Confessions

Magnify

The first time she spoke about Walter she was still healthy. Not happy, certainly, but the days were full enough with friends, swimming at the recreation center, afternoon bridge games, dinner or a play downtown with my father. Some mornings were taken up with treks to department stores, where she returned brightly colored outfits bought on a whim, always coming home with more. Before fixing supper, martini in hand, she immersed herself in long phone calls with Helen from next door or with her best friend John, a gay designer who helped her open her antique store a few years back and grieved along with her when the rent increased and she couldn’t make a go of it.

When she said Walter’s name aloud, it was more of a relief to me than a surprise. The truth was, I had already discovered my mother’s poems about him right before leaving for college, sifting casually through the contents of her jumbled bedside table for a safety pin or a pencil stub, I don’t remember which. I unearthed the little datebook filled with her neat cursive and thumbed through pages full of untitled poems, unrhymed verse full of yearning and flowery, wistful phrasing. They were earnest and trite and passionate. I had known immediately these romantic poems were not about Dad. Now she was forthright with me, this first confessional occurring while I was home on a visit, made late one night at the kitchen table after my father had gone up to bed.

“You mustn’t ever mention this to Dad, it would kill him,” she said. It was an interesting notion that her decade-old tryst with an Austrian doctor somehow had the power to end lives, possibly even topple cities, but I promised to keep my mouth closed. Their meeting on shipboard sounded thrilling—he, a pensive, handsome stranger from Vienna she encountered and fell in love with en route to Italy, who happened to share her same birthday. Though Walter barely spoke English, and she not a word of his native German, she reluctantly danced with him on that first night, then dined with him, and finally surrendered to his tender, helpless honesty and affections over the course of the journey. She showed me a photo of the two of them dressed elegantly inside her stateroom; their rapt faces needed no translation.