mother has one more chapter to share. She reveals it to me when our son is ten, and I am alone with her again in that cozy, messy room.

  She is walking in New York one day, many years after those days in the Village, when she hears her name called. Bill Rivers is walking toward her, his face lit with recognition.

  “Our eyes met,” my mother says. “He saw instantly that I knew him. But I snubbed him, Dylan. I looked away as if he were a stranger, and I walked right past him.”

  My heart aches as if the person she had snubbed were me, or herself.

  For the next twenty years and probably for the rest of my life, I will replay that moment, revising it, trying to get my mother’s face to light up too. In this movie, I steer her into the embrace, into ardent conversation on the sidewalk as people flow around them, then the inevitable drink at—where are they? Fifty-Sixth Street?—the Oak Room, and the beginning of a slow reversal in her life, aching and grieving, as radical and cataclysmic as when the Chicago River began its arduous turnaround and flowed the other way.

  In this movie, Bill Rivers is a free man. My mother is not a free woman. But I’m not considering my father, who would be crushed, and lost. And I don’t care about the younger me. All I want is for Yum to dance again.

  “Why did you walk away?” I ask her in the study that day. I’m almost imploring her.

  “I don’t know why,” she says. “I’m so ashamed of my behavior that day.”

  You do know why, I think. Of cours
e you know.

  “We could try to find him,” I say. “We could look him up.”

  She brings her hand to her mouth.

  “It would be too painful,” she says. “Please don’t.”

  I give her my word. I leave it alone.

  I always leave it alone.

  * * *

  Bill Rivers dies in 2002. I won’t find this out for years.

  * * *

  A year before Erica’s death, when she is eighty-four and I am fifty-seven, I ask her a personal question, and it’s the wrong one.

  “You’ve spoken so often of Bill Rivers,” I say. My mother looks at me brightly from her wheelchair. “He gave you a painting. You had this amazing . . . friendship. And I’ve always wondered.”

  My mother waits. She is still beautiful, though her hair has grayed rather than silvered, and her body slightly thickened. Her sweater hides a feeding tube, and her scarf a tracheostomy tube.

  Deep breath. “Mom, were you and Bill Rivers intimate?”

  I have asked her nurse to give us privacy. My mother can no longer live without a nurse. In the bedroom, my father slumbers, his own wheelchair nearby.

  My mother straightens and shoots blue light at me.

  “I am offended,” she says, “that you would ask me this.”

  My father dies in May 2014 and my mother dies seven weeks later, just after a state of rapture in which she declares the following while I take frantic notes:

  “Give your friends a message for me. I accept the miracle that is upon me. I accept the miracle that is upon me. I accept the pain with appreciation. I am the luckiest woman in the world.” And, after a pause, “I think one of the worst things in the world is to be cynical.”