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More about Truth and Fiction 12/15/2012 9:36:13 AM
My book "I'll Meet You in Syracuse" is the orphan among my writings. I've never publicized or promoted it. In fact I felt rather chagrined about it as my family hated it.
More about Truth and Fiction
The relationship between mother and daughter is so complex that I’d always feared to tackle it in my writing. In my first novel, written under the tutelage of Prof. Roy Cowden at college, I had the mother deceased and the child raised by a maiden aunt called Aunt Anne. The character was a combination of my Aunt Mildred and my paternal grandmother, the two women who had charge of me during summers spent in Michigan. (I mostly grew up in Chicago but always spent summers in Michigan because my parents didn’t consider the Chicago streets a suitable playground for a child.)
Aunt Mildred was the disciplinarian of the duo, and seemed to be down on me all the time for some infraction. She was always commenting to Grandmother, “I don’t know what ails that child. Sometimes I think she’s not quite bright.” She was forever comparing me to her own daughter, Barbara, who was the perfect child and never misbehaved.
I did not like Aunt Mildred. And Grandmother was little better; she never defended me. She would say, “I don’t know what her mother is thinking, to let her do those things.” So when I came to write the story, I made Aunt Anne a person very careful about the child’s physical safety but baffled by her behavior, her thoughts, her questioning of the Universe. That was the way I experienced those two women.
Unfortunately, as I realize now, my mother must have made the mistake of confusing fiction with fact. She apparently took Aunt Anne for a disguised version of herself, and she was not happy with the way the woman was portrayed. She never complimented me on the book. I sent her a copy but she never said anything about it. I waited hopefully for a comment; at the very least I knew I’d done a good job of describing the Lake Michigan dunelands which were the setting of the story. I thought, if nothing else, she would praise my great descriptions. But all she ever said was that she had received a copy of the book. (It was never published but I’d had copies bound so I could enter them in a contest.)
When I arrived home from college that year, my mother had one of her famous temper-tantrums right at the bus station. The minute I stepped off, before I could rush over to my parents for a hug, she began storming at me. I’d worn a friend’s coat for the three-day trip from Ann Arbor to San Diego, knowing that my own clothes would become wrinkled from sleeping on the bus, and thinking to keep them neat. She protested vociferously. “That coat doesn’t fit you. You look like a Hodag. What in the world are you thinking? Why didn’t you tell us you needed a new coat? I won’t have my daughter arriving here looking like a poverty-stricken Irish immigrant girl in hand-me-downs. I won’t have it, I tell you!”
I didn’t know what to say except, “I’m happy to see you, too.” But then she would have complained about my sarcasm. So I said nothing at all. I let her yell. She raged at me all the way home. By the time we arrived there, I’d made the hard decision that I should return to Michigan for graduate work. Obviously, I couldn’t please my parents so there was little reason to remain here trying to do so. On arrival at the house I announced that she wouldn’t have to look at my unpleasant clothing for long, since I planned to return to school in a week or so.
Then of course she was desolated, she pleaded with me not to go, she spoke of all the plans she and my dad had made for the summer. He’d arranged to take a month’s vacation so that we could explore all the national parks, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Sequoia, and even the Grand Canyon. But I was afraid to stay on. My mother’s temper tantrums were simply too upsetting. I didn’t want to risk another one. When the week was up, I insisted on being taken to the bus station, and I remember yet those long, tearful faces peering up at me in my seat by the window. It was the saddest day of my life and probably of theirs.
For many years it didn’t occur to me that she’d perceived Aunt Anne as a portrait of herself. I pondered how a mother could react so unlovingly to a daughter she hadn’t seen for two semesters. Later, when I had children, I didn’t notice what they were wearing when they returned to me after time away. I was just happy to see them. I asked myself how come my mother didn’t feel that way.
Our relationship continued to be difficult. She loved my first husband and was furious when I left him for my second husband. It wasn’t until midlife, after my second divorce, that I finally tackled a literary study of the mother/daughter theme, in the novel, I’ll Meet You in Syracuse. And when I did tackle it, I never felt I’d been successful with it. I came down too hard on the bad side—but unfortunately, that is the side I remember. I keep wanting to re-do it and put out a second edition.
I’ve recorded elsewhere that my mother was prone to temper attacks during which she would viciously criticize my father and me. Many times in my childhood she told me that she couldn’t control me and had decided to send me to a home for juvenile delinquents. Then again, she could be very loving, and actually sit down and play dolls with me. As an only child, I loved the loving mother and was terrified of the threatening one. She never understood that fact; she’d grown up with five siblings, all of whom protected her from parental wrath. She kept telling me that she was only letting off steam during those tantrums and I should forget them. That was about as easy as forgetting a boiling volcano coming up in your living room. As Dr. Phil is fond of saying, it takes a hundred attagirls to counteract one violent critical attack.
We never resolved anything. My mother lived a long life but I couldn’t talk to her about any of these matters as she would always deny that they happened. It was always, “Oh, pooh, you were too sensitive. You read too much into my words.”
That may have been true, but I was an only child in a family that moved often, never stayed put to allow me to find close friends or bond with other children. Dad was often away working two jobs to see us through the Depression. My mother was all I had. I guess that’s why the portrait of her came out so witch-like in the novel, and why I never liked it or felt any urge to promote it. I still look at it and wonder if there’s any hope for it, any way I can redo and salvage it.
