Our People     

Mother, circa 1904: My First Julius Caesar

In one photo of my mother in a family album, she is about 17, attired as a Roman soldier and wearing long, curly brown hair. With her father, Joel Parrish, she had doubtless recently attended a production of Julius Caesar at the old Salt Lake Theater, founded by Brigham Young, a remarkable and distinguished stage for remote Utah. As she frequently did, she had probably re-enacted parts of the play before her mirror. She very early became stage-struck and insisted on seeing most of the theater’s productions. She loved all kinds of drama, but throughout my youth she remained a Mormon in her insistence on the “moral uplift” of each work. Another photo in the album shows mother in the early Twenties, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a long coat, and a voluminous ankle-length skirt, all in dark colors. Hiding in this ample skirt and peeking out at the world is her four year-old appendage, son Joel, in what looks like a velvet suit and pongee shirt, appearing as scared of the world as he usually was. A third photo shows her at about 50, seated with eminent dignity on the reviewing stand for the commencement exercises at her college, looking like the trustee that she had become. She is once again dressed in black, and her graying hair is now short, drawn severely back behind her ears. Looking at this picture later, when her hair was again full, she asked, “Why did I wear my hair like that?” But I remembered the words printed beneath her radiant picture in her college yearbook: “Her glossy hair / Clustered o’er a brow / Bright with intelligence.”

Coming from a hard-working farm family of limited horizons, mother seemed to feel that she had to transcend her background in every possible way. I derived my own goal of fierce self-improvement from her—a formula for an interesting, though forever restless, life. Her father was the first to interest her in the outside world. He read a good deal, and talked to her about much of what he read. In mother’s eyes, Joel Parrish had set an exalted example for me, and in her later years I probably replaced him in her imagination. When she told me why she had resolved to name me “Joel,” I almost felt that I had been knighted. Mother spoke with pride of her father’s having been a friend of the Prophet Joseph Smith in Illinois. Later, I realized that Clara Parrish Dorius—after she married she preferred to be called “Claire”—went to plays and movies and shared her life only with someone named Joel—my grandfather and myself. She moved from one Joel to another; Ray Dorius was only a blip in this continuum. Joel Parrish formed her sensibilities, as she was later critical in forming mine. Like Athena, she seemed to have sprung from his head. In my teens, my ardent conversations with mother about books and films became the model for the deeply gratifying discussions that I later shared with close friends.

When Clara was four, her father had held her up to see her mother, Emma, dying of tuberculosis, and the shadows of the disease and of the terrible loss hovered over mother for many years. In 1847, in one of the Mormon companies emigrating to Zion, her father’s family had ridden in covered wagons and pushed handcarts across the plains to the Great Salt Lake. Although some of Emma Parrish’s children had died, she left Joel with the five boys and two girls whom I knew as adults. A Mrs. Jenner, a stern Englishwoman who became the family nanny, tried to fill in for the children’s lost mother. Like many single female converts, she was probably seeking a husband in Zion. Mother was spoiled by her father, as she was later to spoil me. He let her eat all of the tooth-decaying candy she wanted in his general store, and in her early 30s, an irresponsible dentist pulled out all of her teeth and left her with dentures for life. Perhaps also because digestive troubles were common in her father’s family, she early developed ulcers. She was subsequently to devote most of her life to the study of nutrition—not a popular subject in those days.

Clara was her father’s favorite child. As in many polygamous families, he was old enough to have been her grandfather. Later, she rarely referred to polygamy, to her father’s having been called by Brigham Young to undertake a second, or “celestial marriage,” or mentioned that she was one of the children of such a marriage. Several years after her father had married Elizabeth, his first wife, he then married Emma Ford, my grandmother, who came as a girl to America from Cambridgeshire, England. In Centerville, Utah, Elizabeth’s family lived on one side of the main road, and Emma’s family on the other. Most of the time the road might as well have been a wall. I think that mother early realized that the lives of women in Mormondom would always be subordinate to those of men. She vowed to live a very different life, and she did. Although she had been deeply distressed by the effects of polygamy on her family, Clara’s enduring worship of her father kept her from breaking openly with his faith.

