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  Also by the author

  Shedding Skin

  Cattle Annie and Little Britches

  Red Baker

  The King of Cards

  The Cactus Garden

  Grace

  a FICTIONAL memoir

  Robert Ward

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  This book is dedicated with love to my son, Robert Wesson Ward, in order that he might understand where he came from and that courage, character, and compassion will never go out of fashion.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by the author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Grace and me, 1950

  Mother and me, 1953

  Sue Retalliata, me, and Grace,1955

  Bobby Ward, 1955

  Robert “Cap” ward

  Cap’s ship

  My mother, Grace, and my aunt Ida Louise at an interracial picnic in the late fifties

  Graduation from woodbourne High school, 1958

  Grace at 19

  My Father’s rendering of mayo

  Cap at 19

  Grace at 23

  About the Author

  Cattle Annie and Little Britches

  Also Available

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I want to acknowledge the contributions of my old and dear friend, my editor, Bob Asahina. Over the past twenty years, Bob has consistently been my best friend and a strong critical presence for my other books, even when I was working with other publishers. Grace came about largely because he remembered a story I’d told him eighteen years ago about my grandmother’s quietly heroic life. Thanks, good friend, and God willing, we’ll have twenty more years of laughs and good conversations together.

  I also want to thank my wife, Celeste Wesson, for her courage and honesty, and for insisting I not give up on this book, even when people were telling me it was “too small, too personal.” (Frankly, I’ve always wondered how something can be too personal. Seems to me most writing nowadays is too corporate, but that’s another story….) Thanks, too, to my mother, Shirley Mason Kauffman, for her tales of her own young married years and her relationship with Gracie. Thanks to my agent, Richard Pine, whose wisdom, editorial sense, humor, and kindness helped steer this project true north.

  And thanks as well to my motion picture agent, the literate and unflappable Ron Bernstein.

  The writing of Grace would not have been possible without the following books:

  First is the wonderful The Baltimore Book: New Views of Local History, edited by Elizabeth Fee, Linda Shopes, and Linda Zeidman (Temple University Press, 1991). I’m especially indebted to Chapter 8, “Radicalism on the Waterfront,” by Linda Zeidman and Eric Hallengren, which refreshed my memory concerning stories of union organizing on the Baltimore docks, stories I first heard from my grandfather, Robert “Cap” Ward.

  I’m also grateful to The Bay, by Gilbert Klingel (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1951), and William W.Warner’s Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay (Atlantic—Little, Brown, 1976). Both of these books are classics and are essential reading about the Chesapeake Bay.

  My reading on Gandhi included Gandhi, an Autobiography, by Mohandas K. Gandhi (Reprint: Beacon Press, 1993); Gandhi, a Memoir, by William L. Shirer (Simon & Schuster, 1979); and Gandhi on Non-Violence, edited by Thomas Merton (Reprint: Shambhala Press, 1996). And, of course, I’m grateful for Taylor Branch’s unsurpassed biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Parting the Waters (Simon & Schuster, 1988).

  I’m also grateful for the invaluable and fascinating reference work The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, edited by Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant (Penguin Press, 1969), and The Dictionary of Symbolic and Mythological Animals by J. C. Cooper (Thorsons Press, 1995).

  Thanks, too, to my late grandparents, who seem more alive and fully human in spirit than many people I meet still walking around:

  To Robert “Cap” Ward, my grandfather, for his courage and surprising tenderness.

  And, especially, to my grandmother, Grace Allan Ward, for her generosity of spirit, kindness, and great courage. Even with her flaws, she was the embodiment of all that is best in humanity, and it was an honor and an inspiration to be her grandson.

  Grace and me, 1950

  A mong those who knew her well, my grandmother Grace was famous for three things: her intelligence, her kindness, and her “weird spells.” As a child, however, I had experienced only the first two. All I knew about the spells was that occasionally Gracie would cancel on a dinner or a family movie outing saying she had gotten a cold or was exhausted. My father would look at my mother and say, “Ma’s had another one of her weird spells.” My mother would give my father a knowing look, shake her head sorrowfully and say in her heavy Baltimore accent, “Its such a shame, hon. Such a tumble shame.” Then, just when things were getting tense and interesting, they’d both become very quiet. And that would be the end of that, until the next time it happened.

  Though I was too well bred to say anything, my father’s comments irritated me. I worshiped my grandmother, thought her incapable of anything less than the finest, most virtuous behavior, and couldn’t tolerate picturing her as subject to weird fits, like some kind of helpless mental patient. I suppose a psychiatrist could make serious hay out of “grandmother worship,” but the plain and simple truth is everyone who knew my grandmother well was either crazy about her or was temporarily furious with her for her gentle but firm insistence that they be better people than they felt they could be (or, in some cases, wanted to be). In the end, though, most people tolerated Grace’s high-mindedness because she seemed to embody the best in life: civic virtue without pretense, and a real humility, not goody-two-shoes Christianity, like the big-haired jokers who these days troll for your bucks on “Christian television.” In spite of the fact that Grace was good and kind, she was also effortlessly witty and occasionally even acid-tongued. Even though she had character by the bushels, she was fully human in a way that now seems almost quaint, or even perhaps extinct.

