 Family MysteriesbyLev RaphaelThe memoir scandals keep breaking, as publisher Lynn Behler noted in a recent blog post. I never expected to write any memoirs at all, and my first was a short piece commissioned for an anthology called Hometowns. In writing about buying our house in Okemos and what it had been like to live in our bucolic neighborhood, I found myself driven to distraction at times. Had I made a mistake about the number of homes? Or the types of trees? As a fiction writer working in a new genre, I was paranoid about accuracy. But gradually I came to realize that no matter how accurate I tried to be, or was, this was still only my version of a story. My spouse would have told the story differently, and maybe the closer someone is to you, the more different that story will be. One of the earliest memories I have is a traumatic one. It’s actually a set of memories post-trauma. When I was three, my mother fell and broke her hip and spent a week or more in the hospital. I don’t remember her fall, but I do remember her absence and her glorious return. First memory: I’m waking up in the large bedroom I shared with my brother high in a Gilded Age apartment building in Washington Heights, a room decorated with very little more than basic sticks of beige furniture and a full book case. But the double windows opened to a magnificent view of upper Manhattan and the George Washington Bridge which glowed like a giant necklace at night. I think I crept that strange morning from my room down the long gray linoleum-floored hallway because I heard someone in the kitchen. I moved into the foyer and saw across the dining room and into the kitchen that a woman I didn’t know was moving about there. Scared, I hurried back. The next thing I remember is being dressed and my brother helping me tie one of my shoes. My foot is up on the play table at the center of the room, whose 1950s linoleum also is trimmed with a Greek key motif in crimson. The next scene is many days later when my mother is back home, lying on a day bed in the large dining room which also sports an old upright piano. I’m excited that she’s home and that my father is in the kitchen making me bread and butter and honey. I run back forth between her and my snack. Some time later, my mother and I are walking down Broadway. She must be on crutches, and I’m dancing along beside her, thrilled we are together again. The day is sunny and we may be headed to see her friend Pola, who owns a dress shop. The big narrow store is packed with dresses and lingerie, and on the counter near the door is a Maidenform Bra ad. A slim, smiling blond woman in rolled-up pale jeans, a bra and a red scarf as a belt is hanging off a scaffold at night, a paint brush in one hand, the white building in front of her partly red. I also remember at some point standing at the foot of my mother’s bed. The furniture in her room as all black, the shades are drawn, the chenille cover looks very white, but not as pale as her face. “Why did you leave me?” I ask. Okay, here’s where things get blurry. I couldn’t swear to you that I actually remember saying that. I do remember standing at her bed, looking along its length, but did she tell me I said it and now I think I remember it? She did recount years later me that when I was gone, I drew angry black crayon scrawls on paper and said they were “the hospital.” And that even when she was home, there were nights when I would cry myself to sleep. I don’t remember either. Something else. How did my mother fall? I only have her explanation: I used to run to the phone when it rang, pick it up, shout “Wrong number!” and dash off. Trying to forestall me one day, because she was waiting for an important call, she slipped and fell. The story gets even more complicated. Discussing it with my brother when I was going to write about it, he told me that he was there when it happened, that he called for a doctor (who lived in our building), and helped my mother get to the door by getting her into his red wagon and pulling her. I am nowhere present in his narrative, one in which he’s the young hero. And he wasn’t present in my mother’s narrative. She never once told me that my brother had helped her so ably; all she did was talk about how she was trying to stop me from grabbing the phone, how she had morphine at the hospital and it didn’t kill the pain, and that she had a pin (or maybe several) in her hip. She’s been dead over a decade, so I can’t do what I would love to, which is sit down with her and my brother and share our pieces of this story, and see what else the three of us might remember, and how. But writing about it, as I intend to do, the only honest thing will be to weave together the three stories, acknowledging the doubts and the lacunae. Those gaps are as much a part of the story as the facts; memory may be equal parts record and mystery. Books mentioned in this column:
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