He has been described as driven and intense. When the Great Depression drove him into bankruptcy and destroyed him financially, he committed suicide. I know only that he went into the woods and hanged himself from the branch of a sturdy tree. He had built his fortune from the forests, and that’s where he ended his time on earth.
My mother told me very little of this tragedy, even though his disastrous end totally changed her life.
My grandmother never acknowledged it to me.
I loved my Little Grandma very much, but the language barrier made it difficult for us to communicate. When I was a young married woman, I brought Grandma to my home in Toledo for a visit. I invited a friend from my workplace who spoke Polish to talk to my grandmother and act as our translator. That’s when I learned that, although my Polish grandfather spoke his native tongue fluently, my grandmother could not speak it at all. My friend said that Mary could mix some Polish in with English, but neither was her birth language. I tried to find out where she came from. I learned nothing conclusive, but I believe her family came from Hungary, and her native language was Hungarian. Obviously, my grandparents met and married without sharing a common language.
Parenthetically, I believe my grandmother’s lack of language and sophistication disturbed my mother when she was a young woman. As a child, I had observed the relationship between my mother and her mother. It was for my mother a mixture of love and frustration. For Little Grandma, it was a source of unstinting pride.
When my mother died, my grandmother’s grief was inconsolable. This was the one child who’d stayed connected to her, and now she was gone. But that loss came years after grandpa’s suicide abandoned Mary to the life of a poverty-stricken widow.
After grandfather’s death, Grandma Mary continued to live in Iron Mountain, Michigan. It was a remote little place, and her children gradually left town. Finally, she was left with Alex, her youngest. There was speculation in my father’s family that this child, who came much later than her first four children, might actually have been an illegitimate offspring of my mother Sally. I asked my grandmother about this, and she exploded. She never had learned much English, but there was no doubt that she was screaming that Alex was her baby and people had lied about her baby.
Alex was severely mentally retarded. When he was in his teens, he was taken from her custody by the authorities and placed in an institution a long way from home. According to eyewitnesses, she wailed and cried and struggled so hard to keep her baby, who was then about sixteen years old, that the police came close to locking her up. Finally she was forced to accept her loss, but she didn’t forget Alex, and for years, she never failed to take the bus each month to visit him in the institution where he was confined.
Whether that heartbreaking experience served society well, I really don’t know, but it took a cruel toll on my Grandma Mary. From then on, folks in Iron Mountain considered her a bit strange.
The whole town of Iron Mountain knew her as “Little Mary.” She lived above a bar and restaurant. She had one room of her own and supported herself by cleaning rooms for all the elderly men who lived there. She never really learned to count, but she was very careful with her money. She scrimped and saved enough to pay for her funeral and burial arrangements when she died.
I visited Little Grandma when I was a teenager, and I became acutely aware of her unusual status in the town. For example, the cloistered convent allowed Mary access – a most extraordinary circumstance.
Several years before Mary’s death, I was in the midst of major life changes and had moved to another address when it became evident to the townspeople that Mary would have to go to a home for old folks.
I didn’t hear about it. No one in Iron Mountain knew how to reach me. Had I known, I would have done my best to rescue her, but, limited as my time and resources were in those days, I might have been unable to do as well as she and her friends did when they placed her in the home.
It was nothing fancy, that home, but fancy wasn’t what she needed. It was an old house, and it boasted a staff of compassionate people. They let her clean the stairs and certain rooms. It was satisfying labor for her. She knew there was hard and useful work to be done, and it was her job to keep on contributing. She had to work because that is what people need to do.
Eventually I learned what had happened to her, and I went to see her in Iron Mountain. When I visited, she was proud to show me her room, but she was even prouder that her chores were important. She was a productive, contributing citizen even at her advanced age. (I never knew how old she was, nor did she. Based on my mother’s age, I estimate she died in her mid-eighties.) I believe that she lived the balance of her life in comparative peace. Very likely, it was the best place for her to live out her days.
When she died, my Aunt Catherine and I received her few worldly possessions. I was amazed to see that gifts I had given her had been carefully preserved and had never been worn. What was even more disconcerting was finding gifts to my grandma from my mother, who by that time had been dead for more than twenty years.
As years went by, I learned that many elderly people save things for a future they don’t have, for golden years they won’t live to see. I hope grandma got pleasure keeping the trinkets we gave her.
Little Mary’s life offers vivid lessons. An illiterate girl whose family had grown up somewhere in Europe, married a Polish immigrant (whose language she didn’t know). He crossed half a continent and a mighty ocean to a country he had never seen where first he dug coal out of the ground and then owned a lumber mill and got rich and powerful until the Great Depression broke him and he killed himself. His widow had borne him five children, and (except for Alex) she raised them to adulthood.
Consider this: First, she had been poor, then rich, again poverty stricken, and finally ended her days as a cleaning woman who eked out enough from meager earnings to pay for her funeral and burial arrangements.
I learned a lot about resiliency from my Grandma Mary.
