Grace Read online

  “Oh, everyone gets them now,” my mother said, in a slightly superior tone.

  “Really?” my grandmother asked. “Why?”

  “Well,” my mother said, suddenly not at all sure. “They save time.”

  “Oh? To do what?” my grandmother said.

  “Watch TV,” I said, eagerly hanging on the shopping cart.

  “I see,” my grandmother said. But it was obvious that she did not see, that she would never see.

  And even then, I think part of me knew she was right. But I didn’t want to believe her. I loved my family, I loved my church, I loved the Orioles, I loved the shopping center, I loved Baltimore and America, and, by God, I wanted to love fish sticks, too.

  It may have been an uncritical time, but if we were blindly optimistic, we were also tentative. We were afraid of criticism, any criticism, because, I think, not so very deep down we knew we were blind, and if someone made a rent in the fabric, then the whole cheap cloth might tear to shreds.

  It was an age when it was important not to be too critical of fish sticks. Or anything else.

  For the most part, the family trip to my grandmother’s was a happy occasion. We chatted about the neighborhood, about my schoolwork, about my father’s new job at the Aberdeen Proving Ground learning the first great computer, Univac, a wall-sized monster that was like something out of a ‘50s sci-fi epic.

  We were a happy family taking a trip toward the happiest of destinations, Grace’s.

  One exception was the Dannons. Tad Dannon, a burly happy-go-lucky boy in my fourth-grade class, had awakened one morning with pains in his arms and chest. He was diagnosed with polio. Six weeks later he was dead.

  As we drove past his wealthy parents’ modern stone home, my mother would look at my father and say, “Poor Mrs. Dannon, I don’t know how she can go on living.”

  I would look up at the Dannons’ old elm trees hanging over the street and think, The polio trees … God save me from the polio trees. A few seconds of panic would ensue, in which I would feel my muscles turning to mush, and the casket lid being lowered over my head.

  But within a few more seconds we were clear of the Dannons’ tragic home and we would begin chatting happily again.

  I mention this because, looking back, it now seems to me that during my early adolescence polio was my only cataclysmic worry. I suppose the atomic bomb did scar our psyches in some undefinable way, but even though I recall bomb drills (“Duck and cover, and don’t forget to put your books over your head to protect your hair from fallout”), I don’t remember taking death by atomic bomb seriously.

  Why not? Because our dads had beaten the Germans and the Japanese, that’s why. Without once saying it or perhaps even consciously thinking about it, we knew that America was king of the world. We had TVs and dads who learned Univac and the Baltimore Orioles and the Methodist Church and fish sticks and nobody could really hurt us—ever.

  The Russians? Come on, we would clobber the lame Russians. How could we lose? They had big flabby bodies, wore ratty-looking car coats, had super bad haircuts and giant spaces between their front teeth where all the horrible boiled potatoes they ate got stuck. We had President Kennedy and sexy, glamorous Jackie, too. Enough said.

  After surviving the polio trees, we would cross Alameda Boulevard and start the descent down 39th Street toward Waverly. As we came closer to Grace’s, I would feel happiness spreading through me like some kind of elixir. Perhaps that sounds a little excessive, but there was a headiness and sweet excitement about going to Gracie’s house that made all of us a little giddy. Our car chatter would become more lively as my mother would wonder just who Gracie might have over for dinner this Sunday.

  Often my aunt, Ida Louise, would show up, the only college graduate in our family. Sexy in her tight college-girl sweaters, and darkly beautiful like the actress Laraine Day, she was a nurse, a graduate of the University of Minnesota. She worked at Union Memorial Hospital, had her own “efficiency apartment” on Calvert Street, and dated a marine named Clay who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for wiping out a North Korean machine-gun nest. Sometimes Clay joined her at the table and I liked his big broad face, the friendly way he joked with me. He was a true hero, a man’s man, the real-life version of John Wayne. And just like the guys the Duke portrayed in the movies, he never bragged about his war exploits but was content to let someone else bring them up. Then he would act like the modest and humble fellow he really was—which only increased my boundless admiration for him.

  As for my aunt Ida, I was simply in love with her.

