My Name Could Be Toby Gardner

by Ann S. Epstein

I lost my name. Perhaps the name was never mine to begin with. In which case, will I ever own one? Or, if the name was once in my possession, can I get it back?

People on intimate terms with their names stir envy in me. When I hear mine, no inner voice says “Me”. The roots of this dissociation sprout in a family soil that teems with multiple, secret, and lost names. Such history is common among immigrants who changed their names to assimilate. For me, not being my name also stems from my family’s particular pathology.

My late mother, for example, Kate Alsofrom Savishinsky, could be called Gussie Shirley Savage. Like many Eastern Europeans who came to the United States at the turn of the last century, names on both sides of my family were Anglicized or phoneticized. Thus, my father’s Polish surname “Czauczinski” became “Savishinsky” at Ellis Island. When my mother married him, she shortened it to “Savage” at work, which was also the name we put on the waiting list at the Chinese restaurant where, like other New York Jews, we often ate supper on Sunday nights.

The story behind “Gussie” is explained in this letter I submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with my mother’s Medicaid application:

The enclosed 1911 birth certificate erroneously lists my mother’s first name as Gussie rather than Kate. Her aunt, who was interviewed at the lying-in hospital, had limited English, and thought the official was asking for her name (which was Gussie) instead of the baby’s name. My mother’s Austrian maiden name, spelled “Alzufrumm” on her birth certificate, was later Anglicized to “Alsofrom”. I am also faxing a copy of my 1946 birth certificate, which lists my mother’s name correctly as Kate Savishinsky and her birthplace as the United States. I trust that with both documents, her citizenship will be established for Medicaid purposes.

“Shirley” was yet another twist in the Medicaid application, which also required a copy of my mother’s Social Security card. I found one issued in her work name, Kate Savage, but needed a card under her legal name, Kate Savishinsky. She’d owned one when I’d moved her into assisted living a few years earlier, but had soon lost it, along with her purse, and her mind.
Since my mother was a packrat, I asked my brother Steve (whose first name is Joel, but Joel is what we called an older cousin) to check for a Social Security card in the possessions he’d stored when we cleaned out her apartment. He discovered a card, but it identified her as Kate Shirley Savage. We’d never heard the name “Shirley” and assumed it was an error. But after phoning my mother’s sister Fae (called Fannie or Feigele as a child), I emailed my brother:

Dear JSS: [Note: He and I avoid the first-name problem by using our initials]

Shirley (surely) you won’t believe this. Mom’s real middle name is Shirley! When I shared my tale of woe with Aunt Fae, we had the following conversation:

Me: I know Mom used “Savage” in business, but who knows where “Shirley” comes from.
Fae: Shirley is your mother’s middle name.
Me: I thought it was Sheba, from her Jewish name, Kayla Shayva.
Fae: No, it’s Shirley, although she’d call me a liar for saying so. She wanted it to be Sheba.
Me: Huh? Mom hated that name on account of the Shirley Booth movie “Come Back Little Sheba.” Sheba was a runaway dog.
Fae: No, your mother always liked the name Sheba.
Me: Did my father know my mother’s real middle name was Shirley?
Fae: I have no idea what your father knew about your mother.


Love,
ASE

As my maternal grandmother Mindel (who was registered as Minnie at Ellis Island) used to say, “I’m glad I didn’t die yesterday or I wouldn’t have known that.” I was fifty-nine when I discovered my mother’s real middle name. She was too far gone by then for me to ask her why she claimed it was “Sheba,” but even if she’d been cogent, I doubt she would have told me the truth. In her typical long-winded fashion, she would have narrated a convoluted story in which she was the aggrieved party or the heroine. And, as my straight-talking Aunt Fae said, my mother would have called her sister a liar.

*

If learning my mother’s identity meant sorting truth from fiction in her nonstop chatter, figuring out my father’s entailed filling in gaps of silence. He was not just taciturn, like many men of his generation. When I was a graduate student in psychology, I recognized in him the classic symptoms of a schizoid personality, someone incapable of relating to others. As a child, however, I knew only that his muteness made me ashamed to invite friends to our apartment.

Despite his lack of connection to others, or perhaps because he lived inside himself, my father seems to have had a strong sense of who he was. Except for passively allowing my mother to use Savage at the office and Jade Garden, he refused to simplify his last name. On the other hand, in elementary school, he’d dropped his first name in favor of his middle one. He stuck with this choice, even when it was later ignored by virtually everyone, who called him by a nickname. My father was born Layzeh Dovid in the shtetl of Yadow, and called Louis David when he arrived in America as a boy. For untold reasons, he hated the name Louis and answered only to David. In his teens, friends nicknamed him “Cal” after President Calvin Coolidge, a man stingy with words, who the press had dubbed “Silent Cal.” The president’s reticence may have been a political choice. No one was aware, or admitted, that my father’s was a handicap.

As young adults, my parents met at a summer resort on the Jersey shore, where they’d each rented cabins with their friends. Urged by her bunkmate to check out a guy named Cal, my mother approached the man she hoped would be him, but was told by that man, “I’m not Cal. He’s the bum over there.” Redirected, she paired off with the guy who was Cal for the summer. Back in the Bronx that fall, my father phoned her to resume their courtship:

He: Hello, this is David.

She: David who?
He (annoyed): You know, David.
She: I don’t know anyone named David.
He: We’ve been dating for two months!
She: You mean Cal?

Friends and family never called my father anything but Cal after the nickname was bestowed in the 1920s. Yet he steadfastly thought of himself as David until his death in 1997. What they intended as a playful moniker was to him a painful reminder of his isolation. I never heard my father protest—he was incapable of direct confrontation—but “David” was how he always introduced himself and the name he signed on his anniversary cards to my mother.

My father was equally reticent about his own parents. He never spoke of his father, who died when I was a toddler. The story as reported by my mother—or invented by her; one could never be sure, especially about tales that cast my father’s family in a bad light — is that her father-in-law was an alcoholic who disappeared for long stretches of time when my father was growing up. As the oldest child, my father was pressured by

his demanding mother to become “the man of the house,” a worldly role for which he was ill-suited, and his shame and bitterness muted him for life. So total was his silence that my brother and I did not know our paternal grandfather’s name until we were in our 40s. We were gathered for the bar mitzvah of my brother’s younger son, Jacob, when my brother and I asked our father the name of his father. His reply: “Jacob. I assumed my grandson was named for him.” I don’t know which of us was more surprised at the other’s not knowing.

              Gussie, Cal, Steve, and Toby

           a.k.a. Kate, David, Joel, and Ann

The true name of our father’s mother was revealed even later, ten years after our father’s death. My brother, cousins, and I had called her Grandma Lillie, which we assumed was short for Lillian. But on my 61st birthday, my father’s sister told me that their mother was born Ruchel (Rachel) Leah. She reinvented herself in America, dropping her first name and applying the initial of the second to one that may have sounded less Jewish or more elevated than her peasant upbringing. My aunt, and the rest of my father’s family, assumed that my daughter, Rebecca, was named for her, this time repurposing the “R.” I informed my aunt otherwise, but perhaps I should have let the misconception survive. A lineage buried in silence deserves to create its own stories.

*

My full name is Ann Toby Savishinsky Epstein. When I married my first husband, few women kept their maiden names. Since I was not enamored of mine, and was years shy of understanding and loving my father, I took my spouse’s last name, which was Epstein. To preserve part of my identity, however, I began using Savishinsky as a middle name. Eight years later, when he and I divorced, I kept Epstein to maintain continuity for my young daughter and because I’d published under that name. I still sometimes think of myself as a Savishinsky, though. Whenever a group is split alphabetically into A-M and N-Z, my instinct is to head for the one that includes “S.”

Twenty-five years later, when I remarried, I continued to use Epstein. My daughter was grown, and my career was well established by then, as was the practice of women not changing their names. However, my second marriage raised the possibility of yet another name for me.

I was called by my middle name, Toby, until kindergarten, when I insisted on using my first name, Ann. I happily shed Toby because it was an easy mark for alliterative teasing. I was called “Toothless Toby” after a fall knocked out my baby teeth years before the permanent ones grew in. “Tubby Toby” didn’t fit the skinny kid I was, but amused my tormenters. Toby could also be a boy’s name (Toby Tyler and the Circus was a popular children’s book at the time). The final humiliation was a television show about an elephant named Toby. When I switched to Ann, teasing rhymes like A”, Ann, frying pan” sounded too impersonal to bother me. Perhaps it was also an early indication that I didn’t think of the name “Ann” as really belonging to me.