As contrasted with my mother’s parents, who were fairly new arrivals in this country, my father’s family had been here a long time. The ancestors of my paternal grandfather (Grandpa John) immigrated to this continent from Scotland and England in the mid-1600s, and the family of my maternal grandmother (Grandma Lucile) came here the following century from England and Germany. Many Midwestern farm families had similar backgrounds, and no one took any special pride in it. Mostly they laughed at the Daughters of the American Revolution and the “blue bloods” who paraded their ancestry.
Grandpa John was not much for bragging about his forebears, and he grumped about a genealogical search financed by his sister (Great-Aunt) May: “She wasted her good money for that nonsense! It doesn’t matter a hill of beans who your ancestors are. Just because you can trace them back a few hundred years doesn’t mean they amounted to anything. What you are now and what you do now, that’s what counts.”
Sometimes Grandpa sounded like he’d rather not be linked to his ancestors – especially not to his father. Once a year, he would take his youngsters to spend an hour with the “Old Cuss” at his farm. Totally estranged from his tightwad father, he would sit in his Model-A Ford staring through the windshield until the visit ended and his children came back to the car bearing or wearing bizarre gifts.
One time Aunt Eileen had draped over her seven-year-old body a golden fox fur half as big as she was. The Old Cuss had trapped the fox and skinned it, tanned and lined the fur, and saved it as a gift for her annual visit. Aside from allowing a snapshot of the child wearing this amazing luxury item, her mother said there was no appropriate occasion for its display, but for years, it was one of the little girl’s treasured possessions.
My father never mentioned the Old Cuss, and he didn’t talk to us about his family tree. Only in recent years has our genealogy been perfunctorily circulated among the younger family members, most of whom seem to agree with Grandpa John that lineage doesn’t matter a hoot.
In retrospect, t
hough, I think the unsung family history helped shape my father’s life.
Back in this country’s early days, my father’s ancestors were Quakers, believers in peace and simplicity, opponents of rituals – alien to a religion featuring Low Mass and High Mass, rosaries and confessions, incense and sacramental wine, priests and nuns, and the Pope in Rome.
In more recent years, the family felt the strong influence of the Shakers. That was because Grandpa John’s mother, Grace, was an orphan who was raised by Shakers – a small sect that guaranteed its own demise by segregating the sexes and forbidding sexual intercourse. EVER. There were a few Shaker villages in the United States, but the unappealing Shaker program didn’t really get off the ground, and its failure saved the human race from extinction by abstinence.
The one taboo the Catholics and Shakers shared was birth control, though for very different reasons.
The Shakers got new members by raising orphans and persuading them to stay as adults in the Shaker community. They also got a few adult recruits – usually abused wives running from sadistic husbands. Their rigid, repressed society was not congenial to my orphaned great-grandmother, and she left the Shaker Village as soon as she could.
Even though the Shakers preached that all sex was sin, she opted for marriage and children. Unfortunately, she chose a mean, hard-working, stingy farmer, and the rocky marriage of the miser and the waif produced three excellent, though inhibited, children – John, May, and Ona. The parents divorced as soon as their kids were grown.
Grandpa John’s philosophy drew upon the sternest strictures of the Shakers and the Puritans of New England and forbade, with equal ferocity, sex, smoking, and drinking. With such a dark moral code, sacramental wine and tobacco and extramarital sex had to be the ultimate evils, and Grandpa’s taboos were so unrealistic that his children sought a different set of values. Sometimes they made awful mistakes.
I believe his only son (my father) was a troubled man with respect to his sexuality, beginning in his teens, most certainly continuing through marriage and fatherhood, and probably all his life.
Grandpa John was not alone in his struggle for appropriate sexual mores. The twentieth century moved from Calvin and Luther and the Popes to Freud and eugenics and planned parenthood and the pill and the sexual revolution. Maybe some day we’ll get it right, but I doubt it.
Along with its ban on sex, booze, and cigarettes, the family repressed emotionalism. Self-control was the rule. “Don’t complain. Never cry” was the unspoken good-behavior code. Aunt Eileen said that one time Grandpa John was jauntily whistling “Yankee Doodle” as he came into the house from the barnyard. Something was wrong she knew, and, sure enough, his thumb had been torn halfway off in a farm accident. She said any time his voice was that carefully controlled, you could be pretty sure he had suffered a physical injury or was in some sort of danger.
Grandpa John’s Quaker/Shaker heritage with its sexual taboos gathered fuel from his work. In addition to running a farm, he was a teacher and superintendent of country schools. It was almost as politically vulnerable an occupation as a rural minister’s. His children learned the hard way, “Control yourself. Don’t complain. Never cry.”
Even down to my generation, I was taught to stay silent and hide my feelings when disaster struck. I remember that when a marriage was going sour and I didn’t know why and I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t fight. I could only cling. And hurt.
Grandpa John and Grandma Lucile were strong, hard workers. As farmers and teachers, for many years, they worked at both occupations at the same time. Their work ethic was rock solid, and that’s how they raised their children. Grandpa was very strict and seemed scary to me. He expected hard work, and his rule was law. That’s what he had learned from the stingy old farmer and the industrious Shaker.
