The Good Mother Read online

  The buildings were all painted white, with dark green trim. Just after Molly and I moved into our Cambridge apartment, I used those colors to paint her bedroom, and it was only as I recognized their source in the finished job that I realized how frightened and homesick I was for something familiar and safe.

  My mother always sent me to my grandparents as soon as school was out. Sometimes, in fact, it would be my grandfather and I who made our buggy way around the lake to get the first rowboat. I would sit in the stern and bail all the way over to get my grandmother and back, while the water seeped steadily through the dried-out boat in dozens of spots that would swell shut within a week. My mother came up in midsummer for a month or more, leaving my father alone in Schenectady. G.E. allowed him only two weeks, and he didn’t usually appear until August. Then he seemed uncomfortable, as did the other brothers-in-law. They spent their time growing beards and fishing. The walls of the main house were dotted with birchbark reproductions of record catches, traced by the men in an unspoken competition that had developed over the years. When they were all up at camp at the same time, the brothers-in-law and my Uncle Orrie tended to cluster awkwardly together, apart from their wives and children, like a group of oversized boy cousins. It seemed as though they felt, in that setting, that it wasn’t appropriate to assert any kind of sexual or paternal claim.

  One childhood night, late in August, the fathers were talking about business. They had the choice seats, a semicircle of wicker chairs around the big stone fireplace. My grandfather sat off to the edge of the group, but he was reading. He never talked much to his sons-in-law, those only moderately successful men who had compromised his daughters’ lives. I wasn’t really listening to them either. I can’t remember what I was doing. I might have been reading, or stirring fudge, or just watching the fire. No matter what, the fathers, the uncles, didn’t interest me. It was the aunts whose talk I cared about. Their conversations seemed to be about things that mattered—love, death, mutilation. This was the stuff that seemed important to me, although later I was to learn that it wasn’t. It didn’t count. And the preoccupation with it was what kept women from doing anything of consequence in the world. Tonight my Aunt Weezie was telling my mother about a friend of hers who had had her whole insides removed. “All of it,” Weezie said portentously. I sat trying to imagine this, trying to imagine how the woman survived, hollowed out this way. My mother and Weezie were both knitting, pushing and counting their stitches as they pursed their lips and said what a tragedy this was. Fat Weezie leaned into the lamplight and said emphatically to my mother, “You can’t tell me they had to do that to a girl that age, twenty-four. They love their knives, those surgeons.”

  When my own father began to speak, though, I turned to listen. He was so silent at home that I yearned to know him better, if only to justify somehow the passionate love I felt for him. I was just over twelve at the time. I moved closer to the men and watched my father’s face.

  He seemed like a stranger. His nose and cheeks looked flushed in the orange light. He hadn’t shaved since he’d arrived, two days before, and his whiskers were like a film of grime over his lower face. He was wearing a plaid woollen shirt. He’d taken off his waders outside, and his pants were crumpled. His feet rested on the floor in thick wool socks. At home even on Saturdays he was impeccably dressed. His workclothes came in paired sets of khaki and olive green, the shirt and pants always carefully pressed; his work shoes were polished a dull orange, and their thick soles rippled under his feet like two ruffled, gummed skirts.

  He was telling the other fathers about some copper mines in South America that he’d persuaded his immediate superior to buy up. The older man had felt that the mines were exhausted, but my father insisted that they only seemed so because South American technology was so backward. In the end my father had won the argument: G.E. had taken over the mines and brought in new personnel, new technologies. “And now,” my father said, “that mine is turning out copper like there’s no tomorrow.”

  There was a little moment of silence while the uncles contemplated the story or the fire.

  “And I have to credit Reynolds,” my father added abruptly. “He admitted to me that he’d been wrong. ‘Dave,’ he said, ‘I have to admit it: on my own I wouldn’t have taken the risk.’ I give him credit for that.” My father bent forward and uselessly stirred the fire with the poker, the same way various of my cousins did from time to time. But when we did it, one of the aunts or uncles always spoke sharply: “Please, will you leave that fire alone.” Now pink and white embers rustled down from the grate into the ashes.

