TURNING IT AROUND

                                          Gloria g. Murray- wd ct.1010

                                                                glorggm@optonline.net

TURNING IT AROUND

After my mother’s sudden death at age fifty-six, my father, my sister and I, began to go through her personal belongings. She had a heart condition, of which my sister and I were never told the details of. Just that she had diphtheria as a young child and developed it at that time. In those years surgery was considered too risky and not that successful. 

My father was impatient—in a hurry to get everything settled as he was planning to marry a divorcee he just met recently—a well-to-do divorcee from the Bronx. He and my sister would be living there as I was already married with a little boy of my own. When we began going through her things, I came upon a box covered in pink floral paper and tied with a satin bow. On the outside there was a label that said: PAULINE’S PERSONAL ITEMS. Quickly I grabbed it and, since my sister and father were busy sorting other things, took it into the bedroom. I tried not to think of my parents in that room as the thought of them together always disturbed me. I always wondered why they had stayed together all those years.

The latch on the box was loose, rusted with age but opened easily. There were a ton of papers, some letters still in envelopes, a birth certificate and lots of photos. A few of me and my sister sitting cross-legged on the stoop of our apartment building in Brooklyn. We both had big bows in our curled hair and nicely starched dresses. My grandmother and grandfather in European attire when they first arrived to this country from Romania, my mother and her two sisters in 1920’s style bathing suits, arms around each other and waving at the camera. I rummaged through until I came across a faded photo of a man in a white button down shirt opened at the neck. His hair was thick and darker than my father’s and his eyes had a deep, penetrating stare. His lips were full with a slight curve at the sides which gave him a comical, but innocent look. I took it out and stared at for a few moments. Who was he? A family member? Maybe a cousin? I turned it over and there in large black swirling letters was an inscription: Dearest Pauline, you will always be my true love…Harvey.

My heart was skipping wildly and my hands trembled as I held it. I didn’t know much about my mother’s romantic life, except that she had been engaged to someone before my father—a musician with a clubbed foot who my grandmother forbade her to marry, just in case she would have children with the same affliction. My mother loved music, sang and played the piano by ear and perhaps found this man to be her true soul mate. But she would never defy my grandmother, who was a lovable, but strong-willed woman, and so, as the story goes, broke off the relationship. Soon after that she met my father. He was tall, very thin and handsome, except for a broken nose from a thrown baseball. His parents had never bothered to get it fixed and it left a large bump but still did not deter from his good looks. They married and by the time she was pregnant with me, he was drafted into the Navy for a short time, since it was the end of the war. She lived with my grandmother until he returned and I was born. 

I couldn’t put the picture down. It was as if a piece of my mother’s past had somehow slipped into me. Was he the one? Harvey? What instrument did he play? Was he the true love of her life? She and my father had never been happily in love which was obvious to all. He was a stern quiet man, taken to sudden fits of anger that always frightened my sister and me. She was a bitter, hysterical sort of woman who hobbled around with a leg prone to blood clots from the Diphtheria that had struck her as a child and left her compromised. So our home (a four apartment in Canarsie) had more than an element of doom. In time my mother never went out, except to visit her two sisters and my grandmother. It was my father who did all the shopping and errands. Since we didn’t have enough room or money for a piano her musicality began to wan. 

But Harvey…I turned the picture over and over as if I could regain that piece of my mother’s life. As if it could change anything, as if it could capture that playful part of my tortured mother who all those years had a place in the heart of this unknown stranger.

I was intrigued by the photo of this man; the more I stared at it the greater my imagination was ignited—thinking of her in a ruffled dress and high heels, sheer seamed stockings, her curly dark hair pulled up with a red ribbon, her legs now free, swirling to one of Chopin’s nocturnes Harvey was playing on a shiny ebony baby grand. Her face would be glowing in ecstasy, her red lips smiling and fleshy pale arms swinging in the air. She would go over to him and he would stop playing, look up and touch her rouged cheek with his long slender fingers.  Then she would press her lips to his forehead until they moved down to his mouth and the kiss would be long and passionate as his hands moved from the piano keys to around her waist. The sheets of music would fall to the floor.

I didn’t even realize tears were rolling down my cheeks. I still had the photo in my clenched hand and looked at it one more time before I crumpled it and threw it into the wastebasket. 

Find anything important? My father yelled from the other room amongst the sound of things tossed into boxes and I said softly, as if only to myself, Just the life my mother should have had.