November 2006. Gretchen Elsner-Sommer begins to write what she imagined would be her autobiography. In time, she lays out a list of chapters: seven in all, from her birth in 1948 to 2006. And she has extraordinary material to work with, a set of journals she wrote from October 1969, when she was 21 years old. Gretchen began her journaling at the time of the birth of her daughter Maggie, and she continued her journal up to about two weeks before her death, August 14, 2020, age 71. Not every day, but hardly a break of more than a week.
While family members and friends, and others, knew that Gretchen journaled, it was not known until after she died that she had produced digital and print copies of her journals for 16 of the first 27 years of her journaling: 1990-2005. Three parts, three Word files, in print, coming to about 900 single-spaced typed pages in all.
In one journal entry, Gretchen reported that she had completed five chapters and was looking forward to working on two more: “Chapter Six: 1986 until moving to Ann Arbor 1995” and “Chapter Seven: 1995 until now.”
Soon after we completed the printing of Gretchen’s The Book of Hertha in October 2022, Heather Gretsch and I began to talk about continuing to edit Gretchen’s writings, some of which we were adding to Gretchen’s website, LookingOppositely. We became aware that one long essay uploaded to the website, “Traveling,” was a core piece of her projected “autobiography”: “Chapter One: 1948, Birth until Move to Shorthill Road, 1953.” We had found it on a thumb drive. We also found a photo album that Gretchen assembled with photos, letters, postcards, and documents referred to explicitly, or related to, her reconstruction of her first years of life.
Later, we discovered another section: “Chapter Two: 1953 until we return from Europe 1959.” We have found a “Chapter 3” but we are not certain it is “Chapter Three” of the proposed autobiography. We have hopes of still finding Chapters Four and Five, and of course Three, of the projected “autobiography.” We shared our confidence that Gretchen provided a credible accounting of what she had completed. We had searched several thumb drives, an external hard drive, and several computers, as well as crates of files of papers from her many research and writing projects. But we did not find what we thought we should be able to find.
While we were working on editing the Hertha texts, Heather and I came to know that Gretchen began drafting a “time line” of her life from 1948 onwards. The work on the time line was begun December 4, 2008, and the last entry refers to her life and thoughts on specific dates in November 2007, curiously an entry that she transported imaginatively into an account of great-aunt Hertha’s time in Calcutta.
Gretchen’s time line is an extraordinary detailed accounting of her day-to-day and week-to-week experience. It replicated, in format and style of writing, the time lines that Gretchen meticulously constructed for thirteen women in her ancestry, each with attached documents and images, as well as the lived experienced of each woman contextualized in the moments of significant events on the world stage. Gretchen uploaded these thirteen time lines to LookingOppositely. [These texts appearing on the website look forward to some future copy-editing.]
For a moment, I thought that Gretchen’s work on the “time line” might have represented what was meant by the reference to five completed chapters. But comparing Gretchen’s discursive and imaginative writing in “Chapter One” and “Chapter Two” to “Gretchen’s time line” text, and to the thirteen other time lines, I recognize that the two forms of historical writing are clearly different. One could not stand in for the other.
A time line, such as Gretchen’s, could be in a sense an archive for discursive and imaginative writing, and perhaps it was so in respect to Gretchen’s writings on the round-the-world journey of her great-aunt Hertha, now available as an edited print volume, The Book of Hertha. [An aside here: it is our intention to copy-edit Gretchen’s time-line, which is—in its present formatting 79 pages long, and to upload the text to LookingOppositely.] But, in this instance, Gretchen’s drafting of her Chapter One, and her list of seven chapters of her projected “autobiography” preceded her project of constructing her time line.
As far as Heather and I know, Gretchen never spoke to anyone about this project of her writing an “autobiography”—though she did suggest from time to time that I, her partner, do so with my own life and writings—so Heather and I have tried to imagine not so much the contents of the missing chapters but rather the course of Gretchen’s work from 2006 to 2008 when her attention to writing about her own life shifted, it seems from an essay form to the time-line approach. It is possible that at some time between the commencement of the “autobiography” and the beginning of work on the time line, Gretchen may have shifted the mode in which she would attempt to diagram her life experience. Heather has noted that amidst this work, Gretchen opened two other lines of writing organized more or less chronologically, one “The Thanksgivings of My Life” in which she sets out her memories of every Thanksgiving gathering from 1948 through 2012; and, a journal of her dreams that she recorded over a number of years. So, there is the possibility that she was experimenting with different forms of representing the sequences in her own personal and emotional history.
Most significantly, we guessed that Gretchen left the methodical frame of a chronologically organized story of her life and began to see herself producing a collection of essays that related to her life, and reflected her research, but which would not be represented as an “autobiography”. It was as if she were trying to free her thinking, her imagination, and writing from a temporally organized failure framework of one thing after another. We have found an additional series of “chapters” that suggest at least one alternative plan for a book.
Across her writings over five decades, Gretchen was experimenting with variant ways of understanding and representing the pasts of women and families, a different sense of “family history”, not just her own but also the genre of producing family histories as touch-stones of people reckoned a part of a family or lineage, or of interconnected lineages. Here, in the months of 2007, she was finding her way moving in and out of different possibilities of organizing her writings. . .writings both completed and those yet imagined. It is pretty clear that Gretchen sought through her research, and in her writings, to reconsider the ways in which various intimate histories engage “broader” social histories. As she herself would occasionally remind others, she was not doing genealogy but rather attempting to comprehend, and represent, the experience of women who came before her.
In this autobiographical work, as in other writings, Gretchen recognized the importance of imagination (sometimes referred to as “intuition”) in amplifying the archive beyond the objective details of lives, in understanding how those archives can possibly seed imagination, producing understandings and representations that exceed the possibilities of conventional biographical and social accounts. Gretchen was a great reader and moved among creative work, fiction poetry, and writings representing themselves as sociology and history, and here she was perhaps looking for validation in bringing creativity and objectivity into a close relationship with one another.
In her work on the time lines, and in her texts relating to Hertha’s round-the-world journey, 1919-1923, Gretchen saw chronology as critical, not only for placing experience in sequence but also in understanding the moments of intersection among life events and world history. . .to cite one example here, the question of simultaneity of great-aunt Hertha’s and the Prince of Wales’s experiences in Calcutta discussed in The Book of Hertha. So, in part of her writings 2006-2008, Gretchen claimed the value and possibility of a chronological frame, but seems also to have been seeking something else, something beyond the discipline imparted by simple historical ordering.
For Gretchen, her research and writing would characteristically bring into view those who might have in various ways disappeared from the knowledge of descendants, or been forgotten, or silenced, portions of their lives hidden, but also as a path to understanding herself, her life, and answering those who have looked past her, not seen her at the edge of the frame, assuring through her craft not only that she would be seen but also that she, and those she most often wrote about, were at the edge, almost out of sight and mind, however formative they might have been of those around them and of next and future generations.
Perhaps, ironically, the opening chapter of Gretchen’s “autobiography” is in some ways not about herself at all. It is a deep accounting of the relationship of Gretchen’s mother Maxine Elsner (also known as “Mike” but then as “Sylvia”) and her father Bill Gretsch across the years of their courtship through Bill’s struggle with cancer, and then his death, and her mother’s first years of widowhood. The chapter posted here represents the most comprehensive representation of that relationship of Maxine and Bill and of the family Bill and Sylvia constituted. It is a complicated, challenging, and loving story that is, in an important sense, a gift to Bill and Sylvia’s descendants, whose numbers will soon come to approach a hundred. It is hoped that they, and those who follow from them, will find value in exploring whence they came.
David William Cohen
July 29,2023
Gretchen’s partner (1989-2020)
Monday, November 13, 2006 9:37am
Old fur timbers, disassembled during renovation from the roof beams of our house, burning and crackling in the fireplace. Strauss playing a waltz on CBC radio. A grey day. I can see David through the kitchen window revising the plan for the back entrance to the barn.
I woke up on Saturday morning with the idea to write my autobiography. . .a wonderful writing idea to wake up with.
My earliest memory is of being on a big bed with white sheets and lots of pillows and soft blankets. I am extremely happy. Someone is with me, hugging me, playing with me. Lots of sunlight coming in from the window at the side of the bed. I think I am between one and two years old. It must be Emily who is with me.
Emily came to live with my family the month I was conceived: April of 1947. In fact, the first reference I found to Emily in family letters is dated exactly nine months before I was born, April 15, 1947. My mother’s letters to her parents, saved through many years, have helped me put back together the pieces of my family’s life in the very early stages of my own life.
My mother’s letters came to me only recently. I was in my late 40s and my mother had been dead for more 30 years when I first heard of their existence. Word came to me through my brother’s second wife, Dinah. Dinah and I had never been close and Dinah had never met my mother. Nevertheless, there she was explaining to me one Sunday afternoon, over the telephone, how she felt she had gotten to know my mother so well by reading her letters. Her letters, I thought, WHAT LETTERS??!!! I had never heard anything about my mother’s letters.
That was how I first found out about the letters, more than 30 years after my mother’s death. I learned that they were all written to her parents. She wrote the first at age ten and the last when she was 46 just before her death. Her parents kept them to themselves until they were passed down to my mother’s brother and then my mother’s only son. Nobody, it seems, thought to mention them to any of my mother’s three daughters.
This dismissal of the importance of my mother’s daughters in the preservation of her legacy gave me an immediate clue as to my mother’s own difficulties in a family of which she was the only daughter. These letters proved to be a gold mine of information as to who my mother was and how she survived my father’s death in 1948.
The letters written before 1948 show a woman I never knew. They were written by a women who constantly struggled to be independent of her parents and then, in 1948, with the death of her husband, gave up the struggle. That was the year my life began, just months before my father’s death.
