Memories of my mother, the poet Ruth Stone 1915-2011
Mother died. I have to say that. Not as a reminder, but simply because it is the largest thought occupying my brain. Mother died and Mother died.
I took the subway into Manhattan. That’s the first thing I remember doing after watching my mother die. It was the day after, and my computer had died like a tribute to my mother. I headed to the Apple Store. While waiting for the subway, a grubby man sidled up and spit right near me. Rats ran along the rails below where I stood- and when the train came, the Q train squealing into the Beverly Road Station, I got on and had to stand next to a pervert who fell against me repeatedly whenever the train lurched.
The Apple boy who checked my Mac pronounced the hard-drive dead. I staggered out of the store. By the way, the little dog who lived with my mother also died a few hours after she died. Why should the grim reaper waste an extra trip? Not to mention every little issue, but my daughter’s cat also died during a routine operation the same day as my mother died. Well. Before getting back on the Q train, I betook myself to Starbucks to partake of a coffee and their bathroom, and therein a person in the next stall was vomiting and vomiting and vomiting while I peed reluctantly. Mother is dead, said my brain. And the bathroom resounded with retching.
That night, I dreamed a Christian right wing woman was shouting at me, “Murder! Murder! Abortion is murder!” I also dreamed my mother answered the phone. “I’m not really dead,” she said. I started crying with relief and woke myself up. Mother died, my brain reminded me. Shut up, I said.
A few days passed. My sister called and cried. Mother was still lying in the same bed in the house where she had spent the last two years of her life, wrapped in a shroud and beginning to decompose I imagined. “We’re trying to get papers to bury Mother in Goshen, on her own land,” my sister said.
“Why? Why?” Oh, said my brain, haven’t you heard? Your mother is dead.
A week passed. A family member built the coffin and hired a backhoe and they put Mother to rest finally, out by the raspberry bushes behind where the old barn had stood before it caved in. “That awful friend of Leo’s destroyed it,” Mother had often said. “Remember? He didn’t know the first thing about foundations.”
But now she is buried there. And Mother is dead.
2... Cliff Notes
Last night I lay in bed unable to sleep. When I would drift off, a terrible knowledge would wake me. Like the night the dog fell over the cliff out back, beyond the yard. Actually the cliff is behind the playhouse and storage shed. And in the 27 years I lived there raising my children, no one had ever fallen or ventured there. It was a blizzard that afternoon, and I had let the little Lhasa Apso out to pee in the yard. She was old and blind and never went far beyond the front porch. Mother by that time was also old and blind and things had gone badly between us, unmentionable things, and I was, how shall I say it, utterly lonely. The dog and I just waited for things to change, or for God to grab us. The blizzard was silent. It was such deep snow that for the first time I was afraid to go out back and feed the birds. I sank waist deep when I tried. Maybe that was how the dog got back there. Maybe she followed me. But there were no tracks.
I was inside, sitting glumly by the wood stove, drawing, when I heard a barking and then a howling. It was unlike my dog but still, I thought, is that a dog? Out there? In this? And then I realized she was not on the porch waiting to be let in.
My mother has a poem about her uncle Cal, some long ago southern family connection from her life before she became Mother. In the poem, his wife is severe and runs the house with that peculiar power wives can sometimes have in the southern states, and the last line is, “Uncle Cal spent a lot of time on the back porch, waiting to be let in…”
Poor Mother is dead. Poor me. Her poetry knocks the stuffing out of me as it travels across my brain, making it’s way to the vast nothingness where all my uncalled thoughts are stored. Mother often wrote about her southern relations, who lived in Virginia and had names like Uncle Cal and Aunt Maude. One poem about Aunt Olla, which Mother would often recite at her poetry readings, described a turn-of-the-century woman. Words like “camphor” and “ginger beer” and “portico” come to mind when remembering her poem of Aunt Olla. The last line has run a groove in my memory and repeats itself over and over; “and all her pets were cats.”
Mother’s poetry tumbles within me, ominous, disconnected. Fragments of lines jumbled together, they make a Parshah Ruth of sayings to be remembered. They are eternal wisdoms.
“Oh weep my daughters and have you heard?”
“The pretty tinsel of it,”
“I feel your coat, I smell your clothes, your tobacco; you almost touch me.”
“Uncle Cal, waiting to be let in…” But that is the line which made me think of the blizzard- and how I somehow knew finding the dog would be a dangerous mission, I might not make it back to the house, I might be buried in the blizzard snow drifts, like the group of mountain climbers in Mothers poem…where in the last line they are waving and waving to a helicopter that cannot get to them, until they are “blotted out by snow”.
So I put on two sweaters, my warmest coat, a pair of big sweat pants over my jeans, two pairs of socks and my boots and a hat and scarf and mittens over gloves, and went out into the blowing snow calling my little dog who was partly deaf. It was almost as if I knew what had happened. I headed straight for the back yard, calling out “Niente! Niente!” which is Italian for “Nothing! Nothing!” I had named her during the existential period of my life which later became a religious experience.
I heard her cry a long way off, and still in that thread of knowing, I plodded through deep snow to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the swirling white. I could hear her down there, though I could not see her. It was steep and I could see no way back up once I began sliding down. I had some crackers in my pocket. I could eat snow. I had a small blanket, too. I sat down and began to slide as slowly as possible, but the pitch was severe and I tumbled down, down, down, like a last line in a poem, reaching a powerful ending- crotch high snow and thorny bramble bushes- the dog whimpered near me. There she was, an enormous snowball… bound up and immobile in packed ice balls and matted fur, invisible until I was almost on top of her. I tried to pick her up but she was so enormous with the added ice that it was nearly impossible. But I did pick her up, after freeing her from the deep drift and making the blanket a sling, I carried and dragged her along the edge of the shelf, careful not to get near the next drop down… and by pulling myself up inch by inch holding on to the little saplings, I saved us both. At the steepest moments, I had to lunge forward, almost throwing her a foot or two above me, and then crawl up to her, pick her up and heave her another few feet ahead as it was not possible to carry her and crawl upward at the same time. It took 3 hours to get back to our house and by the time we got inside she was nearly lifeless. The yard had grown dark and shadowy. Just getting my boots off I remember took so long. Everything about us was stiff and frozen and my skin when it finally stopped being the temperature of icicles, still did not react to the warmth. When I touched my arm I remember being surprised that it did not feel like my skin.
All night long, with scissors and patience that comes from battling the supernal, I cut off the ice from my little dog. And hour after hour she lay bound as if by ropes and let me cut away until she emerged from a sea of ice and matted fur and pools of melted snow around us on the cold floor of the kitchen. She licked me, and looked long at me… and then we both curled up together in the feather bed upstairs and the fire hissed with wet logs and we slept until the blizzard went away.
Epilogue on the Dog….
When I began describing to Mother on the phone what happened, she cried out “Ohh is the little dog dead???” and I said,
“No! No, I saved her. I want to tell you what happened…”
Mother and I spoke 5 or more times a day, reporting our every move and reading each other our latest poem or story. We often bickered and hung up, but within a few minutes we would be talking again about something else.
