My grandma – my only physical trace of her is a small cross I brought her one year from Benediktbeuern. But she is with me, just as she was when I used to sit beside her and hear her talk about the olden days. She is my link to that other world, that one I can access sometimes by slipping sideways in time. The people there are black and white – except for the moments when I slip in and see them, all of a sudden, and see their freckles, their bright brown eyes, starched but worn clothes. It is a world rich with meaning; indeed, it contains all of the meaning that my own world, 1970s polyester and food created from fake food, has always lacked.
I used to pore over her pictures. There were just a couple, sepia-toned, but through them I could recreate her heartbreakingly chocolate dark eyes and warm, rich skin, and her glorious black hair, which was always described to me as auburn. (How different my own life would have been had I been born with Grandma’s color, or any other color, for that matter. Her black Irish hair and skin; tan skin and blond hair; olive skin with pale green eyes. Any color at all. It would have been good to be a person with color.) I could never quite see her freckles, but I knew they were there, just like mine. The color matters, because without it the figures from our pasts float out of our grasp; the color anchors them. Also important is to make her sufficiently thin, haggard, even. She had six children, after all. And she is tall, like I am, thin from the side, broad from the front. Through her I can touch that community of women that goes back and back; through her, I can touch Ireland, another misty world steeped with meaning, where life is humid and real. They still eat real food there, smell like real people.
She is my conduit to that real life. But the problem – and here is the essence of life – is that that real life is so filled with pain. The cold horrible violence of Catholicism. There existed and still exists a hierarchical chain of all being in that Church in which I can no longer take part, but the reality of it is nonetheless imbues every atom of my life. The horror of it has been much diminished over the years, and even by the time I came around it had at least lost its omnipotence. My own family lived within its shadow, but I knew from early on that I could dodge it, run away from it, because there were places where it had no purchase. But for Grandma there was never an escape. Not from the shadow of the Church, not from depressing and relentlessly male-dominated every-day life. She got married. What else could she do? She had to quit school in eighth grade even though she was very bright. Our family story always proved her intelligence by her ability to do crosswords, by the old words of wisdom she imparted. “It’s better than a kick in the teeth,” was her typical response to the good that life infrequently tossed her.
She married my grandpa. Why? She was so pretty. He was a good, steady man, they say, but he was uneducated. He worked in a garage. I could not find him, cannot fathom him. My only access to him came from some elderly cousins at Grandma’s funeral who spoke of him with such affection (and spoke to me in German although they had lived in the US for at least sixty years) that I felt the beginnings of a relationship. I was happy, because I do not feel any relationship with most of them. Uncle Lenny, Grandma’s brother, dead in about 1945 of TB and drink, I do feel him, close to Grandma and brown-eyed like she was. I probably mix him up with my cousin of the same name. But Grandma’s other two brothers – I feel nothing for them. I don’t know them.
I do not like my great-grandma. Grandma claims that she was a beauty, and the one picture we have of her as a young woman bears this out. But it was a nasty kind of beauty. Even in the black and white, her eyes are light and icy. Grandma stands beside her, hardly more than a baby, with her dark cloud of hair and my cousin’s eyes. She raised my grandma to believe that she was not pretty, a sort of cruelty that I can never never forgive. Because Grandma, like all of our babies, deserved the unconditional love and unstinting praise of a warmly affectionate mother. Her excuse was that she did not want Grandma to be vain. But here is no excuse. No decent mother would do such a thing. The only answer is that she did not love her daughter sufficiently.
But I do feel that I know and love her husband, my great-grandpa. He has Grandma’s color, round brown eyes and dark dark hair. He was college educated, maybe even a masters degree. On the other hand, he did get the half-witted maid pregnant, forfeiting forever the love of his wife and children. Great-grandma tossed him out. I understand her disgust, and they undoubtedly had a history beyond this particularly horrendous indiscretion. But she was bitter, and being bitter only hurts. It hurt Grandma. Her father tried to reach out to his children when they grew up, but they would have nothing to go with him.
I want to catch and hold Grandma's particularity, her sweetness. Of course, my perception is based at least in part on her physical helplessness, her resignation, maybe caused by her electric shock treatment. But I believe it was also her core. Partly because I don’t believe that I would love her so overwhelmingly if sweetness were not essentially a part of her. Partly because I see some of it in my own mother. Mom is pathologically reserved, both utterly rigid and entirely vulnerable, needing to paint the blacks black and the whites white. My own mother cannot bear anything that disturbs her framework, but inside she is utterly sweet. Grandma, I think, had lived too long and seen too much sorrow to be anything else. Living in sorrow either turns you bitter or it wears down the edges, opens you up, makes you even more vulnerable.
The imaginary of my childhood is formed around the blessed coolness of her house, the dim interior contrasting with the brilliant green heat of a summer afternoon. Her house, just across the alley form the school ground where we spent summer vacation, was our haven. We could always dash across to get a drink. Ring the doorbell. And she would appear, smiling. Or the sound of feet stamping on the porch in winter, and, again, again, the contrast between the frozen air outside and the warmth inside.
The sorrow of her life crushes. The horror of the repressive Catholic environment, being told by her mother that she was homely. Marriage to a man who immediately dashed off to hunt or fish in his spare time. Yes, he brought home the pay check, $12 a week. But there was no intimate bond. And then she lost him to cancer, when my mother was only nine. How much did she love him, I wonder? She said that she was SO green when she got married. Oh oh the sadness of those years. The depression that came later in her life, when she should have been able to relax and enjoy herself. And yet, it’s always the relationships that keep us going, and she had her girls. And I hope that she had her granddaughters. We had her, in any case.
I want to talk about the sadness of life, that real life she led. I can't make it right for her, but I can acknowledge it. Say it, say it and keep saying it. It was bleak,and it was grueling. But when one slips in, one sees that it was filled with color: blazing leaves, sad brown grass, painfully sharp glistening snow. And her eyes. I never saw the auburn hair, but I knew her dark dark eyes. She was a gorgeous person to have come out, so sweet, on the other side of that stony road. I am trying to keep touching her.
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