Remembering Aunt Grace

     When I asked why Uncle Herman had married her, Grandmother’s answer came in one word—“Guilt.”

     We four children had not been invited to the wedding.  Nor had Grandmother, Mother, or the uncles.  But no one could fault Aunt Grace.  She had been planning those nuptials for years and had never been able to drum up any enthusiasm, especially Uncle Herman’s.  This time she had known better than to seek the family’s blessing.  They would have talked him out of it again.

     Uncle Herman called from Reno right after the ceremony.  I guess he felt safe with the width of California between him and his mother.  Grandmother did not have a heart attack when the news broke, but she came close.

     We kids could never figure out why Mother and the uncles were all afraid of Grandmother.  She was an old, old lady, probably seventy, and her children were pretty old, too.  But Grandmother held her children tightly, particularly her sons.  Uncle Herman showed more courage than King Edward VIII of England.  To renounce a throne was child’s play compared to defying Grandmother.

     Aunt Grace had been in the picture for nearly twenty-five years, and right along, everyone would have liked her out of it.  Even our easy-going grandfather put thumbs down on Grace.  He called her a chippie, whatever that was.

     I rather liked her brassy blonde hair and cupid’s-bow lips.  It seemed more interesting than Mother’s gray-brown tresses and light lipstick.  Grandmother, of course, was snow white and wore only the barest trace of powder.  I think what really annoyed them was the way Aunt Grace sat and tugged her dress above her knees.

     But that wasn’t the worst of it.  It was how she talked.  For some reason, she tried to impress the family with her fancy friends and her executive position.  Our family was not impressed.

     Grace was always putting on airs and was ashamed of the house she lived in.  As a matter of fact, Uncle Herman told his brother, Uncle Albert, that for the first five years he took her out she always stood on the steps of the house next door, because it was grander.  One night he arrived early and caught her coming out of her own house.  She never explained and he didn’t ask, but after that she waited on her own stoop.

     Grandmother wanted Uncle Herman to take out Anna Bahrs, the daughter of an old friend.  Anna was a school teacher and a head taller than Uncle Herman.  He like Anna, but we children decided that he didn’t have a case on her.

     Helen, Grandmother’s housekeeper, had gone all through St. Paul’s school with Aunt Grace.  Helen was always good to us children when we were at Grandmother’s house.  She was quite deaf and was always snapping off her hearing aid to save the battery.  It was a complicated contraption with head phones connected by a cord to a battery pack that she wore somewhere down inside the front of her dress.  When we asked her about Aunt Grace she would flip on the switch and start talking.  I noticed the adults in the family pretended to be doing something else, but we knew they were listening.

     Helen said Grace made a fuss if she didn’t get the best parts in school plays.  “Actually,” Helen said and stooped in front of the big wood stove to take out a steaming pie, “she was pretty good.  It was one of the few times she let herself go, and the real Grace seemed to shine through.”  Adult conversation ceased as their ears turned in our direction.  “The rest of the time she was always pushing and never having fun.”

     “Did she have a lot of boy friends?” Brother Peter asked.  He was older and knew more about all that than the rest of us children.

     “The boys liked her, all right.”  Helen looked around before lowering her voice.  “But she wanted someone with sugar in the old sock.”

     I knew better than to believe that.  Uncle Herman would never put sugar in his sock.

     There was a lot of speculation as to Grace’s age.  I couldn’t imagine why it mattered, but Grandmother sent a friend to St. Paul’s Church to check out her baptismal record.  I think she was disappointed that Grace wasn’t as old as she had thought and was even younger than Uncle Herman.

     Once Aunt Grace married she felt she’d arrived and insisted on an apartment on Pacific Avenue.  Grandmother supposed that if you'd waited until you were almost fifty to get married, the right address was even more important.  I think what irritated the family most was that Uncle Herman looked happy.

     Aunt Grace didn’t like to visit our Woodside home any more than the family wanted her.  The problem was Uncle Herman.  Because he loved being there, she had to go once in a while.  Then everything was touchy.  We had to be careful about what to say.

     Before they were married, Grandmother once asked Aunt Grace if she had a pension for her old age.  Grace never forgave her for that, and now she wasn’t going to take anything from anyone—especially Grandmother.  I didn’t blame Aunt Grace for being miffed, but the whole atmosphere changed when she arrived.  She looked scornfully at all of us.  She now had a “Mrs.” before her name and an apartment with a view.

