What My Mother Gave Me (19 page)

She Gave Me the World

MARY MORRIS

I'm driving with a friend into Rome. We zip past Roman pines, cypresses that dot the hillsides.
Th
e golden Mediterranean light filters down. Its brightness illumines the ruins of aqueducts and walls as we drive on the old Via Appia. I'd been teaching in Umbria for the past week and now I'm on vacation. I know Rome well. In some ways it is my city. I've visited many times and lived here for a year. I know my way around. I know what to avoid. Still I find myself sitting at the top of the Via Veneto at Harry's Bar, sipping wine. Normally I'd avoid this part of town. It's touristy and expensive. But it's where my friend wanted to be.

As we sit, chatting, I look across the street and see the Hotel Flora. I'd forgotten about the Flora and am surprised to see that it's still there.
Th
ough it's been almost fifty years since I've seen, or even really given much thought to the Flora, I suddenly recall every moment I once spent here as a girl. “I stayed in that hotel,” I tell my friend. “It's still there.” She nods, grimacing as she tastes her bitter Campari. At dusk my friend must meet someone for dinner, and I decide to wander alone. I cross the street. I peer inside the lobby. I contemplate going in, but then I might have to answer a question or two and I don't particularly want to.

Instead I head through the ancient Porta Pinciana, past the crumbling Aurelian walls, and cut over to the Villa Borghese gardens. Here I leave the bustle of the city behind. In the gardens it is quiet and cool as I stroll on a tree-lined path. Pausing among the tall pines, I take out my phone, and call my mother to tell her where I am. “I'm in Italy,” I say, “in Rome. Do you remember the Hotel Flora? Do you remember when you brought me here?” But on the other end of the phone my mother grows confused. She tells me her knees hurt, but otherwise she is fine. She doesn't remember the Flora or Rome. “Italy?” she asks, her mind struggling to recall. And I can tell that she doesn't even know what Italy is anymore. “Remember our trip?” I ask her. “You threw your pearls into the sea.”

My mother, of course, is fading. She is ninety-nine years old, and I have watched her world shrink. Just a few years ago she was still talking about us going once more to Paris.
Th
en it was Montreal. And Chicago, the city where she lived her entire life until, in their nineties, my parents moved to Milwaukee to be near my brother. But when I was a sullen teenager in love with the Irish boy who lived on the other side of the tracks (quite literally), my mother picked me up one day after school. “Get in the car,” she said. “We're going to get your passport.” I didn't want a passport. I didn't even know what one was really. My summer would revolve around only these things: learning to touch type and spending every free afternoon at the beach and in the arms of the boy I loved.

But my mother had other plans for me. As we drove south on Edens from the suburbs where we lived, to downtown Chicago, she explained that she intended to take me to Paris, London, and Rome as soon as school let out. She had never been anywhere except to Idaho one summer—a place she detested. And she was longing to travel. Anyone who knew my mother knew this about her.

When I was much younger, my parents were invited to a Suppressed Desire Ball. You were to come in a costume that depicted your secret wish, your heart's desire. My mother went into a kind of trance and for weeks our pool table was covered in blue taffeta, white fishnet gauze, travel posters, and brochures as she began to construct on her seamstress's mannequin the most extraordinary costume I've ever seen.

Sometimes I'd go downstairs to watch her, sewing, cutting late into the night. “What do you think about the Taj Mahal?” “Where should the pyramids go?” On and on into the night my mother pasted and sewed.
Th
e night of the ball my father looked dashing in his tuxedo and toupee (he was going as a man with hair), but it was my mother who entranced me. Within her blue skirts, she had sewn pictures of the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower. On her head sat an aluminum globe. Her skirts were the oceans. Her body the land. And laced between the layers were Tokyo, Istanbul, Tashkent. Instead of seeing the world, my mother became it.

Now she wanted to do the grand tour of Europe. And I was appalled. “Can't Dad go?” I whined. We both knew that my father never would. He hated to go anywhere except to his office, the golf course, or a bridge table. I was to be her reluctant companion, an accidental tourist for six weeks on the road.
Th
is was, at the time, my worst nightmare. “I don't want to,” I told her, staring out as the flat, Midwestern landscape sped by.

