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Chapter 14: Mother’s Legacy

            Cousin Alberto must have told Mother that I had seen them at the subway entrance.  Her presence in the family rooms suddenly became scarce.  If Father was home for dinner, she ate with us, and afterward, she sat with him in the living room while he smoked a cigar.  Otherwise, she was in her workroom, at the salon, or out playing bridge.  The workroom was ill-named since Mother no longer worked for Salerno Imports.  Mostly she sat on the chaise longue, smoked one cigarette after another, and read magazines.  Or she talked on the telephone.  I could hear her voice droning on in her flat New Jersey squawk even from my bedroom down the hall.

            In front of the twins, who were just turning thirteen, our parents behaved as they always had.  The business was the main topic of their conversations.  Politics and world events came up too from time to time.  The atmosphere in the apartment was thick and heavy, a viscous sad syrup that clung to us all.  How desperately I wanted to move out!  Any number of college girlfriends had asked me to share a flat with them.  Even though I was twenty-one, I stayed at home for the twins’ sake.  They were in their own teenage world, relying mostly on each other for support and solace.  Since Father was locked in his depression, and Mother was avoiding all of us, I felt I was the only one left to mind the house and make sure the girls had some supervision. 

            I divided my time among classes, study, and the twins.  On weekends I took them out to a show or a film, or shopping.  They liked to do girl things, like get a manicure and pedicure.  They also liked roller-skating, probably because there were boys doing it, so we’d go to the park, have lunch at the cafe.  I loved Dolly and Debo because they were my sisters, but I didn’t like them very much in those years.  They appeared to have inherited our mother’s rather vacuous approach to life.  A new pair of jeans and lunch at a fancy restaurant seemed to satisfy them.  Our conversations bordered on inane, no matter how hard I tried to guide them into deeper introspection.  For a while I thought they were hiding their profound private thoughts.  Then I gave up and accepted that they were genuinely shallow.  Sad to say, their futures looked to me like a mirror of our mother’s life: a white-collar job, marriage for money, and adultery for excitement.  For a few months, Dolly thought she wanted to be a nun.  But when she and Debo turned fifteen and were allowed to date the most acceptable boys of those who had been sniffing around, Dolly easily gave up her aspirations for the religious life.

            When I was twenty-two, my mother fell ill.  By the time she saw a doctor, the lung cancer was well advanced.  The odd thing was that our routines hardly altered.  Mother went out less, but she continued to smoke and read magazines on the chaise longue in her workroom.  The twins went to school and went on dates.  Father hunkered down in the living room with his ever-present Cubana cigar.  Then the chaise longue morphed into a hospital bed.  Hospice workers tiptoed in and out, and then, one day, Mother was gone.

            Did I miss my mother?  Not really.  I did not mourn for the guilty adulteress who sneaked out of the apartment and avoided making eye-contact with me.   I was angry with her for her immorality, and for the way she abdicated responsibility for her children.  On reflection, and believe me, I did a lot of hard thinking in the days after her funeral, I recognized two things she did for which I knew I would be eternally grateful.  Until I was ten or eleven, she made sure I read all the books on our summer reading lists provided by the school librarian.  In this way, she fostered my learning and my love of literature.  She would call one of the big bookstores in the City and ask the clerks in the music department, “What is popular?  What are kids listening to?”  She did the same with books.  Then she would send me to the store and I’d come home with an armful of greatness.  That is how I knew the score of the musical Hair, and Bob Dylan’s Times They Are A-Changin’ long before any of my peers had heard of either one.

            The other gift I received from Mother was the skill of money management.  When I was nine, I got an allowance of six dollars a week.  She insisted that I use two dollars for spending money, two dollars for school supplies, and two dollars for savings.  As I got older, my allowance increased, but the proportions remained the same.  Mother monitored my spending mercilessly.  The result was that, by the time I graduated from college, I had a tidy sum in savings, and a deeply ingrained habit of good money management.  I’ve never had a problem supporting myself, even though my income has fluctuated, especially now, since I retired from the publishing business in order to write full time.

            A few weeks after Mother died, Father came out of his sad fog.  He began going to the offices of Salerno Enterprises every morning.  He donated a huge amount of money to build a new wing for cancer treatment at the hospital.  His picture began to appear in the paper again: King Olive attending charity events and opening nights.  “The recently bereaved C.E.O. of Salerno Enterprises, Anthony Salerno, aka King Olive, attended the opening of the exhibition at MOMA…”

            Debo surprised us all by demanding to be sent to NYMA, the New York Military Academy in the Hudson Valley.    Apparently, she had clear memories of visiting Junior there.  A little bewildered by her passion, Father agreed to let her go.  Debo had never expressed any interest in Junior or the military; her only concerns had always been clothes and boys and gossip.  Suddenly she was sixteen, looking serious and crisp in her uniform when we visited her on Parents’ Day.

            At first, Dolly was lost without her twin sister.  She drifted around the apartment after school, watched endless hours of television.  All through the school year she languished in sorrow and lethargy.  When June came, I cornered Father in the living room and demanded that he do something about Dolly.  For once, Father listened.  He got her a job at his office, as a secretarial assistant.  Dolly liked it, and she was so adept that by the end of the summer, her supervisor was seriously training her.

            During that summer, Father and Cousin Alberto went to Italy for three weeks.  In late August, when New York City was a sweltering mass of exhaust fumes and short-tempered people, Father came home with a new wife.

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Chapter 13: Killerton House

            Later that afternoon, as she drives away from Killerton House, Teresa accuses herself of being jaded.  In her travels she has toured many of these old elegant homes that were turned into museums because the owners couldn’t afford the upkeep.  Killerton House was much like the others she has seen, except for the vintage clothing display.  For this exhibit it was worth the tricky drive in the rain.  The mizzle did eventually turn into a steady downpour.  Visibility is limited, so Teresa creeps along the slick roads at fifty kilometers per hour.  She reviews the outfits she saw that came from Margaret’s time.

            A woman in Margaret’s society would not have worn the fancy silk evening clothes on display.  Working women wore simple linen and woolen dresses with a cap or bonnet, an apron, and a shawl for warmth.  The colors were muted, but may have been brighter when they were new.  Hair was worn in loose curls.  Men wore knee breeches, boots, and loose blouse-like shirts for work.  Seeing the clothing of Margaret’s time, and the utensils and furniture the people used, brought the period into focus.

            Killerton House itself is grand indeed.  The grounds are lush with flowering shrubs, climbing vines, and long vistas across emerald lawns.  There is even a bear hut, an odd little cottage with a thatched roof and a barred bay window.  Though the Manor House is not imposing, Teresa prefers its human-sized earthiness.

            Teresa realizes that she is already planning the project, Margaret’s story.  It is typical of her process.  When she is in the middle of writing a piece and can see the end clearly, Teresa begins to mull over the next one.  She considers the research she will have to do.  She must look up the historic events that frame the time period.  She’ll need to find out about the lives of farmers in Devonshire, and, of course, the doings of the smugglers and wreckers. 

Tomorrow, Teresa thinks, I’ll make an appointment to talk to Miss MIcklewhite.  And maybe I’ll rise early enough tomorrow morning to hear what Mr. Braithewaite knows.

 Teresa’s plans occupy her until she is back again at her desk in front of the laptop.  She is wearing a dry sweatsuit; her wet clothes are hanging on the shower curtain rod in the bathroom.  A fresh cup of Earl Grey and some biscuits wait on a small tray.  After answering the five emails, one from her editor, and the rest from her sister, Debo, Teresa opens her writing file.