What the Ancestor tells me
And how the portraitist saw her first
Revisiting memories of Uncle Goode in Treasures in the Storage Unit was such fun that I’m going to look at a few more of his portraits. This one, believe it or not, is rather controversial.
“The Ancestor” always occupied a place of honor in my childhood home, more out of duty than appreciation. Was it an air of disappointment? Vague regret for what the portrait could have been, but wasn’t? I didn’t know.
I thought she was lovely, even glamorous, presiding over the dining room in our little house on Walnut Drive. She watched, unconcerned with my transgression, as I snuck sugar cubes from the coffee service. Only when I learned of her unpopularity with my parents did I adopt their appraisal because it must be True — and my own childish impression (being, of course, a child) embarrassingly misguided.
It’s amazing how quickly we’ll dismiss our own responses to art — as if to pass a test of knowledge or taste — to join the safety of prevailing opinion. Only recently did I remember that’s what I’d done here. My daughter and I were re-arranging pictures in the house. Picking up The Ancestor, I started with a critical remark but Maclin cut me off, clearly done with that timeworn narrative.
“Stop,” she said. “I love this portrait! Leave her to me. I will happily hang her in my home one day.”
As if a spell were broken, a tiny inner voice piped up: “Me, too!” and I saw my five-year-old self pick up the painting, tottering under its weight, and flounce out of the room. And here we are.
The painting was not always called The Ancestor. This came later. To me, she was simply Mama, or Mom. Susan in her childhood; Susie to those she met in college and beyond; Z to her nephews, and Zees to my own children. She died 15 years ago, too young, at 61. Less than a decade older than I am today.
The dominant criticism of this portrait was that Mom looks ghostly pale, which she was not. Her cheeks were rosy, often ruddy, and she tanned to a deep, warm brown. However, Mom probably was uncharacteristically pale when she sat for this portrait. She was bleeding. “Like a stuck pig,” she’d say.
It was sometime in 1969, well after my brother was born in January. Mom had recently gotten an IUD, because her doctors strongly advised against her resuming the birth control pill. They suspected its role in the pulmonary emboli that nearly killed her a week after she’d given birth.
It’s not uncommon for an IUD to cause heavy menstrual bleeding, but Mom was bleeding significantly. Then copiously. She stood up from the portrait sitting and the studio stool was covered in blood, as was her entire backside (of course). Doubtless alarmed and mortified, Mom moved quickly to exit, leaving a vivid trail of blood in her wake. Aunt Martha wrapped her in towels and helped her into the pea green Fiat Mom and Dad started with a screwdriver, having lost the key.
The IUD was removed. Mom became pregnant again, for which she and Dad were happy but also apprehensive, given her experience when my brother was born. But then Mom came down with rubella (the MMR vaccine for measles, mumps, and rubella wasn’t licensed in the U.S. until 1971). This was catastrophic news. Pregnant women who contract rubella are at risk for miscarriage or stillbirth, and their developing babies for severe birth defects with devastating, lifelong consequences, called CRS (Congenital Rubella Syndrome).
Terminating the pregnancy was not an option, though I don’t know if they would have, otherwise (the Roe v. Wade decision didn’t happen until 1973 — and now we’re without its protection again). There was nothing to do but wait, under yet another layer of fear. Mom had a miscarriage, and with it, the inevitable mix of grief and relief that — times being as they were — no one talked about.
My parents’ next baby arrived in 1971, and exactly as before, Mom was readmitted to the hospital with pulmonary emboli one week after giving birth. This time, she insisted on keeping her newborn with her, unable to bear repeating the separation that happened with my brother (he was sent to our grandparents for his first weeks while she remained in the hospital). I was the youngest patient on record admitted to a private room, adjoining Mama’s, at Nashville’s Baptist Hospital.
On some level, I imagine this portrait always reminded my parents of a terrifying time in their young lives and even younger marriage. A time when they were admittedly clueless and felt powerless, suddenly with the awesome responsibility of parents. “We were like children, having children ourselves,” Dad would say.
And how could it not remind Mom of an incident in her in-laws’ studio she’d just as soon forget? I’m confident Uncle Goode wasn’t put out about his studio looking like a crime scene, and he most certainly was concerned about his young niece-in-law. Uncle Goode and Aunt Martha, my grandparents, and the entire Davis clan thought Mom was the bomb. Still, this wouldn’t have eased her shame. Maintaining dignity was bred into her bones and upheld at any cost. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to cut herself a break; needing one at all was itself perceived as failure.
Our eyes are, literally, windows into our bodies — and into our souls. Pictures we see can tap directly into our deepest places, and pictures of ourselves into what we feel and tell ourselves about ourselves.
As a child, I thought Mama must be wearing a fabulous, emerald green ball gown in this portrait (and where was it, so maybe I could wear it one day?). In fact, it was just a blouse she whipped up on her Singer to be a portrait-worthy backdrop for that necklace.
