Toward the end of my mother’s life, when she couldn’t carry on a conversation, I took to singing for her. She lived in a group home for people with dementia in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. I live in Brooklyn, and even before the pandemic, I visited her only every few months. So maybe lockdown wasn’t all that different for her, but on Zoom, I couldn’t help feeling mean, yakking on about my incomprehensible life as she dabbed her mouth with a handkerchief, big brown eyes blinking slowly, a caregiver at her side prompting, “That’s your daughter, Miss Catherine. Say hello to her.”
I’d been taking voice lessons for quite a few years and had worked on many songs from my mother’s youth—jazz standards, American songbook classics, Broadway numbers, works by George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Noël Coward. My mother, who once loved words, used to get a kick out of witty lyrics, but she had always been painfully self-conscious about her voice. Once, as a child, I heard her sing naturally on pitch and said, “You have a nice voice.” I still remember her surprised smile. My mother had an unhappy childhood, multiple stepfathers, a mother whose leather skin was adapted to the tough, boozy world of the New York Herald Tribune, where she was an editor, and who had little time for a sensitive girl. I can easily imagine my grandmother or someone else in her daunting circle matter-of-factly saying, “You can’t sing, Cate,” and my mother choking herself off. There is something uniquely wounding about being told one’s voice is unpleasant. It goes to the core.
I loved to sing as a child and wanted to play violin. The elementary school orchestra teacher told me to sing a scale. “You don’t have the ear,” he said. That was that. I tried to teach myself to read music and play a recorder I found in a cupboard. At some point, I asked for and received an autoharp so that I could play folk songs. Depress the felted bars labeled with chord names and strum. But the autoharp was impossible for me to tune without a piano, and it was boring to play. I soon lost interest. In my teens, I tried to teach myself guitar. It never occurred to me to ask for lessons, and none were offered. There was a tacit notion in my otherwise artistic family that music wasn’t one of our gifts. Or perhaps that only genius deserved training.
Some 40 years later, while doing my MFA in fiction at Bennington College, I started studying guitar and voice because I wanted to write a novel about a girl who played and sang. I abandoned the novel but fell into a blended musical community centered on vocalist Renée Manning and trombonist–band leader Earl McIntyre. At student recitals, their friends— pros with decades of touring and recording experience—regularly back up students of all ages like it’s no big deal. Song by song, I’ve learned how to read music, hit the notes, feel the time, recognize the surprises that make a melody stick in the brain, and stand up in front of a band. I’m continually astounded at what goes into interpreting a song—arranging, conducting, performing—and grateful to these musicians for finally opening this world to me.
Long before my mother lost her memory, she would curtly dismiss accomplishments of mine, even if they involved skills that she herself had taught me, like writing. By the time she reached her 90s, her barbs were a neurological reflex, but they reliably got a rise out of me, even though I should have been long past minding.
During the pandemic, when lessons and recitals were held on Zoom, I became familiar with the weirdness of online performing—the time lags, the robotic quality of backing tracks, the unflattering camera. I wanted to sing something for my mother that would reach her through the techno-barriers. I chose “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” a George and Ira Gershwin number that Fred Astaire sings to Ginger Rogers on a foggy New York City pier in the 1937 movie Shall We Dance:
The way you wear your hat,
The way you sip your tea,
The mem’ry of all that
No, no! They can’t take that away from me!The way your smile just beams,
The way you sing off key
The way you haunt my dreams,
No, no! They can’t take that away from me!
My mother, a beauty in her prime—oval face, classic features, sleek black hair in a chignon—sure could wear a hat.
On my computer screen, her expression was inscrutable. Her caregiver’s affect, meanwhile, was flat: Did she hate my singing or simply resent having to listen to my amateur act, on top of tending to my mom’s bodily needs?
A few weeks later, I sang “Send In the Clowns,” Stephen Sondheim’s bittersweet lament for love too late, which I’d worked on for several months and wanted to show off, though I sensed that the song would irritate her. I asked my mother if she’d like to hear more.
“No,” she said.
“Don’t you like my singing?”
“No.”
Stung, I didn’t plan to sing to her again, but on a subsequent Zoom call, the manager of the home suggested, “Why don’t you sing that song your mum likes so much?” Apparently, the staff had taken to playing “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” for her on a phone or computer. When we were able to visit in person again, I sang it, along with other old favorites, and she tried to mouth the words, though she could barely speak. It was an immense relief to please her.
Our last visit was in January 2022, a few weeks before my mother’s death. She appeared unchanged, sweet, ethereal, her fine white hair suspended by static electricity, the elegant bone structure of her face showing through her almost transparent skin. I spent the morning making the arrangements for hospice care, having been persuaded by the director of the home not to wait for an aspiration of fluids to lead to pneumonia and one of those horrible tussles with an emergency room doctor over what constitutes palliative care.
That business finished, the aide brought Mom out to the glassed-in porch, which looked out on a wooded ravine, bare trees draped in dry creepers. I sang for her, clicking around YouTube to find backing tracks in a good key. One song I’d performed, even played on guitar, was the Joseph Kosma composition “Les Feuilles Mortes,” known as “Autumn Leaves” in English. The literal translation is “The Dead Leaves,” but “Fallen Leaves” is more apt. The French lyrics, by the surrealist poet Jacques Prévert, are about old love: Oh, je voudrais tant que tu te souviennes, / Des jours heureux où nous étions amis. “I so wish that you remembered / the happy days when we were friends.”
Those lines are part of a slow intro verse that’s omitted from the Johnny Mercer lyrics, which Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, and others made famous. (“The falling leaves drift by my window …”) The only mention of leaves in the French is this enigmatic line about the impossibility of recovering what’s lost: Les feuilles mortes se ramassent à la pelle. “The fallen leaves, we collect with a shovel.”
I clicked on an Yves Montand performance, a grainy concert film from 1963, and sang along, thinking she’d enjoy hearing me sing in French, even if the sounds had no meaning. Maybe that was a mistake. Language, like music, is hardwired to feeling. French had mixed associations for her. When my diplomat father’s job took us to Côte d’Ivoire in 1966, we all had to learn the language. My father and I became bilingual, and our fluency was a bond between us, while Mom took it personally when salesladies pretended not to understand her. Perhaps hearing French stirred feelings of hurt or jealousy, or perhaps it summoned memories of my father that dementia had stolen from her. Over the years, Montand recorded many versions of “Les Feuilles Mortes”—with a full band, with just piano, reciting the verse like a poem, dropping it altogether. Singing along with him, I felt I’d happened upon his most mournful interpretation, an elegy. At the end, my mother stared at me: “Why did we listen to that?”
“It’s a great song. Didn’t you like it?”
She blinked, unable to answer.
I hugged her and said I had to go back to New York.
“Can I go with you?” she said. “I want to go with you.”
“No, Mama. Bye now, you’re making me cry.”
I returned a few weeks later, after a social worker at the home called to say that my mother was unresponsive. For hours, her eyes darted back and forth, unseeing. I sat by her bed until she died. And I didn’t cry then, or while cleaning her room, or at the funeral home, or in April at the burial of the urn, when I sang “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” The only time I cried was in that moment when she felt the pull of “Les Feuilles Mortes,” and implored me not to let her slip from my grasp.
