Making My Mother Cry | Dave's Place

How Could I

I’ve been reading Hillbilly Elegy this week, about the Scots-Irish who settled in Appalachia and eventually became Hillbillies, are now struggling with widespread unemployment and opioid addiction, and it occurs to me how close my ancestors came to all that, brushing right by it, as it were. My father was born in San Antonio, Texas, and adopted by a physician who lived in Pittsburgh, so I know virtually nothing about his lineage, but my mother’s father grew up on a farm in West Virginia, in a large family of men and a few women who had old-fashioned names, like Audley, or Ada, or my own grandfather’s name, Weir Russell. Their last name was McCutcheon, and that is my middle name, but my grandfather at some point left the farm, went to pharmacy school, moved to Pittsburgh, and worked in that business for years, as a salesman for a drug company and a pharmacist. He worked part-time into his eighties. Every now and then a relative would call him Russ, but most people called him Mac.

In the summers when I was a boy, we went back to the farm for a reunion. There was still some livestock around, a chicken coop full of chickens, and there was a spring house where you could drink water from a spring, the coldest cleanest water I ever tasted. The house had a wide porch that wrapped around a couple of sides, looked down on a meadow. The old men, dressed in shirts and ties, would have a baseball game the way they used to do when they were young, out in the field catching the ball barehanded (my grandfather told me that the great shortstop Honus Wagner only wore a piece of leather on his left hand, and was just as likely to catch the ball with his right, which was more or less like leather). The tables inside would be loaded with food, ham and fried chicken and potato salad and deviled eggs, stuff like that. Mammoth amounts of food. Multiple desserts.

My family were city people, from Pittsburgh, along with my uncle’s family—my mother’s brother—and some others. But some of those reunion people were real country, wearing flower patterned dresses and heavy black shoes, lugging in the huge plates of food and not talking much. Booze was not served at these reunions, needless to say. The family was Presbyterian, and toed the Presbyterian line.

I don’t know how long those reunions had been going on, or how well my mother knew her forbearers, but I have a feeling she looked on that whole scene with horror, as the part of her life she most wanted to flee, those bovine women with their massive platters of food. Her mother had grown up in DC, the daughter of a physician, but her father was still pretty country, eating ham every day of his life (he actually preferred pork at every meal, usually bacon in the morning, a ham sandwich for lunch, a nice slice of ham for dinner) and smoking little stogies, which he called tobies, that were made in West Virginia (“I just smoke once a day,” he once said, describing his smoking habits. “I start after I wake up and finish just before I go to bed.” He actually lit up before he had his morning coffee. “If I had it to do over again,” I heard my grandmother say one time, “I don’t think I’d marry a toby smoker”). He was an easygoing man, and everybody liked him. But he still had a lot of farm boy in him.

I have a feeling that, when my mother married the son of a prominent Pittsburgh physician, who would himself become a physician, that was the first great triumph of her life. It got her one step further away from the farm. And much later, after my father died of leukemia at age 47 and she was a widow for eighteen years, then married a man from an old Pittsburgh family, who had been president of a bank, her triumph was complete. Nobody could take her back to West Virginia now. She was Mrs. Richard Edwards.

In any case, for my whole life—I don’t know when this phenomenon began, but I have the feeling it was many years before—if you had a question of etiquette, the person you should ask was my mother. If you wanted to know how to dress, how to respond to a gaffe at some social occasion, where to put the forks on the table, you asked her. She clung to those things like a dog with a bone. That West Virginia farm was lurking in the background.[1]

I only saw my mother even come close to crying twice in her life. One was the night after my father died, when she was wondering if the doctors might have been more attentive, or if there might have been better doctors there, on another day (he died on New Years Day, 1965). The other was on a day when I was six years old, seven years old, I’m not sure what. It’s way back in my life, after we had moved to Claridge Place but long before my father became ill.

