The Sunny Bedroom

Yesterday I sat in my bedroom reading and listening to a cd of a historic performance of "Tristan und Isolde" sung by the great stars of the thirties, Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior.  Although this recording is of a live broadcast from Covent Garden in 1936, I felt as though I were back in my mother's bedroom listening to her radio of something broadcast live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, an event which defined her every Saturday afternoon.  Flagstad and Melchior were two of her favorites,  "Tristan und Isolde," something that she truly swooned over.  Many were the Saturday afternoons she beguiled some of her six children to sit and listen along with her.  It was a room that faced south and the winter sun streamed in bringing its extra warmth to a cold, cold Iowa day. More often than not the listening was preceded by her washing the hair of those who were attending this musical event, that in itself a very special occasion since our mother generally left our care in the hands of the hired help.  Sitting in her bedroom in our bathrobes, no less, before that sloshing about in her very own tub, and having her hands running over our heads,  these were delicious moments of serenity and security.  Even her tears at hearing the Wagnerian strains of music were comforting, I guess, because it was a good feeling to experience mother's warm emotion at this moment.  Odd that the only other opera I specifically remember hearing with her is "Madame Butterfly," a memory that somehow is painful and and brings up feelings of loss, because it was her violent sobs that I can recall, induced by the desolation of the heroine at her abandonment by Lt. Pinkerton.  It seemed to bring back her own bitter despair at being a war widow, the woman in my mother I of course never knew, all so long ago, years before my birth.  But yet, the very fact that we children were lounging about in my mother's bedroom, adjacent as it was to my father's, meant that it must all have been after September 1936  (he never would have allowed this invasion of tots, I feel) when mother became a widow again, and relived the terrible abandonment she no doubt had felt in 1917 when her first husband died of flu while serving in the army.  The warmth and pleasure of the sunny bedroom is a memory that is always challenged by her inherent bitterness and desolation scarcely ever well masked, even though she was always so witty, gracious, the woman entrapped in the cage of her widowhood and motherhood.  "Having children took all the curl out of my hair," she used to claim, or then again "Having so many children took all the calcium out of my teeth," neither statement an accusation but a calm truth of life.  Well, doctor, my stream of consciousness has taken me a long way from the opening strains of that great Wagnerian opera.