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My Mother Writes the
Letter That I Dream by
Mary Cappello Because of her creativity
with her flowers, even my memories
of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms. —Alice
Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens I live and dream for no
one can deny it to me—not even
poverty. —From
the Journal of my Maternal Grandfather,
John Petracca I Alice
Walker’s mother’s garden reverberates for me in the survival lines I trace
through my Italian-American immigrant family. The knowledge and desire to
tend the earth and attend its seasons—the gardens I grew up in stood for
willfulness, patience, and an abiding love of changing forms. Eggplant
ripening on the vine; the first fig at table; a gardenia for every occasion,
forget-me-nots and roses for every day. Gardening doesn’t exactly screen out the material circumstances of not
having heat in one’s home or the mental anguish brought on by the classism
and racism that prevent one from getting it. What I have learned from my
mother’s and grandparents’ love of plants, of fruit and flower, though, is
that the creation of a garden was an absolute necessity for them, and that,
as a result, I have more vivid memories of those gardens than of the actual
architectural spaces called home. The garden was the place where the
imagination, in work and play, could take up residence. The garden, that is
to say, was a many spoked wheel that enabled other survival guides, including
the act of writing. Words
in the form of conversation in visits from friends forge the space between
plantings; whether a favorite flower will “take” this year will take the form
of dreams. Ritual gatherings around unexpected spectacles in the garden lead
to poetry. Snapdragons, if you press the hairy underside of their throats
ever so gently, will speak. As a child, I wanted to eat every blossom in
view, until I learned the pleasure in my mouth of their names: calla lily,
cosmos, rose eclipse, dahlia. As an adult, I keep The Field Guide to Wild Flowers on the same shelf with books of
poems: “fragrant bedstraw,” “wild madder,” “grass-of-parnassus,”
“night-flowering catchfly,” “ragged robin,” “shooting star.” Everything in
the garden is shared with neighbors—even the ones who aren’t speaking to
you—so my mother sends me at eight-years old on the errand to deliver
tomatoes in odd-sized brown paper bags to each unsuspecting asphalt dweller.
Now there is something like the receipt of a letter to celebrate on Concord
Road. Turning
down a particular garden path in my mind—it might be lined with shells, or bricks,
discarded tires or aluminum cans—I remember how gardens provide a way to
wander, and how gardens become a place for the sweetness of doing nothing.
After squeezing out orange juice for a family of nine, sizzling orange peel
for scent, washing each sock on a washboard with arthritic fingers, my
greatgrandmother disappears through the screendoor to the garden. She’s left
her rosaries behind, fills her pockets with camphorleaf, then sits or stands
staring, not sighing now for her five dead children or the ocean between her
and the place of their birth and death. She walks slowly, she nods, she sits
or stands. She’s doing nothing. Turning another bend, beneath the pear tree
whose fruit the squirrels have won again, stands grandfather, hands open,
eyes shut. So many shoes repaired will mean at least one child will be able
to see the dentist. But for these moments, it is important to do nothing. In
another generation, there’s my mother. Locked in our rowhome for seven years
with agoraphobia—episodes of which began in the Catholic church she later
learned to leave—my mother roams the garden at least, gathering herbs,
gathering thoughts, she writes. It
is the odd path I want to explore now, the link between flowers and letters,
a brief history of unvalorized jottings. Both my maternal grandfather and my
mother found various forms, in solitude and community, for expressing the
politics of their daily lives. My grandfather left mountains of lore, short
stories, aphorisms that he composed in his shoe repair shop and jotted onto
the material of his trade, whole treatises squeezed onto the back of the tab
used to mark down what part of the shoe needed fixing, with a word
inevitably broken by the hole-punched “O” at the top or bottom of the tab. My
grandfather was a musician and sculptor who taught me to play mandolin, and
my grandmother to play guitar. He also helped to found a mandolin and guitar
society. My mother organized poetry readings, edited a poetry journal of her
own creation in Philadelphia for many years, and most recently has become a
self-taught painter of figures of mandala-like proportion named for the
sound in her ear when she suffered a severe ear infection (“Sound”), memories
of her own mother’s unusual though seasonal art (“Mother’s Palm 2”), and
daily political struggles: during Lorraina Bobbitt’s trial, she made a canvas
of Permanent Rose and deep Turquoise (“Woman Rising”). The form that persists
even as it takes different shapes across three generations in my family,
however, is the letter, sent or unsent. While waiting for leaves or flowers
to line the trees, my grandfather and mother seem to have created letters
like lines strung with lanterns reaching toward some other. Now in the days
of electronic mail, one friend writes me that, “You are one of my few (only?)
