Above: The letter my mother wrote me soon after we were reconciled in 1973.
O
NCE I SAW MY MOTHER AGAIN—face-to-face for the first time since I was eleven—I was married and 23. And there I sat, on her couch in Cleveland, Ohio, as she tried to explain why she left us back in 1962. Her narrative sounded like something out of a Hollywood movie: the threatening phone call my father never told me about, the tearful farewell at the Dallas airport that I apparently blocked from memory, not to mention what awaited her when she flew back.
For one thing there was that chilling story about the wedding ring my stepfather had given her. Still on her finger when she ran out his back door, she and my father pawned it shortly after we arrived in Dallas. Unfortunately, that’s how they tracked us down, and when back in Ohio she stood before him again, he held that ring out to her in the palm of his hand, as if to say, You can never get away from me, so don’t try it again.
There’s a heart-breaking snapshot he took of her a couple months later. She’s sitting on an ottoman in his living room; Christmas decorations drape the fireplace mantel; and a football game plays on the tv. Her face is frozen, her tight-lipped smile is forced. She looks like a cornered animal, and his polaroid might as well be a trophy he could hang on his wall.
He would later drag her along as he ran from the mob himself, having “skimmed the skim,” embezzling some of their cash and running away to Dayton on the other side of the state. But somehow he made things right and would only die of natural causes several years later, all his fingers intact.
That’s the story I was told. And so, with a better understanding of what had happened all those years before, I could finally close the book on my past, and my mother and I could pick up where we left off. At least, that’s what I thought. But I had yet to learn that irreparable damage had already been done to both of us, and as much as I wanted to put the past behind, in a way it was just too late.
