DISTANT RELATIVE
These certain things you soon will hear
I’ve tried to disavow.
I should have spoken but for fear
I put it off ’til now.
I phone ahead to let you know
When I will arrive.
It’s quite a distance I’ve to go.
For hours I will drive.
I’ve mulled it over in my mind
The way things were and why,
And how they might have been designed
To temper and to try.
The sun has set when I arrive.
The household lights all shine.
Your dusty Dodge is in the drive
Beside the mangled pine.
I want to say I have begun
To see what kept you cold
And left you loath to love the one
You had but would not hold.
I trudge up to the door and knock
And clear a throat gone dry.
I wait to hear the latch unlock
Beneath a lightless sky.
I want to tell you that your child*
No longer feels the sting
And now at last is reconciled
To be a joyless thing.
A shadow shows behind the blind.
A presence I can hear.
I knock and knock, but leave resigned
As if there’s no one there.
I wrote the poem above for my mother after she died. If she were still alive, she’d be 88 years old today.
Peggy Mengis Duplantier was not the best mother in the world. She was a career woman — one of the first women Marines and one of the first female photojournalists at a major American newspaper — and had no desire to be a housewife or mother. But her parents pestered her to settle down and, at the age of 28, she set her sights on a couple of editors — one at the Opelousas Daily World and one at the New Orleans States. She played them off one against the other and my father was the poor sap who got caught in her trap.
Their marriage was a fiasco from the beginning. I’m not sure my mother was capable of loving anyone, possibly because no one had ever really loved her. She told a story of how an older brother was sick when she was born and her mother was prohibited from tending to him because of the risk to the baby. The brother died, the mother was heartbroken, and the baby blamed for keeping the mother from him grew up unloved.
To this day, because my mother told so many incredible stories, I don’t know whether this one is really true or not — but it would explain things.
Unloved by her mother, she was unable to love her children, or to let them love her. By alienating her husband, she deprived us of a father’s love as well.
It was a sad thing for all of us.
My mother died two years ago. There was an opportunity to offer a remembrance at the end of the funeral, but I was not up to it at the time and have felt bad about it ever since. My siblings and I were only too aware of her shortcomings as a mother, but what seemed to be missing was an acknowledgement of what a remarkable woman she was.
She served as a Marine during World War II. She became a photojournalist after the war — “the lonely little petunia in the onion patch,” as the other, all-male photographers called her. She continued to accept writing and editing projects after her marriage. She was the brains and driving force behind a civic organization that she helped establish to prevent commercial incursions into our residential neighborhood. She went to law school after having seven children. She continued to write and publish well-crafted and insightful feature articles well into her late 70s.
My dad realized early on that she was not content with the housewife’s lot and encouraged her to keep her hand in the journalism game. When I landed my first job as an editor in 1976, I followed his lead, signing her up to write a recipe column for this small Cajun newspaper. Her column was the best thing in the paper — not just recipes, but the stories behind the recipes: who had come up with them, where’d they’d been served, the quirkly little things associated with the dish.
When I became the editor of an obscure national news magazine in 1986, I hired her to write occasional feature stories, and those too were among the most interesting articles that we ever published.
One in particular was unforgettable: an interview with a black man who’d hijacked a plane to the socialist paradise of Cuba in 1968. He’d been thrown into prison immediately upon his arrival and had spent the next 18 years of his life in that miserable hellhole. Eventually, he was able to get himself repatriated and was slapped with a 25-year sentence, despite assurances from federal agents that he would be given credit for the time served in Cuba.
Already in her mid-sixties, my mother drove to Talladega Federal Prison by herself to interview a hijacker one on one. As a result of that interview, and the personal interventions she made on his behalf, the man’s sentence was reduced to five years and Raymond Johnson got 20 years of his life back.
Raymond may be the only person on earth who ever really loved my mother. And he did, too. When he got out, he came to visit and thank her in person, and they kept in touch for many years after.
That was not an anomaly. That’s how my mother was — intrepid, always ready to stand up for the underdog.
My mother entered a nursing home just weeks before Katrina. When she was evacuated, I knew she would eventually wind up with me in St. Louis. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I knew it was inevitable.
I hadn’t spoken to her in over a year, hadn’t seen her in two. The last time I’d talked to her on the phone, she’d started in, as she often did, saying unimaginably disgusting things about my long-dead father. I hung up on her. A few days later, I received a note from her, apologizing and insisting that she didn’t know why she’d said those things. I threw it in the trash. I’d had enough.
The year she spent in St. Louis before her death was one of the worst of my life, and a great blessing. Had she not wound up here, I might never have seen or spoken to her again, and all the pain and recrimination might never have been purged.
It’s all gone now.
I’m sorry my mother wasn’t a better mother, and I’m sorry her son wasn’t a better son, but I do have fond memories — of her pathological frugality, her macabre wit, her immediate and abiding identification with the underdog, her contempt for phonies, and so much more, all of which I’ve inherited and am striving to pass on to my own children.
My mother had her faults but she was a remarkable woman, and I’m determined to remember only the good things.
I hope, when my time comes, that my children will forgive my faults as well.
*Substitute “spouse” for “child.”