)
by
Polly Babcock
Polly Babcock
As the taxi navigated the verdant streets of Roland Park, the wealthy Baltimore neighborhood where I grew up, I joked to the driver, “It doesn’t look like even the leaves on the trees have changed.”
He laughed. “Rich folks don’t like change.”
On the front porch of a house where a schoolmate had lived stood a middle-aged man dressed exactly as my father had dressed in the Fifties: Madras-plaid blazer, butter-yellow linen slacks and highly-polished brown penny-loafers. The gentleman he was talking to was dressed in the exact reverse—yellow blazer and Madras pants.
The lady from the bank’s estate department greeted me at the condo my parents, Connie and Warren, had bought in an assisted-living community when my father was eighty, before quickly returning to her seat in the middle of the nearly empty living room. Presumably, she was there to make sure I didn’t pilfer anything. As executor of the estate, the bank had instructed me and my sister to list every single thing we might want, no matter how small, then compare our lists and negotiate overlapping wishes. Any discrepancy in value between our lists would be compensated for in cash distributions from the estate.
I had told the bank officer on the phone, “Since I haven’t been in my parents’ house for thirty years and have no idea what they have that I’d want, I’ll just take what’s left after my sister gets through.”
However, the bank wouldn’t allow me to abdicate my right to choose items from the estate.
When my sister, Bunny, had called a week earlier to tell me our mother had died at age 86, my immediate thought was about myself: Do I have to go there and do something? Chronic anxiety could make me disgustingly self-protective. Having for years reluctantly attended family events to which I was never invited, Bunny was adamant in her refusal to play a role in Connie’s death. Her resentment ran deep over our parents’ refusal to acknowledge her as a lesbian and allow her to include her girlfriends on her visits.
“I have answered their imperial summons enough. You can go, if you want.”
My estrangement from my parents had been nearly total since my flight at eighteen. “You ran away,” my father said, years later. “I escaped,” I had answered.
The one place I didn’t fare well was within my own family so, by extension, all families were sources of discomfort. I know little about the rituals that mark milestones in family life. I attended a cousin’s wedding at thirteen and my grandmother’s funeral at sixteen. I’ve never been a bridesmaid or a godmother. My two marriages were devoid of ceremony. I had been relieved to learn that the man who would become my second husband was the only child of a widow and I would not have to navigate a maze of familial relationships. To me, families fell into two camps: toxic and tumultuous like mine; or cloyingly affectionate which made me resentful and underscored my alienation. I saw my parents five or six times between 1964, when my son was born, and 1999, when my mother died. Familial convention produced birthday and Christmas presents and phone calls when there was a reason. After Connie’s death, two years passed before I could hear the phone ring on Christmas without stiffening with tension.
My relief was nuclear when I learned my mother’s will, like my father’s, stated there was to be no service or memorial. Connie’s pre-paid cremation occurred before I arrived in Baltimore—every “I” and "T” dotted and crossed. Fear and fascination colored the prospect of visiting my hometown after decades.
. . .
A snorkeler in an underwater coral reef, I wafted silently through this foreign, otherworldly habitat full of unfamiliar things. Now and then, my silent contemplation was interrupted by the bank lady, “Shall I add that to your list?” when I picked up and examined an object. The furniture was tousled into the center of the living room and pictures were propped against the walls. I slunk self-consciously around the condo practically on tiptoe as when I was a child. The bank lady’s vulching presence made me feel like a shoplifter.
I eased drawers open looking for clues to my parents’ life. I was pleased that the small, tin-framed etchings I sent from Mexico hung on the wall next to my mother’s dressing table. Did they remind her of me? Connie’s closet revealed a rack of ladies-who-lunch dresses and many pairs of classic pumps. I sniffed the inside of one of Connie’s hats and claimed two winter jackets I could use in San Francisco. The built-in bookcases in the living room were full of Warren’s favorite literary classics—Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Alexandre Dumas—beside the best-sellers and historical novels my mother read—Robert Rouark, John O’Hara, Daphne du Maurier. The freezer’s stock of Stouffer’s frozen food was the sad symbol of the decline of a woman with a barely concealed contempt of frozen food and pride in her culinary skills.
I added items to my list based upon their familiarity. I had been away for so long I only responded to items I recognized from my childhood—a little wooden box with a sliding top that held a roll of stamps; a nineteenth-century painting that fit badly with my décor, but that I remembered hanging in the living room of my childhood; a little cutting board with cork legs added by my father that he used in his pantry bar; the silver swizzle stick I’d given him for Christmas when I was a teenager.
