I was eight, and through my bedroom wall I could hear my mother, Heidi, talking to herself as she prepared to go to sleep. Every night, in the living room, she positioned old magazines beneath the legs of a red convertible sofa, so as not to crease the rug it rested on. Then, with audible effort, she lifted the bed out of the couch, arranged layers of sheets, blankets, and quilts, and at last put her head down. “How am I going to make it through the month?” she would ask herself, though I’d come to believe that she was really asking me. The red couch had once been the warm center of family evenings. Now it was where she told me about her unhappiness.

When I was three and my sister was one, my mother took us away from my father. He suffered from severe mental illness that made him violent, and it was no longer safe to be around him. We left Washington, D.C., and went to New Haven, where she had secured a job as a high-school teacher. Every evening, my sister and I, in our pajamas, would sit on the couch, leaning against my mother, while she read to us. The books were often historical fiction: “Johnny Tremain,” “Across Five Aprils,” “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” “Farmer Boy.” She read with bright, dramatic energy, making each character’s voice sound distinct. I felt I was living in the fields and towns in those pages. At dinner the following day, we would speculate about what might happen next in the story, then hurry through the meal so that we could return to the couch and find out. In the intense pleasure with which my mother read, I felt her affection for books—and for me. What she revered, I revered. Then I learned to read for myself, something fell away, and we were never again as close.

On school days, my mother would leave our apartment before seven to spend the day talking about literature with other people’s children. Through their discussions, and the essays and stories that they were assigned to write each week, Heidi came to know her students’ pain. “You wouldn’t believe the things kids revealed about their lives,” she told me, late in her life. Even then, such were her boundaries that that was all she said.

Across the years, I have encountered so many of my mother’s former students who tell me that, as one put it, “Mrs. Dawidoff saw more potential in me than I saw in myself.” During my childhood, from the sixties to the early eighties, it was rare for a woman to be a single mother supporting a family. While Heidi was helping the students examine the interior lives of Emma Woodhouse, Isabel Archer, and Lord Jim, the students were collecting fragments of detail about the unusual figure before them—her bright-red lipstick, T-strap and slingback high heels, kilts, pleated skirts, aloof posture, and her bright-red station wagon. She was, one former student said, “A marvel for a teen-age girl to see.” But, another former student told me, “We never knew anything about her life.” This was because my mother was, in a favorite phrase of hers, “bound and determined” that her past should remain concealed, a mystery to everyone.

That included me. Well beyond my youth, my mother never explained why she had left my father so suddenly. Or why such an attractive young woman, who’d written her undergraduate thesis on two erotically charged D. H. Lawrence novels, never had another relationship. As a boy, when I asked about her own childhood, what little she told me involved “naughty” pranks, like throwing cups of water over hedges at passing pedestrians. There was, of course, much more to it.

German troops entered Vienna on March 12, 1938, five months after Heidi was born; within a day, the city had been draped in swastikas. Heidi’s father, an economist named Alexander Gerschenkron, had been born in Russia to a Jewish father, which, to the Nazis, made him both a Staatenloser (stateless person) and an Untermenschen (subhuman). Heidi and her older sister were also at risk. (Heidi’s mother, Erica, was an Austrian-born Lutheran.) On March 15th, while Hitler spoke from a palace balcony to hundreds of thousands of ecstatic Austrians, Heidi’s father planned escapes for his family.

He brought Heidi, wrapped in a shawl, to a location near the Vienna Westbahnhof, where he handed her to a Dutch minister named Melle Visser. As my mother would eventually tell it, Visser then boarded a train to Rotterdam. In his pocket were his own baby daughter Anneke’s travel documents. Once in Rotterdam, Heidi was hidden in Visser’s house, sharing a room with Anneke. Meanwhile, Heidi’s mother and sister went to England, where Heidi’s father’s parents had moved. Months passed, yet Heidi remained in Rotterdam. When Visser finally reunited Heidi with her family, in England, at the end of the year, she was still too young to say what all that time apart had been like for her. But Erica noticed a change. “The baby has forgotten how to smile,” she said.

