Given who she was, growing older for my mother was especially hard. She faced old age with courage and without complaining but at the same time missed her former status and influence and the effect she had had simply walking into a room. An incident I consider poignant brought this home to me—occurring in the early 1980s. My children and I were on a train with her going from New York City to Darien, Connecticut, where my mother had arranged for us to spend a weekend at a Holiday Inn—pale reprise of our old getaway weekends in California. I sat in a row of seats with the children, while my mother sat in the row in front of us. At one point she seemed to be whispering to the woman beside her, and I couldn’t help overhearing. “I don’t want my daughter behind us to hear me,” she said, “but do you know who I am?”
I wish I could tell her about the Illinois junior high school girls who recently got in touch with me. They were doing research for their National History Fair project, a play about the “Unholy Trio” of Hollywood gossip columnists: Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, and Sheilah Graham. Why the Unholy Trio? I asked when we had our conference call. They explained that the project needed a link to Illinois, and it had this in Louella’s being from that state. I hadn’t known about Louella Parsons’s Illinois connection, and it amused me to imagine my mother’s tough old rival as a girl in the Midwest. The present-day Illinois girls had already garnered a prize for their play at the state level, and it was headed now to “the nationals.” They sought details for their portrayal of my mother and questioned me about her clothes and her gestures, her way of speaking and her opinions. I told them what I could. It was nice to enter into the spirit of their project and to sense their young energy. The girl who had the part of Sheilah Graham was named Anjalika Mohanty.
When I got off the phone, I thought how wonderfully apt it was that Sheilah Graham, born into a family of immigrants and spending her childhood years in a London orphanage, should converge with an Indian-American girl who came from the same Midwestern state as Louella Parsons! So much of my life seemed to come together in that moment: Hollywood, my mother, my interest in the Indian diaspora, the reading trajectory that had carried me from orphan to immigrant, my dedication to helping young people. Anjalika on the phone sounded very self-possessed for an eighth grader. I found myself wondering afterwards if she was a reader.
POSTSCRIPTS
April, 2011
I sit tonight at the dinner table with my fourteen-year-old granddaughter Zoé, who is visiting from France with her cousin Salomé, also fourteen, for a two-week stay with me in New York. They are bright, competent girls who have persuaded their parents to let them come by themselves on this adventure. I’ve been impressed by their ease in getting about on foot and by subway. (And we discuss that in English you say ON foot and BY subway.) By themselves they have gone to the top of the Empire State Building and ridden the Staten Island Ferry in order to take pictures of the Statue of Liberty. They’ve shown an interest in art as well with both MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum on their must-do list, though they also spend a lot of time on the computer—my partner Mary Edith’s Mac that she graciously has let them use—giggling together as they post on their Facebook walls and watch videos. This evening Mary Edith has gone out—we’ve been living together since I sold my Upper West Side apartment the previous year and moved downtown into hers on the Lower East Side—and I’m alone with the girls.
“Do you girls like to read?” I ask them, as we sit at dinner over the precooked chicken I picked up at the supermarket around the corner. Yes, they say. I learn that Zoé has read Jane Austen’s Emma in English, and Salomé, even more of a reader than her cousin but with less advanced English, has read Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Wuthering Heights in translation. “Eeetcliff,” she says. “Ah yes, Heathcliff,” I respond. In French the novel is called Les Hauts de Hurlevent. Hearing this alliterative foreign title gives me pleasure. It suggests at once the same and a different meaning from the title I know, the way that the book itself is the same and different for any two readers. I draw closer, though, to Salomé than I’ve felt before in that each of us has been intimate with the same novel. She, too, has paused in the world of the Heights and the Grange, Heathcliff and the two Cathys. Lockwood and Nellie. And she’s just the age I was when I first read the books she’s reading.
So it all begins again! Zoé and Salomé are readers. I imagine their lives of reading, of making the connections that reading encourages in us. It’s possible we will like more of the same books. That would please me. But I’m also excited to think of our different trajectories, for surely they will discover books ignored by me, books I’ve never heard of, and—stretching through the many decades I hope they will survive me—books not yet written, the literature of the future. For now, I cherish the moment as we touch and pass, generations crossing.
June
