How Reading with My Dying Mother Revealed Her Life

I was eight, and through my bedroom wall I could hear my mother, Heidi, talking to herself as she prepared to go to sleep. Every night, in the living room, she positioned old magazines beneath the legs of a red convertible sofa, so as not to crease the rug it rested on. Then, with audible effort, she lifted the bed out of the couch, arranged layers of sheets, blankets, and quilts, and at last put her head down. “How am I going to make it through the month?” she would ask herself, though I’d come to believe that she was really asking me. The red couch had once been the warm center of family evenings. Now it was where she told me about her unhappiness.

When I was three and my sister was one, my mother took us away from my father. He suffered from severe mental illness that made him violent, and it was no longer safe to be around him. We left Washington, D.C., and went to New Haven, where she had secured a job as a high-school teacher. Every evening, my sister and I, in our pajamas, would sit on the couch, leaning against my mother, while she read to us. The books were often historical fiction: “Johnny Tremain,” “Across Five Aprils,” “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” “Farmer Boy.” She read with bright, dramatic energy, making each character’s voice sound distinct. I felt I was living in the fields and towns in those pages. At dinner the following day, we would speculate about what might happen next in the story, then hurry through the meal so that we could return to the couch and find out. In the intense pleasure with which my mother read, I felt her affection for books—and for me. What she revered, I revered. Then I learned to read for myself, something fell away, and we were never again as close.

On school days, my mother would leave our apartment before seven to spend the day talking about literature with other people’s children. Through their discussions, and the essays and stories that they were assigned to write each week, Heidi came to know her students’ pain. “You wouldn’t believe the things kids revealed about their lives,” she told me, late in her life. Even then, such were her boundaries that that was all she said.

Across the years, I have encountered so many of my mother’s former students who tell me that, as one put it, “Mrs. Dawidoff saw more potential in me than I saw in myself.” During my childhood, from the sixties to the early eighties, it was rare for a woman to be a single mother supporting a family. While Heidi was helping the students examine the interior lives of Emma Woodhouse, Isabel Archer, and Lord Jim, the students were collecting fragments of detail about the unusual figure before them—her bright-red lipstick, T-strap and slingback high heels, kilts, pleated skirts, aloof posture, and her bright-red station wagon. She was, one former student said, “A marvel for a teen-age girl to see.” But, another former student told me, “We never knew anything about her life.” This was because my mother was, in a favorite phrase of hers, “bound and determined” that her past should remain concealed, a mystery to everyone.