They say that our senses, especially our sense of smell, generate memories. That's what happened. I was in the garage of my building getting ready to get into my car and there was this strong, pleasant, fresh smell of some one's detergent from the laundry room, on the same basement floor.
We Bronx-ites of the 50s and 60s and even the 70s had generally two ways of doing the laundry. There was the Laundromat, usually one in every neighborhood's block or the basement machines in your building. When I was very young, in our large tenement building, there were no machines in the basement, so it was the local Laundromat we would go. Certain items might be done by hand and carted up to the roof, which alternated as "Tar Beach" for summer tanning, hung on the lines used by the whole building. Some folks hung their lingerie, for example, on a line stretched across the outside of the apartment window. We lived on the fourth floor of the five floor walk up so getting to the roof was only one flight and an additional stairwell to the creaky iron door and the plastic line. My mother ever so carefully lined up the items for drying with wooden clothespins and painstakingly clipped on each item. When I was too young to be by myself in our one-bedroom apartment (I had the bedroom; my parents had the Castro-Convertible in the living room that for parties managed somehow to look a lot like a cozy nightclub--another tale to come), I would trudge up there with her, bored for the most part taking the measure of the whole length of the roof, and if I was lucky to find one, popping the odd tar bubble with my shoes. Sometimes, I could hear the sound of a practicing violinist in the building opposite us on the alley side. I could never quite discern where the sound came from as all the windows were curtained--but when I see the movie "Rear Window" where the sounds and sights of the too close neighbors Jimmy Stewart watches while he recuperates with his broken leg, I always recognize a similar experience. It was only a matter of feet, I never was good at exact distances, from our building's back to that building's back. I am trying to remember what detergent my mother used, and what softener; there was always a softener. Whatever it was, that scent in my garage brought it all back. My mother was serious about her home making activities. Is every mother like that? Probably. But my mother seemed more serious than most and I don't remember chit-chatting with her while she did her work. I just wandered, looking over the edge toward our courtyard, with its fountain that never in my memory was ever used as a fountain but rather as a planter--until the landlord began to take less and less care and then it wasn't even much of a planter. When we moved to a more upscale building when I was sixteen, we had the machines in the basement, including a dryer! and to the extent I would join her for a foray into clothes washing, I was amazed by her skill in perfect folding of every item. I think, when I look back, that I joined her more after she was diagnosed with a terminal breast cancer--mostly to keep an eye on her-though she did not slow down after that diagnosis.
I am having a cascade of memory now.
This is my mother. Likely this picture was taken some five or more years before I was born. After I was born she avoided being photographed. Until she was sick, I knew her as an overweight woman, and she covered up completely in an effort to hide it. A friend who saw this photograph just before I posted it said "She looks like a gypsy". I never thought about it. My mother always dressed differently from other women, and certainly very differently from other mothers in the Bronx. One person sees a "gypsy"; I see only a fashion plate, an iconoclastic fashion plate. Even after she was heavy, she still dressed with panache. When she went out, there was no such thing as "casual" for her. If it didn't match she didn't go out.
My relationship with my mother did not become a warm one, in my experience of it, until she became terminally ill. By then she was buying me supplies of Bazooka Bubble Gum to be stashed in an old Barracini container. She was insisting on lunches with me at Krum's on Fordham Road and my need for an ice cream cone for dessert. I inherited my mother's tendency to weight, so believe me, I didn't need it, but mother-ly softness touched me with both joy and sadness. Before that, it always seemed that I was one step from violating a probation that I didn't recall being imposed or being deserved. Long ago I came to realize that it all had nothing to do with me, though her internal secrets to explain them were never revealed to confirm my speculations. There were only hints. My father thought she had not really wanted to marry, yet, she did. She wanted to be a model, but never seemed to have the drive to pursue it, except superficially. It always seemed to me she never wanted a child yet there I came some 8 or 9 years into the marriage conceived during a rare trip she agreed to make, to Canada. It is ironic that I probably have had more of the life she wanted. I have no complaints, but as you know, the grass truly is always greener on the other side.
But there were Bronx mother daughter moments. There was a deli like grocery store on Mt. Eden Avenue that had dill pickles in a barrel, and she and the store owner would let me reach in for my pick of the biggest. At the A and P "around the corner" from our building, she'd make sure that I'd get a slice of extra thin American Cheese from the meat department. There was a night when neither of could sleep and while dad was sleeping soundly in the convertible bed, she let me lean against her, something that she never did, and together we watched the Late Late Show movie on Channel 9. My first and only dog Bruno fell in love with my mother. She couldn't leave the building without evoking extended howling. And by the time she came home her clothes had been pulled by him from their hangers to sit on and derive emotional comfort. There was the bus trip to Freehold, New Jersey, after she got sick to visit with relatives she had eschewed entirely in my life's memory, including her favorite aunt, Mary, her mother's sister, by then already well over 90. We took the bus, my father worried to anger about her travelling in her clearly deteriorating condition, and no one said anything about her clearly yellow color (the result of the cancer going to her liver by the time she was diagnosed), and pretended that it wasn't odd she had made a sudden visit after at least a decade. She was relaxed as I had never seen her and I had to interdict thoughts that I was actually grateful to a condition that somehow had broken down her thick emotional walls. She was inviting my friends over to the apartment, something that had virtually been forbidden in my younger days.
There will probably be many things I write of her as blog days go by. I will probably add some more of Dad's "Myra" stories. Myra is a thinly disguised version of my mother in dad's writings; his experience of a clearly reluctant wife and mother, a woman who would rather have been a Rita Hayworth in Hollywood than a first generation American-Irish daughter trapped in a cement jungle Bronx.
She was a autodidact sophisticate in a land where that was no more than putting on airs. She was for real, but in that environment, it was eccentric. She claimed many people, with first names only, that dad and I never met, as her friends. All of them were super rich, she averred matter of factly. She made trips to downtown New York that she never explained, except to say that she was working with these friends, she, as a hand model. There was Robert (pronounced as Robaire), Evelyn (Eve-lyn), and Lisa (pronounced "Leeza"). Dad said that mom passed on an invitation for a flight in a private plane by one of these friends, but Dad declined, feeling that he couldn't compete with such people. He should have gone. Then maybe we would know if these friends were real or imagined. I'd go through Vogue or Bazaar magazines and I would try to guess which hand was my mother's. I couldn't be sure. The hands in the glossy photos were highly decorated and air brushed. "Yes," she might occasionally say, "those are mine." I never knew if I should believe her. She did have well groomed nails, too long for any manual work, and certainly useless on a typewriter.
If it seems that my descriptions of her are sketchy, I agree, they are. She was with me for 20 years, and she was pure enigma. Really, she was enigma to everyone who knew her, but particularly those closest to her.
She gave me life, she gave me my education and my drive, she gave me my the Catholicism she never practiced herself, and she gave me my love for cats (we share an uncanny rapport with them). That's a great deal for one short life.
I have no doubt I will write of my mother, as well as dad, again and again and she will live on in the internet ether as well as heaven where I know she found the happiness that eluded her in this life.
Such a wonderful tribute to a very beautiful woman!
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