Despite my becoming Ann at school, to my family I remained Toby. So, when I married my second husband forty-five years later, my Aunt Honey, whose real name is Anita, sent us a check made out to “Gerald and Toby Gardner.” Our joint account was under Gerald Gardner and Ann Epstein. He endorsed the check and I went to the bank to explain the situation to the teller:

Me: My aunt thinks I took my new husband’s last name, which is “Gardner.” (As further proof that I wasn’t faking a family relationship, I pointed out that the middle name on my driver’s license, Savishinsky, was also my aunt’s last name.)
Teller: No problem, I understand. (Long pause …) Who’s Toby?

The teller’s perplexity mirrors mine. None of my names: Ann or Toby, Savishinsky or Epstein, feels like me.

*

Funny as name anecdotes can be, it is also tragic when ancestral names are lost. But in addition to this universal phenomenon, my personal disconnection is the legacy of my odd family history. I question whether I am alone in having a nameless self, or if others share my experience. Even people who dislike their names don’t necessarily question that they belong to them. And what of those who are adopted or assume a different name for fame, fortune, or fraud? Did Norma Jean think of herself as Marilyn? Did James Gatz fully inhabit the person of Jay Gatsby? Did Anna Anderson

believe herself to be Princess Anastasia? Or did they coexist with a stranger who posed as them?
Now in my mid-seventies (and single again), I occasionally braid my hair in the style I wore as a little girl. I wonder if I am not just attempting to recapture my youth but to become Toby again. Up until age five, I had only one name. I may have been haunted by an unhappiness I was too young to name—my father’s silence, my mother’s lies—but I knew who I was. Rejecting that name may have been a child’s way of rejecting that family. Decades later, with more wisdom and empathy, perhaps I am ready to reclaim as mine the family that made me.

One solution to my self-alienation is to think of myself as the name I like best. Each has something to recommend it. Toby is uncommon and cute. I value creativity and I’m small, so the name fits. Ann, Hebrew for grace, is reassuring in the face of aging and death. My signature initials also appeal. ASE is the suffix for enzyme or catalyst, and I like to see myself as an agent of change. Yet, there’s no satisfying click when I drop any of these names into the slot labeled “me.” I’m still unwilling to give up the hope that someday I will find, and know, my name, but I fear it is too late. Either our names become us when we are young or they are forever lost.

Ann S. Epstein writes novels, short stories, memoir, craft articles, and book reviews. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize nomination for creative nonfiction, the Walter Sullivan prize in fiction, and an Editors’ Choice selection by Historical Novel Review. Her novels are On the Shore, Tazia and Gemma, and A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. Her stories and nonfiction work appear in Sewanee Review, PRISM International, Ascent, The Long Story, Saranac Review, The Madison Review, The Minnesota Review, Passages North, Summerset Review, Red Rock Review, William and Mary Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and many other literary journals. In addition to writing, she has a Ph.D. in developmental psychology and a M.F.A. in textiles. Her stories often have historical settings that mix fact and fiction. Her nonfiction explores the people, places, and events that shape us, especially the residue left by family and friends. Her website is: https://www.asewovenwords.com.

Mixed Emotion Family

by Susan D. Bernstein

“My mama is mean,” Ruth used to say. I couldn’t see this myself. Miss Cora, as Ruth insisted her mother liked to be called, seemed a benign old woman to me. She had traveled to suburban New York from Georgia by bus to spend six weeks of the summer with her daughter. Miss Cora hardly spoke to me. I might say, “Good morning,” and she’d wince a smile or murmur some slight recognition. I found her puzzling, but since she was Ruth’s mother, I accepted her presence without asking questions.

When I was an infant my parents hired Ruth to cook and clean and to care for my brother and me. She remained in this job for over forty years until each of my parents died in the same house where Ruth had dusted, swept, and managed the kitchen work. She witnessed everything, from first days of school to arguments and holiday celebrations. She not only washed the dirty laundry, she saw and heard it. But while she knew everything about us, it seemed, what did we know of her family and her life beyond our house?

          We knew Ruth had grown up in Georgia where her mother still lived. At Christmas each year, Ruth journeyed south to Cordele, Georgia to see Miss Cora and other family whose names I never kept straight, and occasionally Miss Cora came north in summers. In 1979, the last time Miss Cora visited her daughter, she was closing in on eighty, her sight was gone, and cancer lurched through her body. She sat silently in the folding chair by the back door for hours, sucking the juice out of an orange through a straw Ruth had inserted. She wore heavy cotton socks rolled up at her ankles, and my blue gingham shirt from my high school years underneath a sleeveless dress with a faded floral print. Although her eyes did not work, Miss Cora wore heavy black-rimmed glasses. Ruth dressed her mother every day and fixed the elastic in the waist of the slip because Miss Cora liked wearing a slip, but objected if it drooped below her hemline.

          “Why does Miss Cora wear glasses if she can’t see?” I asked. I was home for a visit a few years after I'd graduated from college. Ruth peeled potatoes into the sink, her back hunched over as she supported much of her weight on her forearms, which were massive, as if they belonged on a bigger, athletic body. Due to childhood polio, Ruth’s legs looked like skeleton bones, thin envelopes of flesh wrapped around them.

          “I put them on to keep her from picking at her eyes. She don’t care anymore.” Ruth's low voice hushed the room as she watched Miss Cora from the kitchen window. “She about given up and is just passing time.”

          My mother walked in from the front hall. For many years I’d watched her passing time. “Ruth, did you see my book? I was reading it at lunch, but now I can’t find it anywhere.”

          I hugged Ruth from behind, circling her broad back with my arms. Then I turned on my mother. “Why should Ruth know where your book is? She’s busy taking care of her mother, who can’t see at all.” I was in a stage of belligerence towards my mother and protective of Ruth. Eventually I outgrew my pugnaciousness like the gingham shirt Miss Cora wore.

          My mother sighed, “Oh, leave me be! I didn’t say Ruth should know—I only asked a question. Is that a crime?” Not waiting for a reply, my mother walked out of the room, and I heard her climb the stairs to her bedroom, where she often soothed herself with rounds of solitaire.

          Ruth patted my cheek. “Hear her and don’t hear her. That’s what I do. She only talking to hear herself talk.” Ruth had little tolerance for what she called “chin music” or “jaw dancing,” whether aimless chatter or in this case my mother's mumblings of despair.

          “Where do you sleep when Miss Cora is here?”

          “In there,” Ruth gestured toward her cubby of a room adjacent to the kitchen. but her eyes caught mine as she turned from the sink. Ruth was the mistress of the ironic, “you-fool” glance.

          As a child, I had loved Ruth’s room because it was small, a coziness that I thought had to do with the size and walls, but it was Ruth’s presence that made her room a safe hideaway. I had tried to get Ruth to switch rooms with me at one point when I was five or six, but she told me I had to sleep upstairs, she downstairs. Ruth’s room was warm in winter, cool in summer, as if it had its own thermostat that adjusted to seasonal weather. The shoe-box room held a cot, two feet wide, a bureau, a desk, and a sink. The black and white checkered bedspread, from my brother’s bedroom years ago, was tucked neatly around the mattress. In clumps everywhere were food coupons, prescription drug bottles with the pharmacy labels peeling away, spools of colored thread for crochet projects, plastic bags of assorted shades piled high on top of newspapers and stacks of Ebony and Jet and outdated TV Guides. Miniature china animals and faded hard candies sat on the glass top of the desk along with rolls of pennies, safety pins, and baseball cards. On the bureau, along with the coupons and scraps of papers with Ruth’s handwriting—addresses and phone numbers, stray shopping lists—was a Gideon Bible, like the ones in hotel bedside table drawers. From the array of improvised bookmarks protruding beyond the gilt and crimson edges, it looked as if Ruth read from all the Gospels simultaneously. Once she showed me a dried flower pressed into the pages near a crucifixion scene. “That’s my orchid for Good Friday. Your mama gets me one every year.”         

          My mother gave Ruth corsages twice a year, one for Easter and one on the day of Yom Kippur Eve. The first was for Ruth to wear to services at the African Methodist Episcopal Church she attended in Harlem. The other commemorated Ruth’s anniversary with our family. I was three months old when Ruth arrived at our house to take care of my brother and me during the evening while my parents went to Kol Nidre services.