“Oh God! He’s all right isn’t he??? Poor little thing.. he loves you so much…poor little..”
“It’s a girl, Mother. Jesus, you always call her a boy and when I had a boy dog you called him she for 10 years.”
3…The Car
Did I mention that I did not go to my mother’s burial? Well, then I will say so. I did not attend the burial of my mother. I can’t say why. I can’t explain. It is all part of the giant bloated balloon that cannot be discussed. It has to be enough to say, Mother is dead. After she died I went back to Brooklyn. I wrung my hands and sat on the floor in my stockinged feet crying and not crying. I played solitaire when my brain brought up things too terrible. I spoke on the phone to my sister. On two different afternoons my neighbors brought me food to eat.
“What am I doing, Mommy?” I asked myself. “Daddy, what is this?”
“You’re sitting Shiva,” they said.
When a week had passed I got in my car which sounded like it too was screaming, and took the BQE toward route 87. But by the time I was passing Williamsburg the car was howling in pain, grinding metal to metal. I pulled off on Humboldt, and there in the midst and mist of the residential streets was a gas station glowing with a red sign… “Repair! Repair!” Since I had been studying Hebrew for the past few months all I could think was that the word ‘repair’ in Judaism is a religious reference meaning, ‘repair of the world’.
I pulled in and a cute young man came out.
“Something is amiss,” I said. “I think I need brake fluid.” But I did not need brake fluid. He peered into the front tires and announced my brakes were gone. The calipers were ruined.
He was a sweet young man. He explained what calipers do and I cried and begged for mercy. He called another garage and discussed parts and then sat me in his office and told me about his wife and family while another man began working on my old Subaru. “They have bad hearts,” he said to me. “They are bad people. They offer me other women. My wife has left me. By the way, my name is Elmar.” He was very sweet. Every so often the big guy working on my car would call out in Spanish and complain to Elmar. “Your axel’s are gone,” Elmar related to me, sadly, swiveling in his office chair.
“What!? I can’t afford it! I have no more! I have nothing left!” I cried. “My mother died… I’m going to the funeral…” This was not really true. I was going to have my own sort of funeral. No, not my own, God forbid, I mean the one I planned to have to say goodbye to my mother, my best friend, my heroine poet.
Elmar told me he was from the Dominican Republic. “I don’t even know where that is,” I admitted. My narrow world was writing; poetry, fiction, religion, philosophy.
“My wife, she likes to drink and party,” Elmar went on. “Always wants to go out. I am a man who likes to be with his family.” He was young and sweet and very handsome and I did not believe him. But I let him describe the man he longed to be, as we all do in our anguish. We all try to hide our faults- like how I hated Mother asking me about my pets- as if that was all we had left to say in the last five years-
“How’s your cat? How’s Russell the cat?” Oh God, how hard it is to accept forever Mommy gone.
“You must come back in one week and get the other caliper and discs fixed. You must get two new axels in a week, do you hear me?” Elmar stood by my car. It was back out in the parking lot and idling, no longer squealing.
“Here is my card,” he said.
“You are an angel,” I said. “Thank you dear heart,” I said. I heard my mother in my voice. She always had lousy cars… she was always grateful to mechanics.
“Be careful. Drive slowly.” I heard my mother in Elmar’s voice too. She worried about me driving.
“I will. I will see you again soon,” I promised. “Good bye. Thank you. Thank you. Goodbye.”
My mother and I once planned a trip to Europe together. She wanted to go so much. Her life in England with my father had been cut short by his death. They had been about to go to Paris together. “Gee, I wish I could see Paris. Walter and I had tickets. We were going to go, we were just about to… when he went and did what he did…” Mother would say. I decided it was up to me to take her there but her fear of getting on an airplane was too powerful. I worked on her about it for a long time, telling her stories of my then recent trip to Europe, until she finally agreed to go. We reserved tickets to France and packed our suitcases in the spring and left in the car one evening from Bloomington Indiana to drive to Chicago’s airport. I think we left Coalie with the guy who lived next door to us. He admired Mother and he once made a movie of her reciting Orchard, only instead of filming her reading it, he had horses running around in fields while her voice recited the poem. It kind of looked ridiculous but we liked him and I think that’s where we left the animals.
Mother never had a good car. They were always old and banged up with a door that wouldn’t open on the passengers side and I think this one may have been the old Valiant she named Violet Hunt. It was not a reliable car. Cars were often unreliable back then- this was in the 1970’s and I was in my 20’s. Mother was in her 60’s and teaching at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, along with Willis Barnstone and Sandra Gilbert. Allen Ginsburg often was on campus giving a reading or playing his squeeze box in the park.
We drove through Indiana, and into Illinois, and our excitement began to die down. It got dark and Mother, who had been writing a poem on a napkin while she gripped the steering wheel, had to quit writing because there wasn’t enough light. And out of the blue Violet Hunt banged and clunked and lost power. Mother pulled over to the shoulder and we got out. We were in the middle of nowhere it seemed.
“Help!” Mother yelled, waving her arms. A truck pulled over instantly. Mother never had to wait long for providence to deliver her assistance. The man offered us a ride but Mother talked him in to pushing us to the nearest town. Back then you could push a car with another vehicle without damaging it. Now they crumple up if they get bumped, but back then cars were made of stronger metals.
“Here! Here!” Mother shouted out her window as we rolled toward a gas station. The truck driver went in with Mother and they got a mechanic to come out and look. “Thank you, dear,” said Mother to the trucker. “What’s your name?”
“John.”
“Thank you dear John. You’ve saved my life. If you hadn’t helped us I don’t know what would have happened…”
I went into the gas station to get a soda and to find a bathroom. When I came out again, Mother had given him her address and a copy of her latest book of poetry and John was wiping his eyes.
“That’s all right dear heart,” she was saying. “You loved your mom and…and…and she knew that…you did all you could! Why look, you helped me! You’re a good person…” John was crying. I looked out into the dark emptiness that only those Midwest states can express, and knew we were not going to France.
“Jesus, that was lucky,” Mother said after John drove away.
The mechanic gave us a ride down the road to a shabby motel and said he’d pick us up the next day when he got the part we needed. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose that wheel while you were drivin’ ,” he said.
“Thank God,” Mother agreed.
“Where are we?” I wanted to know. “Are we near Chicago?”
“Chicago!” the mechanic laughed. “Oh no. Not even close. This is Paris, Illinois.”
Mother, somehow the oddities and your powers always made a holy statement- as if our journey in Violet Hunt was created not to go to France but to go instead to the Muse, where on that napkin you would write the words that the world would later drink as if ambrosia, and we would swerve on into the dark of cornfields and tract houses and end up 150 miles from Chicago O’Hare Airport, vacationing together in a shabby motel in Paris, Illinois.
4…Anthologies and Collections
Mother has been dead just over three weeks but it feels like only a few days ago. In fact, the longer she is dead, the more immediate it becomes. The first week it seemed as if Mother had been dead for years. Week two became a bit unstable; a boat rocking; the ground where I stood, like a deck on a ship in a bit of wind.
