My maternal grandmother saved me from extinction when I was a teenager. She was a refuge of unconditional love during my dad’s worst drinking and my mom’s anger at almost everything.
But she was also a mystery. Handsome instead of beautiful, regal in bearing, a cut-throat bridge player. The mystery was around her youth. She’d been kicked out of Smith College. No one was permitted to ask why. She married my grandfather when she was almost 30, definitely a potential spinster in that age. She started an affair with another man when my mother was five and continued that affair until the man’s wife died of cancer. Then they married. My mother had also married by that time. Granddaddy Bill was the grandfather I knew the best as I spent two weeks every summer at their grand house in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.
The story I tell about that time when I would stay with them is this. My grandparents (for that is how I thought of them) lived in a stucco house with three floors. Two black people worked for them. John was the chauffeur and his sister, Belle, was the cook. She made unlimited sand tarts (crispy sugar cookies) and soft boiled eggs when I would visit.
When John drove my grandmother and me shopping or to one of her friends, he wore a chauffer’s uniform. He drove Granddaddy Bill’s huge Cadillac with a monogrammed lap robe in the back seat. When we would return home, John would stop the car by the sidewalk to the front door of the house and would walk down the driveway to the back door. Once inside he would put on his butler’s white jacket and meet us at the front door. When I was very little I thought this was magic.
Granddaddy Bill died when I was 12. My grandmother moved from Glen Ridge to an apartment in Greenwich, Connecticut, where we lived.
She and my mother fought like hell. In some ways mom was good to her. My grandmother had a garden in our side yard. Mom was also a gardener. Hers was on the opposite side of the yard. They fought about driving (my grandmother stopped for green lights and drove through red ones). My mother was, herself, a terrible driver as she was always late and drove too fast to make up for her timing. My parents traveled a lot (for dad’s business mostly), and my grandmother was our mother during those times. She was a great cook (compared to my mother) and our meals were of a much higher quality when my parents traveled. But we three (my brothers and I) exhausted her.
She took her own life at 82. She’d broken her hip and at that point, there was no surgery to help repair it. She was bed bound and hated it. One afternoon she picked a fight with my mother and then with me, her favorite grandchild . That was her goodbye. Mom found her the next morning. She’d suffocated.
Still, when I’m afraid, or discouraged, or rudderless, I think of my grandmother and her constant support of me, and I feel better.