I remember my family’s visits to my grand-parents in Florida when I was a child. My father always spent a good part of our vacation working on the ranch, mending fences and burning fields. Grandpa was the boss, and my daddy, the successful professional, obeyed him.
I adored Grandma Lucile. I always felt that I was a very special person when I was with her. She would take me to Catholic Church even though she was a Protestant and didn’t like Catholicism very much. She enjoyed reading and respected my passion for books.
The last time I got to spend with her was during my fifteenth summer. We cooked and ate and played. She took me to the movies, and we saw The Roots of Heaven. The movie terrified me, and I couldn’t sleep. She heard me tossing and came to my room and made everything all right. Grandma Lucile’s loving, comforting words that night are among my fondest memories. Going back to a home where I didn’t really belong was so bleak a prospect and my loneliness and the need for her were so intense that I cried all through Florida and Georgia on my way home to Toledo.
It was the last time I ever saw her alive.
CHAPTER THREE
My Parents
Grandma Lucile’s father ran the country store and post office in Oregonia, Ohio (population 300). She was nineteen when she married Grandpa John, and their first child was my father. He was born in 1914 when “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was the maxim of the day. Grandpa John’s parenting was modeled on his tyrannical father’s and his Shaker-trained mother’s teachings. Though he became less repressive as the family grew, he demanded that his firstborn be a model of good behavior.
My father was a painfully shy little fellow, and his life as a first-grader was a disaster. Almost every day, he would come home from school wet and smelly, and Grandpa in despair and disgust would whip him with his leather razor strop, while Grandma would sob helplessly, “Oh John, oh John.”
Finally the terrified little boy who became my father told his parents why he wet himself at school: The older boys made fun of him when he went to the toilet, so he was too shy and ashamed to go there anymore.
As a nine-year-old, he liked to search out nests of hairless baby mice and squeeze them until the feces dropped out. Since the name of the game was to get rid of mice, not much notice was taken of this exercise in sadism.
By the time he was ten, he had learned that China was on the opposite side of the earth, and he thought it would be fast and easy to dig a hole right straight through to China. He and his little sister, Eileen, began to dig and had gotten six inches deep into their shortcut to the Orient when Eileen, who was barely six and new to the hoe, cut her foot, and the two kids tore across the pasture field to the house for first aid. Both were shrieking – she because it hurt, he because he always cried at the sight of blood.
Considering his blood terror, it was amazing that, upon his parents’ prompting, he chose to become a veterinarian.
The two kids never did get to China, no doubt because it proved foolhardy to give Eileen a hoe.
There was a time when my father was in the eighth grade that the family lived in Columbus, Ohio, for a year. He had to wash the dishes each night and would carefully pull the blinds shut so his friends couldn’t see him doing that sissy job.
Even when he went to high school, my father was bashful and withdrawn. Instead of going out into the school yard on his lunch break, he would stay in study hall reading the Congressional Record. His grades were excellent. His social graces didn’t include talking very much, and he didn’t seem interested in girls. He had the reputation of being an exceptionally well-behaved teenaged boy.
He was very much interested in sex, however. After I grew up, I found out that my Aunt Eileen had to battle her brother, my father, when she was about fourteen. They had gone on some mission on horseback in the woods and for some reason, had to get off the horses. First he tried to push her down, pointing to his bulging pants, and saying, “We could have a lot of fun.” When that didn’t work, he tried force. Fortunately she was a farm girl well muscled from heavy field work and serious basketball practice, and she fought him off. She made sure she was never alone with him again.
Then she learned from her little
ten-year-old sister that their big brother was grabbing and prodding her in forbidden places, so she told their father what her brother had done. What I’ve heard is that Grandpa John explained to him, and emphasized with a bit of fisticuffs, that he would kill him if he didn’t leave those girls alone, so he left those girls alone.
My father never had a public girlfriend until he became a veterinarian. He went with a librarian for a while, and then he met my mother.
I feel that I knew my mother best. I think she was beautiful. She had a flawless complexion. People on the street would stop her and compliment her. She had dark eyes and hair, a wonderful laugh, and a lovely speaking voice.
Delivering a baby every year or two caused her circumference to fluctuate wildly. When her weight was down, she had a great figure and was well endowed, but most of my memories are of an overweight woman who had just given birth or was about to give birth. I was the oldest. Her sixth baby was just eleven years younger than I. There were also the two miscarriages to sap her energies. Yet she always had time for us.
Sally talked a lot and loudly. Maybe that was so she could be heard over the hubbub of her children. She embroidered beautifully and was an excellent seamstress. I can’t attest to the earlier years, but as I got older, I noted that none of her projects ever got completed.
For instance, two days before the annual veterinarians’ picnic, mama decided to make matching dresses for her four little girls. I still remember how cute the dresses were and how people fussed over us. What no one knew was that there were no buttons or buttonholes and there never would be.
Mama would work like a mad fool to meet a deadline, and then she’d lose interest. Even as a child, I found this irritating.
The first home that I have any memory of was a place with stairs. I remember parading around in my Aunt Mary Louise’s high heels. It was an apartment that my mama lived in, mostly alone, while my father fought in World War II.
Girl Called Karen Page 2