How My Mother Protected Us from My Father and Found Solace in Art

My mother described the Rembrandt paintings as her friends. I’d never heard anyone talk about art that way, instilling it with something like a personhood of its own.

The first time I visited New York City, I was two years old. As I was so young, the only evidence of my being there at all are a few photographs of me and my mother. In one, she’s smiling from behind my stroller where I am caught mid-laugh, tightly gripping an FAO Schwartz teddy bear. Like a lot of people who lived in the Midwest, New York was a fantasy pieced together through snippets of pop culture and cliches about big city life. But, for me, New York possessed another layer of myth, because it was also a place my mother loved.

In the 1950s, my grandfather worked for the Toyota Tsusho Corporation in Japan. He opened a corporate office in New York and moved between his home country and the United States throughout his career. He occasionally brought his growing family with him. My mother was even born in New York during one extended stay.

While she spent the majority of her life in Japan, she always had a soft spot for her birth city. She’d tell me stories about her year taking classes at CUNY, diligently studying in a language she wasn’t fluent in yet. I’d imagine the scene: my mother moving easily between places I only saw in movies—Juilliard, Lincoln Center, Central Park; her walks down streets whose names meant nothing to my Minneapolis point-of-reference.

She mentioned going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and picking out a marble statue to analyze for an essay assignment. After she selected a statue and took her notes, she wandered around the museum. She found an open area, with large windows pouring sunlight onto the artwork, and a painting hanging on the wall: an old man with a full gray beard and wide cream sleeves ballooning out of a dark apron-like cut of cloth, split diagonally by a glittering gold chain and medallion. He gazes thoughtfully at the head of a sculpture, his hand resting on its scalp.

On the tiny placard: “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), Dutch, 1652.” My mother was transfixed.

I can easily picture the face of Aristotle now without looking up a reference photo. The way the light picks up his cheekbones, the pinprick of light on his nose, the way the gold chain stands out as both fascinatingly, photographically accurate and yet far too beautiful to be real.

We had a small print of the painting, no more than about eight by eight inches, that my mother had purchased the first time she saw it in New York. The Aristotle was also the first picture we hung up in the house when my mother kicked out my father for good.

*

One of my earliest memories of my father is being on a plane to the United States from Sendai, Japan, where we lived at the time. In my memory, I am about four years old and my brother is about two, both antsy from the long flight, pulling silly faces at one another and barely stifling our laughter in the dark cabin. I remember making a silly face at my brother, who doubled over with laughter. I remember my father putting his face close to mine.

“If you don’t stop it right now,” he said, “I’m going to take you into the bathroom and bash your face in.” We were silent for the rest of the flight.

He was a drug addict and an alcoholic, had been for most of his life, with his own history of trauma that he acted out on us. Even the years my mother believed he was sober were years when he simply consumed what he wanted in secret.

My mother’s ability to leave was hampered by money. She had degrees in early childhood education, but they were from Japanese institutions, which didn’t transfer to the United States. During my adolescence in Minnesota, she began earnestly using her educational background and her knowledge from raising my younger brother, who has autism, to find work doing consulting and getting training to fill out her resumé. My father continued to spiral out of control and she grew more apprehensive about leaving me and my brother alone with him.

One weekend afternoon, as she prepared to leave for work, she asked me, “Are you sure you will be okay?”

Something cold settled in the pit of my stomach. We both knew what happened whenever she left: My father would take whatever he wanted, more of it than usual. These were always the worst days.

No. I wanted to say, I don’t want you to go. But I also wanted us to leave him as soon as possible. There was an unspoken understanding that we couldn’t leave until my mother could support us. The only way she could do so was by working.

“We’ll be fine,” I said instead.

The Aristotle was also the first picture we hung up in the house when my mother kicked out my father for good.

There were times when things felt doable, when it was safer for us to let him do what he wanted, rather than try to leave. But there was always an inevitable return to the horrific status quo. And each time the cycle began again, things became worse.

My father was a good manipulator. He knew how to cut people apart into fragments of themselves, ribbons of personhood left on the ground for him to trample. Though none of us were safe, my younger brother’s disability made him an easier target. My father would torment my brother, who was mostly nonverbal at the time. My father would trigger my brother into fits of uncontrollable rage and fear that manifested as physical violence, a last-ditch attempt to make my father leave him alone.

My brother’s trauma never manifested as harm towards others. Instead, he shattered whatever he could get his hands on. My father knew what his torment would lead to. No matter how often we tried to stop him, he knew how to get the response he wanted.

For my brother’s safety, we took everything down off the walls and removed anything breakable from the house.

*

The Aristotle was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1961.

Two years later, in 1963, my mother was born in New York City. After her first encounter with the painting in 1983, my mother would return to the museum, long after submitting her essay assignment, bringing books with her, reading and glancing up at the Aristotle between classes or her part-time job.

I asked about the print once it made its home on our wall. What was it about this dark, rather grubby figure that she loved so much?