Connie’s jewelry box sat on top of her bureau. I wanted the handsome walnut chest that probably cost more than most of the jewelry I kept in a red plastic tool kit at home. I opened the lid slowly to delay the delicious moment when I might discover treasure. The bank’s appraiser had taken away all the valuables to sell for the benefit of the heirs, but he might have overlooked something in one of the drawers and slots. A parchment-colored envelope peeked from a pocket under the lid; might it be a letter from my mother meant to be opened after her death? I glanced over my shoulder before extracting it from its hiding place.
The Western Union envelope was postmarked June 21, 1945. World War II would not be officially over until the end of that year. The telegram inside was crisp with age, stamped as a duplicate of one delivered by phone ten days earlier at 3:23 AM from Oakland, California. It would have been 6:23 in Baltimore where my mother was sleeping in a house with two small daughters whose father was with the Navy in the Pacific. My eyes involuntarily skipped down to the signer who was not my father. What did my mother hope or dread when she was jerked awake by the Western Union operator who would read this message over the phone?
HAVE TRIED TWO DAYS TO PHONE YOU GOODBYE
I LOVE YOU AS OTHER GIRLS WOULD LIKE TO BE LOVED
DAVIS
A photograph in the envelope showed a good-looking man of about thirty surrounded by his crew on the deck of a ship. He had a blond crew-cut, a long neck, and his charming smile turned up the outer corners of his mouth. He looked familiar.
I almost hear the whirr of film: I’m three years old, standing at the top of the steps to my parents' house watching a man in a white uniform walk on his hands all the way to the corner. His officer's hat is upside down at the bottom of the steps where it has fallen when he flipped onto his hands.
Another day, the man walks my sister and me to the ice cream parlor and buys each of us a cone. My scoop of ice cream falls on the sidewalk a few yards from the door of the shop. I freeze, open-mouthed, expecting to be scolded for my carelessness, but the man tells us to wait there. He returns to the shop, then comes back and hands me another cone.
In the pocket with the telegram and pictures is a typed copy of a poem:
“To a Society Woman” by Riley Scott.
Under-dressed and overfed,
Moving, but her heart is dead:
Thoughtless, selfish, cruel, cold,
All she has is priced in gold.
Overbearing, under-bred,
Talking, but her brain is dead;
Sordid, showy, gem-bedecked,
All she does is for effect.
Under-cultured, over-wed,
Living, but her soul is dead;
Grasping, gross, ungracious, grim,
Pity her, O God—and him!
Below the poem my mother has written in blue ink, “I sometimes wonder!”
That exclamation point! I was astonished that my mother ever questioned her status as a society woman—my God, the upheaval I caused by my refusal to become a debutante. In the days following my discovery, I was transfixed by the vision of my mother as a restless, thirty year-old wife engaged in an adulterous affair, while her husband of nearly ten years was at war. This evidence of my mother’s indiscretion moved me to identify with her for the first time in my life. She had done something far worse than my adolescent rebellion of dating outside my social class and ignoring curfew. Discovering Connie’s secret transformed my lifelong fear of her into sympathetic fascination.
Five months later, thoughts of Davis lurked; a snagged song. I began an Internet search that revealed Davis’s unusual surname occurred most often in the South. When I quickly hit pay dirt in Macon, Georgia, I paused to reconsider doing what I was thinking. Was I acting as my mother’s proxy, or goaded by my own memory of Davis’s long-ago kindness to a small, overly-sensitive girl who expected a rebuke that never came?
Several times that week, I let the phone ring for an eternity, thinking, Lots of old people don’t have answering machines. Still, I pictured an empty room where a telephone rang hollowly against the bare floor it sat upon. Finally, a recorded message shocked me out of my reverie announcing the number was no longer in service: “Please dial again or consult your directory.”
I was overtaken by an almost mystical certainty: Davis had died shortly before I began calling. I felt a tender sense of loss for a man I barely remembered and never knew.
In the only time I ever acted on her mother's behalf, this is what I would have said to her lover:
“My name is Polly. My mother was Connie. I thought you’d want to know that she died last October. She must have loved you very much and loved your memory all her life. I found your farewell telegram along with pictures of you in her jewelry box. I remember you—you could walk on your hands all the way down the block.”
