Dear Diary: False Armistice
My mother would have been 91 today. The most curious bit of numerology in my life that I’m aware of is the curious harmony that vibrates between my mother’s birthday and my daughter’s. My mother was born on what became known as “False Armistice Day,” 4 November 1918. There was reason to believe that the War was over — but it wasn’t, quite. It would last for precisely another week, until 11 November, which is Megan’s birthday. An astrologer would seize up at the idea of bracketing a Capricorn between two Scorpios, but my more historical turn of mind relishes the finer, more improbable conjunction.
My appreciation of this accident of birth is entirely ornamental. I can’t work up the slightest interest in trying to read an occult meaning into the association of my mother with a day that wasn’t what it was thought to be, or my daughter’s with the anniversary of a true day of peace. What I should quickly point out to anyone who determined to find significance in this sheer accident of dates is that, while my mother was born on the actual “False Armistice Day,” my daughter was born on the fifty-fourth anniversary of the real one. As numbers go, 54 is among the less prepossessing, owing whatever éclat it carries to the the location of a television studio on a particular West Side block. There is not only no connection between my daughter and a once-infamous night club; there is an anti-connection. The only interesting thing about a picture that contains “Megan” and “Studio 54” is the insistence with which the two terms repel one another.
My mother’s birthday was a day of recognition. It didn’t matter what sort of present I gave her, but it was very, very important that I not forget the day. A card and a Whitman’s Sampler always did the trick, at least coming from me. I don’t know, now I think of it, what sort of gift my sister was supposed to come up with. As for my father’s birthday presents, they existed on a higher, radically more expensive plane, and did not always involve the opening of gift-wrapped boxes. The house on Sturbridge Drive in Houston, for example, was a birthday present, or said to be. I thought it was a joke — the house was a joke (albeit an extremely luxurious one, at least by standards familiar to me), and its being a birthday present was a joke. But that was my mother’s story, and she stuck to it. Looking back, I think that she liked it best of all her homes. It was very large, and it enabled her to give a lot of signature parties.
(Lest you start thinking of my mother as a hostess along the lines of Bette Davis or Tallulah Bankhead, let me assure you that she was a lot more like Celeste Holm. Every party was a carefully crafted plinth for the stages of my father’s corporate career, which more or less fell apart within a couple of years of her death. My mother’s parties were like very astute bridge bids, and having a big house in Tanglewood blessed her with a winning No Trump hand.)
Like so many darling daughters of the Twenties, my mother was something of a fetishist, dementedly sentimental about the pressing of certain buttons at certain times. The pleasure that she took in receiving a corny card and an even cornier box of vulgar chocolates (which she knew to be vulgar) on her birthday was, to my budding intellect, repulsive. I was very young when I lost all respect the idea that “it’s the thought that counts.” (The thought has never counted with me, that’s for sure.) Pleasing my mother was a kabuki sort of thing: if you made the correct gesture, it inspired the correct feeling. From time to time, I would ask clumsy questions that boiled down to this: don’t you want something really nice? And my mother’s answer, broken and almost loveless, was invariably a complaint about my negative outlook on life.
It took years for me to understand that the correct gesture is the only way in which to express respect, because my mother confused respect with love. If, indeed, she ever came to terms with my failure to become one of Notre Dame’s Irish Guard, I think that she would have been content to see me grow up to be a gay interior designer. She would have professed to be “disappointed,” but she would have known where she was, and she would have understood how to accept the commiseration of her friends. She never had the faintest idea how to deal with the actual me, and she never wanted to know, not for a moment.
But of course she was not my mother.