In 2024, as my mother was dying, she brought up Visser. She told me that she’d long carried the burden of “how terrible I felt that I never thanked him.” She said that she’d written several letters to Visser’s children, Anneke and Paulus, in which she’d admitted this “terrible omission I must daily confess.” The Vissers attempted to reassure her. With blunt Dutch clarity, Anneke finally wrote Heidi, “My father was not waiting for your thanks. That is only your problem.” I told Heidi that he must have known how grateful she felt—she’d been only a child. But she remained unconvinced. A few days later, she died.

Nobody was more dependable in expressing formal gratitude than my mother. After a neighbor gave her a pack of tissues, she mailed him a thank-you note, along with a check for eighty-nine cents.

My mother lived by three words: “getting things done.” Her free hours were not free, because any uncompleted household task—dishwashing, dusting, ironing my socks—was a seed caught in her teeth which would not let her rest until she worked it loose. She sent in every bill payment and tax form on time, and finished every book she ever began—with a single exception. She gave up on John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” she said, because it was too dense and confusing to help her understand the economic views of the two men she most admired: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and her father.

The reunited Gerschenkrons sailed to New York in 1939 on the Aquitania, and restarted their lives as American immigrants. The Times would eventually refer to Alexander, who found work at Harvard, as the university’s “scholarly model.” He expected Heidi to become an academic, too. She went to Radcliffe and married my father shortly after graduation. When he took a job at a New York law firm, she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Columbia, where she began writing a dissertation on dreams and dream settings in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories. But then, in 1962, she became pregnant, so she abandoned it.

After Heidi moved to New Haven, she found herself raising two children on a salary of three thousand dollars. Divorce was so stigmatized back then that many adults were reluctant to invite her into their homes; her mother and father did not ask why she’d left her husband, though they lent her money to buy a refrigerator and a stove. Her first year in New Haven, Heidi tutored students on weekends to pay her parents back. Her mother, who never held a job in America, took to making derisive comments in Heidi’s earshot about “divorced women,” and being “nothing but a teacher.” My mother’s phrase for how that felt was “It goes right through you.”

Heidi compared her profession to serving in the army: “Teachers teach anybody who sets foot in their classroom. They don’t choose.” She enjoyed encouraging students of varying academic ability to think for themselves. And she relished the successes of “the underrated kids”—students overlooked by other teachers—unconsciously referring to them with an intensifier. “That Tyler Peterson!” she would say. (He would be admitted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.) She designed imaginative elective courses like From Stratford to Hollywood, in which she taught plays by Shakespeare alongside their film adaptations. Her signature was a class called Great (English) Novels, in which she led students from “Emma” to “Bleak House” to “Jude the Obscure” to “The Portrait of a Lady.” Students later told me about being guided through the moral dilemmas of “Lord Jim,” whose sailor protagonist, in avoiding the discovery of self, fails to attain his dreams of heroic glory. You sat in a classroom thinking about a flawed person like that, then you walked outside and life expanded.

I never watched my mother teach—nor did I see her at all on Monday evenings. That was the day when student papers were due, and she wanted to get them feedback as soon as possible, so that their work was still fresh in their minds. She would give them red-penned comments like “I disagree with everything you say, but your argument is perfect.” As she once explained to That Sylvia Schafer, who became a college professor, there were no grades on the returned papers because they would distract students from the ongoing red-pen conversation that Heidi was conducting with them in the margins. At the end of term, she awarded students final grades based on where “they are now,” and did not penalize them for the inevitable setbacks along the way. She abhorred the idea of assigning books just because they’d be popular with students. Those they could handle on their own: “They need me to learn to read the hard stuff.” That took time—theirs and hers. I never knew anybody who hated a snow day more.

