Matriarch Tales #8: Grace Elizabeth Part 2 – by Saga

These tales are 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. But they have influenced me, often without my knowing.  I set them down here to remember and to honor these unsung women. To refer to blogs about other generations of the matriarchs, please go to https://consortiumofseven.blogspot.com/p/c7-posts.html and scroll down to Wednesday’s list.

Grace around age 35

The move to their own rented home must have been a big relief for Grace; now she was free from her mother and the tiny apartment in the boarding house. With an infant and a toddler, Grace and George became part of their new neighborhood. They went to parties almost weekly, sometimes hosting in the tiny half double. The rugs would come up and the furniture moved against the walls for dancing, Grace would fret and fuss to make things just so, and the drinking and dancing would go late into the night. As with Bertha and Alice, appearances mattered.  Despite their difficult financial situation, Grace was determined to appear at least a little affluent and stylish. The slightest clutter in the house would bring down her wrath and the greatest woe of all when she would snap, “This place looks like white trash.”

Grace coped with her children’s illnesses, including measles and a resulting pneumonia that nearly killed me. Once again, she and George had to decide upon a new and risky treatment,  penicillin.  There were mumps and chicken pox and colds. There were also library books and bedtime stories and trips to the nearby state forest for picnics and fishing. Grace would teach John and I to identify trees and flowers by their leaves and stems, point out the beauty of fall colors, and take us on hikes. She fried chicken in lard over an open fire, made milk gravy to spoon over white bread, prepared a mason jar of sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and onions in a vinegar and sugar brine, and serve up an apple pie. Her pies were masterpieces that George relished and bragged about.

When John went off to elementary school, he had difficulty reading and writing. Grace noticed that he was suddenly reading words backward. “Was became saw”, she would remember well into her later years. Grace discovered that his teacher was forcing left-handed John to write with his right hand, which was not only frustrating to him, but somehow making it hard for his brain to work properly, as she said. She went to the school and demanded that the teacher let John use his left hand and his reading and writing improved. For years she was proud that she had fought for her child and taught that teacher something.  I wonder now if anyone ever fought on Grace’s behalf when she was a child.

In about 1949, I answered the doorbell to discover a policeman asking for Garnet Marksbury. After a certain amount of confusion because I had never heard of Garnet Marksbury, it became clear that the police had been sent to find the son of John Marksbury, who had been hospitalized with tuberculosis. The hospital needed to discharge John as soon as possible and there were no beds available at the local tuberculosis sanitorium. County authorities were asking Garnet to take care of the father who had abandoned him in an orphanage in 1921. This was a risk to everyone in the household, but George and Grace took in the dying man. They turned their bedroom over to him and slept on a sofa bed in the living room. Grace boiled everything he touched: linens, dishes, clothing. I clearly remember her stirring bedsheets in a huge pot of boiling water on the stove. After the water cooled, she carried the heavy pot outdoors and hung the sheets on a clothesline. We had no washer or dryer, after all, and sunshine was a good disinfectant.  She bleached the one bathroom in the house every time John used it, and worried constantly that one of us would contract the dreaded TB, for which there was no cure.

After several weeks, John was transported to the sanitorium out in the country. Every Sunday, George would go to see him, taking clean clothes and toiletries. One Sunday, as we sat waiting in the car, Grace turned abruptly to look at John and I in the back seat. “If you ever wonder what love is,” she said, “you just remember that your dad took care of the father who never took care of him.  That’s what love is.”

It was also clear that love meant affection, hugs, kisses, and cuddling. George and Grace were passionate all the time. They were not inappropriate with their affection, but their attraction to one another was always evident. The tensions between them always involved money and the lack of it.

In the early 1950s, Grace went to work, no doubt because someone in the family had to earn a regular income. It is also highly likely that she was bored at home. The early fifties were a time when working mothers were frowned upon – white, middle class mothers, that is. But a neighbor, who worked for an insurance company, encouraged Grace to apply and she was hired as a secretary. Over time, her responsibilities increased, and she became an assistant to the vice president for operations. She was paid less than a man in the same position, and when the vice president retired, he told her that she should have been promoted to replace him, but she wore the “wrong kind of pants”. 

