American Daughter

by Stephanie Thornton Plymale

  Here I laughed out loud, even as I felt a deep pang over the sly, brash, irreverent uncle I’d never known and might never know. I wished he were telling me about our family at my dining room table, or on my patio over a bottle of wine.

  Old Jeremiah Beall had so much cotton money that even the financial drain of losing an essentially privately funded war had not seriously depleted his fortune. So in desperation, the brothers took passage for Europe to find a doctor who could mend the leg. Joseph was trucking James from specialist to specialist all over Europe the same spring that Mary Grubb was shopping for a title to give respectability to her father’s wealth.

  All of the doctors agreed that the leg was finished and would have to go—all, that is, except one. A London orthopedist told the brothers there was a doctor in New York who was mending shattered bones with metal pins if James would allow himself to be operated on by a Yankee. James surprised the doctor and his brother when he declared that he harbored no ill feeling for the Yankees since they had merely defended themselves when he had tried to kill them.

  The brothers booked passage on the next ship for New York. The morning that the ship was to leave London, Mary Grubb was on the promenade deck when Joseph, dressed in his Confederate captain’s uniform, carried his crippled brother up the gangplank. Mary told her aunt, who was her chaperone on this European tour: “I love my father more than Cordelia loved Lear and my only purpose in life is to bring him honor, but if I can’t have that handsome rebel, I know that I will die.” Three days out of London harbor, they were married by the ship’s captain. One of their daughters was Florence Beall, who was my grandmother.

  But that’s hardly enough, is it? You want to know how James Beall’s leg turned out. And you’re starting to doubt the veracity of the Beall fortune. If the Bealls had so much money, why is the Grubb money so important to me today? The doctor in New York repaired James’ leg with a series of silver pins and he made a miraculous recovery. He never again ran the high hurdles but he was left with only a slight limp, for which he acquired an ivory-inlaid ebony walking cane, just for the style of it.

  The Beall brothers were such a success in New York society that they stayed on and founded the New York Cotton Exchange. They were so successful as cotton brokers that by the turn of the century, they were each just as rich as their father, Jeremiah Beall, or old Peter Grubb.

  I can find far less on the Bealls than I can on the Grubbs. In the Biographical Annals of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Joseph Bond Beall is cited as the owner of several cotton plantations in the south. He was indeed the father of my great-grandmother Florence Beall, who married William Mynn Thornton. The couple surfaces in several of the society pages of the day. And in their wedding announcement in the Washington Post in 1915, it’s noted that “Miss Beall’s father, the late Joseph Bond Beall and her grandfather, the late Jeremiah Beall, were among the organizers and charter members of the New York Cotton Exchange.”

  Joseph and Mary Beall lived quite well, but within their millionaire means. Unfortunately, James tried to make the name Beall synonymous with ragtime opulence on a scale with Carnegie or Brady. He acquired the largest private zoo in America—over one hundred and fifty species, including three elephants. He married a cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt (as did Eleanor, whose rapacious spending was only exceeded by that of her husband’s mistress, a hoochie-cooch dancer he met at the World’s Fair).

  The financial pressure of such a lifestyle was more than even a multi-millionaire could bear and in desperation, James began raiding the portfolios of investors in the Beall Brothers Commodity Brokerage. Eventually his perfidy came to light and the ensuing scandal bankrupted both brothers. Unable to live without money, James hanged himself in the Park Boulevard apartment of his mistress in Atlantic City. Joseph and Mary Beall retired from New York society to live the rest of their days happily and uneventfully in Sullivan County, Pennsylvania.

  When my mother turned twenty-one, she and her cousin, Tucker Smith, inherited the proceeds from the estate auction of James Beall. After the descent of a locust swarm of ancient creditors, all that was left free of liens and encumbrances were the three elephants from James Beall’s private zoo. My mother and Tucker Smith sold the elephants to Frank Buck, who put them in his Bring Them Back Alive Wild Animal Show. My mother used the proceeds of the sale of her one and a half elephants to finance two years’ study at the Art Students’ League in New York City.

