THE PENDANT
“She remembered a man who’d dated two of her sisters.”
When my mother was a teenager, she left her Illinois coal town for Chicago. There she fell in love with a man named Clarence, but when his father found out, he hit the roof. Clarence had to marry a Greek woman, the father said, or be cut off from his inheritance. So back to the coal town my mother went, with no idea what she’d do. Her parents still had seven kids at home (my mother had 16 siblings) so she couldn’t stay with them long. She remembered a man who’d dated two of her sisters. Did she run into him? Call him? All I know is that somehow they got in touch, and two dates and a few months later, my dad offered her a ring.
With nowhere else to go and no one to turn to, my mother accepted. Many years later, as I was growing up, I could never remember a time when she was faithful to my dad. In my diaries, I questioned my love for her.
But boy, did I love my dad. Unlike my mother, I didn’t care that his skin was gritty from decades of working in the coal mines, or that his arms were covered in psoriasis that he wore long shirts to cover up, or that I could hear him in the bathroom every night gagging up coal dust. From the time I was three, he brought me along with him to his second job as a handyman. When I was nine, he took me to a Beatles concert, and on our yearly vacations to Daytona Beach, he was the one who played with me in the ocean so my mother could, as she said she needed to, rest.
Eventually, I learned how shortsighted my view of my mother was. My parents had been married 20 years by the time I was born. When they married, my dad had moved her to the country, into a house with no running water or indoor toilet, where they lived for years. She raised my three older sisters there and did everything expected of her. In the early days, when there was no money for milk, she waited at the coal mines for my dad’s $42 semi-monthly check. When the coal mines exploded, she drove there in the middle of the night and waited for word of her family, including her husband.
Even after I came along and she started seeing other men, she never neglected her home life. Even as Dad’s paychecks grew, she still sewed all our clothes. She fixed our meals and Dad’s mining bucket, kept our house spotless, bought me the things I saw in commercials during Saturday morning cartoons. She was beautiful. Elegant. At mealtimes, we put bread on a china plate and butter in a lidded crystal dish. And I came to see that the sadness I’d felt for my dad, he didn’t feel. What I saw as the inadequacy of her love, he didn’t focus on. He saw her former decades of constancy, her generosity with her family, the beauty she brought to our home.
When I moved back to Southern Illinois after my parents died, I set this pendant on my desk. It’s a cheap thing—gold-plated with a plastic blue stone—but my mother had kept it in a box in her little safe. In black marker, across the top of the box, she’d written, “Daddy gave me this gold pendant on our 6th wedding anniversary — 4-30-1945.”
On my desk, nothing sits next to the pendant. I’ve purposely kept the space empty. Because my mother once described in detail an expensive compact, embossed with a rose, that encased the perfect shade of rouge and a soft red lipstick. Clarence had sent it to her after she left Chicago, she told me. Begged her to come back and said he’d marry her.
That cheap little pendant and the absence of the beautiful compact—that means the world to me.
—Mary Blye Kramer
Mary Blye Kramer is the author of two books (Jossey-Bass and Paraclete Press), has been published in more than 60 periodicals and recently completed her third memoir.