Not Becoming My Mother (3 page)

And then in 1929 the tone of her letters got abruptly dark. The Depression, of course, changed life for everybody in America but Mom had gone into business on a lark, and she was fretting about receipts and sales and desperately trying to keep her little bookshop going. And then there was a worse disaster. Her sister fell precipitously ill with a diseased spleen and was dead within the week.

“ I was smart and she was pretty
,
, ”
my mother always said when she spoke about her sister. “I never had the slightest doubt that as far as my parents were concerned, pretty was better. From the moment she was born people stopped them on the street to admire their beautiful baby. They were convinced that Ruth was going to make a brilliant marriage, and they never worried about her. Her death was such a blow!”

When Rabbi Stephen Wise heard the news he tried to console my grandparents. “It is too terrible to be true, that lovely radiant child fallen upon sleep!” he wrote. “I have always felt that to give up a loved child to death must be like being buried alive.”

He obviously knew the family well. “After Ruth died we went into permanent mourning,” my mother told me. “My parents felt that it would be a crime to enjoy ourselves without her. We never celebrated another birthday, holiday or anniversary. It was a particularly bitter blow for my folks, because she wasn’t there, and what could they expect from me? I was useless; I couldn’t even find a husband.”

But now they had other worries; when the stock market crashed, the family lost everything and their financial situation grew increasingly precarious. My grandmother, with her husband’s blessing, decided that it was her duty to help out. She became an impresario, the Cleveland representative of the Hurok organization, renting theaters and bringing great musicians from around the world to perform in them.

“She was beautiful, well organized and charming,” Mom always said of her mother, and I could not miss the mingled notes of envy and admiration in her voice. “She could do anything, easily. She was very good at business, and she was soon surrounded by musicians—Yehudi Menuhin, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Rubinstein. It was her dream come true.”

Mollie not only presented the artists but also entertained them in her home. Dozens of letters mention her spectacular hospitality. It must have been quite a salon, for even Clarence Darrow wrote, “What a delightful time I had at your house. I was just telling Arthur Garfield Hayes that I don’t know when a whole family has made such a hit with me before.”

To Mom, who was living at home, her mother’s new business offered distinct advantages. Tall, slim and darkly intense, she may have felt that she paled beside her dazzling mother, but others saw her differently. After an evening at the house one man wrote, “Go ahead into life, full-blooded, courageous and leap for the adventure. But you must do it soon—before the summer of your youth has cooled off into caution. You are magnificently charming—and you come like a torrent. But you will be spent on the futility of little things. You are not a watercolor. You are carved out of life—and there can be no petty hesitancies about you.”

When Mollie brought Bertrand Russell to lecture in Cleveland he felt much the same and was so taken with Mom that he quickly made plans to return. Embarking on this subsequent tour he wrote in his small, precise handwriting, “I wonder whether you realize that the strongest hope I had in coming to America this time was the hope of getting to know you better? I have loved you from the first moment I saw you, and more each time.”

Mom never got over the fact that Bertie Russell had been in love with her, and I immediately recognized the handwriting on those square blue envelopes. I can’t remember a time when Mom was not reading and rereading his letters, trying to reassure herself that she was the same person who had fascinated the great philosopher. But at twenty-two she was merely flattered: Russell was nearing sixty, and although they became lifelong friends and correspondents, he was hardly marriage material. And her parents were turning up the pressure.

“How we pray for you to meet Him!” my grandmother wrote in 1928.

“Happy New Year,” she wrote again in 1931, “and may you find the Mr. Right. It is our one prayer and hope and we think of it every moment.”

“There was a new moon last night,” she wrote in 1933, “and I prayed and prayed for Him. I dream that you will find a mate.”

A few weeks later my grandfather weighed in. “Every woman needs to be married, and my dearest wish is that you will find the deep happiness that comes from having a partner to love and guide you.”

The condescending tone of that letter made me want to grind my teeth, and I went hunting for some evidence that my mother might—even once—have considered another option. Did it ever cross her mind that she might not marry?

Nothing, in all her notes or letters, gives any indication that she considered the possibility of staying single. She had been back from France for eight years, thirty loomed on the horizon and she was afraid that no man would ever marry her. And then, finally, a beau appeared. In 1935, there is a sudden flurry of letters from a man in Pittsburgh.

His first, written in an even, careful hand, begins, “I realize how terrible I am at writing love letters. I don’t know whether you should feel complimented or insulted at my evident lack of experience.” Mom was in no position to be picky; she chose to be complimented and before long there was talk of engagement rings. “Please remember, Ernest,” she wrote fiercely, “I
don’t want
one.”

Reading Ernest’s bland letters it is easy to see what disaster lies ahead. They had absolutely nothing in common and I found myself shouting, “Don’t do it!”

But of course she did. After a whirlwind courtship she closed her shop and moved to Pittsburgh. “People are still breathless over your sudden departure and fatal decision,” my grandmother wrote, in between descriptions of the latest concert.

Her parents must have known how wildly inappropriate this marriage was, but Mollie was all approval. “Music to our ears and the greatest wish fulfilled,” she wrote when she learned that my mother was, as she put it, “well and truly married.” She was even happier ten months later when the baby was born, enthusing, “Now you are a
real
woman!”

Mom wanted to name the baby for her sister, but Ernest persuaded her to forgo Rufus and settle for the more conventional Robert. He was a good baby, and she tried to be happy, but she was beginning to wonder if she had made a mistake. “I have everything I am supposed to want,” she wrote on one of her scraps of paper. “A presentable husband. A beautiful baby boy. A fine house. Why do I feel so sloppy, disgruntled and unattractive? I feel just like Orphan Annie.”

