For my mother, there was a story for every pain, every joy, every predicament, every sorrow. These stories were buried in the thousands of books that spilled from the bookcases that lined our living room, from the bookcases hiding behind closet doors, that were piled beside her bed, that lived in every bookcase in every one of our rooms. And we were the leading characters in the stories she told of her life. My father was not just a handsome, smart man, he was “Jimmy Stewart incarnate – brilliant, humble, kind – more than a prince, he was the epitome of what all men should strive to be!” Her stories transformed us — her ten rag-tag, clamoring, competing, whining children – into characters that strutted and stood in center stage. My brother Bill was “sly, brilliant, witty, handsome – like the hero in the Odyssey.” Yes, she told us that story early on. My sister Betsy, “wittier than any Jane Austen heroine.” Dean, the introvert, “obviously brilliant,” but his first words, she claimed, came at the age of three, when he told her, “the mashed potatoes are cold.”
I wasn’t just a girl who loved playacting, but the “future Grace Kelly.” Kathy, she said, was “rebellious and devastatingly irresistible to all men.” Peter, ah Peter, “charismatic, so smart, so charming – the future John Kennedy!” Ellen, oh Ellen, “Smoldering, beautiful,” and “always knew exactly how to get at me,” she would say with awe. Patti, my mother’s story went, told her how to cook the loaves of French bread when she was just two, “And damn it if she wasn’t right!” Michael, “a gifted athlete who can trip over his own shoelaces.” And Barbara, “this baby! Oh she made my father so happy – saved his life!” She was born just as our grandfather came to live with us after his wife died.
My sister Betsy used to say that our mother’s romanticizing of us always meant for a rude awakening once we got into the real world. But for me, my mother was my world. When I was seven, I came home from Catholic school confused about the talk the priest had given “just the girls” in the class. Something about Adam and Eve and the populating of the earth. I asked my mother, but then “where did all the people come from? The priest said something about Eve and Cain and Eve and Abel??” She laughed. “Oh honey, that story is just a myth,” she said, “according to Carl Jung . . .” And from that moment, my days ended sitting on a kitchen stool listening to my mother tell stories, while she pounded bread dough, or mixed cake batter, or laid out the noodles in the casserole dinner.
My mother, a college graduate (literature, of course), the only daughter of a prominent Democrat party chairman and who once dined with Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, never expected to have ten needy kids. When she married my father, she fully expected that their life in Manhattan would be a prosperous, upper-class one, where she would perform great acts of charity while my father became head of whatever. Alas, not to be. My oldest brother’s severe asthma meant a move to Tucson—where my father had no job, and there were very few Democrats. How she survived that is another story. But like my mother, I savor that one and all the rest she introduced us to.
In the picture at the top of the post: My mother being served by son-in-law, Chuck; baby is Betsy’s and Chuck’s (I’m helping to hold). The rest “some of the Allens,” as my sister Barbara would describe us. Only one missing is Bill, the oldest.
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