Below is a short memoir written by Isabel Cooper Mahaffie when she was about 86 years old.
My Father and Mother — A Memoir
Isabel Cooper Mahaffie, 1978
There is an ancient photograph before me on my desk, taken in Tacoma, Washington. The date is 1891. The picture has faded to a pale sepia, but the faces are clear and charming in the light of a long-ago day. There is a dim old mansion in the background, mid-Victorian, with mansard roof, crescent dormers, and many verandahs done in fretwork. One could imagine a heroine out of a Trollope novel trailing her ruffled skirts across the threshold. But for all its mystery, it is only a photographer’s backdrop.
There are four figures in a stiff, old-fashioned group. In the center sits a serious, blond young man, complete with high collar, cravat, archaic mustache, bowler in one hand, umbrella in the other. He looks uncomfortable, as one whose pose has been dictated by an inept photographer. This is my father, James Sherman Cooper, whom I never actually saw except with the unremembering eyes of a child. Beside him on his right are his sisters. One is standing at his shoulder, a buoyant little figure, a faint disdain on her face, probably due to the photographer’s spidery clamp behind her head to hold her steady for the time exposure. She wears an elaborate satin dress and the quaintest possible little hat perched crossways on her head. This is my well-loved aunt, Joanna Elizabeth, named for Joanna Freer, her grandmother of French Huguenot ancestry, and for Elizabeth Hawes, her English grandmother. The other sister is seated at her brother’s feet. This is my youngest aunt — the musical one — Harriet, named for a sister, Harriet, who died in infancy many years before. Her hat is piquant, outlandish, charming, with its stiff brim above a delicate, sensitive face. On my father’s other side stand a fair, statuesque lady, wearing a beautifully fitted costume of the nineties. Her hat is the most absurd of all, merely a becoming little confection of ribbons. There is a diffident expression on her face. Perhaps she also has an iron spider behind her head. This is my mother, Honora Henry. All the ladies wear their hair brushed up severely from their foreheads, surely into shining bands or braids under the foolish hats. They all wear the dainty, many-buttoned gloves of the period.
I believe this picture was taken at the time of my parents’ wedding, the aunts having traveled across the continent to represent the family. There is a quietness about the scene, as if it were a frozen moment of time changed into a strange, waiting kind of now. So that I find myself saying, “What are these young people thinking?” They are solemn and seem detached one from the other during the minutes of the exposure. Is each one off in a private meditation, gazing into the future with wonder or questions or foreboding?
A long, sorrowful, and bitter story followed from this marriage, several, in fact. And I, who know all the stories, look with sadness upon this young generation of my family who passed away so long ago. If they could speak now, each would give a different account. The sisters in the picture held themselves rather aloof from the family tragedy, and their stories would not be so poignant or so important. Joanna was taken up with her books and painting and her exquisite concern with all the domestic arts. Aunt Harriet was completely absorbed in her music. I will speak later of their respective temperaments and the effect of these upon my life. There was another aunt, my father’s oldest sister, Mary, head of the clan, so to speak. She had apparently stayed at home to watch over the aged mother and father. In some ways her version of the family story would be the most important one. She became my guardian, and her decisions and her character had a profound influence on my life.
My father and my mother are the protagonists, of course. Their stories were indeed different, as will be seen. I, in my old age, propose to pull together the tangled threads and tell it all in orderly fashion.
I shall start with the story of my father. This will of necessity be shadowy, because I really know so little about him. His face is familiar, of course, but I have few clues to his personality. There remain to me only a few photographs, a schoolboy’s copy book of writing exercises done in a beautiful Spencerian hand, a very few vivid memories, letters, revealing facts of his short life. There is the one treasure, a diary of his Klondike adventure. I know very little of his early days. I have a picture of him in uniform with three young companions, “the silent four” of E Company, Iowa Infantry, taken in the late ‘80s, as inscribed on the back. The aunts used to speak of a visit to a ranch he had in Arizona at one time. That is all.
I believe my father to have been greatly loved and badly spoiled by his sisters. The youngest of nine children, he was many years younger than his father and was reported to have been a variance with him — rebellious and adventurous. He must have been sure that his fortune would be made far from home. In the late nineteenth century this could only mean the far West.
