I've been applying to some grad programs, and for the past four months I've been obsessed with that process. It's finally (mainly) over. The most immediate benefit of all of it, disregarding what future results may or may not occur, is that I've polished three pieces - most of which I've already posted here in rougher forms. I figured I'd share the final ('final'?) versions.
Number One:
"The glad years come"
On Valentine’s Day, my older sister and I are charged with cleaning our parents’ attic. They’re moving a few towns over in Virginia to a house better designed to accommodate my dad’s escalating health problems (fewer stairs), and they need us to clear out the junk before the movers come.
We crawl up gingerly, easing our way along the fold-out ladder, which always seems about to buckle to the side like an injured knee but does not, and poke our heads into the attic. It’s fairly typical as attics go: cardboard boxes with sharpie scrawl, banged-up suitcases, an electric kettle and lone ski boot; angled wooden ceiling beams so low you have to stoop. Our hands are soon thick with dust from thumbing over poorly boxed and bagged books, and our noses run; the air is stuffy, cloudy with particles of disrepair and inertia.
Once we’re done with the books, we spread out into opposite corners: Mia with the lumpy bag of stuffed animals, and me with the suitcase pile. Most of them (the suitcases, I mean) are useless; old and heavy, without rollers. I’ve just parted with my paternal grandmother’s threadbare Oscar de la Renta (noticing its tag for the first time and suddenly understanding why she carted it around like a puffed-up bird into her 80s), when I find the suitcase.
It is small and maroon and utterly unremarkable, nestled in the shadows between two other dusty relics. Unlike the others, however, it is heavy. When I lift it with the intention of tossing it downstairs into the garbage heap, I’m stopped by its heft.
“This one’s got something in it,” I say to Mia as I thump it down in front of me. “There are cards here signed by a ‘Philip.’” This stops her. She crawls over, squatting awkwardly, realizing before I have that this Philip is our long-dead grandfather, the famous Philip. Philip whose early death altered the trajectory of our mother’s life and became the crucible of her childhood troubles, described to us fleetingly, only in passing, as a long-lost loss. The great loss.
The lining of the suitcase is a shiny, shocking pink. We see from the initials under the handle that it belonged to our Nana, our mom’s mom, who died when we were children. At the very top is a man’s attaché case, which I open. I spread the wealth of greeting cards between me and Mia, and we take turns reading to each other. Happy Birthday, Dear Wife, states the cover of one. A woman in a 1940s dress and high heels arranges flowers on a table. Inside, a printed inscription: Happy wishes to you, wife. It’s your birthday, and you know, you grow nearer and still dearer as the glad years come and go! Below that, his looping cursive: “For I love you, sweetheart, and have you with me always in my heart. Love, Phil.” It is the first time either of us has seen his handwriting, found any personal article of his.
On the left inside flap of the card, a woman’s face drawn in the shape of an apple puckers her lips and bats her lashes; a hat shaped like a green leaf sits on her head. At the top, Philip has penned the date: February 1, 1944.
They would have had the first two girls by then. My mother would come three years later, the final little one, the bean-faced runt. We know almost nothing of those years, the happy years. How they lived, what they did. We’ve seen a jerky, sped-up video taken from their honeymoon in St. Augustine, Nana in her fitted skirt-suits and dramatic heels, dark lipstick and coiffed black hair, waving on the boardwalk. Philip the quiet eye behind the lens, rarely figuring in the frame.
And he’s absent from many of the photos we find here, too, below the cards: Nana, posing in a fur coat and floppy cream hat in their backyard in Brooklyn, the neighbors’ row houses strung out like Chinese lanterns behind her. Nana, glamorous smile, tucked into his wallet.
But he does appear. We lightly touch the images of him now: here he is, squeezing into a photobooth, balancing Nana on his lap and flashing a pretty-boy grin; smoking a cigarette in a white suit, squinting in the sunlight; his dark, thick lashes and eyebrows, cupid’s bow lips. It’s never occurred to me before, but it’s obvious now, somehow: Philip was sweet.
