Then he might go downtown to his club for a game of poker, or he might stay in his deep chair, smoking a cigar and reading a book that always seemed to be the same book: The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page. My grandmother would take up her library book, I would take up mine, and silence would resume its way over the household. The only sound would be the turning of a page or the click of the door on the kitchen landing as the cook went upstairs to bed. Rarely, the telephone would ring, and I would rush to get it, but it was never anything interesting—someone for my uncle or a girl for me, asking what I was doing. Or my grandmother would glance over at me as I lay stretched out on the sofa with my copy (disappointing) of Mademoiselle de Maupin: “Mary, pull your dress down.” At ten o’clock, she would close her book, sighing, and start out to the front hall, on her way to bed. “Going up, Mama?” my grandfather would say, if he were at home, raising his gray eyes with an invariable air of surprise. “I think so, Harry,” she would reply, sighing again, from the stairs. The stairs creaked; her door closed; the bathroom door closed. Soon my grandfather would put down his book and his paper knife, offer his cheek to me for a kiss, and follow her up the stairs. The nursery door would shut.
Occasionally, we would all go to the movies, or to the theater if a New York company was in town; my grandfather did not care for stock. We saw The Student Prince and No! No! Nanette! I remember, and Strange Interlude, which my grandmother pronounced “talky.” On Thursday nights, we might go out to dinner at my grandfather’s club. On Sundays, the cook left a supper prepared for us; my married uncle and his wife always came to this meal, no matter how many invitations they had to turn down, and sometimes Aunt Eva or Aunt Alice. These suppers usually ended with our going to the movies afterward; we were always home by eleven.
About once a year, or possibly every two years, my grandmother gave a tea and we had the caterer in. That was the only entertaining we did. Except for Aunt Alice and Aunt Eva (both widows), we never gave anyone dinner outside the immediate family. We never had Uncle Mose and Aunt Rosie or Uncle Clarence and Aunt Abbie (a vegetarian pair) or any of my cousins and their wives or my grandfather’s partners and theirs. My grandmother’s brother Elkan, whom she saw rarely but was not on bad terms with, was never, to my knowledge, in our house, nor were his wife and his numerous progeny. This leads me to wonder whether it was not the Jewish connection that had put the bar on entertaining. “If we have one in the house, we’ll have them all,” my grandfather may have said. But we did have Aunt Eva, frequently, and once, a great exception, her daughter from Portland to Sunday lunch. The only other exception that comes back to me was a dinner we gave for old Judge Gilman, of the Great Northern, and his wife, a stout lady who called herself Little Eva; I remember this because the men were served whisky before dinner, the only time this ever happened in our house. But why we had Judge and Mrs. Gilman I do not know; I think it puzzled me at the time by introducing into my head the question of why we did not have other people, since, on this occasion, a good time was had by all.
Up to then, it had never occurred to me that my family was remarkably inhospitable. I did not realize how strange it was that no social life was ever planned for me or my young uncle, that no young people were invited for us and no attempt made to secure invitations on our behalf. Indeed, I did not fully realize it until I was over thirty and long a mother myself. If I did not have an ordinary social set but only stray, odd friends, I blamed this on myself, thinking there was something wrong with me, like a petticoat showing, that other people could see and I couldn’t. The notion that a family had responsibility for launching the younger members was more unknown to me than the theorem of Pythagoras, and if anybody had told me of it, I think I would have shut my ears, for I loved my family and did not wish to believe them remiss in any of their obligations. The fact that they would not let me go out with boys was an entirely different case; I saw their side of it, even though I disagreed violently—they were doing it for my own good, as they conceived it.
And yet I knew there was something odd about my grandmother’s attitude toward outsiders. She would never go up to Lake Crescent, in the Olympic Mountains, with my grandfather and my young uncle and me in the summertime, where, amid my grandfather’s circle of friends and their descendants, we had the only regular social life I ever experienced in the West. Life in the mountain hotel was very gay, even for the old people—Judge and Mrs. Battle, Colonel Blethen, Mr. Edgar Battle, Mr. Claude Ramsay, Mr. and Mrs. Boole—in my grandfather’s set. They had card games on the big veranda and forest walks up to the Marymere waterfall; they took motorboat expeditions and automobile expeditions; they watched the young people dance in the evening and sent big tips to the chef in the kitchen. I could not understand why my grandmother preferred to stay in Seattle, pursuing her inflexible routine.
She was funny that way—that was the only explanation—just as she was funny about not letting my young uncle or me ever have a friend stay to dinner. In all the years I lived with my grandmother, as a child and a woman, I can only recall two occasions when this rule was ever broken. The second one was when she was bedridden and too feeble, morally, to override my determination to ask a poet who was teaching at the university to stay and have supper with me. I felt a little compunction, though the nurse and the cook assured me that it would be all right—she would forget about it the next minute. But her pretty voice, querulous, was heard from upstairs at about eight-thirty in the evening: “Mary, has that man gone home yet?” And all through the rest of my visit, she kept reverting crossly to the subject of “that man” who had stayed to supper; it was no good explaining to her that he had no means of getting home, that he lived in rooms way out at the University and took his meals in diners and tearooms, that he was an old friend to whom some hospitality was owing in my native city. Nor could I laugh her out of it. “Why didn’t he go home for his dinner?” she reiterated, and those dark, suspicious words were very nearly the last I heard from her.
