What My Mother Gave Me (2 page)

Th
e Missing Photograph

CAROLINE LEAVITT

When I was growing up in Boston in the 1960s, my life was awash in flashbulbs. My older sister, Ruth, and I could be romping wildly around the living room, dancing to the soundtrack of
West Side Story,
and before you could say Leonard Bernstein, my mother would have snapped a dozen shots of us with her Brownie camera. We blinked at the sudden shock of light, but we always willingly posed, our hands behind our heads, our toes artfully pointed. We were little hams. “Wait! Wait! Take one more!” we begged, and she did.

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ere were pictures of us festooned all over our house. On the walls and in photo albums, stuffed in boxes and on top of everyone's dresser. My mother was our own personal Stieglitz, documenting our lives so precisely that she carefully labeled every photo, both by year and by event. We took pictures, too, of our cat, Elvis, and of each other, but it never dawned on me until I was twelve that there were no photos of my mother anywhere in the house, not even of her as a child. It made sense to us that there wouldn't be photos of her and our father, since he was seldom home, and when he was, he was silent and sulky or arguing with all of us.
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eir wedding photos were stuck in a white plastic album, and we had the same relationship to them as we did with our father: we didn't want to get too close to them. Our mother didn't like posing along with us, her two girls, and we couldn't understand it. She was beautiful and she could never pass a mirror without looking into it, fluffing her hair or fixing her collar, but she still didn't want her image captured. “I take terrible pictures,” she insisted. “I'm too old to be photographed.”

“But what about when you were our age?” I asked. “You probably took great pictures then! Where are the pictures of you as a little girl?”

My mother came from a family of eight siblings and two Russian immigrant parents who both escaped the czar, a life that seemed so far away from Waltham, so exotic, that we were dying to see the proof of it, but even our aunts and uncles didn't have photos. “No one really took photographs,” my mother told me. “Your father doesn't have any of him as a kid, either. It was just different. Not many people took pictures back then and we didn't have these fancy flash cameras.”

“Didn't that make you mad?” we wanted to know. “Didn't you want pictures?”

My mother shrugged. “Well,” she said finally, “there was one picture taken when I was twelve, but it was of my whole family, and I have no idea where it is.”

She had that look on her face she always had when she was hiding information from us. She wouldn't meet our eyes. She pursed her lips. We didn't believe her. We searched our basement, turning up old dolls, worn stuffed animals, and boxes of our own artwork and school papers. At family gatherings, we begged our aunts and uncles, “Who has the photo?”
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ey looked at us as if we'd asked who knew how to do open-heart surgery. No one, it seemed, knew where that photo was or thought it was important.

“Tell us what you looked like,” I begged my mother.

“I don't remember.”

“Did you have curls? Were you fat or thin?”

She laughed and told me how much fun it was to grow up in a big family with so many sisters and brothers. What a gift it was! How lucky she had been! She told us how her father, an Orthodox rabbi, always had the whole congregation over to dinner every week and how everyone sang and danced, beating a rhythm with real silver spoons on my grandmother's polished wood table. She mentioned how her sisters saved their most beautiful clothes for her, handing down velvet dresses and watered silk shirts, how they fussed over her because she was the baby. “Family is everything,” my mother insisted. “You girls remember that.” As if to prove it, she still lived within twenty minutes of all of her sisters, and they were always at the house, a trail of exotic names like Freda,
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eodora, Gertrude, and the more American Jean, and if they argued sometimes, I told myself, well, I argued with my own sister, and I still adored her. Arguments didn't have to mean that there wasn't love.

