Tapestry Of My Mother's Life

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Tapestry Of My Mother’s Life - book excerpt

Prologue: The Silence of Zickelbart

"Do you think Zickelbart is in there?"

            Distracted from my efforts to open the window, I glanced at my brother. He was poking around in one of the boxes we pulled out of our parents’ closet.

"Zickelbart?" I laughed. "That’s all we need."

            Zickelbart was one of a host of ghosts we had inherited from our parents. You might say one can’t inherit ghosts. But our ghosts were as substantial as anything else in the huge pile of things more politely referred to as the "estate."

            The ancient air conditioner sputtered and groaned, reinforcing the sense of sitting below a laundry vent. Of course, my parents, inured to what they considered irrelevant minor discomforts, never replaced the unit. They got a new stove only because the old gas stove blew up; we later learned that the gas pipe had corroded. The refrigerator was a relic from the 1950s; my brothers and I finally pooled our funds and replaced it in 1987. For visitors, served tea from elegant silver tea sets in the stately living room filled with antique furniture, this insistence on frugality was bewildering and incomprehensible. For us, it was infuriating.

            The window was stuck. It took all the strength I had to push it up. The air from the city streets was warm and heavy with humidity. Yet, when I poked my head outside, staring at 57th Street and York Avenue, the sense of relief was immediate. For a few moments I soaked in the sounds of traffic heading toward the bridge, sirens wailing, cars honking, and buses hissing and squealing as they stopped and lurched forward again.

I turned back into the room. The acrid smell of my brother’s cigars mingled with the fumes from a whiskey glass on the coffee table next to an ashtray filled with butts and crumpled up foil paper. Dust tickled my nose. Boxes were strewn all over the carpet. Pop music from a portable radio on my father’s desk blocked out some of the traffic noise.

The contrast was jarring.

Until my mother’s death in 2009, my father’s library had always been a serene oasis. It had retained that quality even after his death ten years earlier. This room, more than any other in my parents’ home, reflected a perfect blend of their respective sensibilities and interests, a marriage of two minds. Undaunted by tall ceilings and ugly air conditioning units, my mother had chosen simple grey curtains with narrow trims in reds and blues and painted the walls in a light blue-grey. She and my father spent hours hanging the etchings of all the generals in opposition to Napoleon, with a double-headed eagle clock in the center. Bookshelves lined the walls up to the ceiling and were filled with books ranging from ancient history to the French Revolution, Russian literature, the Medici, and entire shelves of books on German history, in particular the 1930s and 1940s. On one of the top shelves, my mother arranged a collection of Nymphenburg porcelain horses and riders, stark white against the blue-grey background, some with falcons on their fists, others with hounds running alongside.

My father’s desk gave the feeling its owner had just left it a few minutes earlier, with its array of a leather folder, a silver inkpot, miscellaneous silver jars for pens and pencils, and piles of scrap paper he used for his notes. If I blinked, I could picture my father sitting over a book, so absorbed that he was oblivious to the world around him, while my mother placed the tea tray on the coffee table, covered with piles of art catalogues from her work as an art reporter. When she made tea just for the two of them, she used a pair of Meissen teacups, so fine and thin they were almost translucent, and the perfume of bergamot and Earl Grey or in winter a faint smoky tang of Lapsang Souchong filled the room. I loved the slices of toast and jam, an essential part of afternoon tea.

Now, my brother Agostino and I had to face the task of dealing with the liquidation of the estate. The time had come to clean the apartment and get it ready so we could put it on the market. I dreaded this process. In better days, while my brother Adrian was alive, he and I had often laughed and commiserated with each other about the task that awaited us, aware of the work involved as well as the emotionally wrenching process of tearing apart our parents' world.

I was sickened by the thought of pawing through my mother’s things.

Tired and drained after having cleared out Adrian's apartment after his death less than two months earlier, I had reached the point where I wished I could wave a wand and be done with it all. I had already collected stacks of bills and records and begun to work through the mountains of paperwork piled up in my office. My parents’ penchant for buying supplies that would last them into the next millennium, less politely expressed as hoarding, did not come as a surprise. Meanwhile, the contents of the walk-in closet, in family parlance the archive, far exceeded anything I could have imagined.

All afternoon, we worked on emptying out the large space. Trunks, rolled up rugs, cases of wine and whiskey, Yardley lavender soap, coffee bought in bulk, cans of tomato juice bulging with age, miscellaneous art posters, a wooden box filled with cakes of barrel soap, an unwieldy metal file cabinet stuffed with papers some of which dated back to the early 1800s, formal gowns, golden silk curtain panels, brittle and stiff with dirt, and elderberry juice containers ordered from Europe—we called it "ant syrup" when we were children. Everything smelled musty, coated with the dust of decades mixed with New York City soot that blew through the inadequately sealed windows.

My mother's presence in the apartment was palpable. Any moment she might come around the corner with the tea tray, reprimanding us for making a mess and eager to tell us stories about her day's adventures. It seemed inconceivable that she was gone. I loved her more than anyone in my life and by equal measure often sought to resist her powerful will, like a rock in a current, hard to steer around, and at the same time the source of endless joy and delight. We called her Mima, and just the name alone always evoked a sense of happiness. Many years later, I was thrilled to watch my son break into exuberant shouts of “Mima, Mima,” whenever she arrived at our house.