Gordon - Circling my mother: a memoir

Contents

For my daughter, Anna,
who makes sense of everything

PREFACE

Perhaps the question the writer most fears from her potential readers is: Why have you done this? With the implication: Why have you done this to me? But often in the course of writing this book, I have asked the question of myself: Why are you doing this? And what is the this?

What would a book like this be called? Memoir? Biography? Memoir suggests that the writer is the central character, and although, certainly, I am writing about my mother because she is my mother, I had hoped to step aside and give her center stage. But biography, with its hints of dates and exactitudewell, thats not what Im doing either.

So, if one resigns oneself to taking a place at the end of the increasingly long line of people who have written about their parents, how, exactly, does one understand the place?

It is the attempt to understand this place that has moved me to call this book Circling My Mother. I came to realize that I couldnt see my mother properly by standing in one place, by standing still. For the last eleven years of her life, the years marked by dementia, she was much more a problem to me than a joy. I wanted to move from the spot where I thought of my mother as a problem. To do this, I had to walk around her life, to view it from many pointsonly one of which was her career as my mother.

I had hoped to tell not only the story of my mothers life, but a larger story, a story that had implications beyond her immediate biography. My mothers story is a story of physical affliction (polio, alcoholism, senile dementia), and of a historical moment importantly colored by the experience of immigration, world war, and the Great Depression. It is the story of a particular moment in American Catholicism, and of the American working class.

My mother was born in 1908; she died in 2002. In those years, America changed radically; the world my mother died in would have been unimaginable to the parents who gave her birth. So it is also the story of time, and the effects of time.

I start, then, on this journey of circling my mother, beginning and ending with the painter Bonnard: an acknowledgment that I know that, like him, I am involved in a job of making. Of making something of my mother. Or perhaps I invoke Bonnard simply to allow myself a companion on the journey. To have the companionship of a great painter on this writers journey, this writers task: trying to understand in the only way a writer canby writing. A job that is never completed, and never anything but a failed attempt. And yet we begin, and we begin again, because it is the thing we do. Looking, in the way that is open to us for what Conrad calls that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

Bonnard and My Mothers Ninetieth Birthday

In the year 1908, Pierre Bonnard painted The Bathroom and my mother was born. The posture of the young woman in the painting is that of someone enraptured by the miracle of light. The light is filtered through the lace curtains, and its patterning is reflected in the water that fills the tub into which she is about to step. Even the floral spread on the divan from which she has just risen is an emblem of prosperity and joy. Bonnard is famous for painting bathing women; in all her life my mother has never taken a bath. At three, she was stricken with polio, and she never had the agility to get in or out of a bathtub. She told me that once, after I was born, my father tried to lift her into a bath, but it made them both too nervous.

Ninety years after the painting of The Bathroom, ten days before my mothers ninetieth birthday, I am looking at the works of Bonnard at the Museum of Modern Art, a show Ive been waiting for with the excitement of a teenager waiting for a rock concert. I was not brought to museums as a child; going to museums wasnt, as my mother would have said, the kind of thing we went in for. It is very possible that my mother has never been inside a museum in her life. As a family we were pious, talkative, and fond of stories and the law. Our preference was for the invisible.

I can no longer remember how looking at art became such a source of solace and refreshment for me. Art history wasnt anything I studied formally. I think I must have begun going to museums as a place to meet friends. However and wherever it happened, a fully realized painterly vision that testifies in its fullness to the goodness of life has become for me a repository of faith and hope, two of the three theological virtues I was brought up to believe were at the center of things. It is no accident, I suppose, though at the time I might have said it was, that Ive arranged to meet two friends at the Bonnard show at the same time that Im meant to phone the recreation therapist at my mothers nursing home to plan her birthday party. Fifteen minutes after I arrive, Ill have to leave the show. The therapist will be available only for a specific half-hour; after that, shes leaving for vacation.

Am I purposely creating difficulties for myself, a situation of false conflict, so that I can be tested and emerge a hero? There is the chance that I will not be able to leave the dazzle of the first room, to resist the intoxication of these paintings, so absorbing, so saturating, so suggestive of a world of intense color, of prosperous involvement, of the flow of good life and good fortune. Theres the chance that I will forget to call the therapist. I do not forget, but my experience of the first paintings is poisoned by the fear that I will.

My mother has no idea that her ninetieth birthday is coming up. She has no notion of the time of day, the day of the week, the season of the year, the year of the century. No notion of the approaching millennium. And no idea, any longer, who I am. Her forgetting of me happened just a few months ago, after I had been traveling for more than a month and hadnt been to see her. When I came back, she asked me if I was her niece. I said no, I was her daughter. Does that mean I had you? she asked. I said yes. Where was I when I had you? she asked me. I told her she was in a hospital in Far Rockaway, New York. So much has happened to me in my life, she said. You cant expect me to remember everything.

My mother has erased me from the book of the living. She is denying the significance of my birth. I do not take this personally. It is impossible for me to believe any longer that anything she says refers to me. As long as I remember this, I can still, sometimes, enjoy her company.

The day before I go to the Bonnard show, I visit my mother. It is not a good visit. It is one of her fearful days. I say Ill take her out to the roof garden for some air. She says, But what if I fall off? I bring her flowers, which I put in a vase near her bed. She says, But what if they steal them or yell at me for having them? She asks me thirty or more times if I know where Im going as we wait for the elevator. When I say well go to the chapel in a little while, she asks if I think shell get in trouble for going to the chapel outside the normal hours for Mass, and on a day thats not a Sunday or a holy day. She seems to believe me each time when I tell her that she wont fall off the roof, that no one will reprimand her or steal her flowers, that I know where Im going, that she will not get in trouble for being in church and saying her prayers.