Ruth proved ecumenical in her religious practices. She fasted with my father on Yom Kippur and ate matzah during Passover, entirely without my mother’s lapses into bread. Still, she was a dedicated Christian and went to her church Sundays and read daily spiritual texts from a worn pamphlet she carried in her apron pocket. More than anyone else in my family, Ruth was the religious enthusiast, and took to any kind of ritual or prayer. “It all goes to the same God,” she liked to say.

          During those years, the little I did know about Ruth's past came from her occasional revelations or from my mother. Ruth was evasive about her age and her background. My mother told me that Miss Cora was thirteen when Ruth was born in Georgia, but Ruth never confirmed this hearsay. Ruth’s surname was Stedman before she married, then Greene. When I knew Miss Cora, her last name was Smith. I thought that nearly everyone Ruth knew seemed to be related to her, and I could never follow the familial lines, as they seemed to run in a more circuitous fashion than what I understood about my own more limited store of relatives. Although Ruth didn’t have anyone she claimed for siblings, she had countless aunts, uncles, and cousins. I grew up with these scattered bits of knowledge about Ruth's life, but later I tried to learn more.

          In August 1996 when Ruth was eighty years old, I interviewed her, and then didn’t play the video recording for a dozen years, some four years after Ruth had died in a nursing home in central Georgia in 2004. I had asked predictable questions, prompted by the outline of a life my mother had fed me about Ruth, leading questions Ruth either evaded or flat-out contradicted. Like the woman I knew and didn’t know from infancy, Ruth’s answers were elusive, skewed, as if she’d heeded Emily Dickinson’s advice: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—/Success in Circuit lies.” Take her reply when I asked where she was born.

          “Now, that is a very big question. I was born on the county line of two places, Dooly and Pulaski—half the house in Dooly, half in Pulaski.” This would be central Georgia, just after the First World War. If her birthplace was suspended across county lines, her family was equally dispersed across many names.

          “Oh, I’m the sum total of a mixed emotion family," This meant four names: McIntire, Brown, Anderson, and Marshall. I don’t know where Stedman or Smith fit in, and Ruth didn’t elaborate. She was adept at redirecting my follow-up questions. Cora’s name was McIntire until she married, but whether she married Stedman first, or Smith, or either one, remains a mystery.

          Some of the naming in Ruth’s family had a more legible genealogy. Her maternal grandmother was Minnie Brown. Minnie married twice. The first marriage produced Mary, Carrie, and Cora, and the second marriage to Joe Brown resulted in a couple of boys, and six girls: Margaret, Lula Bell, Willie Mae, Minnie, Thelma, and Anne. These children from her marriage with Joe were more like siblings for Ruth because they were close to her in age even though they were her aunts.

          “My mother was about one generation, and they and the rest of them another generation. They all came out the same hole. Let’s say it that way. They all by the same woman, so the same little place.” Ruth waxed graphic here, maybe a flashpoint of irritation over my repeated questions to ascertain the exact relationship between Ruth and Thelma and Minnie. I gradually comprehended that precise bloodlines were a contrivance that didn’t have much traction in Ruth’s sense of her world. “We all related” summed up her view.  

          Those patterns of generation fueled my persistent questions to know her family constellation. Joe Brown was Miss Cora’s stepfather; he was a farmer, probably a sharecropper, although Ruth didn’t use this word. “He raised corn, cotton, stuff like that, and peanuts for the house.” During my childhood, Ruth regularly roasted peanuts in papery red skins which fell off in brittle flakes.

My mental images of Joe Brown with his cash crop harvests of cotton and corn, the peanuts a treat for the family, are nourished by a different documentation. My quest to understand Ruth led me to photographs by Dorothea Lange, which show Southern tenant farmer families, with children in raggedy clothes in the cotton fields, many of these from the 1920s and 30s when Ruth would have been a child or teenager. This sharecropper system of exploitation, with its legacy in serfdom and slavery, fell apart under the New Deal in the 1930s when union organizing and strikes brought to wider attention the abuses landless farmers and their families—many African Americans in the South before the Great Migration northward—experienced. This public history offered a narrative arc for Ruth’s account of how she and many of her relatives moved north.

Other details about Ruth's childhood in Georgia came through in unexpected ways. When my daughter was eight years old, she had a school assignment to interview someone “old.” Her class had developed a set of questions to find out what life was like when their subjects were children. Flora immediately thought of Ruth and phoned her with her class query in hand. Ruth was past eighty by then.

          “What kind of board games did you like to play?” was one of the questions the third graders had come up with.

          “We didn’t have no games like that!” Ruth laughed at the question. “We played in the dirt, and with sticks and stones. That’s the only board games we all had.”

          “Where did your family go on vacations?” Flora wanted to know, again referring to the class assignment.

          “Vacation? What you talking about, baby? Well, let me see. Maybe we go up to Valdosta a piece, if we in Cordele, or to Cordele or maybe Sibley when we lived down by Sylvester. We visited our family—aunts and uncles or cousins—or sometimes my mother. That’s about the size of it, the sum total of the family vacation we had!”

 “What restaurants did your family like to go to when you were little?” And that’s how the interview went, a limping affair with most every question totally out of key with the chords of Ruth’s childhood.

Flora’s questions were molded from the same narrow vision of the ones I asked Ruth in my interview only a few years before. I kept trying to find out how the ages of people at certain milestones fit in her narrative of her early years. My aim was to work out Ruth’s age and the chronological difference between her and her mother. I tried to confirm without saying so the unwed teen mother story I’d heard. But Ruth seemed downright annoyed.

“So your grandmother must’ve had those children with Joe Brown later on,” I fished for some ages.

”What you call later on?”

“Thirty-five? Forty?”

“I don’t know how old my grandmother was. She had these three kids, became a widow, married this man, and had those kids. If your husband died, wouldn’t you marry again, if you was a beautiful lady?” Ruth gave me that signature arch look of hers, her voice edgy with impatience. “I called him Papa like his children did. I never said ‘Grandpa’ or ‘Grandma’ neither.”

After her father died, Ruth recalled moving around, even living apart from her mother whose work took her to Sibley, Georgia. “I stayed with my Aunt Mary quite a spell when I went to a public school.” I was very interested in learning more about her father, but Ruth yielded little other than his name was Nathan.

I reached for fiction to parse this shadowy father. In his short story “Cora Unashamed,” Langston Hughes juxtaposes two out-of-wedlock pregnancies, one of a white teen named Jessie, the other of Cora, the family maid. While Cora’s response to her condition is announced in the title, Jessie’s parents force her to have an abortion from which she dies. My own mother had told me the tale of Miss Cora, a mother while she was still a child, but there was not a hint of difficulties in Ruth’s recollection of her origins. Instead, Ruth talked about a father she knew and loved. “He was a turpentine man in Sylvester.”

Again, I resorted to public images to fill in gaps. I found a 1912 postcard of the “turpentine industry” in Florida, with the added caption, “Dipping and scraping pine trees.” The image shows two black men in overalls stripping the bark. Turpentine vapors are health hazards, solvents that burn the skin and eyes, and can even damage the lungs and the central nervous system. Was occupational harm responsible for Nathan’s too early death? Dorothea Lange’s 1937 photographs gave more visual clues: “Turpentine Workers, Georgia, July 1937” shows a group of black men in a field fringed with pine trees.

As she had with Flora's school assignment, Ruth pushed against the preconceptions that prompted my line of questions about her parents. She didn’t remember why or when Nathan died, but that it was when she was too young to go to school. “My father I was very fond of—when I saw him coming down the road, no matter who I was playing with, I would leave them. I’d jump up and meet him, and he would pick me up, put me around his neck, and bring me home. I adored my father, and then he died.”

“Was your mother living with him at the time?”

“I said he was my father!”

“But not all parents live together.”

“Well, this one did.” Ruth’s emphasis on “this one” couldn’t have been sharper, a resolute rejection of my insinuating narrative of a poor single black mother and child. “That’s how I know he died. And after that, my Aunt Mary and her husband came and moved us to Cordele.”

Ruth explained that her mother worked as a cook in those days “for ladies in their homes,” first in Sibley and Sylvester, and then in Cordele. “Why did she have that job, and not another kind of job?” I asked, again wanting Ruth to say that African American women had scant employment opportunities, and that domestic labor was better than other alternatives. I had remembered when I was a child hearing Ruth’s Aunt Thelma declare she didn’t want to cook and clean for anyone but herself in her own home. How Thelma’s insinuation about her relatives’ employment “for ladies in their homes” sat with Ruth, I didn’t know.