I do not know how he happened to settle in Tacoma. The trouble seems to have started when he met my mother there. They were married in the summer of 1891. I was born the next summer. The birth was difficult, and she was reported to have been badly injured. She was strongly advised not to have any more children. A brother was born a little over a year later, and a younger brother in 1895. She brought a suit for divorce in the fall of 1896. These facts were recorded in my father’s Bible. The divorce was granted in the northern city of Port Angeles, the children being awarded to the mother.
To continue with this stark outline, while she was away my father abducted my brothers and myself and, with the help of an apparently sympathetic nurse, carried us away on a transcontinental train to the family home and his mother and sisters in New York City. I did not see my mother for some thirty years. My father left for the Klondike in the summer of 1897 and died in January, 1898.
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I think I shall start with the memories, for what they are worth, and see what light they can throw on my story. There is only one, faint picture of my mother in my mind, and that is so vague as to have little meaning, but I could not have imagined it. I think I see a pretty lady lying on a chaise, ill and rather fretful. It is only a glimpse. I do not see the face clearly.
When I try to recapture some memory of the all-important journey across the continent, I get only fragments. I do not see my father’s face or the nurse’s, but I am aware of their watchful presence over us. There is an impression of the dim room on the train, and bowls of hot cereal being brought to us children. The bowls had rims of blue. Maybe I confuse them with some blue-rimmed bowls in a poem which Aunt Joanna used to read to me — Longfellow’s Hanging of the Crane. Perhaps it was the children in the poem, “with eyes of blue.” The long trip is a blank until our arrival in New York City. There is a dreamlike, but vivid memory — my grandmother’s carriage, horses, a stiff-backed coachman, and a stately figure of a lady coming toward us in bright sunlight. I remember particularly this blinding sunlight. It must have been the contrast with the dusky interior of the old Grand Central Station (not the resplendent new terminal, with the many-storied double windows through which I used to walk in later years to a mural-painting workshop — a great, echoing studio on the roof). The stately lady is Aunt Mary. I do not see the street. There is just the unreal tableau of the carriage and Aunt Mary, in the bright sunlight.
There must have been all sorts of impressions coming in upon me: a new home, new faces. It seems strange that I do not remember any of this until I come to my fifth birthday. Of this I have a vivid and elaborate picture. I see in my mind’s eye a beautiful lawn with giant oak trees. There is a table spread with a white lace cloth and a birthday cake, all white icing with flowers cut out of citron and cherries. But the most extraordinary part of the picture is the flight of enormous bees boring holes in the icing. I seem to be standing alone, watching them, fascinated. Some horrified grownup must have rustled up immediately and scared them away, but I shall never forget those delirious insects, drunk with the sweetness of my birthday cake. A vagrant thought: I wonder what kind of honey resulted from this diet? There is one other memory of insects. It might have been on the same day. I was sitting on the grass with Aunt Joanna, watching a detachment of leaf hoppers forming and reforming on our flowered organdy dresses, their wings translucent green with white edges.
These fragmentary memories of oak trees and bees and organdy dresses serve to point up the chronology of my story. It was my fifth birthday in August, 1897. The famous Klondike gold strike occurred in July of that year. The diary of my father’s journey to Alaska starts in August, so it seems that he was setting sail at the time of the famous birthday. I have a yellowing newspaper photograph of the crowded deck of a steamer about to sail from Seattle. It shows all the ferment and excitement of this dreadful gold rush. An elaborate volume about the Klondike has been published lately, with many historic photographs of crowds of happy prospectors. It is possible that my father’s face might appear in one or another of the eager groups. I have thought at times of taking a powerful lens and searching for his face, but to what avail? It would only be sad to see with what hope he set out, and know how it all ended.
I do not know about the empty period between the abduction of his children and his departure to the Klondike. It must have been a bad time for him. I believe that he tried to find interesting work in the East. There surely was discouragement, restlessness, and finally the lure of the gold rush and a fortune to be made, that led to his decision to go to Alaska.
The second and only other memory picture is of the day he left my grandmother’s house to seek his fortune. It seems to me that I remember his pale young face as he stood in the door to say Goodby. I see the spacious front hall quite clearly, the wide staircase landing, and the huddled group of the family, as he bade farewell to his mother and sisters and his three wide-eyed little children. The tableau is sharp and clear, but it has the look of a dream rimmed round with a bright halo of nothingness.