This ungraciousness of my grandmother’s was a deeply confirmed trait. It was not only that she resisted offering meals to anyone outside the immediate family; she resented a mere caller. There was a silver tray for calling cards on the hall table, but most of the cards in it were yellow with age; my grandmother was always downtown shopping at the hour when calls were normally paid. If I had a girl in for the evening, we could not really talk until my grandmother had gone to bed, and often she would outstay the guest, sitting in a corner with her book and glancing at us from time to time as we sat on the sofa endeavoring to improvise a dialogue. We could tell she was listening, but she did not talk herself. Suddenly, looking up, she would make the gesture to me that meant “Pull your skirt down.”
My uncle’s situation was the same, but he had the advantage of having his own sitting room, where his friends could congregate. For the most part, my grandmother ignored their presence; she would nod to them curtly if she chanced to meet them in the hall. The girls he knew were never asked to the house; he could never give a party.
Yet she was not an unkindly woman. She was good to her servants and their families, and on some occasions, if she were persuaded to unbend and tell an anecdote, she could be positively cordial. Her house, with its big rooms and wide porches, had been built, it would seem, with a hospitable intention. And in my mother’s day, so I was told, things had been very different; the house had been full of young people. The silver and crystal and cut glass had not always been put away in the cupboard; there had been music and dancing, and my mother’s school and college friends had spent night after night on the sleeping porches (which served as guest rooms) without even the necessity of a permission.
My mother had been my grandmother’s darling. The fact that we did not entertain, I was given to understand, was related to my mother’s death. My grandmother had resented her marriage to my father; according to my Irish relations, she would not have a priest in the house, and so the ceremony had been performed on the lawn. I do not believe th
is story, which is contradicted by other accounts, but it is true that my grandmother resented the Catholic Church, to which my mother was eventually converted. Dr. Sharpies, the family physician, had told my father, it seems, that my mother would die if she had another child, and my father went right ahead anyway, refusing to practice birth control. Actually, my mother’s death had nothing to do with childbearing; she died of the flu, like so many young women of her age during the great epidemic. But this would not have deterred a woman like my grandmother from holding my father and the Church responsible. That was perhaps the reason she took no interest in my three brothers, who were still living with my father’s people in Minneapolis; she sent them checks and gifts at birthdays and Christmas, and remembered them later in her will, but during the years I lived with her, the three little boys who had been born against her judgment were very remote from her thoughts. Possibly, I was enough of a handful for a woman of her age; nevertheless, it seems odd, unfeeling, that dry lack of concern, when she well knew that their lot was not happy. But happiness, like love, was a concept she had no real patience with.
As for the impassibility or aloofness she showed sometimes toward me, this may have been due to an absence of temperamental sympathy (could she have thought I had my father’s traits?), or it may have been because I reminded her painfully of my mother. (I was always conscious of a resemblance that did not go far enough; everyone was always telling me how “good” my mother had been.)
For three years after my mother’s death, one of her friends told me, my grandmother did not go out socially. Five years, said another. And this prolonged mourning was always offered as the official explanation of any oddities in our household. My grandmother, people said, lowering their voices, had never recovered from the shock of my mother’s death. As a child, I could not quite believe this; it was impossible for me to imagine this contained, self-centered woman overcome by a passion of grief. Without being a psychologist, I felt somehow that her obdurate mourning was willful and selfish.
Children generally feel this about any adult emotion which is beyond their ken, but in this case I think I was on the track of something real. My grandmother’s grief had taken a form peculiar to herself, stamped, as it were, with her monogram—the severe “AMP,” in scroll lettering, that figured on her silver, her brushes and combs, her automobile. Her grief had the character of an inveterate hostility. One of my mother’s friends recently wrote me a letter describing how my grandmother had hurt her feelings by refusing to speak to her whenever they met in the stores for a year after my mother’s death. “Your grandmother could not bear the sight of me,” she sadly decided.
And that is how I see my grandmother, bearing her loss like an affront, stubborn and angry, refusing to speak not only to individual persons but to life itself, which had wounded her by taking her daughter away. Her grief was a kind of pique, one of those nurtured grievances in which she specialized and which were deeply related to her coquetry. If I had only her photographs to go on, I might doubt the legend of her beauty; what confirms it for me is her manner of grieving, her mistrust of words, her refusal to listen to explanations from life or any other guilty suitor. Life itself was obliged to court her—in vain, as it appeared, for she had been mortally offended, once, twice, three times.
