I might have told Pam Carlson that had I not walked away.
* * *
About my former mother-in-law, Catherine, I would like to say this:
When I first became engaged to William she asked me with excitement, it was almost the first thing she asked me, she was on the telephone, “Will you call me Mom?” And I said, “I’ll try.” But I could never do it. I could only call her Catherine, which is what William did. Catherine Cole had been her maiden name, and sometimes William called her that with a slight tone of irony and a twinkle in his eye. “Catherine Cole, what have you been up to these days?”
* * *
—
We loved her. Oh, we loved her; she seemed central to our marriage. She was vibrant; her face was often filled with light. A college friend of mine who met her for the first time said afterward, “Catherine is the most immediately likeable person I have ever met.”
I thought her house was remarkable; it was on a tree-lined street in Newton, Massachusetts, with other houses nearby. The first time I saw it, sunshine was streaming through the kitchen windows and the kitchen was large with a white table in it, and it shone with cleanliness. The counters were white and a large African violet sat on one of the window shelves over the sink. The kitchen faucet was a long thing that arched out over the sink, and it sparkled a silver color. I thought I had stepped into heaven. Catherine’s entire house was clean; the wooden floors in the living room shone a honey color, and the bedrooms had curtains that were white and starched-looking. Never did I think I could live like that. It did not occur to me. But that she lived like that! Really, I could not get over it.
* * *
—
I need to say this, though:
I wrote about it in an earlier book, but I need to explain it more, which is that when I first met William and heard that his mother had been married to a potato farmer in Maine, I thought—because I did not know about potato farms in Maine—that she would have been rather poor. But this was not the case. Catherine’s first husband, the potato farmer Clyde Trask, had run a good and successful farm, and he had also been a politician; he was a Republican state legislator in Maine for many years. And Catherine’s second husband, William’s father, when he came to America after the war, became a civil engineer. So Catherine was not poor. And when I met her I was surprised at the elegance of her home. I think she had ended up rather high on the social scale. I have never fully understood the whole class business in America, though, because I came from the very bottom of it, and when that happens it never really leaves you. I mean I have never really gotten over it, my beginnings, the poverty, I guess is what I mean.
But Catherine, when I first met her, would introduce me to her friends, and she would say quietly with her hand on my arm, “This is Lucy. Lucy comes from nothing.” I wrote about that in a previous book.
* * *
—
In Catherine’s living room was a long couch, a sort of tangerine color, and Catherine would sometimes be stretched out on the couch if we arrived without her knowing, which we did sometimes because William liked surprising her. “Oh! Oh!” she would say, scrambling up, “Come give me a hug,” and we would go to her and then she would take us to the kitchen and give us food, always talking, always asking how we were, telling William he needed to have his hair cut. “You’re such a handsome boy,” she would say, putting her hand on his chin. “Why can’t we see more of you? Get rid of that mustache.” She was light itself. Mostly she was. Once in a while she seemed more subdued and she would say, almost laughingly, “Oh, I have the blues,” and William said she had always been like that, not to worry, but even when she was subdued she was still kind, always asking about the details of our lives; our friends’ names she knew and she would ask about them too. “How is Joanne?” I remember her asking. “Has she found a husband yet?” And then she said, winking at me, “She’s a little dour, that one.”
She would sit at the table and watch us eat. “Tell me everything!” she would say. And so we did. We told her about our life in New York City, we told her about the downstairs neighbor whose wife was much younger than he was and she didn’t seem to like him, and I told her how the old man one day had blocked the stairs and wouldn’t let me get past until I had kissed him. “Lucy!” she said. “That’s horrible! Don’t you ever kiss him again!” And I told her I had to, and she said, “No. You do not have to.” I said it had just been a peck on the cheek, but it had made me feel weird. “Of course it made you feel weird!” She shook her head and ran her hand up and down my arm. “Lucy, Lucy,” she said. “Oh my dear child.”