  Frank Buck is real enough and his menagerie of wild animals is well documented. I don’t know whether the sale of elephants funded my grandmother’s art studies, but I love the idea of it.

  I also don’t know how many hours I spent on ancestry and genealogy sites after reading my uncle’s account. Enough to trace the Grubb lineage all the way back to Sir Henry Vane Jr., my eighth great-grandfather, who served as the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and supported the creation of Harvard College.

  While reading about Sir Henry, I thought about how Harvard had always been a source of fascination and longing for me. To my mind, it represented the pinnacle of intellectual excellence. I studied their branding and logo when I took over the leadership of my own school, and when I created my own branding, I modeled the “H” in Heritage on the “H” in Harvard.

  I don’t know how to describe the way my uncle’s story opened yet another treasure trove of ancestors for me. I don’t know if I’ll ever meet another person who can relate to the surreal feeling of uncovering such an illustrious family history after so many formative years of internalizing the labels that others had always applied to my family: indigent, low-life, white trash.

  The only place I’ve found a narrative similar to mine has been in the fairy tales I read to my children when they were little. In those stories, this kind of reversal is a recurrent motif. Some child of fortune is cursed, or under an enchantment, or whisked away at birth for protection, and lives as a commoner among the poor until the spell is broken and the truth is revealed. Then the beast turns back into a prince, or the royal girl is restored to the highborn place she was torn from.

  There’s always a pretense within the fairy tale that such a girl can go back, return to her place of origin, and be seamlessly reinstated in her rightful life.

  My ancestors as far back as I can trace seem to have cherished the very same values I’ve revered all my life: industry, innovation, education, and art. Like a homing pigeon, like an animal who instinctively crosses forests and streams and highways to return to its home, I have found my way back to where my phantom counterpart might have been if no child had ever been gang-raped, if all had not gone terribly wrong.

  However, nothing is as simple as a fairy tale. While I cherish my newly discovered family roots, if only for the fact of finally having a lineage, I recognize that this knowing comes with a price. My connection to one of the founding families of our nation elicits both pride and disgust. The expansion of the American empire and that of my ancestors was built on the backs of the enslaved and the land of the dispossessed. Many of my ancestors profited enormously off of the struggle of others in order to guarantee their constant place in society.

  If it’s true that this iron dynasty is in my blood, then it’s also true that like the iron itself, I was indelibly forged in the furnace of my childhood. I will always be a kid who was born out of wedlock, a foster girl, dirty and illiterate. I will always be the daughter of a woman the world considered a whore. And in some deep and secret way that no one who knows me would ever guess, I will always be cold, I will always be hungry, lost and silenced in a classroom, and half-blind from neglect. I will always be homeless, watching the sun rise over the ocean in the morning, delighted in spite of everything by the pink in the sky.

  Chapter 24

  IN THE WAKE of finding my uncle, my thoughts kept turning back to my strange conversation with his ex-wife Beth. Are your other brothers and sisters alive? she had asked. And then, upon hearing my answer: Well, how’s that for irony? Allan was the only one w
e tried to save.

  It was impossible to connect with my mom’s brother Allan without thinking of my own brother Allan. His namesake, as Beth had said.

  I’ve chosen to write as little as possible about my brothers and sister. The truth is that while most of them are still alive, the circumstances of our childhood hurt them in ways they have not been able to transcend. I have no desire to hurt them further. They deserve their privacy and dignity.

  But Allan is beyond pain now.

  Allan was my favorite brother. He was the one who introduced me to Jim. Would I even have looked at Jim in the first place if Allan hadn’t told me he was cool? It’s possible that I owe him my marriage, which is to say it’s possible I owe him everything.

  Allan was the oldest of my mother’s six children, and sometimes I think he suffered the most. In my earliest memories, he was the boy almost swept out to sea as he descended those ocean cliffs to gather seaweed, putting his body between us and starvation.

