My Dead Grandmother

<BODY BGCOLOR="#000000" BACKGROUND="imgs/bkrndcurtain.gif" TEXT="#CCCCCC" LINK="#666666" VLINK="#C2C2C2" ALINK="#FFFFFF"> <PRE> </PRE> <IMG SRC="imgs/stage.gif" WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=120 BORDER=0 HSPACE=20 ALT="My Dead Grandmother as a Work of Performance Art"> <PRE> </PRE> <TABLE WIDTH=222 CELLPADDING=5 CELLSPACING=0 BORDER=0 ALIGN=RIGHT> <TR><TD ALIGN=LEFT VALIGN=TOP> <FONT SIZE=3> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">wo days before my grandmother died, I went with my mother to see her at the small apartment she had moved to for her last years. It was in a high- rise co-op near Lincoln Center, in a building crammed with old people. Its only distinguishing feature was a small concrete balcony that overlooked similar high-rise projects and a monotone sliver of the Hudson. At the time of her death my grandmother was 93 years old. She was the only grandparent I ever knew and unfortunately I never liked her at all.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capo.gif" WIDTH=17 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="O">n that last visit, my grandmother was swollen like a rotten fruit, sitting propped up in an armchair, her features wax-like and her legs extended before her as thick as tree stumps, unable to speak as she breathed in loud shallow gulps, with every breath clearly a renewed agony. Her wide blue eyes stared out at us with pure animal panic. I looked at her skin, which had become almost translucent. It reminded me of yellowish waxed paper wrapped around butter.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/caph.gif" WIDTH=38 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="H">i, grandma," I said. My grandmother made no reply--just stared at me with her watery blue eyes and moaned again without recognition, or perhaps recognizing dimly that the rare occasion of my visit could only mean that the end was quickly approaching. Or perhaps not recognizing anything, as she had turned to me a few months before on my last visit there and said to me, point blank, with an almost angry stare, "Who are you?"<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capi.gif" WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="I"> looked for what I realized would be one of the last times at the particular constellation of objects my grandmother had surrounded herself with. Vases, inert sculpted heads that my grandmother had made from clay in some class years ago, creepy knickknacks and dolls from an uncle in Peru, paintings--most prominently one of my mother at the age of ten, in pigtails and a yellow dress, looking apple-cheeked but stiff and uncomfortable. Embroidered chairs that had never once had their plastic slipcovers removed or been sat on during all of the time that I could recall. And, in the corner, the black baby grand piano, a Steck, which, as my grandmother often proclaimed, was "almost as good" as a Steinway and which nobody had played in decades.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">his piano had tormented my mother throughout her childhood. My grandmother had wanted my mother to be a composer of operas and librettos, or a pianist, and had ferociously pushed my mother toward a musical career even when she steadfastly refused to show either talent or inclination for it. A half-century after my grandmother's hopes had dissipated, the piano still remained as a fossilized reminder or reproach, an out-of-tune monument to my grandmother's highest aspirations.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capm.gif" WIDTH=33 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="M">y grandmother never spoke about her love of classical music, although when she was young she had wanted to be a professional singer, and specialized in the mournful lieder of Schumann. In her old age, she remained steadfast in silence on every subject that mattered to her, and by this silence she expressed a terrible, an almost lurid, force. When I stayed at my grandmother's house as a child, I would often crash out atonal concertos in dumb show parody of the real music my grandmother had hoped to foster, shaking my head and raising my arms up high like the mad pianist in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. My grandmother always smiled indulgently when I did this, although it must have seemed to her to be a kind of sacrilege. Sometimes, I suspected she had actually ceased to care about classical music--or, for that matter, anything else--many years ago, but still clung to the idea of culture, the idea of "quality," that it represented. This idea was no longer attached to anything tangible, however; she never went to museums, plays, or concerts.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capu.gif" WIDTH=29 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="U">p until the last years of her life, when she basically ceased to exist mentally except for rare lucid moments, my grandmother expressed a snobbery about culture as well as a disdain toward most other people. Everyone she had known was dead, yet she refused to try to make new friends, to go to classes or summer gathering places for old people, no matter how much my mother urged her. She didn't like being alone particularly, I felt, but she clung to the idea that other old people would be in some way beneath her. "It's not worth the trouble," she would say, crinkling her nose distastefully when my mother brought it up, as the three of us sat for hours in the entropic stillness of her living room, punctuated by the ticking of a clock. My grandma was, it always seemed, saving herself and her plastic-wrapped furniture for something better, but--alas--something better never arrived.