What my mother loved was greengage plums.
The most sublime-tasting plum in the world, she always said, but the tree had a fickle temperament and was notoriously difficult to grow. She had a small orchard in the back of our garden. I had never tasted one of her greengage plums, or if I had I couldn’t remember. The last time her trees had fruited, I was a baby. Every July I’d ask if this was the year the plums would come.
“You must be patient,” she told me. “Everything good takes time.”
I was a greedy boy. I stamped my foot. I wanted a plum now.
“How to wait,” she said, looking down at me with pity. “It’s the hardest thing to learn.”
I was always waiting for my mother to come home. Most afternoons she left the house to attend one meeting or another. She was devoted to many causes. Education. Women’s rights. Land reform and the struggles of the working class. She made signs. She marched in the streets. Once she even went to jail with a group of her fellow suffragettes. Much aggrieved, my father went to retrieve her, paying the exorbitant two-pound bail to set her free. When they walked in the door, my mother looked shy and triumphant. My father was enraged.
“You’ve made me a laughingstock in front of my friends,” he spat at her.
“They are not your friends,” she said, taking off her gloves.
“You have forgotten your place.”
“And you have forgotten where you came from.”
“That is exactly the point!” he bellowed.
They slept in different bedrooms that night and every night thereafter. My father had done everything he could to erase his history and pull the ladder he’d climbed up behind him. He forbade my mother to join any more organizations. She agreed, and instead began holding meetings at the house while he was at work. In her mind, everybody deserved a better life and it was her responsibility as a woman of means to help them achieve it. Unmarried women with children, spinsters, laundresses, jakesmen, beggars, and drunks all traipsed through our doorway and were led into the parlor to discuss their futures.
When I was eight, my mother left. She told me she was going on a painting trip to Provence. She’d been unable to bring herself to tell me the truth: my father was admitting her to an institution. He did it without her consent. He needed only two signatures to have her committed, his and his lawyer’s. Her diagnosis: unstable due to overwork and the inability to handle domestic responsibilities. She was gone for four months.
She returned fifteen pounds lighter and the color of curdled cream. She used the same light, cheery voice she always had with me, but I wasn’t fooled. There was no joy in it anymore. She spoke as if she were standing on the roof of a building in which somebody had forgotten to build the stairs. She’d fight to sustain eye contact when we spoke, but as soon as we stopped our conversation, her gaze would fall to the floor.
It was Charlotte, the kitchen maid, who finally took pity on me and told me the truth. “Painting, my arse. She got locked up by your father. Sent away to the loony bin.”
I didn’t believe her, but the governess corroborated the story. Polly, the cook, too.
“Don’t tell her you know,” said Polly.
“But what do I do?”
“Treat her exactly the way you’ve always treated her,” she said.
“But—she’s different,” I whined. I wanted my real mother back. The playful, optimistic, bread-making, injustice-fighting, eye-glinting woman who called everybody by their first names no matter what their stations.
“She’ll come back,” said Polly. “You just have to be patient. Sit with her. That’s all you have to do.”
It was easy to sit with my mother. She rarely left the house anymore. Most days, after breakfast and a bath, she retired to the parlor.
“I’ve taken up some lovely new pursuits,” she said. No longer did she work in the kitchen alongside Polly and Charlotte. Instead she sat on the chaise and embroidered, the curtains drawn, the lamp lit, her head bent studiously over her work.
“Shall I read to you?” I asked.
“No, thank you. I prefer the silence.”
“Shall I open the curtains? It’s a beautiful day.”
“I don’t think so. The light is too bright for me.”
“Then I’ll just sit here with you.”
“Wonderful,” she murmured.
I lived on that “wonderful.” A crumb, but I swallowed it down, pretending it was a four-course meal.
She would come back. Polly said she would. I just had to be patient.
Over the next year she stopped leaving the house altogether. Twilights were especially difficult. Once my mother was a sunflower, her petals spread open to the sky. Now, one by one, her seeds fell out of their pod.
It was a cold day in November that she told me she would be wintering in Spain. She’d developed arthritis, she said. A warmer climate would suit her.
I’d overheard my father talking to his lawyer, making the arrangements, so I knew she was lying—he was sending her back to the asylum. He’d institutionalized her because he wanted an obedient wife who was satisfied living a quiet, domestic life. Instead she’d been returned to him a ghost. He didn’t know what else to do.
I didn’t know what to do either, but even though I was only nine, I knew locking her away again was not the solution. I threw my arms around her and begged her not to go.
“I’m sorry, I don’t have a choice.” She looked down at me as if I were an inanimate object—a book or a shawl.
“You’re lying. You’re not going to Spain.”
“Don’t be silly, of course I am.” She pushed me away. “And you’re far too old to be acting this way.”
“Mama,” I whimpered.
For a split second her expression softened and I saw my old mother gazing back at me with empathy and love. But a moment later the light drained out of her eyes.
“Take care of your sister,” she said.
“You must run away,” I cried, desperate. “Someplace he won’t be able to find you. Leave tonight.”
She pursed her lips. “And where would I go?”
“Anywhere.”
“There is nowhere else,” she said.
I wept silently.
A week later, the night before she was due to leave, her bags already packed, my mother lay down on her bed in a long dress like the Lady of Shalott, drank an entire bottle of nervine, and took her last breath. In an instant everything changed. Polly became Cook. Charlotte became Cook’s Girl. Madeline became Governess. I reverted back to Young Master; my sister, Little Miss. And my father packed me off to boarding school.
I would never see the greengage trees fruit again.
My toast had grown hard. The butter congealed. The consequences of time travel.
“A girl,” reported Martha, walking into the kitchen. “Ridiculously long lashes. Dark hair. Looks just like her mother.”
My American wife was an herbalist and midwife, as were her mother and grandmother before her. She carried soiled linens into the scullery.
“Are