The story, as told by my mother, goes like this: Philip came from an educated, wealthy Italian family, and Nana, though she’d once been offered a scholarship to Julliard as an opera singer, was a typist. Poor. Despite his family’s disapproval, they had the wedding – big, Catholic – the towering, cloying cake and heavy silk gown. They had the tropical honeymoon; they moved into a house and had the three girls. And then, eight years into the marriage, Philip got sick. A rare cancer in his retina. He was thirty-five when he died; my mother was two. If it’s nearby, she’ll refer to the only photo she has of them together; she is plunked in his lap on the beach, scrawny and scowling, and you can see in his eyes that he’s tired. The sand around them is a bleached white, the ocean a blanched grey. He is grimacing.
A month after Philip’s death, his father died, and his mother’s health plummeted. While she was bedridden (in the process of a two-month decline that would end in her death), her daughter, Philip’s sister, began to visit her. The family money to which Philip had claim had not been distributed to Nana yet, and Philip’s sister didn’t think it should be. ‘We barely know the woman,’ she reportedly told her mother, sitting by her bed and speaking in hushed tones. ‘How do we know she’ll look after those girls?’ (The information was passed on to Nana by the family’s housekeeper, who at one point promised to act as Nana’s witness in court, but rescinded when the family threatened to fire her.) The story is complicated, with many disappointments, but the short of it is, Nana never saw Philip’s inheritance. His mother changed the will to leave it in Philip’s sister’s name, and after that, all communication ended. Nana and the girls were set adrift.
Next in the pile is a hodgepodge of papers: a playbill from Radio City Music Hall (“Showcase!” trumpets the cover), a 1946 invoice for a refrigerator he must have bought her. Here is a little pencil case with his initials, PJB, doodled all over it, and here is his father’s death card, printed in Italian. We rifle through the last of these mementos and, satisfied we’ve explored them thoroughly, reassemble the attaché case and lay it aside.
The rest of the suitcase is less colorful; the emotional objects all seem to have been tucked away in the case, kept intact and protected, and what lies beneath are folders. Documents. We open the first folder, which is neatly organized, left side and right. The pages are thin, tissuey legal paper, and they seem to be correspondences, spanning years. I hand them over to Mia, restless before I’ve even begun, preferring to flip through the rest of the suitcase’s contents for more hidden treasures. So it is Mia who sits still and makes sense of them and says, after some time, “She wrote the President.”
Now this is interesting. Nana’s rages are legendary in our family. We know that she struggled financially after Philip died, relocating from Brooklyn to Catskill, where she supplemented his small veteran’s pension by working as a secretary and, at night, managing her parents’ bowling alley. We know she was stretched thin and felt chronically cheated from the life she should have had. We know that she was mentally ill, that she had what would today be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, but was then called “nervous breakdowns,” and was sporadically hospitalized for it. But writing the president is a new, iconic piece of evidence in the case of Nana. It is deliciously, tragically grandiose.
Mia reads:
November 14, 1961
The President
The Whitehouse
Washington, DC
My Dear Mr. President,
I am enclosing here within a copy of a letter, which I have directed to the honorable Abraham Ribicoff, and which is self-explanatory. Your intercession would be much appreciated. Thank you for your attention to this matter, which is of such extreme importance to myself and to my children.
We find the letter to Ribicoff (the name means nothing to me, woefully poor student of US history that I am, though I later identify him as Kennedy’s Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare), which is itself an introduction to prior correspondences. We see, digging through them, both those she enclosed for Ribicoff and other, earlier letters; how much time she must have dedicated to petitioning for benefits, how increasingly frustrated.
What begins in 1949, following Phillip’s death, as perfunctory withdrawals from his estate evolve into more carefully-worded pleas as her requests grow more frequent: “I’ve put off making this request hoping I would be able to manage without further withdrawals,” she writes to a Veterans Affairs attorney in 1950, “however my illness has precluded my working even part time, and I find I just cannot make ends meet on the small income I receive...Christmas is almost here, and although I cannot afford luxuries for the children, still, warm new clothing would go far in making it a happier time for them.”
Were they really so desperate? My mother has always been mute on the subject. Like a mole, she tunneled through her childhood cautiously, seeking comfort in dark, safe spaces (the bedroom she shared with her sisters, caves found under table tops and other sturdy furniture). Put another way, she doesn’t remember much from those years; she says she’s not sure that she imprinted memories as they were occurring; something about trauma and children, a handy defense mechanism some brains employ to protect their young owners.
