Memoir
Sound Effects
AFTER WATCHING ILLNESS SLOWLY, INEXORABLY
AND EVEN, AT TIMES, COMICALLY ROB HER
MOTHER OF HER VOICE AND MEMORY,
GABRIELLE SELZ THOUGHT SHE WAS READY FOR
ANYTHING. THEN CAME A STARTLING CODA
They weren’t songs, but poems that sounded
like songs, that my mother whispered to
us at bedtime—“The Sleepy Song,” “After
All and After All” and “The Fairies.” In
her magical, soft and slightly sad tone, she
would chant
beg for our very favorite finale. Tilting her head a bit
toward the door as if listening for a knock, she would smile
conspiratorially at the babysitter and begin
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding—
Riding—riding—
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.
ILLUSTRATION: DAVE REINBOLD
Tucked in side by side in our trundle beds, my sister and
I would giggle and imagine creatures, made of foam and
dressed in reeds, scurrying about the room.
This was a long time ago, in the early 1960s, when my
mother was already nearly 40—not a young mother to
have such young children. She was a dreamy woman who
often treated us more like small companions—and her
private audience—than little girls, a state that we weren’t
exactly unhappy with at the time. This was never more
apparent than at bedtime. In that liminal hour between
night and day, my mother donned her fine clothes, her
gold lamé minidress and her peacock-feather earrings
while the stout babysitter from the apartment down the
hall hurried us into our nightgowns. Then, right before
she slipped out to join our father under the clouds of lights
that made up the New York City skyline, she would come
into our shared bedroom and bid us good night.
“‘The Highwayman,’ ‘The Highwayman’—can’t you
please sing us ‘The Highwayman,’ Mommy?” We would
MY MOTHER HAD THE ABILITY to remember almost any
poem she had read, along with a gift for recitation. She
was soft-spoken; her voice, when called for, had a musical,
lilting cadence that was perfectly suited to poetry. In the
playground across from our building, my mother met her
complete opposite, her best friend, Judy, who spoke in a
brassy, sexy, trumpetlike voice. As we scrambled about
the sandbox, Judy called out “Hello, darlings!” to us as
if she were hailing a cab on Broadway. She bellowed her
lines much like Barbra Streisand singing “Hello, Dolly!”
and in her company, we were all larger than life; dancers
on parade. There was no such parade going by when my
mother addressed us. My mother spoke as if she’d just
been roused, her voice drifting in from a different world—
a dreamworld to be sure—that floated just beside us yet
permeated everything. Even her nickname, I realize now,
was musical. They called her Lala.
My mother was hardly a faultless parent. She could
be stingy and ambivalent with her affections. She loved
stories more than people. She was a writer and a teacher of
March 2007 / More / 183
