excerpt from a letter

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Symbolically speaking, I am Dorothy, and Glinda, the Good Witch, is my mother. Glinda in her deeds is always helpful to Dorothy, and sometimes is crucially so, but mostly she's not around and Dorothy, sometimes terrified, has to work things out for herself.

I just wrote a long letter to my sister. Then I had a memory of my dear Mrs. Sullivan, a woman in her sixties when I knew her, I was between the ages of five and twelve. I remember her showing me a handwritten letter from her brother. I commented on how long it looked, and she said that he often wrote her letters that were longer; that she had received one that was over thirty pages long. I was mystified.

Now I see how it would be possible, easily, given that five or six of his hand-written letters on smaller than standard-sized paper would have fit onto one page of single-spaced, word-processed pages.

An excerpt from my letter, in response to my sister's having expressed interest in what living with my mother had been like. My mother died when my sister was two, and I was twenty-one.

a. I’m not sure what age I am, but sometime in adolescence. I walk in the house from school. Gabby, our maid for many years, is there behind the kitchen counter-island. I don’t want it to be Gabby behind the island, I want it to be Mom. Oh well. I go up to the room I share with Quent. I listen to Bob Dylan on headphones while lying on my bed. I go downstairs to see what’s happening. Mom has come home and is taking her before-dinner nap. Waah, I want my mom.

b. I’m in early adolescence. I’m mad at the Catholic Church and Mom both. She is doing some kind of kitchen thing. I say, in a whiny, contentious way, “How could Adam and Eve have eaten the apple? For the sake of one apple, they brought so much, so much suffering into the world!” Mom—we’re in the walk-in pantry at this point—says something like “well I don’t understand why they ate the apple,” and then continues—and this next part I remember in a more word for word way, although I know memory is a trickster—“but I can’t really blame them, because I’m pretty sure I would have eaten the apple if I had been in their place.”

I was stopped in my mental tracks. How could this be true? My mother was the most virtuous person I knew. I was out of my depth, I could tell. I stopped being a brat, for a moment, and drifted off to try to take in what she had just said. Now, as I write this, I find her response, as I have since, surprisingly honest, surprisingly profound. You see what I mean about her being a seeker, the way you’re a seeker? I could provide other examples. By the way, I, knowing me, now think that if I had been in Adam and Eve’s place, I would have eaten the apple, too.

c. This is before adolescence. The other kids are watching the annual TV airing of the movie The Wizard of Oz, always a special occasion in the life of the kids in the family. I decide, though, that I’d rather not watch. I love the peace and quiet and sense of safety of having my brothers and sisters nearby but contained (in this case by their watching the movie) with me free to drift, untethered. I decide to do my homework. I set myself up, with a sense of luxury, at the dining room table, and start in. At some point Mom sails quietly in, and asks, “You don’t feel like watching the movie?” I say no. She is bemused. She says, “Can I get you anything?” I wonder—this is a scenario that doesn’t come up often. “Maybe a glass of chocolate milk?” she says, and I nod my head, feeling that nothing could be more perfect than my mother bringing me a glass of chocolate milk. She sails out, sails back in with the milk, kisses me on the top of the head, sails out, without another word.

Something like that would keep me going, thinking that the world was all right, for weeks and weeks. She didn’t have time or opportunity for many such moments, and had to divide such moments up among her many children. But they’re what we all remember.

d. I’m off at college. We’ve been corresponding, and although she doesn’t talk about her inner life, and writes about her and the family’s outer-life in a surface-y kind of way, we feel in touch. After the storms of my adolescence, and the difficulty for her of my relationship with my high school girlfriend, (my girlfriend drove her crazy—that’s another story) she is so pleased and grateful that I’ve become, at college, a good boy, who gets good grades, who finds himself a college job without anyone asking him too, who has a nice, different quiet girlfriend too far away for me to sleep with pre-maritally; she is grateful. Now I’m home for vacation. I’m in the big bedroom (not used by a child at this point), next to her and dad’s, doing some schoolwork, and she comes in, having asked if I mind if she does some sewing—her machine is there, along the same wall as the window I’m facing. After a little, she starts to tell me something about a friend of hers, someone I’ve known all my life. I am surprised at her frankness and specificity, at the complexity and offhand shrewdness of what she says. (I wish I remember what it was she said). I realize that she’s talking to me like an equal, like a friend. I am thrilled, but also too shocked to say anything in reply.

I realize now that she had a way of saying such things, off-handedly, maybe while folding laundry, just before moving off, say to drop off the different kids’ clothes on their respective dressers. Do you know what she once said? “I wonder if that Sylvia is waiting for me to die so she can marry Dad.” But here’s the kicker—she said it in the most calm, good-humored way imaginable. She liked Sylvia, who was Dad’s secretary at the time, very much, and felt completely unthreatened by her. (Sylvia liked Mom very much, too, as did everyone who knew her, I believe.) This was way before Mom died, way before she had the aneurisms that caused her death, though she died so young. I believe she had no inkling that Dad and Sylvia had in fact had or were in fact having an affair. She certainly had no inkling that she herself was in fact going to die. She had no idea that Sylvia would indeed, in a sense, wait for Dad to marry her, and that that marriage would take place. If there is a heaven and Mom lives there retaining her while-alive self, both of which ideas I’m afraid I highly doubt, I’m sure that she approves of Dad’s and Sylvia marriage and relationship, and that she observed Dad’s relationships after her but before his present one with Sylvia with sorrow, empathy, and patience.

So I have the sorrow of knowing that Mom started to open up and talk to me in a thrilling way—and then died shortly afterward. The exact same thing with Cindy: we found a way to talk to each other that was so fun and rich, and just after we did so—she died. On the other hand, Mom and Cindy remain rich presences in my mind, decades later, so there’s a big blessing.

Wow, I had a lot to say on that subject.