When mother was in her 60s and 70s, she could break down when praising her father. The Parrishes and their kin were descendants of early colonists in New England who had fled to Canada during the Revolutionary War, rather than break with the crown. With the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, mother’s first political hero, she broke sharply with her Republican family loyalties, took up residence in Salt Lake City, and remained an active member of causes for the Democratic party and world peace for the rest of her life. When she and my sister later came to visit me in the East for the first time, I was astonished when they took the long train ride to the site of the founding of the League of Nations in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.

Since Joel Parrish ran the “merchandise” store in Centerville, a tiny rural town ten miles north of the capital, he would take mother with him almost every week into Salt Lake City to buy provisions. They rode in the family carriage or buggy, drawn by their favorite horse, Dobbin. When I was young and she would sing, “Put on your old gray bonnet,” I imagined them traveling together, almost like the couple she doubtless wished they were. The song always brought tears to my eyes because each trip as she described it seemed to have the excitement of the “golden wedding day” of the song. After they had completed their shopping in the city at Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution—the Mormon department store—Joel and his daughter would usually attend plays at the Theater. Many of the best-known actors and actresses of the day would stop over to give a few performances on their long journeys by train from New York or Chicago to San Francisco. Throughout her girlhood, these plays were the highlights of my mother’s life. Since there were many similar pairs in polygamous Zion, the old man and the young girl would have caused little comment in the lobby. Years later, she instilled in me a lifelong devotion to the performing arts, with her stories of the productions she had wept over, from The Return of Peter Ibbetson to Hamlet. She even spoke of her crushes on several of the great actors of the day.

The theater opened up for her a vision of a richer and more enchanting future, a thrilling revelation for a girl from rural Utah. It prompted her to feel that, despite her troubled and provincial beginnings, there was no limit to the life she might lead. The later razing of this theater to build a gas company was one of the great losses of her life. Well before the magical stage of her girlhood dreams was gone, however, she had set about building a far more practical career for herself in the social sciences. As a child, I never had the access to the stage that mother had, except through her memories. Very early, however, I became totally hooked on movies. And mother’s spirited evocation of plays probably inspired me later to study and teach Shakespeare. But by the time I was born, public service had already become an obsession with mother. She had apparently forgotten that the world of the imagination had once enabled both of us to transcend our routine lives.

Mother’s father died when she was 20, bequeathing choice pieces of land to his sons, as was customary among the Mormons. He apparently expected that his two daughters would be adequately supported by their future husbands. He was wrong. Both daughters made bizarre marriages, perhaps convinced that no mere man could ever measure up to their father. So close and so ill-fated were the parallels between my family and Aunt Chloe’s that both seemed blighted by the same curse. Also living in Salt Lake City, Aunt Chloe (pronounced “Klo”) was as gentle as my mother was commanding. Chloe married a Mormon who was a kind of alchemist and quack healer. Uncle A.J. spent his entire life trying to find gold in various rock formations. He built sluices in his barn, and ran water over piles of carefully selected rocks. He discovered one stone he mistakenly called “radium,” and attributed to it magical restorative powers. But A.J.’s eccentricity had unfortunate consequences. One after the other, two of his daughters developed cancer in adult life. Instead of seeking medical help, his middle daughter chose to treat herself with her father’s magical stone; she turned to traditional medical treatment too late to save her life. The eldest, who had suffered mental illness, denied her early physical symptoms. By the time she admitted to herself that she was ill, her cancer had metastasized. After taking care of her at home for several months, my mother had to place her in a nursing home. Uncle A.J.’s youngest daughter has lived a long and productive life as a remarkably successful and prolific portrait painter, still active in her mid-80s. Mother also developed cancer later in life. But typically, she took immediate charge of her health and broke the cycle of death. She at once consulted her nephew, a good surgeon, underwent surgery, and lived out a long life.

