A Mother's Love by Mary Morris Read Free Book Online

cradling Bobby as he screamed in my arms. I should have been working on the free-lance jewelry settings Mike had sent over—priceless diamond earrings that, if I’d hocked them, would have paid all my bills for months, an inlaid pendant that was out of style, a ring that was being reset for someone’s fiftieth wedding anniversary—but I pushed them aside. Balancing Bobby on my shoulder and trying to rock him, I shuffled through my postcard collection. I’d been mulling over an idea for a long time—a ghost face in a desert scene at night, ensconcedin images I would copy from my postcards. The World’s Biggest Apple, the Dinodiner, the Corn Palace, a Vermont cow. I arranged the postcards on the work table as best I could next to a preliminary sketch for the face. The composition had eluded me, but now I saw how the face could fit slightly off center, encircled by some of these images, as if it were rising out of the hills.
    Now that it was clear, I wanted to draw it, but Bobby would not stop crying. Perhaps he was exhausted, overtired from the trip downtown. Or hungry, but for what I could not tell, because I had nursed him before he slept. Maybe he was just frightened and upset at being awakened. Whatever it was, he would not settle down. Suddenly I found myself trembling with rage, and I had to put him in his crib. He would have to cry himself back to sleep. A few days before in a New York hospital a child was found in a lavatory, a note pinned to her jacket. “Please take care of my child. I don’t want to hurt her.” I could see what had made the woman do that.
    I went back to my work table, listening as Bobby’s cries diminished. Picking up a pencil, I tapped it on the table. But instead of drawing, I began to map out a budget. Periodically I made a list of expenses—$550 for rent, $50 a week for food and diapers, $50 a month for phone. (When I called my father, it was collect.) As it was, we were just getting by. I had no idea where the money fora baby sitter would come from so I could go back to work. I couldn’t think about clothes for Bobby when he outgrew his newborn things.
    With a sigh, I put the pencil down and stared out the window. The light was on in the apartment of the woman across the way. It was a small light in the living room, but she didn’t usually leave her lights on, so I assumed she too was unable to sleep. She was upset. I could feel it, wishing there was something I could do.
    Even though I didn’t know her and we had never spoken or even said a casual hello, I felt as if I knew who she was and what had happened to her. I knew the plot of her life. What had brought her to this place. Even how she felt about it. It was a clarity that shocked me, an inevitability that surprised me. It was as if I had written the first word on a page, drawn the first line on a canvas, and the other words and images followed, of necessity.
    I remember my own early life the way you remember a clearing in the woods that you passed at dawn, only to return in the late afternoon when the light shines on it in a different way—the movement of the light altering its surface—so that you’re not certain whether it’s the same clearing, the same woods. It looks familiar. But you can never be sure. So it is with my life.
    What is memory to me but a story I have told over and over, embellishing it each time, making itbetter or worse, depending on the listener. It never comes out the same way twice, and now I am not even sure of what really happened, for I have lost the line between what occurred and what I have made up. In this sense I have come to resemble the woman across the way. It occurs to me at times—and my father says this is so—that I have remembered my past all wrong. Once I read a study that said that creative people tend to recall their childhood as unhappy experiences, no matter how filled with tenderness and love they may have