During this interview, Ruth had another quick retort to my question. “She had to do something, so she must’ve got a job being somebody’s cook.” Ruth offered a logic about her mother’s work in white people’s homes that she thought was self-evident.

“Now, my mother was a wonderful cook.” About Miss Cora’s culinary skills, Ruth elaborated, “I hear people she worked for rave about what a wonderful cook she was, and if you want something good, let her cook it. I know she made something I loved—that was pork chops. Seemed like they melt away in your mouth.”

          Ruth cooked everything our family ate—from brisket and matzo ball soup and chopped chicken liver to vichyssoise and layer cakes with caramel frosting. My mother would find recipes in the newspaper or Ladies Home Journal for Ruth to prepare. I was astonished to learn from Ruth that she didn't consider herself much of a cook. I had heard the family legend that when my mother interviewed Ruth about the job, she had asked Ruth if she knew how to cook. When Ruth said she didn’t, my mother replied, “I don’t either, and one of us will have to learn how, and it won’t be me.” Ruth’s own account of this encounter didn’t contradict my mother’s story; rather, she played up her own side of it. “She say, you know how to cook? I say, no. You ask me today, I’ll tell you the same thing. I don’t tell nobody I know how to cook. I just don’t.” It was clear that a job cooking for “ladies in their homes,” as Ruth had described Miss Cora’s employment, was nothing Ruth relished.  

          Ruth and Cora had other jobs in the food industry. When Ruth was a very young woman in Georgia, she had followed her mother to a canning factory called Liberty MacNeil. “I worked in tomatoes, my mother worked in beans and pickles.” Some sixty years later, Ruth was telling me about grating tomatoes “near a machine where they’d pull the rotten tomatoes off, and the rest went into a boiler to make canned tomatoes, tomato juice, tomato ketchup, or what have you.” This position seemed to suit Ruth at the time. “If I worked every day, I had a nice check—once they took income taxes out of it. I think they closed that factory. I’m not sure, but maybe they didn’t have peoples to come to work there like when I was working there. My mother worked there year round.”

          For Ruth, this canning factory was a summer job. About her youthful attitude on work back then she mused, “I was a spoiled brat. I wanted to work with the other kids picking tomatoes or tobacco, but they wouldn’t let me go, and I had to stay in the restaurant to help, but then there was nothing to do there.” Ruth didn’t elaborate on this restaurant, nor did she provide background about Liberty MacNeil. These narratives assumed I knew the broader contexts of places and people. I was too uncomfortable to ask outright about the teen mother and other buried bits of Ruth’s story. Maybe it was none of my business.

During that humid summer morning in 1996 when I videotaped our conversation, I pursued the kinds of life stages most familiar to me. I remember once, when in high school I was struggling to translate Caesar’s Gallic War feats, Ruth said she had studied Latin. But I didn’t hear about classical language classes so many years later when she told me about moving from school to school as a young child. Speaking of the time following her father’s death when her mother moved for work and Ruth lived with her Aunt Mary in Cordele, she said, “I went to public school then. Sometimes I visited my mother in Sibley and went to school there too one term, but then went home to Cordele, and went into boarding school at Gillespie Selden Institute and finished high school there. Gillespie cast a certain glow in Ruth's recollections. The school was established in Cordele in 1933 when it merged with Selden Normal and Industrial Institute in Brunswick, originally opened in the first decade of the twentieth century to offer vocational training to African American students. When Ruth attended Gillespie-Selden, most likely during its initial decade, it offered the state’s first nursing program for black women. Although Ruth didn't mention subjects related to health or anatomy when she talked about her school days, she had told me she was once a nurse in Cordele. Ruth linked this work to surgery on her legs while she was at Gillespie. “They chopped up the bones and then pieced them back together,” Ruth had explained to me once when I was a child and I asked about her bone-thin legs. My mother had told me that Ruth had polio and lived where she didn’t receive proper medical care.        

Ruth had a different take on this chapter of her life. “I had quite a few operations—don’t know why.” When I mentioned polio as the reason, she countered, “Rickets too, some doctor once told me. All I know is my legs musta been weak. There was a problem from the time I was little, so they did operations to make me walk a bit better.” A nurse by Ruth’s measure, I gathered, meant taking care of children. “I hung around the hospital as a teenager and everyone thought I was a nurse. A lady, a teacher, wanted me to be a nurse, but I said I had to go back to school to get along with my mother.” Ruth paused here and laughed, “You had to go to school to get along with your mother too because she sent you.” School was a filial obligation, and Ruth made clear that she had finished high school despite interruptions from surgery and work.

Then Ruth left Georgia for wider horizons up north. “I went to Washington and took a change of plans and came to New York. I had two or three relatives there, Lula Bell and Margaret.”

          In a photo booth image taken in the late 1940s when Ruth was in Washington DC in her early twenties, she’s posing with Miss Cora. They look like sisters, although Ruth is the glamorous one, with glossy lipstick, and a spirited smile in contrast to Cora’s mild, wistful expression. Ruth sports the fancier hairstyle, with waves cresting over her forehead, and she wears a double-strand pearl necklace and shiny ring earrings, while Cora has a dark dress with a white collar, reminiscent of the uniforms Ruth wore at our house. Although Ruth did not elaborate on the "change of plans," she did pause in her prescient way, in her response to my question about why she continued on to New York.

          She leveled her gaze squarely at me. “I was looking for you.”

          I learned “phlegmatic” and "laconic" from my mother who dwelled on these three-syllable words as the epitome of Ruth’s sensibility. “She doesn’t show much emotion,” my mother often said when describing Ruth, who did not go in for chin music or jaw dancing. To me Ruth revealed a firm belief that our meeting was fate and that she had sought me even before knowing me. I didn't feel I needed more explanation for feelings that cut through the dross of my reportage-style interview.

          Then she supplied the ordinary answer: “I came to New York to see Thelma. She was a housekeeper for Peanut Cole.” Here I interjected that I’d remembered Thelma saying she didn’t want to clean or cook for other people. “After that job,” Ruth continued, “Thelma came from the mail-packing place. Then she started at some school, a Catholic school, a hospital where chirrens are, where kids come from broken homes. You know, where your mother got mail sometimes asking her to help.”

          I wanted to get back to the narrative about Ruth and my parents. “So you came to New York to see Thelma, and then what happened?”

          “I found you.” Again that prophetic-ironic voice.

          I hung onto a journalist role. “How did you find me?”

          “I found you through Aunt Florence.” We were back to the often-recited tale. Florence was my father’s brother’s wife. Ruth continued, “Well, Aunt Florence was looking for a housekeeper, and Peanut told her—Mrs. Cole told her—that Thelma’s niece was here, and maybe she could get me to work for her.” This alternating between formal and familiar names, between—in reference to my father—“Papa” and “Mr. B,” was indicative of Ruth’s not-quite status, as family member in some respects, yet an outsider in most. The rest of the story had to do with housekeeper-swapping. Aunt Florence was visiting my mother when someone my parents were considering hiring came over. “Aunt Florence liketed her, or she liketed Aunt Florence better than she did your mama.” Ruth injected an element of mistress-trading too. “So Aunt Florence said, ‘I’ll take her, and you take Ruth, you take who Mrs. Cole have visiting.’ And that’s the way it went.”

According to my mother, Ruth was supposed to go to Aunt Florence’s house, but in the end, another young woman arrived earlier to take the position when Ruth’s arrival in New York was delayed by her stopover to visit relatives in Washington. Florence convinced my mother to “try out” Ruth on a temporary basis. “She was very serious and had a beautiful face,” my mother told me regarding her first impressions of Ruth.

          “What was the job like?” I asked Ruth, as if I were conducting a survey for an employment agency.

          “Well, from what I see, I was to take care of her whole house—do her cooking, do her washing, do her ironing, do her cleaning. She had a cleaning lady for a while, but then that stopped. And then take care of you and Jonny, and have off Thursdays and every other Sunday.” When I asked her what she thought of this “job,” her hired position in the life of my family, after all the variety of work she’d had before, she said, “Not too much of nothing. It was something to do and put a little change in my pocket, or I’d have to go back to Liberty MacNeil.”