e-mail correspondents who write real letters and talk about difficult things
naturally on the net,” and letters consistently become the bases of or
impetus behind my poems. I have written poems using excerpts from letters
received when the words asked to be shared with others or threatened to
uplift themselves off the page. Poems write themselves in lieu of letters or
because of the impossibility of sending a letter. If I cannot write you a
letter, let me find a poem. Most recently, I wrote a poem in the form of a
letter to a deceased friend: “Dear Marge / You were never one for perfunctory
salutations, / you gave your greetings with a kiss. / I refuse to seal the
envelope of these lines. / I shall cast my net wide. / I await your reply.” II My
family’s letters begin in a language I cannot read; they leave a strong scent
linked to a memory not my own but that seems to reside in my body
nonetheless. In their better moods, they leave traces of the work they did of
love, a form of saving, well done. It is odd to have so many of my
grandfather’s unsent letters—I don’t want to wear those as keepsakes around
my neck, nor can I take up the thread, Emily Dickinson-style, and bind them
into a book well-kept but drafty. My mother guides my fingers over the raised
marks and impressions made from where the words began:[1] LETTERS written in Italian by a young man to a
teenage American
girl who couldn’t
understand them she’d ask her
stepmother to translate them, but she wouldn’t Now, the pages are
thin and brittle here and there,
what once were real violets he placed within a
page are purple marks what once were words, black blurs A fragile art. III My
grandfather keeps a dictionary on the dining room table, and reads, longs to
write, in English. I am a child, so I give him a gift that I would enjoy—a
box of chocolate covered cherries. He gives me my first lesson in poetry in
the form of a thank you letter: Dear Mimi: I am
writing a few phrases to thank you for your delicious and most welcome cherry
gift. Due to the stubbornness of age, my teeth are unwilling to chew such
sweetness, and I am usually forced to look and not enjoy such delicacy. But
now, I am going to dissolve the candies in my coffee, making a chocolate
drink adorned with pretty cherries.[2] Over the years, he has corresponded with
Irving, the man who spoke of suicide during the Depression and who credited
my grandfather’s “homespun philosophy” with saving him: Dear Irving: I am
answering your letter while pacing up and down the sunny side of the yard of
my cozy home. The weather is so marvelous after the zero period of a few days
ago that I am without an overcoat. Imagine such a change! It seems
impossible, yet it is true. This teaches us not to despair, for good days are
always in store for us all. As he writes these lines, one of his
daughters is confined to a darkened room with an illness called St. Vitus’
Dance, and the mortgage company has threatened foreclosure. Years after,
Irving has died, so my grandfather writes to his wife: Dear Mrs. Peterson:
How are you? your children? your condition? Please write and let us know
all. It may do you good to write to us and vice versa. I would love to
write to you but I don’t know if you would enjoy my way of writing as your
late husband did. If you would, I would be only glad to write now and then as
I did to Irving. I am trying to translate a favorite book of mine from an
Italian poet, and if you care I could send you part by part as I progress. Please accept the
enclosed dollar and buy some ice cream for your little ones, and of course, a
cone for you, too. We hope you are well and wish you a
brighter future. IV In
the late l940s, two of my aunts, the two eldest daughters, entered a
semi-cloistered convent together. My grandfather was devastated by their
absence, but my grandmother refused to let him send them the letters he wrote
to them—they were too sad. Now my mother, age fourteen, took up the pen, soon
to learn in an odd combination of prohibition and release, refusal and receipt,
that the mother superior would read all letters before the sisters saw them
and black out lines where she saw fit. Enchanted by my mother’s teenage
accounts of the latest family news, the mother superior read her letters to
the entire convent community while secretly preparing a place for her among