  “And it probably wasn’t easy for him to admit it, either,” my father was saying. “Him being a big wheel in the company like that, and me just a self-made man.” There was a tone of deep self-satisfaction in my father’s voice which embarrassed me a little, and I looked to see if any of the uncles were sharing his pleasure.

  “Excuse me, David,” my grandfather broke in. My mother, sitting across the room, looked up to hear what her father had to say to her husband. The quick motion of her head caught my eye, but her face was in the shadow of the bright kerosene lamp, and I couldn’t see it. Weezie went right on talking, her head bent over the needles and the yellow yarn.

  “I couldn’t help hearing you refer to yourself as a self-made man, and I just want to correct you on that.” My grandfather’s pronunciation was carefully precise, with not a trace of the Scotch brogue that his parents had spoken all their lives. “I don’t mean to take away from your achievement in the least. You must know I respect and admire you for how far you’ve come. But self-made!” My grandfather smiled at my father, the kind, condescending smile of a teacher to a particularly backward child. “I’m a self-made man, David. Let me tell you what that means. That means no . . . pension plan, for example. No company ladder to climb, to protect you every step of the way. No company. That’s what self-made means.” He paused. Then: “You. You’re a company man, David. A company man.” He tilted his book back up on his abdomen again, as if to begin to read it once more. He smiled again. “I just thought you ought to be aware of that distinction.”

  I didn’t really understand the distinction my grandfather was making, but I knew I shouldn’t look at my father. After a moment I could hear the chunk chunk of the poker striking the wood. My grandfather had gone back to his book and seemed totally involved. I looked at my mother. Her head was bowed again over her knitting, her face carefully averted from the group by the fire, and she seemed to be listening intently to Weezie. I wanted her to do something, to say something. I wanted her to defend my father, to cleave only unto him, forsaking all others, as she and I both knew she should do. But she sat, and Weezie’s bright loud voice encircled her as the lamplight did. By her silence, I felt, she contributed to my father’s shame, and I hated her.

  In a few minutes, when one of the uncles had started talking again, I went and sat on the arm of my father’s chair. I put my arm along his shoulders and leaned my head towards him. But he didn’t want me around. His head moved away from contact with mine. After a moment he asked me irritably why I didn’t play with one of my cousins. “Grownups are trying to talk here,” he whispered sharply to me.

  My father had married up as they used to say, though I didn’t understand that phrase until later in my teens. All I understood at the time I’m speaking of was that somehow my father was vulnerable to my mother’s family and I was the only one who seemed likely to try to protect him. On my father’s account I was especially afraid of my grandfather, that stern, seemingly generous man whose every gesture, every gift, was a kind of rebuke to the parsimony of the normal lives around him. We were all, somehow, victims of his largesse, and no one ever stood up to him or defied him. Except Babe.

  Babe was my mother’s youngest sister, my grandparents’ youngest child. She was tall and slender, with pale brown skin and wild full brown hair. She was beautiful in a way none of the other sisters were. They were all large, blond, Wagner
ian, like my mother. Babe was like a wood sprite, a nymph compared to them.

  She had been an afterthought of one sort or another; everyone had always known it. But no one ever dared to ask, and so no one knew, whether she was a mistake, or one last yearning look back at a stage already well past for my grandparents. My mother was twenty-two years older than her sister. She told me once that she had at first thought her mother was joking when she said she was going to have another child; and then was ashamed and embarrassed by it. She said it ruined her senior year of college.

  I was the oldest grandchild, five years younger than my Aunt Babe. In her isolation, Babe befriended me. Reciprocally, I adored her. I had no siblings. I was dominated completely by my mother, and Babe seemed the ideal older sister, glamorous, strong, and defiant. Through those long family summers of my childhood, Babe and I were, in a certain, initially enforced sense, inseparable.