My best friend in the neighborhood was a Jewish kid named Lanny Kaplan. (Talk about being far from the West Virginia farm. My grandfather probably never met a Jew until he went to pharmacy school.) Lanny and I did almost everything together, spent every day together, and to top it off, his sister Margie was the first girl I ever kissed (but not when Lanny was around). The Kaplans were an all-purpose family for me. I even liked the father and mother.[2]

The only thing I didn’t like was his birthday parties. Most of the time he and I bridged the ethnic gap well, but at his parties I was the only goy, I may have been the only kid who wasn’t his cousin, and they were all so close, and knew each other so well, that I felt left out. It felt as if they were purposely excluding me, though I’m not sure they were. They were just being cousins.

Another thing about birthday parties in those days was that we sometimes went to the Pittsburgh Playhouse, where they showed plays that were meant for children, Ali and the 40 Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, I’m probably making these names up, but one time a play opened with a guy walking into the back of the theater waving a sword and shouting at a guy on stage, running down the aisle to confront him. It was living theater, or something like that. It was supposed to be exciting.

Somehow or other it terrified me. Movies I could take, and TV shows, even Captain Video, when his leg was caught one time in a giant clam[3], and he was down at the bottom of the ocean, fighting to keep from drowning, or the time when he was in a room, and the walls kept closing in, so that he would be crushed if he couldn’t get out. (He took off his belt to try to jam the walls as they advanced toward him. A good idea, but it proved futile.)[4] The incidents in the Playhouse weren’t nearly as frightening as those situations. But there was something about having the actors right there, occupying the room with you. Especially that guy running down the aisle brandishing a sword. It was terrifying.

Anyway, Lanny had a party where I had responded in the affirmative, and at the last minute decided I couldn’t go. I couldn’t take all the kids leaving me out of everything. I couldn’t face the Playhouse. I just couldn’t hack it.

I was probably six years old, seven at the most. I didn’t know a damn thing about etiquette. And my mother didn’t want to make me do something I really didn’t want to do. I can’t remember if I explained about the Playhouse, or the way the kids left me out. The whole afternoon just sounded too strange. We were going to have lunch at the Playhouse, is the way I remember it. Then watch some play. Probably I would have to eat some dreadful food too.

My mother agreed to call Mrs. Kaplan and tell her I couldn’t come. But afterwards, as she sat at the little dressing table that was home base for her, there were tears in her eyes.

I was mortified. In my whole life, the one thing I never wanted to do was make my mother sad, or make her angry. The very thought horrified me. I just didn’t want to go to the damn party, I didn’t want to eat some weird food at the Playhouse, I didn’t want to sit in that theater with no idea what the fuck was going to happen, some guy might come in and slice my head off with a sword.

But I didn’t want to make my mother cry! I had no idea I would.

I said I was sorry, and she said it was all right. “It was just such a nice invitation,” she said. “They went to so much trouble.”

I wonder if she was particularly upset because the family was Jewish, and might have thought our cancellation had something to do with that.

Which it did, in a way. But not out of some ethnic prejudice.

My mother always did the right thing. She always did the correct thing. She’d have gone to that party no matter how many guys there were with swords. And she wanted me to do the right thing. That was a huge influence on my life. Never ending.

That and not wanting to make her cry. I never did again.

[1] My brother tells the story of the Sunday morning when he came down to go to church sporting his blue suit and a pair of white socks. He had noticed that one of the teachers at our school—not, apparently, a true sophisticate—wore white socks with his jacket and tie. My mother hit the roof. You’d have thought he’d farted in the middle of the sermon.

[2] A couple of times we went on fishing trips. One time the four of us were going, Lanny and his father and me and my father, and I went over to the Kaplans to collect them, but they were still eating. They said they were having brunch, a meal I’d never heard of, and as I sat out in the living room I heard Mr. Kaplan say, “Yeah, I’ll have a bagel.” I had no idea what a bagel was. Then, as we were walking out the door, Mr. Kaplan turned to my father and said, to my utter astonishment, “Should I bring a bottle of wine?” The two fathers stood over on the other side of the lake, telling stories and laughing and drinking the damn wine straight out of the bottle. Lanny and I caught no fish. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing.

[3] I don’t know what the hell it was, but it looked like a giant clam.

[4] These two dilemmas came at the end of programs, and were intended to bring you back, which they certainly did. They are locked in my memory. I’m afraid, alas, that I can’t remember how Captain Video got out of either of these situations, but he did, thank God. He lived to fight another day.