Our household had no luxuries, no snack foods, no desserts, no popular culture except what came from the AM radio, and only a few appliances, including a washer but no dryer. The one thing my mother “splurged on,” in her words, was books for her children. She gave me “War and Peace” when I was nine, complete with a handwritten cast of characters—a way, I felt, of telling me how much she valued me. Reading it drew me nearer to her family. Just as some American immigrants brought their love of the land to the Midwest and Texas, my mother’s parents carried with them an intense feeling for books. Heidi’s father was, like her, a conspicuously emotional person, but private. Rereading Tolstoy was how he recalled his Odessa past and soothed his American present. His confidants were Russian literary characters, and they formed his inner life. Heidi’s great joys were films and books, but she rarely had time to go to the movies, and she read for pleasure only during school vacations. In the summertime, she might complete all of Virginia Woolf, or all of Anthony Trollope, and, watching her immersed on the red couch, I would wish that she didn’t have to cook for me—that she could keep on reading.

Anxiety defined her. As she stormed around the house, “going great guns” scrubbing pots and vacuuming floorboards, she narrated her state of mind. “I’m just frantic,” she’d say. “I’m just beside myself.” All the clocks in our house were set ahead on a graduated system, as deterrents to being late. The electric kitchen-wall clock was set a heart-dropping fifteen minutes fast, which then propelled her along past other expedited timepieces to the top-of-the bookcase clock, which sprung her forward into the day eight minutes early. Every year, before the first day of school, she had a nightmare about teaching. In one, when her boss told her that she was too rigid, she replaced the line of desks in her classroom with sectional couches. In another, she appeared for her first class and was informed that she would be teaching algebra instead of literature.

For all her uneasy premonitions, when a real storm threatened, she was cool and courageous. If she heard noises in the dark, she called out “Who’s there?” in a sharp voice, turned on a light, and went to see. After a neighborhood thief stole my bike, she tracked him down and demanded its return. Then she gave him her copy of the “West Side Story” Broadway cast album, presumably to show him that there were beautiful options out there for delinquents.

As an adolescent, I found my anxious mother easy to love, easy to admire, easy to feel gratitude for, and impossible to be with. She took care of everything but explained so little. Her dinner-table opinions were a hail of final judgments: TV harmed children’s development, standardized testing was riddled with bias, Ronald Reagan’s efforts to reverse F.D.R.’s New Deal policies would harm cities like New Haven. Her views usually turned out to be right, which, when I was a teen-ager, was almost as frustrating as her refusal to accept any dissent. When I ventured that talking about “the English” was perhaps “generalizing,” she cut me down with a withering “Oh, Nicky, when did you get to be so smart?”

I used to wonder how she could discuss literary characters with such nuance, yet be so inflexible and thin-skinned with me. She shrank from my hugs and expressions of affection, and yet, if my friends or young male family members visited, she could be almost performatively doting. It was apparent to me then that she was a person intended to be a loving and full-hearted parent, and I could not ever grasp the disconnect between this and the often chilly reality. I knew what she was up against, and tried not to cause her problems. What was I being punished for?

Toward the end of high school, my mother presented me with a book by the child psychologist Alice Miller titled “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” Miller describes how accomplished adults with unresolved childhood trauma hide their insecurity, presenting a grim, staunch exterior, and how they bring up children to take on emotional responsibility for their parents’ suffering. My mother and I never discussed this book, and later in life she said that she did not remember buying it for me. But it’s true that I often worried she was lonely. I could sense and inhabit her anxieties, and I dreaded adding to them. I rebuked myself when I outgrew pants or shoes too soon, and when I found myself in times of trouble I didn’t go to her. I knew nobody else making their way through life as she was, and I had such admiration for how she managed it all—which I could hold right there alongside my teen-age resentments. One evening, in frustration, I threw a plastic cup at my recently repapered wall, and after that, every day I’d look at the gouge in that wall and think about what it must have cost her.

I grew up, but the form of our life together did not change. On my visits home, my mother might at first pretend not to notice me. Then she would scowl, and it was never clear why. She always seemed to want less of me, except she also wanted more. I would think and think about how to make things better. My inability filled me with despair. Not that I gave her any more grace than she offered me. I developed a way of being conspicuously absent while present. Visits would culminate in tears and maudlin mutual reassurances. Reliably nestled in my mailbox a few days later would be a thank-you note praising me for being a good and dutiful son, and assessing progress in the relations between us. At first these felt like epiphanies, until it happened too many times. I didn’t want compliments in the margin. I hoped to arrive at her house and receive a fond greeting.