O.K. O.K., week the 3rd, I hear Mother counting. All my life she counted up the women and the men.
“56 men and 3 women,” she said. “3 women and one of them is Emily Dickenson which I don’t consider because she is always the token woman poet.” We were in the living room. The fireplace still worked then. We were sitting there. I was with her. I was always with her. In her lap was a new Anthology of American Poets in which she was not included, as usual. Or, 3 Centuries of Poets. Or, Poets of the 20th Century. Or, Best Whatever Poetry. Mother and I sat there. I burned with rage at the world for not including her. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickenson, and no Ruth Stone?
“Aw hell, I don’t care,” Mother would say. “Good ol’ boys club.” And she would pour herself another glass of wine and cry. Sometimes I raged and said I couldn’t believe they’d included so many lousy male poets and not my mother. And other times I would be affronted at how she counted up the men. It seemed she hated men. I could not see that hostile world yet. I was young and still visible.
“Oh yes, here’s poem after poem of Robert Frost. The great poet of Vermont. Never a chance….”
My mother’s happiness took precedence over mine. She told me she could prevent bad things from happening. That she could see the future. That she could look in to people. “Don’t you know who I am?” she asked.
Mother promised she would live forever and that she would be here for the end of the world. I hated her as much as I could, which was fierce and brief and lasted no more than an hour. And I loved her eternally and above all, self included.
“83 male poets and 5 women,” she’d say, opening another book she’d been sent in the mail. And why, I wonder, did these publishers always remember to send her a book yet forget to include her?
“Oh him!” Mother would say, looking at the editor of the collection. “That little martinet! Augh!”
“Why? What do you mean?” I wanted to know.
“Oh he was a small vain arrogant little weasel. He never liked me. Shoot, he’s left me out of every publication he’s ever done. And you know why? Because when Walter and I were at Harvard he tried desperately to get a teaching job there but they wouldn’t have him. Hell, we had nothing to do with it! But he’s spiteful and…jealous…and he can’t write.”
One of the fun moments in my otherwise lonely existence was when Mother got talkative, usually over a collection of poetry. I would stand in the room laughing at her descriptions of editors. “They’re all men who wanted to write but couldn’t so they compile these giant dull tombs of male poets, most of them dead so they don’t have to feel jealous. And they add Emily Dickenson to represent all the women.”
When I remember my life with my mother, I remember the living room as being cold, with the hot fire in the fireplace that burned you if you sat too close and was ineffectual if you sat back from it. I remember her nose.; she was always sniffing, like the sound a person makes when they are mostly finished crying. She would make a terribly funny comment and then sniff. I remember how everyone was comfortable around her. Even in chaos, she was like a queen at court. She was able to draw people to her, make them feel invaluable and yet in awe of her. She would reel off a hilarious poem so quickly you longed to hear it again. It stunned you. It was so brilliant. Yet she’d never even written it down. “Oh I forget when I wrote that. Silly, isn’t it?” she’d say. She knew something about everything. No matter what subject was brought up, she could tell the room some unknown bit of information about it.
She lay awake all night reading books on astronomy, mathematics, magic, old Victorian novels. She had mountains of poetry books stacked by her bed. She never turned the light off. She was awake when I went to bed and she’d already had her coffee and toast when I woke up. She could make up a bed for someone that was so cozy it felt like it was heaven. Anything she planted went wild growing and reproducing. Even the apple trees, so old that they fell over, kept producing apples from limbs attached to trunks no longer rooted in the ground.
Our house was full of mice. She didn’t mind the cold. She rescued everything. She never killed. Not a spider or an ant. Her mind was usually elsewhere. She rarely talked to me when I was young. She never really accepted me as an equal when I was an adult. She still called me her baby when I was in my 50’s. It enraged me at times. It kills me now.
She went through a Buddhist phase, hanging up little odd sayings on index cards around the house… “This is the moment! Here! Now! This is the moment! You are alive!”
She manipulated psychology. She decided later in life that words couldn’t hurt her, which kept her from crying so much.
She loved and mourned my father and wouldn’t let me mention him. She got mad if I missed him. She was jealous and saintly at the same time. She was flirtatious and repelled by sex…she wrote about it. Spiders, animals copulating, and yet the act seemed repulsive, base, when you read it in her poems. She reduced others to ash or lifted them out of it. She was complex, impossible, her fears and worrying drove her daughters mad. She cried for hours. She threatened. She gave without boundaries, gave enormously. She was an isolate. She was a narcissist.
She made roast beef and carrots and potatoes that was delicious. She made spaghetti and garlic bread. She made scrambled eggs one night for Leslie Fiedler who had never heard of eating breakfast at midnight. She made tuna fish sandwiches and always decided they had botulism. She made liverwurst sandwiches with onions on them. She liked rye bread. She made egg salad. She gathered apple drops from the back yard and made heavenly apple sauce on the stove, the odor filling the house with joy, the sliced apples with their red skins still on, so sour and sweet. She made apple crisp when there was no food in the house. She never made pies. She never made regular meals. We might eat cooked broccoli and a baked potato for dinner and it was delicious. Her food was magical. The potato skins thick and crunchy and the broccoli perfect. There was something God-like in her cooking. She starved everyone in the house all day and when she gave the meal, sitting in front of the fire and discussing poetry, it had the added advantage of being eaten ravenously.
She never cleaned for anyone. Her daughters cleaned when someone important was coming; Willis Barnstone or Henry Popkin or Donald Justice or Sandra Gilbert or whoever. She was above trying to impress anyone with a nice house. Her farmhouse was magical. It all ran on her secrets. The old dusty attic with the fuse box, treadle sewing machine, a century of New Yorker Magazines stacked on the stairs and along the eaves, boxes of Limoge china and antique kitchen utensils, and horsehair furniture.
The water system was a hidden rite of spring. She would tromp through the maple woods in April to the spring to hook it up. I would yell when the faucets began to sputter with water pressure.
The brook, the lilacs, the daffodils, the wild roses and wild asters and the apple blossoms. The back porch where we sat discussing art and writing with endless streams of students; kids from Urbana, Madison, Brandeis, Bloomington,- and the poets and scholars and teachers… bottles of wine and plates of cheese and a watermelon rolling in a pool in the brook to keep it cold. Oh Mother, how could you die and leave this, leave me like this, leave this all to die with you?
Radcliffe, Brattle Street, Mr. Parker and Poochie and Coalie and George Harrison the cat. Gram.
Mother, your Merimeko bedspreads! Your black and white sweater! Your blue work-shirts, your wheat jeans. Mother, your Pond’s Face Cream, your poems on every envelope, your mysterious absence even while you sat in some wicker chair recording the words you were whispered- that train roaring through you-
Mother, the magical, the terrible, the longing that hungers within, aching and whining and waiting, always waiting for you to come back- to pick up a strange orange fruit and hold it in your hands which suddenly become delicate and thin… your voice saying, “Isn’t this persimmon beautiful?” in that time you became enthralled with Japanese culture. How the house reflected your passions; a Japanese tiger print and an oriental doll propped against the fireplace mantle; and you, discarding your blue shirt and jeans now entered the room in kimono, stood like an eggshell statue for a moment with your neck stretched long and your profile against the light and one hand extended; “My darlings!” you’d say. “Shall we eat that persimmon?”