The mother I knew was very close to her parents. Her last 16 years of letter writing depict a relationship with my grandparents which I remember well. Although she choose not to live near her parents, my mother nonetheless depended on them. Perhaps, in these years, as she raised her four young children without their father, she hoped that a continuing relationship with her own parents would provide in their lives a sense of family order and continuity which she by herself could not supply.
Over the years, I’ve looked at these long hidden letters more and more closely. Now, I am not only mystified by the woman the letters opened up to me, I am also intrigued by the woman whom the letters don’t describe, the woman my mother hid from her parents. The life my mother shared with my father and not with her parents begs my imagination. The first letter I could find that mentions Emily was dated “Monday morning April 14, 1947.” My mother began this letter to her parents with a sort of backhand explanation why she wasn’t visiting with them in California as they had planned. “Here we are in New York again, when we had hoped I’d soon be in California.” It had been quite a while since my mother’s last visit with her parents and apparently she felt she needed to give them an explanation. My father had been ill— “some sort of digestive disorder”— my mother wrote to her parents on April 14. So, my mother, my father and my oldest sister Charlotte age 3 were in New York making the “strenuous rounds of a different doctor a day.” What my mother didn’t disclose to her parents in this letter was immense. Just before my parent’s left unexpectedly for New York, Bill’s X-rays from his Chicago doctor had showed signs of cancer.
Katie, age 2 and Freddie not yet one, were left at home in Chicago with “my new housekeeper (Emily) and a friend Lou Egan.” My parents had lived in New York before, in fact my father grew up in New York. So there were lots of friends and family to help take care of Charlotte as my parents traveled from doctor to doctor. My father’s Chicago doctor had not wanted him to make the trip but “Bill felt he had to so I came along on an hour’s notice to do what I could,” my mother wrote. I must have been conceived in New York in this time of uncertainty and hope, for I was born exactly nine months later, January 15, 1948. I like to think that I was conceived in the midst of the comfort my parents gave each other in these uncertain days. “We may go to Boston to the Leahy (?) clinic. Have decided against Mayo’s for the present.”
Less than a week later, my mother’s wrote to her parents from Rochester, Minnesota. Dated Sunday April 20. “No sooner returned to Chicago than we decided to come to the Mayo Clinic…Bill starts there tomorrow morning. Will keep you posted.” My mother writes about the day before in Minnesota and how, “after making preliminary arrangements,” they rented a car and “drove to St. Paul— 90 miles. Visited and saw music stores, and just returned. Had a convertible Mercury, and the weather was so nice we drove most of the way home with the top down.”
On that day of fast driving in Minnesota, April 19, 1947, there is a picture of my Mom and Dad. It’s one of those pictures taken on the street and made into a postcard by a street photographer. My parents both look wonderful. My mother has a big smile and my father, who had taken my mother’s arm as they walked, is almost grinning at the camera. They are dressed warmly, both wearing suits and overcoats and hats. Their overcoats are opened expressing a relaxed comfortable ambiance. They are caught in mid-stride, my mother’s right foot hardly touches the pavement. My father’s left foot poised on its toe about to leave the ground. They look very young, they look very happy and they look very healthy. I remember seeing this picture when I was much younger. I didn’t know its history until recently. My mother hardly ever talked about my father. When I look at that picture now, I am much older than either of my parent’s were when it was taken. They are in fact the same age as my children. I know now what will happen to my parents in the next few days, in the next few months, in the next few years. My heart breaks for them and I want to step into the picture and help them. I want to comfort them like I would comfort my own children. When I tell this to my husband, my sadness at what is about to happen to them and my need to comfort this young couple, he reminds me that I was there in that picture. I was already comforting them.
TRY TO FIND THE ESSAY OF LETTER THURSDAY APRIL 24…AND INSERT IT HERE. I ONLY HAVE HARD COPY!
I was born January 15, 1948 in Chicago. The next day at 6 pm, my father sent a telegram to my mother’s grandmother and aunt in Joplin, Missouri. “Baby born weight 8 lbs, 9 ounces Mother and baby doing fine at Wesley Memorial hospital love, Bill.” He specifically doesn’t say that I was a girl, their third daughter. My mother’s parents surely already knew. A few days later, my mother wrote to her parent’s on pink stationery:
“January 19th Dear Mother and Dad, Your new little granddaughter whose name is either Getschen (sic) Gretrude (or vice versa, is a dusky beauty—-big brown eyes, long dark brown hair—well filled out. Always finishes her meals, and is a perfect speciman (sic) I am feeling wonderful, like my doctor and the hospital is just like a good hotel. Plan to stay awhile. Received a beautiful new suit, blouse, slip. Gloves and hose this mornng from my husband! Certainly was wonderful of you to call.
With love, Mike”
Just about two weeks after my birth, a big party was given in my honor at the Illinois Athletic Club. My godparents Bob and Loretta (Rita) Cuskley flew in from New York for the occasion. As a little girl, I was always so proud of my godparents. They were so attractive and always so well dressed. Just a few years ago, I learned that Bob and Rita had spend the summer before my birth with my parents. They had rented neighboring cabins on the shores of Long Island Sound at Sag Harbor. A few years before that—before my parents had children—they were neighbors on Burns Street in Forest Hills, New York. This was during the war and my parents had wonderful parties during the war. A friend of theirs once told me that in that time, you had to celebrate every chance you got because no one knew what was going to happen next. Bob and Rita’s son told me that he remembered, as a young boy, one party when a piano was carried down the block from his parents’ house to my parents’ house where the party was and a piano player was expected.
There is a wonderful picture of Dad from that summer in Sag Harbor. He is standing by the shore in a bathing suit. He had a big barrel hairy chest and broad shoulders. I loved looking at this picture as a child but I had no idea when it was taken. The Cuskleys had three children, two boys and one girl, Ann. There is another picture of Ann with braids and my father standing on the edge of the woods that led to the beach. Ann looks very cute and my father very strong. Like my memory of my father, my only memory of Ann is one of absence. She had polio some time after this picture was taken in 1947. I don’t think I ever met her. My father himself had had polio as a child so it always seems odd to me to look at this picture of my dad whom I never really knew, all healthy and strong and Ann, whom I only imagined as crippled with polio, also healthy. Its interesting they they are standing together in this photo with their shared history of polio, a history that was not evident at the time the photo was taken.
In that summer in Sag Harbor, my father would take a small boat out into the sound and catch fish. He would come back to the beach and fry the fish right there in a fire he made himself. Probably started with wood from the forest behind the picture of him and Ann. In 2002, the Cuskleys’ son told me this story. He was ten years old at the time and was always very impressed with my father and his energy.
My father was a strong swimmer. My father’s right leg was left crippled from his boyhood polio and all sports that included walking and running were impossible for him. He became an excellent swimmer. I’ve heard many stories about his swimming feats, but, that summer, the summer after his operation, swimming was not possible.
His operations at the Mayo Clinic the previous spring had included a colostomy and removal of the rectum. On April 28, 1947 my mother sent a telegram to her parents “Operation Highly Successful no danger of reoccurrence. Bill comfortable.”
When my parent’s returned to Chicago, they didn’t return to their apartment on Palmer Square. Rather, they took an air-conditioned suite at the Palmer House in downtown Chicago. My father’s nurse from the Mayo Clinic accompanied them on the long “rather hectic trip” home on the train. She stayed on for four days. From my mother’s letters it sounds like it was not an easy transition for my father. Certainly, he was not ready to go back to an apartment with three children under the age of three. In the midst of it all, my father came down with an abscess tooth which had to be extracted. A doctor friend of theirs, Herb MacNeal, came to spend some time with Bill. Herb had been a family friend for a while. In late March 1944, when baby Charlotte joined the family, my mother wrote her parents:
“We have two sets of pictures of her, some black and while some color…by Major MacNeal, who had quite a group of CasaBlanca(sic) pictures in the National Geographic. He appointed himself official baby photographer, and comes out with a car load of spotlights, etc. He is a doctor….unfortunately will be shipped out soon, but since he is stationed on a transport, I hope he will be back at frequent intervals.”
Herbert P. MacNeal was the photographer for an article which appeared in National Geographic magazine in July 1943. The article was entitled “Americans on the Barbary Coast”. The article was written by Willard Price. The piece included a photo insert by MacNeal entitled “Casablanca Smiles”. In June 1947, my mother wrote her parents again about MacNeal:
“Herb has been a great help to Bill, getting him on a good diet, giving him iron, locating this infection from the tooth, and generally giving him sound advice. Don’t know what we would have done without him, as only a personal friend would spend so much time and diagnose so carefully. If it hadn’t been for Herb, Bill probably wouldn’t have gone to a dentist for a year. Will try to do better on the next letter I start, love, Maxine.”
My mother had started this letter on Tuesday. Cut it off suddenly and picked it up and finished it again on Saturday. “Have been busy as a bee…doing very little.” I doubt the latter part of that statement. With a sick husband and three small children, I find it amazing she found time to write to her parents at all. In this letter, my mother found time to write on the margins near her first mention of MacNeil, “he’s the one who took all the pictures of Charlotte when she was little.” I find it amazing that my mother found the moment and the energy to relate this piece of history, to add it on to the context of the letter she was writing. It seems like she was not only making it clear to her parents who MacNeal was but also making it clear to me, the child she was carrying. She was leaving a note to me, to the future. She was linking up the quickly scattering pieces of her life. Perhaps, sitting down and writing these letters to her parents was the only time she found to access and to ponder.
As the stages of her husband’s illness ebbed and waned, she no doubt felt that she was losing hold of the world she and Bill once shared.
Please note that my mother at this time is pregnant with her third child in three years. She must have been exhausted and worried, but there is no mention of this in her frequent letters home. I do remember my mother telling me years later that she could not write letters in my father’s sick room. At first she would try to write while he was sleeping. But the noise of her pen bothered him. He was not an easy patient. I wish I could remember the context in which she told me this story: a story about her writing, a story about their life together. Mostly, I remember not knowing enough or hardly anything at all about these topics. When my parents first returned to Chicago, Louise (Huff), a friend of my parents stayed at the apartment with the children. I imagine Emily was there too, getting closer to the children every day. My parents must have been very hopeful that summer after they were settled down in their rented cabin on Long Island Sound. On July 3, my mother wrote to her parents,
“Arrived safely and will have an ideal set up here. Big fenced in backyard with plenty of room to keep the noise away from us. Bill looks better already getting tan and getting his appetite back! He is enjoying the girls and Freddie…all well and getting browner by the minute. Taking Freddie to the doctor for shots right now, Love, Mike.”
I imagine my mother spending a lot of time indoors that summer. Maybe that’s because there are no pictures of her on the beach with the others. She must have been exhausted from the tensions of the previous spring. She wrote her parents before leaving Chicago, “Louise Huff who lived close to us in Jamaica is going to take care of the girls this summer. Emily will take care of Freddie and clean, wash dishes, etc. and I will cook and take care of Bill.” So it was a full household. I imagine my mother talking with Rita Cuskley in the kitchen while she cooked. She would have told Rita that she was pregnant again. To think only three years earlier, as they made plans to adopt Charlotte, my parents worried about never being able to conceive. Together, I imagined my mother and my godmother talked as women have for generations about the meaning of a new pregnancy, the hopes and worries. It was during this shared summer of my mother’s last pregnancy that Rita and Bob were chosen as my godparents.
During that summer my parents made plans to return to Chicago in their own car. They would take an extended car trip together. The quietness and aloneness such a trip would offer them was very different from their busy summer. Just the two of them, and of course I was with them too. My mother was 7 months pregnant by the time they started their journey. But I didn’t learn about this trip until much later. . .when I read the postcards my mother had sent to her parents along the way.
They traveled a circuitous way driving 1800 miles over what was in reality a much shorter distance. They stopped at the Arrowhead Lodge in the Ozarks and at Starved Rock State Park just west of Chicago. They weren’t in a hurry. It must have been the only time they had been alone together in quite a while. Of course they weren’t completely alone. I was with them. I was 56 years old when I first found out about this trip. I spent hours trying to recreate the hours I had alone with my parents. Imagining and writing and this is what emerged:
My mother stands with my father in the garden waiting for me. They are both much younger than I am now. I’m still getting my things together, watering the flowering pots, pulling a final weed. Settling down to write is always like this for me, a slow process with detours and evasions. My last minute hesitations are only efforts to ready myself for the beginning of our long journey together.
Writing my way through this trip won’t be easy. Standing next to their Oldsmobile station wagon, my parents’ bags are all packed. They are not interested in rushing me; rather they are indulging me as if I were still a young child. They know every step of the way and I am feeling my way through each uncertainty. The memory I’m working from, although deeply buried in my prenatal past, is extremely tenacious and persistent. It buoys me at the same time that it eludes me. Yet, the contentment I feel at its revelations pushes me to continue.
Bill and Sylvia wait by their brand new 1947 Oldsmobile because my mother is momentarily out of breath. In the middle of her seventh month of pregnancy, the child she is carrying sometimes takes her breath away. That child is me. Working today from resurfaced postcards and newly assembled medical records, and counting backwards through time, I find myself included in this trip on which they are embarking. It is all somehow very familiar. My father waits with my mother patiently now as she catches her breath. His recent surgery and slow continuing recovery have taught him a certain tolerance with his young wife which he didn’t show in her earlier pregnancies.
It is the beginning of fall and their older children have already left the rented summer cabin on Long Island Sound. Charlotte, Katie, and Freddie are traveling with Emily who has been living with the family since last spring, right before my father’s surgery. Their trip home will be much shorter than ours.
Our journey was carefully laid out over the long summer months of my father’s convalescence in Sag Harbor. That summer, there were many visitors to their cabin by the sound. Family and friends brought with them maps and brochures which my parents savored as they routed their automobile trip back home to Chicago. This trip, their immediate future, was the one thing they could plan with assurance. Although my parents remained hopeful, the months and years ahead were not so certain.
My mother’s doctor advised against the trip. And, of course, her parents worried. She was their only daughter. It was late in her pregnancy and their route was drawn out longer than it need have been. Surely, she was exhausted by the recent months of constant caring for her recuperating husband. My mother, however, promised that they would travel slowly and rest often. In her third pregnancy, she was confident of her own strength. So my parents began in New York, taking me with them.
What I do recall, when I think long and deep about this trip through miles are motel rooms with large beds and also big radios vibrating the otherwise quiet air with music and stories. As promised, my parents took plenty of naps together, slowing our homeward progress but keeping the three of us comfortably close.
Tucked between them, I can still feel the sounds of my parents’ conversation slowing down to a whisper and then silence. Silence at least until my father began to snore. His snoring tempered by the music of the radio in the background is reassuring and never bothersome. It reminds both me and my mother that he is still there lying beside us. He pulls closer to my mother as they nap.
My mother’s body is getting larger every day. Although my father’s hands and arms grow stronger on this journey, his large frame still remains much thinner than usual. There must have been jokes about my mother’s growing belly. My father joked about everything, I’m told. Trying as hard as possible to find hope in their future, they would have been delighted at the prospect of this new child. Perhaps, this baby would be their second son. They had already produced a second daughter and another boy would even things out. But the Fates, those three Greek women who spin and weave and cut the threads of each life’s tapestry, didn’t assemble a pattern of evenness for my parents’ children. Rather, they envisioned in their own image three daughters and only one son.
In future years, this disproportion allowed us children to sort out in our own fashion how we would bond and divide among ourselves. Aware somehow of my parent’s playful hopefulness and the three silent ancient weavers who will outlive us all, I always watch these maneuverings at what feels to me a distance.
The luxury of privacy, which an extended car trip affords, easily surfaces in my memory. This is the longest time I would ever have alone with both my parents. Its memory, perched only weeks before my birth, is undeniable.
After some days on the road, my parents and I are waiting out the sudden rain and holing up in a motel room for some extra days alone. So far the weather has been pristine. This particular late autumn seems to hold only crisp clear hints of the coming snow. The rain comes as a surprise.
Taking advantage of this unanticipated change, my parents decide not to drive through the torrents but to wait for clearer traveling conditions. My mother is reading aloud from Howard Fast’s Citizen Tom Paine. Years of studying speech have shaped her always acute sense of her own presence into a fascinating reader’s voice, and my father loves hearing her read aloud. To her, reading is an easy art, and its subtle intonations allow her usually acquiescent voice a welcome chance for creativity.
Listening against the continuous backdrop of the falling rain, my father relaxes in the rhythms of his wife’s voice. My mother’s close by reading summons images of his eccentric and dramatic Aunt Helen who, like my mother, had trained for the theater. When he was a little boy and recovering from polio, his father’s sister would often read to him. In her voice, books he rarely looked at on his own became exotic. Her playful readings always renewed his interest in his neglected books. Usually, he much preferred the company of others.
My father was never much of a student and, perhaps, that is why he was so proud of my mother. So obviously a student and so gifted with words. It was one of the things he loved about her, her education. And it was one of the things she loved about him, his taking her and her education seriously.
My mother had picked up the copy of Citizen Tom Paine that had been lying by my father’s bedside for the past four years and packed it for their long car journey in the fall of 1947. She had bought it for him the April just after they were married. The book received an excellent review in The New York Times. She always read the book reviews in that paper and not much else. When she told her new husband about it, he replied in an effort to impress her, that he might like to read it. She soon surprised him with a copy.
At that time, my newlywed parents were living in my grandfather’s house. It was wartime in 1943 and there were seven adults living under the same roof: my grandfather, his sister (the aforementioned Aunt Helen who had no children of her own), his nephew Jack, the son of his eldest sister, Henry and Katherine the servants who, as my mother wrote in a letter to her parents, actually ran the household, and Bill and Sylvia. My father had brought his young bride to the house where he himself grew up.
In that sturdy, formal, red brick house, there wasn’t room for the rowdy love-making of newlyweds. At bedtime, my mother tried to engage my father in one of her favorite habits, reading before falling asleep. It was something my father wasn’t accustomed to. But the adventures of Tom Paine, resourceful and rebellious like my father caught his imagination, for awhile. My parents didn’t stay long in my grandfather’s crowded house. The following November, despite the shortages of wartime New York, my father managed to rent a more private house not too far away. Presumably from that time on, Citizen Tom Paine rested unopened on their night table.
Now, four years later in the stone and timbered lodge of a Midwestern resort, my mother was again reading Citizen Tom Paine to her husband. This time I was also listening. Three absent very real children rounded out their family now whereas as newlyweds they were only figured in their parents’ dreams. Now, my parents’ dreams are quite different. My father’s illness makes everything uncertain. Citizen Tom Paine, however, remains the same and my mother’s reading continues sturdy and clever as always. Wrapped in my mother’s cadences, Tom Paine’s spirit, with all of his passion and fury, surrounds and transports us all.
In that cozy room with the knotty wood paneling and the clean smell of rain drifting in the barely opened windows, the three of us wait for the weather to change. All of us wish it wouldn’t, wish that we could stay there forever, listing to the rain and the story of Citizen Paine.
Snuggled safely in the moment, my sudden and powerful movements cut short my mother’s reading. She pauses a moment to comment on my vigor. My father—broken from his reveries of Tom Paine, Aunt Helen, and his three absent children—feels keenly, perhaps for the first time, the extent of his diminished strength which lies so near my intruding and evolving energy.
