Reading History
to My Mother

Robin Hemley

“Everything’s mixed up in those boxes, the past and the present,” my mother tells me.  “Those movers made a mess of everything.”  I’m visiting her at the Leopold late on a Monday night after reading to my kids and being read to by my eldest, Olivia, who at six is rightfully proud of her newfound reading ability.  My mother and I have been readers for many years, but in some ways, she finds reading more difficult than does Olivia..  At eighty-two, my mother’s eyesight has deteriorated.  Glaucoma.  Severe optic nerve damage to her left eye.  Macular degeneration.  Tomorrow, I’m taking her to the doctor for  a second laser operation to “relieve the pressure.”  We have been told by the doctor that the surgery won’t actually improve her eyesight, but, with luck, will stop it from deteriorating any more.  After that there’s another operation she’ll probably undergo, eighty miles south in Seattle.  Another operation that won’t actually make her see any better. 

“I always had such good eyesight,” she tells me.  And then, “I wish there was something that could improve my eyesight.”  And then, “When are we going to go shopping for that new computer?”

“Well, let’s make sure you can see the screen first,” I say, which sounds cruel, but she has complained to me tonight that she wasn’t able to see any of the words on her screen, though I think this has less to do with her eyesight than the glasses she’s wearing.  Unnaturally thick and foggy.  My mother looks foggy, too, almost drunk, disheveled in her dirty sweater, though she doesn’t drink.  It’s probably the medicine she’s been taking for her many conditions.  My mother owns at least half a dozen glasses, and I know I should have sorted through them all by now (we tried once) but so many things have gone wrong in the last five months since my mother moved to Bellingham that sorting through her glasses is a side issue.  I get up from the couch in the cramped living room of her apartment, step over the coffee table -- careful not to tip over the cup of peppermint tea I’m drinking out of a beer stein, careful not to bump into my mother -- and cross to the bedroom crammed with wardrobe boxes and too much furniture, though much less than what she’s used to. On her dresser there are parts of various eyeglasses: maimed glasses, the corpses of eyeglasses, a dark orphaned lens here, a frame there, an empty case, and one case with a pair that’s whole.  This is the one I grab and take out to my mother who is waiting patiently, always patient these days, or perhaps so unnerved and exhausted that it passes for patience. She takes the case from me and takes off the old glasses, places them beside her beer mug of licorice tea, and puts on the new pair.  

She rubs an eye, says, “This seems to be helping.  Maybe these are my reading glasses.”  I should know, of course.  I should have had them color-coded by now, but I haven’t yet. 

She bends down to the photo from the newsletter on the coffee table, and says, “Yes, that’s William Carlos Williams.” 

A little earlier she told me about the photo.  “It’s in one of those boxes,” she told me.  “I saw it the other day.  I thought I’d told you about it before,” but she hadn’t, this photo of her with William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, and other famous writers.  So I spent fifteen minutes rifling through her boxes of bills and old papers mixed up on the kitchen counter (a Cascade Gas Company bill, final payment requested for service at the apartment she moved into in December, when we still thought she could live on her own; a letter from the superintendent of public schools of New York City, dated 1959, addressed to my grandmother, a teacher at the time, telling her how many sick days she was allowed), looking for the photo, until she explained that it was actually part of a newsletter from the artists’ colony, Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York.  Armed with that crucial bit of information, I found it. 

The photo is captioned “Class picture, 1950.”

Can you pick me out? she says. 

From left, top: William Osborne, Theodore Roethke, Robel Paris, Harvey Shapiro, Elaine Gottlieb, Beryl Levy, Cid Corman, Simmons Persons, Gladys Farnel, Hans Sahl, Clifford Wright, Richard Eberhart.  From left, bottom: Ben Weber, Nicholas Callas, Jessamyn West, Eugenie Gershoy, William Carlos Williams, Flossie Williams, Mitsu Yashima, Charles Schucker, Elizabeth Ames, John Dillon Husband. 