  By my early teens, I could barely speak when she looked at me. Her eyebrows were dark and dramatic, she had sensual red lips, and when she spoke I could often see a little tip of her tongue. Once when she was leaving my grandmother’s, I suddenly kissed her on the lips, and she said in the sexiest voice imaginable, “Well, well, look who’s getting bigger.” I visibly blushed and ran to the backyard, feeling like a fool, the heat of her lips still burning my own.

  But by the early ‘60s, I saw less and less of her, for she had moved out of Baltimore and its limited horizons, to Washington, D.C., where she could become a policymaker rather than a nurse. I was deeply proud of her, but I also missed her terribly, and beyond that I felt a certain fear when she left. Until she moved away, it had never occurred to me at all that things could change for our family. Ida’s moving to D.C. proved that they could and would. Yet she was still close enough and I saw her often enough to maintain the fantasy of family permanence.

  Sometimes my grandmother had exotics to dinner, like Mr. Oh, a very thin and devout Buddhist from Japan, or Mr. Pran, an eager and very talkative Indian mystic from Delhi. I was a bit too young to benefit from the wisdom of Mr. Oh, but I recall Mr. Pran very well. He was a Methodist Church—sponsored exchange student, replete with purple-and-red turban, a big black beard, and a full set of gleaming yellow teeth. He often brought a gift for my aunt and my grandmother—one time a carved ivory elephant, another time saris. My sexy aunt Ida tried on hers after dinner and did a fake Indian dance, barefoot, while the family laughed and I felt hot, overwhelmed with sweaty desire. Mr. Pran told us stories of his country, especially of his own youth, and of Gandhi’s nonviolent movement, ahimsa, which his own relatives had taken part in. The stories were inspirational, the triumph of the good and spiritual Indians over the mercantile and snobbish, empire-building Brits. We loved the Indian people, we worshiped Gandhi, and we loved the purity and subtle humor of dear Mr. Pran.

  After one dinner, Mr. Pran told us in a high-pitched voice that the secret of Gandhi’s power was meditation. Everyone wanted to know more about it, so he took us all into the living room, made us sit in the lotus position, and taught us all how to breathe for “deep spiritual satisfaction.” Thus, long before hippies and Deepak Chopra, my family sat and breathed deeply as a real live Indian mystic told us how to “get our chakras up.” I remember my own spiritual breathing, sucking in great cubic centimeters of Baltimore air in order to “receive enlightenment” and “to be as pure as Gandhi.”

  I meditated like a true believer for twenty minutes, and got a headache for my troubles.

  Usually my grandfather didn’t make these family gatherings. He was nearly always away at sea, on a freighter in Galveston, or a tanker in New Orleans. Five foot nine, and built like a fireplug, Cap was a seafaring man, a freighter captain since his youth. I had known him first, of course, as my granddad, a nice old guy whose main physical attributes were his “sea legs.” He walked on land as he did on a ship’s deck—that is, he wobbled back and forth like Popeye, looking comical and slightly ludicrous.

  But no one ever said so to his face, for there were other stories, tales of his toughness, of battles he’d had with my father as a boy, many of which revolved around Cap’s wild, destructive drinking. Even at this time, when he was in his ‘60s, the family held their collective breath when he came back from the sea. Would he or would he not go on a bender? Would he end up
in a brawl, or disappear for two days, only to be found sleeping on the tar roofs of the garages behind his own house? So, while I loved him and was proud of him, I felt tense and uncertain when he appeared.

  But in September 1961, my grandfather was getting a lot of work, so he was usually away at sea. During most of our Sunday afternoon dinners, he would call us on a ship-to-shore phone. The family and our guests would gather around the telephone, and Cap would call from some place on the high seas. As I listened in awe, he’d tell us of a “big wind” they’d just gone through, or a “little hurricane” he’d managed to steer through off Mobile. Then, invariably, his voice would break up from the static, and he’d say “Love you all” and be gone. I remember the feeling I’d have after the phone calls. It was exciting, exotic, and most of all it was manly. Indeed, as I turned fifteen years old he had become a secret hero to me. He was a seaman, by God, out there on the Atlantic, roughing it, while we sat in his cozy living room, eating our apple dumplings, drinking iced tea and coffee, and listening to Mr. Pran tell us about Gandhi. And even then I would think, What Cap does makes all the rest of this possible. And I loved him for it.

