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a point of view, but reporters generally
aim for fairness, and libel law generally enforces
it.
I slipped through the looking glass when I dug into
my mother's story.
Professional decorum? I wept in every interview.
Sometimes my emotions carried me so far from the job at
hand that my interview subjects wrapped their arms
around me and soothed me as if I were a colicky baby.
Objectivity? I leapt at scraps of hearsay. This one says
my grandfather hid a bottle in his desk at the factory?
In an instant I reconfigured my mother's biography,
attributing her fall into my teetotaling father's arms
to her dad's drunkenness. Fifty people told me of her
kindness before one described her as cold and selfish
and confessed a wicked prank her schoolmates played on
her. Get me rewrite: First I was eerily thrilled by the
tidbit, as if it let me off the hook for not knowing
much about my mom. Her life was a blank canvas to me
because she was cold. Her fault. Then I felt sad for
her—the outcast schoolgirl cruelly tricked—and sadder
for my own schoolgirl self, who hadn't the warmth to
warm her own mother. Finally I was angry at the old
woman who poured that poison in my ear.
By the time I was making my first memories, my mother
was in the last decade of her life. It was sixties, and
we were a suburban family of five: mother and father,
sister and brother, and widowed grandmother quietly
crocheting in a rocker upstairs. We opened presents
under a fir tree on Christmas mornings. We shared our
big brown Thanksgiving turkeys and clove-speckled Easter
hams with our cousins from Chicago's southside. Sunday
mornings, we piled into our Cadillac and my father drove
us half a mile to the only block in Evanston that housed
two stone churches—the First Baptist Church, and the
First Church of Christ, Scientist. Hers and his. I went
with my mother and grandmother to the Baptists, while my
father took my brother to hear the gospel according to
Mary Baker Eddy.
When my mom died, our family traditions disappeared
with her.
My father shipped my grandmother—his
mother-in-law—back to Tennessee. He got rid of my
mother's clothes and emptied her shelves in the
bathroom. He worked long hours at his office in the Loop
and traveled for business, leaving his teenage children
alone with their teen troubles. He started dating.
Five years after he was widowed, my father went
bankrupt and moved in with his girlfriend. He was
sixty-six. She was thirty-six. I was nineteen. He put my
mother's wedding ring on her finger, though they never
married, and gave her my mother's jewelry. The bits of
furniture
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