About the Hankie | First Person

By Ann Klotz

As I join the second-grade morning meeting, Fiona points and asks, “What’s that, Ms. Klotz?”

“This?” I say, pulling the square from the stretchy gold band of my watch. “It’s a hankie.”

“Why do you have it?” wonders Giulia, on my right, her unbrushed curls tumbling down her back.

Why do I have it? Because my left eye leaks, I always have a hanky, gentler than Kleenex. My tear duct, an eye surgeon explained, was never connected. The procedure he endorsed failed. I still weep from one eye.

I’ve tucked a hankie into the band of my Mickey Mouse watch for decades. If I appear without one, colleagues inquire about its absence, even on Zoom. Hats have gone out of fashion, as have lorgnettes, but hankies, just vintage enough, linger at the corner of memory.

After the undertaker rolled my mother’s body away 11 years ago, my daughter and I returned to Mom’s empty condo. In the early morning hours of a chilly April, Cordelia slept the exhausted sleep of 15. I, full of grief, prowled the halls, annoyed by the beige wall-to-wall carpeting. This was not the house I grew up in, but it is where I expected my mother to be, asleep in her chair, TV blaring, the ubiquitous glass of bourbon by her side. The absence of her presence choked me.

Her room was in shadow, the light on her bureau glowing softly. I slid out the top left drawer and ran my hand over her pile of handkerchiefs. Starched and ironed, they carried her scent. Shalimar? Chanel No. 5? I could not name it, but it was the perfume she wore when she and Daddy went to dinner parties. She dabbed it on her wrists, behind her ears, on her hankie. With the smell of powder and lipstick, her fragrance clung to her mink coat, which I, a little girl left at home, stroked as if it, too, were animate. I picked up the stack of hankies, buried my nose in them, wept.

Alone that night in her vacant room, I imagined my matchstick mother kneeling straight-backed on her mother’s prie-dieu, swollen knuckles clasped, elfin ears uncurled beneath her soft silver hair still shot with black. Murmuring prayers she knew by heart, she marked loss upon loss upon loss: four brothers, one sister, two parents, one son, all gone. I stroked the carved wood. To kneel would feel melodramatic, but I wanted to place my knees where hers had been. I wanted her back, her whole irreverent self.

Buck up, I heard her voice in my head. I’m here. Here in my head, not here in this house. The new way I would carry her.

Now, in a dresser made from the doors of the Baldwin Locomotive Company—the family business—a spacious drawer holds many, many handkerchiefs. White ones with lacy edges are my favorites; after that, I love ones with red borders or those that have been embroidered. Hankies grow threadbare and vanish unexpectedly, so I try not to get too attached and keep adding to my collection: flea markets, antique fairs, eBay. Each fabric scrap had a life before coming to me. When a student marries, I give her a bride’s hankie, a frothy lace confection. My husband sighs, exasperated, when he finds hankies littered about the house; I shed them as Hansel and Gretel dropped pebbles to mark their path home.

Why do I have it? Here’s the real answer. My mother always carried a handkerchief, up her sleeve or in her purse, and when she died, I stole her hankies from her dresser drawer and brought them home. At our daughter’s wedding last summer, I read e.e. cummings’s lines, “I carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart).” I carry Mom’s heart, a hankie at my wrist, prepared to dry my eyes.

I smile at Fiona and Giulia, and say, “Because I like them.”