My mother gripped the wheel with her white gloves. “You're going,” she said.

Th
e passport office was located in a dreary green institutional-type building. Inside, my mother took a number, got some forms, and sat down in a gray plastic chair. As we waited, a woman in some kind of military uniform entered. She wore high boots and a cap and began to stomp around, then gave the
Sieg Heil
salute to me, clicking her heels together. I was terrified, but my mother laughed. “It's awful, I know,” my mother said. “But she's just crazy.” Still this woman made me feel that the world I was about to enter was a dangerous place, and I was its reluctant visitor.

A few weeks later, a thick, official-looking envelope arrived which my mother handed to me with a flourish, as if I were being anointed for something. But for what? Inside I found my navy blue passport with the gold seal of the United States on its cover. I flipped through its blank, virgin pages, then tucked it into the passport case my mother had given me with my initials inscribed. I didn't really give this passport much thought. Nor did I understand its secret powers until we arrived in Paris, early on a Saturday morning, groggy from sleep, and the French customs official in his dark blue uniform and high red hat raised his stamp and imprinted it onto my passport. He handed it back to me and welcomed me to France. I had crossed my first border.

We stayed in the Hotel Vendome. My mother loved its mahogany canopied beds, its red damask curtains. She savored peach melba in the evenings and washed her feet in the bidet. Paris had long been a dream of my mother's. She'd named our first dog Renoir. When I was in grammar school, she insisted that I learn French. (In fact before I graduated from high school, my mother saw to it that all the grammar schools in our town offered French by the sixth grade.) Every Tuesday afternoon, I went over to see poor Monsieur LaTate who had a nervous tic and seemed despondent as I struggled with the irregular verbs. And I was pretty miserable, too.

But my mother was adamant. She was a Midwestern housewife who probably belonged more in a salon than a supermarket. She had a certificate in fashion design from the Art Institute of Chicago, and her idol was Coco Chanel. In the 1930s, when my mother was working at Saks, selling ladies underwear, a big designer came in to show the saleswomen how to dress the mannequin. As he was trying to explain something that no one seemed able to grasp, my mother held up the sketch she'd just drawn. “Is this what you mean?” He asked her how she learned to do that. My mother just shrugged. “I taught myself,” she said.

Th
e designer helped my mother get a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied fashion until her father refused to give her the carfare she needed to get to school. But she still designed and made all her own clothes. If there was one battle my mother and I fought over and over (down to my own wedding gown), it was how I looked and what I wore. Once she gave me sixty dollars to buy new clothes, and when I got home and tried them on, she took them all back. I remember putting on a little yellow short and shirt set. “Yellow is not your color,” my mother said.

She quickly fell in love with Paris. During the day, my mother dressed to perfection in her dark suit with black patent leather pumps, white gloves, and always her strand of cultured pearls.
Th
ey were a rather cheap strand—something she often complained about—but she wore them everywhere as we clomped around Paris, where she searched for eyeliners and perfumes (Chanel No. 5, Réplique, of which she bought boxes to take home), handbags, and shoes. She didn't care what anything cost. “So broke, so broke,” she used to say. We were at this time in our lives “comfortable.”
Th
is was not to last forever, but on this trip she didn't bat an eye as she bought me a royal blue cloth coat to match my eyes (“Definitely your color”). She dragged me to every Monet and monument she could find. We climbed the steps of Montmartre and found a little bistro where, for the first time, I sipped wine, then staggered back to the hotel. We dined on the Seine on a bateau
mouche
with Paris illumined all around us. My mother didn't just visit Paris. She drank it in.

Th
en we went on to Rome. We stayed at the Flora—the hotel that has made me recall this journey now—in a plush room with a sofa and a view of the Via Veneto. I'm sure Marcello Mastroianni passed us in the street. A handsome, young doorman, who must be an old man by now, called me Miss America and flirted with me in a way that I think my mother found secretly charming. “How is Miss America? Where is Miss America going today?” And we were going everywhere. For the first days, we hired a guide who took us all over Rome. It seemed as if my mother never wanted to stop. When he mentioned that he was taking us to the oldest market in Rome, she asked what she could buy there. “I wouldn't know, Madame,” he replied in his broken English. “It's been closed for two thousand years.”

