Habit (14 page)

Daddy was very organized; I'm sure he could have told me where their birth certificates and things were at all times. He used to spend hours in his study, sitting behind the desk he inherited from his father, the Chief Justice, working his way through a vodka bottle in the bottom right-hand drawer and poring meticulously over figures. Daddy also had a sense of humor: For years, he kept a paperweight on the bureau, with a giant clip holding a check carefully filled out by Ma:

Date:
$106.40

Amount:
Marjorie von Moschzisker

Pay to the Order of:
March 5, 1969

Signed:
The Mills Hardware Company

After he died and we kids formed Operation Ma, I didn't inherit the desk, but I did get the job. The way Ma kept her accounts made me tear my hair out. My picky-eater friend Margaret would speak up for Ma when she could. Her husband, George, is an artist, too, and according to Margaret, their brains don't
do
orderly financial management. And that's quite an understatement.

If Ma's organizational talents equaled her artistic gifts, she would be like a top-of-the line Macintosh with all the latest software updates. She had a lot of solid training abroad and in Philadelphia before she raised us. (Painting, drawing, and sculpting—it's funny to think of a young debutante doing all those nudes. Come to think of it, maybe that's why she's so immodest.) As far as I'm concerned, Ma is the real deal. She was always working on something or other while we were growing up. My earliest childhood memory is downright Proustian: sneaking into her mysterious studio upstairs at age two to smell the turpentine, stretching up on tiptoe to peer over the edge of the table at a stained palette's shiny blobs of rich colors, and finally, unable to resist, popping the lid of a paint tube into my mouth. I can still taste the grit. Ma and I practically lived at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on weekends, and I vowed never to do that to our kids. As a result, they haven't learned much about art from me.

Ma's creative pace picked up a lot when the house was finally empty, during The Separation. Daddy had Ma on a strict allowance and, needing to supplement, she managed to launch a significant career as a portrait painter. People would wait their turn for years. Some of the last ones she did were of our children:

Eliza, Ben, Sam

There's been some rumbling among my siblings about the extensive collection of Ma's artwork in our house, but I say tough luck. She needed the money badly after Daddy died, and we were willing to pay for the stuff. It's lucky that David really does like her work. I try not to insist on displaying everything. We've got a bunch of gifted friends and family whose work we really love, but Ma's art is pretty much all over the place. David says it's not just the quality; it's the scope, the journey of her work that he admires. He's only uneasy when my dealings with Ma are particularly fraught. He says it's hard for him to see me worn down while surrounded by all these potent reminders of my mother, no matter how wonderful they are.

But for me, it doesn't seem to matter how upset I am with Ma, my feelings never transfer to her art. I can be screening her calls except to occasionally scream at her and hang up, waking from nightmares about her almost every night, but my relationship with Ma's pictures and sculptures is on a separate plane. I'm in awe, and I love living among them.

There's probably something in psychology textbooks about this, but, whatever. It doesn't feel unhealthy to me. I even admit to a degree of gloating over certain particular treasures, like these two little bronzes I have:

That's Colette, age two, strangling Pussle, the cat. (Pussle really had nine lives—she survived swallowing a needle and thread when she was a kitten, and being dropped repeatedly from the second floor balcony by eight-year-old Felix. She was found once, after an unusually long absence, under a sewage grate in the street. We had to get the fire department to extract her.) The bull is special because Ma's favorite childhood home was in the country. She's so subtle with these gems; they're like sketches almost but you can tell how much she delights in the subjects. I've always felt miffed that Ma stopped sculpting before she could do one of me, but at least I have these two beauties.

Ma keeps trying to give us a portrait she did of me during college, but it's enormous and I don't really like it—I don't think it's her best work and besides, she did nothing to hide the fact that I was bored out of my mind. She has it in her bedroom:

If this piece had a title, it would be
Young Woman on Stairs with Cats, Holding in Her Stomach and Wishing She Had a Cigarette
. Ma let me read that book near my elbow when I got desperate, but mostly I passed the time trying to make her laugh, mimicking her concentrated expression while she painted: head tilted back, eyes squinting, mouth hanging open. She would snort when she turned from the canvas back to me.

Ma at work, 1980s

I wish she could have put me in this oil below—a Christmas present. She based it on a photograph I took of David and the kids at our club in Penllyn. I had no idea Ma was working on it, and it may be my favorite. That's Sam with his back to us in the too-long swim trunks he insisted on wearing that summer. His bony shoulder blades are poking through his towel, which depicts a Central American village scene, a gift from a babysitter from El Salvador who helped us through the aftermath of the earthquake. Ben looks almost manly. Eliza's there with her elegant neck and her bag of chips, smiling for the camera, and David is David, keeping a quiet eye on the brood. That's the polo field in the background, with all its history from my own childhood, of egg-and-spoon races on the Fourth of July, Sunday afternoon teas on the lawn, and riding ponies along the far tree line with Colette. This is my world, and Ma's, too—she saw her father land his plane on that field. Sometimes he would take her there at four a.m. to look for mushrooms in the dew. She watched from the roof of her grandmother's house when the club's barn burned down one night and the era of polo came to an end.

I have my own personal relationship with that leafy branch in the foreground; in fact, every single stroke of this simple but remarkably accurate sketch is part of my DNA. It's my special people enjoying my special place, and it was made specifically for me by the one person who clearly knows how important that is.

I can't remember if it's Colette or Felix who once said
when you really feel at the end of your rope with Ma, remember the art.

Here's one we have that I'm in. It's a
Where's Waldo
. This is the backyard of the first house David and I bought in Los Angeles, just up the hill from Universal Studios. If you look carefully, you'll spot me (actually only my legs) working on a wannabee starlet suntan by the pool. David designed that wall and the gate, and I tended the roses. The house came with a pre-installed mean old white cat with a crooked tail named Missy, who shunned us. She lived mostly in that rose garden (when David wasn't chasing her around the house in a rage, bleeding from their turf battles). Missy's buried there now. We still wish we'd kept this house . . . and it's so typical of Ma to bravely let that blue striped umbrella take up a quarter of the canvas. I imagine a therapist might have questions about that—what exactly are we hiding and whom are we hiding it from?

Ma gave me a fascinating pencil sketch of Daddy. She dashed it off on the day after they were married, during a train ride on the way to report for his height-finder school at the beginning of World War II. Neither one of them had any idea what they were doing; they were not emotionally equipped for marriage and hardly even knew each other. They hadn't really had a honeymoon at all, but look at how she did his lips in this picture: