The Echo of Old Books(34)

I used to call her Maman, but only when we were alone. My father didn’t like her speaking French in the house. We used to spend afternoons together, just the two of us, tucked away in her room, which smelled of lilies and the creamy French soap she used in the bath. She would pull out the photo album, the one she kept hidden from my father—butter-smooth leather with her initials stamped in gold on the front—and we would flip through the pages. I couldn’t read the captions. The letters were funny, not proper English words, but she would read them aloud and tell me stories about them.

There was a picture of her as a schoolgirl, looking stiff and awkward, her hair swept back in an enormous bow. That was my favorite—because I could see myself in her and I so wanted to be like her when I grew up—but I loved them all. Seaside vacations spent at Les Sables d’Olonne. Family dinners eaten by candlelight. Holiday celebrations that stretched on for days. And everyone smiling. I’ve always wondered what happened to that album. When I asked Cee-Cee, she claimed she’d never seen it, but not long after we got the call from the hospital, I caught her in our mother’s room, going through her things. A few days later, I snuck in again and everything was gone. Her dresser drawers were empty. Her closet was bare. Even the dressing table where she kept her perfumes and creams was stripped clean. It was as if she’d never been there at all, as if she’d been erased.

I vowed then and there never to forget her. Because that’s what they wanted—my father and Cee-Cee—for everyone to just forget she was ever a part of our lives. But I remember her. I remember the good and the bad.

She used to laugh a lot when we were together, but even as a child, I sensed that there was something false about her gaiety. I never let on that I noticed, but as time went on, it became harder to pretend. A sudden storm of tears, food trays left untouched, visits from the doctor at all hours of the day and night. It would come on all of a sudden, a kind of curling in on herself, as if someone had drawn a dark cloud over the sun.

To hear the kitchen staff tell it—which I did on one occasion—it started after my sister was born. The baby blues, the doctor called it. It came on again after my brother came along, but my father was so happy to have a son that he did his best to tolerate her weepy moods. She had given him his young prince, and for a time, it was enough. But after they dragged poor Ernest from the pond, she went into a terrible spiral. A few years later, I came along—a daughter rather than the replacement son my father had hoped for. Once again, my mother struggled with depression. After burying a son, a third bout of the baby blues was more than she could handle. She never recovered and eventually got worse. Much worse.

I’m not sure how old I was when I realized it. It was gradual at first, little things. She stopped singing. And she slept a lot, sometimes whole afternoons. When I would ask her to retell some of our stories, she would say she was too tired or that she couldn’t remember them. But it felt like something else. It felt like she was afraid. I couldn’t say of what. I thought grown-ups weren’t afraid of anything. But life just seemed to be too much for her. She would lock herself in her room and not come out for days. She wouldn’t eat or bathe or let anyone see her. And then out of nowhere, she would reappear as if nothing had happened, and the sun would shine again. Melancholia, they called it back then.

My father was no help. He had no patience with her when she got that way, so they fought constantly. My sister would sneak down the hall and listen at her bedroom door: him thundering on about disgracing his good name, her wailing about what she’d given up to be his wife. I crept to the door once and tried to listen, but I couldn’t bear it. He hurled such horrible things at her—words I didn’t understand then but do now. He was ashamed of her. Ashamed of her frailties—as a woman and as a human being.

But that part you know.

Her bouts grew more frequent with time and lasted longer. One day, she left the house and stayed gone for three days. They found her at a hotel in New Jersey, registered under an assumed name. The papers had a field day. My father dismissed her doctor after that and called in a specialist in female complaints. He was also known for his discretion. He prescribed pills for her nerves. She got better for a time, more manageable. And then one night, my father was holding an important dinner for potential investors in some new venture, and right there at the table, in the middle of a discussion on Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Michigan Independent, and its revived crusade against the international Jew, she had a sort of breakdown.

I’ve never forgotten that night—though not for want of trying. The commotion was so loud that Cee-Cee and I scurried from our rooms and crouched at the top of the staircase, watching it all unfold. My father, red-faced and grim, leading my mother from the table. My mother’s shrieks ricocheting off the walls as she was forcefully propelled up the stairs. We had to scramble to keep out of sight, but we ducked into one of the guest rooms and watched from the cracked door as my father flung open my mother’s bedroom door, shoved her inside, and locked it behind her.

The sight made me sick to my stomach. To see her so broken. To see that he didn’t care. There was so much I didn’t understand then. But my sister understood. At least she seemed to. I remember her creeping back out into the hall when it was over, listening to my mother’s muffled whimpers with a strange expression on her face, not quite a smile but almost. And then my father’s voice drifting up the stairs from the dining room, explaining to his guests in the gravest of tones that his wife had been struggling since the death of their son.