Mère

All of us knew her by one simple name, "Mère."

Even though Yvonne Louise Goodrich Gifford was tiny in stature, standing just over 5 feet tall in her stocking feet, you can tell by her regal bearing in Jack Marshall's 1960 portrait of her (above) that she was a giant of a woman.

More than a century after her family moved to America from Paris, Yvonne was born on November 7, 1890 in the family home on Esplanade Avenue at the edge of the Vieux Carré in New Orleans. As a toddler, she spoke her family's native French almost exclusively at home. Years later she recalled, "We played games in French, we spoke French around the dinner table, and my mother said we even sinned in French!" At the age of 8, she was made to learn English to start elementary school. She was a member of a well-to-do family that published a daily French-language newspaper, L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans. She enjoyed performances from the family's reserved seats at New Orleans' famous French Opera House. But the family eventually fell on hard times. She married and moved around the Eastern seaboard for her husband's work and then was divorced with four young children, a struggling career woman forced to make difficult choices for herself and her family.

Despite everything that happened in her life -- the good and the bad -- Mère lived into her 95th year. She read nearly every news article published in the daily editions of The Times-Picayune, the ultimate owner of the assets of her family's long-ago media empire. She welcomed 12 grandchildren and the first of what eventually would number 19 great-grandchildren. Just last summer her sixth great-great-grandchild was born. She worked full-time until she was nearly 80 years old. She outlived not only her youngest child (Gloria Gifford Keefe) and a beloved son-in-law (Jack Marshall), but also several physicians who over the years solemnly predicted her imminent demise.

Now, 119 years after her birth and nearly 25 years since her death, Mère is without a doubt the solid rock upon which remarkable generations have descended and prospered.

But her real legacy is best kept in the many memories precious to her family even to this day.

When I was very young, going on vacation more often than not meant loading the 6 of us in the Marshall family's 1950s-era non-air conditioned Chevrolet and traveling 321 miles, much of it down the two lanes of Louisiana Highway 1, from Shreveport to New Orleans. The trip took all day, and by the time we arrived at her sprawling apartment on Pine Street, near St. Charles Avenue and Broadway in uptown New Orleans, we were dirty, hungry and exhausted.

But we were thrilled to be there!

Mère's kitchen smelled wonderful. The apartment was full of people, including our aunts, uncle and and cousins, who had decamped there to welcome the Marshall clan. Around the cacaphonous dinner table, Mère always happily chirped, "Let only six talk at a time!"

My sister Mary and I got the choice sleeping accommodations, on the airy, screened front "sleeping porch." We looked down on the busy neighborhood sidewalk.

Each night we excitedly snuggled into makeshift bedding and drifted off to sleep with a symphony of unfamiliar sounds in our ears -- the honking cars of big city traffic on nearby Broadway, wailing sirens of New Orleans police and fire units working through the night, and the clanging streetcar bells on "The Avenue" (St. Charles) just a few blocks away. We were awakened at dawn each morning by the smell of chicory-laced coffee brewing in the kitchen and the novelty of loud, mechanized garbage trucks working their way down the narrow street. It seemed to Mary and me that the garbage men probably were paid more if they could bang each can's lid on the sidewalk with the loudest possible noise. We thought it all a grand adventure.

There were some hilarious misadventures too involving the fearsome landlady who lived downstairs. Like the time my brother David, then probably 10 years old and never at a loss for words, upon being introduced to the landlord, is reported to have said, "YOU'RE Mrs. Steckman? My grandmother says you're HORRIBLE!" Or the time I found some green paint, meant for shutters, in the garage and proceeded to apply a coat to a section of white exterior wall. Realizing the trouble I was in, I raced inside and hid under Mère's bed. When the illicit painting was discovered, I was the prime suspect and a boy hunt ensued. I recall that finally my aunt Elise Aimée discovered me. From my narrow floor level vantage point, I saw her upside-down head peering at me. "Here he is!" she shouted to the other searchers. And then turning back to me, she asked, "Tommy, what are you doing under there?" Thinking fast, I replied, "Oh, just resting."

Over the years, life changed, but Mère did not. For a while, she lived in a lovely, small apartment in a building called "The Monterey" on St. Charles, just a block or two from Napoleon Avenue. She loved the corner stores of K&B Drugs, where it seemed that everything, including mouthwash, baby powder, and tissues, was made and sold in the chain's trademark purple color.

Later she lived in an apartment on Jefferson Highway and then finally in an assisted living apartment called Metairie Manor, run by the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans. In fact, though, Mère didn't need much assistance.

Still, she read the newspaper daily. She joked that she turned to the obituaries first and "if I don't see my name, I know I'm going to have a good day." She maintained that she wasn't afraid of dying, but always added, "I'm not ready to go just yet." She reveled in Louisiana's infamous politics and voted in every election. She drank a glass of sherry every night, and she slept soundly.

One day, in March of 1985, the name Yvonne Goodrich Gifford finally did appear in the obituaries of The Times-Picayune. Mère was laid to rest in the Dufour/Goodrich family burial site, Tomb No. 27 in St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery on Basin Street, the oldest cemetery in New Orleans.

My most enduring memory of Mère dates to about a year or so before her death. I was living in New Orleans, and my first child, James, was born in 1983.

One Sunday afternoon I took baby James to her apartment. Mère sat in a rocking chair and held his tiny body close to hers, swaying gently. She closed her eyes and I heard her singing what sounded like a sweet lullaby. I stepped back to take a picture (which I still treasure) and then I leaned in close to listen to her song. But I didn't understand a word ... she was singing in French to my little son. Just as she had been sung to as a child of Esplanade Avenue, and just as she had done with her children when they were little.

In life, Mère often had joked that the tomb at St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery was to be her "final apartment," always adding with a wry smile, "I'm just sorry it doesn't have a window." I understand that the woman I knew as Mère is not really living there of course. But in heaven, no doubt, there is a daily newspaper, some juicy politics and a glass of sherry for Yvonne Goodrich Gifford, our matriarch.

À votre santé Mère!

- Tom Marshall, New York City