Song silenced but remembered
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
They would have been married 58 years today. Hard to believe, but not hard to imagine. I imagine they would have been good years.
I remember when they were married for only a decade. I was nine then, my mother 31 and prettier than any mother I knew: tall and thin with dark blond hair, which she claimed was hard to curl but it always looked perfect to me. She wore dresses every day. And high-heeled shoes. And a hat and gloves to church on Sundays.
``You should have been a movie star,'' I told her at least a million times. She was already a singer. She sounded just like Rosemary Clooney. That's what I swore to her. That's what I swear still.
She sang, sometimes with the radio, sometimes with a record, sometimes alone. I loved her voice. It was like water; cool or warm, it didn't matter. It was clear, and you could see right through it. And it led straight to her heart.
For weeks before their 10th anniversary, my mother sang constantly, but only for me. She sang in the bathroom in front of the mirror, and in the kitchen in front of the sink, and when she was vacuuming, and when she was ironing and when she was hanging the laundry to dry. The song was ``Mr. Wonderful,'' and these are the words:
``Why this feeling? Why this glow? Why the thrill when you say hello? It's a strange and tender magic, you do. Mr. Wonderful, that's you.''
She was practicing, she whispered, to make a record to give to my father on their special day. It’s a secret, she said.
She saved quarters and nickels and dimes to do this. For months, she saved and she sang and she schemed through all of May and June and July so that she could stand in a soundproof room, a mic dangling from the ceiling and sing by herself; a piano player $10 more than she had. And in her Rosemary Clooney voice, she did this, she sang of a love that was young and hopeful and strong.
My father loved the record and he played it all the time. But after my mother died, he gave it to me because he said it hurt too much for him to listen anymore. That was 16 years ago.
I used to listen to it a lot. But I don't now. It hurts me too, to look back and see her, young and pretty, singing alone in that room.
The record is a half-century old. It's a 78 rpm and it warbles. The sound is tinny, my mother's voice well water now, cool and still and clear. But it’s deep and distant, too. And though the sound of it echoes through time, I can not touch it, I cannot hold it and keep it cupped in my hands, because it’s a moment, a memory that recedes a little more every time I reach for it.
I try to picture my mother today. She would be 79, not so old. I can see her - she has just turned 32 - in that empty sound proof room, singing her heart out. And I can see her at 46, months after her accident, strapped in a wheelchair, her body slumped, her voice silenced. But I can't reconcile the two. I can’t grow her into the white-haired woman she might have been.
My father will call this morning and say, ``It's my anniversary, you know. Your mother and I would have been married 58 years.'' And he will sigh, and then shake away the sadness and all the ``what ifs'' and ``whys,'' all the ``could haves'' and ``should have beens.'' My father will count his blessings because he really is a lucky man. He had my mother. And now he has Louise, who doesn't sing about her love, but who lives it every day.
Still, a 58th anniversary deserves remembering. So I am remembering a wedding I never attended, but a couple I knew well: a tall, blond singer and a loving man mesmerized by her song.
