I drove home in tears, forced to face a bleak truth I’d tried to deny: It was not within my power to transform my mother, and it never would be.
THE VERY NEXT morning, when I pulled the car to the curb outside my school, my phone began to vibrate with an unidentified call. I never answered such calls. I don’t know why I took that one.
“Hello?”
“Is this Stephanie?” It was a man’s voice, low and unfamiliar. I could not imagine who it might be.
“Yes, this is Stephanie,” I said. “Whom am I speaking with, please?”
“Stephanie, this is your Uncle Allan,” he said. “Has my sister died?”
I sat in the car and spoke to him for almost an hour. I was making myself late for work, but I was afraid to let him go even for a brief time. What if he never called back? It was too soon to ask him to trust me with his number.
“I was so happy to get your message,” he said. “As Tom told you, I like to be off the grid, so I didn’t get his email until this morning. I’m sorry your mom is so sick. I haven’t talked to her in a real long time.”
“She’ll be glad to know we connected,” I said, though I had no idea if this was true.
“I love my sister,” he told me, “but we have nothing in common. She was always heavy into smoking and drugs. I’m a dedicated runner and I’ve always lived clean and healthy. She married a good man and then cheated on him with every deadbeat and loser who crossed her path. She left him for that scum, Rick.” He spat my former stepfather’s name as if it were a rotten chunk of apple.
“It killed him,” he recalled. “She killed him. She might as well have shot him through the heart. I love my sister, but there’s a demon inside her. She burned our mother’s house down, did you know that?”
“What?” I said, shocked. “No. No, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, she did.”
“When was this?”
“It was after she got out of that convent home she was in,” he told me. “She was living with our mother, but she didn’t like it there. She was used to a fancy house and fancy food and her own servants. Our place wasn’t good enough for her. It was small and poor and shabby compared to what she was used to. The food our mother cooked wasn’t to her liking. She was a serious swimmer—she’d been on the swim team at her prep school, Bryn Mawr—and we didn’t belong to any country clubs.”
“Why did she live with the Thorntons, while you stayed with your mother?” I asked.
“Because they only wanted her,” Allan said. “They didn’t want me.”
“I don’t know why they wouldn’t,” I said, feeling a pang for the child rejected by his own grandparents. “I’m sure you were an adorable little boy.”
“I looked like him,” Allan told me. “Like my father. Gilman. They hated him because he was just a regular guy.”
He sounded bitter, and I didn’t blame him.
“They never forgave my mother for marrying him, and she never forgave them either,” he added. “Did you know she got rid of all their possessions in a yard sale?”
“A yard sale?”
“They disowned her, but when they were gone, there were no other heirs. She was their only child, so their entire estate went to her after my grandmother died. Their art collection was worth millions. Your mother’s doll collection alone was probably worth a million. They had an original piece of art by Botticelli.”
“No!” I said, shocked again.
“Yes, ma’am, as God is my witness. And priceless antiques from all over the world.”
“And it all went to her?”
“Every last piece. Now, I can understand her loyalty to my father’s memory. But why not use the money in ways that would have pleased him? He loved nature and animals and favored conservation. She could have endowed all kinds of outdoors or wildlife organizations in his name. But no. She dragged that fancy European furniture and their art collection and their family heirlooms out onto the front lawn and sold it all for next to nothing. Just about gave it away to anyone who came along.”
“I can’t believe that,” I murmured, aghast and more than a little heartbroken at the idea of such flagrant waste. I myself would have paid good money for just one remnant of anything they’d owned.
“My sister had so many kids,” my uncle said then. “Which one are you? Are you one of Louie’s?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “She told me Louie wasn’t my father. I don’t know who my father is.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” he replied matter-of-factly. “She probably doesn’t know either. That’s how she was. Pardon me for saying.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I know how she was.”
How can I describe how it felt to find him? It had taken months to uncover and corroborate my mother’s story, and even now, it still felt so far-fetched, so unreal. But here was someone who knew it all, someone who shared my family history and my blood. Someone who understood where I’d come from.
I talked with him until the battery of my phone flat-lined. Just before I was forced to hang up, he asked for my mailing address, and I gave it to him. Then I sat for several dazed minutes behind the wheel, staring at the rain on the windshield and smiling.
My uncle had called. My uncle had called! It was the kind of thing other people said all the time, but that simple pleasure had never before been mine.
* * *
“MOM, YOU’LL NEVER guess who phoned me today,” I said that evening as soon as I arrived at her place.
The last few weeks of hospice had been good to her. When she left St. Vincent’s, she’d weighed eighty-seven pounds, and now the scale hovered around one hundred and two. Her pain was under control, and she was even able to spend time outside.
She looked up at me from the couch as I dropped into the nearest chair. “Who?”
“Your long-lost brother Allan.”
A smile lit her face. For a moment, she didn’t look ravaged or old or sick.
“You found Allan? Where is he?”
“He went to Mexico, just like your mother. I spoke to him on the phone this morning for almost an hour,” I said. “Mom, he told me you burned your own mother’s house down. Is that true?”
