Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Grandma Haverhill
Part 1: Unintended Consequences
Many years ago my mother was sorting through some of my grandmother’s belongings and came across a letter that had been written by my Great Grandmother. It wasn’t a letter in the traditional sense. It was just something she had written down. It was titled, “A Visit by Grandma Haverhill.” It was written in 1926. The letter described her nighttime visit. It would probably be more accurate to describe it as a vision as there was no such person alive.
The letter has long since disappeared, but it was interesting and around long enough for me to have read it many times. It was kept in the junk drawer of our coffee table, so it was something I came across frequently.
It doesn’t really matter if it was true or not, but it was interesting in the sense that it told me a lot about my distant relatives—something written in a more frank style about the people who were living at the time, and their troubles and the lives they led.
Grandma Haverhill said she, “circled the planets every eight and half years” and would check on the family on her visit to the earth. My teenager image of her was that she was some sort of comet or comet rider. I could imagine this veiled granny straddling the back of a comet, Slim Pickins style in Dr. Strangelove, and in a kind of Yee Haw!, would enjoy a wild ride around the galaxy.
She said she was a sort of visiting guide. My great-grandmother asked her a series of questions, as one might ask a combination fortune teller and doctor. It was the fact that this was treated so normally that made it appealing (and there were other family stories about being visited by dead relations), so this wasn’t the only example of this sort of thing.
I remember the year it was written because my mother was nearly three years old at the time of the visit. Regarding my mother, she was asked if she would be a singer and was told that she would do a little singing, but “she would travel the world and write about it.” This section was especially touching to my mother, reading it in her late 50s, as this was something she longed to do with her life, but had not done (nor did she, although the dream of doing it died with her). To my mother then, the letter became a kind of validation, a sort of ordination of her unfulfilled desires.
Regarding one family member, Grandma Haverhill advised that he lay off the “Irish Potatoes” (white potatoes) as it wasn’t good for this person’s diet. I thought this was interesting because during the time it was written, there wasn’t much known about these sorts of things.
Anyway, there were all sorts of strange tidbits like that, in a type-written page and half. There was one section though that rang true, and remained true and accurate over time. The section was about my Grandmother.
At that time my Grandmother had only recently returned home to Sterling, Illinois, in disgrace, with my then three year old mother. She had left Sterling in 1920, with her new husband. My grandmother was a practical nurse and she had met this handsome stranger, Richard Shipman Andrews, at the hospital. He had some sort of injury that needed recurring attention. Family lore, or Mr. Andrews, described it as some sort of heroic war wound, that caused him to have a slight limp. The truth was closer to him having been born with a club foot, but that was neither romantic nor mysterious.
They were married by the justice of the peace, given $500, a car, and a shotgun as wedding presents, and set off for Los Angeles. The shotgun was in case they encountered any wild injuns along the way.
It took the newlyweds almost two years to get to Los Angeles. This is because they stopped and worked along the way.
In hearing my grandmother’s accounts, it was fairly obvious to me that Mr. Andrews was a grifter, but the full story of him would not come for decades. My grandmother said that he would stop to buy sewing needles in the bigger towns, and then, as they would travel through small towns, he would knock on the doors of rural farmers and sell these needles to the farm wives, individually, for an exorbitant rate for ordinary dime store sewing needles. He had a tale of how superior they were. My grandmother was obviously impressed by his tall tales, and that said more about her innocence than Mr. Andrews’s questionable character.
They became pregnant with my mother along the way. My mother always joked that she was born on her parent’s honeymoon—a honeymoon that lasted three years.
They lived in Los Angeles for a few years, where my mother was born, and stayed with Mr. Andrews’s aunt, Julia Messamore. Julia was a published poet, and was clearly delighted with her new niece. She wrote a few poems in honor of my mother.
My grandmother also told stories of Mr. Andrews selling songs he’d write, and the musicians that were his friends. At the time, it was very difficult to publish a song under your own name, so song writers would sell their copyrights to other, more famous song writers. It would be more like how people hire gag writers today, and sell gags for $20 a line. Mr. Andrews would make $10 to $50 for each of the songs he wrote and sold.
Mr. Andrews was obviously well enough known in the entertainment circles, among the variety artists of the era, so that my mother’s birth was announced in the Daily Variety, Hollywood’s daily rag.
He sang and performed with other musicians of the time (names I was only able to validate in more recent years with Internet searches) so there was some truth to my grandmother’s stories from this period. She wasn’t clever enough to have made it up.
The song, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” was written by Mr. Andrews (for my mother that Christmas) and was sold to Haven Gillespie and J. Fred Coots. (You didn’t really think those guys were that prolific on their own, did you?)
My grandmother was a fish out of water. She was a small town girl, suddenly among the wolves–snake oil salesmen, grifters, and musicians of the 1920s. It was not surprising, but still tragic, when Mr. Andrews disappeared one night, leaving my grandmother and my infant mother to fend for themselves. My grandmother worked her way back to Sterling, as “sending for money” would not have been something people did in those days. The disgrace of being abandoned by your husband was more than enough disgrace for anyone. It took her a couple years to get home, and she worked her way home, picking up jobs at canneries and factories, with stories of how she hitch-hiked to work each day, often picked up by kindly men who had their 32nd Degree Mason rings, rescuing and aiding my Eastern Star ring wearing grandmother.
And that is how my mother came to be raised in her Grandmother’s home in Sterling, Illinois, an only child, fatherless… a clever and creative child, with a mind filled with the fairy tales of her birth, and growing up in a small town, destined for grandeur and fame… like her disappeared father and Aunt Julia. Three women of three generations, under one roof, with husbands a distant past or a distant future.
My mother would say that “Granny” did not approve of her at first and tried not to like her, but softened. My mother, Mary Chilton Andrews, became Granny’s and Grandma’s pride and joy. Grandma was more like a sister than a mother to my mother. Granny and my mother’s bond was so close that on Granny’s death my mother was herself hospitalized for a few weeks, the strain of that loss (despite all the other losses in my mother’s life at a time), was more than she could bear. My mother would share tales of Granny’s visits to her after her death, appearing at the foot of her bed, veiled, when my mother was in need of comfort or encouragement, in visions similar to those of Grandma Haverhill.
This brings me back to Grandma Haverhill and her predictions about the lives the family would lead.
She described the family as having a kind of mental illness, a kind that could skip a generation, but one that lie dormant. It would strike the women in the family, all of us especially and unusually strong-willed, but vulnerable. My grandmother had it, she said, and it was something she could fend off and keep dormant as long as, “there is a man in her life.”
When my mother and I first studied the letter, this was the most remarkable passage in it, as it described my grandmother to a tee. She had been married several times in her life, giving the outside world the impression that she was some sort of wanton creature, but she wasn’t anything of the kind. She just had bad luck at her first marriage and was left widowed from her later marriages.
During the period Grandma would be married, she’d be the happiest person on the planet. She’d fuss and giggle over her husbands, loving them truly and dearly. And these men knew they were loved, and adored her.
After they were gone, Grandma would descend into a kind of madness—a kind of lost state of being, like a ship without a rudder. It wasn’t a Hollywood kind of madness, with drama, closets, and lots of screaming. It was just a kind of sadness, combined with chaos… the inability to remember where she’d put her keys, or forgetting to do simple things, like tie her shoes, or brush her hair. As families are wont to do, we described her as peculiar or eccentric, rather than anything disparaging.
And when a new man would come into her life, a kind of invigoration and rebirth would occur, and she’d become (once again) as sharp as a tack, capable, and happy and giddy once more.
I’ve written before about how men love their wives and how they remain in their eyes the youthful, ageless beauties they married. (Another of the tidbits I first picked up from the account of Grandma Haverhill’s visit and her description of men and women.) But I don’t think I’ve ever written before about women, and how important their husbands are in their lives.
The thing is, I don’t think my Grandmother’s situation was unique, nor do I think that the account of my great-grandmother’s vision was providing anything unknown or unobservable. I believe, in fact, that this is what happens to most women, when they find themselves man-less and having to fend for themselves.
History is chock full of literary accounts of this phenomenon, from The Taming of the Shrew to the evil stepmother of Snow White, whose evil side is only revealed upon the death of her husband. I also believe that the escalation in the rates of child abuse, by divorced women, is somehow based on all of this.
There is a kind of sanity balance, a balance of power that occurs when we are coupled. It is like some sort of cosmic mental equivalent of the wizards from The Dark Crystal, where good and evil divided are purposeless, dangerous, or impotent, but joined and bonded, they define what humanity is, and keep us sane (or allow us to be).
I think that many men wonder why their wives seem to be so controlling or need to constantly fiddle with the nest, barking and griping about this or that. They’ll fret and meddle with everything about their husbands, a kind of constant grooming ritual of him and home.
It has always been clear to me why that is, maybe because of my teenage reading of the strange letter of Grandma Haverhill, or maybe not: Men are our rocks. They are our stability and our sanity and the source of our courage. They are the tails of our kites and without them we’d be never be able to fly, or we’d crash in a whirlwind of paper tatters and splintered balsa wood. And maybe we’re aware of that somehow, and fight against it, nit picking through our daily lives, trying to discount the importance the men have in our lives.
People often say that women are the civilizing force of society, the heart song that tames the savage breast. But I think we overlook or tend to disregard or dismiss what a man gives a woman: an anchor, and with it, strength and purpose in our lives. Without it, and them, we are lost… left circling the planets, hoping to touchdown on earth, riding the backs of comets, Yee Haw!
More about Richard Shipman Andrews anon.