  Another familiar guest was Grace’s friend and constant companion, Sue Retalliata. My grandmother had taught her in Sunday school, so she must have been at least twenty years younger, but she was already an “old maid” and seemed to be Grace’s contemporary. Sweet, round-faced, with heavy-lidded brown eyes, friendly and quietly intelligent, she adored my grandmother, and the two of them spent endless hours working on church projects, going to Bible study groups, and attending liberal political meetings.

  Like my father, Sue was also a painter, but unlike him she hadn’t given it up. She had worked for years as a legal secretary, and now that she was retired she’d taken up the Baltimore folk art of screen painting again.

  Screen paintings were and still are a Baltimore tradition that had started in Highlandtown, a section of the city quite far from Waverly, my grandmother’s neighborhood. Sue had grown up there, and learned from her mother this complex and tricky folk art created by actually painting on window screens. Typical screen paintings showed rustic barns, water-wheels, or cows and horses in sylvan pastures. Once the screen painting was finished and sold, the owner would put it in his window, where it could be seen from the street. Highlandtown’s row houses were even smaller and narrower than those in Waverly, and the paintings broke up the monotony of the gray formstone-covered row houses and the mostly treeless streets.

  Sue had only recently resumed practicing the family art form, and to her great surprise she was now gaining a local reputation as a folk artist, which delighted both her and my grandmother. She had even been interviewed for the Baltimore Sun Sunday magazine, where she’d been called “an authentic Baltimore primitive” by some overeducated art reviewer. Both Sue and Grace loved that, and Sue had written the words “Cave Woman” over her little workshop in an abandoned warehouse in Waverly.

  Sue’s other distinguishing feature was a problem with her left leg. She limped badly and needed a cane to walk. Though I never knew exactly what had happened, there were subtle family suggestions that Sue had hurt her leg in some dramatic way, though like my grandmother’s “spells” no one would openly discuss it. As a young kid I was only vaguely interested, but as I entered my teens, I was now beginning to question family propriety. What were my grandmother’s spells all about anyway, and why did no one ever talk about how Sue had hurt her leg?

  Wesley Brooks was the pastor of my grandmother’s church, First Methodist, located eight blocks away. The round-faced minister with sagging jowls (he was only in his mid-thirties, but looked like a much older man) often joined our happy Sunday family get-togethers, a fact that made my grandmother proud, and me slightly sick. Officious and pretentious, with an overly pink complexion, a balding head, and tiny eyes that sat in his head like two frozen Birds Eye peas, Brooks seemed to me a bloodless, sexless man. Indeed, though I could scarcely admit to myself (in those distant days bad thoughts about a minister were tantamount to cursing God Himself), I disliked him at first sight. He rarely smiled and seemed slightly patronizing to everyone he met. No matter what anyone did for him—whether offering him fresh cinnamon rolls or knitting a sweater for his doughy-armed daughter, Alice, he always drummed his munchkin fingers and said, “Fine, fine. God’s work. Just fine.” No one could inspire me to do God’s work less than Reverend Brooks.

  My grandmother, on the other hand, was devoted to him. He was her minister, her spiritual leader, which was, for her, proof enough of his ultimate goodness, whatever his shortcomings. Whenever I was overly critical of him, Grace quickly recited a litany of the many charitable works he’d done for the poor. When I grumbled that “he probably only did it to show everyone how perfect he was,” my grandmother said I “lacked charity” and gently reminded me that “we all have our strengths” and “everybody can’t be as uproariously amusing” as I was. She said this with a gentle smile, and though it was clearly a reproach, she gave the last part a special emphasis, just to let me know that she really meant it. To her, I was uproariously funny, with my mimicry and parodies of authority. But that in no way conflicted with her love and respect for Dr. Brooks, and she didn’t appreciate it when I mocked him.

  Far from being a wise-guy rebel, I stood chastised where Dr. Brooks was concerned and tried my best to think well of him. Usually at my grandmother’s Sunday dinner that wasn’t too hard, for Grace’s spirit of generosity, sweetness, good cooking, and flat-out fun made it easy to think the best of everyone in the room.

  I remember the great mounds of mashed potatoes, the huge porcelain bowl of delicious gravy, the plate full of fried oysters, the great Smithfield ham, lima beans smothered in butter, and mounds of red, ripe, stewed tomatoes, a Maryland delicacy, which Gracie always made in the same half-cleaned pan. “You need to keep a little of the old grease to keep in the flavor, honey.”