          Ruth’s retrospective on this employment reminded me of a story my mother had told about her uneasiness that Ruth seemed “unhappy” in our home at first. After Ruth had worked for a few months, my mother considered asking her to leave. “She never smiled and I worried that her disposition wasn't good for young children.” My mother put my father up to the task of sacking Ruth, but that backfired, as my mother relayed to me. “Your father said to Ruth that she didn't seem happy and thought maybe she would prefer a different family or a different job. Ruth didn’t flinch, just looked at him, and said calmly, ‘Everyone who gets to know me, loves me. You all will too.’” This is the tale I heard often from my mother about how Ruth ended up part—and not part—of our family for these multiple decades. Ruth’s words clarified that this was a menial job, “doing” for others in their Northern homes, barely preferable to the factory assembly line in the South. And yet the value of Ruth's labor was not the polished silver or holiday pot roast, but in the lasting—and loving—entanglements with this cluster of people.

“What was I like as a baby?”

“Didn’t want to drink your milk! Didn’t care too much about eating! Jonny kind of clicked with me right away, and everything he had was mine. I wonder why?” Ruth laughed ruminatively. “I guess kids are like that if they see something in you they like.”

My very earliest memories put me in a high chair in the kitchen with Ruth listening to a noontime gospel radio hour, with Mahalia Jackson, the Queen of Gospel, belting out "Take My Hand, Precious Lord." In memory, all the white of the kitchen merges like the days, each into the next and back again, Proustian style. The white of tile and appliances bleeds into the white of the smelly white fish I could not stand. “Now you eat that up—it’s brain food. Your mama done paid a lot of money for that fish.”

 During the interview, Ruth offered a wry summary of her job. “Life around your house was just a bowl of cherries. Yessssss … you and Jonny would mash the cherries, and I drinked the juice!” There’s a compressed metaphor swirling in that bowl.

Much to my parents' discomfort, Ruth announced, “I’m voting for George Wallace,” the Alabama racist who tried to undermine the effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act when he ran for U.S. president that same year and again in 1972 and ‘76. Perhaps there was some undercurrent of irony in Ruth’s insistence that she could vote for whomever she pleased, whether she intended to cast this vote, or whether she liked provoking my parents’ predictable reaction.

She demonstrated this slippery humor even when it came to her annual vacation. Since my family was dependent on Ruth’s presence, and planned all travels accordingly, my mother would ask Ruth when she was going to Georgia to visit Miss Cora, or if she was going to take any other trips. “Well,” Ruth would sometimes smile, “I’m going to see the Queen real soon!” Maybe she’d elaborate that she had plans to travel around the world, or go to France, but this was her way of joking and the effect was that my mother’s anxiety about travel plans increased. My mother used to say, “It’s hard to know where you are with Ruth.” Ruth’s evasions weren't calculated exactly, yet all told, I see her dodges as something other than narrative allergy. Except for Ruth’s hysterectomy when I was twelve when she was unable to work for a month, she never left me for long.

While I was in high school Ruth called me into her room one evening, and said she had an important secret to tell me. “Walter and I got married last week, but I don’t want your mama or daddy to know.” Her reason for this secrecy was that Ruth didn’t intend to live full-time with Walter until I left home. “When you go off to college, there will be time enough. I’m not leaving you until I see you through to the other side."   

Walter Greene was a chef at a restaurant in White Plains. Ruth loved to take my brother and me to visit Walter’s kitchen where he’d ply us with our favorite menu items. He knew all our dietary delights from Ruth. “French fries?” he’d ask. “I know you love spaghetti, Susie,” and he heaped up a plate with pasta. Ruth added to her ironing basket Walter’s uniforms and I’d see her prop up with starch those white toques. Although I enjoyed his generosity as a professional cook, so different from the domestic version his wife halfheartedly held, Walter remained a shadowy person to me. In death, Walter became more vivid, as did Ruth's world outside our home.

It was after eleven at night when my mother phoned from New York to tell me Walter had died two days earlier from lung cancer. At six the next morning I called Ruth to say I’d be in New York in time for Walter’s funeral.

“Really?” Ruth sounded almost excited and almost like herself, except for a slight hollowness in her voice. “You really goin’ be here?”

My parents and I arrived at the funeral home before Walter’s family. In the front hallway was a black glass-enclosed announcement offering the day’s event: 11 o’clock. Monday February 23, 1981. Services for Walter G. Greene. The three of us went uneasily from the entrance hall to the chapel where the coffin was on display in the front of the room. I saw Walter’s head propped up, his black eyeglasses on his face although his eyes were closed.

Two days earlier Ruth had asked my parents to drive her to the funeral home, “the undertaker’s,” as she put it. “You can see Greene’s body. They did a real good job on him. I made sure they put on his glasses. No one would even know it’s Greene without his glasses.”

I asked my mother, “Was it hard to look at him?”

“Actually, it wasn’t so bad. Your father took one look in the coffin and whispered, ‘That’s my suit he’s wearing!’” We had entered Ruth's world by proxy only, through castoff clothing, even while she lived in ours. We were making our debut at Walter's funeral.

After I greeted Ruth's cousin Agnes who had taken a seat up front, I turned back to the third row where my parents had rooted themselves into gray folding chairs. “We better move back, since the front rows are all for Ruth’s family.”

“Don’t worry, dear,” my mother quickly parried. “We’ll be conspicuous no matter where we sit.”

When the seats were nearly filled, two young men helped Miss Cora, who had traveled in a car from Georgia for thirty hours, in through a side door to the front of the room.

Suddenly a hush descended on the dim hum of chatter, and behind me was a terrible sound, a chillingly painful gasp. Everyone turned toward the main entrance, and there was Ruth as the chief mourner, like the bride at the back of a procession. Going down the aisle ahead of Ruth were Walter’s daughter Patricia from Jacksonville, his brother Charles from Miami, and his sister Anne from Chattanooga.  

Transfixed with fear I watched Ruth, her hands covering her face as she sobbed loudly. I had never witnessed this pitch of emotion from her in all my life. My mother’s view of Ruth as stolid may have had more to do with our particular domestic dynamics. A woman dressed in a nurse’s uniform supported Ruth as she limped toward Walter’s coffin. She held Ruth around her shoulders as they moved down the aisle.

When Ruth reached Walter’s body, she leaned over it and cried out, her voice piercing the still room, “Why did you leave me, Greene?” My fingernails reflexively pressed into my palm. On one side of me, my father seemed to shudder, and said beneath his breath, “Gee!” On my other side, my mother did not flinch.

Once Ruth had been led to her seat in the front row, Reverend John Jackson, the minister from Ruth’s AME Church in Harlem, stood at the pulpit to address the mourners. He was a large man with impressive presence, his voice like a full sunset, streaked with a symphonic range of emotion. He began his eulogy, his eyes trained on the audience before him.

“Sometimes, sometimes, my brothers and sisters, we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. We have the suffering with the living, and then more suffering with the dying, and then the ache of hell when they are dead. And we cry out in our pain and in our rage, ‘Why Lawd, why?’"

The minister’s head bent down as if under a huge weight, a pendulum suddenly struck still in the clock of life. Slowly he lifted his head. I was mesmerized by the drama of him, the room’s fragile quiet. Now his voice was a low, deep wave, gathering force as it grew.

“And you ask yourselves, brothers and sisters, ‘Why did my brother Walter Greene die? Why Lawd? Why Lawd? Why now? We’re not finished with him, Lawd! Why now? Why did you take him from me, Lawd? Why?’”

After the graveside services when we were walking back down the path to the row of parked cars, Ruth introduced me to Charles, Walter’s brother. “This here’s my baby.” She appeared tired and, as usual, walked with a lame gait. I was relieved to hear Ruth speak without that pitch of powerful feeling, her cries still pinned to my brain.

Charles put his hand out and I shook his. “Nice to meet you, m’am.”

I was Ruth’s baby. She told me this, she told other people this. But was there another baby? Did I replace another lost baby, like Jessie replaces Cora’s Josephine in the Langston Hughes story? Did I displace Ruth’s own story of other babies, narratives buried, forever lost? Twice I heard that doctors had pronounced Ruth’s body bearing the traces of childbirth.

When I was in seventh grade, Ruth suddenly became ill and had to have a hysterectomy. My father’s cousin Eugene was a gynecologist, and so my parents arranged for Eugene’s partner to perform the surgery. I only remember visiting her in the hospital the night after her operation. She looked small and helpless, not at all the Ruth who protected me from my brother’s punches, my mother’s depression, my father’s mild-mannered oblivion. Her face was drenched, and I could tell she was in terrible pain.

“There’s my baby,” her attempt at smiling more a grimace as she saw me at the foot of her bed.