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capi.gif" WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="I"> often stayed at my grandmother's house when I was a child, especially during a period when my mother was having an affair with a man who lived in California. I slept in my mother's old room, unchanged since she moved out during college, and spent the days of my exile eating my grandmother's bland food--broiled chicken, steamed vegetables, orange jello--and watching television. My grandmother was fascinated with my bathroom habits and bodily functions. She explained to me, over and over again, her belief that it was normal to do "a number one" three times a day, and "a number two" just once a day. Any major deviation from this pattern was cause for worry and for swift and decisive reparative action. I can dimly remember her liberal application of enemas to my tiny child-sized ass, as I yelped and wept in dismay in the bathroom. During these proceedings, it seems to me now, looking back, I can recall her older sisters fluttering nervously around the apartment, whether to provide moral support or advice on technical matters, I can't say.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">here was, I think I suspected even then, nothing wrong with my bodily functions, and my grandmother and her sister's concentrated interest on this area and on the giving of enemas seems oddly perverted and dark. It was as though they were giving in to some inexplicable and unconscious desire to invade my body, to torture me the way they had tortured my mother with years of forced piano lessons and composition classes, the way they had once turned the onset of her menstrual cycle into something mystifying and scary, as well as the general attempt to suffocate her and crush her will which had ultimately backfired, as my mother eventually escaped into the artistic bohemia of downtown New York in the 1950s, a permissive milieu that shocked them.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capm.gif" WIDTH=33 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="M">y grandma and her sisters were traumatized people, I knew instinctively from a very young age, and the three of them together had the quality of guardians, protecting me from the secrets of the long-ago past, secrets that were never discussed or even alluded to and yet lingered in every one of their sighs and somber silences.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">hey all had a mania for preservation, as if life was something that could be kept immobile in a jar, like a moth that would never die if it was properly trapped. They never sat upon the "good," plastic-covered furniture, because of its theoretical value--yet it proved to be worthless after their deaths. They stored empty picture frames, dusty pennies to be put into rolls, electronic gadgets given out by the banks when they opened new accounts, hotel stationery, outmoded kitchen appliances, and old empty ledger books--after all, you never knew when a blank insurance-office ledger or calendar from 1952 might come in handy again, they must have thought to themselves as they amassed this junk in their closets. Perhaps, living as they did in a kind of arrested state, they believed 1952 might recur some day, surprising the rest of the world, while they alone would be ready with the requisite blank ledger book. As a child, I had the obscure sensation that my grandmother and her older sisters were seeking to outlast time by approaching absolute stasis. I wondered if the expression in my grandmother's eyes when I last saw her was not just panic but surprise that she, the last of the three, had been caught out in this clever ruse.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">hey were Jews who never discussed God, or Jewish tradition, as far as I could detect. Every year, my mother and I ate Passover dinner with my grandmother and, when they were alive, her sisters in grandma's embalmed-feeling living room, but without ritual of any sort, without prayer, with perhaps one candle being lit in memory of all that was forgotten, which was as much as possible. Our little family seemed to thrive on forgetting. Forgetting was the family theme, the family compulsion. My grandmother never spoke about the past--never mentioned her dead husband, or good times the family once shared--and neither did her older sisters. These older sisters had, in fact, been born in Poland, around the turn of the century, but about Poland I never heard any of them utter one word. My grandmother, the youngest of the three of them, was born soon after they arrived in New York, where they lived for years, caught in the terrible, crushing poverty of the Depression.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capi.gif" WIDTH=15 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="I">n a way you have to hand it to that older, now almost completely vanished, generation represented by my grandmother and her sisters: secrets mattered to them. In their day, if skeletons rattled in the closet, you held the door shut with all your might, even if this effort meant you would spend your entire life paralyzed in that one painful stance. When you release secrets, as we so avidly do in the contemporary world--let them float into the atmosphere, bray them out loudly on a daytime talk show--their power disintegrates. They become meaningless, even laughable. But unexpressed secrets have a force that accrues over time.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capa.gif" WIDTH=20 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="A">ll that I know about my family's history comes from my mother, who learned it indirectly from another relative, an aunt or cousin, now long dead as well. My great-grandfather had been a Rabbinical scholar and poet in the Old World. In America, he struggled with the English language and found himself unable to get a job, except for temporary janitorial work and the like. At a certain point, this tormented, perhaps psychically fragile man could no longer bear his failure in the theoretically abundant Promised Land, and took his own life, sticking his head in the gas oven of their apartment in Brooklyn, twenty-five years or so before millions of other Polish Jews would fall to a similar but involuntary fate.