     Aunt Grace didn’t find anything humorous at our house, particularly the comments of Uncle Bill’s friend, Mr. Prince.  If Mr. Prince happened to be visiting when Aunt Grace came, he tried hard to be funny which meant he was irritating.  Even Uncle Bill looked uncomfortable.  Aunt Grace sniffed and said in a voice just loud enough for us to hear, “And to think we could have been with our own set.”

     One good thing, when Aunt Grace came she usually brought the cake, which was a lot better than the ones Uncle Bill bought at the Sanitary Bakery.  One day Mr. Prince was there when she was bragging about her cake being “Pure butter and cream from Goldberg Bowen.”  Mr. Prince tried to be nice and said it looked like it was all blown up with a bicycle pump.  She really exploded, grabbed Uncle Herman, jumped in the car, and roared out of the driveway.

     It might have made a difference if the family had welcomed Grace with open arms.  They were polite, of course, but there was no warm-hearted acceptance.  They knew it and she knew it.  If she hadn’t boasted so much about her elegant connections and had cut down on the makeup it might have worked, but I doubt it.  She had one of those changeable personalities where, just as you were beginning to enjoy her, she flipped back to her usual unpleasant self.  On occasion she could be fun and showed a keen Irish wit, but too often she berated our whole family, leaving us limp and antagonistic.

     Although Grandmother’s relationship with her soured how she felt about all of us, the family agreed that Grandmother had been right all along.  Uncle Herman should have married Anna Bahrs.

     As ornery as Aunt Grace was to the older generation, she truly loved children and endeared herself to us.  She was generous to me and my brothers, particularly when we were small.  If she was coerced into going to the country, she always brought us gifts.  I remember one Easter when she covered the lawn with chocolate eggs and sugar bunnies.  As we grew older she began to lump us with our tainted elders, but even at that, years later when my first son was born she requested the privilege of buying his christening dress.

     They had been married only two years when Uncle Herman had a stroke from which he never fully recovered.  She blamed us, saying his stress had come from family pressure.  Grandmother held a different opinion.  I think the poor man was in a terrible position between two strong women.

     Aunt Grace took good care of our uncle, but she expected the rest of the family to jump when she spoke.  She herself was in poor health, which could have accounted for her temperament.  One or the other of them was often in the hospital, and on these occasions she demanded and received my brothers’ services as drivers.  Uncle Herman enjoyed his only freedom when Aunt Grace was indisposed.  He liked to be with my brothers who drove him to the peace and beauty of the country and the arms of his family.

     Meanwhile, Aunt Grace loved being in the hospital—not the illness, of course, but receiving non-stop personal attention.  She insisted on having the room the Archbishop had once used and the cachet she imagined went with it.  This was her opportunity to wear her frilly pink nightgown and peignoir sets.  She would pile on the makeup, lean back on the pillows, and hold court.

 Every evening my brothers took Uncle Herman to see her, and they did it willingly.  They were not nearly as happy to drive Aunt Grace to see Uncle Herman when he was the patient.  The trips to and fro gave her extra time to complain and criticize.

     Years later, Uncle Albert became seriously ill, and my brother Charles offered to take Uncle Herman to see him.  Grace would not let them go off alone and climbed into the car to supervise the excursion. 

     I was there that day with my two little boys who were too young to sense the troubled undercurrents.  Walt, the five-year old, took a shine to Aunt Grace and decided to do her a kindness.  He went outside, picked up the family cat, and carried it into the living room where he deposited it on her lap.  Walt didn’t know that Grace hated animals and cats most of all.  She jumped up, dumping the poor creature on the floor, screamed, and grabbed her digitalis pills.  Within two minutes she had Uncle Edward back in the car and my brother behind the wheel.  It was a terrible afternoon.

     When Uncle Herman died, Aunt Grace lost her hold on the rest of us.  She could no longer command the assistance or presence of the family.  There was no audience upon whom to heap her invective.  My saintly mother still called her faithfully once a week, and just as faithfully Aunt Grace unleashed her week’s supply of venom.  My brothers and I, who had long since moved into adulthood, invited her to family occasions and tried to take her out at other times.  More often than not she refused.

     When Aunt Grace died, the undertaker asked me to select a dress for her.  I felt a pang of remorse when I looked in her closet.  Only one or two suitable garments hung there.  The rest of the hangers held lacy pink peignoirs and nightgowns—all in readiness for her next hospital stay, the only pleasure in her life.