My mother tried to reassure me when we left the hospital. “Of course, Ruth isn’t dying! She just had major surgery. She’ll be fine in no time.” We spent a month eating most dinners at restaurants, or my mother made tuna salad sandwiches. I learned to make spaghetti sauce from a mix. During that period, I overheard that the doctor said Ruth once had a child.

Many years later I heard a similar story when Ruth was crazy with senility, and no longer knew me even by name. That failure of memory was so painful to bear that I stopped phoning her at the Pinehill Nursing Center in Byronville, Georgia. Her cousin Jean Smith, who lived in Cordele and looked after Ruth when she moved back there a few years after my parents died, would phone me from time to time with updates about Ruth’s condition. I hadn’t caught Jean’s place in Ruth’s sketch of her family tree, but Jean told me she’d known Ruth forever. This time she told me that Ruth had some bleeding, and that the doctors said she had cancer of the uterus.

“That can’t be! I know Ruth had a hysterectomy a long time ago, when she was maybe forty years old.”

“I’m just telling you what the doctors say. And they say she had one baby, maybe two.” If Ruth had given birth, what happened to the baby? Dead or surrendered or something else? In the part of Ruth's life that overlapped with mine, so much was unspoken, so much of the past unshared, that baby was as good as dead.

Ruth liked to talk to the dead, and that’s what she did when I took her to visit Walter’s grave. As if paralleling our peculiar family, The Jewish cemetery, Sharon Gardens, where my family has a plot, and a Christian cemetery, Gates of Heaven, lie side by side in Valhalla, New York. Ruth made wreaths for Walter’s grave with different colors of plastic newspaper and supermarket bags which she balled up in some fashion and then attached to wire clothes hangers. Once I suggested I could get some cut flowers from a florist for her to leave by the gravestone, but Ruth declined. “My flowers look fresh a lot longer than those ones you spend your money on.” She had a point.

          I envied Ruth’s camaraderie with the dead. When we approached Walter’s plot, she’d call out, “Look who’s here, Greene! I brought Susie to see you!” Then she’d give a quick update about relatives or friends, the change of ownership of a restaurant where he’d worked.

Some months after my mother’s Aunt Fredda died in a nursing home, her body willed for scientific research, a special delivery package of the rest of Aunt Fredda, now reduced to smooth sand, arrived at my parents’ front door. My mother and Ruth took Aunt Fredda’s box to our local Valhalla. As they approached Walter’s grave, my mother held the open box while Ruth called out, “Greene! I’ve brought Aunt Fredda to stay with you now! You remember Aunt Fredda! She’s the lady who basted the turkey every Thanksgiving!” Ruth scooped up the substance of Aunt Fredda’s remains, and dispersed the grains like fairy dust onto Walter’s plot.

          Ruth's own death, like her life in some ways, felt painfully remote to me. I had not seen her in several years since she'd returned to Georgia and I had not spoken to her in over a year since she didn't seem to know who I was anymore. Still, I was some variety of next of kin and received the news before dawn one September morning.

          “She gone,” I heard a voice say. “She gone now. Susie, this is Jean. Ruth passed in the night, around one o’clock."   

          A week later and a thousand miles away, Ruth's funeral took place at the New Oak Grove Baptist Church in Cordele. Jean sent me the program from the service, a six-page foldout with a large color photo of Ruth on the front. The image of Ruth came from another photo which appeared inside, one I’d taken at my brother's rental home on Martha’s Vineyard the summer of 1996 when I’d interviewed Ruth. In the original picture, Ruth sits in a tee-shirt on a lawn chair in the company of two toddlers, my brother’s daughter Jenna and my Flora next to her. Flora is hamming it up, Jenna is studying something on her hands, Ruth is looking at the camera. Her expression seems distraught, but perhaps she was in the middle of saying something, and the shutter caught her face at an odd angle.

          The program came to me like a long-distance notice of the framework of Ruth's story, her early and final years in Cordele, which became legible on my mental map when I learned the city was forty miles east of Jimmy Carter's hometown of Plains. Unlike Walter Greene's funeral in White Plains, NY, Ruth had the royal treatment with escorts courtesy of the city of Cordele, including the chief of the police department, the city manager, and the sheriff of Dooly County. The order of the service includes two selections of songs by “The Gospel Ensemble” and a eulogy from the Minister Charles Perry. Ruth’s body didn’t make it to Walter’s Valhalla resting-home; she was buried in “Pleasant Valley”. Toward the back of the funeral program is a poem titled “Come and Rest":

          God said you were getting weary

          So he did what he thought best,

          He came and stood beside you

          And whispered, “Come and Rest.”

          If there were any “Why Lawds” at Ruth’s funeral, the answer might have been this, that she was “getting weary.” Arranged around the poem at the center of the page are several photos including one of Flora and Jenna, a few of Ruth as a much younger woman. In one she’s in a kitchen, although I don’t recognize it. In another, she wears a uniform with an apron, and another shows Ruth with her arm linked through Walter’s. Although neither my parents nor my brother and I appear in any photo, there is one of Ruth at the Hartsdale train station, with her hand resting on the back of my parents’ 1960s Cadillac convertible. Ruth was likely heading to her church in Harlem.

          A short obituary begins: “Mrs. Ruth Steadman Greene, daughter of the late Mrs. Cora Smith born on January 1, 1916 in Sylvester, Worth County, Georgia.” Finally, I learn Ruth’s age, and marvel that she died at eighty-eight, a year older than my father had lived, and thirteen years longer than my mother. She was less than two years younger than my mother. Why had I assumed my mother was at least a decade older? Neither woman was forthright about her age. In addition to her mother's name, this version of Ruth’s biography mentions two aunts and seven cousins, again a glaring contrast with Ruth's own account of an adored father. Then, this: “She moved to New York where she lived and worked for many years. She was employed by a very loving and caring family, The Barntine Family.”

Something was garbled in the translation here, from “Bernstein” to “Barntine,” but no matter. Like a photo negative, Ruth's many decades in New York working for our family for most of her adult life was a shadowy detail for the people at her funeral in Cordele. What she told me about her childhood and family in Georgia, an account colliding with my mother's version, was more a sketch than the thick description I sought. From each perspective, her Cordele community of her childhood and final years, and her workplace people like me, Ruth was a strong presence, known in some respects, and not known in others, the very marvel and mystery of herself, as she had told me, a sum total of a mixed emotion family.

Susan D. Bernstein moved a few years ago to Boston from Madison, Wisconsin where she spent twenty-eight years as a professor of English with a focus on Victorian literature and gender studies. She now teaches in the English Department at Boston University including a course on life writing. In addition to scholarly books and articles, she has published literary nonfiction essays and short fiction, and is writing a novel.

The Granny, the Grocer and the Cobbler

by Eileen M. Cunniffe

The phone roused me near midnight, and I pulled back the covers and stumbled toward it. I’d hardly managed a hoarse hello when my mother’s voice rushed at me from the other side of the Atlantic, wide awake and seemingly oblivious to the five-hour time difference.  

I could tell from her voice everything was fine. More than fine, it seemed.

“How’s the trip?” I asked as I climbed back into bed and propped a pillow between my back and the knobby brass headboard.

“Great,” she yelled. “We’re having a grand time. We’re in a pub.” 

Mom was shouting, no doubt because of the noise around her, but also because she was unaccustomed to speaking to me from so far away. Mostly, I think she was yelling because she was—uncharacteristically—a bit tipsy. I pictured her always-pink cheeks flushed a shade deeper. I imagined the comical scene in a dark, smoky pub as she and Dad had figured out how to place an international call.

My parents had been gone for more than a week. I’d been tracing their itinerary on a map on my dining-room table: Shannon to Galway, Mayo to Sligo, and now Derry, in Northern Ireland. They’d been planning this trip for months, dreaming it for years. All their parents were born in Ireland and emigrated to America. Each couple had met in Philadelphia, made their lives in that city, and never once went back to where they were from.

Now in their mid-50s, their parents long gone, my parents had finally made the journey “home.” Almost no one from my grandparents’ generation was left—just two of Mom’s aunts, Ciss and Aggie, and one uncle. But both my parents had cousins scattered across Ireland. Before the trip, they’d swapped countless letters with these cousins, most of whom they’d never met. Each exchange uncovered another connection, another invitation, another branch of the family that couldn’t wait to welcome them. 

“How was Aunt Ciss?” I asked, knowing they’d seen her in Sligo. Ciss and her sister Ena had visited when I was eight.

“Oh, she was fine,” Mom replied. “I’ll tell you about her when we get back. But guess what? The most amazing thing happened today. I met my granny!” 