My mother was enchanted with it all.
Th
e street sign
SENSO UNICO
, which she thought was the name of our street (as opposed to the Via Veneto).
Th
e audience we had with the pope and about five thousand other people at the Vatican.
Th
e nuns who shoved to get past us.
Th
e priest from Chicago who led us by the hand. One afternoon, we went across the street to the famous Eva of Rome, where we had our hair done. Mine was washed, set, and combed into a fluffy confection that was then sprayed. I hated it. My handsome doorman gave me a wink. “Miss America, what have you done to your hair?” he asked as I walked by.

Back in our room, my mother lay down to take a nap. When she was sound asleep, I stuck my head in the sink, combed it out, and towel dried it back to a semblance of its former self.
Th
en I set out on my own. Leaving the hotel, I crossed over to the Villa Borghese gardens, happy to be alone, walking in the shade. But it was not long before I began to hear sharp whistles, the sounds of men calling. Some followed, shouting “Bella!” And other things I didn't understand. It took me a few minutes to understand that these catcalls were for me. I was both frightened and entranced. I found myself being coaxed into this world of strange men, and my Irish boy back home suddenly paled.
Th
ough I didn't know what they were saying, I did understand that I was on the brink of something and my life was about to change.

I bid sad good-bye to my doorman, saying I'd send him a postcard (which I'm not sure I ever did), and we traveled on to Florence. As we left Rome, the bus driver's wife handed him a lunch pail and clean clothes. As they kissed good-bye, he cradled her face in his hands in a loving way. “Italians are so romantic,” my mother said. As we rode along, I gazed out at ruins and cypresses, the vineyards and olive trees, until we stopped at a small town. Here another woman greeted our driver with a kiss and, as he went off to spend his lunch break with her, my mother laughed and laughed. “I don't get it,” I said.

“Oh you will. One day you will.”

Florence, Pisa, Genoa. We bussed across Italy. We were heading to Nice, but en route, stopped for a night in a seaside town of La Spezia. On a warm summer evening we sat, dining on a balcony with the sea stretching before us. With the sun still shining, we dined on grilled fish and sipped cold white wine. It was, I would have to say, kind of a perfect moment. And here my mother put her hands on the strand of cultured pearls she'd worn for years. As the waiter came to clear, she unwound it over her head. “I'm sick of these,” she said. And with that, she tossed them into the sea.
Th
e waiter and I watched, aghast, as they sank into the Mediterranean, disappearing from view. I had no idea what to say. I just stared at my mother, stunned.
Th
en we both began to laugh. I recognized then what I've come to know is true. Travel can be transformative.

My mother has given me many things over the years—jewelry, china, silver. A few years ago, she handed me her mink coat (which I have worn once).
Th
ese things never meant very much to me—perhaps because they meant so much to her. But I recall that first passport, holding it in my hands. I remember the moment the French customs official placed a stamp in its virgin pages and welcomed me to France. I cannot say that my mother and I have always had a smooth ride, but out of all that she has given me, or tried to give or pawn off, it is my passport and the world it opened up for me that has been the greatest gift. My mother set me off on a journey and I have yet to stop.

Since then, I have wandered through Latin America, traveled from Beijing to Berlin by rail, searched for tigers in the jungles of India. And now I am back in Rome. I stand in the Villa Borghese gardens as the golden light of evening filters down, and my mother tells me she's tired and wants to get off the phone.
Th
en she asks as she always does, “When am I going to see you?” “Soon, Mommy,” I tell her, “I'll be there soon.” Beside a pond, lovers kiss, their bodies entwined on park benches. Boats row in the waning sunlight. A family of ducks paddles past as my mother ends our conversation the way she always does. She tells me she loves me with all her heart.
Th
ere was a time in my life when I wasn't sure what the heart was, but I feel clearer as I grow older.