Mom's Secret

My column that appeared in the Express-Times, 11/8/04:

As I watched a repeat of a newscast showing Senator John Kerry conceding the election, I thought of my mother.
Now my mother couldn’t vote in this election; in fact she didn’t vote in the last. Mom’s been gone since 1992, so she didn’t even get to vote for Bill Clinton, who I’m sure she would have liked. He was so much like the good old boys that mom grew up with in the hills of West Virginia.
My Mom, Ollie Anna Carter, was born in 1923. She married a World War II veteran, Frank Tornese, in 1946. She then gave birth to a baby girl, me, in 1947 and another baby girl, Pattie, in 1951. Ollie Tornese was the real fifties housewife. She didn’t work and she did everything her husband said. Or so her daughters thought.
The first real election I can remember was Kennedy vs. Nixon – 1960. I was just thirteen and knew everything. I knew that I wanted Nixon to win. I was real happy to know that my Dad wanted Nixon to win, too. I knew that if Dad wanted Nixon to win, that Mom wanted Nixon to win.
That’s the way it was, Dad said. The wife had to vote the same as her husband. If she didn’t they would cancel out each other’s votes. Sounded okay to me – at thirteen.
Dad absolutely hated Kennedy. He was afraid of the liberal Senator from Massachusetts. Dad was afraid of the “Negroes getting more rights than they needed.” Only Dad didn’t call them “Negroes.” At thirteen I didn’t have much of an opinion about that one way or the other. I just knew that something seemed a little wrong about it. But wasn’t Dad always right?
So in Laurel Junior High School we held our mock elections and I voted for Nixon. I watched the returns breathlessly on election night and was very disappointed when Kennedy won.
But at thirteen I started to develop my own sense of right and wrong. My ideals and my politically ties were being formed. And I found, by the time I was 16, that I was more a Kennedy liberal than I had ever been a Nixon conservative.
And then Kennedy was assassinated and the world, and I, moved on.
In 1991 my mother became terminally ill with a cancer she had been battling for more than a year. I stayed with my parents in their small senior citizen apartment in
Romney, West Virginia – helping my dad care for her.

One day, when Mom was getting weaker, she called me over to her bed. “Lean down. I have something to tell you.” She could barely talk, she was so weak. “Lean down. I don’t want your father to hear.”
I did as I was told, hoping to hear a deathbed confession. My loyal mother had had an affair. Or maybe there was some money stashed away somewhere.
“Promise me you will never tell your father. Promise.”
I gave her my word.
She touched my cheek and whispered, “I voted for Kennedy.”
That was Mom’s deathbed secret. She had defied her husband and had voted her heart.
So I was my mother’s daughter. I had no husband to defy. I just voted my heart and voted for another liberal Massachusetts Senator.
Thanks, Mom. And I did keep your secret.