When it came to the Aristotle, in particular, she said, “It used to hang in a space with many windows. When the light came into the building, it looked alive. I like how he uses light, how he treats all human faces with so much tenderness and care. He understood something about pain, but so many of his paintings feel warm and calm. I always felt better looking at them.”

My mother would describe it and other Rembrandt paintings she saw in New York as her friends. I had never heard anyone talk about art in that way, instilling it with something like a personhood of its own.

I can picture my mother on these museum trips because I’ve seen photographs of her at twenty years old. In them, she is always looking directly into the lens of the camera, head held high even though she was bullied in school for being too tall for someone who is Japanese. In most of these pictures, she wears red high-top Chucks and gloriously feathered hair. Her vibrant, stubborn personality translates so well onto film. For many years, these old photos of my mother in her parents’ house in Nagoya were the only way I could see who she was before my father.

Until I was seventeen, my mother was a shell of the fiery, independent spirit that got her into trouble in Japan. She was frequently the nail that stuck out, hammered down for things that were inherent to her adventurous personality. She was too quick to voice her opinion, to ask questions in class when she was told to quiet down, to fight school bullies who teased her younger brother. These stories of her rebelliousness were difficult to reconcile with the woman she was while married to my father.

I grew up with a flattened version of my mother, the version that kept her personality flat enough to weather the storms of my father’s abuse, while spreading her arms wide enough to protect my brother and I as much as she could.

My father’s addiction and abuse increased to the point that my teenage memories are fragmented. There are holes in my life, entire year-long swaths of time that are simply gone. I had once read in middle school that our skin replaces itself fully over the course of twenty-seven days. For many years, I believed that our memories, like our skin, sloughed off to make room for new memories. And yet, listening to my friends easily recount their schools, teachers, and fellow students from the past, I feel uneasy. When I wrack my mind for similar memories, I come up empty.

If you trace the peaks and valleys of my memories, they match the pattern of my father’s addiction. The only memories I have of the first seventeen years of my life are hazy impressions of friends, Japanese family members, my trips to Japan to get away from my father. I can piece together the ghostly outline of my childhood through the people or places that took me away from him.

My clearest memory of high school is of a Saturday afternoon during the fall of my senior year. My mother picked me up from taking the ACT while my brother was out of the house with one of his PCAs.

I had never heard anyone talk about art in that way, instilling it with something like a personhood of its own.

I climbed into the car as it sat idling. My mother stared straight ahead, looking out over the busy road that ran parallel to the testing site. I was apprehensive, my ACT-deadened mind instinctively whirring to life—why was she so quiet, what did my dad do now?

Still looking away she said quietly, “He’s gone.” I froze. It seemed she could hardly believe it herself. Then, as if encouraged by that first tentative declaration, she turned to me, “I finally kicked him out.”

I remember the two of us crying the entire drive home, unable to believe that he could truly be gone. I remember entering our house and feeling that something had been exorcised from the house. I remember it so clearly: For the first time in years, I felt happy.

*

My second time in New York City is in the early spring of 2019. During our visit, my mother oscillates between disbelief at how much things have changed and how strangely familiar everything remains. While I see the city with what might as well be completely new eyes, the word she uses repeatedly is 懐かしい (natsukashii), an adjective that describes something akin to nostalgia, something loved and dearly missed. I hear in her voice that a part of her has returned home.

Over a few days, I bring my mother back to the places she told me about. We walk the paths she did when she was young, going past sites that remain the same, even though the buildings themselves have grown, more sleek and more modern than when she last saw them. Each sight leads to an excited rush of stories, some I have heard before, some coming from memories newly bubbling up to the surface. For the first time in my life, I see the face of the girl in the old photos in Nagoya. Alive and vibrant once again.

I finally meet her old friend, the Aristotle, in person. He now lives in a space on the lower level of the Met, hanging against a deep forest green wall in an exhibit with other Dutch masterpieces. The painting is nothing like the tiny, faded print we have hanging in my mother’s home.

The Aristotle’s expressiveness comes from Rembrandt’s particular use of multiple layers of paint, a more rough approach that causes the image to fade into brushstrokes the closer you get to it, but gives the subjects their signature softness and glow when you stand at the right distance. There are more nuances, variations, tricks of the light that happen when you see it in person. Though the paint has faded over the centuries, the yellows and reds that break up the dark palette are still enchanting. I can see why my mother ascribed humanity to it.

When we visit, my mother spends quite a bit of time in front of the painting. I spend more time watching her. This is the woman who scraped together every ounce of strength she had to keep me and my brother safe in horrible circumstances, whose fiery personality remained hidden beneath a facade erected in the name of survival.

Our Aristotle print now hangs in my mother’s dining room, the same familiar face marking another change in our lives. Recently, my mother sold our old house, the one she had kicked my father out of over a decade ago, wholly washing her hands of all the ghosts that lingered there.

In her new home, the first thing we put up on the walls was her old friend Aristotle.