“Stealing Love,” A Memoir by Gabrielle Selz
(11/26/2009) On a rainy day in 2004, just a month shy of her move to Connecticut, my mother called me on the 
phone. “I need your help.”
I had just returned from my Pilates class. My son, Theo, was at school and I wouldn’t be picking him up for a few hours. I had blocked out the time to write, but my mother said again, “Please, this is important.”
“Come meet me in my dining room.” Back then, my mother was 79 and lived next door, in one side of our two-family home, in Southampton, Long Island.
Coming in her back door, I threaded my way through the rows of boxes that she had begun to fill with all her books and china, and found her sitting erect in her Queen Anne chair. She was dressed in stretch pants — my mother discovered stretch pants and big sweaters when the movie “Flashdance” came out and never gave them up again — and a white sweater with the collar pulled up so high, elongating an already long neck, that she looked more like an egret than a woman. In front of her, in the middle of the table, was a funny shape, wrapped in a faded old sheet. My mother’s hands were clasped as she stared at this bundle.
“Her gravestone. I want to take her back home, to rest.”
“Oh Mom, you still have that?” I sank down into a chair opposite my mother.
“What would I have done with it?”
Well, that was a good question. My mother and I both silently contemplated the bundled gravestone between us. Finally, I asked, “What do you mean, take her home?”
Blinking over the rim of her sweater, my mother looked like she was surfacing over the lip of a swimming pool. Then she nodded, took a deep breath, and said, “I know how you don’t like to hear about this sort of thing, but I’ve felt an angry presence emanating from the attic. It wakes me up at night. It’s Jemima. Now, I’ve decided that I want to return her, and I need your help.”
Years ago, on a June day in 1965, while my father packed his bags and exited our apartment on Central Park West, my mother drove my sister, my cousin, and me out to the beach in the Hamptons. She didn’t want to watch as pieces of their 17-year marriage were folded, wrapped, and placed into suitcases and boxes. Since we’d summered out here, in an old house on North Haven, she thought this would be familiar to us.
We stayed overnight at Sea Breeze Farm, a bed-and-breakfast on Sagg Main Road that no longer exists. In the morning, down at Long Beach, translucent jellyfish littered the shore, and we poked sticks into their gelatinous bodies. Standing apart from us, my mother skipped flat stones out across the water and told us that the pink and orange shells we’d gathered looked like old toenails.
When it was time to leave, we raced up the dune to the car, joining hands and laughing, the long line of our clasped bodies whipping in the wind like untethered rope.
We stowed the picnic basket in the trunk of our Volkswagen, but instead of heading west and home, she drove down Ferry Road, parked in front of our old summer house, and told us to wait. In a flash she’d darted across the road, her wide flowered skirt billowing out like a sail, and then climbed up the hill into the small graveyard of the Payne family. When she returned, she was carrying a stone. It was a tombstone, or part of a tombstone, the broken fragment of Mrs. Jemima Payne’s stone whose curved top showed part of an angel’s wing and her name.
Now, she wanted me to drive her back to that graveyard.
With the tips of her fingers, my mother gently touched the covered stone. “Your father was leaving me for another woman, for Norma. I had to take something.”
I had my elbows up on the table, my chin in my hands. “Did you think taking her would do any good?”
“In such moments one doesn’t think, Gaby!”
Her eyes floated up from the stone, tiny sea creatures rising from the depths. “Of course, and I was preserving her, the stone, the memories.”
“Oh Mom,” I said reaching across Jemima for her hand.
“That old man,” my mother burst out laughing. “I look at him now and see an old man. Peter is an old man and yet once upon a time he was my whole life.”
Why Jemima’s stone? My mother said that Jemima Payne was Silas Payne’s second wife. She insisted she stole the fragment of her gravestone — which was about the size of a toaster — because my father was leaving her to remarry and take on a second wife, Norma. Because she couldn’t steal Norma away, my mother wanted to steal, metaphorically at least, this particular second wife away. “I wanted to leave Silas Payne with his first wife, alone and intact, the better to work out their marriage problems in eternity.”
To this day, I don’t know why there was a first and a second Mrs. Payne, or who else was buried in that family plot, the stones of which dated from the 1700s. All I’ve ever known was that this tombstone bore the inscription of the name: Jemima Payne.
Growing up with that stone in our house, I’d been careful. I didn’t marry a man who had affairs and whose life felt like it would swallow up my own. I married Bogdan, a man who greeted me at the door, when I returned from a trip, with both our shampooed child and dog in his arms. Sometimes, I thought we didn’t have much in common, and I envied women like my mother their ability to disappear into a relationship. While I read books, Bogdan fell asleep in front of the television. Bogdan may not have been the most exciting of men, but he was safe, and known, and not a phantom or a larger-than-life figure that would haunt my dreams.
