by Susan Morse
Ma’s mother’s first husband, Sidney Brock, was wealthy and socially acceptable. He came approved, even recommended, by her mother, Gaga. Ma’s mother had four children with Mr. Brock, and when he went off to war, she became entangled with Grandsir (my grandfather, the accident-prone flyer). Grandsir, born Harry Drayton, was descended from an old Charleston family, but their money had run out. This seemed to be happening more and more by the twenties: Old establishment families must have made life so easy on their children that the ones coming up didn’t necessarily have the juice to step forward if things got tight.
Gaga consulted with her well-heeled son-in-law, Sidney Brock. They both thought it best for everyone if Ma’s mother (Gaga’s own daughter, mind you) didn’t bring her four children when she bolted with her impoverished aviator (her second husband, my Grandsir).
Ma’s mother was deemed an unfit parent, by her own mother.
Ma’s parents, Granny and Grandsir, went where the army took him: first to Virginia, where Ma was born, and then to Long Island, where her little sister, Bobs (short for Barbara), was born. Grandsir was eventually transferred to Honolulu, Hawaii. This must have been pretty exotic—imagine what Hawaii would have been like in the Roaring Twenties, all Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald under the coconut palms. There’s a fascinating picture of a fancy dress party with a crowd of partied-out grown-ups, probably from the army base: Grandsir’s a pirate, Granny’s a gypsy or something, and there are one or two people in blackface, which is awful, but there it is.
When I was little, I had a favorite story I’d get Ma to tell me over and over at bedtime, partly because it seemed to soothe her nerves, but also for my own pleasure:
—Tell about the goat.
—Well, Bobs and I were both in bed with the mumps.
—And you were soooo bored.
—Yes, we didn’t have anything to do for weeks and weeks.
—And there was a nanny goat who died.
—Yes, Grandsir went hunting with his sergeant and the sergeant shot a nanny goat by accident. The nanny goat had a little kid and it had to be fed, so Grandsir brought it home for us.
—And you and Aunt Bobs were in your beds and—
—And we heard something outside the door: meh-eh-eh!
—And it was a little baby goat!
—Yes, and it was so lovely because we weren’t bored anymore—we had the little kid. We could feed it and it got on the beds with us and everything.
For years, I thought Honolulu must have been the absolute best thing ever, but it turns out that like Ireland was for us, there were more layers to Honolulu than you realized, and things got tough. The people on the army base weren’t interesting enough for Ma’s mother, and there wasn’t much money for servants. Neither of Ma’s parents knew how to cope (i.e., cook, clean, get children to school) which is pathetic, but that’s the way it was. They drank and fought a lot, and Ma’s mother would go back to Auntie Gaga’s in Philadelphia for long stretches of time, to “get her teeth fixed.”
Eventually, Ma’s mother bolted a second time, to her final true love: Jack Henderson (known to us as Granjack), who was also not particularly well-off. This culminated in a standoff in San Francisco when Ma was about eight years old. Ma’s father’s term in Honolulu was over, and he had just brought the little girls back to the mainland. Ma’s mother showed up with her new husband and told Ma and Bobs that she would take them with her to their place in Wayne, Pennsylvania, or wherever it was. Ma must have had a precocious backbone, because at age eight she took it upon herself to speak up. No, she said to her mother. She and Bobs would be living in stability, in Penllyn with their father, Grandsir, and his mother, Grandma Drayton—
—Ma. Time out.
—What?
—Who’s Grandma Drayton and where did she come from?
—She was my other grandmother.
—I can’t deal with Grandma Drayton right now.
—Don’t say that! Grandma Drayton was very important, and I loved her! She was my father’s mother, your great-grandmother.
—Grandma Drayton. Grandma Drayton. You left your mother, who I called Granny and you called Mummy, and went to live with your father (my Grandsir) and his mother, Grandma Drayton.
