My Mother's Table

The house is silent, so silent; not at all as it was on that day forty years ago when the Schwartz Furniture Company delivered my mother's dining room set. All morning she paced the house, swatting the already immaculate room with a dust rag, picking invisible lint out of the soft, dark carpeting. The chandelier she had brought with her from Poland as a young bride was polished and shining brightly. Now, after so many years, a table would reflect its sparkling glow.

I was 12 and old enough to sense my mother's excitement. For years we had heard the stories of her family's magnificent dining table, and the way her parents and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins had sat around it time after time, laughing in joy or crying in sorrow. My mother talked wistfully about the delicately embroidered linens that her own grandmother had done in her youth, and how the openwork lace allowed the shiny surface of the table top to show through. It seemed, from my mother's stories, that everything of importance was discussed at that table, and that if it could speak, it would relate the history of at least four generations of her family.

She grieved for it, I knew that, even though she rarely spoke of the night it was lost. Surely, in light of the horrendous events that followed, the loss of one table was hardly important. The screams, the terror, the sound of heavy boots and glass breaking—these were what the family remembered, and also tried to forget.

Perhaps because my mother was young and unable to fully comprehend the destruction of her family's way of life—the long dark train ride, the foreign soldiers who shouted at her and pushed her along, the lingering death of each of her brothers and sisters—this may have been why the memories of her family's table were the only ones she could speak of happily.

Secretly, I worried. After so many stories and the passage of so many years, could our table ever live up to the ghost-inhabited one turned to ash so long ago?

And now, here I was, pacing that same floor, that same room, my hands gently gliding over the well-polished surface of the table. If I closed my eyes slightly, I could still see the image of my father sitting at the head of the table, my mother to his left and me to his right. In the fourth chair was sometimes a dinner guest, often a man their age, who had lived what they had lived, seen what they had seen, and had survived despite it all. In our little enclave in Central New Jersey were many such survivors, often the only living remnant of a once thriving family. There were no grandparents, no aunts and uncles, no cousins to gather with us. Only other sad survivors, grateful to share a meal at my mother's table.

Even in her old age, long after my father had passed on, my mother continued her tradition. It was hard for me to visit often, my life had taken me far away, and I had my own family to care for. So, my mother filled her table with others like herself, women who had lived through the worst of times, widowed women who had kissed their children on the front porch and watched them drive off to the world. Their voices, heavily accented, rose and fell at the table, often speaking rapidly in the language of their childhood. There was history imprinted on my mother's table, maybe not the four-generation chronicle that had been absorbed by the table in Poland, but a history nonetheless.

I wanted the table, and yet, could not bear to take it. The crystal chandelier, the delicate plates and glasses—all those had been carefully packed up and shipped to my home. Yet, the glossy table, its chairs and the matching china closet remained standing as silent sentinels in my mother's empty house. To look at it was to look at a ghost, a sad, wailing ghost who, having lived a tortured life, could not rest in the afterlife. I was not sure that I could live with it in the small apartment that now constituted my home. After my children grew and started their own lives, after my husband had left me, I had moved into a small retirement community. Unlike my mother's neighborhood enclave, the place was inhabited by dozens of solitary residents who kept to themselves and left their stories untold. The table, in my home, would starve for words.

And so, I was passing it on. Not to my sons, whose wives declared it ugly and unfashionable, and not to my daughter, who might auction it off on E-bay to classic furniture collectors. Instead, I was giving the table to a former student, one whose work was full of the richness and vibrancy alive in family history. Each item in her home had a story, from the heavy glass vase that was a wedding gift to her grandmother, to the row of handkerchief vases on her living room shelf. One once belonged to the great aunt of a neighbor, another to a local spinster whose house was a treasure trove of period furnishings, yet another, from a garage sale of a family down on its luck. I knew, in her care, the table would hear its fill of stories, absorb laughter, tears and baby formula.

I heard a truck in the driveway and my heart quickened, just as my mother's had on that day, forty years ago, when the table had been delivered. Now, the table would make another journey, to another 40 years of serving as the heart of a home. I wiped a tear that had fallen to its shiny surface, then went to open the front door. The sun was breaking through the clouds, slanting through the mature elm trees on the front lawn. It was a good day to move furniture. A good day to transplant history.

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