I learned from the little information my mother would dole out to me that my grandfather was of Scotch-Irish stock—the McCallen clan. On this day, she explained that he was a building contractor and a craftsman who made fine furniture, and he had managed to support his wife and five children even in the throes of the Depression.
Since she seemed to be more open than usual to talking to me I asked her, “Momma, what was my grandfather like?”
“He worked hard for his family.”
“Was he nice? Was he funny?”
“He was always tired from working.”
“But what was he like?”
But Momma was no longer willing to talk about him. “He was a good man. He worked hard for his family. I didn’t know much more about him.”
Join the club, I thought. A family of secret keepers.
I yearned for a family. I wondered what it would be like to have a father who came home from work every day and gave me a big hug and kiss. I wished I had grandparents who would come to visit and dote on me like other kids’ grandparents did. And so I clung to the crumbs my mother would give me about my extended family, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant.
My mother did tell two stories about my grandparents that first summer at Ruby’s, both involving the Great Depression.
During the Depression, my grandfather had to go out of town to find work. He would send home money at the beginning of the month with instructions to my grandmother to make the money last all month.
But my grandmother loved to live extravagantly. She’d been raised with money and just couldn’t seem to economize. And she was quite the social butterfly. So each time she received money from my grandfather she’d go to the store and spend it all in one day. She’d buy chocolate-covered cherries and liquor and food for a party. Then she’d invite all the neighbors over. By the middle of the month, they had only potatoes to live on.
Once, when my grandfather was home for a visit, one of the kids slipped and told him how they’d only had potatoes for weeks. He became very angry with my grandmother and lectured her about economizing. But it seemed she never learned.
My mother always told this story with great relish and an obvious affection for my grandmother. She’d say my grandmother was a very outgoing, gregarious woman who was loved by everyone. And then she’d begin to cry and have to stop talking.
My mother’s love for her mother was so powerful and her description of her so loving that I couldn’t help loving her myself. She was so vivid in my mind, partly because of the picture my mother had of her and partly because my mother said I physically resembled her. She told me my personality was like hers as well.
I felt sad that I never met her. She died just before I was born, hit by a car. My mother had planned to name me Sadie Jane but named me Beverly instead because my grandmother liked that name.
Momma told me that my grandmother had quite a penchant for exotic names. She was an avid reader and a romantic. She named all her children after characters in novels. Her oldest daughter was named Natalla and my mother was named Olga, both taken from Russian novels. It wasn’t as clear where she got the names for her sons, Forrest and Wendall. Only the oldest, Frank, got a regular American name.
The other story my mother told me about the Depression was that it finally got so bad that my grandfather could no longer find enough work to support his family. And so the only thing to do was to send some of the children to relatives. They sent Frank, who was seventeen, along with Wendall (they called him by his middle name, Kay), the youngest and only ten at the time, to live with relatives in California. My aunt Natalla married at sixteen, to her high school sweetheart. And my uncle Forrest, fourteen, had to quit high school and go to work in a bakery. He and my mother, who was thirteen at the time, were the only ones to remain at home. This tore the family apart, my mother said, and no one was ever the same again because of it.
I liked hearing about my mother’s large family and imagining what it would be like to have so many siblings. I hated being an only child. But my mother always seemed sad when she talked about her family, and she didn’t seem to be close to any of her siblings. I wondered why that was.
chapter 3
Having no father, siblings, or grandparents created a burden for both my mother and me. My mother’s burden was that she had to raise me on her own, with no help from anyone. That meant that she alone had to provide for me all the attention, guidance, and love a growing child needs and wants. My burden was having to try to make do with the little she could provide for me.
When you have only one parent to look to, it puts a lot of pressure on that person—more pressure than my mother could take. So instead of teaching me about personal hygiene or how to tie my shoelaces or the multitude of other things parents show their kids how to do, she taught me to be invisible around her, to push down my needs and not bother her with them, and to not burden her with my problems. And she taught me to fend for myself—to get myself up in