—Your Granny, by the way, was not a bolter, Susie. Sidney Brock kicked her out, and then she and Grandsir fought so terribly much that she had to leave. She couldn’t take her children because she had no money. And she just loved Granjack. He was an old friend she’d known all her life. He was descended from Washington Irving and related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, he played the piano beautifully, and I was very fond of him.
Whatever.
I have a few memories of my mother’s mother (aka Granny aka Mummy, aka the bolter) mostly to do with croquet and dogs. Like Auntie Gaga, my Granny played a vicious game of croquet. When I knew her, Granjack had died and she was living within range of Manhattan in Seabright, New Jersey, in a moldering 1930s-era bungalow she named Malgré Tout, which means “In Spite of Everything.” She had card tables set up in almost every room for her ongoing jigsaw puzzles. There was a stash of empty bottles by the bed, and enough lawn for both croquet and a sizable pack of carelessly trained poodles, who generally preferred the masses of newspapers lining the floors inside the house. She wore wigs and had long cigarette holders, and made sure our visits were relatively bearable by keeping up her membership at a wonderful Victorian beach club we all adored.
Almost every picture of Granny includes a small dog—that was her thing, dogs. In fact, Ma and Daddy met when his mother went to buy a poodle puppy from her mother. My guess is the dogs filled the void left by the two successive households of children she didn’t manage to keep, or else they always had priority to begin with. Just a guess.
So little Ma and Bobs went with Grandsir, which is where his mother, Grandma Drayton, comes in.
Ma and Bobs had the best years of their childhood to date with Grandma Drayton, who gave them more stability than they had ever known. They even managed to connect with their older half-siblings and spend time over at Auntie Gaga’s trying to play touch football. It’s possible that they would have gone with Grandsir to his next army posting down south, but this got canceled when he had his elbow sideswiped in the car and instead needed to spend five years having a series of operations at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. They were able to keep in touch with their mother and Auntie Gaga, while living with Grandma Drayton in the country, in her house named Warley.
And Grandma Drayton was such a relief. She gave them a predictable routine, and religion—grace at meals and prayers and things. She loved her garden and believed in fresh air, so they took long walks every day with a “companion” hired especially for them. Everything Grandma Drayton did was carefully thought out—she was a widow and wore only black all winter and nothing but white in the summer. Ma and Bobs became pre-teenagers, and did happy teenager things like secretly painting their toenails up on the third floor and smoking hand-rolled cornsilk cigarettes behind the barn.
—She was so thoughtful to us, and so civilized. I listened to the symphony on the radio with her on Saturday afternoons, and the coverage of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping and the stock market crash. The crash worried her—you knew always when Grandma Drayton was worried because she used to fiddle with her wedding ring.
When Ma and Bobs’s father was discharged, he got a job in insurance and settled with them in Philadelphia. His drinking escalated. Grandma Drayton was determinedly oblivious, but Ma was not, especially one morning when Grandsir was going to drive her to the eye doctor. Her father was obviously drunk already, Ma says. She tried to get out of it; she went to the servants, who clearly didn’t have the authority to protect her. Grandsir and Ma eventually set off. They were headed straight for a pine tree along the side of Warley’s driveway when Ma decided to open the door and make a leap for it, out of the moving car.
Ma, age thirteen, dusted herself off and marched back into the house. Grandma Dra
yton was in the front hall looking out the window as her son’s tailpipe as it disappeared around the bend. She had on her winter black, and was silently twisting her wedding ring around and around.
—He’s DRUNK, said thirteen-year-old Ma.
—He’s NOT, said Grandma Drayton.
So Ma took a deep breath, and then took her thirteen-year-old self upstairs to the phone and called her mother (who lived with Granjack on the other side of town). Ma told her mother that she and Bobs couldn’t stay there, it was too much.
Her mother told her to sit tight and eventually called back. She asked if Ma would be willing to stand up in court to explain why she and Bobs needed to get out of their father’s care.
This was the law in that area at the time: If children wanted to have their custodial circumstances changed, they could only get it legally done by testifying in open court.
