A Good Enough Daughter: A memoir

Book by Shulman Alix Kates

Whenever my parents came to visit me in New York City, I never met them at the airport; even during the years my husband had a car, I let them take a bus or taxi. Yet for forty years, each time I flew to Cleveland, my parents or brother met my plane no matter how I might demur. They did it out of courtesy and love and to insure that no preventable discomfort could provide me an excuse to stay away. Still, once I wrenched myself out of their lives, nothing they did could bring me back till I was ready. The years rolled by, with some years only the occasional phone call and not one visit.

Now I was back--smack in the center of their lives. But this time my parents' car, armed with a car alarm, sat idle in its garage, and my brother Bob was dead. So I took an escalator down to the lowest level of the Cleveland airport, hopped on the convenient Rapid Transit that goes directly to downtown Cleveland and straight out Shaker Boulevard to a stop not two hundred feet from my parents' house. The Rapid had been whisking affluent professionals and businessmen from their downtown offices past Cleveland's industrial slums back up to their grand Shaker Heights houses ever since the 1920s, when the Van Sweringen brothers built the suburb, along with the fancy shops of Shaker Square, for successful Clevelanders--including the architect who built for himself my parents' house. I used to think the proximity of the house to the Rapid was Mom's trump in persuading Dad to sell the modest Cleveland-Heights-style three-bedroom on Ashurst Road where Bob and I grew up ("a postage stamp, but sweet," recalled my mother) for this six-bedroom English-style Shaker edifice: any day of the week he had only to step out the front door at five minutes past the hour or half hour to catch a train that would deposit him in a mere twelve minutes on Public Square, a five-minute walk from his office. Some people might have taken longer, lingering at the enticing windows of those great thriving department stores, Higbee's and May's, or (like me) stopping for cashews at the Nut House or for chocolates at Fannie Farmer; but S. S. Kates, born Samuel Simon and known around town as Speedy Sam, was in too much of a hurry to saunter. "I saw your dad on Prospect Avenue the other day walking so fast he leaned going around the corner," reported a young lawyer to me admiringly when my father was ninety. The brief memoir Dad composed at eighty-eight begins: "I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, November 10, 1901, in the kitchen of my parents' home, apparently in a rush to enter the world, and the habit of rushing--hurrying--being impatient--being early--has stayed with me ever since." Now I know my father agreed to buy the house for Mom for a weightier reason: Okay, Bummer, he said when the time came, I'll move if that will bring you back to me.

I carried my bags up the drive past the long leaf-strewn lawn spotted by one tall spruce and one towering elm. There used to be three elms, but two succumbed to Dutch elm disease years ago and were felled and hauled away. Around the garage I trudged, past Mom's flower garden, dormant but for three late roses, to the back porch. Fishing out my key and the secret code to the alarm, I felt an illicit excitement: in the forty years my parents had lived in this house, I'd never stayed in it alone. Now I could search out its secrets without asking permission.

An ear-piercing wail violating the dignity of the entire stretch of boulevard shattered the air as I let myself in. Dropping my bags, I dashed past the kitchen to the foyer, flung open the door of the coat closet, and groped behind a scarf for a keypad to shut off the alarm. Consulting my notes, first I punched in the code for the outer ring, which controls doors, windows, cellar, and porch, then the one for the electric eyes that scan the interior spaces in search of an intruder who, breaking the beam, can set off a tremendous clanging in the house and simultaneously a signal at the police station.

This tyrannical burglar alarm (and its cousin in the car) was the highest-tech object in the house. Until a decade ago, my parents didn't own a clothes dryer, but had their laundry hung by wooden clothespins on lines strung the length of the basement. Though Mom was passionate about music and a lifelong concertgoer, they never upgraded their sound system to stereo, much less to cassettes or CDs, remaining content to play their old 33-rpm records on the same Magnavox phonograph on which I learned the classics back in the 1940s by playing them over and over endlessly, driving everyone away. (It was only fair, since Bob was allowed to blast through the air all summer long the play-by-play of every Cleveland Indians game.) Except for the garage-door opener and a microwave oven, there were no electronics in this house, no VCR or answering machine or even a digital clock, though my mother invested in an electric typewriter when she decided to write a novel at sixty-six. At eighty-two she considered buying a computer to write a book about Bob, but never did. I'd been using a computer for years by then, but I didn't encourage her. Worse, fearing her too old to learn, I was evasive when she sought my advice. Too bad--it might have kept her mind intact. That's one book I'd now give anything to read.