On both sides of the family, I think that at least 70% of my first cousins have remained within the bosom of the Church; we never hear about the Jack Mormons. I think that because the Saints who know of me still want to save my soul, I’ve had to keep my distance from them. America’s geography is a great divider, but for me a blessing. I have unfortunately, however, lost touch with nearly all of my relatives.

When mother was in her early 20s, her brother lent her the money to go to the Utah State Agricultural College, where she majored in Home Economics and began to think of a career in the field. She went on to study at Brigham Young University, where she became the secretary to a Church official, Dr. Widtsoe. Although most Mormon leaders did not then look with favor upon independent professional lives for women, Dr. Widtsoe inspired mother to pursue her professional goals to the fullest. The Church’s opportunities for women were usually limited to work in the Relief Society—sewing, cooking, and other forms of group domestic work. When I was a child, mother held two or three critical positions in the Church’s aptly-named Mutual Improvement Association. In 1930, she helped organize the Church’s grand celebration in the Tabernacle—100 years after the Church's founding by Joseph Smith. I’ve often doubted whether my mother would have married had she not been born into a Church that emphasized parenthood and replenishing the earth as religious duties, as did the ancient Israelites. Claire was at different times a lecturer at the Civic Center, a food specialist at the State Fair, a restaurant manager at the Lion House (the former home of Brigham Young’s wives), a hospital dietitian, a trustee at her alma mater, and finally a teacher of nutrition at the University of Utah. Even in her retirement, she led classes for women at her local Mormon chapel. I still derive pleasure from reeling off her achievements.

As far back as I can remember, mother was civic-minded. Once when I was about seven, I complained that there were few boys my age in what was then a sparse neighborhood. Mother went to work with her usual energy to attract more children to Capitol Hill. She even organized a summer fair, with many children’s activities, but I took little part. Later, after a campaign of strenuous telephoning, she raised enough money to build a local playground. I never went to the playground, because it was soon taken over and wrecked by bullies. I remained as much of a loner as ever, absorbed in my fantasies, and mother did not seem surprised; she was already thinking up her next project.

When they were first married, my father’s coarse farm expressions annoyed and shocked my mother, even though she too had been reared on a farm. By my time, father’s robust cursing had been reduced to terms like skit and goldern. Remembering her own father’s strong character, mother must have concluded early in her marriage that Ray Dorius was neither an appropriate husband nor a good model for her children. When he would come home from his travels, mother received his proffered wet kisses dutifully, if somewhat impatiently. He always needed far more hugging and kissing than she or we children could tolerate. She came to have less and less respect for him, although she rarely berated him in our presence. She always called him by the name I must first have used—”Daddy”—never “Ray,” or anything more tender. Although he remained emotionally limited, she continued to grow in mind and character.

After my father started traveling regularly on business, mother began to suspect that her husband still longed for polygamy. In early years, signs of my father’s apparent dalliances when he was away from home troubled her deeply. She could never bring up this ugly topic with my siblings, but she would occasionally share her suspicions in guarded language with me. My father probably had a few willing Mormon “sisters” in some of the towns along his route, attracted by his remarkably youthful good looks and passionate faith. These women were doubtless far more affectionate and easy-going than mother. When father returned from a trip, always later than he had promised, she would become resentful and hostile when he would tell her, in his seemingly innocent way, of the widowed ladies who had fed and befriended him at their homes. My mother was especially mortified to learn of an Ernestine MacDougal, from whom father had borrowed a goodly sum of money when he was penniless. I was too young to wonder whether he had rendered any services for this loan.

Mother had always had what the family called the “Parrish back.” Her work kept her on her feet for much of the day, especially later when she supervised young women in cooking classes. The long hours of standing, year after year, worsened her already defective back and gave her ever-increasing discomfort. To give her aching legs and feet a rest, she would go to bed most evenings immediately after preparing dinner. She might then awaken in the middle of the night with severe leg cramps, calling out for me to lessen her pain. Her calves would become hard as rocks. My sister and I would bolt out of our sound sleep and rush to apply hot water bottles to her legs until the muscle spasms stopped and the pain loosened its grip. Sleep for my sister and me was therefore troubled, and we were often at fire-alarm readiness. My memory of mother’s frightened moans, sometimes almost shrieks, rendered my sleep restless for years. My younger brother Kermit would hold pillows tightly over his ears. Twice during my father’s earlier absences, I had seen her in the midst of serious medical crises—vomiting violently with bleeding ulcers. I remember fearing that her end might be near. She underwent three surgeries for ulcers, a practice rarely necessary today.

With my father away on trips that could last as long as five months, I was frequently afraid that I might lose her too. I was so insecure as a child that I feared every evening that she might not return from work. The Depression had begun, and after school, I alone was in charge. I would have done anything for her, almost taking pride in the yoke she had placed securely around my neck. Because mother was gone all day, I served for several years as a nanny for my brother and sister. I wanted to be the best son, baby-sitter, nurse, companion, and servant who ever lived. But mother was never fully satisfied with my housekeeping. She felt that what was already clean could always be cleaner. I often saw myself as an impeccable English butler, an Eric Blore or Arthur Treacher. The self-effacing good worker was my ideal—not a noisy show-off like my father. In my loneliness, I tried to imagine myself as part of a huge, nameless work force: one of the countless thousands of anonymous men building a pyramid or a cathedral. Later, I realized that I was laboring for her love. We children always felt that we had to sing for our suppers. Slowly, I began to resent her taking my servitude and devotion for granted. But I could never broach this subject, because she was always in pain and working harder than I.

After we had our home remodeled in Salt Lake City, I had to do even more of the daily chores that my father would have helped with had he been at home. We now kept four apartments, including ours, and maintaining these was endless labor for me. When we still used coal, fire played a fearsome role in my life. If I thoughtlessly shoveled too much coal into the old, poorly-ventilated furnace, the resulting fire and smoke created an inferno. Sometimes I feared I might cause the furnace to explode and burn the house down. Since all of these tasks were dull and monotonous, on most days I would move about in a trance, humming musical themes or recalling lines of poetry to render my actions bearable. In my perpetual dreaming, I insulated my imaginative life from the pointless work my hands were doing. Thus I carried out my chores slowly, perversely extending my work-sentence. Every project seemed never-ending. If I had known Milton, I might have repeated to myself, “Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves…” Later, I thought that someone who taught Household Management should not have expected her son to carry out her domestic ideals. Instead of turning her son into a houseboy, she should have relaxed her standards. By the time I was in high school, when mother’s professional life became yet more time-consuming, she rarely invited her friends in to see her spotless house. My mother didn’t seem to have close friends. I recall that when working on my own projects in later life, I’ve seen each as without end, and during times of stress, I too have placed work ahead of my friends. Throughout life, I’ve been reminded repeatedly of my father’s Sisyphean work habits. Like him, I’ve at times surrendered to a life of “quiet desperation.” My family’s perpetual busy-ness was a parody of the work ethic. Lately, I have asked myself whether I’ve partly used writing, as I earlier used teaching, as an excuse to avoid wider interaction with the world.

During the Depression and afterward, when my father’s business failed and he could find only part-time jobs, mother became the sole breadwinner of the family. As I later learned from talking with her students, she was a skillful and devoted teacher. Both her colleagues and students found her a natural leader and generator of ideas—if shy, formal, and overly-controlled. Her work on her feet—her vertical life—was mostly rewarding. But her simultaneous horizontal life—in bed immediately after dinner and often in pain—cast a shadow over most of her working years and over our lives. Whenever mother was ailing, it was impossible for us to disobey her in any way. I identified with both of her lives, on her feet and in bed. I even found something strangely ennobling in her pain—a perverse empathy that has played havoc with my own emotional life.

Mother and I both had crisis mentalities, almost what Henry James called “the imagination of disaster.” She was too insecure, for example, to be a good driver. After a small accident, she gave up sitting at the wheel entirely, but she always remained an anxious back-seat driver. Despite her absence each day, mother was the inspiration for all three of her children. When she had the time and could relax, she was warm, sympathetic, and companionable. Mother’s love for Kermit and me was reassuring and encouraging, essential to our lives. Unfortunately, my sister always remained in third place. For Julia, mother only occasionally filled the void left by our father, to whom she was closest. I strongly feel that the devotion I lavishly gave (or felt that I was expected to give) mother later helped to diminish my ability to love other women. Instead, I have at times waited on them as I did on my mother. To compensate for the fact that I was not attracted to them physically, I have often over-praised women, occasionally to the point of sounding insincere.

Unlike my father, mother was moderate and reasonable in temper, and she could be persuaded to change her mind. Unfortunately, this flexibility did not apply to major matters like our careers. When I was about 12, she suddenly changed her mind about how to bring me up, a portent of her later interference in my professional life. From the beginning, she had always wanted me to be a “young gentleman.” Indeed, one of the first books she had recommended to me when I was old enough was John Halifax, Gentleman—a woman’s over-idealized portrait of a faultless young man. One day, when a visiting cousin thought I was out of earshot, he told mother almost angrily that he thought she was bringing up a “sissy”—a word that I had also heard on the playground at school. “Why isn’t Joel out playing baseball with the other boys? Good rough-and-tumble sports would make a man of him.” I was listening to these scarring words through a half-open door. I shrank from being a “man” in my cousin’s terms. And I hated him for being tone-deaf to Mozart, and for sticking his nose into our affairs. Afterwards, I always kept my distance from this cousin.

I naively didn’t connect his words with mother’s actions shortly afterwards. She said nothing, but slowly and resolutely, as was her style, she went to work to make her son more manly, little realizing that it was a lost cause. I wouldn’t, of course, give up the piano, but mother had me join the Boy Scouts, and told me very pointedly that I was to become an Eagle Scout. Although she helped me to earn merit badges, badge by badge, I never did become an Eagle. I hated everything about scouting except the study of flowers, trees, and local fauna. Once when the troop met at our house, mother said that adolescent boys “smelled bad.” This and other signs of young male crudity weakened her enthusiasm for scouting. She was soon again preoccupied with her own work, and I returned to my books, music, and reveries, greatly relieved that she had taken the heat off me.

When I was in high school and mother was 53, she suffered a heart attack. At about noon, we were enjoying a Sunday dinner, which she as usual had “stayed home from Church to prepare”—an excuse she had been using for years, to her husband’s dismay. In the middle of the meal, mother retired to her bed in exhaustion. This was not unusual, but she soon called out that she was experiencing severe chest pains. Even though I had long expected that something like this might happen, I was frightened. My father telephoned her cousin, a neighbor, the same physician, as I later learned, who had supposedly botched the birth of her first child. This man had been the County Health Commissioner, but in most spheres of medicine he was incompetent. “It’s mild angina, Clara,” he said, after a brief visit, “There’s nothing to worry about.”

Although she was extremely weak, mother rose the next morning and continued to walk about feebly for a few days, until the chest pains returned. This time, my father, now also frightened, called a highly competent physician, one of his own nephews. After an examination, the doctor reported that she had had a major heart attack and prescribed bed rest for many months. When he heard the news over the phone, my father wept for some time, but his overall behavior did not change. My worries were reflected in my distracted studies at West High. Mother’s heart attack deepened the guilt all of us had been feeling about the price of mother’s serving as both parent and major breadwinner. I realized my excessive dependence on her at this time. How could I have survived without her? It wasn’t until I left home that I realized that I too had been making sacrifices for her.

Mother in the 1960s

She slowly made a complete recovery. Wearing the closely-cropped hair she was to wear in her photo as a trustee, mother seemed in her middle years of public service to become our alpha leader. On father’s stays at home, he gradually surrendered his role as head of the family. I knew that mother had always worn the pants in our family, though in those days never literally. After I left home for college, mother began to teach less and less, so that she could remain off her feet, and she started helping my father with his mail-order business. It immediately improved. Anxiety-ridden until her late 50s, mother slowly became almost fearless, especially after father died. I think that she finally felt free from both husband and children.

I have identified with my mother to such an extent that I have developed many of her temperamental and even physical symptoms. Like her, I have frequently expressed my anxiety as psychosomatic distress or pain. Probably because she was ill at ease in her own body, mother could not bequeath us adequate confidence in our physical selves or our abilities to experience pleasure—a word I never heard her use. Mother would give us quick and frequent hugs and pecks on our cheeks, but her embracing was never prolonged, and we children were slow to risk touching others. My sister Julia was especially squeamish about being touched. I would, however, give mother intense kisses on her soft cheeks, but feeling her tension, I did not prolong them. We children felt that mother was too preoccupied with her various positions to give us the full attention we required. If we offended or disappointed her, she would say nothing, but instead fall silent and look at us with baleful, judging eyes. I later called them her superego eyes. Her wounded gaze was far more powerful than all our father’s roaring. In later life, whenever anybody has given me this kind of silent treatment, I’ve felt condemned and desperate.

Since we could not tolerate father’s excessive kissing and hugging, we became very shy physically. Mother’s constant refrain was, “Don’t be like your father.” Today, when I am on my back, my kitty, Cleo, another strong female, frequently lies on my chest, and remains in control of the moment when petting begins and ends. I have never stroked a human being as regularly as I now pet Cleo, and I feel this deprivation as a great loss. Curiously, in her permitting no one else to touch her, Cleo seems to be carrying my family’s fear of intimacy to the limit. One of my greatest regrets is that only for limited periods have I enjoyed bodily comfort and physical affection. How my hands and arms have ached to touch, stroke, and enfold! Perhaps because father’s mental and physical boundaries were ill-defined, we over-protected our own. This guardedness delayed our intimacy with others and may have appeared as indifference or coldness.

In my early teens, as my alliance with my father and Mormonism weakened, my bond with my mother grew, and I developed lavish verbal expressions of love for her, reassuring her of my indebtedness and gratitude. Did mother merely tolerate being over-praised, or did she somehow encourage it? Until I went to the university, we were locked together in a small world, and it could be stifling. By my late teens, our intimate talks became less frequent, because there was now much in my Jack-Mormon conduct I didn’t wish to discuss. Echoing my father’s superlatives, I began unconsciously to exaggerate, even mock, my own extravagance. My words and feelings became disconnected. Trapped in my eccentric speech patterns, I couldn’t find a natural language of affection for my mother. She simply laughed off my wordy compliments and our love easily survived. My brother and sister would often imitate me. Perhaps we were all simply begging for more time and affection.

Only as a young adult did I realize that I was still treating as an invalid a woman who was becoming stronger, more self-assured, and more capable year by year. Even mother’s back greatly improved in her last three decades. To this day, with close friends, I can easily fall into the odd language of my early years—quirky forms of verbal play. I discovered the seductive world of linguistic absurdity and nonsense in my early teens. I had to learn the language of adult loving much later. Each of my lovers and I would develop an argot that seemed right for us. I didn’t realize until later that gays often develop their own speech patterns, trying to express their special bonds with one another and their roles as outsiders. Even today, in conversing with friends, I try to add verbal drama to my limited housebound life. Like my father, to get a laugh, I have always been happy to play the roles of fool and clown. But with friends who do not enjoy wordplay or irony, as I found among some of the North Germans, I lose my joy in conversation, especially in subverting the King’s English.

