My Mom had beautiful hands. Her
fingers were long and perfectly proportioned, her nails so white and
perfect without polish that they could have based the so-called French
manicure on them. That said, they were not lady-like or fancy hands.
What made them so beautiful in my mind was their simple grace: no jewelry
adorned her fingers but dad’s plain platinim wedding band, and
the texture of her skin was muscular and sinewy, with her veins giving
such shadow and depth to her hands that I wanted to sculpt them. What
her hands radiated was the incredible beauty of quiet strength. They
may have seemed like Plain Jane hands, but, like their owner, they were
far from ordinary.
Discussions with Kate and Mag over
these past months have evoked at least one common early memory: of laying
our heads on mom’s lap late at night and feeling her stroking
our hair with her smooth, soothing touch. (We also enjoyed listening
to the earth-mother gurgling of her belly, no doubt recalling in some
way our origins and our destinies in the most comforting way.) Other
memories of mine include watching her fold things, smoothing them down
with great care. Her sheets, for example, even after she stopped ironing
them, remained crisp and clean and neat: even as an adult, sinking into
them made me feel all safe and cozy again. And who can forget Mom’s
fudge, which tasted the way it did precisely because she patiently stirred
each batch for 45 minutes. It was as if all the love she had for the
many eager members of her family was poured from her hands into each
of the many batches she made for us at Christmas. There was truly no
better gift…and she knew that.
If the old adage has any truth, that
“Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” Mom was a saint.
If Granny B. twiddled her thumbs to keep the devil at bay, Mom played
solitaire. Her cards were soft and worn with use, but she didn’t
like to open a new pack. Was it the heritage of the Depression that
made her use her cards as well as her clothes and linens until they
were torn and frayed, even though she had shiny new cards and clothes,
towels and tablecloths peeking brightly out at her from the drawers
of her dresser and her cradenza? Or was it rather that the things she
used with such care and thrift became hers to such an extent that she
could no longer discard them? Her things bear her mark as well as any
photograph. Perhaps moreso, as she always looks in photos as if she
is daring the instrument to just *try* to steal her soul away, whereas
her things seem to reflect the simplicity and tenacity of her very being.
Mom also did needlepoint. For each
of her children and grandchildren, she embroidered a picture with the
child’s name and birthdate upon it. When I look upon the pictures,
I can feel her careful, patient love shining out from them. But I can
also feel something else, something that resembles that “iron
fist” with which she brought us up. Mom’s love, like her
personality, was fierce and feisty and clannish: she either loved you
passionately or you didn’t exist. And even if she loved you, woe
be to you when you erred or strayed. We always liked it better when
Dad spanked us: Mom’s hands were never weak or flaccid, and her
aim, alas, was always true. That’s what I feel looking at the
pictures she made: she caught up the perfection of our being into them
and held us strictly and rigourously to it. Oscar Wilde once claimed
he couldn’t live up to his blue and white china, but that was
nothing compared with trying to live up to my mom’s needlepoints.
There was a family joke about unicorns:
once upon a time when I was 12 or 13, I really liked them, and so mom,
with that desperate grasping at straws typical of parents trying to
understand their adolescent children, gave me unicorn books and calandars
for years after that, finally missing the mark so badly that I was almost
embarassed for her. Until she got me, at 20, with a painstakingly perfect
replica of one of the unicorn tapestries at Cluny. That tapestry stopped
me in my tracks, and put an end to careless sarcasms and adolescent
eye-rolling much as the fiery sword of an Archangel holds back demons.
For her unicorn had far surpassed MY unicorns, and had come to represent
the single-minded love of a mother for a child, strong and strict and
unspeakably deep, weaving together history and myth in a single careful
stitch, until something much more vast and silent was made than any
word could possibly utter.
Which is why her hands’ works
were so important: words were not her medium. If she were looking down
upon all of this at this moment (and especially at my affectionate long-windedness),
she would simply utter those three words we all know so well: “Oh,
pish tush.” After dad died and I tried to get her to “open
up” about her feelings, she said to me, “Buffy, I’m
a tough old Irish woman, and I’ll be fine.” And when she
became ill with the cancer and I asked her why she didn’t want
to see more of her friends for help and support, she said she didn’t
believe in complaining, and that besides, she didn’t have anything
to complain about. And as I, with my naïve Rousseauian belief in
transparency, muddled her words over, I realized I had no idea what
she meant, and wrote all of it off as “denial.” As she got
sicker, she became more silent, with the occasional “Oh Boy”
serving as the non-complaint to her suffering. I was in awe of her,
as I had complained incessently about something as mundande as my pregnancy
from beginning to end, but I still didn’t understand her.
It was only at her death–bed
that I began to see that what was motivating her was far greater than
denial. Two days before she died, family members came by and called,
and she had a joke and witticism for each one. While she poked fun at
us all, cousin Bill said that her eyes shone as she looked as “her
girls,” and indeed, it did seem as if we were having a party of
sorts: a celebration of her life. Even during the next day’s coma,
she awoke to the sound of “Hi Granny!” and not only grinned
but winked at the anxious grandchildren hovering near her. This was
no wan smile: it was a real live grin, and she batted her eyes flirtatiously
at Ben when he told her how beautiful she looked. No more words, although
she did manage a resounding “ha!’ when Kate, Mag and I told
her we loved her that night before bed. (Did I mention that Mom was
not real big on sentimentality?) What she offered us in lieu of words
was her hand: her beautiful strong hand, still lovely and graceful in
spite of the calloused veins and bruises from the countless horrible
needles she had been enduring for months. All of us, Aunt Peg and Cousin
Peggy included, held onto that hand and bowed to it like a gift from
God. And indeed it was. It was her offering to us, allowing us to finally
cradle her the way she had cradled us, to give back to her a tiny fraction
of what we had taken from her all those years. And so her hands, her
hands that I will never forget, were part of that amazing transformation
she had been making all along: I believe now that is wasn’t simply
“denial” of illness, discomfort and death that mom was creating,
but rather a space for what the French would call “un esprit de
fete” (spirit of festivity)– when I saw her grin at the
grandkids I could almost hear her chiding me: “See? Now what do
I have to complain about?!”
I have sworn to myself to keep alive
my Mom’s wish that when she dies, she be not overly mourned but
rather, as she herself so delicately said, that we “Open a bottle
and tell stories about the Old Biddy.” It is my hope that at Cousin
Jim and Sues’ house later on that we may do just that: share many
memories of my mother, drink a little, cry a little, and laugh a lot.
I can see her raising a toast to us in approval with a strong and beautiful
hand.
Elizabeth Allen
November 11, 2004