The tragic diary is in my father’s handwriting, except for the last entry announcing his death, January 8, 1898. This is a very interesting human document. The tone is impersonal, as he refers to himself as JSC, with only an occasional use of the personal pronoun. It starts off on a note of high adventure. First there was the long trip from Seattle to Skagway, an endless inland waterway of islands, narrows, sounds, canals, straits. It is a factual account of considerable interest. Then it was necessary to climb the terrible Skagway trail to reach the divide and the Chilkoot Pass — an ordeal, a melange of stumbling men and horses and baggage trains of all pitiful descriptions. Many turned back, and many were lost on the way. The final and longer part of the trip to Dawson City, at the mouth of the Klondike River, was by water — by boat and raft — over a chain of lakes and rivers. There were portages, perilous canyons, and sandbars to be negotiated. A high spot was the triumphant passage of the famous White Horse Rapids of the Lewes River (upper Yukon). It is a credit to the courage and stamina of my father and his friends that they, amateurs, got there at all.
It is sad to think that misfortune set in after all this. It is not clear to me just went wrong. Probably a combination of things. The arctic winter arrived, with perishing winds and temperatures of fifty and more below. They found they could not compete with the experienced miners. “Lays,” that is to say, areas allotted for digging, were scarce. There was a strike of mine employees, and all jobs were scarce. It became a question of giving up and trying to get home over the Yukon ice and the frozen trails, or somehow digging in and waiting for spring. There is an account of an heroic effort to build a cabin and cache their meagre supplies safely, cut their own firewood, and somehow endure day after day the dreadful cold. Imagine a cabin with no glass for the windows, only cloth stretched over. It is heartbreaking to think of.
There are so many human endeavors which fail because they start at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. It was a cruel circumstance that the infamous gold strike took place in late summer, so that many of the hapless prospectors were overtaken by the early arctic winter. I am thinking of the invasion of Russia by the French army in 1812. Wrong-headed, bent on conquest, they launched the assault on Moscow in mid-August, and by December they were dying in the snow, defeated, in the famous retreat. The analogy is not perfect. There was no burning city to thwart the conquerors, no wicked emperor to desert his faithful soldiers. There was only the gold, mysterious, implacable, inviolate in the hills, and many who wanted to go home and never got there.
It is a sorrowful tale of misfortune — privation, homesickness, and for my father bronchitis, pneumonia, a failing heart. It would seem that here ends the story of a man who died defeated, at thirty-two.
The end came later for his family. I have several letters written to his mother and his sisters during those last terrible weeks. I think they are about the saddest I have ever read: despairing, full of love and concern for his children. The latest of these were not received until the spring. Then, indeed, was the end of his story.
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The bitter history continues. There are several letters written by my father to his brother John at the time of the divorce, giving what seems to me an ill-considered account of the whole matter. It is a terrible thing to say, but I think that the intimation in these letters, that his wife had deserted her children and left him for another man, was speculation and misapprehension at best, or unthinking misrepresentation. Thirty years later my mother gave me her version. It has been difficult for me to judge between his wish to vindicate himself then in his family’s eyes and hers, so much later, to vindicate herself in mine. Of course, after thirty years one might expect rationalization, but there were some definite facts to uphold her story. The children were awarded to her; that would be a matter of record. He abducted the children, which makes the theory that she deserted us untenable. It was necessary for his sister Mary, after his death, to take legal steps to get control of us and establish her guardianship. There are papers in support of this, also a variety of affidavits which were necessary to persuade our mother that we were being well cared for and would be in better circumstances if raised by the family in New York. Who knows? I believe that she realized the truth of this. She might have found herself with limited resources with three children to bring up alone in what was certainly a frontier city at that time. The fact remains, she did give us up.
The terms of the agreement were harsh. She was forbidden to see us or to write to us. She was allowed to see any photographs taken of us by the family. The family escaped this stipulation by never having any taken themselves, though many were taken by friends. The result of all this was she saw no pictures of me until she came across some in the New York Times in 1925, taken upon my return from an expedition to the Galapagos Islands. She was reported to have been badly upset by this. I also heard of a sad thing that had happened earlier which she said had been terrible for her. She had traveled to New York when I was about seven years old to try to see us and get us back, but had been met with determined refusal to give us up. So three children, fatherless and motherless, were left in the care of their grandmother and their three maiden aunts.