  There were four cottages at camp, but most of us cousins slept together on the sleeping porch of the large main house, the only one with a kitchen. Each child had an iron hospital bed, and we were grouped by families. Since I was an only child, and Babe an aberration, we slept together. Babe had rigged up a curtain to separate our corner of the porch from the rest. She didn’t mind my hanging around watching her paint her toenails or curl her hair. But if one of the younger cousins poked a head under the curtain, she was harsh. “No brats!” she’d snap.

  In the early morning the sunlight reflected off the lake onto the whitewashed ceiling of the sleeping porch. As the air began to stir, the motion of the ripples increased until the ceiling shimmered with golden lights. I lay still and watched them; watched my beautiful aunt sleep, until my grandmother arrived from her cottage to the kitchen. With the smell of coffee and bacon, the squeak of the pump by the kitchen sink, I’d get up, easing my weight slowly off the steel mesh which supported my mattress in order not to disturb Babe, and go to help Grandmother make breakfast for the fifteen or twenty cousins and aunts and uncles who would rise when she rang the bell.

  Babe was always quite distinct in my mind from the rest of them. I felt, even then, a strong bond with her, a sense of shared possibilities. In fact, I think we were two sore thumbs, Babe even sorer, I’m sure, than I. The other sisters grew more expansive and thick as thieves as summer wore on, seeming to pull away from us children. They told secrets, laughed at private things, often made fun of Uncle Orrie’s wife, who clearly was never to be one of them. In general they seemed transformed into people we had never known, could never know. Into girls, in a sense, but girls whose club was private and exclusive and cruel. Babe was, of course, not a part of the club. But she was also clearly not one of us cousins. Her singular status was a constant irritant to my aunts and my mother. They wanted someone to be in charge of Babe, her appearance, her language, her behavior towards the nieces and nephews. They turned in vain to my grandmother. She was, in her silent way, almost proud of Babe’s eccentricities. She’d say, “Oh, that’s just Babe’s way” or “But you know, dearest, I can’t do a thing with her.” Neither could they, so she existed in a no man’s land, nobody’s child, nobody’s mother.

  She was sometimes a leader of the cousins, and sometimes tormented them. I was honored to be her ally in whichever direction she went. I felt I had no choice, and didn’t want any. To be more than just myself, to be like her, that was the opportunity she offered me. Even now I feel I would have been a fool to say no. And when I occasionally tried, she made me ashamed of myself. “But Babe,” I’d say, “Aunt Rain said . . .”

  “You want to grow up to be a creep like Rain?” she interrupted. “The most exciting thing she’s done in the last ten years, she finished that thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle last week.”

  Babe was a born teacher, and she bound us all to her through crime and her own special insights into the adult world. She swiped food regularly, and kept a supply in the icehouse which she sometimes shared. She pilfered cigarettes and taught us all to smoke. We had a meeting place, a dappled clearing far back in the woods; and I can see her now sitting on a rock, puffing a Pall Mall, her fuchsia toenails glimmering on her dirty bare feet, and pronouncing all the aunts and uncles, our parents, a bunch of fucking assholes.

  Another time she pulled down her pants and showed us where the hair was going to grow when we were as old as she was. We thought it was disgusting, ugly. We hoped she was wrong, that it wouldn’t happen that way to us. But we adored her for doing it.

  The few years after this Babe grew more remote from me. Her adolescence fell like a shadow between us. She was simply gone a good deal of the time, off with young men in power boats from the other side of the lake where the houses clustered close to the shoreline. They would come swooping into our inlet to get her, shearing off endless cotter pins on the unmarked rocks which studded it, and then hover helplessly fifteen feet from shore. We had only rowboats, so no need of docks. Sometimes I or a cousin would row her out the little distance, but often she waded out, holding a bundle of dry clothes above the water with one hand, swimming the last few feet awkwardly. She often came back after dark, and occasionally so late that she swam in quite a distance, theoretically so that the noise of the boat wouldn’t wake the family. The lake was so still at night, though, that I’m sure my grandparents lay in their beds listening, as I did, to the dying whine of the motor’s approach, the murmur of voices, laughter, carrying over the still water, and the splash as she dived in. Her teeth sometimes chattered a long time after she slid under the layers of covers on the cold sleeping porch.

