Harvey: Linens—and Things

The first and last things to recover from Harvey were my linens. When our house became accessible after the storm, my friend Lindsey retrieved several boxes of moldy tablecloths and napkins from the bottom shelf of my closet and took them away. After consulting the internet, she washed them gently in Pinesol and dried them in the sun. They were brought back carefully folded in a new box. Almost all of them made it; some did not.

It was my linens that made me cry (although it was the fridge with its rotten groceries that made me vomit). I say “my linens” but they were really mostly my mother’s, my aunt’s and my great aunt’s. My maternal grandmother was not apparently a linens kind of girl. Most of the table linens came to me through my mother—some when I got married and some when she decided she was too old to “entertain.” Her linens are heirlooms in the strict sense of British law. As Victorian author Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds reminds us, heirlooms are not extaordinary, but everyday objects—pots and pans, not the titular diamonds—passed down within a family. But many of my mother’s linens did not follow the lines of blood or marriage, interrupting ideas of maternal inheritance. This was in part because, in her own small way, she stepped to the side of rituals of marriage. In choosing to “elope” (her term) rather than to have a big wedding, my mother did not get the monogrammed linens that were a staple of the 1950s marriage plot. When I was little, I actually thought of her elopement in terms of linen—picturing her climbing down a ladder made of knotted sheets into my father’s waiting arms. I don’t think it was like that (not least because my mother’s apartment was on the first floor) although my mother never really told me what it was like and why she chose against a wedding.

My mother, then, bought her linens herself, mostly second (or possibly third) hand from thrift stores. Many of them bear the embroidered identity markers of women my mother never knew: complex, sometimes undecipherable knots of initials. Of course, in some ways the marks are less about the women than about the men they married. Judging from the age of the linens, the monograms would likely have been an amalgam of the bride and groom’s first initials with a larger, central letter representing the man’s last name, newly shared and declared in material form. When my mother passed the linens onto me, I inherited a complex history of marriages, of women, and of family.

Over time, I added to my inherited linens, sometimes adding new initials, new letters. With Harvey came a wave of new-to-me ones, replacing those that could not be restored. Talia, a most generous friend of mine, read the perhaps whiny story of lost items on my daily Facebook update and sent me two boxes of her own family table linens: formal damask monogrammed white tablecloths meant for long and leisurely dinner parties; and voile placemats and runners from, I think, the 1960s, light, transparent, innocent of initials, in a pastel rainbow of colors, that spoke to the beginning of something more casual in the long history of dining. I folded these, Talia’s family heirlooms, with my “own”, thinking of how they transported me beyond my family and household.

With Lindsey’s restoration and Talia’s replacement, my box of linens and the story about them might seem to be complete. But Harvey does not make for tidy endings. Two years after Talia sent me my presents, I went back to the wreck of the house on Merrick St for what my husband and I hoped would be the last time. We had sold the land with what was left of the house still on it: it would, we knew, take the new owner only a few hours to raze the building. This was our chance to collect anything that was left. Since we had been to the house many times, and since what was left were mostly things we had just been too tired to throw away, I was not expecting to fill the plastic tub I had brought with me. I almost did not check the linen closet in the hallway where the floor had swollen up to block the door. And there it was, inexplicably, a deformed cardboard box of my most precious linens: my mother’s collection of small objects, two tablecloths and a shawl embroidered by my great-aunt Celia.

This time, I would have to rescue them myself. First, my mother’s things. Cocktail napkins so small that when I fold them they looked like doll’s handkerchiefs. Two sets of something I have never seen elsewhere—cotton and linen covers for the bottom of wine glasses. Each of these tiny pieces—some 40 of them—features an embroidered chicken so small I needed my glasses to tell its silken beak from its silken claws. There are even more roosters than chickens. My mother loved roosters, although not the real ones.