In the loving eyes of his sisters my father could do no wrong. They believed his story. They were old-fashioned ladies and, I am sorry to say, narrow-minded. They had been prejudiced against my mother from the start: a stranger; a westerner. Or they may have felt that she was a adventuress of nineteen who had beguiled their young brother. The divorce was probably the last straw. It must be remembered that in those days divorce was practically a crime, certainly disgraceful behavior, to be censured and whispered about. So it all built up into a tragic hatred. It is hard for me to imagine kindly gentlewomen having so little compassion. As I have said, the sisters in the photograph were not so involved and were wise enough not to show their feelings. I do not remember either one of them making any cruel remarks about my mother. But Aunt Mary was extraordinarily bitter and did not share the wisdom of her sisters, so that as I grew up there was a shadow of disgrace hanging over me. I remember feeling there was something inferior about being an orphan. I envied my friends, who seemed to have mothers and fathers in good supply. I gradually outgrew all this; at least it became unreal in a strange way. It was there, and it was not there. It is hard for me to explain this ambivalence. I suppose it was due to a determined rejection of gloom on the part of a healthy young person. I was born with a sanguine nature, essentially optimistic, high-spirited, and with invincible health. So the sadness was eventually banished to some remote corner of my being.
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I should describe the home and the general scene in which the children started a new life. I remember some of it quite well: a large, old-fashioned city house; whole rooms clear in my mind; even some of the pictures on the wall. The pictures were mostly very fine but somber engravings: Burne-Junes, Turner, and the like. I remember cushioned seats and big bay windows in the front of the house; a parlor done in rosewood and white brocade, where children could not go except on special occasions (or, in my case, for the austerity of five-finger exercises); a cavernous kitchen, presided over by a tyrant who hated children. My room looked south and west over roofs and chimney pots — there were no skyscrapers in those days in New York. I could see the evening star, sometimes the moon speeding across the sky in a whirl of clouds, or proceeding majestically with a planet between her horns. There was an alcove with bookcases in the hall outside the parlor, where I liked to sit and read a listen to Aunt Harriet working over airy passages of Chopin or Brahms intermezzi. It seems odd that I recall so much about the house and so little about the happenings of my early childhood. Perhaps there were no happenings of importance.
As for the inhabitants of this scene, I should start with the grandparents. I have heard that my father took my mother and me to visit the family. In fact, my older brother was born in the east. My grandfather dies in 1894. Many years later my mother described him. He was apparently very old and frail, but entirely clear in his head. She told me as well that he was the only one of the family who gave her any friendship or understanding. I have letters that he wrote to his daughters in boarding school. They are old-fashioned, a little pedantic, full of a sort of homely wisdom and affection.
My grandmother lived until 1905 — her 80th year, my thirteenth. She was quite deaf and seemed remote. I did not know her very well, but wish I had. I remember her folded hands and the little lace cap she wore, and her gentle, patient smile. Perhaps this was to reassure everyone that she was all right, or was it in gallant defiance (or propitiation) of her world of silence?
I do not know to what extent my brothers were affected by the family bitterness. I did not really know them; in their younger years they were hardly ever home. The aunts were ill-equipped to deal with growing boys, who were badly in need of a kind mother and a strict but wise and gentle father. The three spinsters could not furnish such ambiance, so the boys were sent off to boarding and military schools from time to time. As the older boy grew up he threw off the authority of the family. He was quite young when he worked his way, with many adventures, and settled permanently on the West Coast. He looked up our mother and used to write me saying I should come out west to see her. It took a different approach to make me want to do this, as will be seen. The other boy, his father’s namesake, had inherited his father’s special place in the aunts’ regard, and they proceeded to spoil him badly. He was venturesome, as his father was. In spite of bad eyesight, and underweight, he talked his way into the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. He used to joke that he memorized an eye chart and augmented his weight with a large number of bananas. He went to France and managed, for the most part, to have an interesting, even an hilarious, time, though there were some dark, tragic days that he didn’t like to talk about. The stories of these boys and of their marriages and their descendants are interesting, as all life stories are, but they do not concern us here.
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The three aunts loom up as the most important figures in my early life, and I would like to go rather carefully into the characters and dispositions of these women. I should probably sketch in an account of my life. I will content myself with a brief catalogue of important points: a superlative school, which I attended from kindergarten to college entrance time; several years in two colleges; art schools; independence; seventeen years of a happy career; exciting expeditions; rare travel; highly variegated jobs, each one more interesting than the last. All this was only prologue to the important time: a momentous, romantic meeting; a long, delightful courtship by letter; engagement. I want to lead up gradually to the day in 1927 when I saw my mother. I was going to say “again,” but it was really the first time in my conscious life. I did not actually see the face of the ailing lady on the couch in that fleeting memory of c four-year-old girl. A strange day indeed, not long before my marriage. I will speak of the meeting with my mother later, and how it came about.
