American Daughter

by Stephanie Thornton Plymale

  “She was from such a prominent, elegant family, and he drove a taxi,” my mother went on. “And he was old enough to be her father. Think of the humiliation. They were positively scandalized.”

  “Mom,” I said. “This sounds like an episode of Downton Abbey.”

  “You see, this is what you do,” she said. “You beg me to tell you things, and then you don’t believe me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I mean, that very thing just happened on a hugely popular TV series. Are you sure you didn’t see that show and get confused?”

  She glared at me. “I’m tired,” she told me. “I think you should go now.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I will look these people up. And if any of this is true, no one will be more excited than me.”

  She didn’t answer. She wouldn’t even look at me.

  I rose to give her an awkward hug, which she endured but did not return.

  “Get some rest, Mom,” I said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  When she still didn’t respond, I saw myself out.

  IN THE PARKING lot of St. Vincent’s, I texted Jim.

  Mom gave me two names. Dr. William Mynn Thornton Jr. and Florence Beall. Her grandparents?

  The truth was that, beneath my skepticism, I was still embarrassed by my own hope. All my life I’d heard people refer to my family as the dregs of society. Was it possible that these prominent, pedigreed people could actually be my kin?

  I’d always felt that Jim’s family was superior to mine. I’d apologized to him for that so many times, though he had no need of such apologies and winced whenever I voiced them.

  I come from nothing and no one, I’d say.

  It doesn’t matter, he always told me. I hate when you say that. You’re everything to me.

  And I knew he meant it. If Jim’s family had any notions of his marrying up, I couldn’t have been further from their hopes. This bride’s family would not—as tradition would have it—be assuming the cost of our wedding. This bride’s father would not be offering the promising young man a place in the family business. I was not an uptown girl.

  JIM AND I had saved one thousand dollars between us for our own wedding. He was working for UPS, and I was waiting tables at Elmer’s, a local diner. We were renting our own apartment and paying all our own bills with his paychecks and my tips. Every spare cent went into the wedding fund.

  I lucked into what I thought at the time was an elegant dream of a wedding dress, and the memory of the afternoon this miracle unfolded will always be with me.

  I’d just arrived at Elmer’s for work when I saw Connie pull in across the lot. Connie was another waitress who’d gotten engaged a few months ago. We would be working the dinner shift together. She was a pixie-faced blue-eyed blonde who had always been kind to me.

  I waved to her now, and she waved back. Then she took what looked like a wedding dress from where it hung beside the shotgun seat. It was still sheathed in plastic.

  “Connie!” I said, going over. “Did you just pick up your dress? Oh, it’s beautiful!” Only then did I notice that her face was splotchy, as if she’d been crying. “Connie, what’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she sniffled.

  “About what?”

  “Last Friday I found out I’m pregnant,” she said. “Not only that, but I’m already three months along! I don’t know how it happened. I thought I was being so careful, making him pull out every time.”

  “Oh, Connie!” I hugged her, not sure what to say. “Are you at least a little bit happy, though? I know you and Don want a big family.”

  “We do, but I wanted the wedding to come first. And it will, I guess. But I’ll be just about ready to pop by then.”

  “Can’t they alter the dress?”

  “I asked about that. They said it doesn’t have enough seam allowance to let it out much. It’s one thing to take a dress in. But you can’t really make it much bigger.

  “My mother paid five hundred dollars for this one,” she said. “I was so happy about this dress. I mean, look at it—isn’t it pretty?”

  This was the era of Princess Diana’s wedding, and minimalism was not in. This dress was in keeping with the decade: It was made of white satin and dripping with lace. It had a lace-edged sweetheart neckline, puffed lacy bell sleeves, and a long lacy train.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said truthfully. “It’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen. I’m getting married too, and I would give anything for a dress like this.”

  “Well,” she said. “You can have it, I guess.”

  I stood very still.

  “What?” I finally said. “No!”

