Mother And Son (February/March 1983 | Volume: 34, Issue: 2)

Mother And Son

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Authors: Malcolm Cowley

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February/March 1983 | Volume 34, Issue 2

MY MOTHER DIED in Pittsburgh on the evening of Thanksgiving Day, that is, on November 25, 1937. If she had lived three weeks longer, she would have been seventy-three.

She died in the Wallace Building, three stories of grimy yellow brick in the commercial center of the district known as East Liberty. Even late at night streetcars grumbled past two sides of the building. It had shops on the ground floor, some of them expensive, though even these had taken to changing owners. The upper stories contained a few cramped apartments, like ours, but were mostly occupied by music teachers—voice, piano, violin—and by a few unprosperous physicians who lived next to their offices. Every two or three years there was a fire in the building, but it was always brought under control. During one fire Mother stood shivering in the street beside my father and watched firemen playing their hoses on the roof.“Oh, doctor,” she said, “I forgot to empty the pan under the icebox. ” She emptied the pan next morning when they went back to the apartment and found it not much damaged except by smoke.

She had lived in the Wallace Building since it was spanking new and she was a bride. She died there in a little room lined ceiling-high with my father’s books, which she never opened, and dimly lighted by an air shaft. She died of a heart illness that had lasted, in its acute form, a little more than three weeks, although it went back to another attack two years before when, as always, she was spending the summer in the country. That first attack would have killed an ordinary woman, but Mother had brought herself through it by a pure determination to live. In her extreme pain she had sometimes moaned, “Mamma, Mamma,” as if begging forsolace from arms that had seldom embraced her. She asked to see a Catholic priest, for the first time in forty years. My father, who was a devoted Swedenborgian, nevertheless summoned a priest, and I think she was given absolution. From that day she slowly began to mend.

Though the nurture she offered him was haphazard, this distinguished writer recalls his mother and the frustrations of her life with loving generosity

Back in Pittsburgh she tried in vain to resume her usual life. She had always been a restless, energetic woman, bigboned, full-bosomed, and confident of the strength in her arms, but that strength couldn’t be restored. Her chief task in those last two years had been taking care of my father. Popsie, as I always called him, was a little round Santa Claus who by then was severely crippled with arthritis. Unable to make house calls, he had lost much of his practice as a homeopathic physician. Mother worried about food for the winter and kept herself too busy canning and preserving. In her last October she bought a bushel