My mother died decades ago, but an eerie spectacle has lately brought her vividly to mind. Across Europe this hot and arid summer, reservoirs have evaporated. As they have, “drowned villages,” places evacuated and abandoned decades ago when a dam was built or a river diverted, have returned from their long underwater absence. There is one at the bottom of the Burrator Reservoir in Devon. There are several in northern Italy. These places vary, of course, but as the drought goes on and the waters recede, you can make out farmhouse cellars, roadside walls, gravestones, all laid bare like a bad conscience.
George Eliot made much of such a scene in her novel Silas Marner. It was that thought that brought my mother to mind. The copy of Silas Marner on my shelf—a navy-blue leatherette duodecimo in a little cardboard case—sits next to an identical edition of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. The novels are strangely paired, aside from their standing at the zenith of the English literary tradition as it was understood on June 23, 1948. That was the day my mother was given both books for winning the Frazier award at Cobbet Junior High School in Lynn, Massachusetts. There is still a little Audubon card inside the front cover with a commemorative note from the principal, Helen A. Boyce.
I am not sure what kind of excellence the Frazier award recognized. My mother was one of those students who really take to high school. She won one academic award after another, was gushed over by her teachers and honored on graduation day, and then moved on to . . . well, nothing, really. Nothing that took advantage of her education, although she would always gain advantage from her smarts. She went to secretarial school, worked as an airline stewardess, became a wife and a mother. I bring this up not to hector the reader about anything political, only to explain why the books were on prominent display in our house. Although won by a girl just turned 14, they were a culmination of sorts.
She won an award in Latin at about the same time. I forget what it was called. It came with a prize: a visit to a studio to recite something that would be produced on a 78 rpm record. My mother chose Marc Antony’s memorial oration from Julius Caesar. The oak-colored record sat in the back of the cabinet beneath the hi-fi, alongside my parents’ LPs of Nat King Cole, Johnny Horton, the Fifth Dimension, and Neil Diamond.
I discovered it one day in my early teens when I was in the living room with my sisters and put it on the turntable. Across the years and through the crackles and pops came the voice of my mother, reverent and orotund, at just about the age we were then.
I wish I could say our mood was reverent, too. But even as an adult my mother had a strong Boston accent, and the guileless girl on the hi-fi clearly had no clue that working-class elocution might someday be an obstacle to her social mobility. We found it hilarious. We hooted out imitations of my mother’s accent at its most broad:
“So let it be with Caesah!”
“F’ Brutus is an honorable mee-an!”
“My haht is inna coffin theah with Caesah!”
We would pull it out to listen to every few months or so, often in front of my mother. It never failed to crack us up.
When my mother died, we gathered up certain objects that would allow us to keep our mother in mind over the years. The recording of her girl’s voice would obviously be the most precious of these. But we couldn’t find it anywhere. We emptied the cabinets. We emptied the closets. We looked through all her papers. It just wasn’t there.
Had she mislaid it? How could she have? Had she grown indifferent to it and thrown it out in some spring cleaning? Again, how could she have? And yet she must have. She must have thrown it out. The thought has occurred to me over the years that she would have done so not out of indifference but out of humiliation. This youthful triumph must have begun, under the lash of our mockery, to embarrass her—all the more so for the many years in which she had harbored a sense of it as a triumph.
Should we have been more sensitive? But where would we have got that sensitivity? How are kids supposed to understand the spirit in which a middle-aged person looks back on his youth? Didn’t she, having reached middle age, know we didn’t mean anything by it?
It is a relief to have such thoughts interrupted by work and day-to-day responsibilities when they come, like rain.
