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Rage and Angels

Brenda Webster

Hal Jaffe asked me to write something about my mother's journal, Hungry for Light: The Journal of Ethel Schwabacher, edited by myself and Judith Emlyn Johnson (Indiana University Press, 1993). What came to me instead were images of me and her. Me outside looking in at her. Her slipping away from me. Maybe editing her journals was the closest I ever came to her, especially after I found her secret ones, the ones she hid in her drawer.

     On the day of my mother's funeral, my friend Judy called and asked me what I was going to do with all the paintings and the journal she had heard about. I hadn't thought, I said. The paintings were stacked in warehouses, the journal manuscript was on Mother's desk. I was going to read some of it at the service, but beyond that... "Mother couldn't find a publisher for it you know," I mumbled. "It needs editing." I could hear myself stalling.

     i am about four years old. i am outside a room, my ear pressed against a door...i hear mother singing softly... i hear the swish of her skirt and the slap of her shoes as she moves back and forward on the wood, approaching and retreating from an object i can't see... i push against the door and whimper, my nurse runs up and pulls me away. your mother is painting, she says, she's making you something pretty. i glare at her, furious... i know it's not for me...

     Mother was one of the group of abstract expressionist artists who came to prominence in the forties. She studied with Arshile Gorky and was best known for the biography which brought him to the public's attention but she was a wonderful painter in her own right, exhibiting at Betty Parsons with artists like Rothko and Barnett Newman, Pousette D'Art and Okada. Still, did I really want to spend years immersed in her work? "I'll do it if you help me," I said to Judy. Judy had always thought she should have been Mother's daughter. They would have been two geniuses together. I knew she'd defend Mother from me, she'd help keep me fair.

     i am outside looking through the open door at what my mother has made with her colored chalks... it is a peach round and covered with a soft fuzz, it hangs under a branch full of green leaves. i can feel the weight of it. my breath catches. i have a mother who is a magician. she gives me a piece of chalk to try but i can't even make my circle round... that's beautiful, she says kindly but it isn't, it is simply an orange scrawl on white paper...

     Editing the journal, I became a voyeur of my mother's inner life, a sort of junkie of her mental processes, fascinated by the way she constructed herself. Her larger than life mythic characters. Can you imagine what it is like to have a mother who sees herself as a child Prometheus tied down and tortured by parent gods, or Oedipus or Abraham, or Orpheus? I got up in the morning and went to school. My mother rose up like a superhuman being to struggle with the Sisyphian stone of her creativity.

     my mother is helping me with my homework. we are in the living room at our farm, squeezed together at a small desk. she keeps looking out the window at the shifting pattern of sunlight on the grass. i am trying very hard to listen to what she is saying so that we can finish and she can get back to her studio... but i can't seem to understand... one number has to go into three numbers that are separated from it by a little sled... looking at the shape of the sled i forget how to make the numbers string out in a long line below... why can't you do this simple thing, my mother screams at me... how many times do i have to explain it? her body is vibrating with the horror of having a backward daughter... a daughter who can't divide. who takes up her time and her energy...

     Each mythic subject poses a problem or revolves around a set of issues. For instance, while painting Orpheus Mother wonders whether it is possible to be an artist and still love someone. She agonizes in her journal over whether Orpheus unconsciously had to get rid of Eurydice in order to create. I know she is thinking of my father who died of a heart attack when he was fifty-three. After thinking of herself as Orpheus for awhile, mother tries to imagine herself as Eurydice, the woman he abandoned. They are the two sides of her self: the woman who craves closeness and the artist who needs distance in order to create. She must know that after my father's death, her painting became more powerful.

     someone calls me out of the riding arena where i have just won a blue ribbon and tells me my father is dead, i have to leave camp right away. i am hurried home bringing all my ribbons to my mother... the reserve championship is yellow and red with gold writing... the first in jumping is blue as the sky. my mother is lying in her bed looking very pale... she seems hardly able to speak. my horse was named Retreat, i tell her when i give her my best ribbon, the one i'm sure will make her smile... i had to use spurs and a crop to get him to go. even the counsellors couldn't believe i'd done it... my mother takes one look and starts to cry... her friend Muriel leads me into the other room. you have to be very careful of your mother, she says, she's on the edge of a nervous breakdown. okay, i say... i think of broken down cars with the stuffing exposed... clearly i am not what my mother needs.

     i am outside the door listening to my mother wailing the words of orpheus's farewell to eurydice. che faro senza eurydice, she cries against the music, che faro senza mio ben? what will she do?: what can she do? the sound says it all... it's impossible... everything is impossible without my father. i hear a sound like glass breaking. i bend and look through the keyhole... she is walking on shards of glass with her bare feet... she is walking over a canvas with her bloody feet... later she tells me that orpheus was torn to pieces by furious women because he rejected love...

     While Judy and I were editing the journal, I found a sheaf of typewritten pages of things Mother had removed from the journal and a handwritten diary in a drawer. The typewritten pages were mostly about her anger and disappointment at not getting enough recognition from the art world and her attempt to paint her own Parnassus--portraits of geniuses with whom she felt allied. The other diary--I called it the rage journal--was written in a completely different style. Brief jottings, fragments of her psychoanalysis, suicidal and murderous thoughts, shocking in their intensity. I am struck by a sequence in which she is jealous of my new lover and angry at her maid for having a boy friend. This reminds her of how angry she was at her mother once for having a young lover and paying more attention to him than she did to her. She fantasizes cutting off the young lover's genitals and choking her mother with her own lust, watching her die. She imagines blackmailing the lover of her old age by showing his letters to his wife. She begrudges my brother his vacation with his family.

     i run away from my mother as fast as i can... she is chasing me around the apartment... finally she corners me in the bathroom... i jump into the tub and try to hide behind the curtain... i wasn't lying, i say... but she slaps me across the mouth. bitch she says... i'll kill you, you little bitch...

     In the journal there is a beautiful passage where she suggests the type of non-violent, nourishing art that she approved of. Her lyricism is poignant, marvelous. I admire her spirit, the way she transcends pain. I believe her when she says art should be gentle, beautiful like the ancient art of China or Egypt, excluding everything ugly and angry. Yes, I say, yes...

     it is the year before she dies... i am sitting beside my mother's bed feeding her jello... she opens her mouth for it like a baby bird... she can't get up any more... a tube runs from under her covers into a bag filled with yellow fluid... i never refuse an angel, she says before i put the next spoon in her mouth...

     Please don't interrupt. I know what you think. She's not like you. Not like me for that matter. She's always been seeing angels and not seeing things like jello or spoons or the bag tacked to the foot of the bed.

     "have another spoonful," i say. "was it the same angel this time?"
     "It was many angels," she says, "and a turtle... isn't that curious?"
     "Yes," i say, "have you had enough jello? do you want to drink?"
     "I like you to feed me," she says, "but i'm not hungry anymore. could you just hold the spoon there in my mouth?"
     "you can suck my fingers if you want," i say, "they're warmer."
     "yes," she says and she takes my fingers in her mouth... and looks right at me... intent, holding me with her eyes.. the way my daughter did when she nursed...

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