GRETCHEN

Gretchen Margaret Dupander, my paternal grandmother, was born in 1893. She was the only living grandparent I had growing up and while I never remember curling up on her lap, snuggling with her to read a book, or having any heart-to-heart talks, this dominating, energetic little woman managed to be quite influential during my early years without my understanding how until much later in my life. I was in my late forties when my father once commented how similar I was to his mother in appearance. I found that surprising since she was dark haired and olive-skinned with a high-hooked Roman nose. I think what he saw, however, was that my grandmother and I were both small-framed and although I had a turned-up nose and large blue eyes - a huge discrepancy from her high-hooked Roman nose and hooded dark eyes - my mannerisms and facial expressions more closely aligned with hers than with my mother's. Indeed, I was truly my father's child and he was more like his mother than he probably cared to admit.

My grandmother went by the name of Gretchen Alexander. After doing some recent research, l learned that her legal maiden name was Dupander, so not until I was an older woman with grandchildren of my own did I learn of my grandmother's real name. Knowing my grandmother, Dupander did not sound as sophisticated as Alexander and being a vain and proud lady, I'm certain she believed Dupander simply wasn't impressive enough. I'm also suspicious she tweaked a few other background details and elaborated about the achievements her family had made to make a better impression on her friends and neighbors. Then again, perhaps to avoid discrimination often hurled onto first-generation immigrants, she wanted a name that didn't give her away as a "foreigner," especially since her mother Lena spoke German and looked foreign in her dress and demeaner. During both World Wars, being German wasn't something one wanted advertised, regardless that your son was a member of the United States military and had been deployed to parachute into France to fight the enemy in his grandparents' homeland, Germany. Gretchen told me how her mother attempted to go to the open-air fresh market in St. Louis to buy food for the family and was pelted with vegetables by people who yelled at her to go back to Germany. After that, she sent her daughters, Gretchen and her little sister, Bertha, to the market to buy the family's produce. In my grandmother's telling of this story, I sensed how deeply this had frightened and hurt her. Perhaps it was the source of some of her idiosyncrasies. For example, although always poor, she was meticulous in her appearance and in her housekeeping and harbored a dignified, soft-spoken demeanor. When friends or neighbors inquired about anyone in her family, she took the utmost care to ensure whomever she spoke of was presented in the best possible light:

"And Gretchen, how is your son-in-law? What he is doing currently to make a living?" Gretchen: Oh, Howard is doing very, very well. He just opened his own business and it is thriving. He now runs the (......) Printing and Commercial Design Company and already has several big clients, such as the St. Louis Poultry Association. He does all their commercial art.

The TRUTH: My uncle did open his own commercial art company; however, he struggled to make a go of it for the three years he owned it, barely making ends meet until he closed shop, sold his house, packed up his family and moved to Florida. He did design a logo for a poultry company once, but it hardly extended to the entire poultry industry the way Gretchen implied (or lied?) On the other hand, to Gretchen's credit she never bad-mouthed any of her family to others. Rather, she saved her bad-mouthing for family members, delivering it straight to their faces, especially her daughter and daughter-in-law (my mother), making sure everyone knew exactly how she felt about everything, from the jobs their husbands had or didn't have, how to rear their children, how to keep a house in the correct order, right down to whether or not the gravy for dinner that night met her standards. In other words, she was considered a royal pain in the ass. The operative word in that sentence, however, is royal. She did whatever she could to present herself to the world as if she descended from royalty. Surely there was a Prussian princess tucked in the family line somewhere? Thus, her father's job with the Pevely Dairy company as a bookkeeper translated into a position as a "chemist."