As I got older, I couldn't stop thinking about the missing photograph and wondering what it would tell me about my mother. I wanted it to reveal that she was the prettiest of all her sisters, that she had the most personality. I wanted the picture to show me who my mother was before my father fell in love with her and then changed his mind and grew cruel. My sister and I hit adolescence, and suddenly my mother, who was always fussing about her own appearance, saw our pain. My sister came home crying because two girls at school had mocked her awkward pixie haircut. Our mother immediately took my sister to John Robert Powers Modeling Agency and they gave her a makeover, telling her she had the wrong clothes and the wrong hairdo, something my mother rectified with a flash of her credit card and two trips to Clip 'N' Curl in Belmont and to Filene's in downtown Boston. When a boy in my history class drew a caricature of me on the blackboard, all medusa-haired and skinny, I came home and tried, secretively, to iron my curly hair straight. I broke the iron and singed my hair, and had to admit both matters to my mother. She put her arms around me and then she took me to the Star Market to get a box of Curl Free.

But my sister and I were still sensitive about our looks. We didn't want our images caught on film anymore. We put our hands up when our mother approached with the camera. “Now that makes me very sad,” our mother said, but we were teenagers, and we didn't care about making anyone happy but ourselves.

We grew up. Our father died the year I graduated college and we hoped our mother would remarry, choosing a kind, funny man this time, getting the second chance at love we thought she deserved, but she seemed uninterested in meeting anyone. We got married ourselves and moved away, and there were oceans of photographs documenting our lives. After I gave birth to my son, and my husband and I began capturing his life in pictures and videos, I began to think about that missing photo again. It became a missing link in this whole chain of glorious family. I couldn't go home to see my family without asking where it was.

“What does it matter?” my mother said. “It's just an old photo.”

By the time my son was twelve, almost all of my mother's family had died.
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en my aunt Jean passed on, and my mother called, not just to tell me about her sister's death, but to say, her voice strained, “I found the photo in Jean's basement.” I imagined her voice sounded funny because of her sister's death, because of her grief. I told myself that when I got home, I would make her feel better.
Imagine that,
I thought,
a whole family, except for my mother, gone, but the photo has suddenly appeared.

My sister and I traveled back to Boston for my aunt Jean's funeral and to see my grieving mother and the photo. We sat in our living room, all three of us on the floral couch, our bare feet sinking into our mother's blue wall-to-wall carpeting. “Ready?” our mother said. She had a box on her lap and she opened it, slowly taking the photo out and handing it to us, almost shyly. I gasped but my sister was silent, as transfixed as I was.
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e photo was bigger than I thought it would be—eight by twelve—and it was sepia toned. Everyone was standing: my Russian grandmother, who always terrified me, was in a floor-length velvet dress, one hand balanced on my Orthodox rabbi grandfather's shoulder as if she were pressing him into his chair. My aunts, in flapper dresses and boyish bobs, were so young and happy beside my three preening uncles, one even wearing thick, tweedy knickers. Which one was my mother? Surely not the small girl, like a brown wren, hidden in the corner like an afterthought. I looked again.
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is girl was younger than all the others, in a misshapen dress, in dirty knee socks, her hair raggedly cut, looking as if she would smile if she wasn't about to burst into tears.

My mother, sitting between us, tapped the girl who was so out of place she might belong to another family. “
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ere I am,” she said. Her voice slowed. “Don't I look so homely.” She said it as if it were a fact.

Shocked, I stared at the photograph. Surely that couldn't be her. I felt a flash of shame for her, and then guilt that I had badgered her about this photograph for so many years, and all I had to do was look at that little girl to know why she hadn't wanted me to see it. I looked closer, and suddenly I couldn't take my eyes off her as a child.

“You look like the most interesting one there,” I decided, and it was true.
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e others looked like they'd be happy-go-lucky guests at a party, but this stormy-eyed little girl—well, she'd have a story to tell and you'd have to listen to it.

“Really? You think so?” my mother said. She looked at me doubtfully. “No one else in my family thought so.”

“But I thought your family life was so wonderful,” my sister said, and my mother sighed.

“It wasn't,” she said abruptly, and it was as if a closed door had swung open.

