MY MOTHER'S PAINTING

“…she spent hours lying in bed, beneath a large painting of her mother as a child.”

My mother was born in 1925, the youngest of five. She was a lonely child, her siblings already gone from the grand family home in rural New Jersey when she was young. She was often sick, suffering from chronic bouts of pneumonia. Every winter her mother took her to Florida to escape the cold. But when she was home she spent hours lying in bed, beneath a large painting of her mother as a child.

The painting is dated 1896, when my grandmother was five. She grew up in Manhattan and Hyde Park, NY; the family belonged to the blue-blood world of New York society. Their next-door neighbors were the Roosevelts; at 13, my grandmother attended Franklin and Eleanor’s wedding. When she married, she received wedding gifts from Roosevelts, Rhinelanders, and a Mrs. Wharton with a Paris address. A shy and reserved woman, she largely removed herself from that world as she grew into motherhood, learning to find joy in her children—especially my mother—and the domestic work of the home.

My mother resembled her mother in many ways. They were both almost six feet tall and happiest when home. They loved to garden, to do needlework, to read. After my grandmother died, my mother surrounded herself with objects that had belonged to her. My grandmother’s things became her things.

She hung the painting over the mantelpiece in a room she and my father called the Library. It was lined with books but also included my mother’s desk, my father’s grand piano, and, oddly, an Eames chair. My mother sat here as she ran the household; my father played Scott Joplin at night. Over time, though, the Library became the room where my father, a psychoanalyst, saw his patients. He installed soundproofing under the doors, and the patients sat in the Eames chair on one side of the fireplace, while he faced them in a stiff, upright armchair on the other.

My mother, ever supportive, learned to stay away when the doorbell rang and the Library doors closed.

My father died in 2007 and my mother in 2012. The painting now lives at the bottom of the stairs in my home, and every morning my grandmother’s blue eyes—so like my mother’s—meet mine. When I look at her I see them both: the girls they were, the women they became. From her vantage point, she can see into our dining room and living room, as well as up the stairs. Perhaps she feels comfortable in a house built in 1840—albeit small and plain—and maybe she notices some of her other possessions and creations here and there: framed needlework, worn copies of Virginia Woolf, the old blue velvet sofa.

The gold frame surrounding the painting is original. Imagine lying sick in bed for days at a time. You might look up one warm fall night when you are twelve and alone and decide to carve your name into the bottom of the frame, forever preserving your connection to the painting that you know so well and to your beloved mother: MARY = Nov. 8, 1937. A way to lay claim, but in secret, hidden from the world. How proud my mother was of this small, rebellious act, one of few in a long, quiet, and most generous life.

—Laura Spence-Ash

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Laura Spence-Ash’s debut novel, Beyond That, the Sea (Celadon Books, 2023), was a GMA Buzz Pick and an Indie Next pick.