And then I would hear what Davis wanted to tell me about the troubled, troublesome woman who was the mother I knew and feared.
He laughed. “Rich folks don’t like change.”
On the front porch of a house where a schoolmate had lived stood a middle-aged man dressed exactly as my father had dressed in the Fifties: Madras-plaid blazer, butter-yellow linen slacks and highly-polished brown penny-loafers. The gentleman he was talking to was dressed in the exact reverse—yellow blazer and Madras pants.
The lady from the bank’s estate department greeted me at the condo my parents, Connie and Warren, had bought in an assisted-living community when my father was eighty, before quickly returning to her seat in the middle of the nearly empty living room. Presumably, she was there to make sure I didn’t pilfer anything. As executor of the estate, the bank had instructed me and my sister to list every single thing we might want, no matter how small, then compare our lists and negotiate overlapping wishes. Any discrepancy in value between our lists would be compensated for in cash distributions from the estate.
I had told the bank officer on the phone, “Since I haven’t been in my parents’ house for thirty years and have no idea what they have that I’d want, I’ll just take what’s left after my sister gets through.”
However, the bank wouldn’t allow me to abdicate my right to choose items from the estate.
When my sister, Bunny, had called a week earlier to tell me our mother had died at age 86, my immediate thought was about myself: Do I have to go there and do something? Chronic anxiety could make me disgustingly self-protective. Having for years reluctantly attended family events to which I was never invited, Bunny was adamant in her refusal to play a role in Connie’s death. Her resentment ran deep over our parents’ refusal to acknowledge her as a lesbian and allow her to include her girlfriends on her visits.
“I have answered their imperial summons enough. You can go, if you want.”
My estrangement from my parents had been nearly total since my flight at eighteen. “You ran away,” my father said, years later. “I escaped,” I had answered.
The one place I didn’t fare well was within my own family so, by extension, all families were sources of discomfort. I know little about the rituals that mark milestones in family life. I attended a cousin’s wedding at thirteen and my grandmother’s funeral at sixteen. I’ve never been a bridesmaid or a godmother. My two marriages were devoid of ceremony. I had been relieved to learn that the man who would become my second husband was the only child of a widow and I would not have to navigate a maze of familial relationships. To me, families fell into two camps: toxic and tumultuous like mine; or cloyingly affectionate which made me resentful and underscored my alienation. I saw my parents five or six times between 1964, when my son was born, and 1999, when my mother died. Familial convention produced birthday and Christmas presents and phone calls when there was a reason. After Connie’s death, two years passed before I could hear the phone ring on Christmas without stiffening with tension.
My relief was nuclear when I learned my mother’s will, like my father’s, stated there was to be no service or memorial. Connie’s pre-paid cremation occurred before I arrived in Baltimore—every “I” and "T” dotted and crossed. Fear and fascination colored the prospect of visiting my hometown after decades.
. . .
A snorkeler in an underwater coral reef, I wafted silently through this foreign, otherworldly habitat full of unfamiliar things. Now and then, my silent contemplation was interrupted by the bank lady, “Shall I add that to your list?” when I picked up and examined an object. The furniture was tousled into the center of the living room and pictures were propped against the walls. I slunk self-consciously around the condo practically on tiptoe as when I was a child. The bank lady’s vulching presence made me feel like a shoplifter.
I eased drawers open looking for clues to my parents’ life. I was pleased that the small, tin-framed etchings I sent from Mexico hung on the wall next to my mother’s dressing table. Did they remind her of me? Connie’s closet revealed a rack of ladies-who-lunch dresses and many pairs of classic pumps. I sniffed the inside of one of Connie’s hats and claimed two winter jackets I could use in San Francisco. The built-in bookcases in the living room were full of Warren’s favorite literary classics—Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Alexandre Dumas—beside the best-sellers and historical novels my mother read—Robert Rouark, John O’Hara, Daphne du Maurier. The freezer’s stock of Stouffer’s frozen food was the sad symbol of the decline of a woman with a barely concealed contempt of frozen food and pride in her culinary skills.
I added items to my list based upon their familiarity. I had been away for so long I only responded to items I recognized from my childhood—a little wooden box with a sliding top that held a roll of stamps; a nineteenth-century painting that fit badly with my décor, but that I remembered hanging in the living room of my childhood; a little cutting board with cork legs added by my father that he used in his pantry bar; the silver swizzle stick I’d given him for Christmas when I was a teenager.