The months wear on and you can feel Mom’s spirits dwindle as she shrivels into the marriage. “I can’t talk to him!” she wrote. Instead she began writing letters to Ernest, pouring her dreams onto the paper. She wanted “a home filled with peace, a few understanding friends, books, music . . . and above all deep understanding between ourselves. I need that to make life worthwhile.” She sounds so earnest, so wistful and so young.

But in his replies Ernest simply sounds baffled. All he wants is a compliant wife, and he releases a chorus of complaint. “I know your intentions are good but as I’ve told you before, you do not weigh your words carefully enough before speaking. I wonder if you will ever acquire this habit?” She is too reckless, too impetuous, too impatient. She does not keep a neat house. She must be more careful when she drives.

Reading their correspondence is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. She tries to conform to his pleasant respectability, but she always gets it wrong. Trying to serve food that will please him, she continually fails; his letters reproach her with forgotten gravy and invisible desserts. Before long he is stopping at his club to play tennis after work and staying on for supper.

In the end, Mom stopped apologizing. “I can feel myself growing more and more rebellious,” she confessed to a friend. “Who cares about menus and the way they are cooked when there are so many more interesting things to think about?”

She described the marriage as “tempestuously unhappy,” but women of that time did not walk out merely because they were miserable. And they certainly did not leave when there were children. I had always wondered how Mom managed to extricate herself from this sad situation, and now I discovered the secret: He left her.

“I don’t think he ever loved me,” Mom lamented to her parents after Ernest declared that marriage was not for him. But to herself she admitted an even harder truth, one that reveals how thoroughly her confidence had been shattered. “I think he married me because he was in love with my mother,” she confessed. “She was so beautiful and so accomplished. What a disappointment I must have been!”

Her parents were shocked; divorce in those days was very rare. “Did you really try?” asked my grandmother accusingly when she found that Mom had taken the baby and moved to New York. “It was over so quickly!” The marriage had lasted less than two years.

But although Mom’s pride was wounded, she was relieved and she wasted no time on regret. “What a pleasure it is to be independent!” she scrawled across a piece of paper, the words so exuberant you can almost hear the “Hallelujah Chorus” blaring in the background. In short order she found a small apartment in Greenwich Village, a baby nurse and a job, and set out to create that life she had dreamed of, the one filled with books, music and understanding friends.

Talking about the time between her marriages, Mom always glowed. “I finally found myself in New York,” she said, “and I actually began to like myself a little. And for the first time in my life men liked me too. Then, one night . . .” Mom’s voice always got dreamily seductive when she reached this point in her story. “I came home from a party and looked into the mirror. And then I looked again. I realized that a miracle had occurred: I was pretty!”

Mom repeated this story to me again and again when I turned into a pudgy, awkward teenager. “You’ll see,” she said, “once you find out who you are you will find your beauty. You have to grow into your face. But I promise you this: you will.”

Anyone who has been an ugly adolescent—and we are legion—knows that the hopeless feeling of being unlovely and unlovable never really goes away. No matter how much we are able to transform ourselves in later life it is always there, lurking right beneath the surface. No mother can banish that particular pain from her child’s life. But my mother, who had been told as a teenager that she was too homely to be successful, was determined to try.

“How could I feel good about myself when the self-image my mother gave me was that I was sloppy, inefficient, homely, ungraceful and ungracious?” she wrote on one of her scraps of paper. “I carried that person around for so many years. I want to protect Ruthy from that.”

At the time I was too mortified by my appearance to be aware of the gift that my mother was offering. With my squishy blob of a body and untamable hair I felt like the Pillsbury Doughboy topped with a pad of Brillo, and when I looked in the mirror I hated myself.

Mom understood. “It is so hard to watch Ruthy going through this,” she wrote, “because I know exactly what she’s feeling. I wish I could send her to the hairdresser, have her nose fixed, or buy a dress that will make her graceful. But I know that none of that will work. All I can offer her is hope. It’s one thing my parents didn’t do for me.”

Mom enjoyed her new found freedom,
but she spent the rest of her life regretting how little she had done with it. Even at seventy she was still lamenting that she had not used that time more productively. “When Ernest left me and I thought about building a career, why didn’t I do it? I wanted to study psychiatry. Imagine how that would have changed my life! Why was I in such a hurry?”

Reading that, I muttered, “Why are you always so hard on yourself?” She was a single mother with very little money; how could she have possibly managed medical school? As it was, Mom was barely able to make ends meet.

Although it was the late thirties and the country was still mired in the Depression, Mom had found herself a small job in publishing. She told her parents that the work was “fascinating,” but to her friends she admitted the truth. “I am a secretary, and a very inexperienced one at that,” she wrote. “And my boss wants a very experienced one. I don’t know how long he will keep me. The publishing business is very precarious. And I am only making $25 a week.”

The rent on her apartment was $77 a month, and although Ernest sent her $50 a month in child support, she had to scrimp. Once the early thrill of independence wore off, Mom began to chafe at spending time in a dull, low-paying job. She wanted a real career. In 1940, she took action; buried in the bottom of the box I found an official-looking document from the Human Engineering Laboratory of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken.

The report is filled with technical jargon that a long-lost booklet (“An Objective Approach to Group-Influencing Fields”) apparently explains. Her test results indicate that she was terrible at both inductive and analytical reasoning and that she lacked all aptitude for accounting. But her creative imagination was high and her tonal memory almost perfect. “You have made 47 correct answers out of a possible 48,” concluded the tester, Evelyn C. Wight, as she suggested that Mom consider work that combined her talents for words and music. “You must use your most outstanding characteristic in choosing a career,” she cautioned. “Idle aptitudes cause restlessness and may detract from a woman’s success and happiness.”

In conclusion Ms. Wight suggested that Mom seek work with an agency doing public relations for musicians. The irony was not lost on Mom, but it was too late for her go into business with her mother.