  Yes, the food had everything to do with our good times. But I have since been to many more sophisticated dinners where the food and wine were all first class yet the party arrived dead. What was it that made my grandmother’s table so inspiring? I can only say that it was she herself, though she never talked of herself at all. Instead, she led the discussions, from art (she loved van Gogh, Renoir, Gauguin, hated Picasso because she thought he defiled women, thought Jackson Pollock a “talented infant”) to social philosophy—she quoted John Locke and Rousseau—and politics (she was strictly a Roosevelt Democrat and, of course, revered Eleanor; indeed, Sue Retaliatta had once called her “the neighborhood Eleanor” and Grace thought it the finest compliment she’d ever received) and, of course, literature. Grace’s passion for books was that of a broad-minded, curious adult who had found great literature late in life, when she finally had some time to read. She now read Thomas Mann—she adored The Magic Mountain—Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and especially Charles Dickens.

  When I started reading Great Expectations in the ninth grade, she called me every night to ask me how far I’d gotten, and we would end up having a two-hour discussion about Pip and his friends. We would laugh happily at all the fantastic and wonderful twists of the plot. I remember those phone calls even now: her voice would become almost girlish, and her infectious laughter would infuse me with such happiness that it never occurred to me that talking to one’s grandmother for two hours on the phone about books was an uncool thing to do. Just the opposite, actually: she was the coolest person I knew.

  One rainy Sunday we ended up in a family discussion of Shakespeare, and my grandmother suddenly began to recite from memory lines from King Lear. This happened spontaneously and put the family in mild shock. No one at the table, including my father, had any inkling that she knew the Bard well enough to quote him from memory. Later, when I asked her about it, she said that she didn’t talk about Shakespeare often because she “wasn’t sure she understood him. Will’s a little brighter than I am, honey.” It was a typical witty and self-deprecating Grace remark
, but I didn’t really believe her. As far as I was concerned, no one was smarter than she was.

  And I wasn’t the only person who felt that way about Grace.

  Around her neighborhood, Grace had almost unwittingly become a counselor. Sixty-five-year-old, overweight Hazel Richardson would come to her door to discuss why her roses didn’t grow like Grace’s (not enough nitrogen in her topsoil, Grace would explain). And retired miner Harry Martin would call to tell her how his son was doing in the army in Germany. And old Pop Crakowski, owner of the corner store, would come by occasionally to discuss, of all things, baseball, and times he’d spent watching the greats like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. Grace surprised Pop and me by knowing a tremendous amount about Ruth’s boyhood at the St. Mary’s Home for Boys and Girls, which was, of course, right in Baltimore. His subsequent years with Boston and the Yankees—the years that made him Babe Ruth—didn’t really interest her. Her only real concern was the drama of his rise from poverty and a drunken bartending father to becoming someone. The fact that the someone happened to be a great athlete made him slightly less interesting. But she listened carefully as she pruned her roses, and Pop Crakowski trundled off to his home, five doors down, with a smile on his face.

  I won’t say that my grandmother loved all her neighbors. She wasn’t a saint—though for a long time I often mistook her for one—and she admitted to me that occasionally she found her neighbors’ repetitive woes boring. But she never turned any of them away. And I believe she tried not only to hear them all out but to love them as well.

  After Sunday dinner, the women would clear the plates and help Grace in the kitchen, while the men retired to the living room or the front porch to talk sports or politics. And I would wander out onto the front porch, with its cozy green metal glider, and sit with my feet up, gently swaying back and forth. The streets were generally quiet in those days, but I could see the surreal glow of television sets in the houses across the way—in Johnny Brandau’s house, a boy who’d become a friend almost on the order of my own neighborhood pals; into the living room of big Sherry Butler, a huge Polish woman whose husband, Stan, had left her for his secretary. Sherry now lived as few women in our world did then, alone. There had been rumors about her—that she had men visitors at night, that she had been drunk for weeks, that she’d been fired from her job at the phone company, that one of her new boyfriends was fond of beating her up—and, absurdly, I tried squinting my eyes, as if by doing so I might gain X-ray vision, be able to see through her cheap flower-print curtains, into the unusual anarchy that was her home.