“Yes, it is,” she said without hesitation. There wasn’t a hint of apology in her tone.
I hadn’t really doubted it, and yet I felt myself stiffen with renewed shock.
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to be there anymore! I never wanted to live with her in the first place. I loved my grandparents’ home. I was miserable at my mother’s.”
“So your solution was to burn down the house?” I asked. “How did you do it?”
WHEN THE TRIALS were over—after none of the defendants received more than two months in prison for the prolonged abduction and gang-rape of two children—my mother was not sent back to her grandparents’ stately home in Baltimore but to her own mother’s home in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her grandfather had died during her time in the Good Shepherd Home for Wayward Girls. The judge ruled Baltimore unsafe for my mother. My grandmother blamed her parents for her daughter’s ordeal. She believed my mother never would have been abducted if they’d been more watchful and aware.
For years, the price my grandmother had paid to give my mother a better life was estrangement from her. Now, her daughter was back in her house, but by then my grandmother was in a bad state. By all accounts, she never really recovered from her husband’s death. She moved through her days in a kind of malaise, spending a lot of time in bed or staring out the window. She passed most of her evenings in a local bar, where she’d pick fights with other patrons and come home bloodied.
Some of the details my mother revealed about her mother’s life were of poverty and depression: Her house was dark and dreary, dirty and unkempt. Others revealed sheer eccentricity: She enrolled in the local black college, for instance, and the family received death threats in response. She had, according to my mother, at least twenty dogs.
&nbs
p; “Mom,” I said. “Come on. Twenty dogs?”
She swore it was true.
In any event, the rage inside my mother grew to be like a wild, clawing thing. So much had been taken from her. She’d been stripped of her girlhood, her innocence, her grandparents and home and future—all in the course of a single, unimaginable year. She felt trapped in this dreadful house, this dreadful new life, unable to abide it.
So one afternoon, after my grandmother had gone elsewhere, my mother let all the animals out of the house. She walked through each of the rooms, pouring kerosene. Then she stepped onto the porch, knelt on the threshold of the front door, and lit a match.
There was a popular lake within walking distance of their home, with an area marked off as a local beach. My mother spent the day at the swimming hole, as she called it, while my grandmother’s house burned to the ground.
* * *
TWO WEEKS AFTER my phone call from Allan, I came home to find a flat parcel on our porch, leaning against the front door. It was wrapped in heavy brown paper and festooned with purple Mexican stamps.
Dear Steph, began the letter I found inside, a letter written on wide-ruled paper in the shaky hand of a seventy-one-year-old man, I would much like to be your friend/uncle—I have few friends and no relatives I am in touch with.
The next few lines provide his contact information, including two email accounts and a mailing address.
I really liked the man who was not your father—when I was seventeen, I spent my summer in the Bronx with your mother and Louie. I worked in his restaurant. He was very good at what he did. He was a great cook and people liked him. Beth and I spent our honeymoon in San Francisco with your mother and Louie. It was 1968—were you alive then? I didn’t pay much attention to you kids.
Louie had another very successful morning and lunch diner for working men. I don’t think Louie was crazy—he had a beautiful young wife whom he loved very much but she kept having children who were not his. It is hard to imagine how much that must have hurt him. Beth had an affair and it almost broke my heart and she didn’t have another man’s child. Suicide seems a natural reaction to that kind of pain—a man doesn’t have to keep taking the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I thought he was a good man. Please don’t judge him too harshly.
He’d enclosed a photograph of Louie at work, possibly on a break, wearing his tall chef’s hat. The date printed into the frame was July 1967. He was seated with one arm slung casually over a chair in the foreground of the picture. Beside him on a nearby table is a cup of coffee.
I stared at this photo of Louie for a long time. The man staring back at me looked tough, burly, and resolute. He had a certain authority, even a certain majesty beneath that puffed white hat. Both the letter and this picture conjured a very different image of Louie than the one I’d harbored all my life. The tragic figure in my mother’s story had been a kind of hapless cartoon character, in thrall to a reckless beauty, easily manipulated, drinking himself to death in a roadside motel.
Here in the letter and the photo, though, was an upright man, steadfast and hardworking, honest and competent. A man who’d bought me a dress just before dying. I felt awash in sorrow suddenly, for him and for myself. He was right there, ready and willing to be my father. I could have grown up with a man who loved me.
My relationship with your mother is strange. As I told you on the phone, fate led to your mother going to live with my grandmother in Baltimore. We never got together until my father died in 1952. After that, my mother and I took the Greyhound bus to Baltimore for two weeks at Christmas and a month in the summer at Bar Harbor, Maine or Watch Hill, RI. After your mother was raped, she came to live with us in St. Petersburg, FL—this was 1953 or 1954. This picture is how I best remember your mother.
Here I felt jarred by his words. After your mother was raped. Such a casual corroboration of the story she’d told me. I never doubted my mother was one of the unnamed girls in the newspaper stories, but it still felt momentous to have confirmation from a family member.
The photo he enclosed of my mother was breathtaking, the most beautiful one I’d ever seen. She was in a blouse and skirt, leaning against a tree. She looked prim and girlish with a slight smile, downcast eyes and soft brown curls. Her face was angelic. It was an alternate vision of her: fresh-faced and wholesome, serene and sane.
