Matriarch Tales, Part 4 - by Saga

Matriarch Tales, Part 4 – by Saga

In this Wednesday blog I’ll be posting the stories I remember about my maternal ancestors: my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother. The stories may or may not be accurate; family stories seldom are. I set them down here to remember and to honor these unsung women.

After packing in secret, Bertha left her violent husband and went home to Terre Haute to seek safety and help from her parents.  Her father, by all accounts, was not happy that she had left the husband he had chosen for her.  In any case, he sold a portion of his land holdings and gave Bertha what would have been her inheritance at his death. With the money, Bertha moved to Indianapolis and sought employment.  She found clerical work because her Spencerian script writing was beautiful, but that wasn’t enough to support herself and her daughters. So Bertha purchased a large house with several bedrooms and turned it into a boarding house. It was an upper middle class neighborhood - a successful hardware merchant lived across the street - and the neighbors found her boarding house beneath their standards. But Bertha persisted. The Victorian house had 17 rooms: a front parlor, a sitting room or second parlor, a large dining room, a huge kitchen, and a wide ornate staircase that led to at least 6 bedrooms and two or three bathrooms on the second floor. To keep body and soul together, Bertha rented out rooms and fed her boarders two meals a day.

Bertha had a busy social life in various ladies’ organizations such as the Garden Club and the Travel Study Club. She often attended luncheons and meetings at the Propyleum, a stately building dedicated to knowledge and women’s betterment. Bertha, who was as clever a seamstress as her mother, remade her suits, dresses, and hats from week to week so that she appeared to have a large wardrobe. Shoes were another matter; she usually had many as 20 pairs under her bed and I loved counting them as a child. Bertha’s artistic talents were expressed in her sewing, her script, and her beautifully decorated home. She was proud of her beautiful handwriting well into her eighties. The family Haviland china was displayed in the dining room, just as Nancy Alice had displayed it. Perhaps Nancy gave it to her as a sort of blessing for her new life. 

Bertha was also very active in the large Presbyterian church and women’s circles there. She often wrote prayers and meditations for her church circles.  She told her daughters that she would “go into the silence” to receive guiding messages and her ability to see into the future was common knowledge. Bertha could also find missing items by dreaming on them, and she often helped her boarders by using her psychic abilities. Once when I was a girl, a young woman boarder came to her distraught because she had lost her engagement ring.  Bertha said, “Give me something metal of yours and I will dream on it.”  That night she tucked a hairpin the young woman had brought her under her pillow. The next morning, she told the young woman where to find her ring – and there it was.

Grace, the youngest, grew up with the understood that there was little money. The refrigerator was chained and locked, the pantry was locked, and a hungry little girl just had to wait until the boarders had been fed before she could eat. When she visited a friend one evening, she was startled and enchanted by the fresh lettuce she’d eaten. When disposable handkerchiefs became popular, Grace wanted to carry them like the other children at school instead of the cotton ones she ironed for her mother every week. But plain old tissue paper had to suffice, and the other children made fun of her, an injury she remembered long after dementia claimed the rest of her memory.

In their later years, Alice and Grace agreed that they had had different mothers. Alice’s mother was gentle and attentive and vibrant. Grace’s mother was usually angry and even neglectful.  In her mid- seventies, Grace had a sudden realization and said, “I think I was the product of a marital rape,” which seems likely. She remembered a time when the garage at the back of the boarding house caught fire. She slept on a second-floor screened porch no matter the weather and woke to see flames shooting up beside her. She stood at the corner of the porch and screamed until eventually a fireman noticed and came to rescue her. Grace always believed that her mother had forgotten her and that the house was more important to Bertha than she was.
My understanding of my grandmother was, of course, colored by my mother's words and attitude. I found Bertha to be a bit mysterious and fascinating, too. I loved to visit her and stayed overnight a few times. I remember her working in her flower gardens at the big house, the many shoes under her bed, the creaking of the floors in the house, the highly polished majestic stairway, the large wrap-around porch with its swing full of cushions, the huge shady trees, the fish pond in the back yard. I remember picnics in the state forest to the south and stopping at the fish hatchery every spring to get her goldfish for the pond, and water lilies. I remember her wanting to make me pretty, using a curling iron heated on the gas stove and burning my hair in the process. And kid curlers, strips of wire covered in leather that could be wound around strands of my hair in a vain attempt at curls. I remember being told to stand up straight and proud. I remember how her intuition and psychic abilities were entirely an normal part of her daily life and going into the silence was important.  I remember her temper when she came to live with us when I was a teenager. But most of all, I remember her persistence, her determination to keep going, even to keep up appearances when her life fell apart. She taught that to her daughters and it's a legacy I appreciate. 

For Bertha Rachel, the house was survival, and so were prestige, stylish clothes, and pretty things. Her legacy persists, as she did. 

               Next week, the mystery of Esther.

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