of year. Someone else had wept and yelled at me minutes before, and Bella Eldridge would never have recognized her.
My mother wasn’t a weeper and I rarely saw her cry; but there was one other instance of impromptu tears that has stayed with me. It was just before Matt went off to college—in the summertime, because I remember we were freezing in the air-conditioning at the Hunan Gourmet. My brother was surly, wishing himself already gone. My father, typically mild, was oblivious to the tension at the table, to my mother’s tight brightness and her habit, throughout the meal, of reaching for Matt’s sleeve and then pulling back before she touched him, a ghostly sort of tic. It seemed as though I was the only one watching, the only one who could see the four of us in our leatherette armchairs, leaning over the soy-spattered synthetic tablecloth (it rucked with every human movement, then slid oilily back into place), father and son chatting in a desultory way about the upcoming football season and how my brother would have to throw his heart behind the Notre Dame team, now that he was going there, all the way to Indiana. My mother, who loathed sports, kept trying to change the subject, picking at possible threads (the campus? The journey? Matt’s friend Busby’s choice of Bowdoin?) like a glassy-eyed magpie: thwarted, persistent, quick. It was an evening in which I said nothing—it was like that with our family, because Matthew and I had so little relation to one another beyond his occasional insult or a quietly hostile tousling of my hair. Even when we were all four together, our parents were being either his parents or mine, in one mode or the other, able to deal adequately with only one of us, two children who merely happened to share the same accursèd progenitors. And that Hunan Gourmet outing was a Matthew Eldridge night.
It was the fortune cookie that felled my mother. Mine said simply “Hallelujah!,” and Matt’s promised, “A short vacation is in order for you.” My father’s told us, “It isn’t our position, but our disposition, that makes us happy”—and if my mother had gotten that one, things probably would have been fine. But my mother’s fortune read: “It is what you haven’t done that will torment you”—which I knew only because I picked it up off the floor on the way out. When she read it, she gave a little cry, as if wounded, and crumpled and chucked it, and then became very silent, and for the last ten minutes of the meal I watched the tears trickle unacknowledged out of the corners of her eyesand down her cheeks, and I watched the tremor of her lower lip, and I watched my brother and my father throw themselves the more valiantly into the football conversation (Matt even dropped his surliness, animated in his effort) so as to pretend, altogether, that everything was fine. Nobody said anything to my mother; nobody even asked what her fortune had been. Only on the way out of the restaurant my father put his hand on Matt’s shoulder and murmured, in the bluff, confidential tone of manhood at that time, “Be good to your mother these last few days. It’s hard for her that you’re going.” And I, all of eight, wondered briefly whether Notre Dame involved danger, like going to Vietnam (my friend Sheila’s cousin had been killed there a couple of years before, and the older brother of a boy in my class had come back not right in the head), but didn’t ask.
Over the years I’ve tried to understand my mother’s emotion at that moment—regret about an unconsummated love affair? Her own Lucy Jordan moment? Simple sadness at my brother’s departure, and thoughts of all the things that now would be forever unsaid?—but all I know is that I’ll never know. I decided, for a long time, that it had to do with the ending of a maternal role, with the painful knowledge of all she’d sacrificed to raise him, when now she was handing off her son to the world. But more recently, I’ve
My mother wasn’t a weeper and I rarely saw her cry; but there was one other instance of impromptu tears that has stayed with me. It was just before Matt went off to college—in the summertime, because I remember we were freezing in the air-conditioning at the Hunan Gourmet. My brother was surly, wishing himself already gone. My father, typically mild, was oblivious to the tension at the table, to my mother’s tight brightness and her habit, throughout the meal, of reaching for Matt’s sleeve and then pulling back before she touched him, a ghostly sort of tic. It seemed as though I was the only one watching, the only one who could see the four of us in our leatherette armchairs, leaning over the soy-spattered synthetic tablecloth (it rucked with every human movement, then slid oilily back into place), father and son chatting in a desultory way about the upcoming football season and how my brother would have to throw his heart behind the Notre Dame team, now that he was going there, all the way to Indiana. My mother, who loathed sports, kept trying to change the subject, picking at possible threads (the campus? The journey? Matt’s friend Busby’s choice of Bowdoin?) like a glassy-eyed magpie: thwarted, persistent, quick. It was an evening in which I said nothing—it was like that with our family, because Matthew and I had so little relation to one another beyond his occasional insult or a quietly hostile tousling of my hair. Even when we were all four together, our parents were being either his parents or mine, in one mode or the other, able to deal adequately with only one of us, two children who merely happened to share the same accursèd progenitors. And that Hunan Gourmet outing was a Matthew Eldridge night.
It was the fortune cookie that felled my mother. Mine said simply “Hallelujah!,” and Matt’s promised, “A short vacation is in order for you.” My father’s told us, “It isn’t our position, but our disposition, that makes us happy”—and if my mother had gotten that one, things probably would have been fine. But my mother’s fortune read: “It is what you haven’t done that will torment you”—which I knew only because I picked it up off the floor on the way out. When she read it, she gave a little cry, as if wounded, and crumpled and chucked it, and then became very silent, and for the last ten minutes of the meal I watched the tears trickle unacknowledged out of the corners of her eyesand down her cheeks, and I watched the tremor of her lower lip, and I watched my brother and my father throw themselves the more valiantly into the football conversation (Matt even dropped his surliness, animated in his effort) so as to pretend, altogether, that everything was fine. Nobody said anything to my mother; nobody even asked what her fortune had been. Only on the way out of the restaurant my father put his hand on Matt’s shoulder and murmured, in the bluff, confidential tone of manhood at that time, “Be good to your mother these last few days. It’s hard for her that you’re going.” And I, all of eight, wondered briefly whether Notre Dame involved danger, like going to Vietnam (my friend Sheila’s cousin had been killed there a couple of years before, and the older brother of a boy in my class had come back not right in the head), but didn’t ask.
Over the years I’ve tried to understand my mother’s emotion at that moment—regret about an unconsummated love affair? Her own Lucy Jordan moment? Simple sadness at my brother’s departure, and thoughts of all the things that now would be forever unsaid?—but all I know is that I’ll never know. I decided, for a long time, that it had to do with the ending of a maternal role, with the painful knowledge of all she’d sacrificed to raise him, when now she was handing off her son to the world. But more recently, I’ve
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