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06/11/2005: "Some Don't"

I wrote this back in prison, but my sister wisely didn't post it, as it needed substantial rewriting.

It's another memory piece about my family. Certainly I must have some of the details of what happened years ago wrong, but I think I remain true to the spirit of her life.

Some Don’t

My Aunt Nancy died of a broken heart. But the real tragedy was that she lived with one.

My grandparents adopted her when she was two, in 1938. Research my Aunt Cora did after Nancy’s death uncovered that her parents were a couple of modest means who were killed in a car accident, leaving several children behind. The other children were distributed among relatives, but Nancy was given up for adoption. Times were still tough in 1938, the relatives probably did the best they were capable of doing.

Still, for a child that young, the reason her parents, and any older siblings, suddenly disappear would make little difference. It is certainly easy to imagine that Nancy experienced the rupture as a rejection of the most profound kind. Even if she didn’t, so fundamental a loss at that age could only have inflicted a deep psychic wound.

My grandmother’s maiden name was Hazel Beebe. She was an imposing woman in her bearing and manner; a nurse who joined the workforce during the first great wave of women to do so, when World War I temporarily drained the U.S. labor force and loosened as well the social restrictions that kept proper middle-class girls at home until marriage. For a time she worked for the Anheuser family (of Anheuser-Busch) and even nursed its ailing patriarch in a private railroad car all over the country.

Eventually she ended up working at Bellevue Hospital in New York, and it was there that she met my grandfather, Russell Conwell Olmsted, in 1919. He was not recovering from war wounds, but injuries suffered in a grain elevator accident in Cuba. According to my Uncle Donn, the residual pain from the injury was to plague him for the rest of his life, and that chronic pain may have been a contributing or definitive factor in his suicide in 1942. No one really knows for sure.

In any case, my grandparents had 3 boys in a row in the 1920's, and Hazel wanted a little girl. Given Russell’s suicide a few years later, I can’t help but wonder that something was amiss in my grandparent’s marriage and perhaps, by adopting a little girl, my grandmother was trying to seal the fissure before it became an open breach.

Certainly, any tension within the marriage was well hidden from the children. Still, the trauma of her father’s suicide when Nancy was six could only have driven her farther into the arms of “Mother.” (My grandmother was never a “Mom” or a “Mama.” She was “Mother” to all of her children To my two sets of cousins, she became “Grandmother,” only to my brothers and sisters was she “Grandma”).

I have a photo of Nancy at 4 or 5, one of those pictures taken at a portrait studio. She is truly a dead ringer for Shirley Temple, with curly hair and a completely endearing grin. I haven’t come across many other photos of her from the decade that followed, but it could would well be they survive in photo albums that were passed on to either of my uncles. The next photos I am aware of are those in her high school yearbook, which we inherited.

Nancy looks every inch the 50’s teenager. She also appears to be smack dab in the middle of the pack socially and academically. She was a pretty redhead on the shy side whose principal extracurricular activity was softball. Her brothers were long since out of the house, married and in different parts of the world. There is no indication that she had any serious beaus, or any college aspirations. It was just her and my Grandmother in their Harrington Park, New Jersey house, and after graduation, a bookkeeping job for Nancy.

I don’t know how or when she met Eddie, but I suspect it was at this job. And it occurs to me for the first time, as I write this, that this well could have coincided with a dose of freedom for Nancy when her mother sailed to South America in 1956 to meet my mother and welcome the birth of my elder brother Luke. (My French mother and American father had met in Austria in 1951, and after a long, complex transatlantic courtship, she’d married him in Chile in 1955, where he worked for a shipping line)

Nancy would have been just 20 when my Grandmother left, and one can easily imagine her being especially vulnerable to the attentions of a handsome older man at work. Perhaps by the time she realized he was married, she was so far gone she thought a love like theirs could overcome everything.

Grandma came back from Chile, of course, and two years later, so did my parents. After a year’s sojourn in Denver, where my father sold encyclopedias door-to-door and my mother gave birth to me, my parents settled in Hazlet, New Jersey, very close to Nancy and Grandma.

As I reconstructed the story from my parents years later, by 1959 Eddie was an accepted fixture in Nancy’s life. Yes, it was known that he was married, but he was supposedly in the process of getting a divorce. Eddie must have been a pretty slick number to overcome the objections my grandmother must have had to their relationship, but evidently he did. A wedding date was set, the dress was chosen, even a cake was ordered. Then “suddenly,” Eddie announced there was glitch delaying finalization of his divorce. The wedding would have to be postponed.

By that time, fate had brought not only my father but his brothers as well back to the New York area. They pooled their suspicions, and decided a visit to Eddie's house was in order.

Eddie wasn’t home. But his wife was, along with three kids that had ever been mentioned by Eddie. It was complete news to his wife that she was in the middle of a divorce. The brothers had no choice but to tell their sister the man she loved was a liar.

Years later, when my father told me the story, he didn’t detail what it was like for Nancy to hear the news. He didn’t have to. One only needs to have been crushed by a first love to have a sense of it. Except in Nancy’s case, Eddie ended up being not only her first love, but her last love as well.