So that’s what Ma did. She went to court. It must have been horrible because her father was there that day, of course, and Grandma Drayton, too, who loved them like a mother should, loved them to pieces and must have felt terribly betrayed. Ma told the story of the near-accident on the way to the eye doctor and lord knows what other stories, but whatever she said did the trick. The judge gave custody to the bolter.
Grandma Drayton got very ill some months after Ma and Bobs left. They wanted to visit her, but since their mother and Granjack didn’t exactly feel welcome at Warley, there was endless debate about how to handle the delicate trick of taking Ma and Bobs all the way out to the country to see their father’s mother. By the time Ma and Bobs were delivered, everyone seemed busy and preoccupied. Someone was in with Grandma Drayton, and nobody invited the girls to go in and see her. They waited in the hall outside the bedroom, listening to their favorite grandmother’s moans of pain, until finally someone (Grandsir?) came out looking distracted, to say it was not a very good day for a visit.
Grandma Drayton died soon after. So the last time Ma saw the only truly dependable adult in her childhood was on the terrible day when she had to tell all those grown-ups in open court the truth nobody wanted to face. That kind of wound never goes away.
Ma’s and her little sister’s bumpy childhood must have been a sharp contrast to the other world Auntie Gaga ruled over at Kyneton on the Main Line. They were lucky for their foothold in it through their mother: this vibrant, jolly club where people mostly stayed married to each other, met their responsibilities to their children, and there were enough means for staff, afternoon teas, and what have you.
Supposedly, the house still stands, although the land surrounding it has long since been subdivided and developed. We’ve tried one road that Ma thinks was their long elegant driveway. This used to go through the fields to the main house, but now it dead-ends at a much smaller building that looks like a little converted barn.
—The schoolhouse! says Ma.
Holy mackerel, this is Muzzy’s schoolhouse! People actually living in it, with a mailbox and their cars parked out front and everything. We back around and go out to the main road again. Not far down the way we find another road that Ma says hadn’t existed. It’s called Kyneton Road, which sounds promising, so we try it.
One McMansion after another line both sides of the street.
—This doesn’t look right at all, says Ma.
—Let’s just go to the end and see what happens.
The road ends in a cul-de-sac, and we pause self-consciously. We are the only people on the sleepy suburban lane besides a crew of gardeners swarming with mini tractors and leaf-blowers all over a garden to our left.
—None of this looks right, says Ma.
—What’s up that hill?
There’s a longish uphill driveway disappearing somewhere above the gardeners.
—We need to go see what’s up there, Ma.
A woman in an SUV comes down the driveway, waves at the lawn crew and heads off to the main road.
—Darn, we could have asked her. Let’s go up.
—Susie, this is trespassing!
—Ma, we’re having an adventure. We’ve come all this way, why don’t we drive up there and see? Just act like you know what you’re doing.
So up we go past the gardeners, who don’t look like they’re going to report us. At the top of the hill, we round a corner.
—Oh my, says Ma.
—Is this it?
—Yes, this is it!
I’ve had a huge estate house in my mind, with tennis courts and outbuildings, a ballroom, but Kyneton is actually sort of normal looking. It clearly has a lot of bedrooms, but it’s not really anything to jump up and down about. Still it’s fun—somewhere below here among the newer houses was the tennis court and the actual touch football field. This is where Auntie Gaga lived and died, drove one of the first Model Ts, and much much later, age eighty-two, woke herself up at four in the morning to see the first Soviet Sputnik overhead.
—That oak tree has always been there. Always, says Ma.
I remember a grand old oak mentioned in Muzzy. Auntie Gaga and her husband, George, bought their twenty-five acres of land around the time they married in 1902. The only tree on the hill where they built the house was a single massive oak. It was supposedly still standing when Muzzy was written in 1966, so this must be the one. The gardeners are working their way up the driveway, too, but I get Ma out because who knows when we’ll ever come back here? I give her my arm, and we teeter across the driveway to take a picture by the ancient tree.