Not many of these people are smiling.  Eugenie Gershoy, seated next to Jessamyn West, has a little smirk, and Mitsu Yashima, seated next to Flossie Williams, smiles broadly, and also Cid Corman in the back row, whom I met in 1975, when I was a high school exchange student in Japan.  My mother visited me in Osaka and we traveled by train to Kyoto, to Cid Corman’s ice cream parlor where I ate a hamburger, had an ice cream cone and listened to a poetry reading while my mother and Cid reminisced. 

“Don’t I look prim?” my mother says, and she does.  Or maybe it’s something else.  Scared?  Intimidated? Shocked?  My mother was 34 then – This was a year or so before she met my father.  My sister, Nola, was three, and my mother was an up-and-coming young writer, one novel published in 1947.  John Crowe Ransom liked herwork, publishing several of her stories in the Kenyon Review. I wasn’t born until 1958. 

She stands up straight, hands behind her back, a scarf tied loosely around her neck, draping down over a breast, a flower pinned to the scarf.  Theodore Roethke stands, huge, imposing, dour.  In an accompanying article Harvey Shapiro tells of how publicly Roethke liked to display his wounds, how he told Shapiro of his hurt that John Crowe Ransom had rejected “My Papa’s Waltz,” though Roethke was famous by then and the poem had been widely-anthologized.  What remained, still, was Roethke’s pain, perhaps the pain of rejection meshed with the pain of the poem’s subject matter -- abuse at the hands of his drunken father.  Shapiro also tells of Roethke’s claim that he’d bummed his way to Yaddo after escaping in drag from a mental institution on the west coast earlier that summer.  “He liked to romanticize his mental illness,” Shapiro writes.  Perhaps, but something honest still comes across in that picture, the despair clear for anyone to view head-on. 

In the front row, William Carlos Williams sits cross-legged, dignified. 

“He dreamed of my legs,” my mother tells me.

“William Carlos Williams dreamed of your legs?” I ask. 

“At breakfast one day he said he’d had a dream about my legs.  ‘That girl has nice legs,’ he said.” 

We have to keep going back over histories, our own and the histories of others, constantly revising.  There’s no single truth … except that, perhaps.  History is not always recorded and not always written by the victor. History is not always written.  We carry our secret histories behind our words, in another room, in the eyeglass case on the dresser in the bedroom.  Maybe someone comes along and finds the right pair.  Maybe we have too many, unsorted. 

* * *

My mother’s former landlord, Loyce, wants to know the history of the “L.” I was gone for the past week in Hawaii, and that’s the only reason I haven’t called before now.  Loyce has left messages on my answering machine twice, ostensibly to see about getting back my mother’s deposit to us; minus a charge for mowing, the ad for renting the apartment again, a reasonable charge for her time, and of course, for painting over the “L.”  She’d also like the keys back from us.  But the “L” is the real reason she’s called. My mother wrote an “L” on the wall of the apartment in indelible magic marker before she left.  “I’m dying to know the story,” Loyce says.  “I know there’s a good story behind it.” 

Loyce appreciates a good story, and this is one of the things I appreciate about Loyce, that and her compassion.  She moved to Bellingham several years ago to take care of her ailing mother, and now lives in her mother’s old house on top of a hill with a view of the bay and the San Juan Islands.  So she understands our situation.  She knows that my mother can’t live alone anymore, that all of us were taken by surprise by her condition when she moved here five months ago. Until then, my mother had been living on her own in South Bend, Indiana, where she taught writing until ten years ago.  She’d been living on her own since I moved out at the age of sixteen to go to boarding school, and had been taking care of herself since 1966 when my father died.  But in the last several months things have fallen apart.  Our first inkling was the mover, a man in his sixties who worked with his son.  He took me aside on the first day and told me that in his thirty years of moving he’d never seen an apartment as messy as my mother’s.  When he and his son went to my mom’s apartment in South Bend, they almost turned around.  “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want,” the mover told his son.

