Siren Song

continued

among the three of them -- once so close -- I was never told. I knew only that by the early 1940s Mea came less often to the house in Scarsdale, and finally not at all.

The loss to her was enormous, another in the lifelong pattern of abandonment by those she loved. Her sorrow was so intense that I became even more fiercely loyal, going each Sunday to the corner mailbox with a letter to her, receiving hers at the home of my high school friend Ann Beveridge.

From college I could correspond openly. From Europe my junior year, I wrote that I'd met a twenty-four-year-old man named John Sherrill who I was sure would love her as much as I did. All my letters from Mea went into the teakwood box that is on my desk today. Rereading them now, I'm amazed at the closeness of the relationship between a woman nearing sixty and a teenage girl.

It did not, of course, continue this way, at least on my part. John did indeed enjoy Mea's company when at last they met -- her pluck, her gaiety, the aura she could weave around the most ordinary event. With John, though, I was encountering an intimate relationship that did not clutch.

I remember meeting Mea's train at the Chappaqua station near our home north of New York City one day in 1963. John and the children and I had been out of the country for a year; this was her first visit since our return. Stepping off the train, seeing me after an absence, Mea's hands flew up as though to ward off a physical blow.

"Oh!" she cried. "Don't look so much like your mother!"

She may not have known what she was saying, but I did. I was to have no history, no family, to be solely the creature of her own making. How unconsciously we all do it -- define another's identity to fit our need! But by 1963 I'd learned that God's fathering does just the opposite: On the way to heaven we become ourselves.