Valerie Martin - The Confessions Of Edward Day

Valerie Martin is the author of three collections of short fiction, most recently The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories, and eight novels, including Trespass, Italian Fever, The Great Divorce, Mary Reillythe Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story told from the viewpoint of a housemaid, which was filmed with Julia Roberts and John Malkovichand the 2003 Orange Prizewinning Property. She is also the author of the nonfiction work Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis. She resides in upstate New York.

a cognizant original v5 release october 07 2010

M y mother liked to say Freud should have been strangled in his crib. Not that she had ever read one line of the eminent psychoanalysts writing or knew anything about his life and times. She probably thought he was a German; she might have gotten his actual dates wrong by half a century. She didnt know about the Oedipus complex or the mechanics of repression, but she knew that when children turned out badly, when they were conflicted and miserable and did poorly in school, Freud blamed the mother. This was arrant nonsense, Mother declared. Children turned out the way they turned out and mothers were as surprised as anyone else. Her own child-rearing strategy had been to show no interest at all in how her children turned out, so how could she be held responsible for them?

Proof of Mothers assertions might be found in the relatively normal men her four sons grew to be, not a pervert or a criminal among us, though my oldest brother, Claude, a dentist, has always shown far too much interest in crime fiction of the most violent and degraded sort, and my profession, while honest, is doubtless, in some quarters, suspect. For the other two, Mother got her doctor and lawyer, the only two professions her generation ever recommended. My brothers specialties have the additional benefit of being banal: the doctor is a urologist and the lawyer handles real estate closings.

My mother was a tall, beautiful woman, with dark hair, fair skin, an elegant long neck, and excellent posture. She was poorly educated and, as a young mother, intensely practical. My father had various jobs in the civil service in Stamford; his moves were sometimes lateral, occasionally up. She hardly seemed to notice him when we were around, but there must have been some spark between them. She had her sons in sets, the first two a year apart, a five-year lapse, and then two more. I was the last, her last effortthis was understood by allto have a girl.

Even if Freud hadnt encouraged me to, I think I would still have to blame Mother for my craving to be someone else, and not only because she wasnt satisfied with who I am, though she wasnt, not from the start. My middle name is Leslie and thats what I was called at home; I became Edward when I went away to boarding school in Massachusetts. Mother had gender issues, but none of us realized how serious they were until after she died. This mournful event took place when I was nineteen, a freshman at the University of North Carolina, and it was preceded by a seismic upheaval that lasted six months, during which time Mother left my father for a woman named Helen, who was ten years her junior and bent on destruction.

Mother wasnt naturally a warm personI know that nowand she must have been lonely and frustrated for years, surrounded from dawn to dark, as she was, by the unlovely spectacle of maleness. A frequent expression upon entering a room in which her sons were engaged in some rude or rowdy masculine behavior was Why are boys so As the youngest, I took this to heart and tried to please her, not without some success. I kept my corner of the bedroom spotless, made my bed with the strict hospital corners she used on her own, rinsed my dishes at the sink after the pot roast, meat loaf, or fried chicken dinner, and expressed an interest in being read to. I wasnt picky about the stories, either; tales of girlish heroism were fine with me, hence my acquaintance with the adventures of such heroines as Nancy Drew, the Dana Girls, and all the travails of the shrewdly observant Laura in the Little House books. I know, as few men do, my fairy tales, from Rumpelstiltskin to the Little Goose Girl, stories certainly grisly enough to terrify even a stalwart little boy and which I take to explain the surprisingly violent images that so often surface in the consciousness exercises of young actresses. Mother was a good reader; she changed her voices for the different characters. She had a cackling crone, a booming good fellow, and a frightened little girl in her repertory, and she moved from one to the other with ease. Long after I could read myself, I approached her after dinner with a book clutched to my chest and asked if she felt like reading to me. Many times she didnt, and she wasnt terribly nice about refusing me. But when she agreed, I was invited to lean against her on the couch, watch the pages turning beneath her bloodred fingernails, and feel her voice through her arm. She was a smoker, so there was the cloud of smoke wafting up from her lips as Nancy cautioned her dopey boyfriend Ned not to open the suitcase theyd found in the empty house. It was all very comforting and at the same time confusing, also mysterious and sexually disturbing. But I like to remember Mother that way, and myself, her favorite, her Leslie, the good boy who hung on her words.

When I went off to school and became Edward, I had no clear idea of myself; perhaps that was why I was drawn to acting. Inside a character I knew exactly who I was, the environment was controlled, and no one was going to do anything unexpected. It seemed a way of playing it safe. Of course, real acting is the farthest thing from safe a person can get, but I didnt know that then. Perhaps in some corner of my adolescent consciousness, I understood that my mother would eventually crack under the strain of the role she herself was playing with increasing reluctance and incredulity. On school vacations she and my father were glum and irritable. One night she put a roasted chicken on the table and announced that it was the last meal she was cooking. She joined a reading group, but this quickly bored her and she decided to become a potter. This led to sculpture and ultimately ironwork. On my next vacation there was a welding torch on the kitchen table and all food was takeout. A few days before I graduated from high school my father called me to say Mother was moving out; she would be living with a friend named Helen, someone she had met at the artist co-op where Mother had rented a space to do her sculpture.