Connie’s jewelry box sat on top of her bureau. I wanted the handsome walnut chest that probably cost more than most of the jewelry I kept in a red plastic tool kit at home. I opened the lid slowly to delay the delicious moment when I might discover treasure. The bank’s appraiser had taken away all the valuables to sell for the benefit of the heirs, but he might have overlooked something in one of the drawers and slots. A parchment-colored envelope peeked from a pocket under the lid; might it be a letter from my mother meant to be opened after her death? I glanced over my shoulder before extracting it from its hiding place.
The Western Union envelope was postmarked June 21, 1945. World War II would not be officially over until the end of that year. The telegram inside was crisp with age, stamped as a duplicate of one delivered by phone ten days earlier at 3:23 AM from Oakland, California. It would have been 6:23 in Baltimore where my mother was sleeping in a house with two small daughters whose father was with the Navy in the Pacific. My eyes involuntarily skipped down to the signer who was not my father. What did my mother hope or dread when she was jerked awake by the Western Union operator who would read this message over the phone?
HAVE TRIED TWO DAYS TO PHONE YOU GOODBYE
I LOVE YOU AS OTHER GIRLS WOULD LIKE TO BE LOVED
DAVIS
A photograph in the envelope showed a good-looking man of about thirty surrounded by his crew on the deck of a ship. He had a blond crew-cut, a long neck, and his charming smile turned up the outer corners of his mouth. He looked familiar.
I almost hear the whirr of film: I’m three years old, standing at the top of the steps to my parents' house watching a man in a white uniform walk on his hands all the way to the corner. His officer's hat is upside down at the bottom of the steps where it has fallen when he flipped onto his hands.
Another day, the man walks my sister and me to the ice cream parlor and buys each of us a cone. My scoop of ice cream falls on the sidewalk a few yards from the door of the shop. I freeze, open-mouthed, expecting to be scolded for my carelessness, but the man tells us to wait there. He returns to the shop, then comes back and hands me another cone.
In the pocket with the telegram and pictures is a typed copy of a poem:
“To a Society Woman” by Riley Scott.
Under-dressed and overfed,
Moving, but her heart is dead:
Thoughtless, selfish, cruel, cold,
All she has is priced in gold.
Overbearing, under-bred,
Talking, but her brain is dead;
Sordid, showy, gem-bedecked,
All she does is for effect.
Under-cultured, over-wed,
Living, but her soul is dead;
Grasping, gross, ungracious, grim,
Pity her, O God—and him!
Below the poem my mother has written in blue ink, “I sometimes wonder!”
That exclamation point! I was astonished that my mother ever questioned her status as a society woman—my God, the upheaval I caused by my refusal to become a debutante. In the days following my discovery, I was transfixed by the vision of my mother as a restless, thirty year-old wife engaged in an adulterous affair, while her husband of nearly ten years was at war. This evidence of my mother’s indiscretion moved me to identify with her for the first time in my life. She had done something far worse than my adolescent rebellion of dating outside my social class and ignoring curfew. Discovering Connie’s secret transformed my lifelong fear of her into sympathetic fascination.
Five months later, thoughts of Davis lurked; a snagged song. I began an Internet search that revealed Davis’s unusual surname occurred most often in the South. When I quickly hit pay dirt in Macon, Georgia, I paused to reconsider doing what I was thinking. Was I acting as my mother’s proxy, or goaded by my own memory of Davis’s long-ago kindness to a small, overly-sensitive girl who expected a rebuke that never came?
Several times that week, I let the phone ring for an eternity, thinking, Lots of old people don’t have answering machines. Still, I pictured an empty room where a telephone rang hollowly against the bare floor it sat upon. Finally, a recorded message shocked me out of my reverie announcing the number was no longer in service: “Please dial again or consult your directory.”
I was overtaken by an almost mystical certainty: Davis had died shortly before I began calling. I felt a tender sense of loss for a man I barely remembered and never knew.
In the only time I ever acted on her mother's behalf, this is what I would have said to her lover:
“My name is Polly. My mother was Connie. I thought you’d want to know that she died last October. She must have loved you very much and loved your memory all her life. I found your farewell telegram along with pictures of you in her jewelry box. I remember you—you could walk on your hands all the way down the block.”
And then I would hear what Davis wanted to tell me about the troubled, troublesome woman who was the mother I knew and feared.
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