Wanting only to encourage each other, neither of my parents mentions the juxtaposition of my father’s weakened health with my spirited activity. Instead, my father makes a joke about the three rambunctious characters they didn’t take with them on this trip. Instead, my father says that it was wise of them to take only a character whose rumpuses were silent and under control.
The rain keeps falling, my mother continues to read and, for the rest of my life, I will feel most comfortable and secure when my revolutionary thoughts and endeavors are quiet ones.
My mother is walking through the fallen leaves, listening to them crackle as they blow across the ground and crumple under her feet. Nestled inside of her, I am listening too, but not to the far away sound of the leaves, rather to the rhythm of her thoughts.
This is the last morning of our trip and my father is just beginning to pack up the car. We spent the last night of our journey here at the lodge of Starved Rock State Park, just west of Chicago. We had traveled south and west from New York so that we could come north through the Missouri towns of Joplin and Kansas City, where my mother grew up and where her grandmother, aunt and brother still lived. Along the way we stayed at every secluded forest lodge we could find and we found several.
There is a certain sadness in the air this morning mirrored by the coming winter and the ending of our journey. In her eighth month of pregnancy, my mother is reminded by her heavy body that there is also much to look forward to. She decides to take a walk around the grounds and readjust her vision. She doesn’t follow the steep trails leading through the sandstone bluffs to the Illinois River. She sticks to the level ground that circles the lodge. She wants to stay close to her husband.
In the distance she watches my father as he works. It will be a short ride into Chicago, and she plans to mail the picture postcard she has just written to her parents from there. “Will be close to 1800 miles by the time we reach home” she reminds herself as she goes over the wording of her postcard. After all the discouragement she and my Dad received about the hardships of this journey, its achievement is something she is proud of.
Next week will be Thanksgiving, and Bill’s father will be in town. Shortly, after that is Bill’s 41st birthday and the next day their fifth wedding anniversary. Last night, huddled together in front of the big stone fireplace, they have decided to celebrate that event in private at a Chicago hotel where they have never stayed before. They know for sure that they want to hold on to the satisfying seclusion that this trip has allowed them. Soon after that comes Christmas, then New Year’s which will be filled with more company.
Images of her sorely missed children run through my mother’s thoughts. Emily, who only last spring was hired as a nursemaid for the children, has been a godsend to the family. My mother can see them all together clearly this picture book morning. Emily has taken the children to the square just across the street from their apartment. Right now, my mother imagines that they are playing, as she is, in the crispy leaves. She kicks up her foot in unison with the children’s imagined kicks. Together, they watch the leaves cascading to the ground. She knows that Emily has been the one constant in her children’s lives in the previous months. The children haven’t seen their parents in weeks and coupled with their long absence last spring, my mother wonders what kind of memories they hold in their tiny heads of their absent parents.
It was quite sudden last April when she and Bill first left the children in Chicago. Easter Sunday was April 6th and my mother had chosen that day to celebrate Katie’s second birthday. Katie, whose real birthday is April 1st, had actually been born on Easter Sunday and my mother wanted to keep the jubilation of that day associated with her daughter’s birth. She had even made matching dresses for the girls to wear and there were two large stuffed bunnies that took part in all the indoor festivities.
The bunnies didn’t accompany them that day, however, as family and friends piled into the brand new Oldsmobile station wagon for the short drive to an outdoor amusement park.16-mm movies show the girls and Freddie riding on a kiddie train and my parents flirting with each other like teenagers. I was not yet in the picture.
Just a week later, my mother was writing to her parents from New York City and explaining why she was there and not visiting them in California. My parents “were on a strenuous round of seeing a doctor a day…Charlotte was with them.” Charlotte was the oldest of the children. She was the easiest child to travel with, no bottles, no diapers. Her first year of life was spent in New York and she could easily be left with familiar friends there while her parents achieved their mission. The letter was light and didn’t give much information. My mother chose instead to write in detail about the dress pattern she was considering for the girls and new dresses she had purchased for herself that were wrinkle free and just right for traveling.
By the end of the week my parents would be back in Chicago and on their way to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. In Rochester, after several days of tests, my father was admitted to the hospital on April 24th. It was in this time frame just before he entered the hospital that I was conceived. I like to think that I grew out of the comfort my parents gave each other in this hectic and uncertain time.
Hospital records and my mother’s letters to her parents show that my father had a series of operations. On April 28th after a single barrel colostomy my mother sent a telegram to her parents “Operation highly successful. No Danger of recurrence”. His last operation for the removal of his rectum and sigmoid and a large, invasive tumor was on May 14. The next day was Ascension Day, just 40 days after Easter.
After a six-weeks recovery in Minnesota, my parents returned to Chicago—but not to their home. They stayed at the Palmer House, an old and stately downtown hotel. There, Bill could rest quietly away from the bustle of small children. And the children’s lives could continue, as if normally, with Emily, away from their visibly ill father.
There they stayed until the whole family left Chicago for the rented summer home on Long Island Sound. From New York, my mother wrote to her parents that there is a “big fenced in backyard with plenty of room to keep the noise away from us”. The family was together again, but some separateness was still needed.
How would the children respond to her now my mother wondered as her steps rustled the noisy leaves? Just last week, as Chicago drew nearer, she and Bill had discussed their plans for the coming winter. At first my father suggested that my mother go to California to visit her parents. She had put off that promised trip several times over the past two years, for reasons that had nothing to do with her husband’s recent illness. She clearly much preferred her life in Chicago as a wife and mother to the role of a dutiful daughter that her parents always insisted upon. Now, after so much time, her delays seemed painfully obvious. Now, her pregnancy made such a trip impossible and, anyway, she didn’t want to leave her children again. So she encouraged my dad to travel, visit friends, do some business. He was better now and a trip alone would restore his confidence. It would be the first time they would be apart since his operation. As she watched him from across the lodge’s grounds, she wondered how they would fare without each other.
As my mother dragged her feet through the leaves making a ribbon of unbroken rustling around her thoughts, I too felt my dad at a distance. Sensing then my mother’s troubles, and feeling them so close to my own well being, it’s no surprise today that the sound of crackling leaves beneath my feet still makes me uneasy.
Recently, I found an old photograph of my parents’ 1947 station wagon. Its wooden sides and boxy frame make it quite a classic. Even though I can’t remember ever seeing this car, its contours are very homey and familiar. On the back of the picture “September, 1948” is written in my grandfather’s hand along with the address of the first house I can remember living in and the name of my uncle in Kansas City, “Ralph”.
In the picture, my mother and all of us kids are leaning against the Oldsmobile, almost as if the car is holding us up and in a way connecting us. This picture might have been taken on my mom’s thirty-first birthday just 4 days after my father died. It was taken by my grandparents who had come from California and were with us now in New York. Copies of this picture were sent around to other members of my mother’s family.
My mom is wearing a black coat and hat. The difficult smile on her face attests to her sadness. She is holding me in her arms and I am reaching away from her out to Emily who is standing just outside the frame. Since my birth and my father’s accelerating illness, I had spent more time in Emily’s arms than in my mother’s. Katie and Freddie are standing at some distance from my mother on opposite sides. Katie is holding in her three-year-old hand a straw hat with a flowing ribbon. Her Easter birthday hat is a bit out of place in this early fall weather but she holds tightly nevertheless to this memory of a happier time. It is only my oldest sister Charlotte who stands solidly next to my mother.
During the last three months of my father’s illness, we children were divided up among family and friends. Charlotte accompanied my parents to New York, where my father knew he was going to die. He wanted to be near his father, his brothers and his cousins. Chicago was a place of happiness and success for him. New York, though, where he had grown up, was always his home. Katie, Freddie and I stayed in Chicago. Emily and family friends continued to look after us. Eventually, my grandmother arrived from California. In the very last weeks of August, Katie and my grandmother went to Missouri. Katie most surely noticed that she was left behind by her father, mother and older sister, and she needed some extra attention. There they visited relatives in Kansas City and Joplin. In Joplin, they received the news that my father had died. They flew together to New York to meet up with my mother and the other children.
Where I was at the time is harder to discern. No one ever talked about it and there are no written records. There is however a ten second very fuzzy 16-mm clip of me in a baby carriage, sitting up straight. Freddy standing very close by, is stepping even closer to the carriage and holding on tightly. Above us, adults move in and out of the frame packing up the Oldsmobile station wagon whose wooded door is easily recognizable. These, perhaps, were our final moments in Chicago before moving to New York. Someone, thinking of my absent parents, picked up the family camera and focused in tightly on my brother and me, huddled so sweetly together. Soon after this, Emily went with us to New York to be with my mother.
This photo of family togetherness is really a picture of a family coming together again not only after the loss of their father but after being apart. It was not easy for the children to warm up to a mother whom they’d seen so little of in the past months. It was not easy for my mother to smile broadly with the sadness of my father’s death so immediate.
Those of us who could stand are leaning on the car for stability in this captured moment of a family trying to hold itself together. I’m only eight months old and can’t stand firmly yet. It is my mother who connects me to the car she is leaning against. Just as it was my mother who connected me to the “1800” mile car trip just months before I was born.
Snow is on the ground now. The flower pots are all stacked and put away for next spring’s planting. My young parents are no longer standing in the garden waiting for me to begin. Rather, my writing coupled with their patience and our joint optimism unites us in our own triad of cutting, spinning and weaving. They have taken their long awaited place in the landscape of my life. Alongside rustling leaves, sudden autumn rains, articulate rebels and my far away siblings, I take note of their distance and their presence.
You can see from the above that this autobiography is composed of three interconnected parts. The first, my own memories which are slight and not to be trusted; second, the research—lengthy and circuitous—which I have done into the lives of all those who contribute to my story; and three, my own intuition which mixes the facts of the past into the unstoppable world of my imagination, playing the facts over until, as Kafka says, they roll at my feet.