In 2000, the head of Heidi’s school contacted me. He was having a problem. Heidi was retiring that spring, and he wanted to host a dinner in her honor. Invitations had gone out, R.S.V.P.s had come back, and there was only one no: it was my mother. She explained that the dinner fell on the day that her students’ exams were scheduled, and it was her strict policy to grade all student work as soon as it was completed. She was sorry, but attending the retirement dinner simply wasn’t possible.

The date was changed, and she went. Soon afterward, with minimal warning, my mother moved to a small white farmhouse on a lonely hillside in rural New Hampshire. It had belonged to her parents, and, for more than twenty years since their deaths, she’d been paying the property taxes, secretly planning for this day. In New Hampshire, she plunged into many forms of small-town life, leading a film series, chairing assorted civic and political committees, reading all of Zola’s books in French, making good friends. And she kept up her teaching by presiding over a “Tuesday Academy” of women who met for rigorous discussions of literary and academic subjects. When I remarked that her mother had run a similar study group for Harvard faculty wives, I was instructed with a ferocity I found startling never again to compare her to her mother.

Life might have continued in this way, if not for the isolations of COVID. Thinking of my mother marooned in her house was dismaying to me. She couldn’t Zoom, because computers (“those damn machines”) were anathema. Searching for ways to offer her company, I proposed that we read books simultaneously and then discuss them by phone. She mostly liked the idea, although she noted in her reading journal, “Nicky calls it our book club, but I am reluctant to call it a club, given my disapproval of clubs.”

In four years, we read fifty books together. “How are you, Mom?” is inevitably how our discussions began and, to my surprise, she began to tell me. The simultaneous intimacy and distance of reading allowed personal reflection to become her new habit. She revealed parts of herself through her appraisal of the characters with whom she felt a connection. We read “The Emigrants,” W. G. Sebald’s novel about four people who have left German-speaking countries for England and the U.S. Speaking in the present tense, my mother said that she considered all four to be “unhappy in the same way. The only one I know who resembles these people is my mother.” Then she briefly referred to her time in Rotterdam. “I suffered,” she said. “When I was returned to my mother, I was not the baby I’d been.”

When we read Jane Austen’s “Persuasion,” my mother was at first dismissive of how painful Captain Wentworth’s broken-off engagement might have been for him. But, the next day, she called to tell me about a college beau of hers, who’d taken her to see the film “Gigi,” and then to a jazz club. I was astonished when, after all these years, she proposed looking him up and apologizing for not wanting to go out with him again.

The COVID restrictions ended, but my mother continued to conclude our conversations with suggestions for what we could read next. As a reader she was enthusiastic about a range of books. We read novels by James Baldwin, Anna Burns, Ralph Ellison, and Gabriel García Márquez, works of ancient history and “The Hunger Games,” and were gripped by the procedurals of Ross Macdonald and John le Carré. Among the books that were new to her, easily her two favorites were Willa Cather’s “The Professor’s House,” and James McBride’s account of his mother, “The Color of Water.” Yet on visits, when I hugged her hello, Heidi still did not reciprocate. “That damn Nicky,” she’d mutter frostily. “It goes right through you,” I would think.

In the late winter of 2024, my mother told me that she was soon going to die of cancer. While I was absorbing this news, she insisted that we should continue our reading. Once I collected myself, I had a proposal: Would she read her great-novels curriculum with me? She agreed. That spring and early summer allowed me to glimpse my mother as she was to her students—and to herself. When we read “The Portrait of a Lady,” I asked her if she saw herself in Isabel Archer, who is lured by Madame Merle into marrying the monstrous Gilbert Osmond. She thought about it. “Some aspects, certainly,” she said. “I would have welcomed a great love.” By the time my mother met my father, he’d endured at least two devastating breakdowns. She recalled telling a friend, “I was thinking, if I loved him enough, then nothing could hurt him. That he wouldn’t be sick again.” Her friend was horrified, and told her, “Oh, you were so romantic.” My mother said that this was true. “He wasn’t a Gilbert Osmond, and there wasn’t a Madame Merle who pushed me into it,” she told me. “It was my own naïve insistence that it would work.” After the divorce, she knew that people were attracted to her. “But I felt so rushed by men,” she said. “I wasn’t emotionally up for anything.”

