Matriarch Tales, Part 5 – Esther 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.

All families have secrets, some of which remain hidden and eventually forgotten. But some family secrets find their way out of hiding and become memories. Some memories, like Esther’s story, remain hidden for decades, then emerge in bits and pieces to reveal what a family has tried to forget. For me, Esther’s life is a sorrow and a mystery still.

When my grandmother Bertha died after a long and busy life, the family greeted callers at the mortuary the night before her funeral. I was standing near the parlor door when a woman asked, “Where is Esther?  We went to high school together and I drove from New Albany to see her.” It was January and the woman had driven for hours in a snowstorm. I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know who Ether is. This is the is the calling for Bertha __________.”

She replied, “Yes, Esther’s mother.”  I gaped at her, and finally had the sense to take her to my Aunt Alice.

We were all gathered around a restaurant table later when I asked my mother, “Who is Esther?” It was one of those strange moments when the restaurant had gone silent for no apparent reason. The older generation around the table, my uncle and aunts, stared at me, silent and clearly unhappy. “Later!” my mother said through gritted teeth, and someone changed the subject.

Eventually, later arrived, probably because I kept asking. I discovered that Esther was the oldest of Bertha’s daughters and had been about 18 when Grace was born. I also learned that Esther had spent years in a mental hospital, probably in Illinois, and no one knew what had become of her. Eventually my mother told me that she was a teenager when Bertha received a bill for Esther’s care from the State of Illinois and had torn it up in a rage.  “I don’t have any money!” she shouted and then, according to my mother, went shopping for new clothes.

Over the years, I wondered about Esther and how a family could just abandon her. Perhaps her father watched over her and paid the bills, I thought.

Then I learned about another family secret, this one poorly kept. Grace had been told from early childhood that her father had died when she was a baby. That lie probably supported Bertha’s status as a grass widow, a divorced woman who claimed her husband had died. But one day Grace was riding in the back seat of a car when she overheard a conversation between an old family friend and Alice during which she learned that he had lived in Elgin, Illinois. Alice had ended the conversation abruptly. It didn’t make sense; the family had never lived in Illinois, and the abrupt end to the conversation meant someone was hiding something. So Grace, who was about 18, wrote to the county clerk in Illinois and asked for the date of his death. Her letter came back in the mail with a penciled note on the back, “W… lives at [a street address], Elgin, Illinois.  Her father was alive. Her mother, brother, and sister had lied to her. When she turned 21, Grace went to see him, but he would not talk with her. She left and never tried to contact him again. Grace kept few bits of memorabilia, but that letter was with her legal documents when she died 75 years later.

Slowly, a few more details about Esther emerged. She had been “overly attached” to her father. She was violent the one time she visited Bertha and Grace when Grace was about 5 or 6.  In a rage at her mother, Esther destroyed Grace’s small table and chair, whereupon Bertha “threw her out and told her never to come back.”  I had heard part of this story, but the banishment part came to me from my younger son, who remembered his grandmother, Grace, talking about Esther just once.

It was quite remarkable then, when a cousin and her husband began gathering stories from Aunt Alice for their genealogical research. I listened as they recorded an interview and at one point, Alice mentioned Esther.  “She was a painter, you know, a really fine artist,” said Alice. “Through the years, she donated her paintings to the home where she lived and they sold them to pay for her care.”  My mother said later, “What a lot of baloney. Alice always wants things to be pretty and happy. Esther did no such thing,” and left the room clearly agitated. When the transcript of that interview with Alice came to us, the passage about Esther had been deleted. She had disappeared again.

I honored the family secrecy for reasons I do not entirely understand. I had a busy life and had no idea how to find her, but she was always in my awareness, just out of reach.  To my sorrow, I never looked for her, nor did I explore how to do so. But after Alice and my mother died, I began to search for Esther. I fell down the Ancestry.com rabbit hole and it wasn’t pretty.

The 1910 U.S. census shows Esther, age 8 and living with her brother, sister, and parents in New Albany.  By the 1920 census, her occupation is listed as stenographer and she now has three siblings at the same address. The new sibling was my mother, Grace.  It would be only a few months before her father would throw infant Grace against a wall and Bertha would pack in secret to leave him. (See Matriarch Tales Part 3 for that story.)

The 1930 census shows that Esther was a patient in the Elgin State Hospital, age 27, (not accurate) and enrolled in an occupational class. Why was Esther hospitalized? One cousin has a vague memory that she was found wandering the streets and sent to “a home.” Another cousin doesn’t remember anything about her at all. My mother once said, “You know, they put Esther away because she liked girls.”  That may have been a warning to her lesbian daughter, but my mother was well over her homophobia by the time she made that remark. It may be worth noting that Esther’s father, W.W, had married his housekeeper in 1929.  What happened in that family?  We know that W.W. was violent; what had sent Esther wandering the streets?  Or did that happen at all?

There is no other information in accessible records. The State of Illinois is slowly emerging from bankruptcy, so the hospital archives, which do exist, cannot employ anyone to help locate records. Enough time has passed that I could see them without violating patient privacy, but it would require traveling to the archives and, according to the state website, “digging through boxes and files.” I will find a way.

The 1940 census shows Esther to be an “inmate” at Manteno State Hospital, also in Illinois and that she had completed three years of high school. Subsequent census data is unavailable online.

I kept looking, absorbed in the Ancestry.com trail, and found a Social Security record that she had died in 1994 in a convalescent center in East Moline, Illinois. She would have been 93 and I could have found her and met her, had she been willing. If she was in a nursing home, she most likely was not violent. Had she finally received medication, humane treatment for her illness?  Her obituary in a local newspaper is only about 1 inch long and states, “She had no local family.”

Further down the rabbit hole, I found information on the Elgin and Manteno state hospitals. Electric shock therapy was introduced while she was there, as were lobotomies.  What had happened to poor Esther?

Then, a treasure of a happier nature: I found her high school yearbook picture.  She is described as busy and was an artist on the student yearbook staff. So, Alice remembered correctly that she was an artist. Esther looks like other women in the family.

I’ve read between the lines again and again, imagining young Esther, a sensitive artist with a violent father and a feisty mother. She is a junior in high school when a new sister is born and her mother abandons her father, to whom she is attached. Just how healthy or unhealthy was that attachment?  She goes to live with her father in another state, visits her mother, flies into a rage at her, and is banished. Her father marries his housekeeper and the same year, Esther is confined in a mental hospital. She may have been found wandering the streets; she may have been a lesbian; she may have been traumatized. No one knows. Mental health treatment is either brutal or non-existent at the time. Electric shock treatments and lobotomies are far too common. After a few months in a mental hospital, a traumatized but otherwise mentally healthy woman could easily have “gone mad.”  Esther is moved a few years later to another hospital, and then later to another. The state where she is confined asks her mother for payment for her care, but her mother destroys the letter.  At age 94, Esther dies in a convalescent center in that city with no local family.

Where did she find comfort in this world? Who were the people who loved her? Did anyone care about her at all? Did her mother grieve for Esther after she banished her? Did her father commit her to the state hospital for the insane?  The level of shame about mental illness in those years was even worse than it is now. Did her family care about her so deeply that the only way to cope with her illness and brutal treatment for it was to forget? 

The questions lead to more questions. I want to honor Aunt Esther by remembering her and telling her story.

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