Susan Fales-Hill - Always Wear Joy: My Mother Bold and Beautiful

Part One
Life Is Beautiful

Part Two
Intimations of Mere Mortality

Part Three
Then, Face to Face

O ur house had many mirrors. Since my mother, an actress, believed firmly in the virtue of contemplating ones own reflection, she made sure to have one installed in every room except the kitchen and my fathers study. Each night before tucking me into bed, she would sweep me up in her dancers armsdouble-jointed Balinese dancers arms, she always pointed outand waltz me around before every mirror in the house. In my frilly nightgown, I imagined myself the heroine of the swashbuckler film wed just watched, and during which my mother had pointed to the five-hundred-room Chenonceau-style movie set and exclaimed, Thatll be our house someday. How she planned to make the leap from an eight-room apartment on New Yorks then seedy Upper West Side to a palace in Europe, she never specified. My mother never let reality dampen her dreams. And I believed she could make anything happen. In her arms, I became deaf to the wail of police sirens outside and the drumbeats and chicken squawks of voodoo ceremonies taking place in dark side streets fourteen floors below us. Every night my mother transported me from West End Avenue and Ninety-seventh Street, from 1960s New York, to a magic kingdom.

Pausing before each looking glass, she and I would recite in unison and at waltz tempo, Good night, Mistress Susan, good night, good night. Shed laugh the rich, guttural laugh that ensured that even in a room crowded with towering adults, I could always find her and run to the safety of her amber-scented cocktail skirt. At our first stop, one of three full-length door mirrors in the deep burgundycolored bedroom my parents shared, Id beam adoringly at the reflection of my mothers face, a sharp-angled mahogany heart dominated by enormous dark eyes. Her chiseled features were heightened by her elaborate makeup, or face painting, as she called it. For her, applying makeup, or putting on her face, became an elaborate ritual performed every morning at her bathroom mirror. With her Max Factor Dark Egyptian pancake makeup, eyeliner, and false eyelasheswhich, arrayed on the milk-glass shelf in her bathroom, looked to me like bushy black centipedesshe became her own creation, a portrait, a rendering of herself, my mother, a queen.

Shed smile back at my caf au laitcomplexioned face in the mirror with such joy and pride, as though every night she experienced the happiest moment of her life. Her cheek was as fresh and soft against mine as her silk charmeuse blouse. Soon we glided across the living rooms dark, shining parquet floor to the double doors separating the living room from the dining room. Four mirrors sent back our reflections, and so eight laughing, dancing, smiling figures stared back. Beyond our own images and various pieces of furniture, the red damask slipper chair, the tumbled marble garden planter, which sat on the floor as a gargantuan ashtray, and through the doorway, I could see the reflection of my parents deep, dark burgundy bedroom. Its somber hue contrasted with the pink-and-green rosettes on my nightgown. It loomed as a place of mystery, a repository of grown-ups secrets. But there was no time to dwell on this darkness; my mother kept us moving on the tour of beauty. Off we went, through the double doors to the huge mirror that covered the upper half of one wall of the dining room, above the marble-topped sideboard. The myriad lights from the Italian chandelier, a bouquet of copper wildflowers that hovered above the heavy Victorian walnut table, danced and glistened, creating tiny rainbows in the mirrors that refracted the light from the rhinestone earrings and bracelets my mother often wore. It was our own version of a Versailles sound-and-light spectacle, and to my six-year-old eyes, just as spectacular. One refrain and we departed for the entrance hall. There we stood in the mirrored door of the coat closet, the white-and-gilt baby grand piano huge behind us, like a relic from a rococo past life or perhaps a televised Liberace recital.

And thus we progressed until we reached my room, where at long last my mother would lay me down and sing me a lullaby in Creole, the dialect of her familys native homeland, Haiti. Ti oiseau, ti oiseau . Her gravelly voice tickled my spine like an electric charge. I giggled uncontrollably, wanting her to stop yet begging her to continue. Finally, I would pass from my mothers strong, loving arms into the embrace of night and sleep.

Many years have passed since we first built our dream castles. She is seventy-four, and dying. Now, it is my turn to hold us up to the looking glass once more before we say good night.

New York
January 2001

B reathe in! my mother commanded in her low, smokier-than-Bacall timbre, as she took a puff on her cigarette and cinched my lean, as yet unblooming fourteen-year-old physique into the pearl-gray peau de soie ball gown. I bought this dress years ago, in Paris, from my friend Jacques Fath, one of the great designers. Each of my mothers gowns told a story of her life, her performances, and her travels. As she drew the zipper up, the dresss whalebones rose and folded over my pitifully underdeveloped bust, encasing me in femininity. Though just a few years earlier, white women had declared their emancipation in a bonfire of brassieres, in our home such garments represented neither bondage nor second-class citizenship, but rather glamour and its almost infinite transformative power. To my mother and her bevy of beautiful black diva friends and fellow performers Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Diahann Carroll, Carmen De Lavallade, and Cicely Tyson, women who had survived segregation, the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, and many a bad romance, it was creativity, illusion, and high style, not gunnysacks, earth shoes, and the dreary truth, that set you free.

Your waist was tiny! I exclaimed in admiration. My mother flashed her cat-that-swallowed-the-Hope-diamond grin.

When I married your father, I could wrap my arms around it and shake hands with myself. She laughed her caressing, husky laugh. Youre going to be much taller than I am. Thats why it fits you already. Ill have to take it in here! she said nipping the strap-less top of the bodice tight around my mosquito bitesized breasts. I ran my hands over the forlorn, unfilled cups. I was always flatchested, she reassured me. Its far more elegant! Big breasts are vulgar, she declared, casually demolishing in two sentences a hallowed canon of American beauty. She pulled a pink rayon overdress with three-quarter sleeves and dusty rose velvet piping off the Singer sewing machine perched on the dining room table and helped me into it. There, go look at yourself. She prodded me toward the mirrors on the folding double doors. Beauty lele , she cheered.