Her book-group self-reflections followed no linear chronology. They were spontaneous, responsive to the reading moment. Eventually, I could ask her about anything, and she would answer. Having never witnessed my parents happy together, or seen my mother truly experience leisurely relaxation, I was thrilled to hear about a time when she and my father went to Puerto Rico, shortly after their wedding. When Heidi tasted her first banana Daiquiri, she thought it was so delicious that she ordered a second, and then a third. Exactly nine months later, I was born. But my mother said that the combination of her marriage and her own mother’s unkindness had “sapped me emotionally and kept me from being the kind of mother who was fun. I was never fun. I didn’t think I was fun.”

We usually spoke on the weekend, and our shortest calls lasted more than an hour. Words and expressions she used—“guff,” “fusspot,” “lummox,” “fritter away,” “sure as shootin’,” “well, rootie tootie!”—took me back to my childhood. And back to hers. Our conversations kept finding their way to Rotterdam. She said that in college, during a psychology course, her professor had showed films made by the Austrian American psychoanalyst René Spitz about infants who were growing up in orphanages and foundling homes. “All the babies were very depressed. No attachment. I knew something was wrong,” she told me. “I couldn’t watch the movie. I got up and left the room. I knew then what had happened to me.”

I asked if she’d sought help or treatment. “Goodness gracious, no,” she said. “I was nineteen. I didn’t really understand how incredibly serious it was.” Heidi came to believe that her mother associated her daughter with the loss of Austria: “She told me how terrible things were when I was born. I asked my father, ‘Was it really true, things were so bad when I was born that it was ruinous to life?’ He said, ‘No. When you were born, everything picked up.’ ”

Heidi’s ongoing anger at her mother expressed itself in forms she would have considered potent if she was exploring them as a teacher. In the letters that Melle Visser’s children wrote to my mother, they told her repeatedly that their mother had accompanied Melle to Vienna, and that she had held Heidi on the way back to Rotterdam. But Heidi continued to ask how Melle “managed with a five-month-old baby on such a long train trip,” all by himself.

Being separated from her parents as a baby was an unhealed sorrow for Heidi, and her anguish followed her into the messy intimacy of family life. Right after we left my father, upon arrival in New Haven, my mother staged what was intended to be a reassuring lesson for me about family separation. She had a fellow-teacher take me alone for a ride in her car, to show me that I’d eventually be brought back. But, my mother admitted, “You were absolutely terrified.”

She had longed for grandchildren, yet when my son was born she had to be coaxed into coming to meet him. Two years later, no sooner did she have a newborn granddaughter than Heidi was making worried comments about having “no connection to her.” My wife was incredulous: “No connection with a baby!”

In the final months of Heidi’s life, our book conversations usually took place in person. We read Tolstoy’s long story “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” about a St. Petersburg judge who is dying of cancer. Ilyich perceives that his family regards his suffering only as an inconvenience to them. “He wants so much to have meaning in his life,” Heidi said. “He wonders, Did he do anything wrong? Because he’d always done everything right. Was so respectable. So good. And a good judge. But the lack of meaning at the end is terrible to him. He tortures himself with what did he do wrong in his life. Then his son kisses him and there is the light.”

It was natural enough then to kiss her forehead and, when she was too weak to read anymore, to read aloud to her. She chose Chekhov’s stories, and as we turned the pages of “Gooseberries” and “The Lady with the Little Dog,” we met ordinary people like ourselves, reflecting upon the sources of human happiness, and human deceit, and human dignity, and the possibility of salvation that uplifts what Chekhov described as the world’s “utter indifference to the life and death of each of us.”

When I asked how she was, the question, which had begun our calls across the years, seemed fundamentally inadequate—even coarse. But my mother wasn’t bothered. She was bound and determined to get the Chekhov done. She said, “It’s hard, as you can well imagine, no longer to be able to manage one’s life with supreme independence. But I can still talk about books with my son.” ♦