Mother had a kind of single-mindedness, determination, and persistence that made my brother and me realize that we could never give up. As children, my sister and I believed that our mother’s career and life were more interesting and valuable than our own. Later on, we feared that we probably could never catch up. Until my early teens, I imagined that we children were moons revolving around mother’s sun. Like moons, we received reflected light from her achievements. Julia particularly was always her mother’s pale and waning moon, and she even followed mother within three years into the grave. Since mother loved and admired me, I now find it strange that she persisted for so long in placing her ideals for me far ahead of my own desires. At first, because I valued her judgment, I did not make my predilections about my professional life clear. In her deeply held conviction that I should become a doctor, she remained for at least three years as implacable as my father. But since I trusted my mother more than my father, she could cause me greater distress. My father could never have so prevailed upon me. Mother thought that with will power, the trump card of the Mormons, I could conquer anything and work for the health of mankind. Nothing less noble would befit the grandson of Joel Parrish. What profession could bring more respect than that of a physician? It took me some time to realize that I was programmed to fulfill an ideal role in her mind.

My sister and I later felt that we had been invaded in different ways by both parents. I never acknowledged that I had also long been Claire’s husband, the only male with whom she could share her thoughts and feelings, as she never could with Ray Dorius. My relationship with my mother became incestuous in everything but fact, with all the crippling that this word implies. I could never fully admit, much less act out, my own conflicting erotic feelings. In dark moods, I later associated my teenage obsession with vampires with mother’s metaphorically sucking the life out of Julia and me in order to achieve her professional goals and fulfill her emotional needs.

In exalting mother, I began to realize that I was demeaning myself. For several years, I would similarly permit aggressive friends to dominate me: passivity felt familiar. Unlike my sister, however, who never learned to defend herself against mother and mother-figures, my brother and I gradually learned to fight far harder for autonomy and create independent lives. Independence was no doubt made easier by our geographical distance from mother. In adult life, I established reciprocal and easy relationships with my friends—my later families—who became far closer and healthier than my first.

Even as an adult, my mother continued to threaten my independence. During the war, when I was working in Cambridge at a technical school, I wrote a complaining letter to my mother about my tedious schedule. To my astonishment, she boarded a train and came to visit me. Amazingly, she stayed for several months. I knew that my sister and brother were still very needy at home, but mother made a predictable and preferential choice. From the moment she arrived, mother tried by example to lift my spirits. As we passed through Harvard Yard one day, she spotted the list of guest lecturers scheduled to teach at the Harvard Summer School. She decided to audit courses with the sociologist, Howard Odum, and the anthropologist, Margaret Mead. Her reports of their lectures were so stimulating, and she was in such a state of excitement, that I marveled again at her curiosity and range of interests. And almost at once, we two were again able to discourse freely and fully, without the silly babble of Salt Lake City. Nevertheless, her invasion of my privacy at the very moment I was trying to break free caused havoc with my studies and my personal life. The Eastern bastion I had hoped would separate me from my family, and enable me to create a new and satisfying life, had been suddenly compromised.

At 80 in Los Angeles, mother was still mentally active, teaching the history of the Utah pioneers before the Mormon Relief Society. I was startled by her late return to the Church, although a visiting cousin once told me that, at the deepest level, she may never have left it. All of my talks about agnosticism in adolescence seemed not to have shaken her faith. With typical pragmatism, she once wrote to a doubting cousin, “Get involved in Church activities and then the problem of belief will take care of itself.”

Though mother had often said, “I won’t live long because I have had too many surgeries,” she lived until the age of 91. About a year before she died, she suddenly asked me, “Did I ask too much of you when you were young?” So my childhood servitude had been on her mind for 50 years! No answer was possible. If she had been younger, I would have changed the subject and tried to reassure her by reminding her that whenever I heard my father’s cutting refrain “You can’t do it,” I also heard her encouraging “Oh yes, you can!”