It came from a stomacher — a fancy piece of jewelry once worn on the bodices of ballgowns — that had belonged to my great-grandmother, Blanche Ames. The stomacher had two pairs of pearl and diamond tassels linked by two strands of pearls. My grandmother had the piece divided for her four children: two received a strand of pearls and two received a pair of tassels. Dad had his tassels put on another strand of pearls, and he gave it to Mom as a wedding gift. She wore it on their wedding day and many other special occasions. Its uniqueness and history have always made it a favorite of mine.
For years, Mom rigged the tassels to hang together using a bit of sewing thread. No one was the wiser until one day, a jeweler friend discovered it while examining the piece. Stifling a laugh, brows arched, he slanted his eyes toward her in disbelief. She laughed, mildly embarrassed but unapologetic. After snipping off the thread, he showed her how to simply loop the ends together.
Along with the screwdriver car-key and countless other examples, this was quintessential Mom. On one hand, she was polished, intellectually sophisticated, trained to perfection, and reared for highbrow society. I mean, she dated an exiled Russian prince. But she wasn’t fussy. She was a born problem solver and earnestly can-do. If a job called for a shovel, she wasted no time looking for a spade. She just got to it.
That emerald green silk also offered a lovely contrast to Mom’s mahogany-black hair. The bob she wears in the portrait is shorter than the one I remember from early childhood. I loved the buoyant, curling ponytail she wore with a hair ribbon or held back with a scarf at the beach. Here it is — and we are — in the spring of 1973:
Uncle Goode did another portrait of Mama that same year, a pencil drawing for my maternal grandparents that hung in their house with a companion portrait of her younger sister, Ann.
Why did my grandparents commission these in 1973? I suspect because it was a particularly happy time. After harrowing childbirth experiences, Mom was well, the mother of a son and a daughter, and lived only five minutes away. Aunt Ann, who lived in Connecticut, also had a son and another coming soon. Married to the finest of men, blessed with healthy children, and flourishing in their young lives, both daughters were in full bloom, and Uncle Goode captured them.
I have no idea how Mom felt about this portrait. Dad didn’t particularly care for it, remarking that she didn’t wear her hair like that often, or perhaps it hadn’t been his preference. I’m struck by how black it is, the graphite positively sooty.
I do think the bright curiosity characteristic of Mom’s eyes — by turns guileless and worldly — comes through in the pencil drawing more successfully than in the oil portrait. Yet Uncle Goode did nail their distinctive color, like dark gold topaz, or the brown diamond of her engagement ring.
Of the oil portrait, Dad recently suggested Mom didn’t like, or feel good about, the woman she’d been then. This got me thinking. Why?
Mom grew up in Nashville, the first child in a loving, if perfectionistic, family. She was high school valedictorian and sorority president, had good friends, dated nice boys, and always did as she was told. Practically perfect in every way, as Mary Poppins would say. She went to Smith College in Massachusetts, where she was a Russian Studies and Government major — when the Cold War was frigid. She had a knack for languages and spoke several. She was, in retrospect, a ringer for the State Department, or even espionage. But this wasn’t what nice young women did, and Mom was raised to be — and was very good at — just that.
“I was mama’s parrot,” she reflected ruefully, later in life. It is interesting, perhaps telling, that her mother, who I called Gran, was a physician, one of two women in her graduating class at Johns Hopkins. I wonder if Gran learned the hard way where a woman would and would not succeed in Nashville society, and decided accordingly:
Gran was a tireless, uncompromising advocate for her daughters’ education, but she neither counseled nor encouraged Mom’s pursuing anything but the social status quo after she came home and got married.
I think Dad meant that the oil portrait depicted the woman Mom felt she ought to be, and allowed to define her overmuch, at the expense of exploring — and being — the woman she authentically wanted to be.
There is truth in this, but it’s equally true that she was in love with Dad and desperately wanted to be with him in Nashville, where he’d started law school. They wanted to marry and have a family. They were close with their parents, also in Nashville. It was home. But in the 1960s, young married women in their circles kept homes, raised children, and did volunteer work. Mom followed the rules, and ever the achiever, became the youngest president of the Junior League. She enjoyed this work, her friends, and being a wife and a mother. But as can happen so easily, so stealthily, she lost herself in fulfilling the needs and expectations of everyone except herself — and then blamed herself harshly for having done so.
I wonder if the oil portrait became a self-indictment of sorts, tapping into self doubt and shame that never stopped gurgling in her gut, and gave rise to an inner turbulence that troubled much of her adult life. I say this because she only dubbed it “The Ancestor” many years later, wryly, after a treacherous physical and emotional journey to understand and pacify that inner turbulence. And this only happened when another bleeding episode — this time a stomach ulcer — nearly killed her again.