At the office

By that time, Grace had seen her world and the wider world change in many ways. She was angered by the inequalities based on gender in the business world and became a feminist before the word was widely used. George drifted from one sales job to another over time, so Grace’s wages were essential, which probably made the inequities based on gender even more infuriating. She watched unqualified men be promoted and rewarded while she continued to perform as a statistician, human resources manager, and more.  In the early sixties, the company acquired a computer and Grace learned as much as she could in order to integrate the new data processing systems into the company. But training was available only from the computer manufacturer and restricted to men. Somehow, she learned it anyway. Her abilities as a champion flirt may have helped her extract the knowledge from the male experts.

Grace had joined a professional sorority in which her sister Alice was a member and the organization offered friendship and travel opportunities she loved.  After a “girls” train trip to Chicago to see a road company production of South Pacific, Grace became a musical comedy fan. She would sing along to the LPs on the record player, lost in another world. Sometimes, when the family went to visit her old friend Betty and her family, Grace would sit down at the piano, but she often became irritated with her limitations and stopped abruptly.  For a while, Grace and a friend from work drove the hour trip to Kokomo to take an adult ballet class at Betty’s studio. The trips became an opportunity for private conversation as I slept (or pretended to) in the back seat. Grace found the money for tickets to musicals and ballets, taking me along as a part of my education.

Her friendships with the men and women she came to know at work became more and more important to Grace, and it became evident that they depended on her in many ways. When Larry and his wife had their long-awaited baby, Larry turned to my mother for solace. The baby boy had spinal bifida, a condition that at the time meant eventual death in infancy. Larry’s wife was inconsolable, and he needed advice and support. Grace talked about the situation at the family dinner table and struggled to know how to help. Doctors were clear: the baby needed to go to an institution out of town where he could be cared for as he died. This was the “treatment of choice” at the time and it was heartbreaking. When the time came to take the baby from the hospital, Larry and his wife asked Grace to help them. Larry’s wife could not bear to even see the baby, so Grace took a day off and she held the baby in her arms all the way to the institution. The ride was long, and the baby was so sweet, she recalled. She wept with Larry as she handed the baby to him and watched him leave his child behind.

As a working woman, Grace kept up appearances and paid careful attention to her wardrobe as well as my teen-aged need for formals and John’s continuing need for shoes that fit. He was growing so fast that one pair of shoes might last a week. She sent us to ballroom dancing classes, paid for my ballet classes and costumes, made curtains and slipcovers for the household, cooked a full meal every night, and kept up a social life with George.

Both George and Grace wanted their children to finish college, an opportunity they had never had. It was clear that I would have to earn scholarships and work my way through school. One of Grace’s sorority sisters called one day during my senior year in high school and suggested I talk with a woman who wanted to offer me a scholarship and work study at a small college in central Illinois. My mother’s relief was palpable when it all worked out and she set about making sure I had the perfect wardrobe. Clothes and appearances were still what mattered.

I planned to major in theatre and to work in summer stock companies to earn money. But a career in the arts was too risky for my mother to contemplate.  I worked typing names and addresses on insurance policies during the summer after high school and, like other parents whose children were given jobs in the insurance company, Grace was interviewed about me.  She told the interviewer that I was going to major in journalism so that I could eventually write for the women’s pages in the local newspaper. (The women’s pages covered weddings, fashion, cooking, sewing, and some social events.) Financial security was so important to her, and so scarce in her life, that Grace could not encourage or even acknowledge my ambitions for a career in the arts. And she knew that I didn’t have the beauty that was required. “Don’t ever smile for a picture,” she would tell me, “because your crooked teeth will show.”  I resented this advice until well into my fifties, when Grace, Alice and I were looking at old photographs.  Alice commented that Bertha had taught them both not to smile too broadly for the camera because their teeth weren’t perfect. My mother was simply passing along practical advice from her own mother.

The legacy Grace left included such advice along with her kindness, her willingness to help others in crisis, her commitment to her career, her enjoyment of a passionate marriage and more.

Next time: Grace’s adventures continue.

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