Since I was a child my mother had been telling me ghost stories. She believed in a continued presence after death or departure. Often in her stories, she was the one having visitations with ghosts who made pilgrimages into her bedroom in the middle of the night. At first I had been scared of her stories, then later, as I grew up, irritated and annoyed, especially the time when she’d told me that a spaceship had appeared and hovered up in the corner of her ceiling during the night. I’d been 16 when I’d heard that story and I’d slammed out of the room. When my mother moved in to live with us in Southampton, I’d made her promise, “No gravestones, no dead people, and leave the ghosts at your house.”
For the most part she’d complied, though my son and I had recently discovered a box of gray white powder in the attic that turned out to be the ashes of my dead grandmother.
Today, I had laundry to do, a story I wanted to write, accounts I had to balance, a son to pick up, a dinner to make, a husband coming home, and here was my mother sitting in front of a tombstone she’d been carrying around with her for nearly 40 years.
Still, she was not crazy and she truly believed in these wonders that appeared to her from the particles that surround all of us. It must not have been easy to live in such a crowded universe, I thought. If she was ready to return Jemima, then I would do all I could to help her. “Okay,” I said. “Get your coat.”
My mother gently placed Jemima’s stone — swaddled like a newborn baby, in that faded sheet and bolstered between blankets so no harm would come to her — in the back of my car and climbed in beside me. I backed out of the driveway and drove along North Sea Road toward North Haven and our old summer house.
“Where’s Bogdan?” my mother asked, looking around for his car.
I shrugged, “Work, I guess.”
The rain thundered against the roof of the car as I turned onto Noyac Road. Along the curving crescent of Long Bay, on either side of the car, the bay had flooded the banks, and the rising water nearly submerged the road. But we splashed along, waves rolling up as high as the windows. “It’s like the parting of the Red Sea,” my mother laughed.
“Mom,” I asked, “how are you feeling about your move?”
“Now don’t take this the wrong way because it’s hard to leave you and Theo, but well, for the first time it my life, I feel oddly free.”
The thought of my mother being unencumbered and free made me inexplicably happy.
We rounded the circle and headed out on Ferry Road. My wipers slapped back and forth as if we were underwater and my mother rubbed fog from her window and pressed her face against the glass. “I feel like I’m swimming,” she said.
I slowed down as we passed by the house. A small cottage that still had the bright red door I’d remembered.
“We were lucky to find it,” my mother said. “Did you know Mary Pickford once stayed here?”
“Or Lillian Gish. I think you told me that.”
“One or the other of them,” my mother said. “Remember those stilts you used to walk on across the yard?”
I nodded and pulled off the road beside the graveyard. “But I don’t remember that tree,” I said, pointing at the large tree that stood like a sentry in the middle of the stones.
“It was a little tree then,” my mother said, “a very little tree.”
I grabbed my umbrella from the back seat. Together, my mother and I lumbered up the slope, my mother holding her stone tenderly in her arms as I shielded her from the rain. I opened the gate and without hesitation she found Silas Payne and the first Mrs. Payne and, beside them both, the ruined remains of the base of Jemima’s stone. Gingerly, she set her fragment down. It fit like the last piece of a puzzle.
The rain beat down on the top of my umbrella and my mother and I huddled beneath it. She sighed and I stroked her back. Down on the road, cars sped through sheets of water, but I doubt that they could see us up on the hill, behind the gate, under the tree, covered by my umbrella. We were shrouded in my mother’s story. Because that’s what it felt like; as if I’d somehow slipped inside one of her gothic tales about ghosts and spirits and redemption.
“Do you think it was a crime?” I asked.
I thought then, maybe Bogdan isn’t my whole life, and maybe I wouldn’t desecrate a grave if he left me, but I, too, might be capable of committing a strange, crazy act, a gesture in the face of loss. Tossing clothes out windows, burning effigies, suddenly these seemed like good things to accomplish under the circumstances. Make a bold statement, burn the bridges and let the waters rise. In abducting the second wife away, my mother had attempted to do in her fantasy life what she couldn’t accomplish in reality, and isn’t that what stories are for? Well, she’d finally worked out the ending. I hugged her against me.
“Look,” she said beaming with pride at the angel’s wing and the clearly engraved name of Jemima, which, unlike the other stones in the graveyard, was untouched by wind and weather. “I did preserve her.”
“Should we say anything?” I asked
My mother shook her head. “We’ve said enough.”
Gabrielle Selz’s fiction and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times, Newsday, More magazine, Art Papers, and online. She is finishing a memoir and recently won a 2009 Fellowship in Nonfiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Her parents were part of the South Fork’s “art world” in the 1960s, when they rented a summer house on North Haven and her father was the curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.