No, the first inkling was my brother’s call from L.A., where my mother was visiting a few days prior to her big move.  The van had loaded in South Bend and she’d flown off to L.A. to visit him and his family.  The night before her flight from L.A. to Seattle he called me near midnight and said, “Mom’s hallucinating.” 

I asked him what he meant, what she was seeing, and he told me that she was seeing all these people who didn’t exist and making strange remarks.  “When I picked her up at the airport, she said there was a group of Asians having a baby.  She said they were a troupe of actors and they were doing a skit.” 

Still, the next day, he put her on the plane to me, and I picked her up and brought her to her new home.  Since then, we have gone to three different doctors and my mother has had brain scans and blood tests and sonograms of her carotid arteries and been placed on a small dose of an anti-psychotic drug.  One doctor says her cerebral cortex has shrunk and she’s had a series of tiny strokes to individual arteries in her brain.

 At three a.m. one morning, the police call me up and tell me that my mother thinks someone is trying to break into her apartment. 

“Is there anyone living with her?” the policeman asks.

“No.”

“She says a handicapped woman lives with her.  You might want to see a doctor about this.” 

I take her to doctors and try to convince my mother that she needs to live where she can be safe, but she refuses to even consider it.  “I should have stayed in New York,” she tells me.  “I never should have left.”  And then, “I should never have come here.  Why can’t you be on my side?”  And then, “I’ll move down to L.A..  Your brother is much nicer than you are.”

I spend a few nights at her apartment, and she tells me about the Middle Eastern couple who have taken over her bedroom and the children who are there, and the landlord comes over and puts a lock on the door from the kitchen to the garage, though we know no one was trying to break in.  And homeless people are living on her back porch.  And she keeps startling people in the garage who are removing her belongings.  

But finally. 

After my cousin David flies up from L.A.  After visiting a dozen managed care facilities, after my brother says he thinks it’s the medicine that’s doing this and I talk to the doctors and the doctors talk to each other and they talk to my mother and she says, “The doctor says I’m fine,” and I say “No, he doesn’t,” and she hangs up, turns off her hearing aid.

And coincidentally, a friend of my mother’s in South Bend wins second place in a poetry competition run by the literary journal I edit.  The poems were all anonymous, and I had nothing to do with the judging, but my mother’s friend has won second prize for a poem about her delusional mother, called “My Mother and Dan Rather.” I call her up to tell her the good news of her award, but she assumes, of course, I’m calling to talk about my mother.  So that’s what we do for half an hour.  She tells me she’s distanced herself over the last year from my mother because she seemed too much like her own mother, and she tells me that several of my mother’s friends wondered if they should call me and let me know what was going on. 

I almost forget to tell her about her prize.

No, the first inkling was two years ago.  My wife, Beverly, wondered aloud about my mother’s memory, her hold on reality. I told Beverly my mother had always been kind of scattered, messy, unfocused.

And finally.  After I come into her apartment one day and feel the heat.  I go to the stove and turn off the glowing burners.  My mother has a blister on her hand the size of a walnut.  Beverly tells me that it’s insane for my mother to live alone, that somehow we have to force her to move.  “What if she sets the apartment on fire?  She might not only kill herself, but the people next door.”

“I know,” I tell her.  “I’m trying,” but I also know that short of a court order, short of being declared her legal guardian, I can’t force her. 

And finally.  I convince my mother to come with me to the Leopold, an historic hotel in downtown Bellingham that has been converted into apartments for seniors, one wing assisted living, the other independent.  We have lunch there one day.  My mother likes the food. 

And finally, she agrees to spend a couple of weeks there in a guest room. 

Famous people stayed at the Leopold, I tell my mother.  Rutherford B. Hayes.  Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale.  This doesn’t impress her, of course.  She has known more famous people than can fit on a plaque.  But she has a nice view of the bay, somewhat blocked by the Georgia Pacific Paper Mill.  And she likes the food but the apartment is only two cramped rooms, and across the street at the Greek restaurant, people party until two each night and climb trees and conduct military rituals.  And the Iraqi Army rolled through the streets one night.   And a truck dumped two bodies, a man and a woman dressed in formal evening attire. 