Now I am back to writing my autobiography. Picking up the story after my father died. I remember living in Kew Gardens with my mother and my siblings. I remember helping my mother look for the heads of brother and sisters after they left for school in the morning. My mother would tease my older siblings reminding them to be alert in school not to leave their heads at home. Although I had no idea what it all meant, I remember enjoying immensely looking with my mother behind the sofa and in back of the living room chairs for their probably left behind heads.
I remember jumping into bed with my mother and my siblings in the early mornings and all of us combing her hair. She had long straight thick hair and we would all take and comb a piece. This was fun and cozy. It held us close together. I am sure it was very comforting to us all to sit so close together around my mother. I am sure we tugged and pulled in sometimes painful ways to my mother, but I don’t remember her complaining. It must have been nice for her to have us near. I remember my mother at her typewriter in those days in Kew Gardens. I remember coming up to her one time when she was typing. I had been playing a game of doctor with my older siblings. They told me I had a disease that would make my arms and legs fall off. I was very young, I was terrified. She of course comforted me. I knew that she was writing letters to her parents. There was always lots of talk about my grandparents. When they were coming here next. When we were going there next. My grandparents were very much a part of our lives when we were young. I don’t think my mother had planned it that way.
I also remember all of us together raking leaves in the fall and piling them up in the street to burn. The smell of burning leaves was always such a wonderful fall sensation. One year, I must have been about 3 or 4, I was watching the fire and saw a beautiful red wire in the fire. It looked so gorgeous glowing in the waning flames. What was it I wondered. I had never seen a red wire so bright before. I reached in to grab it and burned my fingers. In the summer of 1949 we all went to California to visit with them.
1951 was a year of getting settled in Kew Gardens, Katie had a serious accident and my dad’s estate was settled in March.
At Christmas of 1951, Max and Hattie came to New York and spent some time with us. What I didn’t know until much later was that, in April, 1952 when I was four or before then, my mother was sending articles out for publication to various magazines. One published in Modern Romances magazine. The article entitled “ Sew and Save: A Beauty of a wardrobe at budget prices” by Katherine Frederick appeared in the Modern Family section of that magazine alongside articles including “Four Basic Steps to Skin Beauty,” “What to tell her: how to explain sex to your child,” and “the Beauty foods: the part foods play to keep you lovely.” There was a whole other section of the magazine called “ Short Stories” which had much racier titles like “ Devastated,” “Cherished,” “Tell me no lies,” “the wrong side of marriage,” and “Off-beat Love”. I remember going with my mother to a photographer’s office and having my picture taken with my mother. She was sitting at a sewing machine in back of me and I was playing with a bunch of balloons. We were wearing matching dresses that she had made. I remember my mother making lots of our clothes. I remember the photographer that day encouraging me to “touch the balloons to the floor and then reach them up to the sky.” I enjoyed it immensely. From this vantage point, I am sure I enjoyed it so much because seldom in fact, probably never, had a man paid that much sustained attention to me.
Katherine Frederick was my mother’s pen name. It was also the name of a small musical business rental company that my mother ran out of my father’s family business. My father’s family had been involved since 1883 in the manufacturing of musical instruments. My father was president of the firm until he died, then his older brother, who had been away in the war when my father took over, regained his position as head of the company. My father really loved the music business and there are lots of stories of just how much he enjoyed it.
The name, Katherine Frederick, was taken from the names of my mother’s two middle children. I remember as a young child going with my mother sometimes to the office in Brooklyn. “Gretsch Building # 4” was a large factory building on Broadway just past and opposite the long ramp that leads onto the Williamsburg Bridge. There was another Gretsch Building on the other side of the roadway. As a kid, I remember loving to drive over the Williamsburg Bridge and seeing my name “Gretsch” on one side of the road and then again on the other side. “Gretsch Building No. 3, “Gretsch Building No. 4.”
I found out years later from my research into my mother’s life and, in particular from one family friend, that my mother had always wanted to work. This was something out of the ordinary for a woman of that time. When my father was dying, he said to Duke Kramer, “ Be sure that there is always a job for Sylvia to do in the company.” Duke, of course, promised my father. Then when my father died and his brother took over the company, Duke told my father’s wishes to Fred. Duke told me that Fred was outraged. He said “ Sylvia will never have to work, we will always take care of her.” Perhaps Duke chose a bad moment to say this to Fred, right after his brother’s death, where there was now a widow and four small children to be cared for. It is very clear that at that moment, Fred did not understand that my mother wanted to work..
It had taken a long time for my father to understand my mother’s inclinations towards a career. After college, she took a job in Missouri teaching high school, then a job in Texas working with a radio station which was her love and then a job in San Francisco editing a hotel trade magazine. From the telegrams of this period that my father sent to my mother, there were lots of comments about her jobs in various places.
For long periods of time, there were no telegrams at all, indicating that they were not communicating. References in family letters to fights between my mother and dad, and their making up, further my understanding of their having a stormy relationship before their marriage. After their marriage, when they had come to come kind of an agreement, the situation between them was quite different. Fritzie Kramer, Duke’s wife, told me that she and all the other wives would get so mad at mother because she always went along with everything that her husband wanted. Her obliging behavior make them all look bad. They even organized a meeting to talk to my mother about it. This is certainly a quite different attitude than the stormy relationship of their courtship.
In late October of 1949, my father’s brother Fred and his own father, Fred took a Nassau cruise on a ship named “The New Amsterdam.” Margaret and Morris Van Nostrand from Forest Hills were along on the cruise. I imagine that my grandfather and uncle talked a lot about my mother and us four children. These two bachelors now had the responsibility and jurisdiction of a woman and four young children. They probably discussed my mother’s wanting to work. Although they didn’t understand it, they obviously came around to accept it. My mother had already won over one Gretsch man, her husband, now she was attempting to win over two more.
“The new job is off to a slow start,” my mother wrote the following February to her parents. She went on to describe a manual for dealers she would be putting together and asks her Dad for ideas.
“I am in hopes you will help me out with this one Dad as I think your experience with the insurance deal should be somewhat along these lines. . . The only job I have done so far was an editorial Fred was invited to write for a little publication…..Music….and he liked it very much, and is thinking of having reprints made when it comes out, for hanging in Music Studios. I was delighted that it was such a success. Music comes out four times a year, and so this probably won’t be out formoths (sic), but I’ll let you know when the time comes.”
This new job she is referring to must be the beginning of Katherine Frederick begun then in 1949, just one year after my father’s death. I had no idea of my mother’s push to work until I read her letters. It was very strong and very confident. I wonder where it came from. In this same letter of late February, 1950, my mother refers to Emily.
“The babies are all doing well and Emily is back in the swing of things. She has Saturday afternoon and Sunday off…I have a girl in Sunday morning to babysit while we go to church….and a man once a week for heavy cleaning.”
I wonder what was wrong with Emily, what was it that sent her “out “of the swing of things. I was just barely two years old, my father had been gone for a year and a half. But what was going on with Emily. I know she was in Joplin with us in the summer. There is movie footage of my crying and running off screen on the front porch of the Dieter family home in Joplin. Moments later I return perfectly pacified in Emily’s arms. The family was in Joplin on its way to California that first summer after my father died. Did Emily go all the way to California with us that summer? There are no pictures of her in California that summer, no more mention of her in letters. Only the picture of her in Joplin, holding me on my great grandmother’s front porch. She doesn’t turn up again until that letter of late February, 1950
Just a month later, the end of March, my mother reports that
“we are all in good health except for Emily. She suddenly developed pneumonia again a week ago today, and had to be taken to her daughter’s home in an ambulance. She is improving, but her daughter doesn’t think she will be able to work full time again. This has been coming on for a year, almost, and I’m not surprised, but we all feel very, very sorry for Emily, of course.”
So for the past year, since shortly after my father’s death, Emily has been slowly getting ill. Surely working with four small children must have been very difficult for her. She was at least 50 years old herself as she had an adult daughter. But, my mother writes, for the past year, Emily didn’t leave when she might have. She wanted to stay on, she tried hard to stay on. Most likely she stayed to earn more money. It would have been hard for a woman of her age to find another job, she must have been happy to have this one. I wonder how Emily came to the family. How it was that she started working in Chicago for us when her daughter lived in New York. Did my parents know somehow that they would be moving to New York when they hired her in 1947 before my father was really ill?
Or had my family somehow arranged for both Emily and her daughter to move to New York when it became apparent that the family would be moving? I was just two years old when Emily left the family. I must have been devastated to lose her. She had been my major caregiver all my short life. My brother Freddie too was also very close to her. I wonder if he felt left behind when I was born and a new baby came into the household. After all, it had been Emily’s job to take care of him and after I was born, she was taking care of me also. In that same March letter, the last letter when Emily is mentioned, my mother writes about a new girl, Pauline, who speaks only German.
“ she is a D.P. has been here three weeks and started this morning…that is the only reason I’m able to write now…..Since I want to learn German from her I am in no real hurry for her to learn English. Her home was in Yugoslavia, and she was displaced to Austria nine years ago. Her twin sister came with her and is looking for work. They have an aunt in Glendale…nearby…Of course I won’t work until I have her under control, but did want to let you know all about us. Dad, thanks very much for your letter, It gave me lots of ideas, and I have it filed away for the time when I can get back into production. I’ll send you a copy of the manual when It’s finished., The first draft is about half done now…the hardest part fortunately.”
So my mother was writing soon after my father died. Writing had been her profession. She wrote radio copy in the early 1940s for a radio station in Texas. Later, she got a job as an editor for a trade magazine in San Francisco. So it is no surprise that she picked it up again when she felt she needed to earn money….and she wanted to work.