I will start with Aunt Harriet, the “musical one, as the family were wont to call her. She was whelmed in her music, as I have said, and did not have much to do with me, except that it never occurred to her that a child in the family would not have a musical education. So I was started in early — scales, octaves, arpeggios, etc., and exposure to great quantities of chamber music. The family wanted me to have my voice trained, an idea which I repudiated violently. “Parlor singing” by young female members of the family was in vogue, which always seemed to me the most dreadful bore. Aunt Harriet was greatly talented, nervous, and very hard to please. I’m afraid I disliked her intensely, and I am sure I was a trial to her, but as we both grew older we became more mellow and learned to appreciate each other. She had developed a highly original philosophy of her own. She lived to be very old, and retained a clear intelligence. I used to visit her in her late years and found it entirely rewarding to talk to her.
I would like to write a book about Joanna. It would be a book about a remarkable woman. She was spirited, intelligent, accomplished, resourceful, delightfully literate. You might call her a renaissance woman, except that the term implies a certain flamboyance which she did not have. Also, this designation seems to be reserved for men and a very few exceptional princesses.
Motherless, I might have been a candidate for the “disturbed child” class, a concept out of the dreary lexicon of the psychiatrists which happily did not exist at the turn of the century. Aunt Joanna saved me from this fate. She was prim and reserved, not exactly maternal. I remember no embraces or gestures of tenderness, but I knew that she loved me. She was the most wonderful figure in my childhood. As I look back it almost seems as if she had been waiting for a child, a young person to come into her life who she could cherish and inspire. She taught me alphabets and numbers and names of the piano keys; songs out of the “olden time;” to embroider and “sew a fine seam;” to love the seasons of the year, and weather in all its phases; beautiful things in nature or made by human hands. She read to me from a wide range of poetry, literature, and history. She painted things that Victorian ladies likes to paint, with exquisite care. She also supervised my early artistic efforts. When I found out what could be done with those shiny little sticks with ends of sharpened metal or pointed able hairs I started to draw and paint, and have practically never stopped since. Poor dear Aunt kept the most dreadful files of my little girl drawings.
Best of all, she had an inquiring mind, which she bequeathed to me. Or perhaps we both inherited this from an ancestor in the dark ages who liked “finding out about things.” This is sometimes called intellectual curiosity. The concept seems vainglorious. I prefer to quote the expression “to know how and why” out of Thomas Hobbes’ potent 17th century comment.[1] Whatever you call it, it is a gift beyond compare.
Aunt Joanna died when I was twenty-one. My brother and a first cousin are actually the only persons alive who remember that she existed. I do not think they knew what a wonderful person she was. All the friends who loved her have departed this world, and when I too depart it will be as if she had never lived. It saddens me more than I can say to think of all the charm and wisdom she had and all the loving kindness she bestowed on me vanishing into thin air. Perhaps these grateful words I have written will serve as a memorial for her.
I come now to a discussion of Aunt Mary. She was a martinet. At least she acted like one, that is to say a strict disciplinarian. There was a fatal flaw. She was inconsistent. When she should have been firm with the boys, she would be soft, and the other way around. She was violent in her prejudices, inflexible in her judgment of my mother. Perhaps she was not sure that my mother was a unworthy person. Was there a secret feeling of guilt, and a need to justify her treatment of her? Or was she just afraid of showing compassion? It was a terrible thing to do to a child, to let her grow up in the shadow of a hatred like this. But she had a very strong sense of duty, and I expect her disciplinarian ways, of which I felt the full force, were good for me. She lived to be very old and showed a loving side to her nature before, tragically enough, she lost her faculties. I used to visit her and found myself able to give her the affection she had probably craved all along. The solving of difficult family relationships does really seem to be to grow old and mellow, doesn’t it.