“They sometimes flood the parking lot,” she tells me, “and use it as a waterway.” 

Or, “Look at that,” pointing, reaching for nothing.

She keeps returning to the apartment, driven by the woman I’ve hired to clean it.  My mother wants to drive again, and I tell her no, she can’t possibly, and I read articles and watch programs that tell me not to reverse roles, not to become the parent, and I wonder how that’s possible to avoid.  One day, I walk into her apartment and find signs she’s posted all around on the bed, in the guest room, on the kitchen counter.  “Keep off.”  “Stay out,”  “Go Away.”  I ask her about these signs and she tells me they’re just a joke.  She’s become wary of me.  I tell her she’s safe, ask her why she feels so threatened.  She tells me, “I’ve never felt safe in my life.”
During this period, my mother writes her “L” on the wall of the kitchen.

And the weeks at the Leopold have turned to months, and now most of her belongings are stuffed into a heated mini-storage unit.  More of her belongings are stuffed into the basement of The Leopold. 

Finally. 

* * *

 I almost don’t want to tell Loyce the story of the “L”  when she calls.  I’d like to keep her in suspense, because sometimes that’s stronger than the truth.  She probably thinks it’s about her, that the “L” stands for Loyce, but it doesn’t.  It stands for Leopold.  One day my mother was at the apartment, after we finally convinced her she had to move, and I gave her a magic marker and asked her to mark the boxes she’d like taken to the Leopold.  Apparently, she thought she was marking a box, but she was really marking the wall.  This is what she really wanted.  That was not lost on me.  She loved that apartment.  She wanted her independence, but this was just too much for me to move.

Loyce and I say goodbye after I assure her I’ll return the keys and she assures me she’ll return most of the deposit. It’s already eight-thirty and I told my mother I’d be over around eight, but I had to read to my kids first.  I haven’t see them in a week. I’ve just returned from Hawaii. 

* * *

In Hawaii, where I’ve been researching a new book,  I probably had more fun than I should have.  Not the kind of fun with life-bending consequences, but fun nonetheless, hanging out with a former student, eating out every night, smoking cigars, drinking.  For ten dollars a day more, I was told at the airport, I could rent a convertible -- a Ford Mustang, or a Caddie, and I’m not ready for that, so I take the Mustang.  Stupid.  The wife of the friend I’m staying with laughed when she saw it in her driveway.  “Oh,” she tells me.  “I thought maybe Robbie was having a mid-life crisis.”  No, it’s me probably, even though I hate to admit it.  I refuse to believe such a thing could happen to me at this pre-ordained age, a month from forty, that I could be saddled with such a cliché crisis, such mediocre regrets.

* * *

Olivia wants to read to me tonight, all seven stories from an Arnold Lobel book.  “They’re short,” she assures me.  We compromise on three, her three favorites.  One of these she read last week to her class while I was in Hawaii.  Beverly, who sometimes works in Olivia’s class as a volunteer, has already told me that the class was enthralled by Olivia.  “She acted so confident.  She took her time and showed them the pictures.” 

The one she read to her class, “The Journey,” is about a mouse who wants to visit his mother, and in a sequence of transactions, acquires a car, roller skates, boots, sneakers and finally a new set of feet.  When he reaches his mother she hugs him, kisses him and says, “Hello, my son, you are looking fine – and what nice new feet you have!” Olivia’s  whole class broke out in hysterical laughter, she assured me.

* * *

I’ve brought my mother a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.  She looks at it, bewildered.  “Oh, I thought it was a book,” she says.

I make tea for us, but she only has a few tea mugs and they’re dirty, so we have to use beer steins.  “I’ve ended up with such an odd assortment of things,” she tells me, and she blames this on the movers. 

A week before my trip to Hawaii, I visited her and she showed me a notebook in which she’d kept a journal during the mid-seventies.  My mother has kept journals from the time she was sixteen, a series of secret histories written in any notebook she can find.  But now, she cannot read these histories, and she asks me to read this one to her. 