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">he older daughters, Aunt Anna and Aunt Leona, whom I was to encounter only in their long-drawn-out final manifestation as shadowy old crones, took jobs as soon as they were able, as teenagers, and struggled along with their mother. Compounding this tragedy was a second one, my mother told me, as she had heard it from her cousins, involving Aunt Anna.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/caps.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="S">keletal Aunt Anna had wide eyes and sunken cheeks. She always wore widower's black dresses of the 1940s. Unlike my grandmother--with her lugubrious undertone of sexual repression and self-negation--and Aunt Leona--a golfing and tennis enthusiast who my mother always suspected had lesbian tendencies and who wore far too much makeup and heavy sweet perfume (to the point that when I was a child, I dreaded the soapy-tasting lipstick press of her kisses and would actually hide away in a closet or remote bedroom for as long as possible from this monstrous relative rather than submit willingly to her cloying and somehow life-negating embrace)--Aunt Anna seemed to retain a spark of rational humanity up until the end of her prolonged existence. She had, according to my mother, kept the family alive through the twenties and thirties with her office work, and at some point married a coworker in her office, a Marxist organizer who was a devout follower of Trotsky. Aunt Anna's husband vanished the day after Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico. He took all of their money out of the bank and was never heard from again.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">his vanished husband continues to exist in just one photograph of the two of them together. Aunt Anna's face, even then, reflects long-suffering forbearance underneath her floral hat; her improbably-named mate, Roman Blueglass, appears bearish and tall in an overcoat and dark suit--surprisingly substantial for a man who was soon to vanish. After his disappearance, Aunt Anna never made another attempt to escape from the suffocating cocoon of our family.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">hose were the family secrets: a traumatic suicide, an abandoned wife, years of grinding Depression-era poverty. The weight of the family secrets turned my grandmother and her sisters into husks of human beings, people without memory or ritual or interests, whose basic motivation for existence I could never understand, although they did take a stubborn pride in their capacity for self-preservation (which occasionally took surprising forms: my grandmother, for instance, played the stock market with some success). All of them lived to be around ninety, clinging tenaciously to life until the end, perhaps believing in some obscure way that endurance was in itself an answer, that something would be revealed or restored to them at some future point.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capw.gif" WIDTH=28 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="W">hen I saw my grandma for that last time, I suspected that behind her non-stop moaning and her fear-addled gaze, she was trying to express that she had waited too long, that she knew the meanings she had kept within herself would never be divulged now, and that this was not what she had expected. My grandmother had always been a controlling personality, but in the end she controlled nothing. Everything was taken away from her--locomotion, the ability to speak and to go to the bathroom voluntarily. But if my grandma no longer retained a self in the strict sense of the word, she still held onto something even more basic--an essence of humanness, a force, that even in its death throes was terrible to see.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capt.gif" WIDTH=16 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="T">oward the end, the Haitian nurse reported, my grandmother would often wake up in the middle of the night and drag her ruined body out of the bed, repeating over and over again, "I have to find the papers," as she rummaged through drawers and trunks. Yet whatever papers the nurse produced to placate her were never the right ones, and it would be hours before she settled back again into uneasy sleep. When my great-grandmother died in the 1940s, my grandmother and her two sisters gathered together all of the papers--letters, poems, scholarly texts, photos--that recorded the thoughts or existence of their father, the suicide, and burnt them, my mother told me, according to what she had heard from other relatives, leaving no trace of the family's shame. Were those the papers my grandmother was looking for? Nobody will ever know.<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/capw.gif" WIDTH=28 HEIGHT=23 BORDER=O ALT="W">hen people die, it is true that a whole world vanishes with them. Whether that world has been a grim or a delightful place to inhabit hardly matters. For a historian, my grandmother and her spinster sisters might represent one particular case of the East European Jewish assimilation in America. They were a variation on a theme, but it was as if they took certain elements of that theme and pushed them as far as it was possible to go--among them, the yearning to forget the past; the drive to associate themselves with an abstract notion of "quality" or high culture; the alienation and loneliness of lives that denied all tradition and ritual; the self-negation and repression that typified that vanishing generation. They expressed these traits with almost surrealistic intensity, turning their lives into a kind of performance-art piece whose themes were stasis and disappointment, for which my mother and myself were a final, and not completely appreciative, audience. <P><BR> </FONT><FONT SIZE=2> written by<P> <A HREF="../../bios/pinchbeck.html" TARGET="_top"><IMG SRC="imgs/daniel.gif" WIDTH=156 HEIGHT=19 BORDER=O ALT="Daniel A. Pinchbeck"></a><P><BR> designed by<P> <IMG SRC="imgs/jason.gif" WIDTH=143 HEIGHT=25 BORDER=O ALT="Jason A. 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