What the first offense was, I do not know, but I imagine it had something to do with her Jewish pride and sensitiveness; some injury was dealt her early in her marriage, and it may have been a very small thing—a chance word, even—that caused her to draw back into an august silence on this topic, a silence that lasted until her death. The second one I know about. This was the tragic face lifting that took place, in 1916 or 1917, I imagine, when she was in her forties and my mother was still living. Perhaps she really did have a mastoid operation at some later period (I rather think she must have), but the pouchy disfiguring scars I have spoken of that started on her cheeks and went down into her neck were the work of a face-lifter, who, as I understand the story, had pumped her face full of hot wax.
Such accidents were common in the early days of face lifting, and the scars, by the time she was sixty, were not especially noticeable. It was only that her cheeks had a puffy, swollen appearance, which her make-up did not conceal—in fact, if anything, enhanced, for though she did not know it, she always looked better in the morning, before she put on the rouge and the powder that made her skin’s surface conspicuous. But when the scars were new, they must have been rather horrifying, and that was surely the reason for the dotted veils she wore, pulled tight across her face. The photographs break off at the time of the operation. That was when she stopped speaking to the camera, and, according to one informant, my grandmother left Seattle for a year after the tragedy.
“According to one informant”—the story of the face lifting was well known in Seattle, and yet in the family no mention was ever made of it, at least in my hearing, so that I learned of it from outsiders—my father’s people, friends of my mother’s, who naturally were unable to supply all the details. I was grown up when I learned it, and yet that same unnatural tact that kept me from ever using the word “Jewish” to my grandmother kept me from prying into the matter with the family. “Your grandmother’s tragedy”—so I first heard the face lifting alluded to, if I remember rightly, by one of my friends, who had heard of it from her mother. And I will not query the appropriateness of the term according to the Aristotelian canon; in this case, common usage seems right. It was a tragedy, for her, for her husband and family, who, deprived of her beauty through an act of folly, came to live in silence, like a house accursed.
My grandmother’s withdrawal from society must have dated, really, from this period, and not from the time of my mother’s death, which came as the crowning blow. That was why we were so peculiar, so unsocial, so, I would add, slightly inhuman; we were all devoting ourselves, literally, to the cult of a relic, which was my grandmother’s body, laved and freshened every day in the big bathroom, and then paraded before the public in the downtown stores.
I was living in New York when my grandfather died, from a stroke, one morning, when he was seventy-nine, in the big bathroom. My grandmother’s ritual did not change. She still dressed and went downtown at the same hours, returning at the time when she would have picked him up at his club. She was cheerful when I saw her, a year or so after this; she went to the races and had a new interest—night baseball; we went to the ball park together. Once in a great while, she would lunch and play bridge with a group of women friends, with whom she had resumed connections after twenty years. But she did not, to my knowledge, ever have them to her house; they met at the Seattle Golf Club usually, the best (non-Jewish) country club.
Like many widows, she appeared to have taken a new lease on life; I had never seen her so chatty, and she was looking very handsome. I remember an afternoon at the races, to which she drove Aunt Rosie and me in her car, at a speed of seventy miles an hour; she herself was well over seventy. The two sisters, one a lively robin and the other a brilliant toucan, chaffed and bantered with the sporting set in the clubhouse. Conscious of their powers and their desirability, they were plainly holding court. Aunt Rosie did not bet but advised us; my grandmother, as usual, won, and I think I won, too. That night, or in the small hours of the morning, Aunt Rosie died.
It was something, Dr. Sharpies thought, that she had eaten at the races; an attack of indigestion caused a heart block. He believed at first he could save her, and I had persuaded my grandmother to go to bed, confident that Aunt Rosie would be almost herself the next day. But in the middle of the night, the phone rang. I ran to get it; it was Uncle Mose. “Rosie just went.” My grandmother understood before I could tell her, before I had set down the telephone. A terrible scream—an unearthly scream—came from behind the closed door of her bedroom; I have never heard such a sound, neither animal nor human, and it did not stop. It went on and on, like a fire siren on the moon. In a minute, the whole household was roused; everybody came running. I got
there first. Flinging open her bedroom door (even then with a sense of trepidation, of being an unwarranted intruder), I saw her, on her bed, the covers pushed back; her legs were sprawled out, and her yellow batiste nightgown, trimmed with white lace, was pulled up, revealing her thighs. She was writhing on the bed; the cook and I could barely get hold of her. My uncle appeared in the doorway, and my first thought (and I think the cook’s also) was to get that nightgown down. The spectacle was indecent, and yet of a strange boudoir beauty that contrasted in an eerie way with that awful noise she was making, more like a howl than a scream and bearing no resemblance to sorrow. She was trying, we saw, to pull herself to her feet, to go somewhere or other, and the cook helped her up. But then, all at once, she became heavy, like a sack full of stones. The screaming stopped, and there was dead silence.
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood Page 23