Grandmothers

March 9, 2022

I wrote the first part of this memoir for my grandchild, Haley Redding, who loves to sew. I was compelled to write the second part of this memoir for myself alone. I have no idea why.

Acts of love: PART ONE

Gramma, our father's mother from Ballingarry, Tipperary, shared nothing of her Irishness with us. Nor did her younger sister Elizabeth who lived with her in a small house in South St. Louis. We scarcely ever heard Gramma and her sister speak to each other, and we certainly never heard a word pass between them in their native Irish-Gaelic tongue.

Aunt Elizabeth — she was actually our great- aunt — was bent over. She sat motionless in the living room, a thin, ghost-like presence, while we three small girls, close in age to each other, scampered around or sat in the middle of the living room floor playing.

There were no toys in Gramma's house, but there were two gifts that her second son, Jimmy, had sent home from Asia, where he was away at war: a miniature Filipino stilt house constructed of sticks not much larger than toothpicks, and a big box of mahjongg tiles decorated on their undersides with calligraphic Chinese characters and colorful stylized images of discs, flowers, birds, and bamboo. The tiles fit neatly in our little hands. Our little fingers arranged them and then rearranged them for hours. Thus we amused ourselves with bounty from the Pacific Front.

Uncle Jimmy had also sent home a photo of himself. He was confident, handsome and young, a soldier in a short- sleeved khaki uniform, his smile lit by a hot foreign sun. A side cap tilted neatly off- center across his close crew haircut. The image was powerful. Somehow we understood that our uncle had been sent off on a mission to save the world from every kind of evil.

Gramma's third son, Donnie, lived with her and Aunt Elizabeth and was almost always present on weekends when we visited. He never spoke with us, but sat silent at the immense round oak dining room table, seeming to resent our presence and to put up with us only because he had to.

The dining room served as Gramma's sewing room most days. Its oak table was an ample surface for laying out fabric and adjusting and pinning down paper patterns. There she cut pieces for dresses that she sewed for her neighbors, earning much-needed money. Throughout our childhood she made every dress we wore for Easter and Christmas. The table was rarely used for serving dinner.

Having been a widow for more than twenty years, Gramma continued to maintain and cultivate the severe appearance of a widow. While she wasn t bent over like her sister, she didn t stand up perfectly straight either. She clothed her thin body in dresses made of just enough fabric to allow motion while modestly covering as much flesh as they could, their skirts falling down straight and ending well below the knees. She managed to tie her hair back more tightly than one thought possible, as though someone else had tied it for her. Her face, once pretty and fresh, was now greyish and full of lines, displaying but one indecipherable expression, like a weathered stone. No perfume, no jewelry, no frivolity, no music, no Art. She was always on the move, working, busy with her house, the back yard, the chicken coop and vegetable garden, gathering eggs and picking lettuce leaves.

Clearly, Gramma loved us as deeply as any human being could love any other. Clearly, she would not have wanted anyone to know how intensely she loved us or how satisfied she must have felt just knowing that we existed. I sometimes imagine her glancing at us three fair-haired, fair-skinned girls playing with mahjongg tiles in the middle of her living room floor. I imagine that she feels a pang of pleasure so intense that it feels like pain. She pushes the feeling aside and reassures herself that now, finally, through us, she has paid her debt to the Eternal, to the ancient Irish nation, and to her immediate ancestors.

One day Elizabeth was gone. She must have been sick for a long time. Our mother explained: the doctors had operated on her. They opened her up. Shocked by what they saw, they sewed her up right away. There was nothing they could do. Why had she waited so long? Why had no one brought her to the hospital sooner? I could see it all in my child s brain as though it were an animated cartoon: doctors and nurses in scrubs and masks stand around an operating table. They lean forward, look down into Elizabeth s exposed viscera and turn their heads slowly in unison from side to side in disbelief.

Acts of Love: PART TWO

“Ahgah” our mother's mother from Moberly, Missouri, freely shared her wisdom with my sisters and me: “You don t want to wash dishes all your life” and “You can love a rich man as well as a poor one,” she might say out of the blue when we visited her in her big house on West Cabanne Place in St. Louis. People either “played their cards right” or they didn t; they either didn't amount to a hill of beans or they did; and lucky were those who managed to make a “good marriage.”