“I might use it in a story,” she tells me.  “It’s about Moe and Helen.”  Moe is Moe Howard, of the Three Stooges.  He was a cousin of ours by marriage, and whenever she visited California, she’d stop by to see them.  Moe, who had such a violent on-screen persona: Think of him saying, “Wise guy, eh?” Poking the eyes Larry, Curly, Shemp, or one of the later pseudo-Stooges, Curly Joe and Joe Besser.  I met him once, a frail old man with white hair, too quiet to seem like Moe.   Off-screen, he was a gentle family man, kind and grateful to his fans, never refusing to sign an autograph.  What my mother wants me to read to her is an account of the last time she saw Moe and his wife Helen, when they were both dying. 

Seeing Moe and Helen was touching – a beautiful hill of purple flowers outside that Moe said was all theirs – a beautifully furnished, expensively comfortable house through which they glide, ghost-like.  They don’t kiss me because of the possibility of germs.  Helen is in a loose purple nylon dressing gown.  She has been recuperating from a breast operation and says in a slightly quaking voice that she will be going to the doctor soon and will probably have cobalt.

Moe is red-faced and very thin.  His thinness, wispiness, makes him look elfin – because he used to be heavier, he seemed bigger.  His hair is white.  He smiles proudly, talking about his appearances at colleges and his memoirs which comprise many books.  Talk about the film I am supposed to have made with him.  He reminds me that I acted in it (at the age of about 19) 8mm, I think, with his children.  But it is packed somewhere with thousands of feet of other film.

As I’m reading this to my mother I feel odd, wondering if she notices the similarities between this passage and her own present life -- the things packed away, the memories, the frailty -- but I say nothing about this, though it moves me.   Instead, I ask her about this film she was in, and she tells me it was an impromptu home movie in which Moe was cast as the villain, of course, and she was the protector of his children.  She has never seen it but it exists somewhere.  Moe’s daughter, Joan, once showed me the huge roll of home movies in her attic.  Towards the end of his life, Moe took every home movie he made and spliced them all together onto one monstrous cumbersome roll that no one could ever possibly watch in its entirety.  Somewhere on this roll exists a movie with my mother, age nineteen, circa 1935. 
Silently, I flip through other pages in my mother’s journal, as she sits near me, lost in her memories, needing no journal really. 

I am not in fantasy land.  I am painfully living out my loneliness and nostalgia.  I dream of my son every night and wish he were here.  Those who have died are intolerably absent and I feel that all the love I need and want will not come because I had my chance and lost it, and what man will be responsible for or will react to my aging, my passion, my intolerable loneliness …?

I am with her now, but not.  We see each other through veils.  We have battled for this moment, and neither sees the other as we would like.

* * *

William Carlos Williams dreamed of my mother’s legs, as did other men that summer of 1950 at Yaddo. 

As we bend over the class photo, circa 1950, she tells me the official history of that summer, how special it was for her, how it was so exciting to be around such vital intellects, such talented writers. “It was really something, going down to breakfast and having conversations with all these people.  The talent was never quite the same after that.”

I tell her I’d love to have a copy of this picture.  “You could write to Yaddo,” she says.  “They use it for publicity.”  She tells me I could write to one of the writers pictured with her.  “It’s the least he could do,” she says, with what seems like bitterness, and I let this remark wash over me because I think I know what’s behind it.  

Once, a number of years ago, Beverly and my mother and I were on a drive, and I was telling her about a friend of mine who’d done his dissertation on the poetry of one of the poets pictured in the photo.  From the back seat my mother blurted, “You know, he raped me.”

Beverly and I looked at one another.  We didn’t say anything.  We didn’t know what to say.  The remark was so sudden, so unexpected, we hardly knew how to react.  We were silent, all three of us.  Neither Beverly nor I mentioned this to each other later. 

