What My Mother Gave Me (18 page)

Betrayal

MARGE PIERCY

My mother married for the first time when she was seventeen to escape a job as chambermaid in a hotel. She had been forced to quit school halfway through the tenth grade in order to bring in money to her poverty-stricken family with too many children to feed. It was a disaster. She was more miserable in that marriage than as a chambermaid being sexually harassed by male travelers.

Her next marriage was to a small businessman with whom she had a son.
Th
ey were married a number of years. During the Depression, she ran a boardinghouse to help out.
Th
ere she met my father and eloped with him.

Whatever chemistry they had at first—and it must have been strong—by the time I was born it was gone. It was the marriage of the dog and cat.
Th
ey could agree on almost nothing. Since he was the breadwinner, he had the power, but she was a great sulker. Although he did pretty much as he pleased—he bought a new car every two years while there was no money for her or me to go to a dentist—she had her own ways of making his life torturous when she chose.

My mother and I were much closer than I ever was to my father, who never got over the disappointment of having a girl and not a boy. My brother came to live with us, and my father preferred him to me, although he was quite harsh with him during his adolescence. I was even more rebellious. Both my brother and I left home as soon as we could.

She had few nice things, but one of them was a jade necklace my father had given her when they eloped. It had an oblong pendant intricately cut on a fine gold chain with smaller globes of green jade set into the links. I seldom saw her wear it. I think she felt few of her clothes were good enough to set it off. But frequently she would take it out, show it to me and hold it, finger it, admire it. Mostly when she was in that nostalgic mood remembering what she chose to cherish from her earlier life, she would go through scraps of velvet or satin or silk from a little chest of drawers stored deep in their closet.
Th
e chest was tiny, like something made for a child. She would take out those scraps, recall the dresses they had once been a part of, and tell me some story to go with each. But the prize possession she loved the best was that necklace. She always said as she put it away, “Some day this will be yours.”

Th
e last time we spoke on the phone, the Monday before she died suddenly, she reminded me that I was to have it. She seemed afraid that my brother's fourth wife would take it. As she was not ill, I couldn't understand why she brought it up. She suffered a stroke the following week. My husband, Ira, and I flew down on standby the first night of Hanukkah, but my father took her off life support while we were in the air. When we landed, she was already dead.

Along with my brother's wife, I went through her things quickly, as my father intended to get rid of everything. What I took were photographs, my own books signed to her—my father had never read any of them—some shawls I had given her wrapped in plastic and obviously never worn, the rings cut off her fingers by the undertaker, and that jade necklace. She had so little to leave me and I knew how she had cherished it, proof my father had once cared for her. (When I was thirteen, she made a fuss about wanting a present from him for her birthday. He bought her a kitchen garbage can.) I told him I was taking it, to make sure he did not mind. He claimed never to have seen it before and denied having given it to her.

I put it on now and then, always reminded of her, always missing her freshly. Two years after my mother's death, I was invited to a party on Labor Day weekend and decided to wear it. It was not in my jewelry box. I was frightened. How could I have misplaced or lost it? I always put it away carefully in the exact front left-hand corner of the upper drawer. I took everything out. I crawled all over the floor. I tried to remember the last time I had worn it, about six weeks earlier. Had I not put it away? But I always did. Always. I had a stomachache all day. Obviously I had done something stupid with it. Ever since my mother died, I had been misplacing things. I saw it as a metaphor, that since I had lost her, I kept losing other things, especially clothing and jewelry.

Monday, Labor Day, I received a phone call. It was from the roommate of my assistant, who had been working for me for seven years. Two and a half years earlier my assistant's marriage had broken up and she had been briefly homeless. I let her stay in my house while I was in Florida for my mother's funeral. Earlier that year, my assistant had complained of pains and gone to her gynecologist, who told her nothing was wrong with her except nerves. From her symptoms I did not believe he was correct. I suspected she had an ectopic pregnancy. I made an appointment with her at a women's clinic in Boston. Her pains got worse. When she arrived and was examined, they discovered I was correct and that her situation was critical.
Th
ey rushed her into an operating room and saved her life.