I think I was about ten when a friend of the family wanted to adopt me. Aunt Mary showed her strong feeling for family and faithfulness to my father’s memory; she refused flatly to let me go. I was not supposed to know about this, but it is hard to keep things from children. There were veiled words and a sickening kind of yearning toward me on the part of the lady. This would-be guardian was a woman of about forty years, whom I regarded with foreboding and horror. There is a photograph of her in an ancient family album, one of those old-fashioned leather-bound, brass-buckled, gilt-edged volumes which used to take root on Victorian parlor tables. Her face, examined under a lens, seems kind. Sometimes it is necessary to look long and hard at a person to find a hint of loving kindness. I find a small hand lens useful in the case of a photograph. Perhaps she would have been kind to me, but who know what sort of kindness it would have turned out to be.
She stands in the picture turning toward the viewer with posed romantic grace, leaning on a photographer’s impossible table. The general impression is a pile of braids and ruffles — a ruffled dress, a handsome jabot with ruffles. The ruffles had ruffles. I remember these Victorian jabots. The served to enhance a fresh young face and draw attention from the multiple chins of middle age or the withered throat of the octogenarian. They were always voluminous, a froth of the finest linen and lace, and always fastened with a cameo. These ornaments were usually decorated with bas relief figures in classical undrape. I wonder if the Victorian ladies mused upon this juxtaposition.
My usually reliable imagination does not tell me what my life with this person would have been. I only know that I did not want it. Children shy away from change and cling to anything faintly resembling home. I heaved a private sigh of relief when the whole idea was dropped.
I found myself often at variance with Aunt Mary. Was this the clash of personalities, or was it the age-old combat between youth and authority, parental or otherwise? Aunt Mary was given to imperial pronouncements. One decision she made for me marked a very special turning point in my life. To be sure, practically any moment of one’s life might be a special turning point: for instance, the moment of one’s birth, which presages a series of turning points, or the split second when a flying leap to a Manhattan curb saves one from death by a marauding taxi, thus allowing the series to continue. I had picked an art school for myself. Aunt Mary decreed another, which was nearer home. We had been walking in Central Park — that lovely park which used to be my playground. One walks there now at risk of unimaginable violence. I remember very well the street corner where we were standing and the moment when I agreed to her choice, with rather bad grace.
It was at that art school that I met the first of seven persons who led me directly to the eighth, a man who became my husband. These seven people were an odd assortment of men and women to be instruments of fate. Of course, I do not believe in fate, but things do happen. Sometimes, in retrospect at least, they seem to proceed with a certain stately and portentous rhythm. I could write a book about some of these people. I find I cannot resist the temptation to run the seven through a series of thumb-nail sketches.
The First one was a quaint little painter, head of the art department, who couldn’t paint. But he was a superlative teacher, so good, in fact, that you did not know you were being taught, but long afterwards you thought you had discovered for yourself subtleties of color or line or design. It was at one of his summer sketch classes that I encountered the Second of the famous seven — a flighty young woman with one blue and one brown eye — very disconcerting — who brought the Third to my acquaintance. This woman was a visionary — a philosopher way ahead of her time, incomprehensible, whom I came to appreciate and understand as the years went on. She brought a man to one of my studio parties, the Fourth, whom I remember not at all. But I remember the studio parties. I had reached the point in my career when I had fascinating work and a delightful circle of friends. Everyone gave lovely parties. This Fourth person was notable for one thing: he brought to my studio the Fifth, a debonair character who seemed to have no special occupation or means of support. But he was a fine dinner partner; he wore top hat and evening clothes with distinction; and he could throw together the best salad dressing that anyone had ever tasted. He brought the Sixth person to meet me. This man was a famous biologist, part scientist and part faker, if you can imagine a more weird combination. He introduced me to the Seventh, a festive lady who loved people, giving parties, and matchmaking. So in the course of time I met the Eighth, a wise and wonderful man.
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I had become quite far removed from the family tragedy, and had certainly lost the feeling that being an orphan set me apart from normal people. Years of independence and a variegated, happy career had given me confidence, but it seemed that the shadow of the old family story was not forgotten. I had had the good fortune to meet this eighth, all-important, person. And during the halcyon days of tranquil happiness when I was in the process of becoming engaged to marry him the old trouble came upon me with all the pain of a shameful blush. Immediately I realized that he should know about this, so I took courage and told him. He did not appear to be traumatized in the slightest. He, a kind and just man, merely made a quiet remark, which rocked me back on my heels. He said, “You should know, of course, that none of this has anything shameful to do with you. But the whole story seems to be slanted against your mother. Has she ever had the chance to tell you her side?’ I am ashamed to say that this had never occurred to me.