I was 12 years old. It was a dark and difficult time, lasting several years. I missed her, felt abandoned, felt at fault, all the things that children do. But I also witnessed a beautiful thing: a woman fight for her own life, and win. I watched and learned as she battled the invisible, slippery, confusing, and unpredictable inner forces that can bring down the strongest, most intelligent, moral, and loving people. Only now can I fathom how she felt about our family’s suffering it, too. I got to see a butterfly emerge from the cocoon. She looked like this:
Those dark years made Mama wise. Perhaps keeping her oil portrait in view reminded her of the journey she’d made, who she was and was not. I think she even came to appreciate the Ancestor’s part in her becoming more fully herself. But I don’t think the haunting ever stopped.
Long before she did, Uncle Goode saw Mom’s vulnerability — the bare catch of her lip in her teeth — and how essential it was, if he was to capture her likeness at all. I’ve been looking at these portraits my entire life, and only now have I noticed that exquisitely poignant detail; a silent invitation to see her.
After the wounded resentment of that dark time, Mom and I found our way back to each other. We became very close for several years during and after college, traveling overseas and in our own towns, exploring neighborhoods, historic sites, old buildings, bridges and gardens, and all kinds of museums, from the Corn Palace in South Dakota to the Capuchin Crypt in Rome. We’d take field trips to study colonial living re-enactments, wander gardens, puzzle over old machinery, revel in woodwork, wavy old glass, and curious fashions. We graded museum shops, sampled their cafes, and mused over the purpose of house museums. We shared books and recipes; wrote letters; went shopping; gabbed on the phone about everything and nothing at all. We cherished our relationship, as you only can that which you’ve lost and then found.
My having children was a miracle neither of us expected. When I saw her holding my babies — she was magic with babies — I felt my own body’s memory of our time together, mother and newborn readmitted to Baptist Hospital.
“The nurse would wrap you up and bring you to my bed, packing you in close, right here next to my thigh,” she’d say, patting hers to indicate where she still felt the heat of eight-pound me, snuggled there. “It was just you and me,” her voice wistful at the marvel of it. “No one telling me what to do or how to be … just you and me,” and she’d smile, eyes tender.
Mom recounted this story in the hospital before she died. I was sitting on the bed next to her, my thigh flush against hers, where my entire newborn self had been 35 years before. It was the last thing she said to me.
From earliest memory, I knew Mom struggled to keep her drinking in check. It would flare like inflammation in our lives, then subside for a while, until the next time. In the late 90s, feeling the weight of loss, heartache, and health concerns, her craving for alcohol to dull pain slipped out of her grasp. As the disease bloomed, the darkness of past years came flooding back.
She could not bring herself to seek treatment. At the time, I felt her refusal even to try as a rejection, a squandering of the love we’d re-discovered, of the blessing my children were. I was angry and devastated for Dad. Of course, we did all the things that desperate alcoholic families do that don’t help and possibly make things worse.
There is no sense to addiction, no understanding or resolution. Nor could I, at the time, understand that my mother didn’t have the emotional armature or self-esteem to forge another battle back to living. Or that she couldn’t forgive her own inability to fix it. Now that I know the cruelty of that inner voice — See? You still aren’t good enough — it guts me to realize she was in that lonely place.
I didn’t realize just how sensitive my mother was to shame, which is one of the cruelest aspects of the disease that killed her — its attendant indignities, private and public, and the staggering weight of guilt. Blinded by my own hurt, I couldn’t see that she judged herself far more harshly than even I did.
I wanted her to be invincible, of course, not only because I was afraid of losing her, but because I couldn’t bear the shame of not being enough to make her want to stop. I punished her for it with my anger — fully unaware of the power I had to hurt her. I didn’t yet know that parents are vulnerable to their children, too.
I didn’t see the vulnerability in Mom that Uncle Goode did. I didn’t even think to look for it. I do remember the sound of her teeth gently scraping a pearl. I was very small. “It’s how to tell if a pearl is real,” she explained. “It should be a bit gritty — like sand. But you must be gentle — pearls are very, very delicate.”
Alcoholism is a cruel disease for everyone in its orbit. I know I was doing the best I could at the time. But I wish I had been more kind. This is the failure that haunts me, at times so intensely it’s hard to breathe. Waves of regret, sorrow, and love crash in, as they do. It’s a discipline to focus on the love, so much bigger than all the rest. It is not always easy.
Both of these portraits hang in my home now. Perhaps when a memory of something I said or did makes me wince, I’ll look to them, see her eyes and the catch of her teeth, and listen for what I know she’d say. Love yourself as I would, Kate-Kat. Remember? You were hurt, too. Uncle Goode’s paintings are helping me find my way home to her, and maybe, her to me.
This is what art can do.