5…Readings
Mother, dressed in her casual uniform of velvet blazer, corduroy pants, button-up blue mans shirt, and jaunty Beatle cap, arrived at every poetry reading carrying her canvas book bags and purse full of cough drops, glasses, Kleenex. Keys, envelopes with poems on them, pens, bills, and so on. Her book bags contained manuscripts, anthologies, and her published books of poetry with page markers through-out. When introduced, Mother would stand at the podium and arrange her poems in front of her. “Is this water for me?” she would call out.
Someone would say, “Yes!”
Mother would then ask that they turn off the light shining in her eyes; (there was always a spotlight or overhead light that bothered her) and the room would grow dim. “There! O.K., Now I can see!” she would say. The audience tittered. She would put on her glasses that we had stopped to buy on the way, still with the price tag dangling, and read Laundry or another opening poem. “Wait a minute. Something’s bothering me,” she said, and pushed the price tag away from her nose. “Huh-uh. Nope. What is that?” and the person who introduced her would rush to the stage and remove the tag from her glasses. “Whew! That’s better. I just pick these up at the dime store to enlarge the words,” she would say. The audience laughed. They loved her now. Now she could read them her poems and they would hear her.
But Mother was never predictable. Just when one could assume that she would charm her audience with an innocent humor, she could be utterly straight forward and read without comment. These times I sat anguishing in the audience. She did this sometimes because she feared that people liked her performance and not the poetry. She wanted her poetry to be loved. She wanted to be able to read them without inflection or remark and have them carry the power. And they did, without question. But her readings were overwhelming in their emotional highs and lows; weeping and laughing, exalted, and cowering beside a corpse, she would lull her audience into listening comfortably and then inoculate them with truth. At the end, they gathered around her literally for hours. When the other poets and faculty were gone, Mother would still be surrounded by people in the auditorium, signing books and giving advice often until well after midnight. Every audience, arriving stiff and chilly, would dissolve into passionate fans. I watched, as we traveled by car, by greyhound, by train, creeping across the country, enlightening and revealing. I carried my camera and she brought her canvas bags containing her words.
Traveling by Greyhound with Mother was no fun. When she sat beside me on the bus, she refused to talk but became focused on the road and the driver. “Hey, he’s swerving!” she would say, clutching the arm rest.
“No he isn’t. Can we go to the hotel after the reading instead of before? I wanted to go to Harvard Square first and get a lime rickey at that place we used to go to.”
But Mother would ignore me. Instead, she would shout, “Hey, slow down! You’re scaring me!” to the bus driver.
Once, I remember not traveling with her but picking her up at the other end of the journey. I got to the bus station out west somewhere and was waiting as the bus pulled in. She’d been traveling for 3 days. The doors opened and an enormous crowd got off, all with tears in their eyes and hugging my mother. “Good bye, my darlings!” she said.
“Back up, step back please,” the bus driver called out as he climbed off with the keys to the luggage compartment.
Mother turned to a large weeping woman and said, “You’re going to come see me now. You promised.”
“Yes, I am, I just wish I could get there sooner is all…” the woman said, wiping her nose. Then the bus driver turned, and Mother said,
“Now Bob, don’t be officious like your dad…” and he too hugged her, and his eyes were full of tears.
6…Metamorphosis
Mother, I cannot sleep. I sing in my head to drive out the horror of you flailing your arms trying to breath.
I cannot sleep and I am not a dancer. I drag my feet through Mondays into Sundays and can’t remember even what dancing is…in fact, since you died, Mother, my mind is weirdly empty of all knowledge. Whatever I learned is now erased. Only split seconds remain.
The way your mouth made an upside down U when I cried out, “I don’t want her to suffer!”
The day I didn’t come to have breakfast with you.
The letter you wrote me that I never received. Mother, what did it say? Where did we fail each other? How can it be, how can it be?
“Oh, you’re not going to let me read,” you said when every night I would sneak in to your room to turn off the light, years ago. At 2 A.M. your bed was covered with volumes and tissues and a book open over your face. You looked like you had fallen asleep while cramming for an exam. But the minute I clicked the switch off, the book would lift from your face and you’d say,
“Oh you’re not letting me read!”
Now Mother, I too get up and read at 2 A.M., at 3, at 4. But I cannot retain the words. I read the lines but they do not reach my mind. They remain read on the page. They do not fly to thought. They are dormant, lifeless. My ears ring with a high consistent pitch. I see yet do not see. It is just as you wrote in Metamorphosis;
“Everything shimmers and glitters and shakes with unbearable longing;
The dancers who cannot sleep, and the sleepers who cannot dance.”
But I am neither dancer nor sleeper now. I lie down at night and fall asleep only to wake within minutes. My eyes fly open. I am holding my breath.
You loved New Yorker cartoons. You loved Leonard Bernstein, Lotta Lenya, Pete Fountain. Daffodils. Thurber. E B White.
You hated people calling you Ma’am or Lady. You hated styrofoam.
You danced the Charleston. You played piano when you felt like it, though you’d never been taught.
Mother, how could you let your dying be so terrible? Once dead, you were wrapped like a butterfly in a cocoon, a metamorphosis. Everything shakes with unbearable longing- Mother, my only mother, your life chained me to a rock on an ocean of poetry, within which lay anguish and intensity and joy and hope, too. And yet, however many days dead, I cannot dance, Mother. And Mother, I cannot sleep. I cannot even find your death among all that is now erased.
7…..Famous people
7…..Famous people
When I was in my 20’s and living with Mother at Bloomington, she announced to me that we were going to meet a famous man. Before I go on, I want to say he is among my favorite writers today and I have read and raved about his novels to everyone, Mother especially. But then, in 1974 or whenever it was, I did not know his work. Oh sure Mother had some of his books on her shelf, but I had never opened them.
“Want to go with me tonight? I’m having dinner with Isaac Bashevis Singer,” Mother said. I was sitting in the living room of our university apartment, writing a story about Robert Bly on my typewriter.
“No thanks,” I said.
“Oh come on,” Mother pleaded. “You’ll have fun. He’s a wonderful Jewish writer.”
We drove to his hotel and met him at the door of his room. I remember going down in the elevator with him. Or did we just walk down a hall? He was very sweet. He had a kind way of speaking and a mild face. And he liked Mother. I have a vague memory of dinner, a bottle of wine, a nice restaurant, but really I cannot recall much else. I’m not sure why. I think I was still in the clouds over the Robert Bly reading, or maybe I was miffed about something. I know he had asked her out because he liked her poetry.
“You really like my poetry? I’m…I’m honored. You know Walter was crazy about your writing…as am I.”