One story was about a wayward great-great uncle who had actually contracted syphilis, and as the tale goes, whose diseased thumb rotted and fell off his hand. He ran off with a so-called actress and disappeared forevermore into the wilderness. All this, as translated by my grandmother turned this great-great uncle into a dashing, mysterious, and famous actor who traveled throughout the country to perform before retiring somewhere in California. She never explained her uncle's lineage, but claimed he was "half" Jewish - why she thought this piece of information was important was never revealed. Through various conversations with my grandmother, she did seem to believe that Jewish people were more intelligent and successful than others and that even though they did not believe in Jesus Christ, her Lord and Savior, to their credit, certainly loomed large in the Old Testament. Besides, she believed that if they didn't own a shop, all their sons were doctors and lawyers and who could argue with that kind of prestige? I suppose that by making that wayward uncle half-Jewish supported his otherwise shaky credentials as an actor.

Oddly, when my father was a skinny little kid the neighborhood children nicknamed him "Meyer." Was it because he was smart? Did my grandmother tell the story about her uncle to her neighbors and someone decided my father came from a long line of Ashkenazic Jews? After all, my grandmother was a little swarthy looking. Or was being intelligent a character flaw? Or an asset? Regardless, I think my grandmother enjoyed creating mystery around her family, perhaps believing people would assume money and grandeur was attached to the "half"-truths she spun, to what was unspoken more than to what was revealed.

Looking back at Gretchen's life is akin to taking a biopsy of a person's liver. She serves as a small sample as to how women fared at that time. She attended public school near her home located in South St. Louis where she learned to read, write, and do basic math. According to her, the remainder of her curriculum was cooking, sewing, and homemaking skills, whereas the boys were offered engineering, higher math, and sports. Although she never said, I was under the impression that after finishing 8th grade, her education was considered completed and she spent her time at home helping her mother with household duties. In the 19th century, education for women, especially for girls from homes with limited incomes, was not considered important. Even my aunt Thelma, Gretchen's daughter, was not encouraged to continue school beyond 10th grade. In contrast, her brother (my father) knew that continuing his education until he "earned not just a living but respect" was not expected but was mandatory. Thelma, put on some nylons and lipstick and go out and find a man to take care of you! Robert, get educated and go out and seek your fame and fortune!

Despite Gretchen's quest to shape her family's legacy, she lived in an era of huge change without really changing herself much at all. At eleven years old, she attended the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair (the World's Greatest Fair as it was called) where new inventions such as private automobiles, outdoor electric lighting, x-ray machines, and other technological marvels were displayed. She lived through the Roaring 20s, The Great Depression, and both World Wars (her husband fought in WWI and her son in WWII). She witnessed: the launching of the first commercial passenger airline in 1914; telephones, televisions, and air-conditioners installed in homes; girls from all walks of life admitted into colleges and major universities; the Civil Rights Movement; the 1960s assassinations of key political and public figures; and watched a man land on the moon. In her lifetime, life progressed from horse and buggies and dresses that covered women's ankles to rockets being launched into space and girls wearing hip-hugger jeans or mini-skirts that barely covered their thighs (and other important parts). That's a lot to absorb in one lifetime. And yet, Gretchen left St. Louis, Missouri only twice in her life, never changed her basic life-style or habits, all the while fabricating details about her family to suit her needs. So when I sat down with Grandma to look through her extensive family photo albums, I never got a true picture of who was who and how these strange people in those ancient black and white photos fit into our family.

