Lies My Grandparents Told.
Posted on 2013.01.02 at 09:52
What's that sound? That beautiful music? Why, it's the sound of daycare resuming! It's the sound of just Heebie, with nobody else, all by herself! It's so beautiful. Maybe I need not bother with a therapist after all.
My grandfather was named M. Aaron, or something similar. My grandmother is named Beatrix, or nearly. My grandfather died when I was four, and Beatrix just turned 95 a few weeks ago. Family lore has it that Aaron was deeply wise and serene. Many nephews, grandchildren, and other offspring are named for him. Even ones that would have been born when Aaron was 30 or 35 or so - it seems odd now to honor someone in their mid-thirties, since trendy names tend to come from a few generations back. One uncle has a bit of deep serenity to him, so it's not far-fetched to me that Aaron had something similar.
The story goes that M. Aaron left home at age 13, when his dad told him to drop out of school and work on the farm. Aaron wanted to stay in school, and so he had to leave home. He went to New York City, and supported himself as a janitor while he put himself through high school, and then Hunter College, and then left for graduate school in psychology in one of those midwestern states. I think he began graduate school in 1938 or 1939.
(How closely should I monitor such google-proofing of the story? I know perfectly well which state it was.)
Beatrix lived in the same brownstone in Queens that my second-cousins grew up in. (My second-cousin is now raising her kids in that same home. The phone number still begins FL-something, for Flushing.) Beatrix lived with her parents, twin brother, and older sister, and they were all very close. The story goes that she graduated high school at age 17, in 1934, and went to the women's CUNY in Queens. She had an instructor who recommended that she go to graduate school in psychology, and so she applied to exactly one program, where she was accepted.
She headed to graduate school in psychology in 1940, in that same midwestern state school, where she met M. Aaron. She fell in love with his voice, sitting behind him in class. They were married in 1941.
For all the wisdom and kindness and blah blah blah of Aaron, he was super-secretive about his past. He just gently deflected all questions, even though my mom and her brothers were desperately curious. He threw a few crumbs to my mom: a photo of his father, a word that he sent money back to the farm, monthly. But nobody has ever met any of his siblings or their offspring. Conventional wisdom speculates that this is because they were anti-semitic, and would not have approved of Beatrix and her Commie-Jew family.
At Grandma's 95th birthday party, we watched a slide show (updated from the 90th birthday party, which was updated from the 85th party) and mused about such things. My mom's cousin (who happens to be named after Aaron) is not serene and peaceful whatsoever, but more like tone-deaf and tenacious and loves to troll and create unwinnable arguments and trap people. (I sometimes wonder if he comments on blogs I read.) He sank his teeth into the secrecy of Aaron's past and kept bringing up how uncharacteristic of him it was. Again and again and again.
Now, I have a cousin in Dallas. He got married about two years ago. Let's call his wife Christine. Christine has an aunt who is super-into geneology. So when Christine married my cousin, her aunt said "Let's research the hell out of Heebie's cousin's family! Wheee!"
The aunt turned up a very small news article, from the graduate school midwestern state, in 1939. (I saw it, too - Christine logged into Ancestry.com and found the whole scanned-in newspaper page.) The article says "M. Aaron Lastname and Beatrix are filing for divorce. They were married in 1936, in New York City. Reasons given include abuse."
To refresh your memory, the story goes that M. Aaron and Beatrix did not meet until 1940, in the midwestern state. So Christine, in response to the cousin Aaron's tenacious questioning of M. Aaron's past, admits that this article exists. Everyone is confounded by the discrepancies.
What's interesting to me is the response from my mom and her siblings. In various ways, the article was doggedly dismissed by them. Emotionally. Somehow it is so threatening to their father's memory that they just shut it down and were upset that my generation found it salacious and intriguing. (My mom: Obviously it's a prank. Someone likes altering old newspapers just to get their kicks.)
Nobody asked my grandmother, and everyone else from that era has died. I personally felt it was futile to ask Grandma, because she has told the same story for the past 70 years, and we know what happens when her narratives deviate from reality: she doubles-down and repeats herself, extra-doggedly. She's got the tenacious dog-with-a-bone trait that the cousin Aaron has. Plus, her memory is actually failing now, and I'm not sure the truth hasn't been entirely replaced with the narrative in her mind.