  “Why not?”

  I felt my face heat up. The possibility of Connie giving me her wedding dress had honestly never occurred to me. Did she think I’d been fishing for it?

  “Connie, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, I know you didn’t. But why not? I can’t wear it.”

  “But can’t you return it?”

  “No, I can’t. I already had it altered. Before I found out about the baby.”

  “I’ll give you all I can for it,” I said. “My budget for a wedding dress is one hundred dollars. I wish I could give you five hundred dollars but I just can’t.”

  “I’m glad you’ll get to wear it,” she said. “At least it’s going to someone I like.”

  Just like that, by sheer chance and Connie’s grace, I had the dress of my dreams. That’s where the fairy tale ended.

  Jim and I had no idea where to get married. We opened the Yellow Pages, and the only place within our budget was a tiny wedding chapel in Aloha, Oregon. It was on the main highway and shared space with a bridal shop. The storefront faced the road, and the chapel was in the back. The venue offered a choice of clergy who could essentially be rented by the hour, and we chose a nice minister whose name I no longer recall. Jim rented a gray tuxedo with tails.

  We had given no thought to wedding music. The minister suggested Eddie Rabbitt. Jim and I lit our unity candles to the recorded strains of his “You and I” on the chapel boom box. Our guests showered us and our car in white rice as we descended the chapel steps.

  Our reception was a potluck at a friend’s country club. To our peers, we were a curiosity. None of them were close to getting married and wouldn’t be for a long time. Jim and I weren’t old enough to drink yet, so we served soda. Toward the end of the party, his high school buddies threw him in the pool in his rented tux.

  These same buddies had also decorated our car. They’d written “Just Married” in shaving cream on the rear windshield and tied tin cans to the back fender. By the end of that hot June afternoon, the shaving cream and rice had been baked into the car. In his sodden rental tux, Jim drove it to a car wash and the car got stuck on the tracks in the middle of the wash. He was drenched all over again while trying to get out.

  I cringe now when I look at our photos from that day. The dripping gown, that hot eighties mess of satin and lace. My big hair and blue eyeshadow, the plastic flowers in the chapel. The high school classmates who didn’t remain in our lives.

  Yet when I recall that day, I also think of the Eddie Rabbitt song that played as we lit our candles. Just you and I / Sharing our love together / And I know in time / We’ll build the dreams we treasure / And we’ll be alright / Just you and I . . .

  There was a certain prescience in that default wedding song of ours. All Jim and I had then was our love for each other. In time, as the song went, we would build the dreams we treasured.

  We’d be all right, just he and I.

  WHEN I REACHED our house, Jim was standing on the front porch. His face was ashen, and I couldn’t read his expression, but I understood something momentous had happened.

  “Jim!” I said. “What is it?”

  “The names you gave me,” he said. “Stephanie, it’s true. They’re real people. They’re your grandparents.”

  He was holding t
wo sheets of printer paper. On each one were a series of what looked like endnotes. And on each, Jim had highlighted a section of them in yellow.

  The first read:

  William Mynn Thornton, Jr. graduated from Hampden-Sydney College [B.A., 1904], the U. of Va [M.A., 1907] and Yale [M.A., 1912; Ph.D, 1914]. A Robinson fellow at Yale, he taught chemistry at City College of NY and he was chemist for Du Pont & Company. During WWI, he worked on gas-mask absorbents and related research in the laboratory at Johns Hopkins. He was later an associate in chemistry at Johns Hopkins and then research fellow at Loyola College. During the WWII era, he was a chemist at the Explosives Division of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. After the war, he was a research associate in the Department of Pharmacology at the U of Maryland until his death. He married in New York, NY [Feb. 5, 1916] Florence Beall [born in NY, ca 1884, died 1959]. He died in Baltimore, MD, Sept. 22, 1953. Child: Florence Beall Thornton.

