I BELIEVED EVERY LIE MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME
A strange woman walked toward us on Fairview Avenue. I raced back to my mother, who was pushing one little sister in a stroller and holding tight to the other one. She’d let me run ahead because I was five, and we both had to accept that in Great Neck, where there were cars, she didn’t have enough hands. She was surprised I returned. “I’m not used to strangers,” I said out of breath from going so fast.
“We’re new. Everyone we meet is someone we don’t know.” Her voice sounded like tiny glass bells. I didn’t yet know that mothers could be strangers, too.
I missed our apartment on Highwood, an abandoned estate with acres and acres of woods in Manchester-by-the-Sea. I had so many friends—chickens, trees, buttercups, broken-down stone walls, and the stone lions protecting the weed garden. Highwood was far from town and my mother was sad and lonely there. But the Second World War was over, my father was transferred to a job in New York, and now we lived in Great Neck, where houses were closer together than you could believe and my father said we’d have friends. We were out walking to find them.
The woman stopped in front of us. She smiled and I knew she was kindly. Maybe, I thought, a friend.
My mother pulled the stroller brake. Soon she and the woman were talking talking talking. The woman said what beautiful children we were, just like our mother with our shining eyes and dark hair, and well-behaved, too. Now I was worried. I wanted the kindly woman to like me.
My mother was honest. Once on Highwood I let her believe my sister left the porch gate open, and when my mother found out I was the one, she scolded me. Not telling the truth, she said, was the same as a lie, and I thought she’d tell the kindly woman the truth—I hated braids and wanted to be like the other girls so in the morning before kindergarten when she fixed my hair I screamed—not well-behaved at all.
I was surprised, but with a little joy in my heart, that she and the woman talked about gardens, grocery shops, and children growing out of their shoes without her saying how bad I could be. The happy talking took so long that my mother’s loneliness drifted like morning fog into the sky. I tugged her coat. Maybe I’d find a friend, too.
The kindly woman moved her feet to say she’d be on her way. She gave us a Nice-meeting-you goodbye.
My mother answered with a friendly See-you-soon and released the stroller brake.
But the woman danced herself back into the talking. She asked, “Oh, by the way, where are you from?”
I didn’t know my mother could make herself so tall. That was the strangest moment of my life. In her don’t-you-dare-argue voice for braiding my hair, she shouted “We are American” and stormed off in a huff.
Who was the angry mother rushing my sisters and me down Fairview Avenue with her coat flapping and hairpins popping out from the braids that wrapped twice around her head? Where was the mother who told me to politely answer “Massachusetts” when people asked where I was from because they wouldn’t know about Highwood or even Manchester?
Those questions spun inside me, sweeping up the rest of the afternoon in their wake. In bed that night, I couldn’t remember if we marched straight home or wandered around looking for girls to be my friends. My head pounded with the thought that if you lived in this country, you didn’t have to say you were American.
My family had lived in America so long that our story filled the leather-bound book beside my mother’s big Larousse dictionary, our Bible, and the globe on the living room shelf. The first page told about a fourteen-year-old stowaway from the British Isles who landed in Massachusetts almost three hundred years before I was born. We’d been here ever since, unless you count the two years my great-great-grandfather was in an English prison called Dartmoor because he was caught being a pirate. Too bad the book ended when my father’s father was a student at MIT. That meant that my mother, my father (who also went to MIT), my sisters, and I couldn’t be in it. But it showed we were American. Wearing braids could make you angry because it meant you were old-fashioned and different from other people. But being American shouldn’t, because it meant you were the same.
The next day my mother was too busy cleaning, minding little sisters, and making a soufflé for dinner to go walking. After that it was meringues or timbales or washing the sheets in the sink, because for a long time after the War you couldn’t buy a machine, and we never went walking again. I wanted to know, How could I find friends?
My mother suggested, “Bring girls home after school.”
I didn’t want to. The girls laughed at my braids and the way I spoke. One girl said I sounded like President Roosevelt, who was already dead. If I brought girls home, they wouldn’t see stowaways or pirates. All we had were braids, children who weren’t allowed to buy candy after school, and old-fashioned people who didn’t use Rs.
“Buck up,” my father said. “You should be proud you’re a ninth-generation American,”
My mother said, “If something hurts, just ignore it, and your mind will make it go away.” She said that about mosquito bites, too, and iodine she swabbed on my cuts. Wasn’t that lying to yourself? Here was the truth: I was a sad and angry girl the other girls didn’t like because I had to be old-fashioned; I’d lost my chickens and broken-down walls; and in Great Neck the outdoors was too crowded to hear my heart. I needed friends.