What do I think? I think M. Aaron and Beatrix met in college, and got married. His school was in Manhattan and hers in Queens, but they were brother-and-sister colleges, and so there would have been mixers and occasional classes offered to students from both schools. I think she took a psychology course at his school and heard his voice and fell in love.
I don't think she would or could have kept it a secret from her family, though. That's out of character. So I think the older sister and twin brother and parents probably all met M. Aaron and embraced him. I think that Beatrix went to graduate school in the midwestern state not randomly, but because M. Aaron was already there.
Why did they file for divorce? Probably nothing very interesting. Maybe she felt she needed to stay in New York, and he was heading off to graduate school. And then later they changed their minds. Maybe something more sordid. I can't see how it could tie to his secrecy with his family of origin, but maybe Beatrix met them and it went so badly that they questioned their union. ("Reasons given include abuse": apparently in the early 1960s, the phrase "irreconcilable differences" is used in a court case for the first time, and is one contributing factor to the rapid increase in divorce rates. Before then you could only divorce for infidelity or abuse. So I don't think anything of that word abuse, appearing in the news blurb.)
Could we settle this by locating some marriage certificates? Probably yes. Nothing has turned up by Christine's aunt. The original story goes that M. Aaron and Beatrix married en route to Florida, where they were visiting Beatrix's parents, who were staying there to help heal her father's rheumatoid arthritis. So there was never supposed to be a marriage certificate in either the midwestern graduate school state nor New York.
What eventually happened? They were happily married until my grandfather passed away in 1982. They had three kids and lengthy academic careers. M. Aaron was beloved by all, and I've always felt a personal loss that I didn't get to know him.
Why do my mom and her brothers find this newspaper so deeply upsetting? On the one hand it makes sense to me - we're calling your parents liars and saying that they had a secret past that they covered up. On the other hand, it doesn't - Aaron was still the peaceful savant that Aaron was, and nothing changes just because they had this odd secret from when they were very young. Who knows.
What else happened? The second-cousins and Cousin Aaron went home at the end of the weekend, and we stuck around for a few more days with my parents and aunts and uncles, and so the line of questioning died abruptly. Then a blizzard came and we took a train to Montana. The end.
My grandfather was named M. Aaron, or something similar. My grandmother is named Beatrix, or nearly. My grandfather died when I was four, and Beatrix just turned 95 a few weeks ago. Family lore has it that Aaron was deeply wise and serene. Many nephews, grandchildren, and other offspring are named for him. Even ones that would have been born when Aaron was 30 or 35 or so - it seems odd now to honor someone in their mid-thirties, since trendy names tend to come from a few generations back. One uncle has a bit of deep serenity to him, so it's not far-fetched to me that Aaron had something similar.
The story goes that M. Aaron left home at age 13, when his dad told him to drop out of school and work on the farm. Aaron wanted to stay in school, and so he had to leave home. He went to New York City, and supported himself as a janitor while he put himself through high school, and then Hunter College, and then left for graduate school in psychology in one of those midwestern states. I think he began graduate school in 1938 or 1939.
(How closely should I monitor such google-proofing of the story? I know perfectly well which state it was.)
Beatrix lived in the same brownstone in Queens that my second-cousins grew up in. (My second-cousin is now raising her kids in that same home. The phone number still begins FL-something, for Flushing.) Beatrix lived with her parents, twin brother, and older sister, and they were all very close. The story goes that she graduated high school at age 17, in 1934, and went to the women's CUNY in Queens. She had an instructor who recommended that she go to graduate school in psychology, and so she applied to exactly one program, where she was accepted.
She headed to graduate school in psychology in 1940, in that same midwestern state school, where she met M. Aaron. She fell in love with his voice, sitting behind him in class. They were married in 1941.
For all the wisdom and kindness and blah blah blah of Aaron, he was super-secretive about his past. He just gently deflected all questions, even though my mom and her brothers were desperately curious. He threw a few crumbs to my mom: a photo of his father, a word that he sent money back to the farm, monthly. But nobody has ever met any of his siblings or their offspring. Conventional wisdom speculates that this is because they were anti-semitic, and would not have approved of Beatrix and her Commie-Jew family.