When the deafening noise stopped, I stretched a tentative toe into the hall before venturing out to the living room. Pale pleated drapes of beige linen covered the windows, dulling down the late afternoon light. I drew them open window by window as I circled the rooms--living room, sun porch, dining room, even the small corner library where my mother always sat with the drapes drawn tightly shut. Not that the neighbors could have seen her through the shrubbery, but for a public person Mom always husbanded her privacy, hugged close her secrets. Sunk into the cushions of the sofa with her stuffed datebook beside her and her mail piled on the low Japanese lacquered cabinet that held the telephone, she could linger all morning over coffee in negligee and slippers, the phone cradled on her shoulder, a pencil between her polished fingernails. A slow starter, compared to Speedy Sam. Or maybe just a leisurely dresser, given the rigors of her exacting toilette. Hurry up, Bummer, make it snappy--Dad's signature words to Mom, sixty years' worth of which are indelibly etched in my ears. He taps his foot and pulls out his pocket watch. Speed it up or we'll be late. Come on, move the bodouv!--short for bodouviator, Dad's elevated coinage for behind.

As light filled the library, I was taken aback to see no sign of life. The plants on the table drooped in their pots, the unanswered mail lay somewhere in a drawer, Mom's active datebook had taken its place in the cabinet alongside dead ones going back to the 1950s, the clock had stopped, and no smells wafted in from the kitchen.

Returning to the living room, where no book lay open on the coffee table, I walked to the farthest end to survey the vast expanse. So much space for just the two of them--as Bob repeatedly observed, bugging them to sell their house, forgetting that even back in 1954 when they bought it there were just the two of them. If you stood beside the Anthony Caro sculpture at one end, looking past the large tiled fireplace with Dad's Crystal Owl, bestowed by the American Arbitration Association for distinguished lifetime service, on the mantel, straight through the entrance hall, past the paneled dining room with its long mahogany table, marquetry sideboard, and tea cart with hammered silver tea service ("Your mother," pronounced their friend and neighbor, Carola de Florent, "set the most elegant table in all of Cleveland, down to the tiniest detail. The silver, the china, the table linens, every last teacup was exquisite. And the food!--the food was perfection!"), and on to the distant library, your eye took in an expanse of pale blue walls, blue carpet, and Persian rugs extending eighty feet from one end of the house to the other--and every table and wall boldly adorned with art. There they hung, my mother's pride, warranting the loud alarms: the de Kooning, the Motherwell, the Frankenthaler, the Avery, the Dubuffet, the two Stellas, the Kline, the Olitski, the Tworkov, the Nevelson--gay or serene, somber or wild, resplendent in their colors and forms, embodying my mother's ambition, resourcefulness, and taste, and, despite his ambivalent mix of disapproval and pride, my father's security and solace.

I plopped down on the living room couch to study the Nevelson while there was still light. A three-foot-square wooden construction of black-painted disks and cubes set inside an irregularly shaped black formica frame, it now belonged to me. Last year I asked for it--the only thing of value I ever asked for. Because it was the one piece in the collection I really loved, I said I hoped they would will it to me rather than leave to chance my drawing it in the elaborate face-off between my brother's children and me whereby, according to the wills, we were to take turns choosing what we wanted, so long as the values wound up equal. (Dad always made a fetish of equality between me and my brother, alive or per stirpes). We were finishing dinner at the time. Since she turned eighty, Mom had been gradually dispersing her things, at the end of each visit inviting her granddaughters to select a pair of antique cups from her collection and urging me to choose something valuable to take home; but I was so loath to appear acquisitive that I usually accepted only trifles. Tickled that at last I wanted something, Mom waved her fork and said, Well of course, darling, it's yours, and turning to my father asked, Why don't we give it to her now, Sam? Whereupon my father tossed his napkin on the table, leaped up, and penned a letter on the spot conveying the Nevelson to me. Signed, dated, witnessed, done.

Alone now in this empty house, too late I realized I should have admired her things more openly, accepted her gifts of love. After so many years apart it was foolish to feel that my indepe...