On April 14,1952, the same year and just a month before my mother’s article was published in Modern Romances, Fulton J. Sheen appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Sheen, “ perhaps, the most famous preacher in the U.S., certainly America’s best known roman Catholic and the newest star of U.S. television,” was the host of a half hour show “ Life is Worth Living” “which began two months ago on three stations and now is carried by seventeen.” (NYT April 2, 1952)
My mother, as with a lot of other people in the country, liked Fulton Sheen very much. It is one of the few television shows I remember her watching. He had a background in radio and this much have really attracted my mother who all her life had been interested in radio. Public speaking was also her forte, so Sheen was really someone she understood. And of course his Catholicism. . .which my mother, having become Catholic to marry my father, was most interested in perfecting in herself.
Perhaps, here is the time to write about my mother’s experiences in radio, about her childhood dreams…as far as I have been able to patch them together. In a questionnaire that she filled out soon after arriving as a junior at Northwestern University in 1937, she wrote
“When ten years old, I started taking lessons in dramatics. From then until now I have studied speech with the idea of making it my career. There is a small radio station in my home town , and through it I became interested in radio broadcasting. I chose Northwestern University because of its superior speech division and its radio courses. When I finish college I plan to do both writing and speaking for radio.”
My mother was ten years old in 1927 when Radio was really the “tops” it was the latest thing. No wonder she wanted to be a part of it. In high school, she won awards for public speaking and debate. She was also in many plays and even held a private speech recital at the home of her teacher. Luckily, the invitation survived, or I would have never known this side of my mother, a beautiful young 15 year-old gathering her neighbors in Joplin, Missouri together, so that she could recite. Imagine the confidence she must have had.
When she left Northwestern, she took a job teaching speech in Webb City, just outside of Joplin. This is the time that I think her parents were having problems. From what I can gather, her father had left her mother the summer after my mother graduated from Northwestern. She took the job in Webb City in late August. Perhaps, she took the job so late because she was not planning on staying in Joplin. But circumstances with her parents might have pressured her to stay at home for a while. If this is what she wanted to do, or what she felt she had to do, is unclear. My father kept in close contact with her as she took her new job and settled into life again in her home town.
The next year 1941, she was working in Wichita Falls, Texas, at a local radio station writing copy. This is what she really wanted to do, it is what she trained to do at Northwestern. But did she want to do it in Wichita Falls, Texas? According to the city directories she was living in Wichita Falls with her grandmother in 1941. And according to family letters, her mother Hattie was also there in the spring of 1941. So there were three generations of women in Wichita Falls. My mother, her mother and her grandmother.
There are no telegrams from the period between May 1940, when her job at Webb City ended, until she was fired from her job in Wichita Falls in December, 1941. My mother knew that she wasn’t going back to that job in Webb City. She no doubt wanted a radio job. A few pictures I have found give evidence that my parents were together in this period. There is a picture of them together in Chicago dated July 12, 1940. They seem very happy; my mother looking young and beautiful, my father adoringly facing her. This is the exact date of my son’s birthday, 34 years later, so the picture especially interests me. The following September the London Blitz started and Robert R. Murrow gave radio even more pertinence through his broadcasts from that besieged city. By early January of 1941, Maxine and Bill were together again at the famous Michael Todd Night Club that had just opened in Chicago. No doubt she had come up form Texas again to spend the holidays in Chicago. Again, in February in Fulton, Missouri, Maxine and Bill and Hattie were visiting, no doubt, Paul and Lola, who were expecting their first child in June.
But then it appears there was a split. My mother was in Wichita Falls, Texas ,and working at a radio station, living with her grandmother and her mother.
Did she go Wichita Falls alone with her mother and grandmother following her? The family home at 410 North Pearl Street was being sold and a new house built just down the street for her grandmother and her Tante Kate. So maybe Texas was a good place for Maxine’s aging grandmother to live while changes were being made. The winter climate would suit her better. Hattie, perhaps, didn’t want to stay in Joplin anymore once it became known that Max had left there. So, perhaps, both women, mother and daughter, grandmother and mother, followed Maxine, my mother to Texas.
Whatever the circumstances it was a family procession of the women in the family to Wichita Falls, Texas and my father definitely was not included. Hattie had been born in Texas. There were lots of Dieter family connections. It would have been a good place for Hattie to “hide out” for a while after Max left. Especially since her daughter was working there. What a lot of pressure all of this must have put on my mother. There must have been incredible pressure on her to help out her mother in this very sad time. Her family needed her to be around. Bill, on the other hand, was really alluring with his independence and his quite obvious (through his many telegrams) affection.
Was my father angry that my mother was pursuing a career and not pursuing him? Was their break-up over Maxine’s remaining so close to her family, especially to her mother. At any rate, they did not communicate by telegram while she was in Texas. Of if they did, those telegrams were not saved.
As soon as my mother was “fired” from her Texas job, she telegraphed my father and then came to Chicago for the New Year’s celebration. Her parents were back together again and living in California. My mother went on to get a job the following fall in California as an editor of a hotel trade magazine. In their November issue Western Hotel and Restaurant Reporter announced
“There is a new personality at the Editor’s desk. Miss Gladys Latham, who has capably filled the position for over a year, leaves now to be married and Maxine Elsner takes her place. Miss Elsner, a graduate of Northwestern University School of Speech, has worked with several advertising agencies in Chicago and has done considerable radio work ‘deep in the heart of Texas.’ When she came to California this year, she associated with an agency in San Francisco, and now steps up to serve the Hotel and Restaurant Industries in the Western states.”
Soon their newest editor would be gone too, also to get married. Maxine was living with her parents in San Francisco at the time. Her parent’s marriage difficulties seemed to be over. She only had her new position for one month when my father surprising asked her to marry him. Perhaps, my mother was feeling that her parent’s no longer needed her with them. She accepted right away. They were married in December of 1942. I remember asking my mom about how my father asked her to marry him. She said something about working in Texas. Maybe she said that they had broken up because she had been working in Texas. I was shocked to hear that there was a Texas connection in my family. I was a real tom boy and anything that had to do with Texas was great by me. I remember my mother told me that she and my father had been arguing (about her job in Texas), so that when he called her on the phone she acted quite aloof. He said to her, you know my birthday is coming? Is it really she said, knowing full well that it was. And you know what I want for my birthday, he said. No, she answered acting as uninterested as she could. Probably that was pretty uninterested given all of her dramatic training. “ You”, he said. And that was it.
A ring was sent to her across the country, she was in California, he in New York, a date was set and plans were made.
So my mother went, in a very short period of time, only months maybe, from being very hard to get to doing exactly what my father wanted her to do. Remember the conference that Fritzie Kramer and Francis _ called my mother to? They wanted to get her to quit doing everything my father said and to stop allowing him to do whatever he wanted. It made them, as wives of his good friends, look bad for not putting up with their husband’s antics. My mother had been through a lot with her parent’s separation so soon after her graduation from college. Their reunion signaled a new life for her. She could now lead her own life with her wonderful new husband. She moved to the other side of the continent and changed her religion and began again.
Back to the Spring of 1952, when my mother’s article was published in Modern Romance and Fulton Sheen was becoming a big television personality.
My Uncle Fred was engaged to marry Helen Mooney. My mother sent a clipping from the paper to her parents with a picture of Helen and Fred at the Stork Club. “Both look awful happy—is wonderful to be in love.”
My mother must have been busy with her writing. There are not many letters to her parents. That summer we rented a house in Connecticut. Not far from Uncle Dick and his children. . .on a lake.
My grandfather was a constant figure in the lives of us four children. He would come to the house on the week-end and bring us treats or take us out for a ride in his big car. We also often went to his house in Forest Hills which wasn’t far away.
I don’t remember much about the house on Shorthill Road when he was there but I do remember standing outside with him and checking his pockets for candy. It was a game we played. He would put candy in his pockets and we would try to find it and get it out.
He would take us in his big car to Forest Park to go horseback riding. It was a pony rink and we would wait in line for our turn to be lifted up onto the back of these small horses that walked round a circle. I remember once vividly, waiting to get the white horse. When my turn came, I was lifted to a darker house and I cried and cried. My grandfather wanted to know the reason I was crying and when I told him, he insisted that I be taken off that horse and put on the white horse. I have remembered that all my life as the first time, really, a man intervened for me, to give me what I wanted.
I remember too one time riding home in the back seat of his car and being stopped by the police. My grandfather had been speeding. I watched from the back window as he talked to the police and made a deal with them. He didn’t get a ticket. He must have given them some money or perhaps, offered them a guitar. It was talked about a lot afterwards. I didn’t understand what was going on then but years later I figured it out.
In the summer of 1952, my mother rented a house in Candlewood Isle, Connecticut. The house was a short drive to my cousins’ house also in Connecticut. They lived on a lake with a floating dock not too far from shore. What I remember most about that summer is swimming. Near where our rented house was, there was a dock at the lake with ropes, dividing off swimming areas. I remember loving being in the water. I just couldn’t be in the water enough. I remember too that my lips always turned blue when I came out of the water. I loved it when my mother would wrap me in a big towel and hug me until I was dry and warm. I remember my mother standing on the dock and coaxing me out of the water by offering me Campbell’s chicken noodle soup for lunch. That summer too, our little dog was killed. Hit by a car. Katie was so sad. I remember she took a pebble from our driveway and said that she would keep this rock in her pocket forever as a remembrance of our dog. That to me was incredible to keep a rock in your pocket forever.
I also remember Freddie taking me into the woods of the vacant lot across from our rented house, the first day we arrived. We walked around in the lot and I thought we were lost. I probably cried. Freddy told me he found gold dust in an old log that had fallen long ago across the path. He wanted me to help him collect it all up. He assured me we would be rich. I remember I didn’t really want to help him I wanted to go home. He must have thought I was a terrible nuisance. In the fall of 1952, our lives changed when my grandfather Gretsch died suddenly in his sleep from a heart attack. I remember waiting for him to come and pick us up on a week-end morning but he didn’t come. He was 72 years old.