  He was the only one I really had in the family, the only one who was protective of me, who looked out for me. When I was frightened at night, he would lie down next to me in bed and say, “It’s okay, Tef. Don’t be afraid.” Tef was what he’d called me as a little kid and it’s what he called me until his last day.

  We lived in rough neighborhoods throughout my childhood, but because of Allan, I was never the target of local bullies for long. If ever I had reason to be afraid of other kids, I only had to let him know. Don’t even come near my sister again, he’d tell them, or you’ll be hurting. And after that, they always crossed the street when they saw me coming.

  Isabella was tougher than me, but Allan’s protection extended to her too. I don’t know how he got hold of a gun, but after Isabella was assaulted, he went looking for Rick with every intention of killing him. He blamed our stepfather for what happened to her, since it was his friend who hurt her. But Rick disappeared in the aftermath of her assault. He fled to Arizona and joined the Peyote Way Church of God, a cult in the Aravaipa wilderness that regarded peyote as a holy sacrament.

  I’m thankful now for Rick’s escape. It’s what kept my brother from dying in prison. It allowed what happened later to come to pass. Rick and Allan would meet again.

  WHEN MY SIBLINGS and I were taken to the dependent unit, the separation of children by gender—girls on one side of the building, boys on the other—was a harbinger of all the trauma to come. There was no fear for me in being separated from my mother. The terror set in when I was separated from Allan, the only protective presence in my world.

  I would not see him again for more than a year. Like me, he was sent to an abusive foster home, where he was regularly beaten with a belt. It’s hardly surprising that he fell in with a troubled crowd of kids in high school, and before the end of his freshman year, he and his friends were convicted of breaking and entering, as well as theft from private homes. Allan was sent to a juvenile detention center, a place even worse than his foster home. He was gang-raped during his time there, and the shame of that would gnaw at him for the rest of his days.

  When my siblings and I were returned to our mother after our time in foster homes, Allan was not among us. He was still in juvenile detention. I have no memory of my mother ever calling, writing, or visiting him. He tried calling us once or twice, but he could only call collect and she wouldn’t accept the charges. When we moved to Portland, she just left him there, as easily as she’d left him with his aunt and uncle ten years earlier.

  Six months after we moved, he was released from the facility. My mother hadn’t seen him in well over a year, but it never occurred to her to pick him up. I don’t know how he would have joined us in Portland if his parole officer hadn’t bought him a bus ticket.

  AS AN ADULT, Allan was the smart and capable one. He could fix and operate any computer, and eventually he worked in tech support. In the workplace my brother was a model of competence. He loved every job he ever held in IT. He was very good at what he did and valued by every employer he had.

  He was very handsome, too: dark-haired and dark-eyed—a dead ringer for Cat Stevens. He had a weakness for country music and liked to wear cowboy hats. Women were always wild about him, but as a romantic partner he was hapless and hopeless.

  He had a memory like flypaper, and he carried all our childhood carnage with him at all times, with nothing blocked out or hazy or erased. He remembered every worthless man my mother ever brought into her bed. He remembered their names, their tattoos, their scars, and their cigarette brands. He remembered every wretched apartment we lived in, every brutal school and each frigid windy empty day on the beach. My love for the Oregon coast, my desire to spend as much time there as possible, was a mystery to him.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he would ask. “After everything we went through in Mendocino, how can you love the beach?”

  He would never brave such conversations without an open bottle of liquor. He had to be drunk to talk about our childhood.

  Allan was a chronic alcoholic. Our mother, who never went a day without her “herbs,” or her acid if she could get it, seemed to somehow regard his alcoholism as a weakness that was beneath her. According to her Allan began drinking at the age of nine. His first taste of alcohol was one of Louie’s Spanish beers, and later he raided Rick’s stash of Steel Reserve and Thunderbird. It’s hard to imagine a child developing a taste for beer, or any alcohol really, but he must have noticed that it made him warm, made things blur, and helped him sleep.