  I seek to remember Grace’s story, though, not to preach the lost art of living virtuously, but to celebrate a life lived deeply and truly, and in the end bravely.

  It’s the story of the year I learned not only of my grandmother’s struggle to escape poverty, to find a life for herself, but the tale of her secret history, a story that forever changed my view of her and of myself.

  I only hope that in my own life I have exhibited half of Grace’s courage.

  First, I remember her front porch, the place where we sat and dreamed and talked as a family. There was a white picket rail around that porch, and on the front of the fence was a cameo picture of a clipper ship. That cameo was painted by my father and nailed to the porch by Grace herself as her way of providing her family identity. Her family was the Wards, and they made their living on the high seas, for my grandfather, Robert Roland Ward, was a ship’s captain. His nickname and the only name I ever called him was Cap, though Grace called him Rob, and the sailors who served with him called him Captain Rob. Grace and Cap had two children: my father, Robert Allan Ward, a navy man, an intelligence officer in World War II, an early computer expert, and a painter; and Ida Lo
uise Ward, a nurse and later the highest-ranking woman in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in Washington, D.C.

  This was her home, their home, a redbrick row house at 544 Singer Avenue, just a block or so off one of the main roads that run from Maryland to Pennsylvania: Greenmount Avenue or, as it becomes called farther up the old Number 8 streetcar line, the York Road.

  My father, Robert, and my mother, Shirley, and I also lived in a row house, a redbrick row house in another Baltimore neighborhood called Northwood, only ten minutes away by car. Even though the neighborhoods were similar—redbrick row houses built side by side with twenty others in the block, small but comfortable front porches, a little patch of lawn, and a grassy hill that sloped down to the sidewalk—I always felt that my grandmother’s home was roomier and yet, paradoxically, snug and cozier as well. Which, of course, had everything to do with Grace and very little to do with architecture.

  Not long ago, I drove my rented car by her old home, catching my breath as the memories came flooding back, and I was shocked to see just how small the house was, what a hardscrabble little lawn lay in front of the place. Only one thing remained the same: the little dandelion-covered hill in front of Grace’s porch. It was as steep as I remembered it, and holding my breath I could see a younger, thinner, and more desperate version of myself pushing Grace’s old hand lawn mower up that hill, then pulling it gingerly back down, careful that the sharp blades didn’t roll over my foot. Indeed, I could hear her voice from the old porch swing, saying, “Now, keep control, honey. We don’t want my grandson running around toeless. That wouldn’t do at all.”

  Strange how all else had changed. The front porch, which seemed almost luxuriously wide as a child, now looked no bigger than a postage stamp. It seemed impossible that on summer nights my whole family—mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and myself—would sit on that porch, telling stories and waiting for a roar to go up from Memorial Stadium, signaling that one of our beloved Orioles had made a great play. I could see the lights of that old stadium, shining over the flat tar rooftops—lights that turned the sky an alien blue-orange. I could taste Grace’s hand-squeezed lemonade, her apple dumplings with fresh-shaved nutmeg and real cream. As we sat there on the old wooden steps with my grandmother, who sometimes sweetly stroked my head, I would think, This is perfect. If things could only stay this way, all of us together, on Grace’s front porch.

  That old sweet world was so slow, and so filled with loving family moments that it seemed life would indeed go on and on in its predictable and sustaining rhythms. Go on, day after good day, and never change.

  And yet, even as I savored the sweet happiness of that moment, there lurked inside me the knowledge that it wouldn’t, couldn’t remain the same.

  But in the good days of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s there was always Grace’s Sunday dinner, the piano, and the hymns. I remember my happiness on Sunday morning as my father and mother and I dressed for church. Red-brick Northwood-Appold Methodist Church was at Cold Spring and Loch Raven Boulevard, only five blocks away from our home, and I genuinely looked forward to attending Sunday school while my parents went into the chapel to listen to black-haired, square-jawed Dr. Robert Parker preach. I remember some of the other kids walking toward church, then veering off to hang at the Medic (short for Medical Center), a drugstore in the little shopping center across from our church. There the hookey players smoked cigarettes and laughed at the “squares” who still attended church. Many of these boys were friends of mine from school, but back in that long-gone world, I wasn’t usually among them. The truth was, I wanted to go to church with my mother and father. Why? Because I believed in the Methodist Church. I believed that God was knowable and that our little church was the very embodiment of His Word. I didn’t question why this was so; it was a given. Now, thinking back on it, I think that I believed it so fervently because my parents seemed to believe it, and I know that their faith was largely based on the rock of my grandmother’s.

  Of course, it was also true that my family and I believed in the church because it was the ‘50s, a time of blind faith in not only religion but government, law and order, America First … but that’s only a sociological truth. Even then there were families and individuals who were less religious. I knew several self-proclaimed agnostics in our little row-house community, and people were tolerant of them, even if we thought their lack of faith a sad thing.