I begged so much for my mother to take me walking that my mother said her ears hurt. Finally, when I started first grade she let me go by myself, even around corners as long as I didn’t cross the street.
I met big high school boys and babies their mothers let me hold, but no girls to teach me hopscotch or jump rope, so I talked with women sweeping their walks and men mowing their lawns. They were mostly new, too. If they were out there hoping to meet a neighbor walking by because their children were napping or maybe they didn’t have kids yet, we sat together on their steps. That question my mother didn’t like sure got people talking, more interesting than “That’s a cute baby.” They came on ships from places like England, France, Germany, Ireland, Russia, the Philippines, and Sweden, mostly from where the War used to be. They all wanted to know when my family moved in and where we came from. When it was time for me to head home, they said I was friendly, used big words, had a healthy curiosity, and should come back soon. That lit up parts of me I hadn’t known about.
My father was glad I was learning about the world. One night after my baby sister was asleep in her crib and the rest of us sat in the living room, he showed us our neighbors’ places on our globe and also his own favorite country, Denmark. He went there on a student trip when he was a boy.
My mother’s favorite country was France. While the globe was still off the shelf, she put her finger on Paris, in the middle of France. I wished we could see the streets, bridges, and cathedrals up close with a magnifying glass, but you had to go there by boat like my mother did before I was born, when she went to a famous school called the Sorbonne.
She looked at my father, and I knew they’d let my sister and me stay up late to hear more. Her grandfather was born near Paris, she said. She told us how he came to the United States when he was a young man and got married. But he died when his eldest son was only fourteen. The son had to drop out of school to work in a cotton mill to support his mother, brothers, and sister. It’s too bad that was too new to be in our leather-bound book with the other brave fourteen-year-old because later that son became the manager of his mill and my mother’s father.
I began thinking. My mother called him Papa. She could speak French. She made French desserts like blanc mange, coffee parfaits that tasted like café au lait, and crispy meringues. Sometimes she made Boston baked beans, which my father loved growing up. If it weren’t for the molasses, they were a little like cassoulet, my mother said.
“Are you French?” I asked.
“You could say so,” she said. “Papa was half French. He spoke French at home when he was growing up in Massachusetts.” He taught her to speak French when she was a little girl and she liked it so much that she studied it in high school, college, and at the Sorbonne.
“Would you like to learn French?” she asked. My father jumped in to say that if I learned all the words in her big dictionary maybe I could study in Paris, too. I thought about the beautiful dresses in the back of her closet that she made to wear in Paris because she didn’t have money to buy clothes. They swirled with rich reds and purples and reminded me of the French ladies in the pictures she hung in my bedroom. She had no place to wear them now, and I wouldn’t either unless I went to Paris.
“I would like very much to learn French,” I said.
Maybe, my mother said, her whole face shining like her dark dark hair, our whole family could go to Paris.
My father said that would be too expensive, but perhaps we could drive to Montreal, where he and my mother had their honeymoon. It was almost as beautiful.
I already could sing “Frère Jacques” and “Sur la Pont d’Avignon.” To start my French lessons my mother had me speak the words slowly. She wanted me to improve my accent.
I tried to copy her but the noise in the back of my throat was too hard.
“Not noise. It’s a special sound,” she said.
“I use Rs like a New Yorker now, right? No one had to correct me. That will happen with French as I listen to you. I don’t need to practice,” I said.
“You do,” she said. “When I came home from Paris, I could hear that my father’s accent was uncultured.” For an instant, her face flashed pink and surprised, a whoops-face I called it the day I caught her biting her nails after telling me not to. The pink disappeared, and in an almost do-not-argue-with-me voice she said, “My father learned proper French from his father—maybe he picked up an accent at the mill. You must speak correctly or people will think you’re poor and ignorant.”
I tried. The right accent seemed to be just another burden of living in my old-fashioned family. “I don’t want to learn French,” I said in tears. My mother didn’t argue. She was busy making dolls and painting flowers on our furniture. My father said the failure was because my mother and I were too alike, both of us hard workers, driven to succeed at any cost, and far too emotional. That was new information about me.
* * *
My braids were gone because I went to a summer camp in Maine where no one had time to fix my hair. I was in the fourth grade now, my New York accent was fine, and I had a two-year-old brother. Friends came to my house and invited me to theirs. They wanted to see my mother’s dolls, which were so beautiful that they were written up in a magazine. But I didn’t have best friends, the way most girls had.