  My brother married young. His first wife’s name was Lynn, and she was the administrator of an insurance company. She wore huge dark-rimmed glasses, and her dark shoulder-length hair framed her face like an Egyptian headdress. Their relationship was fraught from the start. Allan had poor communication skills, and he was wildly averse to confrontation. When an argument arose, no matter how minor, he would disappear. Walk out the door and come back drunk.

  Lynn had a take-charge, do-it-all, intensely managerial character. She kept meticulous books at work, and she kept perfect order in her home, but she could not control my brother, and it maddened her. She loved Jesus and hated alcohol, but she couldn’t get him to church or away from the bottle. In a way, she was the good mother Allan never had, but years too late.

  They had a beautiful daughter named Rachel. She was born with retinoblastoma, and her eye was removed soon after birth. The sight of his baby girl with an empty eye socket sent Allan to the corner bar, and he didn’t come home for two days. In his own way, he was a wonderful father, affectionate and gentle. He was always playing with Rachel and loved to take her places. He snuggled her and read to her and let her ride him around like a pony.

  He may have been a wonderful father, but he was an untenable husband. His inability to stay in the room when emotions ran high and his continual return to liquor as his only source of solace drove Lynn to divorce him by the time Rachel was four.

  * * *

  HIS SECOND WIFE was Carol, and with her, he had a beautiful daughter named Cindy. Carol was nothing like Lynn. From time to time she would call me and announce: “I’m sending Cindy to stay with you for the summer.” Then she’d put her little girl on a plane and fade into radio silence for the next several months. She never called, never checked in.

  Carol was the bad mother he’d always had; she was, in fact, very much like ours. They were soon divorced as well.

  I REMEMBER THE day I got the call from the hospital. I was at the local organic market, filling my cart with grapes, wine, strawberries, and brie when I learned that Allan had been taken to the nearest ER after a grand mal seizure. I left the cart where it was and ran out to my car.

  Even after learning the diagnosis was brain cancer, it was rare to see my brother without a cigarette in his mouth and a beer in his hand. When I nagged him about it, he’d say: The tumor can’t grow if I feed it nothing but nicotine and beer. Eventually we joked that maybe he knew something his medical team didn’t, because he lived for years beyond their most
optimistic predictions—more than a full decade. His doctors marveled at how long he held on. The phrase they used time and again was unheard of.

  It’s hard to know how to feel about his decade of survival. He suffered in ways no human being ever should. He had countless debilitating seizures, after which he’d temporarily lose the use of an arm or a leg. He had two brain surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, and steroid shots. The steroids swelled his face until it was almost unrecognizable. He was hospitalized over and over, sometimes for weeks. He developed pancreatitis and was in the ICU for seventeen days, on a breathing machine during the worst of it. Sometimes I secretly hoped he would die and finally be free of pain, but he held on. He fought to stay. At the tail end of this very dark span of days, a most unlikely angel reappeared on his path.

  If I’d thought, during the years they were married, that Lynn was the good mother Allan never had but years too late, it would turn out that she had just turned up in his life years too early. Her persona was an exquisite fit for both of them when he was dying. During the last several months of his life, my brother and Lynn were reunited, and they finally achieved the relationship they’d never managed to inhabit in wedlock.

  Lynn and I were never close, but what she did for Allan while he was dying was among the most beautiful things I’ve seen a person do. When he needed full-time care and had no insurance and no money, she set up his bed in the middle of her one-bedroom trailer and attended to his every need until he went into hospice. This arrangement was deeply, undeniably gratifying to both of them.

  Lynn finally had all the control she’d always longed for. Allan was fully present with her for the first time in their lives together. He was no longer able to walk out. He gladly joined her for church on Sundays, and he even accepted Christ as his personal savior. It brought him a measure of peace he’d never known before.

  For her own part, Lynn became a completely different woman—soft-spoken, accommodating, and tender—as if this were the role she’d been waiting to embody since they’d met. Alcohol had destroyed their marriage, but she even brought him beer toward the end: all the beer he wanted. She accepted his chain-smoking. She let the air inside her trailer turn blue with cigarette smoke.