Chapter 6

Mom's Dark Streak

On my parents’ 35th anniversary, Mom wrote: “When we were young and love was new/I lived in dread and fear/That War’s grim grasp would reach for you--/I would not have you near.”

As much as my mother loved to laugh, she loved to cry. As a neglected, abused and molested child, she’d trained herself not to weep; years later, she had to teach herself to sob for relief from the horrors of her past. I’d fall asleep at night listening to her talking to my father and weeping.

Shy and self-conscious elsewhere, I was my true self at home—shrieking, flouncing, slamming doors, crying, laughing, dancing, sitting beside Mom at our shabby old upright piano, bought second-hand in a junk store, inhaling her familiar smell of lanolin and Blue Grass cologne, singing. “Oh dig my grave both wide and deep, wide and deep,” Mom warbled. “Put tombstones at my head and feet, head and feet!” Mom had always loved to sing, belonged to the synagogue choir, trilled and hummed all around the house, and at the piano was partial to morbid, multi-stanza English ballads. In those preteen years, I loved everything she loved.

We lived in a sunny California suburb, but my sister and I were raised on dark songs and stories full of abandoned orphans, wicked witches, unrequited love, untimely death. If Mom’s own life were a ballad or a fairytale, it might begin this way: “Once upon a time in Brooklyn town a beloved green-eyed babe was born . . .” Then it would turn bleak and troubled. The way little Heidi was sent off to live in the high Alps with curmudgeonly Grandfather, city-girl Mom at age five, all curly-headed and adorable in a gingham dress, was sent off to live with strangers on a farm. But Heidi’s story had a happy ending when crusty old Alm Uncle turned out to have a heart, whereas Mom sometimes cried when she told us of her cruel foster mother, a dead ringer, in our minds, for Cinderella’s evil stepmother.

There were other characters in Mom’s tale: the pampered foster sister; the teenage aunts who sometimes took casual care of their brother’s child; the jovial, adored Dad who visited her on weekends, smoking cigars and bearing gifts; the elusive, stylish mother in the big cartwheel hat and dark lipstick; and, by Mom’s early teens, the new stepmother with the trained operatic voice who forbade Mom to sing in her presence.

“What did she feed you, Lord Randall my son?” Mom would croon at the piano in slow, macabre tones, pausing to turn pages. “What did she feed you, my pretty one?” Whatever the song’s tempo was meant to be, Mom, a halting pianist at best, always played and sang slowly, in a throbbing, emotional alto; even “The Froggie Went a-Courting” sounded like a dirge. No matter. With each song, I’d wait patiently while her fingers, with their enlarged knuckles and short, blunt nails, paused and arranged themselves on the keyboard. Then, the shivery climax, accompanied by crashing chords--“Eels and eel broth, Mother!”--and the denouement.

Dad half-listened as he read the newspaper. My little sister, the dreamy one, sat cross-legged on top of the piano gazing out onto our cul-de-sac, where children played kickball, and to the blue crest of the mountain range beyond, her thoughts perhaps far from the reach of the foreboding lyrics and haunting minor keys. It was always I who was Mom’s designated sidekick, who sat rooted to the scratched piano bench, with its stacks of yellowing sheet music stuffed inside. “Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair,” we sang.

Mom had special songs for each of us; for my sister, she sang, “Little Annie Laurie was my sweetheart.” For me, it was the melancholy, “I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair.” I thought it was amazing and wonderful that a song had my name and my hair color.

Even simple folksongs seemed chosen by Mom for their downbeat themes: love oh love oh careless love; the mysterious foggy, foggy dew; the old gray goose who drowned upside down in the “milk” pond; the bold cabin boy who sank in the Looooowland Sea. It was cold and wintry in Mom’s songs, and I eagerly succumbed to the watery images of betrayal, death, and grief, far from the shouts of the kids on the block, the confusing social expectations at school. Here I knew exactly who I was: Mom’s oldest and very special daughter, born when my father was overseas. Here I was safe from the wild, competitive ball games on the street. Here I had my mother, who told me I’d be a writer someday. “What do I care for my goosefeather bed, what do I care for my baby-oh?” we sang. “Tonight I’ll sleep on the cold, cold ground in the arms of the raggle-taggle gypsy-o.”

Mom didn’t just sing scary songs; she imagined scary things: being run over; attacked by criminals; driving when “dangerously overtired” and therefore crashing; somehow stuck on the railroad tracks with a train coming (“A boy stood on the railroad tracks and didn’t hear the bell./I’d like to tell you the rest of the tale but it’s too sad to tell.”); paralyzed in a wheelchair forever like the woman across the street, who was a dancer until she got dangerously overtired one summer and contracted polio. “Lock all your doors!” Mom would order every time we got into a car. “Oh my god! Watch out!” she’d shriek when we walked through a parking lot. State Highway 101 was “Bloody Bayshore” to her; benign Sand Hill Road was a death trap. She feared cats; to her, there was evil in feline eyes. Deadly bacteria lurked in the dishcloths. You could get a fatal infection if you didn’t dry carefully between your toes after a bath. In the evenings, she compulsively read terrible news—starving children, kids left in locked cars on hot days, war—and sobbed, sitting in the Danish Modern armchair with her feet, in white ankle socks and orthopedic sandals, on the ottoman, the daily paper in her lap.