My mother starts talking about him now, though I haven’t asked.  She says, “One time, he invited me to a private party, and innocent that I was, I went there.”  In memory, she’s lucid.  Only the present is slippery, tricky, untrustworthy. 

 “There were all these men there. They were all leches. Ted Roethke kept lunging for me, just making grabs.  He really had problems,” and she laughs.  She mentions the name of the poet who was her friend, whom she trusted.  He was younger than her, than all these other famous men.  “I thought he’d protect me.”  She laughs again.  This time, there’s no mistaking the bitterness.

I think about asking her.  What term to use?  “He assaulted you?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Did it happen at Yaddo?” I ask.

She nods. 

“Did you ever confront him?”

“No,” she says.  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

But then she says, “There wasn’t much I could do. In those days, there wasn’t much to do.  I just pretended it didn’t happen.  For a little while, he became my boyfriend.”
I don’t know what to say.  I probably shouldn’t say anything.  I sigh.  “He should have been locked up.  How could he be your boyfriend after that?”

“He was drunk when it happened,” and I want to say that’s no excuse, but I keep my mouth shut and let her talk.  “I left the party early and he followed me back to my room.  I tried to lock the door, but the lock was broken.

“I turned things around.  I had to.  I was confused.  In my mind, he became my protector from the other men there.”

I study the picture again.  My mother’s expression and the expressions of the men.  I wonder when this photo was taken, before or after the assault my mother describes.  The photo has taken on the quality of a group mug shot to me.  I think they look like jerks, most of them -- except for Cid Corman, whom my mother says is a wonderful person, and maybe some others, too, maybe William Carlos Williams, who dreamed of my mother’s legs and “had an eye for the ladies” as my mother says. Maybe even dour Theodore Roethke, though he lunged at her as though she was something being wheeled by on a dessert tray.  

“They weren’t famous for their personalities,” she tells me.

I think about these people in the photo, how unfair it seems to me that someone can go on to have a career, hide behind his smirk, have dissertations written about him, how the actions of some people seem to have no visible consequences.  I think of my mother’s secret histories, her journals, her blurted comments, her assertion that she has never felt safe.

I flip the newsletter over to the section titled “Recent works Produced by Yaddo Fellows,” and see that the latest works reported are from 1987.  For an absurd moment, I believe that none of the Fellows at Yaddo have been productive for over ten years, and this makes me happy, but then I realize the newsletter itself is ten years old. 

* * *

My mother has taken to carrying a picture of me, Ideal Robin, I call it, skinny, sitting langorously, smiling beside a life-size cardboard cut-out of Rudolph Valentino.  The son she longed for in her journal perhaps hardly exists anymore – I was away at boarding school that year, my choice, not hers, and I never returned. 

I have come to visit her now. I’ve knocked lightly.  I’ve used my key.  She can barely see me when I walk into her apartment.  I’ve told her I’ve returned from Hawaii, that she can expect me around eight, but I’m late and as I push open the door she’s looking at me almost suspiciously, because really her eyesight is that bad, and until I speak she has no idea who’s entering.  The Iraqi army?  A stranger who wants her belongings?  A poet she thinks is her “protector” but means her harm?  I half expect to see signs, “Keep Off,” “Stay Out,” “Go Away.”  I have brought a box of chocolate-covered macadamia nuts.  I am wearing new feet, but she doesn’t notice.  Tomorrow she will have surgery on her eyes that will not improve anything, but keep things from getting worse.  How much worse could things get for this woman who loves words, but can neither see nor write them anymore?  Does her history go on inside her, on some gigantic roll of spliced-together home movies?   Tell me the story of the “L.”  Tell me the story of the wall of your apartment.  Tell me the story of those talented writers who publicly display their wounds and the writers who secretly wound others.  Tell me which is worse.  She kisses me lightly and I give her her gift.  And she says, once, only once, though I  keep hearing it, the disappointment, and strangely, even fear, “Oh, I thought it was a book.”

* * *

This essay originally appeared in Fourth Genre #1, 1999.