  The second read:

  Florence Beall Thornton (born in Dela, Dec. 9, 1916) and she resided at one time in NY. She last resided at the U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico, and she died Aug. 14, 1985. Children:

  Florence Agnes

  Allan Winfield

  My mother and my Uncle Allan.

  “Jim,” I said, shivering in disbelief. “Where did these come from?”

  “From a series of books called The Washingtons: A Family History,” he told me. “Volumes 5 and 6. Which cover, respectively, generations nine and ten of the presidential branch.”

  We stood staring at each other. My husband looked as dazed as I felt.

  “Stephanie,” he said. “You’re a direct descendant of the Washingtons.”

  Chapter 20

  IN OUR KITCHEN a few moments later, with these two pages in front of me on the table, I felt my eyes fill with tears. Yale. Johns Hopkins. Such prestigious universities. All those degrees! A bachelor’s, two masters’, and a doctorate. I had always been so intimidated by people who’d attended prestigious schools, convinced of some innate difference between them and me.

  But this was my own great-grandfather. My blood. A man of industry, intellect and science. It felt like Christmas, the kind of Christmas I dreamed of as a child. A gift so precious I hardly knew how to hold it.

  I DON’T THINK I slept that night. I sat in Jim’s study in a fever of research. I bought memberships to heritage and ancestry websites. I subscribed to newspaper archives and spent the darkest hours of the morning poring over the stories, clipping the articles. I scanned the fine print of society pages for the precious names of my kin. For many hours Jim sat across from me with his laptop, conducting his own search, joining other sites, trading content with me.

  The most comprehensive account I could find of my great-grandfather’s life was his obituary in the Baltimore Sun. The year was 1953. The year of my mother’s rape. “Dr. Thornton Is Dead at 69,” the headline read. As if he were so well known in the region as to not need identification by first name. What followed was an account of his extraordinary life. My great-grandfather was a polymath by anyone’s estimation, with a long career in chemistry, minerology, geology, pharmacology, physics and other sciences. He was widely published, widely honored, tapped by entities as diverse as the government and the American Chemistry Society to produce research on various topics. He produced all this without ever stinting on his heavy workload at Loyola. The best and brightest students vied for a spot in his classroom.

  The obituary ended with: “Funeral arrangements have not been completed. He is survived by his wife, a daughter and a grandchild.”

  And a great-grandchild who would have given anything to know him.

  Next I went looking for my grandmother. The wayward daughter. The link between my mother and these men. The heroine of the TV-caliber melodrama. I found far less content about her, just a few scant clippings about her startling marriage. Here again, my mother’s account was verified. My grandmother had indeed eloped with her chauffeur.

  “Nature-Loving Cabby, Socialite Married” read the headline of an item in the Courier-News of Bridgewater, New Jersey.

  BAR HARBOR, ME—(AP)—“A mutual interest in the great out-of-doors” set in motion a romance that resulted in the marriage of the socially prominent daughter of a Loyola, Baltimore college professor and a Bar Harbor taxi driver, the couple disclosed today.

  Florence Beall, 24, daughter of Professor W.M. Thornton, Jr., and Gilman W., 44, were married by a town clerk last Thursday.

  The bride spent the past few summers in this fashionable resort painting nature scenes. Gilman, former assistant superintendent of a Boston construction firm, became acquainted with the young artist while operating a taxicab for a local garageman and serving as her chauffeur.

  No wedding, just a visit to the town clerk.

  There was no photo or likeness of her in connection with her marriage, as there had been for her mother before her.

  No appearances in the society pages. No mention in the weddings of relatives. It seemed she had been cut off from her family completely, just as my mother had said. And not just cut off financially, but gone from the picture altogether. Cast away, exiled. Erased.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER I was back at St. Vincent’s, submitting to the drill I was so used to by now, turning over my coat and purse and cell phone. My mother and I sat once again in the dayroom. I took one look at her face and could see that she’d turned a corner. The crazy had receded. Her eyes were clear and calm.

