The Matriarch

To Francesca

In our culture, matriarchs are rare. With the way families fragment these days, they’re growing more rare all the time. Some families never produce a matriarch at all, and haven’t since the dawn of time. Others offer up a matriarch only once every 10 or 11 generations. Fortunate is the family that can produce a matriarch every other generation—matriarchy tends to skip generations, passing from grandmother to granddaughter or, in rarer cases, from grandmother to grandson’s wife. And the great houses that can reliably deliver a matriarch almost every generation, well, you can count them on the fingers of one hand.

*

On paper, at least, my grandmother was poor matriarch material. The twelfth of fourteen children, she was born in rural Alabama to a family whose fortunes had been in sharp decline since the Civil War, if not entirely because of it. Her mother died when she was 16.  Though saddened by this loss, my grandmother, my Nana, took it in stride. At 16 she was grown, after all.  The biggest change was this: Her father, who had never given his four youngest children much heed, drove them harder than ever with tasks around the farm—or the plantation as they sometimes still liked to call it. None of this is surprising or unusual for that time and place. The only surprising thing is that my grandmother left it. Of all the children, only she and Great Uncle Andrew, who was called up to fight in the South Pacific, ever did. And even Uncle Andy returned after a while.

*

In the early days, after the Christmas meal, the men would retire to my Grandfather’s den to watch the day’s bowl games. All the men but me, that is. My job was to wash the dishes and silver. I can’t tell you when this first became my job. Was I eight? Ten? It was always my job. 

“Since you’ve never complained, I’ll tell you why you’re on dish duty,” she told me one year, several years into this annual, ritual, chore.

“Thank you, Nana.”

“Because you don’t follow football and I can’t trust your sister to do a good job.”

“I’m glad you trust me, Nana.”

*

During the holidays, the matriarch’s job wasn’t easy. First she had to use vast amounts of will to summon the members of her family to her home, wherever they might be. Then she had to prepare the meal to feed them all. 

The Summoning took place up to a month before The Gathering, and usually required a good two or three days of the Matriarch’s time. During this period, the matriarch rarely received guests. I witnessed a Summoning only once, and then only due to a lucky circumstance: My mother and father had gone to the hospital to have my baby brother Pete. The delivery was complicated, the recovery protracted, and so I ended up staying with the Matriarch longer than anyone had bargained for, and longer than she herself would have preferred—even granting that I was the oldest, and favorite, of her grandchildren.

Other years, during the Summoning sessions she would ask me to shush and to go off and amuse myself, which I had no trouble doing. I could spend all morning in the kitchen with Elizabeth, the maid, helping her to bake and iron. I could also join my grandfather in the pigeon coop. Or, best of all, I could simply laze on the floor of his den and read books about the Wild West and about California in the early days.  

*

The Matriarch’s last year was no different from the best of the years that had come before, except the effort of hosting The Gathering seemed to take a little bit more out of her than usual—even granting that every year required more effort than the year before in any event. To her credit, the Matriarch did not once cut corners, even though she told us she seriously considered ordering a bird from the nearby market as she held court in her majestic, horsehide-covered Queen Anne chair in the living room. 

That year for me was special for another reason. That was the year I brought your mother to dinner for the very first time: Of course, she wasn’t your mother at the time. She wasn’t even my wife. How could she be? The Matriarch had not yet met her, much less approved of her. I wanted your mother to be at ease, so I downplayed the importance of the Matriarch’s judgment—and by no means did I mention to your mother that, as yet, the Matriarch had never yet approved of a single one of my girlfriends. Certainly, she’d liked one or two well enough, and was content to let me keep them, for awhile, as girlfriends, but she made it clear, in that wordless way she had, they’d never do as lifelong companions.

“I like that girl,” the Matriarch managed to confide to me in a private moment that came and went in the space of a second, a moment she somehow created in the midst of the group gathering at the front door.

That was all she needed to say on the matter, and all she ever said. And hearing those words, I somehow came to love your mother the least bit more. That, to me, was one of the greatest expressions of the Matriarch’s power.

*

The Matriarch died the following summer. She lived long enough and stayed well enough, though just barely, to sit at the table of honor at your mother’s and my wedding in the spring. She even danced a round with her husband, and then with me. In the photograph she took that day, happiness and weariness play across her face in equal measure. A few years were yet to pass before you-all began to be born. I’m deeply sorry she missed you. She would have adored each of you in turn and yet kept you in line far better than your mother and I have managed to do, especially after we went our separate ways.