One problem was that my parents wanted me to stick to my own kind. They meant girls who went to the Protestant church. When I told my father that my own kind were the girls in the highest reading and arithmetic groups like me, he said, “Don’t talk back to me.” None of those girls were Protestant. The other problem was that they were the hardest to be friends with because sometimes they stuck together.
I tried to learn more about other people. I had pen pals from England, Germany, and Canada. I wasn’t shy about talking with girls anymore. There were different kinds in my class—a girl who could stand on her hands without leaning against a wall, twins from Italy, a Black girl, a girl with a chauffeur who picked her up after school, and a Spanish girl from London who had buzz bombs flying into her windows during the War.
* * *
At ten you should be old enough to know that what parents dangle in front of you when you’re five doesn’t always come true. I was still sad that because I couldn’t learn French, my parents would never let me go to the Sorbonne to meet lots of French people, and now I had to wake up to the fact that we were never going to Montreal either, even though we were staying in a cottage in Maine, which was nearer to Canada than Great Neck was. My father had only a two-week vacation, which filled up quickly. His family lived nearby so we had to eat lobster with them and ride in their boats, and also he wanted to show us the sites—mountains, tides, a desert, which wasn’t too bad, and famous houses. Yesterday it was Longfellow’s. I didn’t want to ooh over dead people’s stuff thank you very much, and I said that unless we were going to Montreal I’d rather read in the car. My father got angry, but sad inside himself, too. He wanted me to like all those places.
And then came this morning. When we were swimming, a girl told me about French people who lived in Lewiston. They were called French Canadians because after they came from France they lived in Canada for maybe a hundred years before they went to Lewiston to work in a textile mill. I imagined a small Paris or Montreal. Maybe with a cathedral-like church, sidewalk booksellers, and picturesque luncheonettes serving café au lait. Why hadn’t I learned about Lewiston at school or from my parents? Maybe they didn’t know there was a special place so nearby. I could hardly wait to tell everyone at dinner that we didn’t have to travel all the way to Montreal to meet French people.We just had to drive to Lewiston, which the girl said was only two hours away. My father would be happy because I wouldn’t stay in the car reading, and my mother would be happy because she liked France.
Dinnertime was perfect. No rain, so we ate on the screened porch. Corn on the cob—fresh picked. Everyone in a good mood—no kids fighting about a sister grabbing too much space on the picnic bench, no parents scolding Whoa there on the butter. I told them what the girl said. I asked if we could go.
“There’s nothing to see in Lewiston. It’s a factory town,” my father said in a voice that meant you have such far-fetched ideas.
“They make textiles,” I said.
“Sheets and pillowcases,” he said, “nothing fancy.”
I wanted to meet French people, I told him, see what they were like, hear them talk.
“You’d be disappointed. French Canadians lack initiative to better themselves,” he said.
My copycat mother nodded agreement with every one of his words. Didn’t she want to see French people? Why would it make a difference that they were from Canada instead of France, like my great-grandfather? Were all French Canadians like my father said? Was this another version of associating only with “our own kind”? Weren’t we all human beings? And here was a really good question I didn’t dare ask: If you weren’t curious the way I was about people who were different from you, why would you travel to Denmark or France?
I looked my questions into my mother’s eyes, a plea really to go to Lewiston. Her eyes were flat, without enthusiasm. What was wrong with her?
“Saving is important,” my father erupted, as if we’d been discussing that topic. He launched into a lecture that began with being proud of my mother. She had put herself through teachers’ college by sewing aprons for ten cents apiece and saved her teaching salary to go to the Sorbonne. After that, he drifted into wasting money like my mother’s father who sometimes bought candy for the family after church. Then came my father’s big windup—if my mother’s father had saved money, she could have gone to college right after high school instead of struggling for two years to pay for it. And, and if her brothers wanted, which he doubted, they could have gone to college, too.
Outside, waves lapped the beach.
I wondered what my mother would say. She often told us she loved her father and how kind and generous he was. She adored her brothers, too.
“I’ve learned so much from your father,” she said. I should have expected that. She made us save every penny we earned babysitting and shoveling snow. Didn’t she hurt inside herself when my father spoke so harshly?
* * *
Thirty years passed. Occasionally, I remembered the incident on Fairview Avenue. It still puzzled me.