  My grandfather was always angry at her now, but his methods of punishment had no effect on Babe. He was stony with her. I heard him talk more than once of her “betraying his trust.” He withdrew his charm and warmth, of which he had a considerable supply, from her. She simply didn’t care. Occasionally he would force her to stay home in the evening. She would pace around the sitting room of the main house, where we all passed evenings together, occasionally stopping to try and fit a piece into whatever the ongoing puzzle was, sighing, picking up and putting down whatever book she was reading. She made everyone nervous, and we were all just as happy, in truth, to have her gone.

  The two summers after this, my mother enrolled me in music camp, so I saw Babe only for a week or so at the ends. When I again spent all summer at my grandparents’, she was nineteen, in college, and I was fourteen. From the start of the summer she was preoccupied and dreamy. She wrote long letters daily, and usually made the trip into town herself to get the mail in my grandparents’ old Packard. Sometimes I accompanied her, as she seemed to be at a stage again where she didn’t mind my presence. Once or twice we sat in the car for a long time listening to popular songs on the radio while the battery ran down. There was no radio allowed at camp.

  She seemed plumper, softer, tamed. Yet, mysteriously to me, she still seemed to create a furor in the family. There was constant tension between her and my grandfather and aunts. Sudden silences would fall when I or the cousins came around. Yet her behavior by contrast with previous summers seemed impeccable.

  I was myself preoccupied because of the music camp. Somehow, it was clear to me, the decision had been made that I was not, as my mother had hoped, musically gifted. My teacher’s attitude had shifted during the previous year, from that of rigorous demand to a kind of empty approval. I knew she and Mother had talked. I would not go to the camp again. Mother said it seemed a waste of money, when I could have such a good time at my grandparents’. I don’t remember that the decision about music had ever been mine, but I had accepted it and wanted to be good. Now I felt that my life as a serious person was over.

  Near the end of August, Babe and I went on a picnic together at Blueberry Island. I swam briefly, feeling my usual anxiety about brushing against unfamiliar rocks or trees in the strange water. Babe lay in shorts and a man’s shirt, with sleeves rolled up, and sunbathed.

  I came out of the water and dried off. Babe sat up. We chatted briefly, about my mother, about how
disappointed she was in me. Babe offered the theory that she probably lost interest in my musical career when she discovered you didn’t wear little white gloves to play in concerts. I went down to the rowboat we’d pulled up onto the shoreline and brought back a sweatshirt for myself, and two blueberry pails. We walked into the center of the small island, screened from the lake by trees and brush, and knelt down to pick the berries. After a while, I asked Babe why everyone seemed so angry at her, why all the doors kept slamming shut on family conferences. Babe’s lips and teeth were stained blue and she leaned back on her heels and said, “You might as well know now, I guess. I’m going to have a baby. I’m almost three months pregnant. They’re all in a twit. They hate my boyfriend, he’s not respectable enough. They think I’m too young. Daddy brought me up here this summer to get me away, to bring me to my senses he said. They want me to go to Europe next year.” Tears began to slide down her face. “All I want is just to be with Richard.”

  I was stunned and appalled and thrilled, just as I had been when she had shown us the secrets of her adolescent body. I remember I asked her why she and Richard didn’t run away, and she said he had no money. He needed to finish college. He was ambitious and poor, and besides, he didn’t know she was pregnant.

  I asked her how she knew, and, eternally the teacher, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and carefully explained to me the way. Then she said she also knew almost right away by her body, how it looked and felt, and that was how Aunt Weezie had found out about it—by seeing Babe naked and guessing.

  “How does it feel, Babe?” I asked, knowing she would tell me.

  She smiled. “Oh, wonderful. Kind of ripe and full. Like this.” She held up a fat berry. Then she put it between her teeth and popped it and we both laughed. A sudden shy silence fell between us. Then she said, “Do you want to see?”