Someone once asked me why we didn’t name one of you after her. How could we do such a thing? I replied. At no time in our history was a matriarch’s name passed on. No, a family retired a matriarch’s name from active use, much the way a sports team will retire a star athlete’s jersey. It’s a reverence.  

*

Aside from my mother, I was the last person to see the Matriarch alive. She was in a terrible state, her body bloated with air yet her lungs almost empty of it, gasping, searching with her breath, her will, for enough particles in the ether from which to fashion a few last words.

“You take care of that little girl of yours,” she said. “Promise me that, whatever you do.”

I promised, kissed her, and left the ICU.

For a few years, I thought perhaps your mother would be the next matriarch. Certainly she was a fantastic cook and a decent hostess and these were the first prerequisites. Unfortunately, your mother came up short in other, subtler areas. Offhand, I can tell you of two. First, she demanded respect. A matriarch certainly had a right to make demands, and to have orders obeyed, but her demands were always specific. Respect simply developed as a matter of course. A matriarch understood this.

Second, your mother refused to shift the center of gravity to her—our—household. Every year, come the second week in December, you’ll recollect that the four of us would pack off to her parents’ house in Greenwich—a tiresome journey upstream against the holiday throng. Not that her own mother—your Yaya—was a matriarch, understand. No, your mother would be the one to oversee the cooking and inviting and planning of festivities. All of which she did with aplomb. She simply couldn’t get past her ties to her childhood home—a home that our own low-slung ranch in ticky-tacky LA could never to rival as a setting for family occasions, she would remind me ruefully.

*

After your mother and I divorced and I remarried, I even presumed to think I might be the center of the family myself—that our clan was switching from a matriarchy to a patriarchy. By then I had mastered all the arcana of table and parlor. But my second wife was given to sarcasm and wasn’t above putting me down in front of others. As a potential patriarch, I was all form and no substance: Patriarchy didn’t demand subservience but it absolutely relied on respect. That is something I never had, or once had and lost. I had a talent for drawing people into a circle but not for presiding over them. No circle ever held. The last two years of my marriage to your stepmother, attendance at our holiday meals had shrunk to the members of her immediate family, who had nowhere else to go. I couldn’t even summon my own.

What was I thinking? Who was I fooling?

Now that you are getting older, I understand things a little bit better. I’ve never been quite where I’d like to be in the race between age and wisdom, but I like to think I’ve acquired a bit more of the latter since I last checked.

I understand that maybe the matriarch will be one of you: My purpose has never been to succeed the Matriarch but to look for the signs of who would.

I’m looking for those signs. I couldn’t tell you what they are, not now anyway, but I know I must look for them regardless. 

And in my looking I’ll concern myself with your lives very deeply—more deeply than you will know—even if my involvement seems slight.

*

The distribution of the matriarch’s worldly possessions was a sorry affair that brought out the worst in most of those who converged on the Matriarch’s home following the funeral.

My mother conducted herself well despite her outright loathing for her stepbrother and stepsister. She took possession of two of the best of the matriarch’s many furs and one or two of her favorite pieces of jewelry. 

I myself hung back. I had nothing but disdain for the conduct I saw. I’ll never share a holiday with these people again, I realized. The circle is broken. Chances are, I’ll never even see them again. And, truly, I wanted no share in the day’s parceling out. But there was one thing I wanted, and that one thing I wanted very badly. I was prepared to fight for it, and to fight hard. To my surprise, though, the object of my desire went unclaimed as the afternoon wore on. I couldn’t believe it: I couldn’t believe that no one saw its power and its value save me.

The matriarch’s cane.

Of course, had it been a fancy cane or a jeweled cane, one of the step-uncles or cousins would’ve spirited it away. But it was just an ordinary wooden cane, and rather worn at that. It was the cane the Matriarch used to get around every day.

It was also the cane that I perceived as a scepter whenever she sat in her chair where she held court, subtly but firmly ruling over us all.

Of the chair, no, I couldn’t take it though I might’ve liked to. But I did managed to tilt it enough to read its manufacturer, and I’ve since located the same model on eBay. 

I simply lifted the cane from the walker that cradled it, next to her side of the bed. Today it sits in my closet, next to the flashlight I keep handy for power outages and the wrapping paper I collect all year long for the holidays. I’m keeping it handy for whichever one of you emerges as the matriarch. Given that you're the oldest, for now my money’s on you.