  “Mom, I’ve been in shock,” I told her. “Every single thing you told me checked out. And I can’t comprehend that this has all been a huge secret from me for almost fifty years. That in all these decades, you never said a word.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “I told you I descended from kings and queens and royalty. You just wouldn’t listen.”

  I exhaled sharply. “Well, okay, yes,” I conceded. “Yes, whenever you were getting arrested, or committed, you’d yell these things. Yes, it did just seem crazy in that context. But I mean, you never really told me where and who we came from.”

  “Of course I did. But there’s no point in arguing,” my mother said. “It’s not my fault that you paid it no mind.”

  “I’m paying attention now. Tell me, Mom,” I begged.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything you can remember.”

  “Well,” she said. She drew herself up on the dayroom sofa. I could see it pleased her to be the keeper of these details. “Let’s see. My grandfather was tall—six-foot-one, I believe—and handsome, with dark brown hair and hazel eyes. He was a very reserved person, although he liked to talk at the dinner table. He let me hang around in his study whenever I wanted. I would play with his weights and measures while he worked at his desk.”

  “Was he nice to you?”

  “Oh yes. He loved me so much,” my mother said. “He would give me a piggyback ride up to bed every evening and listen to my prayers and kiss me good night.”

  I closed my eyes against the wave of longing that broke over me.

  “Wait,” I said after a moment. “Every evening? You didn’t live with him, did you?”

  “Oh, yes. Until I was sent away. After—well, you know.”

  “So there were three generations in one house?”

  “No, no. My mother didn’t live there,” she said. “Just me. My mother lived with her husband and, as I said, she was cut off from the family fortune. She and my father were terribly poor, and they agreed to let my grandparents raise me so I would have all the finer things in life—all the opportunities that came with their money and their place in society.”

  As smitten with my great-grandfather as I was, it was hard to hear that he’d turned his back on his own child. I wasn’t ready to face that, not yet. I pushed it aside and pressed on.

  “What was their house like?”

  “It was lovely,” she said. “It had three floors, and the top level was his domain. Grandma and I shared the second floor
. She almost died in childbirth with my mother, and her doctor forbade her to get pregnant again. So after that, she and my grandfather slept in separate rooms. The servants lived on the second floor too.”

  “Servants?”

  “I had my own maid,” my mother said. Her face took on a dreamy expression, recalling this. “Her name was Mary. I had a little silver dinner bell, and anytime I wanted something, I just rang that bell and she would bring it to me.”

  I winced inwardly at her pride and entitlement and a sudden memory came to mind. My mother had a bell in adulthood as well. It had been part of her Buddhist shrine. She rang it at the start of her prayers. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but she’d gone through a phase of ringing that bell whenever she wanted something. She rang it when she wanted coffee or tea or her herbs, or anything at all. I would fetch it like a dog every time. I hated the sound of that bell.

  “I loved living with my grandparents. They treated me like a princess,” my mother went on, pulling me away from my memories and back into hers. “Every Christmas they put up a magnificent tree. Each year it was decorated so beautifully, and under it were so many presents, you wouldn’t believe.”

  Here again, for just a moment, I let myself flash back to all the Christmas holidays in my own childhood home, with no tree, no decorations, no family dinner, and not a single gift for anyone. No food in the cupboards as often as not, and sometimes no electricity and no heat.

  Then just as quickly, I let it go. My mother had endured the unthinkable. It had broken her in ways I would never be able to fully quantify. As angry as I might still become with her, I could no longer condemn her, and I could never judge her again.

  WHEN I CAME home after our visit at St. Vincent’s, I turned my attention to the senior Thornton mentioned toward the end of my great-grandfather’s obituary. The most extensive account of his life I could find came from the University of Virginia Library Online. He too was among the most academically versatile professors at his own University of Virginia, where he was appointed the first dean of engineering.