When objects were bigger, there tended to be only one of them, chosen perhaps and put carefully away as a memento of a special occasion. Souvenirs. Although there was no trace of the pink- and- white-checked tablecloth that my mother had had made for my early birthday parties, I did have, in the box with the roosters, one pink and white checked napkin with white rick-rack—a word I had forgotten existed. The napkin spoke directly to me across time, across the bodies of the roosters that I think of as my mother’s mark, of a late-‘fifties and early-‘sixties girlhood in shades of pink. It represents other items, now lost or misplaced in our many moves, perhaps as late as Harvey: the tiny rose- embroidered gloves, the matching patent leather shoes and purses made to scale for an especially little little girl; the ‘summer purse” of straw, shaped, appropriately, like a strawberry. The napkin also stands in for things I have literally saved, like the dotted Swiss dress that I put in a waterproof box and hauled to my office as Harvey swirled in the Gulf. The dress is also tiny, made to fit my body as a ten-year-old the size of most preschoolers. As I remember the items, one by one, as I handled the roosters and the napkins I thought to myself I could never have been that little girl. Like Tinkerbell in the wonderful film, Hook, I had big feelings.

My mother loved miniatures. For my mother, tininess—in girls, women and objects—indicated perfection. Although she liked to eat and was not obsessed with her weight, she only ate small things. Cooking for her when I was growing up meant making portions small and therefore perfect. As I grew older and moved to different cities, I would spend weeks looking for a place that served “small sandwiches.” These had to be very small indeed, with the crusts cut off: finger sandwiches. My mother’s trips to the thrift shop resulted not only in napkins, but in an enormous collection of very little cashmere sweaters. It was a point of pride for her not to spend more than a few dollars on a sweater, no matter how adorable, how embroidered, sequined, or beautifully colored. It was a point of pride with her that the smallest sweaters were the cheapest—like Cinderell’s slippers they just would not fit most people. It was also a point of pride that the sweaters for me were even smaller than the ones for her. Over the years I have shed these sweaters. I have gotten larger with age and I live in a climate that is not made for cashmere. I feel guilt sometimes, not so much for getting rid of sweaters that don’t fit, as for not remembering exactly what I did from them. They slipped out of my house as if on the crest of a flood.

I felt another kind of guilt as I handled the box of linens, not only for having overlooked this precious hoard, but for taking my mother’s memories for my own. These were her objects, telling the story of her life, especially the story of having a little girl to whom to pass on her possessions. She had that girl— little enough, at least at first, to be perfect—out of time and place, in her forties, in Italy. My mother often told me that the doctors would not have “allowed” her to have me if she had been in the US when she got pregnant. These were the days where Downs syndrome was beginning to be associated (only) with maternal age, where mothers were blamed for a variety conditions from infertility to schizophrenia. She told two different stories of her pregnancy, sometimes in proximity to each other: the first, that her pregnancy was “perfect”: no morning sickness, no doubts, scarcely any gain in weight. In that story, there is a photograph of my mother, perhaps 6 months pregnant, in a plaid silk dress that I used to play dress up in, smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of wine. This was part of a story about Italy, in which pregnant women were free to do things from which they were beginning to be debarred in the States. The there was another story, though, of a pregnancy threatened, of medical disapproval, of a feared miscarriage and the administration of a magical drug that might have been thalidomide. This second story was one of holding on: to the pregnancy, and to me, in the face of threat.

I spent 15 days recovering the items from the linen box. I use that word because it is the term the media uses to track the emotional and financial distance of the people in Houston and South Texas from the event that was Harvey. That neighborhood has recovered, this one has not. The city arts scene has recovered. This individual, those individuals, have recovered—except when they hear the sound of rain. These people, who have no insurance, no home, no resources, will never recover. Recovery of my linens returns me to being a girl. I take the smaller items and put them in the bag in which you are supposed to wash lingerie (another term both foreign and salient) , and soak them briefly in Woolite (my mother’s go-to for delicates). I then put them (still in the bag) in the gentle cycle, with some Pinesol, which my mother died without encountering, and of which she would have strongly disapproved, indeed recoiled from as being and smelling “too strong.” I have grown to love the scent of Pinesol—at a distance of time. Its scent lingers in my linens, reminding me of Harvey as one might be reminded of a lover who has left the house.

During the pandemic, I have tried to find a safe place for everything. Last month I ordered my first “archival box” for all my linens. It will be a long time before I entertain, before I set a table with my best things. As a Victorianist who works with archives, I know the pleasures and perils of preservation. I also know the tug of other people’s memories as they get folded onto my own. The archival box is on a high shelf—not too high, in case the ceiling leaks. I feel sometimes as if I cannot risk misplacing or losing those things again. At other times—and I plan to talk about this in the future—I feel overwhelmed by things and memories, even once they are shelved for the foreseeable—and unforeseeable—future.