At Grandma's 95th birthday party, we watched a slide show (updated from the 90th birthday party, which was updated from the 85th party) and mused about such things. My mom's cousin (who happens to be named after Aaron) is not serene and peaceful whatsoever, but more like tone-deaf and tenacious and loves to troll and create unwinnable arguments and trap people. (I sometimes wonder if he comments on blogs I read.) He sank his teeth into the secrecy of Aaron's past and kept bringing up how uncharacteristic of him it was. Again and again and again.
Now, I have a cousin in Dallas. He got married about two years ago. Let's call his wife Christine. Christine has an aunt who is super-into geneology. So when Christine married my cousin, her aunt said "Let's research the hell out of Heebie's cousin's family! Wheee!"
The aunt turned up a very small news article, from the graduate school midwestern state, in 1939. (I saw it, too - Christine logged into Ancestry.com and found the whole scanned-in newspaper page.) The article says "M. Aaron Lastname and Beatrix are filing for divorce. They were married in 1936, in New York City. Reasons given include abuse."
To refresh your memory, the story goes that M. Aaron and Beatrix did not meet until 1940, in the midwestern state. So Christine, in response to the cousin Aaron's tenacious questioning of M. Aaron's past, admits that this article exists. Everyone is confounded by the discrepancies.
What's interesting to me is the response from my mom and her siblings. In various ways, the article was doggedly dismissed by them. Emotionally. Somehow it is so threatening to their father's memory that they just shut it down and were upset that my generation found it salacious and intriguing. (My mom: Obviously it's a prank. Someone likes altering old newspapers just to get their kicks.)
Nobody asked my grandmother, and everyone else from that era has died. I personally felt it was futile to ask Grandma, because she has told the same story for the past 70 years, and we know what happens when her narratives deviate from reality: she doubles-down and repeats herself, extra-doggedly. She's got the tenacious dog-with-a-bone trait that the cousin Aaron has. Plus, her memory is actually failing now, and I'm not sure the truth hasn't been entirely replaced with the narrative in her mind.
What do I think? I think M. Aaron and Beatrix met in college, and got married. His school was in Manhattan and hers in Queens, but they were brother-and-sister colleges, and so there would have been mixers and occasional classes offered to students from both schools. I think she took a psychology course at his school and heard his voice and fell in love.
I don't think she would or could have kept it a secret from her family, though. That's out of character. So I think the older sister and twin brother and parents probably all met M. Aaron and embraced him. I think that Beatrix went to graduate school in the midwestern state not randomly, but because M. Aaron was already there.
Why did they file for divorce? Probably nothing very interesting. Maybe she felt she needed to stay in New York, and he was heading off to graduate school. And then later they changed their minds. Maybe something more sordid. I can't see how it could tie to his secrecy with his family of origin, but maybe Beatrix met them and it went so badly that they questioned their union. ("Reasons given include abuse": apparently in the early 1960s, the phrase "irreconcilable differences" is used in a court case for the first time, and is one contributing factor to the rapid increase in divorce rates. Before then you could only divorce for infidelity or abuse. So I don't think anything of that word abuse, appearing in the news blurb.)
Could we settle this by locating some marriage certificates? Probably yes. Nothing has turned up by Christine's aunt. The original story goes that M. Aaron and Beatrix married en route to Florida, where they were visiting Beatrix's parents, who were staying there to help heal her father's rheumatoid arthritis. So there was never supposed to be a marriage certificate in either the midwestern graduate school state nor New York.
What eventually happened? They were happily married until my grandfather passed away in 1982. They had three kids and lengthy academic careers. M. Aaron was beloved by all, and I've always felt a personal loss that I didn't get to know him.
Why do my mom and her brothers find this newspaper so deeply upsetting? On the one hand it makes sense to me - we're calling your parents liars and saying that they had a secret past that they covered up. On the other hand, it doesn't - Aaron was still the peaceful savant that Aaron was, and nothing changes just because they had this odd secret from when they were very young. Who knows.
What else happened? The second-cousins and Cousin Aaron went home at the end of the weekend, and we stuck around for a few more days with my parents and aunts and uncles, and so the line of questioning died abruptly. Then a blizzard came and we took a train to Montana. The end.