In Absence and Presence
Mother’s Day has not been an easy day for me since my mother’s passing a decade ago.
I have the good sense to generally avoid social media altogether on that particular day, but as my mother’s sister noted recently, just as the winter weather starts clearing up, and we are softening into the warmth of Spring, Mother’s Day merchandising begins to “pummel” us collectively.
I was absolutely sanguine until Mother’s Day itself came along this year. I had mistakenly thought it was the tenth Mother’s Day without Mom last Spring, and when I realized my math was off, I was grateful that anniversary hadn’t arrived yet, and figured I could cope with it next year. And then “next year” was this year.
A funny thing about having to work on the Mother’s Day a decade after her passing is that she hated working on Mother’s Day, especially when my parents had a restaurant in the Boston suburbs.
As empathetic as she was, she had a very strong sense of how people should behave, especially in public, and the tension that undergirded many of these family dinners on this occasion unnerved her; she could not believe people couldn’t just rise to the occasion and conduct themselves in a graceful fashion in public even once a year. Her almost unshakable composure was certainly a way she made those around her feel safe and comfortable.
I think she was raised to model a certain gentility and composure by virtue of her generation, but I believe her approach to the social world was more genuinely motivated by kindness and even more so, the spirit of “freudenfreude,” which is the taking of joy in the success of others. Not that that word was necessarily in her parlance, but she quite genuinely rooted for the happiness of others in her life as much as she rooted for the protagonists in her books.
When I was in High School, she decided one close friend should get her first Summer job, and another should apply to Theater School. The first now is a tenured professor, department chair and published author, the other is a sought after acting coach in L.A. Not to say she could see into the future, or her opinion was instrumental in these outcomes, but she strove to really know people she cared about, and she had a strong eye for potential.
As gracious as she was, she was not interested in performative femininity: she was persistently offended by a friend of a friend who would simper at the Dinner table and let her husband order, and every strategic move her sister made in her high profile jobs delighted her. And while she was soft spoken, she could also also be quite indomitable.
She did not enjoy ugliness or conflict, not because it was unseemly (although that aspect didn’t appeal to her either), but because she didn’t like to see people get hurt. She believed very strongly in the concept of “saving face,” and acting in a way that preserved everyone’s dignity.
I wonder what her fiction would have looked like if she had been a writer as well as a reader, as she took a great interest in things beyond her circumstances.
She loved generous writers interested in truth telling about life: Anne Lamott, Robertson Davies, Maya Angelou, Laurie Colwin, Toni Morrison and Jane Austen among many others.
She once made me put a treasured book of hers I had idly picked up back on her shelf simply because it wasn’t mine and I hadn’t asked first. She also read me the entirety of “The Hobbit” before bed chapter by chapter one Fall when I was twelve. Houghton Mifflin had published it when she worked there.
She took interest in Calypso, Afropop, jazz, r and b and classical, and marked her albums in pen with a double D monogram, a phonetic shortening of her nickname.
Scituate Beach, very early eighties
She was prone to describing my Father as being “deaf as a haddock,” a New England expression this Pennsylvania-born transplant had picked up somewhere along the way. Certain things were “beneath her notice,” and she would not have people making “a beef dinner” out of small struggles. She once responded to an assertion of mine she found profoundly dubious by saying: “I wish I knew as little about it as you do.” I was both immediately silenced, and then absolutely blown away by how effortlessly she had put me in my place with just one sentence.
She was pretty much the deciding factor in which team would win at family charades, and this was one area in particular where her gentle modesty could be eclipsed by the spirit of competition—but only on behalf of her nieces and nephews.
In her adult life she transitioned from a woman in publishing, to a Marlborough-street dwelling Junior League member, to a suburban mother, to the daytime bartender and evening hostess at my parents’ last restaurant in Union Square, Somerville, and then finally returned to her books as a bookseller.
At the helm of her last restaurant in Somerville, she was a de facto den mother to the neighborhood, which at the time was full of artists and gay and lesbian folks, who cherished her warm welcome. She received both handmade gifts and books from local authors frequently, most especially when the restaurant closed its doors.
She also hosted dinners at the restaurant with mystery writers as guests, and was an early advocate for the talents of Dennis Lehane, as well as our part time bartender, D., who is now a preeminent American poet and critic.
Her last act professionally was administrating the town wide yearly book reading event and introducing authors who came to read at the bookstore she worked at. She was frequently told by authors they’d never been introduced so succinctly and so well.
In company with a trusted few, she was extremely funny, and could also be more openly unflinching in her assessments, but only because she knew the people she cared about surely could do better, and so perhaps ought to have in whatever particular instance was being discussed.
She was unfailingly well dressed, with a less is more aesthetic (unlike her mother and son). She liked good materials, a certain looseness of fit, and a small amount of gold jewelry. I always loved her gold whale brooch, which looked like it had been drawn in a single line, adorned with just a a few charms.
Working her least favorite holiday this past week, feeling the weight of a decade of physical absence, I was feeling low. A table asked my opinion about a wine on our list, and then the man went on to openly google it in front of me, and only then conceded I might be right in my assessment.
When I delivered the wine shortly thereafter, the other guest at the table hissed “finally…” just under her breath. This was my last straw moment of the evening, but I could clearly hear Mom in my head saying, “don’t you use me as an excuse to be rude.”
I listened.
I still like to talk to her, and point out things to her she would find interesting in the world, however the transmissions might be received.
And when things get sticky in my life, I still feel her presence, beyond her preparing me to live a purposeful life. In fact, she feels far less absent than she did a decade ago, right after her death. It is like the shape of her abscence has filled in with her presence in the time since, and I’ve got better at tuning into her signal.
I miss the everyday earthbound person terribly, but writing about her helps remind me not just how much I loved her, which was profoundly, but also how much I liked her. She was extraordinarily good company, and keeps company with me in my heart still.