Looking for a Story to Tell

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None of the other grandchildren came up with a story, only fragments, memories, thanks. Back at her house after the funeral, I looked carefully at my grandmother's wedding portrait, which my mother had dug out of a box and displayed in the dining room. There was a whisper there of hopeful virtue, but no happiness. She held a bouquet of white lilies. I realized with a start that white lilies had also adorned her casket, and I asked my mother who had chosen the flowers. She said the funeral home had chosen them. On what information did they base their choice? I asked her. 'I suppose they chose lilies because they had the impression she was an elegant person,' my mother said, and walked away. But how would they know that? I wondered. They had had no information about her life. They chose lilies, I am convinced, because all they knew was her name: Lillian. We had left the story to be written by strangers.

My cousin rejoined me, and as we studied the wedding photograph she told me of visiting my grandmother in the nursing home, where she had lain mute and partially paralyzed after a stroke for several months before she died.

'Her nightgown fell away once, and I saw her scar,' my cousin said. 'And it was horrible.'

Sarah was referring to the mastectomy that my grandmother had had in her 20s, an event that neither she nor anyone else in our family ever talked about. Later that day, my grandmother's sister confessed to my mother that there were billboards up all around Boston that year urging women to examine themselves, the result (or cause) of a breast cancer scare. Aunt Esther suspected her sister's surgery may have been unwarranted. 'A second opinion was never sought,' she said.

Now, all of a sudden, other bits of the story came my way. My grandmother never much liked my grandfather, but her parents told her he was a good catch. He was a Harvard Law School graduate and his own father had graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1895, quite an accomplishment for poor Jewish immigrants. My grandmother's family was not as well-educated, but they were wealthier and more materialistic. Her father had begun as a peddler, moved on to collect rags and build a paper mill. At one point he had been a millionaire.

Then my mother told me that after a year of marriage, my grandmother, with her baby, my mother, in her arms, left my grandfather and went back home. But her parents told her she couldn't stay. My mother said, 'They told her she was damaged goods, and that she was lucky to have a husband at all. They told her she had no choice but to go back.'

And so she did, climbing the steps of the old subway cars, riding past the areas of town where before her marriage she had worked happily as a social worker. Something died in her then. She shut herself down. Because no one would listen, she would not be known, even to herself. Her desires were pushed away, thereby robbing her life of shape and movement. She busied herself with women's work: cooking and sewing and entertaining. And she became increasingly distracted. My mother once bitterly referred to her as 'autistic.' Her children suffered from her distraction. Denied the concentrated attention they needed, they grew up with terrible furies, angers that could never be soothed.

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