  Still, the real reason my family believed in God and our church was because of my grandmother. She didn’t go to Northwood-Appold, but a church in her own neighborhood, First Methodist, and she was involved in many church affairs. She helped the “needy” by going to the poorest neighborhoods and taking part in charitable efforts; she was involved in the Methodist Women’s Council, which oversaw students from “foreign lands” coming to study in America. She collected money and clothes and “supplies” (which, in my youthful mind, somehow equated to medicine, canned tuna fish, and Ivory soap) for missionary work. What’s more, she believed in educating the poor, which meant taking needy kids to the symphony, and to art exhibits at the Walters Art Gallery. In casual conversation or in written speeches that she gave occasionally at church or in other liberal havens throughout the city, she always stated that since Christ was the maker of all things, great books and classical music were His true higher manifestations; therefore, a true Christian should read and listen to the very best.

  There was another, even more personal reason that I liked going to church. I liked the social convention. I liked seeing my parents dress up, my father in his light blue Botany 500 sport coat, his red-striped rep tie, my mother in her two-piece, gray wool suit with a sprig of violets on the lapel. I thought them both handsome, and I remember sitting snugly in the back of our old green Studebaker, feeling warm from the car heater, safe and at peace.

  It was a feeling, I now realize with something of a shock, that I took for granted. We were a family, and we were going to our church as all families did, and after church we would talk to the Reverend Parker and our friends in the neighborhood for a while, then take our car back home, where we’d put on our casual clothes (for Dad and me, khakis and button-down sports shirt), hop back in the Stude, and drive to Gracie’s for Sunday dinner.

  I remember the trip to her house as well, down row-house Winston Road, past the houses of my friends—Kevin Higgins, whose father owned and operated one of the most fashionable clothing stores in town, the Oxford

  Men’s Shop; John Littman, the neighborhood’s only Jewish boy and a great basketball player; Ronnie Stumpfel, whose parents had followed us when we moved from our old neighborhood, Govans, just across the Loch Raven Boulevard, only a mile or so away. At the end of Winston Road we would take a left turn out onto the Loch Raven Boulevard, with its wide expansive grass plot, drive back up past Northwood-Appold, and cruise down a rolling hill, then up again, until we turned right just across from the brand-new Eastgate Shopping Center.

  I can still recall the excitement I felt as we approached the shining rows of stores, all of them under one gleaming corrugated metal canopy, and the expansive parking lot. There was the Music Mart, where I first bought an Elvis record, “Don’t Be Cruel”; the Hecht Company, where I bought my first baseball glove and had it autographed by Oriole catcher Gus Triandos; Kresge’s 5-and-IO, where my pals and I could eat twenty-five-cent banana splits. And there was also the local grocery store chain, Food Fair, where my parents shopped, the largest and cleanest store I’d ever seen, completely stocked with every kind of food imaginable. Food Fair featured a new “frozen foods” section with my two favorite dishes: TV dinners, which my parents and I ate on special copper-colored brittle-legged TV trays, so we wouldn’t miss Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, or the great Gleason; and the most amazing new invention in frozen-food land, “Fresh Frozen Fish Sticks.” To be precise, Mrs. Paul’s Fresh Frozen Fish Sticks. Now I’m amazed that we ever ate them at all, considering that even then I thought they tasted like pure sawdu
st, which I had to smother with tons of ketchup to make barely edible. What you must realize is that my family and I were living in early ‘60s Maryland, the home of the then-nonpolluted Chesapeake Bay, which had the greatest crabs and oysters in the United States. Yet instead of buying fresh fish, we eagerly ripped open boxes of frozen, tasteless fish sticks. What could we have been thinking?

  Then again, taste was not what fish sticks were about. Fish sticks were modern, one of the first television foods, the first wave of many products that made us feel part of the great new glamorous electronic reality that was slowly and insidiously supplanting the human warmth of neighbor-hood and family. Fish sticks even came in a cardboard box with a frame of a wood-paneled television set surrounding the “food” on the cover. It stuns me when I think of it now; we were actually optimistic and innocent enough to believe that frozen foods would not only save us time but somehow taste better and maybe even be better for us than fresh food. And beyond that patent absurdity, we believed that if a smiling man came on television and said, “Hey, Mom, they’re tasty, they’re modern, and they’re time-savers. Everyone in your family will LOVE fish sticks,” he was probably telling the truth. We liked the TV guy and we wanted to believe him. After all, he was one of us, wasn’t he? He was white, he was neatly dressed, and maybe he was even a Methodist. In the parlance of the time he was probably a “good guy,” so how could we not believe him?

  However, not everyone in our family felt this way. Sometimes, Grace would come shopping with us. I remember her face when we filled our cart with frozen foods. Her eyes narrowed and there was a bemused smile at the corner of her mouth.

  “Why are you buying that stuff, honey?” she asked my mother.