Her roommate was very nervous but said she felt she had to tell me that my assistant had been stealing from me with some regularity for the past two years. At first, the roommate said, she had taken little things when she was staying in my house. But it had escalated.
Th
e roommate felt some of the objects were too precious for me not to miss them, including a jade necklace my assistant had been boasting about. I told her I'd come over that evening.

Th
e roommate let us into my assistant's room. I began going through her things. I didn't care if she arrived or not. I didn't care if what I was doing was legal or not. I found the necklace very quickly and in fear that somehow it would disappear, I put it on. I found other jewelry of mine, including a gold Mogen David my husband had given me. My assistant was not Jewish. I also found all the clothes, the watch, the other items I thought I had misplaced or lost. I collected them all. Her roommate told me my assistant had developed a cocaine habit over the past year. She was spending the night with a man she had met recently in a bar and planned to go to work directly from his apartment.

When she arrived Tuesday morning, I was wearing the jade necklace. I confronted her. I had put all the items I had recovered from her bedroom in a pile on the table. She kept saying her mother had given her the jade necklace and her boyfriend had given her the Mogen David. She wept. I told her she was fired and I would not prosecute her but never wanted to see her again. She stopped crying, picked up her purse and started out. She turned. “Does that mean you won't give me a letter of recommendation?”

I still have my mother's jade necklace, and every time I touch it and every time I put it on, I think of her and I still miss her. I don't think missing a mother ever stops. I have decided to be buried with it.

Th
e Silver in the Salt Air

ELEANOR CLIFT

I don't have many material things from my mother, Inna Josine Jappen Roeloffs—she wasn't a material girl. She was an immigrant from the tiny island of Föhr in the North Sea off Germany and Denmark, who came to America at nineteen years old in 1923, newly married to my father, who was ten years older than she was. Seasick all the way, she came through Ellis Island, and told me once that she would never have agreed to the journey if she'd known it would be for good. But she put any regrets aside to create a life with my father, working with him in the delicatessen they owned together, initially in Brooklyn, and then, during most of my growing up, in Queens.

She made the potato salad, rice pudding, and custard, her hands so callous that she could peel potatoes moments after they came out of boiling water. What she did looked easy but of course it wasn't.
Th
at was true of a lot of the life lessons she passed down to me, including her instructions on how to make a marriage work, and specifically her marriage to my father, Erk Diedrich Roeloffs. He was the classic in-charge German male, impatient and always barking orders. On the surface, my mother was a deferential housewife, but she shared her secret weapon with me when I was still a girl: “Do what you want to do. Just don't talk about it.” She really ran the show; he just didn't know it. Pop would say no; Mom would wait awhile, and soon all would be well.

Americanizing his first name to Ed, my father dealt with the customers out front while my mother rarely ventured from the wood-floored kitchen in the back of the store. She was a very hard worker, and paid no attention to fashion. She wore what were then called housedresses, cotton prints that she usually bought off the rack from neighborhood stores—the racks displayed on the sidewalk—without even trying them on. Today, Indian sarees hang outside those shops in Jackson Heights, Queens, where we moved after the war, when I was five.

Mom wore sturdy shoes with wedge heels, and I don't remember any makeup in the house, except an occasional lipstick for church on Sunday. But she had a stash of jewelry that I knew was special even as a young girl, yet she never wore any of the pieces and kept them wrapped in soft material in a dresser drawer as you would keep precious silverware. By the time I saw the jewelry she had brought with her from Europe, she had been in her adoptive country for more than two decades.
Th
e horrors of World War II had ended their visits to the German-owned North Sea island she called home, and when she occasionally took out the dozen or so pieces to polish them, she told me that in the salt air of the island, they didn't tarnish the way they did in America. It was a prideful comparison, one of the few she could find in those postwar years.

More through indirection than anything she said, I knew her jewelry would be mine. As the only daughter, with brothers ten and sixteen years older, it was up to me to carry on the tradition represented by this collection. As a teenager, I was pretty blasé about anything having to do with my parents' native land. I wanted to be American, and this odd, faraway place held no allure for me. Mom would tuck the items away, confident that I would someday appreciate what she was setting aside.

