Truth And Beauty.(Personal account)

For Suzanne Berne, growing up with an alluring mother meant accepting that while looks aren't everything, they're not nothing, either.

My grandmother was said to be the most beautiful woman in Jennings County, Indiana. Tall and black-haired with warm-colored skin and big dark eyes, she was smart as well as beautiful and went to a teachers college when she was sixteen. By eighteen she was teaching in a drafty one-room schoolhouse planted on the edge of a cornfield. She liked being a teacher but agreed to marry my grandfather because he burst into tears when she first refused him. He was a boisterous Irish policeman who played semipro baseball in Indianapolis in the early 1920s; she was shy and bookish. Not a good match, as she must have realized when she first said no, but he was besotted and she said she couldn't bear to see a man cry. My grandfather was a lively, funny man, but he was also a possessive husband with a beautiful wife. As soon as possible, he bought a farm 20 miles outside town and stuck her in the corn like a princess in exile, with only chickens and her children for company. She became strange and reclusive, read novels all day long and refused to clean the house. By the end of her life she had become large and vague and hawk-nosed, her face cobwebbed with lines, her still-black hair drifting out of a halfhearted bun as she shuffled about her dingy kitchen wearing a slack housedress and unlaced tennis shoes.

My mother was her only daughter. Whenever she talks about my grandmother, her expression becomes hesitant, as if dwelling too long on that tall, lonely figure in the dirty house might give her a headache. My grandmother was cold and remote. The only time she ever kissed my mother was when my mother was ten and lying on a hospital gurney before having her appendix removed; even then, she had to ask for a kiss. Not surprisingly, she prefers to think about my grandmother when she was still young and beautiful and unmarried, galloping home from the schoolhouse on horseback as storm clouds gathered over the low straw-colored Indiana hills. The mother of myth, in other words, which a beautiful mother can be as no one else.

Being beautiful is a complex business--it requires vigilance, periodic inventories, and a cool head

My mother was beautiful, too--dark-haired with fair skin and fine features and large, wide-spaced brown eyes. Though when she was growing up my mother thought she was ugly. "You look like a little pig," her mother used to tell her.

Perhaps my grandmother resented her daughter's beauty, which brightened as her own waned. Or perhaps, given her history, my grandmother realized that good looks can be hazardous and hoped to keep her daughter from knowing she was beautiful until she was old enough to understand beauty's demands and pitfalls, as well as its benefits.

For any woman, being beautiful is a complex business--if one is to be beautiful successfully--and like any business it requires vigilance, calculation, periodic inventories, and a cool head. My mother lived out on a farm, but somehow she always did what must be done regarding hair, cosmetics, clothing. Early on she recognized that beauty presents certain opportunities, and that to pretend otherwise is foolish, but if she wanted to leave the farm and her mother behind, then she would need to step carefully.