Like rocks skittering down an embankment, a foothold lost, we read Nana’s situation go from tenuous to perilous. Following the annulment of a short-lived marriage in 1954 (Andrew the Greek, who was prone to jealous rages and smoked cigars with the windows rolled up), she attempts to get her widow’s benefits reinstated, but is only allotted a third of her previous payments.
In 1956, she goes through a disappointing exchange with the VA again, trying to establish the dates of Philip’s employment, which she believes should now, due to a law change, make her retroactively eligible for disability benefits. She is denied.
Her letter to Ribicoff five years later reveals an obsession with this perceived injustice: “Since 1956,” she writes, “I have been brooding over what I know is an unfair and arbitrary decision. The referee at the time of the hearing was extremely annoyed with me, because I had caused him to miss his commuting train due to a traffic situation which delayed me in reaching New York City from Catskill, NY, where I was then residing. I explained why I was late, but he was still upset about it...”
I imagine her sucking in air as she sits up straight to start typing, crossing her ankles and tucking them under her chair. Intent on making him see the gravity, the epic disaster, lurking in her petty details. She never received a response, of course.
As abruptly as Mia and I made our discovery, we reach the end. We have finished our excavation of the suitcase, and there is nothing left to sort through. We close it back up, and I carry it back to where I found it. We have taken from it several of Philip’s business cards, which we found in his wallet, the photobooth picture and white enamel necklaces we assume were Nana’s.
The next morning, I offer to show my mother the suitcase; she has never seen it, she says, and doesn’t know where it came from, and I imagine she’ll be eager. But she declines. Slouched in the kitchen watching the kettle for signs of steam, she looks tired.
I have less than an hour to catch my bus back to Brooklyn, and she thinks it’s all just too much to drudge up so quickly. I can understand that. But I was hoping for additional insight from her, an insider’s elaboration, and it’s clear, suddenly, that I won’t get it.
The accounts I’ve heard from my mother about her childhood are patchy at best, a half-made collage: bringing hot bags of donuts for the black boys who worked in the back of bowling alley retrieving and resetting pins; being pulled from bed and rained with slaps late at night by Nana when she didn’t clean the house; hiding under her bed in the morning because she was scared of the nuns at school, who used metal-edged rulers as punishment; her grandmother’s fried dough balls, drizzled in honey; buckets of thrashing eels for Christmas dinner. In her memories, it is mainly the scenery that is vivid.
I feel like I’ve inherited the same blindness. Holding Nana’s necklaces, it’s still hard to picture her. She remains a phantasm, the voluptuous dictator with tiny feet who smiled only in photos. I can easily conjure the traditional image I’ve had of her – Nana as The Great Potential Wasted, a singing voice that could shatter glass (supposedly), a whistle like a warbling songbird. But these are just family lore, old china patterns to stare at wistfully, fragments that helped me imagine where I came from.
It must have been hard, being a widow, and then a divorcee, in a small town like Catskill. If the nuns at school instructed the children not to play with my mother and her sisters, it must have been worse for Nana. I have never heard, for instance, a story involving one of her friends. To be proud is a hard thing, a pebble to suck on, but to be proud and powerless, proud and friendless, well.
Even so, she remained vain; always dressed up, matching hat and purse, marching to her job at her soon-to-be third husband’s office, marching to the bowling alley afterwards, and finally, well past midnight with swollen, pinched feet, home.
Cancer took her, finally; not in her eye, like Philip, but in her famous breasts. She was living in McLean, Virginia by then with her third husband. The house was modest but comfortable; a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard and astroturfed front steps. This husband was not faithful, but he loved her in his way. I would not, based on stories of their life together, describe her as happy at the end, but I would not call her unhappy either, not necessarily.
This petering out, this tapering of a tragic story to a moderately slim end, is for some reason hard to reconcile. As though it can’t be the whole story. As though the mundanity, the layered ordinariness of her final years is an injustice to her, that a Hollywood ending where she died destitute, alone, or made a breathtaking comeback, haloed in light and a final great love, would have been somehow better. Surely she thought the same, squirreling away her own scraps of the past, her thwarted future.
Instead of a righteous conclusion, we have mementos: her pill bottles and reading glasses, which were left by her husband in their medicine cabinet for decades after her death, even lasting through his next marriage; we find her forgotten suitcase and take from it photos and jewelry. After everything, what we are left with gnaws steadily away inside us, hiding but never dormant for long: the stubborn, impotent reluctance to let things go.