And then he asked if she would translate something of his…maybe it was his poetry.
“Oh you’re so sweet,” she said with admiration, “but I don’t know Yiddish…” Mother smiled shyly and they went on talking. Later, when they were parting he kissed her.
“Wow, he really liked you,” I said. “Is he married?”
I was always hoping Mother would find a replacement for my father, but she never wanted that. She remained true to Walter Stone. Or else she just didn’t want to be hurt again. It is not that she kept that private from me, it is just that since she didn’t know, I didn’t know either.
Mother lived in Biblical places. I was 3 when she bought the farmhouse in the Land of Goshen, a little mountain community in Vermont, nestled below Mount Horred, which I suppose is a misspelling of Mount Horeb, another Biblical reference. We were all living at Vassar where my father was teaching when Mother won a prize for her poetry and she took me and snuck off to Vermont where we met up with a fat short real estate woman who showed us the Goshen property belonging to Mr. Blackwell. It cost 25 hundred dollars and had 6 acres, two houses, a barn, a brook, and an apple orchard. She bought it right there on the spot. My father was furious when he found out. But later he took the enormous sickle from the antique barn and began sickling the back yard. Mother collected the apple drops, they put beer bottles and watermelon in the brook pool, and each daughter chose a room to live in. The upstairs had a giant trap door that was hooked to the wall and could be lowered to shut it off from the downstairs. Mother told me it was to keep Mr. Blackwell’s daughter locked away from the boy she loved many years before.
Once we had our summer home there, Mother began finding places for other writers in Vermont. But I think that was after we had sailed to England on the Queen Elizabeth. After my father had died. It was after my father died that we moved to Middletown where the Wilber’s lived. Dick Wilber taught at Wesleyan. Sharley and mother would speak on the phone and get together for cocktails. Mother started drinking “Manhattans” on a regular basis. For years we had Maraschino cherries in the refrigerator and vermouth in the cupboard. I think they had all been very good friends when my father was alive, but after his death Mother was a single parent, a separate unit, and she felt awkward. Or she felt they felt awkward. She did not want to be Walter’s widow to her friends. And yet she was. But she was also her own Poet. Her first book, In an Iridescent Time came out the year my father died. The flap called her, “the poet Walter Stone’s widow”. Later, when Richard Wilber wrote a blurb for her she asked him not to call her the poet’s widow. “I hate being called that,” she said. “It makes me feel strange. Am I not a poet?”
One night in New York City after she gave a reading, we went out to a pub with Allen Ginsburg and E. L. Doctorow. Mother had spent the afternoon teaching a class with Maxine Kumin. I took photographs of them while they taught. I was fond of Maxine as she had been particularly kind to me when I was younger. That night while Mother and Allen sat talking and drinking beer, I sat by E.L. Doctorow, whom Mother later praised highly to me. “Do you often travel with your mother?” he asked. “I do,” I said. “I take the photographs.” I could hear my mother talking about my father to Allen, and I could see their conversation had turned sad. They hugged good bye I think, although I can’t be sure. It seemed they behaved somewhat kindly toward each other. I know my mother was intimidated by the big male poets, but she managed to overcome it mostly. And certainly she knew them all well enough. But she felt left out often…left out of anthologies and opportunities and the general circle, not so much because she was Walter’s widow, but because she was a woman. Cocks and Mares, Male Gorilla’s, and many other poems she wrote reflect that feeling of the woman poet facing the “Good ol’ Boys” as she sometimes called them. But who knows what comes from conviction and what comes from wounds?
When I was nine Mother took me to Breadloaf where she was having dinner with Robert Frost. We went to the barn, a giant building where they gave readings, and we sat in the front. When whatever was going on was finished, Robert Frost spoke long to Mother. Her conversations always seemed earth shattering, enormous, tragic, and urgent. When they were finished, he called me over to him and I stood down below, in his shadow. “You be good to your mother,” he said sternly to me. I remember that he was a giant and had white hair and was terrifying. I wonder if she had told him I was bad.
Our property was only a few miles from Robert Frost’s place. Mother had a barn, too. I am without warning in the middle of a moment with her, seeing her at the end of our old barn sitting on a horsehair fainting couch, writing a poem. I was about seven. It was afternoon and the light was peeking through the pane-less windows and the slats between the barn board walls. She was way down at the other end from the big double barn doors. “Mommy?” I called. “What are you doing?” I was hungry and had been looking for her.
“Don’t come in here, it’s dangerous!” she said. Piles of hand-hewn beams were stacked up on the floor beside wooden barrels; antique chairs dangled from wooden pegs on the walls. The giant sickle my father had used to cut the yard also hung there in the barn. I remember how he sickled first, and then got out the grass cutter and pushed it back and forth across the yard making a sweet clicking noise as it rolled along. My father had a bamboo chair he sat in with a holder built in to it for a drink, and he would cut the whole yard and then sit in his chair in the apple orchard and drink a bottle of Budweiser beer. He kept his beer bottles cold in the brook by our farmhouse and I would go with him and watch him take one out of the cold water. Mother moved the bamboo chair and ottoman from the living room into her Women’s Room three decades later. That was when she turned an upstairs bedroom into a study of women. It seemed the best she could do to exorcise my fathers ghost. If she could not forget him or even get over him, she could at least exclude him. And so, among the bookshelves she built herself filled with women authors, and the file cabinets of poetry, the bamboo chair and ottoman was placed. It filled with books and manuscripts and letters and was draped with a sweater or two. But Mother never sat in it.
The walls of her Women’s Room were hung with my sister’s artwork, poems people had written while staying with Mother, photographs, pot-metal Victorian women statues on shelves, and some poster given to her which read,
“Women are like bread dough. They will rise!”
It was her way of sweeping out the pain of my father. But along one wall, under the shelves of HD and Saffo and Alcott, were my father’s records. I would sneak in the room and sit by them, reading their titles. There were classical records, a Marlene Dietrich album, and Tubby the Tuba which my sister and I would listen to when we were little, back when Daddy was alive.
Surely Mother knew she could not shut him out completely; his chair, his records, the hi fi he built, the odor of his clothing in the closet. Now, since Mother died, I have not gone home to where I grew up. The house, mostly emptied and my father’s chair gone, I could not go there. Nor to the apple orchard which flourished for my mother, or the porch where so many poems were written. One night when Donald Justice was visiting he read his poetry while I played guitar out on the front porch. And Mother sang. And yet, most nights were quiet. Mother would be tapping out a poem with her fingers- her voice reciting under her breath each line, testing it out. She would go over and over a certain part until it was right. It drove me crazy to hear her sometimes. Not her voice, but the odd tapping with her fingers is what bothered me. It was irregular, strange. It was as if a new rhythm were being created, or as if the ground were not solid at all, but utterly fluid, sinking and rising with the weird unearthly tapping of my mother at her roll-top desk, creating a poem.
Recently while taking the Ethan Allen to Vermont, I remembered when you and I took the train across the country all the way to Tuscon, Arizona where you taught a class and read poetry on a reservation for a week. You were in your late 40’s. I was 9. You were teaching at U of I then, where you wrote U of My.