Our mother s sister Aunt Louise, her husband nicknamed “Dinky” and their four children lived with Ahgah. Easter and Christmas were celebrated with an early dinner in Ahgah's dining room with Dinky standing at the head of the huge rectangular table sharpening a knife, ready to perform the significant ceremony of the day, the carving of the meat.

As soon as we arrived at Aghah's we ran up the main staircase to her bedroom. It was large enough to accommodate an elegant set of bedroom furniture carved from light wood in French provincial style: twin beds with a small night table between them, two chests of drawers, and a magnificent mirrored dressing table at the front of the room, situated between two tall curved glass windows set in a turreted fa ade and looking out onto the street.

We took turns sitting on a padded stool, also in light French provincial. We brushed our hair with Ahgah's brushes and admired ourselves, making faces in the mirror imagining ourselves to be haughty grown- ups, elegant like our mother and her sisters, then breaking into silly funny faces. We marveled at Ahgah's assortment of perfume bottles and the little silver box into which she daily stuffed the hairs that clogged her brushes.

Even with all that furniture, there was still plenty of floor space. A satin-covered chaise longue commanded the spacious room's open space from a slightly off-center position. To its side a low table held a 78rpm record player, perhaps Ahgah's most prized possession.

When we arrived, Ahgah would hand us each a piece of hard candy, then she would turn on the record player, causing the disc to spin. As soon as she placed the needle at the end of its arm onto the spinning disc, we heard Arthur Godfrey — her favorite radio commentator — singing “I'd give a million tomorrows for just one yesterday” — her favorite song.

Arthur Godfrey's tone was self-indulgent. The half-spoken and half-sung words puzzled me. Few if any children could accumulate enough yesterdays to feel sentimental about the past. My aversion to the sound of Godfrey's nostalgia gradually mixed with the smell of Ahgah's lavender hand cream whose fragrance overwhelmed the atmosphere. I began to think that, while I wanted to grow up, I didn't want to grow old like Ahgah.

And when Ahgah got out her syringe, sat sideways on the chaise, pulled up her skirt revealing her thighs - two alabaster pillars made flesh and punctured her skin to deliver her daily dose of insulin, I was more convinced than ever that I didn t want to grow old.

Our mother told us many stories about her family s history: marriages, pregnancies, suicides, illnesses, frequent betrayals, and the occasional heroic act, all of them embellished and romanticized as though they had been written by Victor Hugo. One story stood out above all the others — Ahgah's unforgivable betrayal of her daughter.

Already in their 20's, both Catholics and both anxious to have sex, our mother and father were married one night by a justice of the peace in Illinois, just across the river, using false names. They told no one until, six weeks later, Mother's 18-year-old sister Louise eloped on the night of her debut party, swept off her feet by Dinky.

Both sisters were pregnant. Aunt Louise and Dinky moved in with Ahgah; Mother confessed; her marriage was legalized; she and our father moved into an apartment on Clara Avenue in the Central West End.

Neither sister had played her cards right. Neither had made a good marriage. In consequence they would both most probably be washing dishes all their lives whether they liked it or not.

Ahgah took it upon herself to have a private talk with our father. Mother was sure that Ahgah had said to her son-in-law: “Now that you have married my crazy, impulsive daughter, she is your problem, not mine.”

But I imagine the conversation differently. I see Ahgah and our father standing face to face in the middle of Ahgah s spacious bedroom surrounded by the fragrance of lavender. She bypasses her inclination to be charming and looks hard into his green eyes. Seeing a spark of the wild in his eyes, she speaks sternly, as though her words could tame Satan himself.

“You have married into a prominent (meaning old-French-early-settler- bourgeois-St. Louis) family. You are not one of us, but your children will be. At all times your behavior will reflect the prestige of the family. No misbehavior will be tolerated. If you misbehave, the family will protect itself. My daughter, now your wife, may sometimes be impulsive and difficult, but it is now your duty to put up with her and to protect her. If you fail in that duty, the family will act to protect itself.”