“Your granny?” I asked.  

“My granny,” she repeated, giggling.  

“We went to Magherafelt, and we found Pop-Pop’s house,” she continued. 

She said the name of the town just as her father had, with an audible sigh where the silent g and the h brush against each other. As a child I’d been fascinated with that strange-sounding word, which my grandfather loved to say.

“Then we met my granny.”   

Mom’s voice wavered on the word “granny,” and even from 3,000 miles away I could tell there was an urgency to this call. I knew something about her discovery didn’t quite add up. My grandfather left Ireland after his mother died—that much I knew, and little more about his early life. How could my mother have a grandmother who was still alive, a grandmother none of the Irish relatives had mentioned before?  

“My cousin Pauline gave me her address. A tiny old lady opened the door. Before I finished introducing myself she said, ‘Yes, of course, Rose Marie. Michael’s daughter.’ So we went in and she made a pot of tea and we just sat and talked. Imagine—I have a granny,” Mom said giddily, for the fourth time.

“But, Mom, how can you have a granny you didn’t know about?”

“I guess I skipped that part.” 

Mom explained that her grandfather, a shoemaker, had remarried after my great-grandmother died, and his second wife was much younger than him. Which explained how the ninety-year-old granny could still be alive, but did not explain why every relative except Pauline had seen fit to keep her a secret. But our phone call was up, I’d have to wait for the rest of this story. 

I am the oldest of seven brothers and sisters, and the most sentimental when it comes to our Irish ancestry. So Mom had made the right call: if anyone was going to share the excitement about her long-lost granny, it was me. I should have wept for joy to learn I had a “new” great-granny.

But I didn’t.

Because the little old lady who’d shared a pot of tea with my parents was technically just a step-granny to Mom, and a step-great-granny to me. And this particular “step” seemed contrived: only in theory had Mom’s step-granny ever been my grandfather’s step-mother; he’d left Ireland long before she’d stepped into the picture.

“Granny” wasn’t even a word we used, which made Mom’s repetition of it as strange as the news itself. We’d called both of my grandmothers “Nanny.” Mom was now a grandmother herself, and she’d chosen the hip moniker “Grandma Rosie.”  

          My parents took only one picture of the granny because the flash bothered her eyes. In the photo, her straight grey hair is parted down the middle. She has a long, thin noseand thick glasses with large, plastic frames. She’s squinting up from an armchair, Mom crouched beside her, grinning.

          When my parents got home, I heard more about Mrs. Annie Henry. Aunt Aggie hadn’t mentioned her step-mother, even though she’d been so excited to meet my parents that she’d dragged them upstairs to see her son, who was laid up with a back injury, and she’d phoned her daughter in England and handed the phone to Mom to say hello.

Aunt Ciss hadn’t volunteered information about her step-mother either. But once she learned Pauline had, she felt compelled to add some color commentary. She implied the granny had been pregnant before she married the cobbler and that her father hadn’t fathered that child. And she gave Mom the distinct impression that the cobbler’s children had not taken kindly to their step-mother.

         

Three years after their first trip, my parents went back to Ireland, and this time I went along. We visited every relative they’d met the first time, and they showed me each of the four homes where my grandparents were from. Three of these homes were still in our families, although one had been reduced to a crumbling outbuilding behind a newer house. The fourth—the one we reached last—was the house in Magherafelt; my parents had seen it from the outside on their first trip, but the people inside were strangers. 

On our way to Magherafelt, we made one other stop. Mom couldn’t wait to see her granny again, and she was determined I should meet her, as if this would close some ancestral circle. But the granny’s health was failing and she was in a hospital. Although this visit was important to Mom, I wondered if we had the right to intrude on the old woman’s privacy and ask her to entertain her American “relatives” from her sickbed. 

When we stepped into her room, I knew I needn’t have worried. The lively old lady my parents remembered was now a frail little bird who barely made a bump under the bedclothes. Mom set the flowers she’d brought on a table and pulled a chair close to the bed. When she reached for the blanket that covered the sleeping granny’s legs, I excused myself and went to the lobby. 

The tears that had failed to fall when I’d first learned about the granny finally arrived. Not because my step-great-granny was dying, but because it never occurred to me until I saw them together that maybe she and Mom had both been missing something until they’d met. Mom had let Annie Henry step into the void where her real grandparents never had been, and I knew she knew this was a stretch, even if she didn’t say so. And the granny had her own child and her own grandchildren, so she too must have understood the difference. 

After I left the room, the little bird woke up and squeezed Mom’s hand. Both my parents felt she remembered them and understood they’d come to see her again.  

Because my grandfather lived with us while I was growing up, his was the family home I thought I knew best. I’d always pictured a farmhouse, with enough room for thirteen people, and a big yard. Not that he’d ever described it that way, I suppose. But long ago I’d seen a pastel-tinted photograph of him with his parents and ten brothers and sisters all posed on a lawn, and my mind must have conjured the kind of house I thought belonged with that family.

I held onto my image of the Henry home right up until the day I stood outside it. I’d seen pictures my parents took on their first visit, but my mind had simply refused to reconcile the real house on Church Street with my idea of it until I stood there in front of a grey, pebbledash row home on a narrow street in a busy market town.

It had been fifteen years since Pop-Pop died, and still it was hard to forget how sullen he’d been in his last years, how hard he’d been on Mom. But he’d come alive anew for us on this trip, especially when we’d visited Aunt Ciss, who still called her brother “Sonny” more than sixty years after he left home. I’d only ever heard him called Michael or Mickey. I’d laughed with her over how he used to tell us he’d once been a little girl, because he wore whatever hand-me-downs fit, even dresses. 

Dad stood on the sidewalk opposite the house, camera in hand. Just as he snapped a picture of Mom and me, the wide wooden door swung open and a middle-aged man stepped out. We quickly explained why we were photographing his house.

“Please come in,” he said warmly. “My father and sister live here, I know they’d love to meet you.” 

He ushered us past the brass “46” on the chocolate-brown door, through a narrow hall and into a tiny living room, where the elderly father and his daughter sat. We explained our connection to the house, and the old gentleman recognized the Henry surname right away. “Of course, I knew the Henrys,” he said. “They were a fine family. Your grandfather,” he offered, looking directly at Mom, “was a cobbler, and this room we’re in was his workshop.”

At first I thought he was just being polite. But then he began to remember names—Jack and Barney were the ones he mentioned first. He was ninety-three, his daughter told us, so my grandfather and his siblings would have been his contemporaries. 

“I remember Mickey, he worked at the food co-op,” the old man said. Mom was pleased to report Mickey had found similar work in Philadelphia and eventually owned a grocery store. She’d grown up working in that store, and living upstairs. The old man seemed pleased to know this. He asked his daughter to show us through the house, which she gladly did. Upstairs were four tiny bedrooms. How had thirteen people lived there? From a back window I saw a patch of grass, far too small to have been the setting for the photograph I half-remembered. Downstairs was a modest kitchen and the small living area that had doubled as a workshop.

“Show them the hallway,” the old man instructed. His son led us back to the passage where we’d come in. “Stand here,” he said, then waited as we took turns stepping into a well-worn dip in the floor. “Right here,” he said, pressing his hand against the wall, “was a window. Customers would pass shoes back and forth through it. Over time there was so much traffic it bowed the floor. We closed up the wall, but there’s your proof of the cobbler’s shop.”   

          The elderly man seemed to have exhausted his memories of the Henrys. Mom hung on every word, hoping for new information that might shed a little light on the scant facts she’d collected on her first visit to Ireland, but none was forthcoming. Our two families parted with warm handshakes all around.

A quarter-century has passed since Mom called to tell me about her great discovery. All that time I’ve carried around in my head what little bits I’d heard of the cobbler’s story. I’ve turned them over so often—like a snow globe—that what I knew for certain eventually blurred. Unconsciously I’d invented new scenes and extra twists in the plot. I’d forgotten who’d first told Mom Annie was still alive, and who’d implied the rest.

Only lately have I started wondering in earnest about the cobbler and his family, trying to make the picture come clear. I began with what little I knew about my grandfather: He was twenty-three when he sailed for America in 1929 on the S.S. Albertic. Before he left he was a hardworking butter-and-egg man and a decorated Irish football player. In Philadelphia, he built a successful business. He mentioned Magherafelt often, but almost never the names of his people there. He took his family obligations seriously and was a good provider and a generous, though stern, father and grandfather. And I don’t remember him ever being happier or more charming than he was that summer and fall when Ciss and Ena came to visit. 