them when she came of age. My mother never became the convent scribe or
church’s muse, but this almost accidental encouragement launched an identity
in letters, and she later went so far as to compose feminist sermons for a
progressive parish priest. By
the time my mother was the age I am as I write this, in her early thirties,
she had borne three children and an unresponsive, often violent husband. More
a hippie than a happy homemaker—the walls in our house were painted mandarin
orange and cobalt blue—my mother nevertheless struggled daily as so many
women still do, with the oppressive nature of domestic Law. When fear and
depression kept her from literally leaving the house, she sent out life lines
in the form of letters, so many match stems sometimes blazing, sometimes
quickly spent, in the dark. In
l958 she won a letter writing contest sponsored by a Philadelphia radio
station on the topic of a woman who had become a member of congress (the
prize was an osterizer that is now a splendid objet d’art); she began to
treat the newspaper as a letter begging for response; she invited public
figures whose work spoke to her into our working-class living room: Salvador
Dali and Ingmar Bergman didn’t reply, but Sam Levenson and LadyBird Johnson
did. When a local radio station featured a discussion of whether priests
should be able to marry as a cure for loneliness, she wrote a long letter to
one of the discussants—a Monsignor, who was also a newspaper editor—about
the great periods of loneliness endured in fifteen years of marriage to the
wrong person, and she told stories that her female neighbors told her of
frequent loneliness and abuse. The Monsignor published the piece on the front
page of his paper and solicited subsequent articles on timely issues from my
mother for a number of years. Meanwhile, my mother continued to correspond
now with a new friend through the mail—a Californian woman poet who only
coincidentally suffered as well from agoraphobia and whose poetry was
claiming attention on the West Coast. My mother and Annie have written each
other letters—whatever, whenever, in the mood or out of the mood, never
having to wait for the other to write before putting the next missive in the
mail. They have told each other their daily lives for the past twenty years,
and I’m convinced, on some level cured each other of despair, many a time
saved each other through letters from drowning. V While
composing this piece, I received the shocking news via an alumni publication
that a man who was dear to me as an undergraduate was killed in a bicycling
accident. That news led me to return to the sporadic communication we had
maintained through letters. I dug through mounds of mail packed away in my
cellar for a bit of Tom’s spirit and voice, his tendency toward old
yellow-lined legal sized paper and a black fountain pen. While reading, I
found the following commentary on letter-writing and, of all things, the
presence of my mother’s
letter-writing practice in that past: It’s wonderful to
hear from you; I knew I could rely on you to send me a fat envelope bursting
with news and ideas, not to mention poetry. Though I didn’t quite expect such
a hefty package, not after so many years. My friends have mostly joined the
telephone fraternity and find it difficult to master the energy to write
when it’s so easy to call. Only a few destitute friends out in California for
whom a cross-country phone call is still a monetary indulgence continue to
correspond by mail. Yet, I would always prefer a letter to a phone call.
From past experience, I know that the Cappello family, for one, will
continue to prevent the postman from becoming an anachronism; I still
remember receiving a note from your mother before, if I recall correctly, we
had ever become acquainted. My mother, it now occurred to me, perhaps
was wrong to have called letter-writing a “fragile art” in her poem. My
memory of Tom would indeed have been fragile if not for this bundle of letters, the impress of his mind’s body
meandering, brook-like, over, around, and through each distinct formation of
the alphabet. And, her letter to
him, as from a stranger, was one part of a pulse in him. If
letter-writing is really a fragile art, that’s only because, as my family has
demonstrated to me, the medium has to contain unspeakable truths and
inappropriate yearnings that other narrative options seem unable to admit.