“When my dog goes for a walk, I say avuncular! Attache! Williamsburg!
And he pees on the evergreens-“
It was my favorite poem at the time, a real crowd pleaser. When you read the last line,
“University! University of my dreams!” your head would lift, your long neck stretch in an elegant quizzical way, and the audience would cheer.
You wrote a lot of poems on the trip home from Arizona. You would take out a Bic pen and a spool notebook with a tan cover and write while I read or slept. You bought lined paper but you never stayed in the lines. You wrote Hebrew style, from right page to left. You wrote in circles, going sometimes 2 or 3 times around the parameter of the page. Your handwriting was often impossible for me to read. Some of your poems started in the middle of the notebook and went back ten pages to a grocery list where there was more room to finish. Your notebooks were always dime store variety, your pens ordinary. You sometimes drew little faces of Ruth. I loved your drawings. They pained me with their cute innocence. I often pitied you to the point of crying. It broke my heart to see you cry over my father, or over not getting in Poetry magazine, or because we were broke, or because Hawley Hathaway wanted to chop down your lilac bushes along the Goshen road.
We fought a lot, even when I was very young. You would cry and slam your study door, then I would leave you notes in the kitchen propped against the dirty dishes, saying, “I’m sorry Mommy. I love you.” Which is all I ever say now.
I’m sorry Mommy. I’m sorry I never could fix any of it- your shabby clothes, your old cars- I’m sorry you did not get a Pulitzer, a National Endowment, a McArthur, or a second chance at true love.
I’m sorry for not being able to wake the world in time. I love you now as always, imperfectly, wholeheartedly.
I am most sorry that you lost your eyes. “I can’t see,” you said to me, every day. “Everything’s shimmery and blurry and…and…I can’t see anymore. I can’t read!”
“I know. I know!” I would say. And I would hold my hands over my mouth in anguish and terror. I made CD’s for you to listen to. I brought you a CD player and got each of my children to record some work you liked. I read you Life with Father. But it did not comfort you. You only listened to them while I visited. Then when I left, you turned it off. For all I know you turned your back to all of it, and mourned.
Mother, I recall your laughter. How we would laugh so much it nearly killed us, that is how you put it. Even when you lost so much, nearly everything. blind, mostly deaf, you rode with me to Goshen one day, so jolly about going up there. Oh Mother how I cannot bear to remember and yet cannot do aught but recall.
Still, I remember your wisdom. “There is no choice among the voices of love. Even a carp sings.”
You often said you loved Gerald Stern. And Maxine Kumin. And Galway Kinnell. And Robert Bly. You were jealous of Sylvia Plath. Not, you said, because of her poetry, but because Walter flirted with her at a party. You fought over that for days. But that is what you told me, I was not there. Was that in England? I don’t know. I only know you refused to go to the dinner they invited you to, and so there was no friendship between the Plath/Hughes and the Stones. A pity. It would have been a nice addition to a biography of you. But your intuitions and emotions barred you from joining the club. You circled the periphery like that wolverine you wrote about in In an Iridescent Time. Or like the tiger in Topography;
The tiger rasps as he breathes.
His belly hangs low
His jowls are bearded with ice.
He sleeps alone.
Ague and frost have stretched his lip to a grin.
The ermines slip like shadows melting into stone.
By the time I knew you, you were already a loner. But were you always that way? Oh Mother, my angel, my betrayer, I sit here in my little rented room with a canvas bag of photo’s of you and the steam heat hissing, and I know you will never come back. And who am I without you? And who is any daughter when her mother is gone? No longer a daughter, no longer someone’s child, I become an old orphan; one who no person will adopt at the age of nearly 60. I dream at night of the little dog who fell over the cliff, and I relive her death again and again. She got cancer. I had the vet put her to sleep. “You’re going to put the little dog to death?” you asked me. “He loves you…poor thing….”
“She! She!” I shouted. “She’s dying! She can’t walk. She drags a tumor….”
Now each night that dog comes to me and dies all over again. How the vet injected her. How she howled and howled. How I cried out,
“Oh no!! Oh no!” and the vet said, “this never happened before….”
Mother, I will never get over my mistakes. But I want you to know I forgive you yours with me. No one should suffer endlessly for wrongs committed. “I was dumb,” you said, referring to not sending me to school. “I was afraid. I was ignorant. I wanted to keep you safe.” Back then, in that world of a match girls luminous poverty, (Fairy Tales, Topography), you lived in a moment of horror and loss. All men went out and never came home. All children died. All houses burned to the ground. Nothing was safe or consistent. And so you kept the doors locked, the cats and Abigail inside, the dogs on leashes, the wine bottles on the kitchen floor, and the mice chewing without obstruction. You wrote. You cried. You did what you had to, in order to survive.
8……….Era’s
Born when the iceman still pulled a cart with his horse up the streets, Mother’s liberal intellectual ideals mixed with an air of flapper impetuousness. She danced the Charleston in the 1920’s. She watched men who had lost everything sell pencils on the streets during the depression. She bought apples from the homeless. And with the fifty cents for her high school lunch that her father who still had a job as a printer gave her, she bought herself a pair of beautiful shoes. She married her high school sweetheart. According to her best friend in high school who I went to visit some years ago, she had “John Clapp” written all over her notebooks. But when they had moved to the University of Illinois, and he was preventing her from writing poetry, she fell out of love with her husband. “He locked me in the basement once for writing poetry instead of cleaning the kitchen,” Mother often said. In Illinois she met Walter and divorced her husband. World War Two began. She married Walter when he was on leave. “That summer I was 24 in San Francisco, you and I. The whole summer was a cable car ride over the gold bay…”
During the war, she worked on the Indianapolis Star where her father was a printer. She had to review photographs and film reels. She saw firsthand the horrors of the concentration camps and the terrible suffering. It traumatized her so that for the rest of her life, and mine, she could never forget it or get it out of her head.
She was a girl who was traumatized often. The first time she ever saw a plane when she was little, someone said, “Better run home little girl or that plane’s going to fall on you.” For that, she never would get on a plane through her whole life.
Mother described the instantaneous love she felt for Walter and he for her on their first meeting in a soda shop. “We sat there together, drinking milkshakes, and when I left, Walter took my straw and kept it. He still had it when we married.”
Walter was sent to the Aleutian Islands during the war. Before he sailed, he stopped somewhere, Chicago I think, and made a recording on a record for her and mailed it to her. Back in the 40’s, there were recording booths in the train stations for servicemen to send a spoken letter to their sweethearts. Walter’s recording to Ruth was the last part of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach;
Ah Love, let us be true
to one another! for the world which seems
to lie before us like a land of dreams…
I am not sure if I am allowed to quote the whole ending here or not. In any case, it became the family poem. Mother recited it to her daughters, and to this day every child of mine knows it by heart, and why.
