Cardinal Days: A Coming of Age Memoir

draperies.

Good Witch or Bad Witch?

Mother

She had red hair—auburn; not that bright orange hair that redheads sometimes have. And no freckles either. She had beautiful pink skin and her face flushed every time she drank tea, just as mine does. She wore her hair shoulder length and curled so that it circled her face like a carved frame. Her blue eyes grabbed on to things then let go as if resigned to never getting what they wanted. My green eyes do the same.

She moved with a deliberate grace, the way dancers and models do, and I imagine that this consciousness of how her every move looked must have been exhausting. Probably people thought she was very vain, but underneath the vanity was a fear of getting it wrong, of public embarrassment, of saying the wrong thing or dropping the silverware or stumbling into a room.

(There is a hush in the room. Everyone looks… then looks away. Who is that woman? So awkward. Not our kind. Something about the mouth. Too sensuous. Trying to be what she is not. Blood will tell in the end. Mea culpa, she thinks.)

Of course, at a certain age I became aware that I was a tremendous disappointment to her, but starting at about ten or eleven I hoped that I could learn what was necessary to become acceptable. My taste was apparently an abomination but, on trips to buy school clothes, I would convince myself that this time would be different. This time I would not repeat the mistake I had made with pleated skirts. I had begun to notice them, to notice how they hung with the pleats tucked neatly from the top to the bottom in a straight line. Pleated skirts of any color looked navy blue to me—like a parochial school uniform skirt. I thought those straight lines needed livening and bending. What about wearing a crinoline underneath? Now the neat tucks pop out. The line is an S, sometimes a Z. Very interesting, I thought. I’ll try it.

You can picture me, I’m sure, and imagine her reaction. So now I knew to be careful in my choices with her. I would pick plain clothes in somber colors with no lace trim, no rick-rack, no beads or buttons or déclassé touches. I would get it right.

(Of course, it took me decades to realize that there were no right choices; that no matter what I picked, no matter how monastic it looked, it would be the wrong thing. It wasn’t the dress that was wrong, you see, it was me who was wrong.)

In Macy’s or Gimbel’s or B. Altman or Best & Co., I would hold up my choices for her approval. Her lip would curl. You have no taste, she would say with a shudder and would walk off regally, out of the department, out of the store, leaving me to find my own way home. I stood there in my baggy clothes, holding my no taste dresses, letting my mouth hang open, then shutting it quickly. I carefully hung the dresses back on the rack and stumbled, sobbing, to the nearest ladies room. There was a time when I knew the location of every ladies room of every major department store in Manhattan. I would shut the cubicle door and stand there, aware of how close the walls were, of how small my world had become, of what plans I needed to make to find my way home by myself. I have always picked up my own pieces.

I learned how to navigate from 33 St. via the Hudson Tubes under the Hudson River to the Hoboken Railroad Station, to the Erie Lackawanna train, taking me to New Jersey, where I lived with whatever housekeeper hadn’t quit yet.

It’s me, at the station. Can someone come and get me?

My mother’s taste in clothes, on the other hand, was elegant if odd. First of all, if a dress or a pair or shoes was nice in navy, why not get the same one in pink or off-white too? You could never be too careful. You never knew what occasion might be coming up. A garden party? Bring out the straw hats nestling in their hat boxes, some trimmed in flowers, some trimmed in ribbons. If you lifted the lids carefully, which I sometimes did, you could hear the garden party conversations just waiting to be gushed. Why, yes, said the natural straw picture hat with the roses on the brim, I do try to stay out of the sun. I’m so delicate.

I can see that, exclaimed the white boater, circled with red and blue ribbon. Myself, I like the outdoor life. I especially like playing croquet.

Lots of my mother’s clothes were custom made —whipped up by my little dressmaker, she used to say. Being a literal child, I pictured the dressmaker as a midget, working tirelessly, night and day, trying to keep up with my mother’s creative ideas.

I particularly liked the crocheted ribbon dresses that my mother had. They were different and shiny and looked as though they would stand alone if placed properly on the floor. They looked as though you could pull the end of the ribbon, like on a hem, and the whole of it would unravel in a circle as you walked slowly around the empty center, leaving a curling blue pile of ribbon on the floor. (Like the bad witch in the Wizard of Oz, after Dorothy had poured water on her and she slowly disappeared, leaving only a blob on the floor.) To most people, my mother looked and sounded like Billy Burke, Glinda, the good witch. And the question Are you a good witch or a bad witch? had opposite answers depending on which day one asked it. Mostly I heard the bad witch say, I’ll get you, my pretty.

Chinese Lounging Pajamas

One of my mother’s favorite expressions was I’m like the one-armed paper hanger running between two houses. She felt overwhelmed. She would spend most week nights in our apartment in Manhattan and weekends at our house in the country, where I lived. Of course, she would forget what was in the refrigerator or the closet in one or the other location. An ordinary annoyance, but one which she could work into a memorable scene. She would sink into the nearest chair, pull out a small bottle of smelling salts (are such things made anymore?), open it and place it under her nose and sniff. I ran over to investigate the smell once—very much like holding an open bottle of ammonia under your nose and sniffing. It does make you alert.

Then the sighing began and the muttering. God knows I’ve tried. Very often the one-armed paper hanger took a nap after lunch, the shades drawn, she wearing a black mask à la the Lone Ranger, snoring until around three, when she would awake and try some more.

Her gifts were full of calculation. The meaning was not hard to grasp (as I did years later) if you kept in mind that nothing she did was ever spontaneous; that there was a message that came with the present like an enclosure card.

Christmas after Christmas, starting when I was ten, she gave me Chinese lounging pajamas, size 12. (I was about a size two at the beginning, then maybe a four, never more than a six.) I held the pants up with safety pins. The red or blue satin jackets had elaborate stitching on them—usually black and gold dragons threading their way around my torso, curling around my neck. I wondered if I was to wear them during the day (for lounging?) or to bed at night. I worried that at night I would crush the dragons, angering them. They might spew smoke at me from their nostrils. But probably they, like me, had been domesticated.

Since my mother always emphasized the word lounging in the three word name of the gift—Chinese lounging pajamas—I realized that they were to be worn during the day when I didn’t feel 100%, say a day when I hadn’t swallowed my weekly dose of Milk of Magnesia or when my Carter’s Little Liver Pill hadn’t kicked in yet. These were her remedies for everything. I guess this semi-invalid state was to be permanent, judging from the number of these outfits that I had—like the heroine in a Victorian novel. And the large size made me feel my own smallness, as it was meant to do.

You look rather peaked (peak-ed) today, Susan, she would say. Stick out your tongue. Hmm. Dark circles under your eyes. You’d better go to bed.

But I feel fine, and I don’t want to go to bed.

Well, at least don’t overdo, then. Just lounge around today. You have your Chinese lounging pajamas for that very purpose.

I used to dread being in a room, or worse, in the car with my mother when any 1950’s popular song came on the radio. She grimaced at the music and if the singer strained to reach a note or purposely sharped it, her whole face showed disapproval. So vulgar, she would say. So common.

Why I felt responsible for my mother changing her mind about Gogi Grant or Theresa Brewer I don’t know, but I did. I felt that I needed to introduce them and explain them to each other.

Well, mother, Gogi only sings that way because she wants to create a certain effect. She knows that she is singing the note wrong… but that’s the point. If she didn’t, The Wayward Wind would just be another boring song. It’s why they have the pretend wind whistling in the background too.

And, Gogi, I’m sure if you only knew what unhappiness some of your notes cause my mother, you wouldn’t sing them that way anymore.

As