NONFICTION - Sept. 17, 1995

MOTHER AND SON: A Memoir by Michael Sledge (Simon & Schuster: $23; 320 pp.) “Though my mother was a housewife,” writes Sledge, “she was of Texas mint; she could host her bridge club in the morning, brandish a shotgun on the hunting fields in the afternoon, and that night attend a cocktail party where women with bouffant hairdos wore psychedelic mini-dresses and men talked of money.” She could do it, yes, and her son is very, very proud of her, but the toll it takes on both of them is the ransom. When Sledge’s father, a brute of a man whom his son and, doubtless, all five children want desperately to please (“I knew I could not be the kind of boy he wanted”), finally leaves his 36-year-old wife, his absence, writes his son, “didn’t change a thing.” Sledge watches his mother hold family and home together, go on dates until she bravely decides to go it on her own (“All of her life she had been given to understand that a woman alone was worth nothing”), and finally meet a man, Hank, who flowers into an abusive control freak, marries her and then leaves. As he grows older, Sledge becomes more and more her confidant, which is often painful to him, particularly when his mother announces that Hank is leaving and Hank changes his mind. It is hard for the son to see the mother he is so proud of (for her beauty, her compassion and her spunk) compromise so much. Hank, who wants the divorce, hangs around punishing everyone. “I keep asking him, ‘Hank, what did I do wrong? Why are you punishing me?’ ” Michael’s mother confides to him. “Maybe you forgot to put your napkin in your lap,” jokes the boy, and the two of them crack up. But Michael’s loyalties are tested one too many times, and as an adult he has a confusing time sorting through the differences and similarities between romantic love and friendship. He resolves many things by the end of this book, not least of which is his need for his father’s approval. He recognizes his father’s “mercurial temperament, his belligerent, willful secrecy, his constant drunkenness. I’d gotten off lucky.” Sadly, oh so sadly, his mother is unable to support his happiness as a man who realizes he loves men, and so she disappoints him also in the end. But readers can tell he still cherishes his boy’s-eye view of her.