When Walter returned from the war, they moved to Cambridge where he taught at Harvard and where Ruth had Phoebe. From there, they went back to Illinois, where I was born, and on to Poughkeepsie where Walter taught at Vassar. Some years ago, Mother and I went to Goshen and she gave me some of his books. I treasure the Keats, as I know he both loved and taught him, and it is full of his notes. It one of the very few things I have that belonged to him.
He loved to buy books, and in England he purchased quite a few, though they did not come home with him, but with my mother and her little family, who sailed back alone on the Princess Mary ship. On board there were deck games, and one day there was a tea party for children in first class that my sister and I snuck in to. We carried our Nora Wellington dolls which we pinched there, all the way back to America, where a gathering of Walter’s friends stood at the pier, crying, when we sailed in to port.
Mother was so wounded by the loss of her friends. When my father died in England, they came to meet our boat, but according to my mother, they disappeared after that and we were quietly dropped from their lives. She wrote about just that in Denouement:
You intimidated me. I was thrown into hell without a trial.
Guilty by default. It was clear the murdered one was dead.
There were only two of us. But no one came to lead me away.
A hundred eyes looked in and saw me on fire.
We loved him, they said. Then they forgot.
After many years I knew who it was who had died.
Murderer, I whispered, you tricked me.
Anyway, what am I doing here? Am I trying to tell my mother’s history or my own? Am I writing an essay on her poetry? Am I trying to find my mother among the fragmented memories and lines and pictures torn from my photo albums? I wrote about my mother constantly through out my life. It was as if I was born to watch and record her life. I wrote Prayer, a story published years ago in Footworks, Maria Gillan’s magazine. I wrote Tour De Mornings, about mother mothering her students while I stood by. I wrote The Summer the Porch Roof Fell In, almost taken by the New Yorker, but as it goes with me, was not. The Summer the Porch Roof Fell In was about her Brandeis students meeting her Bloomington students, and the chaos that came of too many visitors to the old farmhouse. Mother on her porch, on chaise lounge, wine glass and book in hand. Students relaxing around her in wicker chairs, everyone excited and holding a manuscript. I lived in the woods in a little house and the sound of my electric typewriter could be heard echoing all the way to where Mother sat with her gang.
“She likes that electric typewriter,” Mother explained to them. “I just use my old Royal.”
Mommy where is your old royal now? Where is daddys?
“Let that go, Abigail. It doesn’t matter.”
“I have nothing that was yours. Nothing. Nothing.”
“You have the combination of us. You are the result of our combination.”
As it goes, memories and now stir together and I have to keep reminding myself not to put Mother in the present tense. And yet she is exactly that. How can a person disappear? Simply because she is not visible, doesn’t mean….
Her students loved her not only because she was hilarious and brilliant and warm, but also because she was able to seize what they were trying to say in their work and bring it out by perfect editing and shaping. She appreciated, encouraged and helped them become what she saw they could become.
Born before television was invented, my mothers cousin had a stereoptic machine and cards that when inserted showed up as 3d images. The cousin would only allow my mother (who was very little at the time) to look if she looked at ALL the cards. Most of the cards were beautiful scenes and my mother always wanted very much to look. But one of the sets of cards was of Jerusalem and the lepers outside the gates, and every time she got to these she would be overcome with horror. She often told me how these lepers had traumatized her childhood. She wrote them in to her poems, and climbed in to their anguish. (from The Excuse)
“But now I am among them. I too, am a leper, a warning.
I hold out my crippled fingers; my voice flatters
Everyone who comes this way. In the weeds of mourning,
Groaning, and gnashing, I display
Myself in malodorous comic wrappings and tatters,
In the excess of passion, in the need to be worn away.”
She replaced her own horror of lepers with terrible stories of the holocaust that she related to me in brutal detail from my infancy on. The only difference between her cousin making Mother view the lepers while seeing the beautiful pictures, and Mother forcing me to hear the horrors of the Nazis, was that I did not receive the alternative as she did. So in a way I grew up without the beautiful, and saw only the tragic. But the price of greatness is high, all who knew her suffered to some extent, and what was said falls away, but what was written remains forever. Her great poems go on, in my head, on the page, the glory of her words outshines her little drawbacks.
I was a child when you married me,
a child I was when I married you,
but I was a regular midwest child,
and you were a Jew ... "
Her poetry, like her mind, was always fixated on the terrible and the beautiful. She mixed them together like pancakes and served them to whoever happened by. And you ate them, and you thanked her, and they were delicious because you were starving.
My mother married her first husband, she says, because she was afraid that if she didn't he would die.
"She had his name written all over her school books," Gertrude had told me. "She wrote Ruth Clapp all over everything ... she loved that man." But my mother maintained she never loved John Clapp. In fact, she said,
"I hated him. I only married him to keep him from being run over by a train…"
To understand my mother is to understand what is not comprehensible. I could tell you how her grandfather got run over by a train, and that somehow that must have traumatized her and related to her marrying John to keep him from getting run over. But in saying that, I am only relating how she explained it. "My grandfather got run over by a train on his way home from work ... grandmother used to worry so about him because he was nearly deaf, and he always walked the railroad tracks home ... and one day when he was walking, he didn't hear the train coming, and it hit him and killed him. It traumatized me terribly ... And ahh, that's why I married John." Mother would say this, and then in her unpredictable way, she would throw back her head, and laugh.
She grew up on Julian Avenue, just a few doors down from her best friend Gertrude. It was an ordinary street with medium size houses and small yards, a modest neighborhood probably built up around the turn of the century. But when Mother described it, it took on huge and frightening shadows of pre modern existence.
“When pneumonia swept through the neighborhood, you could hear the screams of the families when they lost someone. The little boy who lived next door to us succumbed to it. And we heard a great wail rise up from his mother and siblings when he died. Oh, it was awful. I’ll never forget it.”
Mothers and their girls had an irreproducible relationship in that other world. There was a mutual longing and needing that ebbed and flowed but was quite consistent in it’s timing. In fact, all relationships had their deep basis that was quite unshakeable. When a daughter worried or felt low, she saw her mother. Which brings me back to the beginning. I can never see my mother again.
And yet, even that is not completely true. I can see her in my head, walking that funny bold walk she had, mingled with shyness. How she wore the same clothes for years, not because we were so poor, but because she would find an outfit that felt comfortable to her and refuse to wear anything else. In the 1970’s it was her blue work shirt and tan corduroy pants. In the 1980’s it was a V neck sweater and jeans. In the 1990’s it was a long skirt or loose corduroys and a bulky sweater. It is odd but I cannot remember her shoes. I recall she liked boots. But I cannot remember her shoes in summer.
Mother slept in the same bed as her mother when her mother got very old. We had brought her in to our lives around the time I was 9 and should have been in fourth grade. Or perhaps it was earlier…in any case, we traveled to Indiana and filled a U Haul truck with her furniture. I danced around the vehicle, excited to be watching something purposeful and important. Gram had her blue gray dress on and her little hat with a small veil, held on by a stick pin. She had told me stick pins were for when men tried something inappropriate on a young lady. “You just take the stick pin out of your hat and poke him with it,” she said.
