always understood that the great dilemma of my mother’s life had been to glimpse freedom too late, at too high a price. She was of the generation for which the rules changed halfway, born into a world of pressed linens and three-course dinners and hairsprayed updos, in which women were educated and then deployed for domestic purposes—rather like using an elaborately embroidered tablecloth on which to serve messy children their breakfast. Her University of Michigan degree was all but ornamental, and it always seemed significant that it stood in its frame under the eaves in the attic, festooned with dust bunnies, among a dozen disavowed minor artworks, behind boxes of discarded toys. The first woman in her family to go to college, she’d cared enough to frame her diploma, only then to be embarrassed about having cared, embarrassed because she felt she hadn’t done anything with it, had squandered her opportunity.
The transition from pride to shame took place sometime soon after my birth, I think: I appeared in ’67, and by 1970, her two closest friends in Manchester had divorced and moved away, reborn into the messy and not necessarily happier lives of the liberated. My brother was born in ’59, when Bella Eldridge was but a tender twenty-three-year-old: he was what she did with her precious education.
As far as I could tell, she didn’t burn over the consuming demands of motherhood the first time. In those days, all the young women around her were doing the same thing, discussing Jane Austen over coffee while their cloth-diapered brats wriggled around on the floor, the women themselves still almost students, glad to be absolved of worry about money and still blithe in their belief that life was long, would bring more to them than wall-to-wall carpet and a new Crock-Pot, with the occasional dinner at Locke-Ober or the Copley Plaza in Boston as an anniversary treat. She was young enough to be hopeful.
There are abundant home movies and antiquated slides of baby Matthew, with his slightly Frankensteinian square head and his bright blue eyes—he looks, somehow, like an infant of his time, has an all-American aspect that babies seem not to affect these days—and in the background, my mother grins, her face all angles, cigarette in hand. She grins at the swing set, she grins by the Christmas tree, she grins behind the picnic table, with its blue gingham cloth, on the Fourth of July.
In the later pictures, the few that remain of my own infancy, even the daylight looks darker. Maybe Kodak had changed their formula; or maybe the world had moved on. I was a smaller, more somber child, born three weeks early, weighing less than six pounds (“always impatient, that’s my girl,” my father used to say), and with thick black hair that subsequently fell out and left me near bald for months. I look like a befuddled frog gussied up in pretty dresses, a fat foot peeking from beneath the hem, and my brother, a strapping eight-year-old with buckteeth, eyes me askance from the corners of the picture frames. My mother is hardly in these pictures at all, anywhere. She must have been taking them. There’s one Christmas snapshot of the three of us, my father behind the camera: it was the year, she said, that Matthew and I both had the flu, and all of us have high color, cheeks like painted dolls’, including my mother, whose long hair is a ratty mess, and whose dotted pinafore is falling off her shoulder. Perhaps because of the fevers, our eyes are forlorn—even Matt’s eyes look black, and my mother’s mouth is open in a half sneer, as though she were about to tell my father to cut it out and put the damn thing away.
I don’t remember my early childhood as unhappy—to the contrary; the only thing I feared was my brother, who was pinching mean when he had the chance—but the record, such as it is, suggests that my mother was suffering. She was only thirty-one when I was born, but had done it all already once and knew what she’d have to give, and knew, too, that like Sleeping Beauty she’d waken from the baby dream to find that years had elapsed, and herself pushing forty. No wonder she later threw herself into her harebrained schemes—the cooking, the sewing, the writing of children’s books that nobody would publish, that she didn’t even really try to publish, all of them intended to catapult her to something