Where did it go, my mother’s intellectual ease and energy? She has never once, that any of us can remember, mentioned the subject of Italian independence to her family. Or the nineteenth century. Or her theory about Mediterranean city-states that’s so clearly set out on the pages of her 1926 essay. It never occurred to me that she would care about the plight of the Italian peasant. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her reading a book except maybe a love novel from the library or some pamphlet about how to breed better dahlias. When I think about my mother’s essay on Camillo Cavour, I can’t help feeling cheated, as if there’s some wily subversion going on, a glittering joke locked in a box and buried underground. And then I think: if I feel cheated, how much more cheated she must feel. She must be in mourning for the squandering of herself. Something, someone, cut off her head, yanked out her tongue. My mother is a middle-aged woman, a middle-class woman, a woman of moderate intelligence and medium-sized ego and average good luck, so that you would expect her to land somewhere near the middle of the world. Instead she’s over there at the edge. The least vibration could knock her off.
Joan’s Theory
My mother’s been sick this year, a nervous breakdown everyone’s calling it, and my sister Alice sent me money so I could go home and visit. She wrote me a long, long letter saying she had thought it over and come to the conclusion I was the best person to cheer our mother up, that my presence would be like a “glassful of medicine.” Which is just like Alice; she’s someone who always goes around appointing people.
I expected to find my mother in a state of torpor and instead found her in a rage. It seems a man called Pinky Fulham has snatched away her newspaper column. All those hours she once put into writing about flower borders and seedlings, she now funnels into her hatred for Pinky Fulham. She can’t talk or think of anything else. She’s narrowed herself down to just this one little squint of injustice, and she beats her fists together and rehearses and rehearses her final scene with him, the unforgivable things he did and said, especially his concluding remark which was, apparently: “I hope this won’t affect our friendship.” He said it blithely, unfeelingly, the way people say such things, never even noticing how pierced to the heart my mother was, how crushed she was by such casual presumption and disregard.
Now she can’t let it go. She lies in her bed and goes over and over that final exchange, how she’d gone to his office at the Recorder and pleaded with him, and how he turned to her and pronounced that impossible thing: “I hope this won’t affect our friendship.” My mother recounts the scene for me, again and again, speaking harshly, weeping, shaking her head back and forth in a frenzy, and begging me to join in her drama of suffering.
I’d only been home a few days when I realized she was relishing all this, the pure and beautiful force of her hatred for Pinky Fulham, the ecstasy of being wronged. There’s a certain majesty in it.
Nothing in her life has delivered her to such a pitch of intensity — why wouldn’t she love it, this exquisite wounding, the salt of perfect pain?
I held her hand and let her rage on.
Jay Dudley’s Theory
Of course I feel guilty about what’s happened, how could I not, though I never actually led her on, as the saying goes. (One marriage was, I confess, enough for me.) I was very, very fond of her though. We had our moments, one in particular on that funny oldfashioned bed of hers with the padded headboard, like something out of a thirties movie. Well, that was fine, more than fine, but I could see she had a more permanent arrangement in mind, not that she ever said anything, not in a direct way. Anyway, it seemed best to put a little distance between us. I had no idea she’d take it so hard, that our “friendship”—and that’s all it was — meant something else to her.
Labina Anthony Greene Dukes’ Theory
When I married Dick Greene back in 1927 I thought I was getting a strong husband. He was straight-backed, his shirts tucked neatly into his slacks, his shoes glossy. The man played tennis. He swam for Indiana Varsity. His face was tanned and finely shaped, and I used to adore watching the way his mouth sometimes sagged open when he was listening to someone speak. That slackness of jaw held me for years in a rich, alert, concentrating innocence. He had a fastidious almost humble way of shifting his broad shoulders, as though he had them on loan, as though they were breakable.
I was the breakable one. Women always are. It’s not so much a question of one big disappointment, though. It’s more like a thousand little disappointments raining down on top of each other.
After a while it gets to seem like a flood, and the first thing you know you’re drowning.
Cora-Mae Milltown’s Theory
The poor motherless thing. Oh my, I remember to this day the first time I laid eyes on her. Eleven years old, her and her father driving up to the Vinegar Hill place in a taxi cab, and myself still up to my elbows in soap and water, not half ready for the two of them, I hadn’t even started on the kitchen. Where’s your missus? — that’s what I was about to say, but thank the Lord I buttoned my lip, because there wasn’t any missus, she’d gone and passed away years before, the life went out of her giving birth to this washrag of a girl.
It was Mr. Goodwill himself who told me the story. A tragedy. That was after I got to know him better.
Coming from Canada like he did, he wasn’t used to coloreds, and he talked to me straight out about this and that and everything else too. “Cora-Mae,” he said, “my girl needs a woman in the house, she needs to learn things, she’ll be wanting a bit of company when I’m not here. First her mamma died, you see, and then an old auntie who took care of her up in Canada, and now she’s got no one in the world, only me.”
That’s how I came to be working for Mr. Goodwill by the week instead of just Wednesdays the way the company said. That’s the Indiana Limestone Company, I’m talking about, they’d hired on Mr. Goodwill and brought him all the way down to Bloomington. A widow-man and his little girl. Now this would be round about 1916, when Orren was overseas, his leg all shot to pieces, only I didn’t know it then. That very fall our own Lucile was six years old and starting school, and so I said yes, to Mr. Goodwill, I’d come by early and get breakfast cooking and see that the child was dressed nice and clean for school, and look to the house and the wash and all. Two dollars a day he paid me, three dollars after they moved into the big house, and that was good pay for colored help then.
They treated me nice. Mr. Goodwill had a jokey way about him.
Sometimes he’d go and leave a sack of fresh doughnuts on the kitchen table. “What’s this?” I’d say, and he’d say, “Why, someone must’ve left those there for you, Cora-Mae, a little treat to go along with your coffee.”
I’d start in on the dusting and the beds and I’d wax the furniture if it needed doing and after that I’d sit myself down with a cup of coffee and a doughnut, taking my ease. If the girl was home from school for some reason she’d sit next to me and have herself a doughnut too and a big glass of milk. Once she turned and said to me, “How come you eat your doughnut with a fork, Cora-Mae?” “I don’t know,” I said back, and I didn’t. “I never saw anyone eat a doughnut like that,” she said, all puzzled-like, and I couldn’t guess her meaning, if she thought I was ignorant, if she was being fresh or just curious the way my Lucile always was. I held my tongue and tried not to scold or fret too much over the things she’d do. I’d say to myself, remember this poor child is motherless, and there’s not one thing worse in this world than being motherless.