Voices
smiled and told me it gave her the
ability to see the truth. I believed
her. She had a way with words, too,
and reading the diary I asked her to
keep in the last six months of her
life was all the proof I needed that,
in another time, another place, she
would’ve been a novelist. Or a poet.
Or perhaps an editor as her son
would become many years later.
So maybe I shouldn’t have been
surprised when, on my 18th birthday, she introduced me to culture.
Culture came in a plain white envelope that contained two tickets
to a Broadway show along with a
simple note in her looping script
that said, “I know you’ll enjoy
this. Love, mom.”
The show was Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, hardly a likely
choice for the wife of a bricklayer
and daughter of an immigrant
day-laborer, who worked as a secretary at a car dealership.
It was an unexpected gift on many
levels. What had prompted my
mother to present me with theater
tickets in the first place? I had not
yet shown any particular passion
for the arts and none for the theater. My idea of culture at the time
consisted largely of going to see Doctor Zhivago twice (mostly for Julie
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Christie) and never missing an episode of The Twilight Zone. When it
came to aesthetic refinement, I was,
as they say, a late bloomer.
And then, of course, I have to
wonder even now, why was she
inspired to choose this chilling and
funny play about death? That year,
as I look back, there were other
My mother had dreams,
and there was poetry in her.
And she had an intriguing
beauty, with chestnut hair and
one blue eye and one green.”
more fanciful options on Broadway — Annie Get Your Gun, I Do! I
Do! and Cabaret were all playing to
packed houses. Why didn’t she pick
one of those musicals?
On the night of the performance, I put on the one corduroy
sports coat and solid tie I owned
and took a bus into the city with
the girl I’d taken to the senior
prom only a few months earlier.
She wore a red dress and heels
and smelled of White Shoulders
Powder. We settled into our mezzanine seats only minutes before
the lights went down.
The week before, I had