I want to tell you so much but just now I have to run. I will continue in my next letter—I promise.
Love ya,
Uncle Al
Chapter 23
THE PACKAGE ON the porch held one additional item, one that would send me down yet another rabbit hole, yield several more nearly sleepless nights. It was a brief and wildly entertaining account that seemed to have issued from an old-school typewriter. It was the story of yet another formidable branch of my family tree, one I’d heard of in passing but never dreamed had any connection to me. A story with the intriguing title of “One and a Half Elephants.”
ONE AND A HALF ELEPHANTS
In the decade before the American Revolution, a man named Peter Grubb Jr. was making a good living from an iron mine and foundry in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t until the war came that he learned how to really make money. He went into munitions. He patriotically sold cannon and shot to Washington’s impoverished Continental Army on credit. The name Grubb might well have been on the honor roll of American Revolutionary heroes along with Lafayette, Paine, and Franklin, had he not also sold cannon and shot to the British through Tory sympathizers in Broome County, New York.
I put my uncle’s pages down to do an internet search of Peter Grubb Jr. He has his own Wikipedia entry that identifies his occupation as ironmaster. He and his older brother Curtis were the proprietors of Cornwall Ironworks, after which the town—initially part of Lancaster County—was eventually named. Its mine was, at one point, the largest one of its kind in the world, and it would produce continuously for 236 years.
His father, the senior Peter, was the one who discovered the vast deposits of exceptionally pure magnetite ore in that region. At the time he had been a stonemason in search of quarrying stone. Once he had acquired the ore-laden land and assembled the necessary components to harvest it, he built the Cornwall Iron Furnace and the nearby Hopewell Forges, which were eventually taken over by his sons.
Their contributions to the Colonial forces during the American Revolution are indeed considered significant. George Washington paid a personal visit to Cornwall to inspect their operations. Both Peter Jr. and Curtis Grubb also served as Union militia colonels.
Eventually a rift between the brothers drove them into competition with each other. Peter Jr. purchased an additional tract of land that he named Mount Hope, where he built his own charcoal furnace. Today the Mount Hope Estate is a national landmark in Lancaster County.
This is the story of how I happen to be living off Grubb’s money today. It was told to me by my mother as it was told to her by my great aunt, Carter Thornton. My mother assured me that this story is mostly true. Jesus, I’m proud to be descended from a man like Peter Grubb! Can you imagine a man having the foresight and business acumen to sell cannon to the winners on credit and collect gold on delivery from the losers?
His grandson Clement Grubb didn’t seem to have inherited any genius for making money. During the first thirty years of his stewardship of the family fortune, he was no more than an uninspired caretaker. There was only slow, conservative growth—nothing to parallel the spectacular coups of his grandfather. But the acorn doesn’t fall far from the family tree. Clement simply hadn’t found his war yet.
Providentially, American history provided him with a financial wet dream. The Civil War was such a spectacular slaughter that the Grubb Ironworks had all they could handle just catering cannon for the North. Of course, he would have preferred to play both sides. He was as admirably even-handed as his grandfather. By the end of the war, he was one of America’s first multi-millionaires.
A separate search f
or Clement Grubb revealed that he was indeed the grandson of Peter Jr., entering the family business at the age of seventeen and becoming the manager of Mount Hope Estate the following year. When he died, Clement was reportedly the richest individual in Lancaster County.
But Clement wasn’t the yikes his father had been. He realized that money was no longer enough—he had to have class. So he sent his daughter to Europe to buy him some.
In the second half of the 19th century, a symbiotic relationship developed between the great families of Europe and America. Europe, fighting a lost cause against creeping democracy, was a great refugee camp of bankrupt nobility while America was teeming with bumpkin nouveau riche. Great alliances were forged based on fair value trade—cash for respectability. Mary Grubb was as devoted to her father as she was beautiful. Within three months of her introduction to European society, she was engaged to a French count.
But I am not descended from a French count. To tie my genetic thread to the Grubb blood money, we have to backtrack a little. When the Civil War broke out, a wealthy cotton farmer named Jeremiah Beall sent his three sons off to fight with the First Georgia Volunteers. The oldest son, Jesse Beall, was vaporized by a grapeshot cannonball in the Battle of Knoxville. Do you suppose the shrapnel was manufactured by Peter Grubb? There are wheels within wheels in the Great Mandala. The youngest son, James Beall, had his right leg shattered by a runaway caisson less than a week before the end of the war. The third son, Joseph Bond Beall, fought in nearly every major campaign of the war and never even caught cold—much less any stray Grubb ordnance.
After Appomattox, James and Joseph were reunited at their father’s plantation in Pembroke, Georgia. James Beall’s leg was such a mess that the local doctors said it would have to come off. Despite the honor attendant to losing a leg for the South and the assurance of his brother that amputees were getting so much pussy in Savannah that he was considering having a limb of his own amputated, James was adamant that he was going to keep both legs or he’d just as soon give up the whole package.
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