Around the same time I began wondering about his backstory, Mom decided to divvy up our family photographs. I asked if I could see—or even have—the Henry family portrait, which I hadn’t seen in decades. The one I mis-remembered as a smiling, relaxed clan in some bucolic setting.

I have that old photograph in my possession now—the original, tinted copy mounted on cardboard that my grandfather must have carried in his suitcase. How many times did he take it out and study those faces? The names are recorded on the back in Mom’s neat handwriting. It’s a formal pose, with a leafy green backdrop that’s clearly fake. Everyone is wearing his or her Sunday best. Two little girls sit on sheepskin rugs in front of two rows of older faces, all with similar features: thick, wavy helmets of unruly hair, some dark, some fair; deep-set eyes and thick brows that all slope downward at the same angle; and thin lips, only a few of which suggest any effort at smiling. The ones whose shoes are visible—including my great-grandfather, right leg crossed jauntily over left, one shiny black boot all but touching the hem of his wife’s long dress—seem to be well shod, as one might expect.

 There they all are, together: the Henrys of Magherafelt, County Derry, in the late 1920s, as best we can guess. Mom knows Martha was the oldest and Aggie was the youngest, but she doesn’t know where the rest of them—Michael (Sonny), Rose (Ciss), Barney, Jack, Mary, Ena, Patsy, Daisy and Kay—fell in terms of birth order. How could I not have known I had a great-aunt named Daisy?

Pauline told Mom their grandmother had all her teeth pulled shortly before the photograph was taken. Her false teeth weren’t ready, and she’d wanted to reschedule the portrait. Because the cobbler insisted on having the picture made as planned, my great-grandmother Rose’s mouth appears as the merest hint of a line above her chin. 

Mom and I recognize a stubborn streak that maybe kept the cobbler from rescheduling. But we might be wrong. Perhaps there was some urgency to having the portrait made, a sense that the little house on Church Street wouldn’t contain them all much longer. Martha looks to be wearing a wedding band. Maybe one of the brothers had just booked his passage out of Ireland—Barney to America, or Patsy to Australia. Patsy seems too young to be leaving, but the resolute look on his face and his crossed arms suggest he’s ready to bolt. If one of the boys was about to leave, it could explain the solemn faces. Or were they told not to smile? Is that why Aggie looks so cross, or did she not like being made to sit on the floor?

The edges of the image are soft and out of focus, like the bits of family lore the American relations have cobbled together. Ena and Daisy each have one arm that fades into the background. Kay and Aggie are in white, probably their First Communion dresses. Four little girls in all, maybe ranging from seven to twelve years old. My grandfather looks to be about twenty, so it won’t be long until he and Barney, Jack, Patsy, and their mother Rose are all gone from the picture, leaving the cobbler with a houseful of young daughters.

Nothing we’ve heard makes us think Annie helped the cobbler raise his other daughters after their mother died. It seems more likely they’d all left home before the cobbler remarried.

My grandfather would have learned about his father’s second marriage through the mail—the only way he ever got news from home, until late in his life, when he or Ciss occasionally splurged on a transatlantic call. Did his father write to him directly, or did one of his siblings tell him about their new step-mother and step-sister? I imagine he was relieved to be on the other side of the ocean. I remember him as proud and proper, mindful of appearances and what the neighbors might think.

His brother Bernard was also in Philadelphia, and I imagine them speaking about their family. But Barney died young, and that subsequent visit with Ciss and Ena when they were all in their late fifties or early sixties was the only other time my grandfather spent with any of his siblings after he left Ireland. Surely, they must have discussed their father.   

As a child Mom was vaguely aware that her grandfather had remarried, but she was so far removed from the experience of being anyone’s granddaughter that the news didn’t mean much. “They always said she was very good to him,” Mom remembers hearing (or more likely, overhearing), “but they said it kind of grudgingly.” She remembers her father receiving a letter telling him his father had died. After that she never heard another word about her step-granny for almost half a century.

In the nearly thirty years my mother’s parents were married, my grandmother always handled correspondence with the Irish relatives—including all those Henry in-laws she’d never even met. She sent photos, money, notes of congratulations and condolence, even a First Communion suit for one of my grandfather’s nephews, Mom recalls.

When my grandmother died, Mom inherited the task of corresponding with the Irish relations. Pop-Pop’s step-mother never made it onto his Christmas-card list. Yet somehow Annie managed to keep track of him, because even at ninety she’d known who my mother was and how they were connected.

My parents have told me everything they recall about their first meeting with the granny, which was all polite conversation, a visit that lasted as long as a pot of tea. If they talked at all about the cobbler, Mom doesn’t recall what was said; and if they had, she almost certainly would.

Still, I keep asking questions. Mom answers by digging up every scrap she can find—prayer cards confirming when my great-grandfather and step-great-granny died, a letter from Church Street saying we were welcome to visit again. She hands over each treasure as if it will answer my questions. I have the frayed white jacket my grandfather wore in his grocery store. I have his passport, and my grandmother’s, and their marriage license. I have the journals my parents kept on their trips to Ireland. On that first trip, Mom wrote that they were “completely enchanted” by the granny, and she described their meeting as “the most remarkable event of the trip.” She also noted that one of her cousins said their grandfather had been a great cobbler: “He could just about spit nails into the heel of a shoe.” 

Mom had received a letter from the granny’s daughter, Kathleen, after our hospital visit, and we knew my step-great-granny died six days after we saw her. But by the time I started asking questions, this letter had gone missing. Then one day Mom called to say she’d found it. “It’s yours, of course,” she told me.

          Kathleen was responding to a Christmas card from Mom. From the seven-page, hand-written letter we learn (all over again, because of course we both read it when it was new) that we just missed meeting Kathleen at the hospital that day. We re-learn that my step-great-granny had six grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. We calculate that Kathleen was four years older than Mom, Kathleen’s oldest child four years older than me.

And thanks to that letter, we now know even less than we thought we did about the cobbler’s children, and his second marriage. 

 “I remember your father’s photo which was always on the sideboard of your grandfather’s house in Church St. where I lived from the age of 7 until 12 …,” Kathleen wrote. Which begs the question of where she lived before she was seven, and what it might mean that she referred to the cobbler as “your grandfather” and not “my father” (or “step-father”). 

And then there’s this: “… I want you to know something very specially. Would you please let Ciss know that Mammy didn’t have her address when she moved and that she asked for it or the phone number on many occasions but it was not forthcoming! Mary and Ciss never forgot her over all the years and she would so much have wanted me to write or call to say so. I do hope you can put that right.”

Mom would have done her best to convey this message to ornery Aunt Ciss, knowing, as Kathleen surely did, that it wasn’t always easy to put things right with a Henry, or even to know what was wrong in the first place.

All we can do now is read between the lines. From the warm tone of Kathleen’s letter, and the cool undertone of everything else Mom heard from other Henrys, it seems reasonable to conclude that the day my middle-aged mother turned up on Annie’s doorstep was the first time one of the cobbler’s grandchildren had jumped for joy at the chance to call her “granny.”  

The cobbler’s house in Magherafelt is gone now—my Uncle Mickey went looking for it and found it had been torn down. Ciss and Aggie died long ago, and our favorite Henry cousin, Pauline, died too. There’s no one left to ask about the people in the picture, the missing parts of their stories, or at least no one we know well enough. Public archives could fill in some blanks, but they wouldn’t tell us the stories we wish we knew; at best they’d help us cobble together a few more dates or add some branches to the family tree.

I ask Mom what she remembers knowing as a child about her father’s parents. “He never talked about them,” she says. And although neither one of us says so, we both know this is the real mystery we are still trying to solve.

I’ve revised the scenes in my snow globe that I’d fictionalized over time. I’ve written down only what I believe to be true, or can reasonably surmise, about the cobbler, his wives, their children and grandchildren.

With one exception: I have, quite consciously, allowed myself to invent a scene at the end of that long-ago day when my mother met her granny. I imagine that after she kissed my parents goodbye and closed the door behind them, she picked up the phone and dialed her only daughter’s number. 

“You’ll never guess what happened today,” she began, then blurted out the news before Kathleen could reply: “I met my granddaughter.”

Eileen Cunniffe’s nonfiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Superstition Review, Hofstra Windmill, Bluestem Magazine and The RavensPerch. Occasionally, her stories present themselves as prose poems. Three of her essays have been recognized with Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards and another received the Emrys Journal 2013 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. More about her work may be found at: www.eileencunniffe.com.