It’s gnarled and lumpy and a lot of its older branches have had to be lopped off. It must be really ancient now, but it’s here.
Ma leans on me as we go up over the grass to stand at its base. I have to back myself up to get as much of the huge tree in the frame as I can. Ma looks so small, but she’s standing on her own, and behind her the trunk of the old oak spirals majestically up, up, up, with sunlight coming through the leaves near the top.
The remaining good branches are sturdy and long. If you look at the picture closely, you might be able to see Auntie Gaga up there on one of the limbs—she still climbed trees in her seventies. And maybe you’ll see beautiful Gaga, and Cousin Buckety, Granny with her poodles arranged along a branch beside her, and the countess, and Aunt Tiny who wasn’t really tiny. This tree is so old, maybe even older than truly tiny Little Granny with her Quaker bonnets, and older than all the other grannies we know about, and Grandsir and Bobs, and Grandma Drayton in her summer whites. But still, the old oak is here.
And so am I. And so is Ma.
Ma, Villanova, 2007
14.
The Fall
January 6, 2008
PAPERWORK MAKES ME GRUMPY, and it’s worse than ever this year. Bills all over the place. Elaborate forms to fill out for Ma’s Long-Term Care claims. Phone calls to places like Eliza’s new college, trying to make sense of their supposedly efficient, indecipherable online paperless tuition payment system. They won’t let Eliza look at her grades till I sort it all out, and it’s a labyrinth of passwords and login numbers and user IDs with unexplained charges popping out of nowhere.
Ring. Ring.
—Hello?
—Susie, did you hear about the Baumards’ rapprochement?
—Yes. . . .
—Isn’t it amazing? It’s just astounding. . . .
(I can sense it coming, here it comes I just know it’s religious and I’m going to get cranky. I should get off the phone quick before I say something mean—)
—Don’t you think it’s astonishing, Susie? Their father wants to see them after all these years!
Ma’s deceased sister, Bobs, married a Frenchman named Baumard, and they had a lot of children, my cousins, who are now scattered all over Europe. Following the divorce many years ago, the children’s relations with their father have been strained. Ma feels very maternal about Bobs’s children.
—Well, I don’t really know them as well as you so . . .
—It’s the Holy Spirit! The Bishop said this kind of thing might
start happening in the family when I became a nun and—
(Too late.)
—So, Ma. You think this reconciliation between the French cousins and their father is our family’s first legitimate miracle? What about your rapprochement with Daddy thirty years ago when you two were separated and he joined AA and started going to church with you at Saint Mark’s? An Episcopalian miracle!
—What does that have to do with anything?
—You’re saying anything good that happens in our family from now on will be because you became an Orthodox nun. All those other good things that happened before were hoaxes because they were the wrong religions.
—But it is the Holy Spirit. I’m going to light a candle for the Baumards when I get to Carlisle.
—You do that. Look, I’m being a pill. I should go; it’s the bills; they’re making me nuts. Sorry.
Mother Brigid is going on a trip. She’s making her first official church appearance to celebrate Orthodox Christmas at her home church in Carlisle tomorrow. It’s a very big deal. She has been spending much of her time this month figuring out how to assemble the nun habit.
Her friend down the hall, Bess, is good with computers and things, so Ma finally enlisted her when she couldn’t make sense of the elaborate handwritten diagrams sent from one of the convents. There are all these pieces of black cloth you have to wrap around yourself and layer over one another and tie together in hard-to-reach places. It takes forever and is exhausting. At the end of their first try, Bess needed a glass of wine and Ma looked like she had joined the Taliban. I have a grim record of the result of their ordeal: a snapshot of Ma, haggard, glaring out from under masses and masses of black fabric, like an exceedingly irritated, swaddled old bird. I’ve posted it on our bulletin board, next to a reproduction of Picasso’s Jester on Horseback and my favorite George W. Bushism:
