Authors: Lynn Austin
“What’s wrong, Suzanne?” Emma asked gently.
Suzanne glanced at her mother, then sighed. “Jeff and I are getting a divorce.”
“Oh, honey, no!” Suzanne’s words were so unexpected, so devastating, it was all Emma could manage to say. She had invested all her failed hopes and dreams in Jeff and Suzanne, trying to redeem her own mistakes through their marriage.
Behind her, Grace’s trembling voice broke the silence. “You are
not
getting a divorce, Suzanne! You can’t do that to your children. You and Jeff need to see a counselor and talk about this. If it’s a matter of money, your father and I—”
“I already told you it’s not the money. And we have talked about it. Endlessly. I’m sick of talking about it.”
“But a marriage counselor could . . .”
“Could what? Make Jeff change his mind? I don’t think so, and right now that’s the only thing that can save our marriage.”
Emma watched them both, hating to see the two people she loved in such pain, unable to imagine what had triggered such a drastic decision on Suzanne’s part. Could Jeff be having an affair? She recalled Suzanne’s earlier comment that Grandma would be on her side of the argument and wondered why she would think such a thing. Was it because Emma herself had divorced years ago? She took Suzanne’s hand in her own.
“Why, Sue?”
Emma waited as Suzanne gained control by drawing strength from her anger. “Jeff’s company offered him a promotion if he transferred to Chicago. He accepted the job, Grandma. He didn’t even discuss it with me first—he
just told them yes, he would move halfway across the country. But I’m not going to move. I’ve worked too hard to build my own career, and if I sacrificed it for Jeff, I’d end up hating him. There’s nothing for me in Chicago.”
“You don’t know that,” Grace said. “You haven’t even looked for a new job there.”
“I don’t want a new job, Mom. I want the job I already have. I love my work. Our families live here. The girls have their schools and their friends. How can he ask us to give up everything?”
“It’s so strange how history repeats itself,” Emma said. “My mother had to leave her family and her home in Germany to immigrate to America for my father’s sake. That was . . . what? More than eighty years ago. She never saw her family again.” Emma wondered what Louise would say to this great-granddaughter of hers if she were alive. Would she tell Suzanne she was making the right decision? Would Louise agree that no marriage was worth such a staggering sacrifice?
“Women didn’t have much choice in those days,” Suzanne said. “But I do.” She finished wrapping another dish and shoved it into the box.
Grace pushed past Emma, taking Suzanne by the shoulders. “If Jeff wants this job, if
it’s
important for his career, how can you stand in his way? He’s the head of your house and—”
“No, Mom. I don’t believe all that Bible stuff about wives submitting to their husbands.” She twisted free. “I’m not like you. My entire life doesn’t revolve around my husband and the church. I would never allow Jeff to tell me I can’t work, like Daddy tells you.” Her eyes met Emma’s. “Did Mom tell you about that, Grandma?”
“Tell me what, dear?”
She’s been working so hard to set up a crisis pregnancy center, but when the board asked her to serve as their first director, Daddy made her turn it down.”
“He didn’t make me—”
“He did so!” Suzanne interjected.
“No, I hadn’t heard about that,” Emma said. She rested her hand on Grace’s arm. “Is this the place you were telling me about where girls who don’t want an abortion can get help?”
Grace nodded. “But I didn’t refuse just because of Stephen. What would I know about directing an organization like that? I’m a housewife. I can’t—”
“Mom, you created that entire center from scratch,” Suzanne said. “You assembled a board of trustees, raised funds, renovated the vacant building,
planned the advertising campaign—all as an unpaid volunteer. You’re a registered nurse, a doctor’s wife. You’d be perfect for the job and the board knows it. That’s why they asked you. But you turned it down because Daddy doesn’t want you to work. That’s insane!”
“We’re not talking about me,” Grace said with carefully controlled anger. “We’re talking about you and Jeff.”
“But you’re the reason I made this decision! I refuse to live the way you do. I’m like Grandma. I don’t need a husband to take care of me; I can take care of myself and my daughters. I’ve always admired you for that, Grandma—for raising Mom alone after your husband deserted you.”
In one terrible instant, Emma realized that the house of lies she had so carefully constructed was on the brink of collapse, trapping the people she loved beneath its weight. She had built it to protect and shelter them, thinking that she alone would be hurt if it ever fell.
“This is my fault. . . .” Emma mumbled to herself. She lowered herself onto the nearest chair, feeling every one of her eighty years.
“No, it’s Jeff’s fault. He doesn’t care about his family, only himself. He already decided what’s most important to him—his job. So I’m going to do the same.”
“Oh, Sue . . . where did all the love go?” Emma asked softly. “Remember when you thought Jeff would have to fight in Vietnam? Remember how you were going to follow him to Canada if you had to? You were so in love with him then. Where did it all go?”
Suzanne looked away. “I don’t know, Grandma. I honestly don’t know. Our lives just got so busy. We both have careers. . . . “She lifted a cut-glass candy dish from the shelf and idly wrapped it in newspaper. “Now we’ve grown so far apart that Jeff just accepted the job without even asking me what I thought.”
“What about your children?” Grace pleaded. “Aren’t they as important to you as your careers? They’re so young. How can you ruin their lives like this?”
Suzanne heaved a tired sigh as she placed the last bundle in the box and folded the flaps. “Mom, times have changed since Grandma got divorced. Half the kids in Melissa’s kindergarten class come from single-parent homes.”
“But your girls need their father! You have no idea what it feels like to be abandoned by your father!” Grace shuddered, as if her entire body felt the impact of her words. “If you did, you would never do this to Amy and Melissa.”
“I’m not the one who is—”
“No, you listen to me. I shoved my needs and my career aside to please your father so that you would never have to live through what I did. My father left his family. And all my life I’ve felt forsaken—unworthy of his love!”
“Oh, Gracie, no. You were precious to him. Your father loved you more than life itself.” Living alone as she did, Emma often spoke her thoughts aloud. She didn’t realize that she had done so this time until the room grew utterly still.
Grace stared at her in astonishment, her mouth hanging slack. “What did you say?” she whispered.
Emma felt the earth tremble beneath her and saw her structure of lies teeter and sway. She could prop it up with more lies, but she was deluding herself if she thought it would shelter her loved ones from further pain. The anguish in Grace’s words had revealed the depth of her wounds. And Emma knew firsthand the devastating loneliness Suzanne would face in the years ahead, even if society was more tolerant of divorce in 1980 than it had been in 1925. The falsehoods Emma had fit together so carefully had silently caved in, pinning Grace and Suzanne beneath the wreckage.
Emma stood and reached for her daughter’s hand, taking it in hers. “Gracie, why did you work so hard to set up that clinic? Why are you so passionate about fighting abortion?”
“Mother, I want you to explain what you just said about my father.”
“Answer my question first.”
“You know why—because my father didn’t want me to be born. When he tried to force you to have an abortion you had nowhere to go, no one to help you.”
“Then why would you turn down the directorship of a place you’ve worked so hard to build? Especially when it’s for a cause you care about so deeply?”
“Mother, please . . .”
“Is it because you’re afraid your husband will abandon you too, Gracie?”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she covered her face and wept without making a sound. Grace had cried that way ever since she was a child, as if her sorrow wasn’t worth disturbing anyone. Her silent weeping moved Emma to tears, as it always had. Suzanne wrapped her arms tightly around her mother.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I’m hurting so much right now, but I never meant to hurt you.”
Emma longed to pull out all the fallen joists and timbers one by one, to
untangle the thousands of lies, to free her loved ones from the rubble of their destroyed lives. But after more than fifty years, the truth might cause more confusion and suffering than it cured. They would have to discover a way out by themselves.
“Suzanne, I want you to listen to me,” Emma said. “It was my own fault that my marriage ended in failure and that Karl left me. Please don’t say you admire me for that. You have an image of me as a strong, independent woman, someone you want to imitate, but that’s false. I’ve brought a lot of this on both of you by making the wrong choices years ago.”
Grace dried her tears and carefully raised her shield of poise and dignity once again. Her eyes met Emma’s. “Tell me why you said that about my father.”
He did love you
, she longed to say again. Instead, Emma took refuge in another lie. “The words came out all wrong, Gracie. I’m getting old. I was trying to say that Karl doesn’t matter. I love you. I only wish that my love could have been enough for you, that you didn’t long so for your father.”
Grace stared hard at her as if challenging the explanation. Unable to bear the scrutiny, Emma bent to retrieve a tattered photograph album from the bottom shelf. “I want you to have this. There’s one picture in here of Karl, our wedding picture. You’ve seen it before. I’ve kept it so you’d always know what he looked like.”
Grace folded her arms around the book without opening it. “I don’t think I can . . . not right now. . . .”
“May I see it, Mom?” Suzanne asked. Grace didn’t resist as she took the album from her and began leafing through it. “Which one is he, Grandma?”
Emma peered over her shoulder. “Right there. That’s Karl and me.”
“Did you love him, Grandma?”
“When I married him? No. Our families were old friends. I married him to please my parents. That’s the way things were done back then. Love was supposed to grow once you were married. This is my mama and papa, right here.” When Suzanne turned the page without asking more questions, Emma breathed a sigh of relief.
“Who are all these people?”
“Most of them are old friends from when we lived in the apartment on King Street. These are our landladies, the Mulligan sisters.”
“The ‘dreary’ Mulligan sisters?”
“Yes. Aren’t they horrible old crows?”
“Oh, Mother, they weren’t that bad,” Grace said. “They watched out for me when you had to work.”
“And this is Crazy Clancy with Father O’Duggan.”
“The priest who paid Mom to read? He’s young. Good-looking too.”
Grace moved to peer over Suzanne’s other shoulder. “Where? Let me see. Yes, that’s him. You know, whenever I hear an Irish brogue I always think of him.”
Emma pointed to another picture on the same page. “Here’s you, Gracie, when you were about four years old.”
“That was taken at Mam’s house. I stayed with her when you caught pneumonia. She was so good to me. Oh my, and that’s Booty Higgins who ran the store.”
“What kind of a name is ‘Booty’?” Suzanne asked.
“It was a nickname,” Emma said. “I don’t remember his real name anymore, but he was a bootlegger during Prohibition.”
Grace stared in surprise. “Was he? I never knew that.”
Emma simply smiled.
“Who are these three guys in the white dinner jackets and black bow ties?” Suzanne asked.
“Oh, let me see!” Grace said. “That has to be Black Jack, Slick Mick, and O’Brien! Yes, that’s them.”
“Who are they?” Suzanne asked. “They look like gangsters.”
“Yes, but they were lovable gangsters,” Emma said, laughing. “What a crazy collection of characters we all were. Nowadays I suppose we’d be locked in a lunatic asylum. But we looked out for one another back then, took care of each other. They were the only family we had.”
She gently eased the book from Suzanne’s hands and closed it. “Do you realize that it’s almost ten o’clock and we’ve barely packed one box? The photo album is for you, Gracie. And I want Suzanne to have this.”
She reached into the cabinet and removed a white bone china cup, trimmed with gold. A delicate painting of a little girl in a faded pink gown and bonnet decorated the front. “I’m sorry that I don’t have very many heirlooms to pass along to you children, but the piece of coal is one of them, and this cup is another.”
“Oh, Grandma, I remember that! It’s the ‘crying cup.’”
“Do you remember how it worked?”
“Whenever I was sad about something, you would let me drink from it and all my tears would magically disappear.”
Emma pressed the cup into her hands. “If only it still worked, Suzy. If only I could fill it with something that would make all your tears disappear.”
“I know, Grandma.”
“Wasn’t it your mother’s cup?” Grace asked. “Didn’t she bring it with her when she immigrated?”
“Yes, it belonged to Mama’s grandmother in Germany.
Oma
was the one who first named it the ‘crying cup’ years earlier. When my mother left her family to come to America, Oma gave it to her. Mama said she filled it to the brim with tears on the boat to America.”
“How did you end up with it, Mother?”
Emma didn’t answer. Instead, she opened a cabinet drawer and lifted out a worn cigar box. “Do you remember these, Gracie?” Inside were three hemmed strips of cloth—green velvet, purple satin, white brocade—trimmed with elegant lace and fringe.
“The miniature vestments I made! Oh, Mother, I can’t believe you saved those silly things all these years.”
“You made these, Mom? What are they?”
“Vestments . . . you know, it’s a kind of shawl that clergymen wear over their robes on special occasions. Only these are doll-sized. I made them when I stayed at Mam’s house.”