There are no records of how my mother felt about this loss. My grandfather has been with us only weeks before in Candlewood, Connecticut, and we all felt close to him. On August 22, he wrote to my mother that he had her letter of August 20. My mother was obviously in close contact with my grandfather and called him “Dad”. In this letter, typed by his secretary, my grandfather wrote,
“I called up the German woman. She seemed to be quite an intelligent person and was working for a doctor over in Richmond Hill. She was getting $50.00 a week, but would take $40.00 if she can bring her 12-year old daughter. She has had a position offered to her, but will get in touch with me again if she does not take it.”
It strikes me reading this letter fifty years after it was written how little sensitivity this letter shows for this”German woman.” Here she is in a foreign land with a daughter to take care of and working. My grandfather is offering her a new job with a cut in pay, taking advantage of her situation, taking advantage of her need to be with her daughter. The same insensitivity I notice in my mother’s letters when she talks about the young woman, Pauline, who is a D. P. and doesn’t know how to cook. There is an arrogance here in the family towards hired help. Maybe it has to do with the proximity of the war. I must say I am not very proud of it. My mother saved this letter and somehow it got passed down to me now. But so many letters were not saved. My mother wrote on the letter after my grandfather’s death, “Dad’s last letter to us-”.
Also the fall of 1952, my brother started first grade and joined my two older sisters in the Catholic school in Forest Hills. The only memory I have of this is looking for their heads with my mother. Counting backwards it would seem that I started kindergarten in this fall too. But I have no memory of going to school in Kew Gardens. This must have been something for my mother…all four of her children in school. Since I had a January birthday, I was in a class with much older children. I was only four, most of the other children were five. Now that I think about it, maybe I didn’t start kindergarten in Kew Gardens. I have no memory of that at all.
But I remember my brother’s first day of school the year before. It was very exciting. I remember my grandparents from California being in Kew Gardens with us. I don’t know if they were there for this first day of school for my brother. I remember, though, taking my brother to school with my grandfather, GrossPop, we called him. We would drop my brother off at school and then we would walk around the neighborhood, just the two of us. This is a very dim memory. Pictures however remind me that my California grandparents were visiting us that Christmas of 1951.
My California grandparents were large figures in my young life. Each year at Christmas and birthdays they would send us large packages full of wonderful presents….dolls, toys, games. On each of our birthdays, we all got loads of presents. I remember this vaguely but reading my mother’s letters really reminds me of all the gifts we each got no matter whose birthday it was. There was never any mention of the disturbance that my grandfather’s behavior had had on the family only a few years earlier. He and my grandmother seemed woven together, we never saw one with out the other. Yet, there was always a bit of discomfort when they were around. There was a tension that was hard to describe and certainly felt by us children. Wonderful presents and regular extended visits couldn’t make up for the underlying unease and distance of our relations. It wasn’t until much later— long after they had all died—that I learned of my mother’s attempt to be independent of her parents when she married my father. Later, I learned of the tensions that had existed between my father and my mother’s parents. I learned of the impact of my father’s death on her decision to be close to her parents again. No doubt she felt that with the loss of their father, her children really needed all the grandparents they could get. No doubt she felt also, the need of parents herself now that her husband was gone.
Also, I remember vividly, my first day of school at P.S.101 in Forest Hills. It was after our move there in March of 1953. I was already five years old. I remember crying profusely when my mother left. I remember someone helping me off with my boots and crying, crying, crying. So maybe, I didn’t start kindergarten in Kew Garden, maybe my mother waited until we moved and I was five before she sent me.It was a period of chance in my young life, my grandfather dying, moving to Forest Hills and starting kindergarten.
“in writing I see connections that I just didn’t notice when I was walking through my life.
the trick is to write about all of these things at once to remember the tone as it resonates again so that it isn’t expressed in a linear narrative way but in a tonal way, that way they can both be there at one time the remembrance of one tone and the playing of another one which is of earlier ones.
to remember the tones of people’s lives, how they lived their lives and how this is passed down
that is the challenge, to find the form to enclose all of that.”
“Okay, so everybody knows this party is for the 100th anniversary of my Mom, who is the mother, and the grandmother, and the cousin of so many people here. So, we got a birthday cake. . actually we got three! And what Katie and I figured out to write on them and what we thought we would write on them is what my Mother would say to all of you, her children, her grandchildren, her cousins, everybody, if she were here. . .and of course we all know she is here in a certain kind of way. . .and one of the things she would say to everybody would be ‘Be kind!’ So, one of the cakes says ‘Be Kind!’ Another thing she would want you all to hear and to do is to ‘Be happy!’ So, the other cake says ‘Be Happy!’ And the last one. . .now did I tell you Katie and I made these up? You know my Mother’s daughters we made these up! And the last one is—ready, everybody?—‘Unplug’! And that’s information from your grandmother, your great-grandmother, your mother, your distant cousin. . .”
and I am looking at the dame light in the cold winter sky
that I saw this morning as I had coffee very early
in the dining room by myself
(and) watched the reflection of the light
in the window of my neighbor’s kitchen’ then it was the sun raising in the cold winter sky
now it is the sun setting in the cold winter sky but the light is the same fleeting and grey and cold, in the morning fading from blackness to more light in the evening
fading to yellow lights in houses,
and passing car lights
the house is also cold in pockets,
reflecting the coldness of the winter night sky. but I dress warm in Luc’s large jeans
and rich’s warm sweater
my precious haircut
and all the materials I can get my hands on
about women writers in the early 1800’s in Germany.
happy in having time to read
and warm clothes to wear
and foods to eat.
GES
“Our language is our lived life. I have invented mine myself.” Rahel Varnhagen
In the days and weeks after my mother died, my grandmother and I would wake early and go out looking for her. Neither of us could quite believe that she was really gone. She was my grandmother’s only daughter and she was my only mother.
Every night as we slept or pretended to, each in our own bed with our own uncomfortable restlessness, we prepared for the next morning’s task. I slept in a high bed that had been passed down to me from unrecorded places. It had a dark wooden frame that loomed above its high mattress and was probably once a part of a man’s bedroom set. When I was very young, the moonlight against the bedposts would cast odd shadows, which sometimes terrified me. As I got older I learned to love its high mattress, which felt like a stage. Before my mother died, as I fell asleep I would compose plays in which I was always the star.
My grandmother slept in a bed intended for two. Her room was off of mine, and there was no way to get to it except through my door. Sleeping was always a problem for my grandmother and, because our rooms were so close, I was always aware of her restlessness. But after my mother’s death, I knew my grandmother’s anxiety in a new way. I could feel it myself in my own bed, and it bound us together.
Unable to stay in bed past the signs of first light, we shook ourselves early into our mission. My grandmother’s old bones ached and grumbled and tried to hold her back. My young body pushed us both forward in search of my mother’s missing warmth and vitality.
We walked the garden first, then round the neighborhood, past the familiar houses, through the back alleys with their hidden gardens, alongside the stores, and down the busy streets. After awhile we would retrace our steps, hoping that a different perspective on ground we had already traveled might turn up a new clue. We held hands and hardly talked.
What a pair we must have made, two sad little faces, one quite young and one quite old, and not so very different from each other.
*****
This is the grandmother I always wanted to have, the one I’m trying to imagine now as I retrace her life and find the parts of her she never shared with me. As I knew her at my mother’s death, present but inaccessible, our relationship was a comfort to neither of us. We got through our awful pain with no help from each other.
Forty years later, with the birth of my first granddaughter, I can vividly imagine how things might have been different with my grandmother.
It is this difference, this warmth and comfort that I want to share with my own granddaughter. With this in mind, I steadfastly reconfirm and continue the search for my real grandmother, the one who never gave me a chance to listen to her stories.
I’ve read somewhere that listening to a person talk is the best way to honor them. Listening to a person’s story confirms them and helps them feel whole. I never had the chance to compliment my grandmother with my listening. Listening intently now years after her death to what she didn’t tell me, I’ve come to understand her silence.
Reading through newspapers from my grandmother’s hometown of Joplin, Missouri, I’ve come across some facts about her life which for some incomprehensible reason she never told me herself. I would love to have heard these stories as a child sitting by her side, perhaps even holding her hand. But instead, in my late fifties, I rush off to the library on an almost weekly basis to sit in front of a microfilm reader and carefully page through reels of hard, slick celluloid. It is as close to sitting at my grandmother’s knee as I have ever gotten, so it will have to do.
*****
My grandmother was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1886. Her family came from Germany to Wichita, Kansas, in the early 1870s and moved through several
cities before finally settling in Joplin in 1900. From what I’ve read in local papers, no matter where this young Dieter family lived, they were always surrounded by a large German community. They fit easily into the “Germania Society” in the booming town of Joplin.
“Germania”: its very syllables conjure up images of power reaching back through the centuries to the era when Latin was the written language which described the European continent. Yet in the 1870s, when the nascent Germania societies were uniting German-speaking immigrants in America, the nation of Germany itself was quite young. Only recently had twenty-two royal countries and three city-states bonded together to form the new Deutsche Reich.
The ancient image of Germania was used to unite this brand-new nation. Germania was always young and strong, but her appearance had changed over the centuries. She was sometimes docile, holding a book or guiding a child, and sometimes fierce, brandishing a sword and a flag. Relying on the wide acceptance of this versatile image and strengthening her attributes of might, the Reichpost chose her likeness for its postage stamps. Sixty-one different stamps were fashioned with the same image: a Walkure woman wearing a king’s crown and breast plates and carrying a sword and an olive branch in her right hand. Their worth ranged from 2 pfennings to 10 Marks. From 1899 until 1922, ties between Germans and German Americans were strengthened by letters stamped and posted with Germania’s image.