I think he was amused at the compulsive speed with which I decided to visit her. A few days after that I boarded a transcontinental train to Portland, Oregon, where I had asked her to meet me. I remember spending a miserable night dreading the encounter before me. A message came over the phone early in the morning: there was someone to see me in the lobby. It was a strange moment. There were three women sitting there. I did not know which was my mother. She knew me immediately. In my father’s family, as in many, there is a very strong look of the clan which follows through from generation to generation.
It was a kind of meeting which I think few people have ever experienced. I had been taken away from her in my fifth year. It was now my thirty-fifth. I had dreaded emotion on her part, but she had this under excellent control. She put no claims of kinship or duty upon me. As for me, I felt not the slightest connection with her. Dreadful, but understandable, I suppose. I had no real memories of her. She was seeing in her mind’s eye a four-year-old child — “winsome and beautiful,” as she put it. But are not all little four-year-old girls so? I wonder, if my father had reappeared after thirty years, if I would have felt a trace of the traditional filial affection of a daughter for her father.
We talked all day. There were reminiscences on her part of my early years. Stories about my baby brothers. She told me that I had loved them very much. There were endless questions about my life, and always my feeling of unreality. It was impossible for me to take in the fact that I was talking with my own mother. She gave me her version of the unhappy events of thirty years past. She told me that far from being interested in another man, she had not even met her second husband until some time later on. This was a crucial point of difference with my father’s story to his family — crucial indeed. She verified the fact that we had been awarded to her. And she said something that I had already figured out for myself, namely that she had not deserted us. She said she had been heartbroken when she found we had been stolen away. She also told me that the legal arguments and general persuasion in favor of Aunt Mary’s guardianship had been overwhelming. Very little was said about the divorce. It was a hard subject to discuss, but I decided anyway that my own conclusions about it were right.
I spoke to her, of course, of the way the aunts had felt toward her. She said she had been bewildered by it. Toward the end of our day together she made a very sad remark — that one comes in time to accept things, and that she had been able finally to take up a new life in which her children had no part. I put her on the night train. The parting was sad for her. I felt no more than a sort of detached compassion for her sadness. I remember writing to the man who started me off on this adventure, “I have been motherless for thirty years, and I remain so.”
I saw my mother again soon after my marriage. My husband and I were on the West Coast for one of his big railroad cases. We found ourselves in Seattle, so we arranged a long luncheon with her. Again, my hard heart felt nothing. Many years later our son and his bride called upon her during their honeymoon trip. She wrote me that this had made her very happy. She died in her eighty-third year.
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Now that I have come to the end of my story my thoughts go back to the two young people in the ancient photograph, on the eve of their wedding. I look at the faces and try to realize again that they were my parents. They seem so anonymous, strangers who are never thought of again. I and my brother, who unfortunately has forgotten many things, are the only living persons who even remember that they existed. Now perhaps the despair and the bitterness and the hate may be forgotten too, because I am speaking only the truth when I say that I am glad beyond reason and beyond words that they gave me life. Impossible to know how my life might have turned out. But many good and fine things have happened to me through the years. I have spoken of the wonderful, richly detailed background of my childhood and of the interesting life I made for myself in my career days. Best of all was my marriage of forty years, with more true friendship and happiness in it than is granted to most wives. And now, in my old age, I am living near my son and his wife, two of the kindest and most charismatic people in the world. And I can have the joy of watching two generations of their beautiful children growing up.
Is it selfish, heartless, to rejoice in these good things? Must I accept the sadness and tragedy of other people’s lives as a foundation for my own good fortune? Perhaps I will always have before me the paradox of my son’s happy family story set over against the sadness of my father’s. What does make for familial love? Is it only closeness, the sharing of lives, growing up and growing old together? I suppose the shadow and the questions will always be with me. Dear good and patient reader, I counsel you. Give those nearest to you your very special devotion and loving friendship, cherish them, and be glad. I hope you will never find yourself gazing into the face of one who should be most dear to you and know the desolation of a cold stone of indifference in your breast where your heart should be.
[1] “To know how and why is a lust of the mind that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge excited the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.” Thomas Hobbies, 1588-1679.
Mishkin, by Isabel Cooper
Sadie Volvisch, by Isabel Cooper