And then we’d move to the piano bench. “Make my bed soooon, for I’m sick to my heart, and I fain would lie dooooon,” she’d trill. I shuddered. I knew Lord Randall wasn’t just going to lie down; he was going to die. I knew all about death. It was one of Mom’s favorite subjects. Mom didn’t fear death. As a kid, she’d contemplated suicide. I figured I wasn’t supposed to fear death, either. But still, I felt chills when we sang about poor, doomed Barbara Allen, who said blithely to Sweet William as he lay pining away for love of her, “Young man, I think you're dying.”

Even Mom’s love poems to Dad had dark, anxious undercurrents. “What if I grow fat and ugly?” she wrote in a Valentine card when she was 64. “Will you want to kiss and hug me?”

Mom was dramatic when she sang, when she discussed the sad and awful way of the world, when she cried. But she liked to laugh too, and the novels she read to us, so different from the songs and fairytales, conjured for me a parallel childhood of big, joyful, squabbling families, thrilling adventures, and magic. As plodding as her fingers were on the piano keys, as wobbly and melodramatic as her singing voice was, her reading voice was just the opposite. Her Brooklyn accent faded away as she confidently took on varied rhythms, volume, and enunciations.

For Mom there was neither a happily-ever-after ending nor a sudden, shattering finale. When I think of the way it unfolded as she went from middle age into the blank space of Alzheimer’s, I see an enlarged Mom in the foreground, tiny figures from her past swirling around her in perpetual motion, as in a version of Dorothy’s cyclone, then digitally disappearing one by one, until only Mom’s face remains, bewildered, floating in space. Always an avid fiction reader—she claimed it as her addiction, the thing that had saved her from despair during her miserable youth—in her 70s she began to choose bland biographies; she said she couldn’t fall asleep at night unless she read a really boring book. The mournful ballads that once held us both in their thrall were gradually replaced by cheery Dixieland jazz on the record-player. “Bill Bailey, won’t you please come home” echoed through the house. The piano was sold, replaced by a tinny-sounding electronic keyboard, which Mom eventually stopped playing altogether. By the time she was 80 she’d hung her harp on a weeping willow tree, like in the song.

And I knew by now that I had a tin ear, just like my dad. Anyway, I’d found my own way to express my dramatic self: in theatre. I didn’t love everything Mom loved anymore.

But Mom’s obsession with death wasn’t over, not right away. In the same way a light bulb will suddenly, momentarily, burn bright before it burns out altogether, so, in the decade or so preceding diagnosis, did Mom’s terrors seem to coalesce into a single, enormous, overpowering fear: that Dad could die before her. She told me she planned to kill herself if that happened. I didn’t want to hear about it. It was enough that I’d sung those bleak ballads with her, over and over, somehow riveted to that piano bench by her outsize personality, waiting for her fingers to find the right keys. The fates of Sweet William and all the others were seared in my mind. But none of that was any longer part of my life. In many ways I’d long ago left Mom herself behind, that beloved figure from my childhood who comforted me, read to me, sang with me.

In her last years, Mom looked like the old witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” or the way I imagined her to be when Mom read to us: cackling and grinning maniacally as she lured children into the gingerbread house. By then Mom had forgotten her final death wish. If Dad died or I disappeared from her life, she wouldn’t have noticed. Nor did she remember the real-life nightmares that haunted her, right up to the doorstep of dementia. Her fears had become amorphous, inexpressible, perhaps like dreams that you forget upon waking but that somehow cling to your bones for the whole day and dissolve by nightfall. Extremely anxious in the early stages of her illness—an anxiety that seemed like a distillation of every anxious moment she’d ever had--she eventually became merely irritable, even at times calm.

Midway through her condition, I’d prompt her to sing, in her high, shaky voice, a few lines of simple songs, like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”—and that was on a good day, a day when she could talk. On other days, all music sounded to her like annoying noise.

As for reading—until almost the end she still liked to have a book at hand, but her eyes never moved and she didn’t turn the pages. If I asked her what she was reading, she’d say, “Who knows?” and shrug. Yet to see her that way, with her glasses on, head bent, slowly eating her cereal, a book propped on the reading stand—she always loved to read while she ate--made me, for a fleeting moment, imagine her the way I’d always assumed she’d end up: wrinkled and hunched, yes, like that, at the table, but actually reading, transported. Or at the piano, singing about Jeanie’s light brown hair floating like a vapor on the summer air, me at her side.