The Domestic Archives

In these last years, as her 80th birthday loomed, my mother has traveled, not to Antarctica or China as in years past, but back through her life and mine.

I have been her companion sometimes on these melancholy journeys. Killing time together last year in too many hospital rooms, Mom has told stories about the early years of her marriage, of Connecticut winters spent ice-skating, and has orally inventoried the contents of her cupboard and closets. She still regrets that the Depression foreclosed a career in medicine, but relishes the photographic treks she made, often without my father, to the farthest reaches of the planet. Late one afternoon, with a winter sunset dissipating outside her window at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, she filled the last miserable hour before surgery recounting her World War II experiences as a Wave officer and a trip to Alaska she took with my father more than a decade ago.

“I’m beginning to think I’ve lived long enough,” she has said often in recent years as age imposes real limitations. And now, into her 81st year, Mom feels beset by chores. Old age, it seems, comes with its own “to do” list.

“Won’t one of you take over the house?” she has asked my brother and me.

“Can you use this set of dishes? I don’t entertain anymore.”

“I need to label those old photo albums or no one will know what’s there.”

No family could have a more diligent curator for a generation of artifacts and memories. She preserved my childish drawings, my brother’s schoolbooks, Dad’s empty wallet. Mom remembers why we backed out of the mule ride down the Grand Canyon trail in 1966 (because my brother woke up sick that morning), how I made bright crepe-paper flowers for my 16th birthday party, what the kitchen looked like in 1959 when we moved into the house that still holds all these treasures. I remember that we all attended my father’s 25th college reunion the same summer we watched Chief Justice Earl Warren induct him and others into the Supreme Court bar, qualified to argue cases before the high court. My mother hung onto the commemorative straw hat from the reunion.

Her curatorial reach extended far beyond the four of us. The aluminum saucepans that belonged to her mother, the Sabbath candlesticks her grandmother held tightly during that voyage from Russia nearly a century ago; each has its place. Red ski mittens from the ‘30s, an aunt’s costume jewelry, even her lingerie, with wear left--all carefully tucked away.

I’m not much better at letting go. I wear my father’s last bathrobe, a yolk-yellow terry cloth, though I have more comfortable, more attractive alternatives in my closet.

The weight of Mom’s household now overwhelms her and me, but the prospect of giving the past away, packing it up or tossing much of it, brings on thoughts too freighted for either of us to discuss.

Can we still remember Grandma if we part with her saucepans? Will I need those green dishes or the towers of Kodachrome slides to recall moments in our life as a family? What will my children remember of me? Are we, she and I, good mothers--whatever that means? A widowed friend recently wondered aloud, if months go by without anyone speaking of her late husband, did he matter to anyone but her? How can she know?

Caught now between the rip currents of adolescence in my own house and the undertow of sadness that old age has visited on my mother, I am beginning to think I know. The parent that she has been hovers especially close in this last long stretch before my own children leave home. As I wonder what they will carry away into their adult lives as parents and partners, old images come into focus, some duplicating slides preserved in Mom’s boxes, most not.

On an outing to the beach at Ocean Park last summer, I’m sure I heard my mother under the next umbrella. After we’d finally sat down by the water, sweaty from lugging boogie boards, the cooler, chairs and all the rest across the blazing sand, she drew that deep, satisfied breath, smiled and chided my father. “Paul, take your nose out of the book. Smell the salt air! Isn’t it magnificent?”

And there in the folds of the Halloween costumes my daughter and I sewed one October glimmered that Pied Piper’s cape, a mother-daughter masterpiece of three decades ago--no doubt still somewhere, wrapped in tissue. Through a 10-year-old’s delight at tackling a big project, I recognize the pleasure my triumph must have given Mom.

I set my table for guests and see her long dining table, perfect, and my mother, laughing, a gracious, relaxed hostess. I give my daughter her birthstone and see the fake emerald ring Mom once gave me. Its stylish silver setting lingered in my jewelry box long after the glass “stone” fell out.

Teenagers are wired to throw you, to shake your confidence as a parent. Rejected one minute, beseeched the next, I hang on sometimes by doing what my parents did to nudge us forward. My father’s spirit swirls closest in those moments when my 14-year-old son talks earnestly about politics, as my brother and I once did, eager for Dad’s opinion, eager to match minds with him on the neutral turf of ideas. I once thought my father took me to court for my edification--to learn about the law, to see him in action. I now see it was he who reaped the greater reward, knowing that I was mature enough, finally, to appreciate the art and dignity of lawyering and poised enough (some of the time) to hold my own with his colleagues. It’s my turn to feel that pride as my son on occasion accompanies me, demonstrating an understanding of the give-and- take of the adult world and recognizing, at last, when he’s about to enter a “shirt-tucked-in” kind of place.

Maybe it’s best that we can know well only a couple of generations, that we are left with just the leaden remains of those gone before. How unbearable it would be if memories rippling back through the years were to keep seeping in, drenching the living with the souls of the dead. If my daughter’s glee over a story written or a painting completed were suffused by sweet-sad visions of one grandmother’s artistic accomplishments, another’s penchant for style--and back forever through aunts and uncles and grandparents long gone.

Now, when Mom offers me this or that of her treasures, I think I know what’s important to me, today and forever. I silently vow I won’t miss the rest--never mind that I literally can’t fit it all into my house--and will spare my children by pruning back the collection. But at times I fear that I will be as helpless as she has been to let anything go, no matter how prosaic, and for the same reason: because it once belonged to someone she loved.

Some years back, just before her first serious illness, I dreamed I was alone in Mom’s house. I’d come to fetch something, a platter, a vase, something she’d meant for me to use. But when I opened the cupboard, all kinds of objects tumbled out--favorite dresses, cookbooks, clay handprints, home-movie reels. The shelves never emptied. I put out my hands to stop the deluge. But those things kept coming, tumbling, spilling, cutting deep grooves through the generations. Saucepan to saucepan, mother to daughter, and on into eternity.