She was right—my attitude changed when I became an adult with a family of my own. I can't remember exactly when I got her jewelry because there was no fanfare. But by the time she died at age sixty-nine with her mind fogged from Alzheimer's disease, I was grateful to have these tangible symbols of a heritage and a culture that Mom had feared would be lost in America.

Th
is distinctively silver jewelry with its delicate lattice design is known throughout Germany as belonging to Föhr and two neighboring islands, Amrum and Sylt, where it is part of the traditional costume women and girls wear for special occasions. I have a picture taken of me in the ceremonial garb when I was in my twenties, on my first visit to Föhr and pregnant with my second child. I'm wearing a long basic black dress borrowed from a cousin and covered from the waist down by a lacy-looking white apron. Round buttonlike baubles, exact replicas of my mother's jewels, rest like a half-moon cloak of silver on my bodice. To refresh my memory of forty years ago, I googled Föhr, and watched with enchantment images of Föhr's finest in traditional dress.

I felt awkward standing there as relatives I barely knew debated in Föhring (yes, the island has its very own language) whom I most resembled, as though I were just an assemblage of genes passing through the generations. At the time, I was not yet a journalist. I was working as a “Girl Friday” in the Atlanta bureau of
Newsweek.
It was 1969, and we had just gone through the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. I had one son and another on the way, and it was comforting to know that amid such turbulence, a place like Föhr existed, beckoning me back to a simpler time and place, with thatched-roof houses and cobblestone streets.

We took my mother back to Föhr the winter of 1972. She wanted to go home, and she died the following summer in a nursing home on the island. By then, I had her jewelry, along with some similar pieces from a favorite aunt who never married and had moved back to Föhr. I keep them in a small luminous blue box that sits on my dresser and that has a clear top so I can see the contents.
Th
e box is so perfect I'd like to think it's an heirloom, but on the corner of the lid it says
COVERGIRL
, which makes it a vintage collectible, and quite American.

Note to burglars:
Th
e jewelry looks antique, and it is old, but it is not especially valuable.
Th
e largest piece is a silver lattice pendant with a large yellow-gold gemstone set in the middle, which Mom told me was a gift from my father to mark their engagement.
Th
at didn't strike me as odd at the time, but studying the amber stone later and trying to understand the symbolism, I thought it must be my mother's birthstone. But no, I discovered the honey-toned gem marks the month of November, which is when my father was born; my mother had a January birthday. Maybe he just liked it. Whatever the reason, my mother cherished it, and it's about the only thing I remember her telling me was a gift from him that wasn't purely practical.

Mom often repeated that silver never tarnishes in the salt air of the island, only here in America. She's right that it is darker here, but I'm not sure it's immune to tarnish in its native habitat. She once told me that everyone on the island is blond, like me, and when I was there, I could see for myself that while there were plenty of blonds, there were darker-haired people, too. “Oh, they're tourists,” my mother said.
Th
at was her story, and she was sticking to it.

Having this jewelry brings the Old World to me along with the strength of my mother, who left her family while still in her teens to marry a man who at twenty-nine had set his course in life. He took her across the ocean to New York, a place bigger and scarier than anything she could have imagined, and where she didn't know the language. But she did it, and she built a good life, later showing the same grit and fortitude in learning how to drive at age sixty after my father died. I think of the courage that took, and it helps me in meeting life's challenges to know I've got her DNA.

Like my mother, I hardly ever wear the jewelry, but it beckons to me from its blue box. All it takes is a glance, and I can feel a powerful connection to the tiny windswept island in the North Sea, and to the woman who gave me life.

While the jewelry represents the continuity of my unique heritage, the other item that my mother didn't intend to give me but that I think of as a gift from her, is much more mundane. It was a can of Johnson Paste Wax that she kept in a mesh bag in the car for her visits to my father's grave out near Kennedy Airport, so she could polish the marker. She went every week, and as I think about it, that was probably why she learned how to drive. For me, it was a powerful lesson in love and loyalty, and the enduring gestures that matter.