Germania Societies in towns big and small all across America solidified these connections. Yet the place that these new American citizens imagined as the home they left behind was really only a dream. Like the Reich itself, the image of Germania was a fabrication. Yet, the figure of this powerful woman united and comforted the newcomers.
*****
In the spring of 1904, Joplin spent months preparing for the first annual carnival in honor of the sovereign majesties “Rex Plumbum and King Jack.” These fictionalized monarchs were the personifications of lead and zinc, which figured so prominently in Joplin’s meteoric growth at the turn of the last century.
The Germania Society of Joplin fashioned “one of the most appreciative efforts made by any of the organizations” which participated in the grand inaugural parade ushering in the carnival. “Their float was grand. It was twelve feet by thirty six feet and contained three allegorical figures … Uncle Sam, Columbia and Germania…. Miss Dieter impersonated Columbia.”
There, there was my grandmother. It must have been her and not her older, shyer sister Kate. Kate would never have been comfortable atop a float. But I could imagine the grandmother I never knew there. The younger and more outgoing sister, Hattie as she was called then, enjoyed moving slowly through the evening, waving and smiling at the crowd. That Monday night, the crowd of nearly 30 thousand was “the largest ever congregated on the streets of Joplin.” This must be the story I was never told behind the picture of my grandmother as a young woman wearing a dress made of stars and stripes. Along the side of this very faded image, written in the shaky hand of my grandmother’s sister Kate, is the inscription: “Hattie Helen Dieter – Miss America On Float in Parade, 1904.”
Kate, writing these words in the 1960s or 1970s, wanted to pass on a history she believed was completely forgotten: the carefree, fairytale life she and her sister shared in Joplin at the beginning of a new century. The family had changed drastically over the years. So much history had been lost. As the oldest daughter, the middle child, and now the last surviving sibling, Kate had always had a certain knowledge of her veiled power. In the long, reflective seconds it took to pick up her pen and inscribethis picture, Kate knew that she was leaving a well-aimed clue to the happiness the Dieter girls had enjoyed in their youth. She left this clue for someone who would come after her, although she did not know who. Someone, she imagined, who would take the time to contemplate the image, read it carefully and search out it circumstances and connections. She left this clue to me. Almost 100 years after the event, I find the young Dieter sisters still living in Joplin.
The image of “Miss America” ascribed by Kate’s aging hand is far different from the image of “Columbia” which my grandmother portrayed in 1904. When Aunt Kate assigned “Miss America” to the long-ago image of her sister, she knew that the image of “Columbia” was out of vogue. Aunt Kate was past seventy by then and living alone in Joplin. Without any family living nearby, she had only pictures from the past to keep her company. She knew that the Miss America she read about in contemporary papers, with its pageants and contests, bore little resemblance to the emblem of nationalism and liberty that the “Columbia” of her youth portrayed. Nevertheless, Kate wanted to connect the past to the present generation, to her sister’s grandchildren. So she chose an image they would understand to underline their grandmother’s long-ago majesty. She knew it didn’t fit precisely, but it would do the trick.
It is the same trick that the fabricators of “Germania” had used to unite the German people. And maybe it’s the same trick I’m employing now to fashion the grandmother I never knew; a woman victorious and loyal who can weather the tragedies of everyday life and still easily share with me all of its goodness-an image perhaps impossible for any woman to live up to, unless of course she is “Germania” or “Columbia” or “Miss America.”
My grandmother’s role in the festivities would have seemed to me like a fairy tale as my grandmother related it, had she related it. There were twenty-six maids of honor, each a daughter of a Germania society member, riding in attendance in horse-drawn carriages. They were escorted by thirty-six mounted gentlemen, all sporting splendid uniforms adorned with gilded buttons and bouncing epaulets. Horse-drawn coaches full of officers and aging Germania Club members, each dressed in full and ancient regalia, followed. The passing of the float ended with a young gymnasium class tumbling and dancing in formation with enthusiastic grace and energy.
To make the fairy tale complete there must be some struggle of good and evil. So, my grandmother would tell me about an incident that occurred just days before the festivities began. The newspaper detailed the assault on the queen by the deposed matron of honor, who had lost her place in the grand opening parade. This classic struggle, the essence of fairy tales, is all true in my own grandmother’s childhood.
*****
A year before the regal celebrations of Rex Plumbum and King Jack on the very same streets of Joplin, a more foreboding incident shaped the contours of my grandmother’s teenage years. It happened on Wednesday, April 15, 1903, just weeks before her seventeenth birthday. Hattie and her family heard the early morning reports of the police officer who was killed the night before at the Kansas City Southern freight yards by a “tramp negro.” They read in the papers about “the bands of determined man standing around the street and awaiting developments.” Hattie’s parents kept her and her sister home that day as the city buzzed with tales of posses, rewards, and revenge. The atmosphere was expectant, full of barely contained turmoil.
When a frightened Negro, Thomas Gilyard, hiding in an outlying barn was captured and brought to the police station, a crowd was quick to gather. “Never before in the history of Joplin has the passion of the people come to surface with such force,” the paper reports. At five minutes of five in the afternoon, the mob, which consisted of men, women, and children, stormed the police station. They dragged their victim from his cell to the southwest corner of 2nd and Wall streets. There, less than an hour later, after some debate and an effort to prevent the lynching, they beat the Negro unconscious and hung him with a rope draped over a telephone pole.
Almost one hundred years later, as I read the newspaper accounts of this day, my unfolding horror mirrors the fright my sixteen-year-old grandmother must have felt as she watched these events unfolding in the familiar street of her neighborhood. The lynching took place just two blocks from the home where her parents were trying to keep her safe. The violence, fear, and hatred could not be prevented from seeping through the walls and windows of their wood-framed house on North Pearl Street and into my grandmother’s developing consciousness.
As a teenage girl, Hattie had more insight into what this day meant than she would be given credit for. In the weeks and months that followed, many residents debated the role that justice played in the lynching. Hattie didn’t take part in any of these discussions; she left them to those more articulate than she. Deep inside, however, she had a new understanding of the world around her. This event led her to recognize racism and violence more acutely than any well-formed debate could do. Although she kept her thoughts to herself, after April 15th Hattie knew that the possibility of chaos was never far away.
The image of the lynching arose in her mind a year later as she sat atop the fairy-tale float, waving and smiling, traveling along the very same streets before a crowd which contained many of those who had stood and cheered a year earlier. My grandmother, my grandmother. What did she think, what did she not think? All I know for sure is that she never told me.
*****
On Tuesday, March 24, 1903, before any of this happened, a party was held in Joplin which was reported in the society column of the Joplin Daily Globe the following Sunday. The party was given in honor of Laura Bartman, a friend of my grandmother’s. Hattie, her sister Kate, and all of her brothers, Fred, Philip, and August, were there. Fred, the oldest, was 23; August, the youngest, was 13. They were all single then, but each of their future spouses were also at this party: my grandfather Max; Fred’s future wife Frieda, who was a good friend of Hattie and Kate; and Philip’s future wife, Emma. Kate and August never married. The guest list included other German names and attests to the closeness of the Dieter children not only as siblings but also as friends.
The young people talked that night about the Kermess to be held soon at the Germania Club. “Kermess” was a familiar and exciting word to these young people, although its meaning is lost to me today. By reading the Joplin papers, which are filled with every detail of its preparation, I find myself listening as the echoes of an old European tradition take root in America. Hattie and her friends and siblings are very much a part of these old-world traditions and very much a part of this new city.
At this Tuesday night get-together, games were played and prizes were given out. Hattie, the only girl to win a prize, stood out—as she would a year later at the carnival. At ten o’clock refreshments were served. Not long after that, I imagine, the Dieter siblings started their walk home together. Max, my future grandfather, walked with them. Fred and Philip left on different routes to walk their future wives home.
There was much for my grandmother to look forward to that night as she walked the six blocks to 213 North Pearl Street: boyfriends, parties, festivals, and prizes. I can see her clearly, walking the familiar streets surrounded by family and friends. At sixteen, Hattie is on the very threshold of adulthood. She senses the powerful changes at work in her body leading her out of childhood and wonders where these changes will take her.
At this moment, we stand together on that Joplin Street, both of us imagining her life. She is breathing in the fresh spring air and looking at the stars, and I am hunched over a microfilm reader in a well-lit library. She imagines her life forward and knows nothing of the future. I imagine it backwards and have documented facts and theories, but none of her stories. This street we stand on connects up in some inexorable way to the same fanciful street that we walk together after my mother’s death. As always she waits silently, unable to talk, and I, full of hope, listen carefully.
In the early morning of May 4th 1919, Hertha’s waking was as usual slow. Stretching and pulling herself up in the darkness of this Shanghai morning, Hertha wished she could stay nestled in her pillows and linens all day long. “Kleine Schlafmuetze”…she whispered to herself, “wach auf” she continued a bit more harshly, “du musst aufstehen”. As a child Hertha’s mother had spoken to her many times in this exact way as she tried to lure Hertha back from her dreams and into the real world. Years later and with her mother far away, Hertha found that same tenderness and extra effort was still needed to entice her from her dreams as the day broke. Alongside images of her mother’s kindness, Hertha also counted on her daily routine to help her make the transition. This morning was no different. When she was awake and dressed, she eagerly began the long walk to the British sector where her work awaited her.
By the time she had reached her destination, Hertha had made a decision. A decision that she didn’t even realize she had been contemplating. From this day on, she would be someone else entirely. Hertha knew exactly who that new person was. She had been standing on the perimeter of Hertha’s life for quite some time now, actually nudging Hertha along. Now, everything was in place. Hertha was far away from her family. She was supporting herself. Her health was good. She would be whom she always dreamed of being, someone else entirely.
Looking Oppositely 