Mother rushed in saying, “Mom don’t say those things.” Then she turned to me and said, “It isn’t true,” But Gram’s eyes gleamed with intent and I was surprised that such a formidable fighter was within my old cranky grandmother.
While Mother taught at Brandeis and Wellesley and we lived on Fountain Street in West Newton Mass., Gram started getting what Mother called, “hardening of the arteries.” Mother was terrified of it. It was to her the worst thing that could happen to a person, to lose their mind.
“Where’s my toothpaste?” Gram would begin saying, wandering through the enormous house we had rented for the year. “Yoo hoo! Ruth? Where did my toothpaste go?” And because my two sisters went to school and had friends and went on dates and were rarely home, and because mother would teach or go absent to write a poem, Gram would invariably end up finding me wandering the dark hallways too, and she would corner me. “You stole my toothpaste,” she would say. I can’t remember what I would say in response, but I felt a strange strangling hysteria and I would snicker and run away. “Oh, I’m going off to the woods,” Gram would moan. I could hear her despair through out the second floor of the house. I would hide in my room, in my closet, laughing into my hands, horrified and amused and unhappy.
That year Mother would invite her students over in the evenings and hold her class at our house. The Brandeis students were jolly and drank wine and read shocking poems, but the Wellsley students were proper and I had to be careful not to say anything to embarrass Mother when they came over.
We had a stereo in the living room and I played Beatle records on it when Mother was not listening to Pete Fountain. She loved Pete Fountain. She also had Al Hirt records but she really loved Pete Fountain best. She also loved the song, Counting Flowers on the Wall which I think came out that year. She was wild over the actor Sidney Poitier. She bought and read stacks of books every week, mostly poetry but that is when she began devouring astronomy books. And every week-end we drove to Vermont. These trips were like picnics to me. We stopped at a country store on Route 103 each time and bought supplies. The owners were foreign and had two longhaired dachshunds just like our dog. “Ohh! You have come to see the coal pappies!” the woman said every time we walked in the door in the evening. “Here, here coal pappies!” and the dogs would run through the store barking with excitement. My sister and I laughed about that for years. I sat in the back seat of the old Rambler or Valiant, covered up with a blanket because there was never any heat in the car, my sister and mother in the front seat, heading over the mountains in the dark, eating snacks and laughing over the woman saying coal puppies. Our own dachshund was named Coalie by coincidence. Or maybe that is why I named him that. He had started out as my dog, as all the subsequent dogs did, and ended up being mothers dog. He traveled with us wherever we went, crossing the country many times. He didn’t take up any room in the usually crowded car, as he lay on the edge of the back of the front seat, with his long nose on Mother’s shoulder, while she drove. And he never lost his balance.
While the dog lay balanced by Mother’s neck, and the heater was broken and the window often froze up so it was hard to see, Mother would become inspired by driving and rummage through her big black purse beside her, get out a pen and begin writing on whatever she had beside her in the car… many of her poems were started on the backs of envelopes, some on napkins. When we got to the foot of our mountain, we stopped again at the little red and white store where Bob Wizell would say in his odd accent, “Well Hellooooo Ruth….” And Mother let me fill a tiny brown paper bag full of penny candy. It was comforting to have this man always behind the counter when we walked in. Of course if we didn’t start early enough the store would be closed, but otherwise Bob Wizell was there, and his wife was in back behind the meats counter. She was not nice like Bob. She snapped at me and never acted glad to see us. Bob was warm and male and he always seemed surprised when he saw us. “Well, helllooooo Ruth!” he said, spoken through his nose, spoken with genuine friendliness. It was almost as if my father were there, running the cash register inside a cozy little store in Forestdale Vermont.
In fact, unlike my life, Mother made friends wherever she went. She was a natural. Everyone loved her. She could say anything, do anything, look disheveled or not, and people swarmed around her in admiration. She had a way of understanding, of secretive conspiratorial knowledge shared only with the other person and herself. “That’s all right…. That’s ok,” she would say warning them not to reveal what transpired in that instant I had turned away, “we understand each other…” and that other person, wiping away tears and shining from within, became a lifelong admirer of my mother. Even if they never saw her again, I could run in to them 30 years later and they would say “How’s your mother? She is one special lady. I’ll never forget how…” and I would have to nod and agree and say, “Yeah it’s true. She is.” Only now I say, “Yeah, it’s true. She Was.”
In this way, she is not completely gone from me. I do still see her in a way. I see her through the eyes of the world, and I see her in my memories, and I see her also in our old home movies.
9.....Home Movies
Mommy and Daddy were poets and fiction writers but they had other art forms too. Daddy was a bird watcher, with binoculars and bird records. He played the banjo and wrote funny songs. Mommy had an old grey steel movie camera. She carried it everywhere.
Time passes. How goes it, Mother? I worry sometimes you know. Over the last four months I have poured through what little I have of you left. I have looked at old videos of you and I have been out ever searching for a job. Of course you might not know that. You might not know I was left without resource. That’s ok. You called yourself “neurotic” in the movies. “Oh I was so neurotic. I wouldn’t let you out of my sight… I couldn’t let you leave for fear something would happen to you…” you said repeatedly over the years. In one old film of 1969, you are sitting on the screened porch steps, as you often did, while hippies and dogs walked back and forth in the yard. You are 55 or so, and look 25. You make your classic gestures; shy, bold, wistful, happy. You speak but we cannot hear what you are saying. I am awkward and stuffed in to a striped shirt and shorts. No one has any idea that time will pass and these images will be all that remain of our family. We stand and sit and try to look natural, but the little steel gray movie camera prevents that. You took that camera everywhere for years. As I later did with my VHS camera. By the time I went digital, you were old. I have a video of you in a kimono standing elegantly in the pathetic world of old age. You who loved your Goshen farmhouse, “Little Farm” you called it. I called it E-Farm when I was three. You who loved your 300 acre property where you dreamed of starting a poetry press…in all the years you owned it, you only were able to live there once. In 1975 you and I moved over there with my boyfriend, and you lived in the print shop with the letter press and I lived in the potato patch in a cabin with my boyfriend. You were so happy there, but we only stayed half a year, and then I left, anxious to marry and begin a life of my own, which I never really did. If only I had stayed, had devoted my life in earnest to you, rather than haphazardly. You who had lived among the things of your life, in this video you are standing in an apartment in a kimono reciting Metamorphosis for me. How we practiced your poems when you lost your eyesite. My impossible mother. My tragic hilarious wounded genius best friend …. I can do no more than admit I went no further. I tried to leave, again and again. And failed. Now my life is your memory. I am your tape recorder, your melodian, your old gray movie camera that captures swaying purple delphiniums astoundingly vibrant in your green golden yard. I will record what you say, I will hear your voice among the lost boxes of your work, among the spiral notebooks. Though I cannot touch what was already done by you and given to others to protect, I can be your voice in the present. I am your living will, your memory, your experience, here, in the gray world between then, and now forever lost.