Whatever she said, Ahgah had crossed a line. It was unforgivable. She had inserted herself into a relationship between lovers still infatuated with each other, still in the honeymoon stage of their relationship, lovers who had just sworn to stand by each other “for better or for worse” forever.

I was about four years old when Mother was hospitalized with mastoiditis. A surgeon cut away the infected parts of her mastoid bone, just under and behind her earlobe, in an operation called mastoidectomy. She was treated with sulfa antibiotics that had revolutionized medicine in the 1930's, until bacteria began to develop resistance to sulphur. It was 1942. Penicillin, a miracle drug, had only recently been purified and was being used to treat infections. Penicillin was in short supply, so Mother's life was hanging in the balance, dependent on the weak antibiotic power of sulfur and any fever that her body could produce to cure her.

My sisters were sent to stay with Gramma in South St. Louis and I, being the youngest, was sent to Ahgah and Aunt Louise because they had a big house and household help. Louise was busy with a newborn, so it fell to Ahgah to bathe me in the upstairs bathroom. We sat together in a large turn-of-the-century oval tub washing ourselves, then dried off in front of a round radiant heater on the tile floor.

I have one intense recurring memory. Ahgah and I have just dried off. We stand naked facing each other in front of the heater that glows like a sun in the center of the small bathroom universe. While my young body can reach no higher than her navel, I perceive all of her form as though she were a statue in a museum. Her skin is plump and light. Her whole body, now middle-aged and growing heavy, glistens from head to toe.

She is reaching out to me trying to instill a message, telling me something important that words alone cannot convey. I am sure of it. Her fleshy large breasts are proud, her thick waist is undefeated, her delicate wrists and ankles are exquisitely well turned, and her arms still taper ever so gracefully. She is still beautiful, still an object of desire, and she knows it.

“This is your instrument,” her body seems to be saying to me. “It will provide you with everything you need in life. You will grow to be a beautiful woman. Men will desire you. They will seek comfort in your breasts and take pride in your beauty. Use their desire to make your way in the world.”

If it was Ahgah s intention to instill carnal knowledge into my innocent four-year-old body and soul, as I imagine it was, she failed completely. As I grew older, a sense of bodily shame overtook me. Shame was so deeply and painfully imbedded in my spirit that I never fought it, but rather invented strategies to deal with my fear of being seen naked, even half-naked in a swimsuit. If I was growing up to be a beautiful woman, let it be. But I didn t want anyone to notice or to say anything about it. I admired girls who took their bodies for granted, who wanted to be seen as beautiful, and who felt at home exciting desire. I envied their courage to flaunt.

I never followed Ahgah's spoken or implied advice. Instead, I look forward every day to washing the dishes after a good meal; I have never loved a rich man; I don't see my life as a game of chance to be played out cleverly from a hand of cards dealt to me by fate. But I have tried to live a life that amounts to whatever amount a hill of beans might amount to, whatever that might be.

My marriage wasn't a good one. I was unlucky, but I tried to make the best of it, finding what happiness I could in motherhood, and in civil rights and anti-war activism. The marriage ended badly when my husband could no longer pretend to be someone he wasn't. It was a stunning transformation. He bonded with a man, a former student, and took him to be his proper and lifelong mate. He didn t need me any more. He mocked me, dismissed me with insults, criticized my cooking, disapproved of the way I kept house, and complained that I failed to discipline the children properly. It became obvious to everyone but him that he was erasing me from his life.

As for my recurring memory of Ahgah, don't get me wrong. Standing before me naked in the bathroom that day she was a divine presence, the source of all life, my mother s life, my sister s lives and my life. The memory of her body is the most precious and most meaningful memory of my life. It is my talisman. It connects me to Eternity. Through it I connect and to the Paleolithic past, a time when small fertility fetishes must have been all the rage.

One day, after having spent many weeks away from home, my sisters and I were told that we would be going home again very soon.

Early that morning the doctor had walked into Mother's hospital room, all smiles. He stood beside her bed and looked into her face, now hollow-cheeked. He spoke when their eyes met. Thank God, he said, your fever broke last night. You will live.

@copyright 2022 Minerva Durham

copyright © 2017 Minerva Durham