The summer of my 10th birthday, my mother and father invited Grandma to join us on a vacation to Cumberland Falls in Kentucky. Grandma was in her early sixties and it was her first vacation. Although my grandmother was loath to drop her composure, her excitement was betrayed through some of the things she did to prepare for this trip. She bought her very first pair of pants - summer casual pants, at that time called "pedal-pushers." These were calf-length pants similar to today's Capri pants. I had never seen my grandmother in anything but a dress and when she tried on her new pants I exclaimed how wonderful she looked, adding a classy haircut would go so well with her new look. The next afternoon, over the slam of the back screened door, I heard Grandma yell out "You-whoo! Anybody home?" Of course we were all home, school was out. Mom was ironing and I was at the red Formica table in the kitchen coloring a masterpiece with my broken crayons. As Grandma entered the room, Mom's iron stopped in mid-air and I dropped my crayon. There she stood: her long braid that had wrapped around her head like a halo dropped onto her skull was gone and replaced with thick, short curls. She looked so much younger and so cute. When we expressed our surprise and delight she told us that her younger sister Bertha, who still supported her milkmaid braids, threw a tantrum and yelled at her. "You have broken one of the Bible's covenants!" she hollered and pointed her finger in Gretchen's face. "You and those pants and that hair! You're going to go to hell, Gretchen! Traveling the country without a husband like a wayward woman!" My grandmother protested that she was not traveling alone but with her son and his family. Bertha didn't care; Gretchen's trip seemed like a blasphemy all the same. How dare she have any fun? My grandmother ignored her sister's wrath and went on the trip anyway and if I remember correctly, she had a grand time. Bertha stayed home alone and sulked. Bertha was an "old maid." Left partially crippled after a bout of meningitis she had as a child, she walked with a deep gimp and spoke slowly with some difficulty. People, even the family, assumed she was cognitively disabled and treated her as such, but in reality, she was quite bright and as a younger woman, had worked as a bookkeeper for a local accounting firm. Because of the era, being a woman with disabilities automatically designated Bertha as dependent and Gretchen as the older sister was expected to take care of her, which she did until the day she died. Bertha cleaved to her older sister like a Siamese twin and her outburst over the trip to Kentucky with my parents is the only time I ever heard her yell at my grandmother. Looking back, I understand now that being left by Gretchen, even for a week, must have been terrifying for her. Bertha was simply frightened.

The only other time my grandmother left St. Louis was when she moved to Florida to be closer to her daughter Thelma and her family. This time, Bertha packed her bags and joined her sister so as not to be left behind, but she never wore pants or cut her braid, remaining true to the version of her faith.

Gretchen purchased a 25-foot trailer and rented a lot in a pretty little trailer park on the outskirts of Largo, Florida where she and Bertha set up housekeeping. The trailer was built long before powered slide-outs and had no air-conditioning. I found it claustrophobic, but Gretchen being Gretchen made do and the small space was perfectly kept. Nothing out of place, everything sparkled. She did have a lovely canopy that provided shade over her little patio where she and Bertha spent a great deal of their time. Indeed, Grandma frustrated her daughter and my mother who encouraged her to make new friends in the park and join in on the many activities provided, such as shuffle board. Gretchen refused, insisting she had plenty to do and needed no one other than her children and grandchildren. I'm sure that pleased my aunt and mother and although I don't remember, I can certainly imagine their dismay when they realized that Gretchen had no plans to change anything, meaning they would remain Gretchen's target of interest. So Grandma continued to clean, cook, and write letters to her friends and in her spare time, reminded her son and daughter how they neglected her and what they needed to do to ensure her well being. For my father, that meant sitting down once a month and writing her a long letter that detailed all the events of our lives for that four weeks, including his achievements and all the successes of his children (whether there were any or not). I doubt there was ever much mention of my poor mother in those letters, as she was not a person of interest for my grandmother unless she could provide some tidbit of advice so that my mother could correct any flaw in what should be her pursuit of perfection. Sometimes, I know Dad included a check to help her out a bit with money. I know this from the arguments between Dad and my mother whenever she discovered he did this. Since they were on a strict budget to provide for three demanding kids rapidly entering their teens and had to maintain a big house, my mother didn't feel much generosity towards a woman who never had a word of praise for her. Gretchen remained a source of contention throughout my parents' marriage and sometimes I wonder if she didn't remain so even after her death. When my father received the phone call from his sister that Gretchen had died, he didn't shed a single tear. Later, my mother told me that even privately, when alone, unlike the sobbing she heard through their bedroom door after his father died or the tears he shed when my mother's mother died (who he dearly loved), my father never shed a single tear over his own mother's death.

Grandma Gretchen never went anywhere else once she moved into the trailer park in Florida and lived in that trailer until the day she died at the age of 84 from multiple mini-strokes. A few months later, Bertha too passed quietly away, wearing her milkmaid braids. I don't know what happened to Grandma's pedal-pushers, but after she went to Cumberland Falls I never saw her in them again. She did, however, keep her hair short.