Every time I look at this picture of my young mother I see what drew people to her and held them so long. Looking at her that afternoon in the library, I thought, we’re nearly the same age — and I studied her closely, as if with enough concentration I might see what to do next.
The second portrait of my mother is the most troubled. She is thirty-two here and it has been a long time between books. In that time Fletcher and I have been born. She carries our births in her face in baffled, dramatic lines. I know just by looking at her here that loving us was never easy for my mother. In this photograph, though it ends at the shoulders, I see Fletcher asleep in her arms and myself curled around her leg like a cat. My mother looks impatient, her eyes are more heavily lidded than before, and her face is strained. She could never have guessed that it would take so long to go such a short distance. As a child, this is the face I memorized. I knew every line, the way her hair curved around her face, the eyes, always dissatisfied, and the pale color of despair that, no matter how much praise she received or how many awards she won, never left her. In her poems she was interested only in saying what could not be said. “There must be a way,” I would hear her say to Sabine long distance, half in English, half in French.
She looks out from this book vacantly at an audience she can neither see nor imagine. She’s too tired. It’s been so hard.
The few people in the library were leaving now for dinner. The quiet seemed to deepen. I felt alone with my mother here where she herself might have sat years before, reading or staring out into the pines.
I was well accustomed to quiet. The word itself carried great significance, for it was nearly the only instruction ever given in our house. It had the gravity of a sole reprimand. We grew to accept it as one of the necessary ingredients of creativity We respected it, lived in it. “Quiet,” my father would say, “your mother is working. Don’t forget, it’s very important. Your mother needs quiet.”
My father was comfortable in the quiet. It made the silence in him seem not so strange. People thought he had cultivated it, worked on it, restrained himself because it was so necessary for my mother. But that was not the case. Had loquaciousness and vivacity been demanded for my mother to write, my father could not have done it. For years his speechlessness, his hushed tones, his silence have been legitimized by my mother’s art. It was not a heroic effort; he never even tried to talk to us.
I looked to the third photograph in an attempt to quiet my brain’s unexpected noise.
On the book jacket of To Vanessa is my favorite picture of my mother. She is in profile and she looks as serene as I have ever seen her — content, happy. The light is beautiful and she is smiling. I would have stopped her in my mind in this position forever if I could have, but that is the photographer’s art, not the daughter’s. My mother cannot stay still in my mind. A lovely profile turns full face, slowly the smile dissolves, and the vision breaks. Her hair grays, then changes back. She grows young, wanders through the quiet house of her childhood in Paterson, New Jersey, a little girl on tiptoe, looking in on her own sleeping mother or sitting in the dark listening to the Sunday stories of her father. I looked again at her smiling profile on the back of To Vanessa, my book. She will not hold still for me.
I remember the picture on the back of her fourth book being taken on the front porch of our house in summer. This must be the reason I cannot see the photo more clearly. I keep seeing beyond the picture’s perimeters, beyond the reach of the lens. I know what my mother saw the moment the shutter clicked. I see the lilac bush just feet away from her. I smell the honeysuckle still. I hear bees, a whole sweet tree buzzing. The photographer, talking to her in his quiet way, lifts her chin and says, “You have lovely children, Christine,” and she, looking absently in our direction, says, “Yes, I suppose they are.”
My father turns the glass knob of the porch door and comes over to where Fletcher and I stand, looking on, and we all wave to her. She sits still as a stone and smiles back.
On her latest book her face seems to have completed itself. There on her brow her first and last poems meet. The difficult second book has brought severe lines around her eyes. The middle work hollows her cheeks. The latest poems chisel her features, refining them. This was the mother I had left for college. She looks weary, I think, preoccupied, lost in her solitary craft.
I want to look like her: the high forehead, the feverish, full lips, the wild, graying hair.
Dreamy, she stares back at her invisible audience. We can’t know what she’s thinking. We look harder. We try to see how she gets where she goes and, every time, she loses us. The watery eyes seem to float back away from her face into her luminous head where something opens, and she sees far, far off. We pursue her and she eludes us.
“Mother,” I whisper into the glossy photo, into the fresh ink, the cool, smooth page, “take me, too.” Her pale eyes surface, her pupils open, overflowing with love, it seems.
“Yes,” she says very quietly, reaching for me through the terrible distance. “Come then,” she says, “follow me.” Louder this time, “Vanessa, yes.”
In what is called “real life,” I have only passed once through Paterson, New-Jersey, the place where my mother grew up, but I have been there manv times in dreams. Some people would say that is the safer wav to go to that sad, violent city, but I would not agree with them. What I have imagined from casual remarks made over the years by Aunt Lucy after too many brandies or bv mv mother, who on occasion tucked a childhood memory into a bedtime story, is just as dangerous, if not more.
Christine and Lucy are huddled in one corner of the sickroom. It is dark and quiet — dark even though it is summer, quiet even though the children are out of school. The house holds the family’s pain in its wooden hand. Though it is hot they seem to be shivering, the two little girls and the mother who is so sick. “Why are you this way?” Lucy wants to ask but does not. “What makes you this wav?” The girls crumble into each other; the house crumbles into the gray dust. I have seen houses like this before — in downtown Poughkeepsie. They are furnaces in summer. People hang out their windows or sit on the broken-down front porches fanning themselves, on the steps of August, music blaring from transistor radios, dogs tied with chains in the backyard. I have always been frightened of these houses, where I think I can see my mother barefoot, back by the fierce dog, or peering out from an upstairs window — a little girl. She will not hold still.
There are no curtains on the windows of my mother’s house. There is little furniture. At night you can look straight through to the other side. There is nothing to obscure the strangeness of the fact that we live in boxes made of wood. A whole family lives in this sad box — though the father is not home much, has never been home much. He works at the silk mill, two and three shifts a day. The mother’s medicine is expensive and without it the doctors say she will die.
“Don’t die,” Christine whispers at the edge of her mother’s bed as she sleeps. “Please don’t die.”
“Tell me a story,” her mother asks when she finally opens her eyes. My mother takes her mother’s pale hand. Words are good, she thinks. Words are medicine, too. With her words she makes curtains for the windows. Light weaves through the little girl’s lacy tales. She crochets beautiful bed linen. She makes elegant nightgowns for her mother. With words she wraps her, with words she makes her mother smile. She would save her life; she would make her well — with words.