Letter-writing might be the only available instrument, for example, for the
“strange noise, which was so loud as to be heard a considerable distance”
(14) that nineteenth-century Native American activist, William Apess,
describes as the bodily echo that cured his hysterical illness; the noise
that, contrary to expectations, enabled him to revive and regain his former
health. Yes, my immigrant heritage is marked by inappropriateness,
delegitimized sound, call it the noise of my grandfather’s desire to make a
living crafting shoes, of my mother’s desire to be accounted for as a woman,
of my desire to love other women, of our collective desire to be writers in
an American culture that would stem the imagination of difference, and that
refuses artistic practice as a place around which the mind and heart might
rally. Now
I try to understand the pathological (?) sense of loss (in the form of
depression) and fear (in the form of phobia) that characterizes my ethnic
heritage: the manifest calls whose response was the letter. I can locate the
source of disjunction in the immigrant status, the initial anomie of being
out of place; but that sense of separation may have only expanded in
proportion to my grandfather’s un-macho ways and my mother’s unladylike
tendency to tell it like it is—this in the light of the patriarchal history
of Mediterranean culture aided and abetted by the misogynist spirituality of
the Catholic church. My
mother is “cured” now—as I once described it in a poem: “when writing fails,
/ you paint. / when painting fails, / you dance. / when dancing fails, / you
remember your parents. / when memory fails, / you take long walks. / And you
have filled your closets / with color; / you have fought the dragon fear /
and won.” And, I learned a great deal from the way in which strangers were
drawn to confide their secrets and pain as well as their joy to my mother once
she started to go out again. Moreover,
this history of uneasiness tempered by lives of letters with which I was
surrounded growing up has made me aware of how little is actually said or
shared about the labors and machinations of our inner lives in a culture
dominated by the confessional modes of the Talk, Talk, Talk Show. Letters
may be precisely the place where a dislocation of what’s come to be thought
of as the “personal” can truly occur. My
mother is “cured” now . . . but I still find it hard to treat
agoraphobia with a sense of humor. A recent TV guide helps me with the
description of a movie about an agoraphobic who gets a roommate to help her
with her rent. The roommate comes complete with a man who is not her brother
(as assumed) but her lover who is also a murderer. Now the agoraphobic isn’t
sure whether to be more frightened by the murderer or by the prospect of
going out. When I tell a friend who is a Beckettian about my mother’s one
time inability to get past the three steps that marked the front of our
house, she explains that Beckett would use the condition to create a
character stuck on the steps, unable to tell whether there are one, two, or
three steps to be mastered, for it would depend on where you’re standing to
know where to begin. Depression
and agoraphobia are not failings but responses, conditions, ways of saying.
When my mother painted the walls of our cramped home orange and blue, she was
trying to let enter the sun, the moon. As a child, I let the blue surround me
in tidal comfort as I tried to fall asleep. But I worried about my mother,
and I worried about myself if someday she should disappear forever into that
sadness. Alice Walker asked, “How did my overworked mother have time to know
or care about feeding the creative spirit?” (239). It’s past midnight, and I
still can’t sleep . . . until I hear the tiny tick of the gas
stove, and smell coffee percolating. Now I know my mother’s pen is moving
across the page: my mother writes the letter that I dream. Like a walk in the
garden, it is not a grand gesture, but it is profound. The letter means that
someone else is walking with her, that she will be there in the morning, that
I can sleep. *** ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Sally Drucker and James
Morrison of NC State University who initially encouraged me to compose and
present this essay for a panel on ethnic women’s responses to Alice Walker’s
“In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” at “Journey Proud: How Women’s Stories
Speak the World,” North Carolina Central University, and to Nellie McKay who
gave the paper a forum at the “Redefining Autobiography” Panel at the l995
Chicago, MLA. Louise DeSalvo, Sharon O’Brien, and William Andrews have
generously helped me to see how from this work, future work will grow. I
would like to dedicate this essay to Tom Sinclair-Kunz (l956–1993) and to
acknowledge Mary Ann Killilea whose garden and the stories she told me there
helped me to remember. Works
Cited Apess, William. On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings
of William Apess, a Pequot. Ed. Barry O’Connell. Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, l992. Cappello, Rosemary.
Poetry at Manayunk. Philadelphia:
Bodacious P, l992. ___, Ann
Menebroker, and Joan Smith. The Habit
of Wishing: Poetry by Rosemary Cappello, Ann Menebroker, and Joan Smith.
Washington: Goldermood P, l977. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. New
York: Harcourt, l983. |