The Image

My mother is gone. I am sitting at my computer, my fingers frozen over the keyboard. I want to record this momentous event, the loss of one of the most important people in my life, but I don’t know how to do it. Where to start. Where to end.

I knew it was coming, but was amazed when it actually arrived. I sat by her bedside, her withered hand in mine as her spirit slipped away. Words refuse to come. There seems to be no way to make sense of her complicated life.

My father brings me a brown cardboard box. On the lid, written in Mom’s loopy script, the word: Memories.

He holds it out to me as if it might contain a bomb. His voice is harsh.

“Your mother wanted you to have this. You always complained that you never really knew your mother. Maybe you’ll find some answers here. I don’t want to look at any of it.”

I begin on the couch in my office, but there is not enough room. I repack the few items I have removed and take the box to the dining room table. I give a small smile as I remember Mom sorting papers, photos, Christmas cards and letters on this table.

“Like mother, like daughter, ” I whisper.

One by one, I remove items and compile stacks: a series of yearbooks, letters tied with a pink ribbon, my birth certificate. The remains of a life. I slip one of the letters from the pack. It is from Richard.

I know about Richard. My aunts have told me the story. They told me lots of stories about my mother. She seemed to have a strange power over men, enticing them until they were crazed with love, then dismissing them. They thought she was a witch. Maybe she was. She seemed to live in a world mere mortals could not reach.

Richard was the one man she truly loved. Her wealthy father broke up the relationship because he believed Richard only wanted my mother’s fortune. He proved his point by assuring the man that he would have never be accepted and that my mother’s funds were tied up in unbreakable trusts. Upon hearing this, Richard melted away like a snowball on a sunny winter afternoon.

Mom’s best friend, Liz, introduced her to my father, a Hungarian refugee with no credentials, no money and no social standing—a man who cared nothing for wealth or position. He was her revenge. 

 I lift a yellowed page-a marriage certificate. Behind it, attached by a paperclip, a photo. My heartbeat quickens. My mother allowed no early photos of herself to grace our home. Daddy said she destroyed them all after the wedding. She insisted that she had no life before she married my father. We celebrated all our holidays at home or with my father’s family.

In the the photo my mother wears her customary somber expression. Her eyes stare into a place she alone visits. Her ebony hair falls around her shoulders like a blackout curtain. She wears a midnight-blue, velvet dress, high in the collar and cinched with a wide silver-buckled belt. It is her wedding dress.

My father stands with his arm draped across her shoulder. He stares directly at the camera with a look of triumph in his eyes. He has won the prize. He wears what I have been told was his one and only suit-a suit my mother bought for him.

The thousand-yard stare is the look I remember most from my childhood—a fragile woman sitting at a chipped-enamel table, smoking endless cigarettes and drinking cold , black coffee. Her hair is long and flowing. She looks like Morticia Adams. Maybe she was a witch. My aunts-my father’s sisters- seem to think she was.

My father tried hard to make things work but, in the end, he remained the impulsive, seductive bad boy. Gradually, poverty and a sick wife wore him down. My memories of him swing from Sunday chicken dinners that he cooked while my mother “rested” upstairs and Uncle Remus bedtime stories, embellished with the voices of Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox, to drunken rages and threats to shoot Santa Claus so no presents would arrive at our house. Later, I realized that his rage came from his inability to buy Christmas gifts at all.

Most wedding photos depict a happy couple-a smiling bride, a proud groom-two people high on life and confident about the future. It is only later that marriages unravel. When a tragedy occurs—a nasty breakup, a spousal murder—the newspapers and TV stations run happy wedding photos and videos as if to ask, “How could something that seemed so perfect at the beginning go so wrong at the end?”

My parents did not start their marriage with a joyful nuptial shot. Did their bleak wedding photo foreshadow their desperate marriage? I smooth the photo and study it to tease meaning from the way the couple faces the camera, how they are standing in relation to one another and what their eyes tell me. I want to understand the story behind the images

The photo slips from my fingers and floats to the table, turning over as it falls. On the back, the same loopy scrawl. 

Joanie,

If you see this, I am dead and glad of it. This photo is a prelude to what marrying for revenge costs. I know you plan to marry Mark to spite Peter. Turn this over and think again.

I turn the photo over. The image of my parent’s wedding photo is gone, replaced by a wedding photo of me and Mark. Of course, no such photo exists. Mark and I are only engaged. Yet there it is.

My wedding photo shows a very young girl with very big dreams and no knowledge of the world. My new husband’s arm does not drape casually or protectively; it holds me with sure authority. I smile. He is grim.

A cold chill runs down my back. Memories that I pushed aside intrude. Mark staring at me with cold fury in his almost black eyes. A raised hand. A derisive smile. Cutting words.

Yet, he can be so warm, so caring. He returned to me after I left him for Tom. Tom who discard me for my best friend. No cold eyes then, just warm. compassionate understanding. His face in my hair as he murmurs. “We all make mistakes. Marry me and I will make everything right. That fool will rue the day he let you go.”

I look down at the diamond glittering on my finger. It slides off my finger as if I have greased it. I feel a cold chill down my back. My mother’s face floats in front of me.

“It’s OK Momma, I understand. I love you.”