The Curator of Family Regrets
I have accumulated objects of my family’s history that were given, or bequeathed to me, over the years by their previous owners. I pride myself in knowing the stories tied to each item and welcome any opportunity to recount them to visitors. I see myself as a custodian of my family’s past. A past which each object has bound to itself like a talisman.
My uncle Ivars’s oil painting Man Creates God hung on the living room wall of my childhood home. Over the years, I pieced together its history: how my mother came to possess the painting after my father left when I was three, how the rivulet patterns on my uncle’s interpretation of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam were caused years earlier by kerosene after his first exhibition (daddy no-show, artwork spite pyre); how my father had stopped Ivars before he could set his paintings ablaze, and how Ivars had then given him Man Creates God.
I would often hear the frame of that painting rattle against the surface of the living room wall from my bedroom late at night as my mother’s third husband pounded his fist against the wall above the back of the sofa where he sat driving home a point at my mother who I imagined sat at the other end, silent and cowed, her eyes downcast with her hands folded in her lap, a facet of the painting’s history I do not recount to visitors. Man Creates God now hangs above my fireplace, a write-up of its history printed on a placard and affixed to the wall next to it.
Several of Uncle Ivars’s serigraphs also hang on my walls, created when he was an up-and-coming artist in San Francisco in the 1960s: his Four Elements series—Earth, Fire, Water, Air—with their swatches of bold, brooding colors; A Joyous Animal and A Serious Animal in bright, primary colors, gifted to me by my uncle on my twelfth birthday; The Hen Laid Two Eggs, given to my mother and father in 1959 as a housewarming present.
A cobalt blue vase that originally belonged to Ivars from his days working at Gumps in San Francisco is on display in my curio cabinet. I had always been enamored of that vase when I visited Ivars and his partner Robert over the years and was pleasantly surprised when, in 1986, he presented it to me for my twenty-eighth birthday. Ivars frequently visited when I lived two blocks up Potrero Hill from his house on Rhode Island Street. He would arrive out of breath, pull his fifth of scotch out of his over-the-shoulder bag, pour himself a drink, light up a cigarette, and giggle. Uncle Ivars giggled at everything. I believe it was his way of pushing back against the grayness of life.
Ivars died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1989. Years of his artwork, unmounted and unframed, was left moldering in his basement.
After my mother’s death in 2008, I came into possession of several items of hers and her mother’s, which are now prominently displayed throughout my home.
My grandmother’s first book of poetry, Hárfa Lettem (I became a Harp), published in 1937, sits on top of the sideboard in my living room. Six framed watercolor paintings by a well-known Hungarian watercolorist, Oszvald Toroczkai, hang on the walls on either side of my living room windows. Each painting corresponds to a stanza from my grandmother’s poem A Párom (My Partner). When I look at each, I deduce that the artist was in love with my grandmother, each stanza so lovingly interpreted in its respective panel.
The galleys of my grandmother’s second book of poetry went up in flames on her publisher’s desk during the Siege of Budapest in the winter of 1945.
I retrieved and framed several pieces of art from a folio of artwork my mother created in the early 1950s through a correspondence art class. My favorite is a colored pencil drawing she drew from memory of her family’s beloved Csobogó, their summer home in the mountains of what is now northwestern Romania. I was surprised to discover what a talented artist she was. Reading through the journals she left me, it became clear that her talent and flair for drawing were neither encouraged nor praised by her parents, which explains why I never saw any of her artwork until after her death when I found the folio she had hidden in the back of her bedroom closet.
In correspondence between them over the years, it’s plain that my mother had been strongly encouraged by her parents to pursue a career in the sciences, if not to become a doctor. When she gave birth to me in 1958, she dropped out of her Ph.D. candidacy in genetics at Johns Hopkins, never to complete her doctoral degree. She became a doting housewife, supporting her husband through his Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at the University of Michigan, convinced as his professors were that he was destined to become a great American novelist. After receiving a U of M Hopwood Award in 1960 for seven short stories he wrote, my father left my mother, moved to Seattle, and stopped writing altogether. Much as they were thrilled that she bore me as their first grandchild, letters she received from her parents over the years make it clear they were never able to hide their disappointment over what they perceived as my mother’s squandered potential.
My mother used to sign her letters with a heart, in the center of which would be two x-es for eyes, with a smile below them. I always found this little postscript drawing of hers endearing. Years later, when closing her estate, I found two small pillow covers she had made in Hungary when she was twelve years old, the top panels of which she had embroidered with representations of hearts and flowers. In the centers of the hearts were crosshatch patterns which I immediately recognized as the inspiration for her little heart drawings at the end of her letters. Having made that connection, the innocence in that simple drawing at the end of her letters pulls at my heart and causes my breath to catch. Those two pillows have found their place on either end of the camelback settee in my bedroom.
While they were on honeymoon at Cape Cod in 1957, my father found a piece of driftwood that resembled a semi-reclining woman. That driftwood was displayed on top of the bookshelves in our living room opposite my uncle’s Man Creates God painting through my mother’s first three marriages. It hung suspended in the middle of a triple-diamond frame crafted by my father. When she married her fourth husband, Ray, I created a triple diamond-shaped frame—three side-by-side diamonds, a large diamond flanked by two smaller diamonds, an homage to the original frame created by my father—in the center of which I hung the reclining woman driftwood. The completed objet d’art was suspended from the ceiling in front of the wall of the stairwell landing in their condominium in Ann Arbor. When my mother and Ray moved to Sarasota, Florida, they could not take the large frame with them. My mother removed the piece of driftwood and kept it on display in their small Sarasota condominium. That driftwood came home with me when I closed her estate in June 2008.
Layers of melancholic memories cling to that dusty piece of wood. Dust motes continue to settle on it where it rests on a shelf in a back room while I resist putting it on display.
In my self-appointed role as custodian of my family’s history, I have unwittingly become the curator of family regrets. Throughout my house, objects from my family’s history serve as constant reminders of their previous owners’ dashed dreams, failed attempts, broken hearts, and thwarted potential. They now serve as a bittersweet goldmine of my own history. I return to them, again and again, to help me make sense of my past as I glacially scribe a memoir I secretly fear I’ll never complete. Like barely perceptible background noise, the artifacts seem to whisper, “Your dreams, too, will be dashed, your attempts will fail, your heart will be broken, and you will never reach your potential.”
I rail against those imagined voices.
I remind myself that my family’s past is simply a prologue to my present, not some curse I am doomed to repeat. Though their creators’ lives may have ended tragically or unfulfilled, these heirlooms my family has left me are things of lasting beauty, born of a creative spirit that could not be held back.
My choices are not fated. Even if my life, too, ends tragically or unfulfilled, I will complete my memoir. However long it takes. The collective creative spirit of my family compels me.