My parents moved to New Hampshire, back home to New England was the way they put it. I lived in Washington DC and worked for a civil rights group, studying the education of Mexican American children in public schools in the Southwest. By way of introduction to the issues involved, a Mexican American colleague told me that the teachers’ low expectations for Spanish-speaking children became self-fulfilling prophecies. The children also faced other barriers, mostly relating to language, with the result that many didn’t excel academically—a lifelong handicap. There were exceptions of course. My colleague was one. He spoke no English in kindergarten and was placed in a class for “retarded” children, where he languished for years. Now he was an impressive psychologist with a Ph.D. I remembered my father’s opinion about French Canadians. Where did it come from? Personal experience wasn’t likely. How widespread were attitudes like his, and how did they affect French Canadians themselves?
I read the few available reports and studies about French Canadians. They were a small group compared to Mexican Americans. They lived mostly in New England where they’d arrived by the thousands in the mid-nineteenth century to work in manufacturing, especially textile mills. The old-line Protestant New Englanders, like my father’s family, didn’t trust them. The old-liners were suspicious of languages, habits, and religions that differed from their own, and they already felt threatened by the waves of Irish and Italian immigrants in Boston. Those groups, along with the old-liners, feared that New Englanders would lose jobs because the French Canadians were willing to work for low wages. Perhaps the old-liners’ biggest fear was that the French Canadian influx was part of a Papal plot to control New England. Newspapers broadcasted these fears. Even The New York Times did its share of fear-mongering. The conclusion was inescapable. My parents had grown up surrounded by prejudice, which was probably why—in an incident I now remembered—my grandmother, speaking about my mother to a neighbor, said “She is French” in a tone reminiscent of the incident on Fairview Avenue.
I also read novels by the French Canadian author David Plante. They made a deep impression on me. He wrote about French Canadians in Rhode Island in an area where their family members had worked in textile mills, an area that encompassed my mother’s Massachusetts hometown. My mother’s father and brothers had worked in those mills. We had relatives by marriage with names like Yvette, Bernice, Chartier, and Dupuis. Were they French Canadian? Was it possible that my mother had French Canadian ancestry and didn’t know? The idea intrigued me. I expected it would intrigue her as well.
She preferred letters to phone calls. To cope with loneliness when she returned to New England, she engrossed herself in making Christmas tree ornaments and writing for craft magazines. She often worked past midnight, the way I did at my civil rights job. Phone calls, she complained, interrupted her work. And she didn’t want her children to waste money. She’d been known to time us to keep our calls within the basic three-minute charge for long distance. I was so eager to discuss French Canadians that I called anyway.
“We are not French Canadian,” she said, more than a little annoyed.
My mother wouldn’t lie to me, I thought. I assumed she would end this call well before our three minutes were up. She didn’t like being annoyed, and I’d done enough of that as a child.
Apparently I’d set something off. She kept going as if she were a lawyer making a case in court. She emphasized that she was truly French, as well as part English of course, from way back. My grandfather, Bartholomew Martin, came from Fontvannes, France, maybe one hundred miles west of Paris,” she said. It occurred to me that I didn’t know his name in French—Bartholomew must have been the anglicized form. She left me no space to ask. “He married Mary Jaro,” she continued, pausing to remind how much she’d loved her grandmother, and then rapid-firing more names: Samuel Cambridge, Rowena Harrison, Andrew Jaro, Sara Stone…. Her timer rang. “Are you quite finished asking questions?” she said. “Because you know these calls are expensive.”
I didn’t ask about her family again.
* * *
Lengthy phone calls flew between my mother, my siblings, and me. The cost was irrelevant. My father had been high-speed ambulanced to the hospital after a massive stroke. He was unresponsive. Doctors didn’t expect him to live. He and my mother were only in their early sixties. One morning he opened his eyes. Garbled sounds spurted out. His left arm lay limp and useless. He couldn’t walk. In a dramatic role reversal, my mother, who hadn’t left his side, commanded him to get well. When the physical therapists arrived, she paid close attention. At the time she was behind in filling orders for her ornaments, but she stopped making them and used her training as a school teacher to devote herself to my father’s recovery. Even on the days he had therapy, she insisted that he work with her for several hours. And so, in spite of grim, professional prognoses, she got my father walking and driving a car again. He could vacuum, fix himself a meal, and print short sentences in block letters that looked like hers.
He remained permanently unable to read or say much more than yes and no.
I expected my mother to return to making Christmas ornaments, painting, sewing dolls, or hooking rugs. Instead, she set about documenting her family’s genealogy—for my siblings, our cousins, and me, she told me. In her glass bell voice, she added that she’d discovered that two of her ancestors arrived in North America before my father’s stowaway.