If you don’t count “Mannix,” that is. For reasons that are a little foggy to me, but probably because everyone concerned thought it was a good idea that Nancy get a little breathing room from Grandma, she came to live with us for a year of so in the mid-60‘s. We had moved to a great house in Rockville, Maryland, that had a basement that stayed delightfully cool in the summer. There Nancy had her own space, where she could watch baseball and her cop shows, (“Mannix” being her favorite,) and chainsmoke her Kents.

With 3 nephews and 2 nieces, and a big brother and a big sister-in-law to pass the time with, I’m sure the yawning chasm of her empty social life was a little easier to tolerate than night after night alone with “Mother.” If Nancy was unhappy, we kids certainly didn’t know it, but of course at that age kids have little concept that being a favorite aunt would not be more than enough to fulfill a young woman barely 30. Nancy was affectionate, and laughed a lot. But it was a nervous laugh. Even at 7 or 8 I noticed.

I also remember once, for some stupid, stupid reason but quite unconsciously, I joked with her that she wasn’t a “real” Olmsted. My brother Luke chewed me out afterwards, as he reminded me Nancy was adopted. I was horrified that she might have thought I was referring to that. But how could she have thought I was referring to anything else?

My brother made me apologize. My brother seldom ordered me to do anything, but when he did, I obeyed. I still can’t understand why I made that “joke.”

My mother tells the story of the one date that Nancy went on during that period. She remembers nothing at all of the man, simply that Nancy pleaded with her that she and my father come along. At the drive-in Nancy and her date could not hold hands because Nancy had my mother’s in a vise grip. That’s how nervous she was. Unsurprisingly, there was no second date.

Eventually, Grandma sold the house up in New Jersey, and she and Nancy rented a ground floor two-bedroom in the brand new, futuristic-for-1967 community of Reston, Virginia, right across the Potomac from us. Every Sunday, Nancy, in her 1964 Rambler, and with her beloved shaggy white dog Dusty, along with Grandma, would drive over from Reston to Rockville for Sunday dinner. Afterwards we would all laugh at “Get Smart” and “Hogan’s Heroes” (although my mother, having lived in occupied France under the Nazis, found some of the lighthearted buffoonery of the Nazis in “Hogan’s Heroes” a little hard-to-take.)

Grandma slipped and broke her hip around this time, and a few months later, in January 1969, she had a heart attack and died. Six months after that, my father got a job in New York, and after several months of commuting to Maryland and back every weekend, finally decided to uproot the family for a permanent move.

When we all finally piled into the car for the trip up to New York, I remember Nancy driving behind us part of the way. She had come from Reston to say goodbye, and then, would peel off when our routes diverged. I remember hearing my Dad say “Geez, your Aunt’s going through hell right now.” I had a very annoying habit of contradicting and questioning almost ever assertion my Dad made, and this was no exception. But I think I understood well enough how lonely he feared she would be. I just didn’t want it to be true. So I argued with him that it wasn’t. And of course I had no idea then that us leaving was probably an extension of one giant pain she’d felt her entire life, a pain that had gone from intolerable to something she had learned to live with, just as people learn to live with a missing limb or no hearing in one ear.

Aunt Nancy stayed in Virginia, and found a pair of best friends in Don and Betty, who were overweight and chainmoked but very good people. They became Nancy’s surrogate family. She came to visit once or twice a year, and once my sister and I spent a week visiting her in Reston. But even we could see her life was very small, consisting of. Don, Betty, Dusty and a low-paying clerical job. If she ever dated, certainly it never went far enough for her to mention anyone to those closest to her.

One Saturday afternoon when I was 14, I decided to experiment with some oil paints I had discovered in the basement. I created something abstract with autumnal colors, but the more I added to it, the more perfectly hideous it became. Suddenly, my father came into the little back room where I was painting. Before he could open his mouth, I launched into a monologue about finding these oil paints and I hoped it was okay that I used them and I can’t figure out if it’s kind of cool or kind of ugly, and then I finally noticed that my father was white as a sheet and I shut up.

“I just got a phone call from Virginia” he said in the shakiest voice I ever heard from him. “Your Aunt Nancy is in the hospital.”

I was never clear on the hows or whens she had started suffering from terrible abdominal pain, but she either called an ambulance or one was called for her, and she was rushed into intensive care. That’s pretty much all we knew when we drove down to see her a few days later. One by one we were allowed into the hospital room to briefly tell her we loved her, while she squeezed back a reply with her hand.

I think the official diagnosis was pancreatitis, and certainly her lungs, which had endured 20 years of smoking, did not help. But when Nancy died a few days later, the doctor requested we allow an autopsy because the pathology of her illness was so unclear. Her body just seemed to give up.

Most of us grieve death because of what is lost with the life, the joy their presence gave us, as well as the loss of the joy they experienced in living. We mourned the loss of Nancy’s presence in our lives, but we didn’t mourn the loss of joy for her, because she experienced so little of it. I think Aunt Nancy also grieved for her life, as she lived it, though she doubtfully could have, or would have, articulated it while she was alive.

I don’t believe in Hell, but if I did, I’d imagine a special place in it for Eddie, and men like him who call a sparrow from her nest and then clip her wings as she perches on a branch, only to push her off of it.

Some sparrows survive the fall and learn to fly again.

Some don’t.

MCO 2004