“Tell us,” I said. She hesitated and slowly began. It was like a movie reel unspooling in front of us, with a plot and characters we always thought we knew.

She was a twin—which she had never told us—and one night, when she was eight, her mother had presented her and her brother to company. “Isn't the boy handsome!” my grandmother said. “And smart, too!” My mother stood, rocking from foot to foot, waiting, but no praise or attention came her way. “Oh, and here's the girl,” my grandmother said offhandedly, and then she dismissed the twins to attend to her guests.

“But that's awful!” my sister said.

“I was the runt of the litter,” my mother said. “I had terrible teeth and my parents wouldn't send me to the dentist. I had to pay for my braces myself when I was older, and thank God I found a sympathetic dentist who let me pay over time.” Her sisters, except for Jean, ignored her.
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e gorgeous hand-me-downs she had told us about were really worn at the elbows and ragged at the hems. We were always proud that our mom had gone to college to be a teacher, the only one of her sisters to do so, but now she told us the truth. “My parents were afraid no one would ever want to marry me, and I needed to be able to support myself because they weren't going to do it. I didn't really want to go.” Even more horrifying, her father had urged her to go to an adult camp in New Hampshire to find a mate, and when she had met my father, a silent, surly brute she didn't really love, she had felt pressured into marrying him because her sisters had kept telling her, “Who else will marry you?”

Sitting beside her on the couch, I was heartbroken for my mother and I began to see all the dating advice she had ever given me through a different lens. Look for kindness. Don't settle. Look deeper than outward appearances.

“Your family was awful,” I announced. It all made sense to me now, the way my mother would sometimes snap at one of her sisters when they told her what to do, and we wouldn't understand why. I pointed out how beautiful she was back then, and my mother looked at me, startled. She said when she was a newlywed and she and our father were looking for a house of their own, which she was looking forward to, our aunt Freda had browbeat her into moving into our grandmother's house instead. “You'll save money,” Freda had insisted, “and you can keep an eye on our mother.” It would be years before our parents moved out, years before my mother understood that she had been manipulated into taking on the job that no one else wanted and that had robbed her of privacy and a home of her own.

She told us how she had stayed married to our father, on the rebound from a man she loved, because she didn't feel that she deserved any better. She admitted that when my father died, he had left her no life insurance and that her sisters, who lived ten minutes away, didn't come over to the house to help or comfort her. “Well, it's not as if it was a great love,” her sister Gertrude told her. “You'll get over it fast.”

My sister and I sat beside her until four in the morning, listening to her stories, each one sadder than the next. We asked questions, we tried to stay silent, we were busy absorbing this alternate history that was the realest story she could ever tell us. But with each story, our mother seemed to be getting lighter. She seemed to be growing more beautiful.
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e girl in the photograph was growing more lovely, too, as my mother unburdened herself.

I took the photograph onto my lap and I pointed out the things she wasn't seeing. Her hair might be raggedly cut, but look how thick and glossy it was.
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e dress she was wearing might be too big for her, but get a gander at how she had rolled up the sleeves as if to give it style. “Yes, I could spiff things up,” she said, and her eyes sparkled.

My sister pointed out how false a picture my mother had given us of her family life. “Why didn't you just tell us the truth?” she asked.

“I was ashamed,” my mother said.

“But why?” I said. “
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ey were the ones in the wrong, not you.” I shook my head. “I love this photo,” I told her. “It's you.”

It made me love her more, knowing how she had struggled. It made me realize how she made a decision with her two girls, never to do what had been done to her, to make us feel special, even when we were gangly teenagers. She couldn't change her past, but she could try to change our futures with every photograph she snapped, every image of us she had proudly displayed on her walls.

A week later, as I was packing for home, my mother gave me two big brown bags of groceries—things I could buy anywhere but which she insisted I take. Boxes of pasta, jars of sauce. Green grapes I could munch on the ride home. Food, for her, was part of love. “And something else,” she said and handed me the photograph.