She’s competing with my father, I thought. I’d known her strategy for ignoring pain didn’t always work for her ever since she’d heard my younger sister describe the inequality between my father’s family and hers as the difference between having grass and flowerbeds in front of your house and plain old dirt. So I assumed she hoped she’d find even more information to prove her family was as rooted in American history as my father’s leather-bound one.
When my mother finished her genealogy, it filled three volumes. As she gave it to me, she said, “Well I guess you could say we are French Canadians because my grandfather, Bartholomew Martin, entered the United States through Canada.”
Now I was irked. I thanked her for the books and told her how much I appreciated all her work, but my mind churned what I couldn’t say out loud: Point of entry into the United States, Mom? When did that count? That’s just a back-handed way of telling me that we’re not French Canadian, and you’re still angry that I asked. It was an innocent question, Mom. Give me a break. Can’t we just forget about it?
Luckily, those thoughts stayed silent. When I turned the pages, it seemed likely that she’d mentioned French Canadians to prepare me: my mother was “French” not only because her grandfather Bartholomew Martin was born in France, but also because his wife, my mother’s grandmother, Mary Jaro, was French Canadian. My mother must have grown up knowing that her grandmother was born in Canada as Marie Giroux. As my mother had often stressed, the two of them had been close. I’d seen photographs. And I’d almost forgotten that, years before, my mother told me that her grandmother couldn’t possibly be related to my friend, whose last name was also Jaro, because Mary Jaro’s name was originally spelled another way.
There was much more in my mother’s genealogy that she’d failed to tell me. The French her father spoke growing up was Canadian. When she was teaching me French, why hadn’t she admitted that, instead of calling his accent uncultured? My mother’s great-grandparents André Giroux and Caesarie LaPierre were also born in Canada. Did it make my mother sad that they’d abandoned such beautiful names to become Andrew Jaro and Sarah Stone?
There was another jewel in my mother’s work, which was not directly related to being French or French Canadian but did shed light on how she was willing to describe herself to others. In the seventies, my mother had disavowed being a feminist as strongly as she’d denied being French Canadian. The struggle for equal rights for women at work and at home was “not her cup of tea,” she’d insisted. And yet, in an effort that showed her female pride and was worthy of any flag-waving women’s libber, my mother had rescued the names of the women in her female lineage back to a woman who had emigrated to America in the seventeenth century. Before genealogy-search websites proliferated on the Internet, those names were too often destined to oblivion. Genealogy books were like my father’s leather-bound one, tracing only the paternal line. It had taken my mother years of searching through New England town records to find her maternal line. When my mother gave me her three-volume opus, my friends were impressed. Not one of them knew a name as far back as her great-grandmother’s mother.
And now I also knew that all of us in that maternal chain, except my mother, who married an eighth-generation American, for a total of nine generations married into families of recent immigrants, not only from Canada and France, but also Scotland and England, as well as Denmark (my husband) and Italy (my daughter’s husband). Probably this was a coincidence, but I savored it. Weren’t scientists discovering genes for just about everything? I liked imagining that our chain shared a magnet gene for European men.
* * *
A lifetime ago a mother had a French grandfather and a French Canadian grandmother. Therefore, she was part French Canadian and her three little daughters were, too—not much, but above the New England one-drop cut-off.
A lifetime ago that mother moved to Great Neck with her daughters and husband. They were strangers there, and she knew almost nothing about the town except that its schools were good. She didn’t know her new neighborhood was filled with immigrants. She didn’t know her neighbors hadn’t heard of French Canadians. She didn’t know there were almost no fair-haired children in her daughter’s new kindergarten class. When she was growing up, she told me (I was the daughter in kindergarten) the popular girls were blonde.
A lifetime ago the stranger to Great Neck took my sisters and me for a walk. A kindly woman greeted her and after a long conversation, the kindly woman asked the stranger where she was from. The stranger shouted “We are American,” meaning, “Don’t you dare think we are anything else,” and at that moment my mother, the stranger to Great Neck, became a stranger to me as well. After that, she revealed only occasional glimpses of the mother I thought I’d known.
That lifetime had passed now, and with it my mother. In her wake, the detritus of her obfuscations, silences, and denials remained. Was she in Paris to distance herself from French Canadians or to kindle French Canadian pride in the place she was from? Was she free to tell her story only after my father couldn’t read it, or did he know it and encourage her? And why, if she feared being an outsider, did she braid our hair? After all those years, I could not say if I knew my mother not at all or far too well.
My mother holding tight to my hand in a chain of once little girls that stretched back far beyond the worlds of my imagining. My mother, impossibly tall. My mother enchanting me with her French, French Canadian heart.
My mother. The stranger. My mother.