In Pieces(3)
No one in her family had ever had a career. The men worked to earn money as best as they could: Her father had been a piano salesman, her brother a bank manager, and the whole time my mother was married to my father, he was in the army. They had jobs, but nothing anyone would call a career. Certainly, none of the women had ever dreamed of such a thing. But now, my not-yet-mother had one. Leaving her baby son in the arms of her own mother, my grandmother, she would take a bus from Pasadena to Hollywood, then transfer to a streetcar that took her within walking distance of Paramount Studios, where she was given movement classes and elocution lessons, all in an effort to help her walk and talk like Jean Arthur or her look-alike, Jennifer Jones.
Most important, my mother was also given the chance to study acting with the brilliant Charles Laughton, eventually becoming a member of his acting company, the Charles Laughton Players, performing Chekhov and Shakespeare in a small theater on Beverly Boulevard, on the outskirts of Hollywood. Not only did she find herself onstage with Mr. Laughton, but she had the amazing good fortune to be directed by him as well. These moments stayed alive in her always.
Much of this change and challenge happened before the war was over, before my father had returned, and before I was born. My memories begin here, with the book, memorizing words, and the comforting smell of noodle soup… all connected to this world where my mother grew up, this world of women, and to the house where my grandmother lived as long as I knew her.
Located in Altadena, nestled in the foothills above Pasadena, her cottage was a uniquely Californian two-bedroom wooden bungalow, trimmed in gray river rock. It had a back porch converted into a third bedroom and a front porch elevated by five big wooden stairs, where a green canvas glider always stood, waiting for us kids to give it some action. It wasn’t a big place, I know that, but to a child it seemed huge, a trusted member of the family that crackled and groaned when you walked from room to room, a comforting murmur that added to the soft chatter of female voices or the occasional pop of freshly washed clothes right off the line, snapped in the air before being folded into a pile.
My mother had spent her late adolescence and early adulthood in this house, living with her parents and older brother. It was where she had stayed when she was the lonely wife of a soldier expecting their first child, and where her beloved father had suffered a fatal heart attack—a loss that jolted her into early labor, delivering my brother six weeks premature. Then in 1949, when my mother decided to pack up her two small children and leave her marriage not quite four years after her husband’s return, this is where we came to live: my grandmother’s house.
When I look for that house in my mind, I have a blurry vision of my great-aunt Gladys standing in the dining room cutting flat rubber padding into tiny circles to paste onto her sore feet. Behind her I can see my grandmother sitting at the sewing machine by the big window, guiding a swatch of fabric under the foot, pumping the wide flat pedal back and forth. There’s a rocking chair beside the mesh-curtained fireplace where my seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother sits under a halo of white hair, her hands dancing around two thin knitting needles with a steady stream of twine-like yarn flowing from the paisley bag resting on the floor. I remember that chair, how it chirped like a cricket when my great-grandmother would rock me, quietly patting my back the whole time.
These are the women who raised my mother, whose influence had been ingrained in her. My grandmother and her sister Gladys, and their mother, Mimmie or Mama, as they called her. The two sisters lived in the house together since both of their husbands had passed away several years before, one right after the other. My great-grandmother didn’t have a permanent home of her own but moved around from daughter to daughter, sometimes making her way to South Carolina to visit Mae, the only one of her four daughters who’d stayed in the Deep South. The youngest sister, Perle, lived in nearby Glendale but was in and out of the house constantly. She was the only one whose husband was still alive, yet I don’t remember seeing Uncle Chet very often, and never for any other reason than to pop in and fix something. My mother’s brother would drop by, but I can’t remember him pausing to sit down, and even though my father must have entered the house at some point, I have no memory of it. It was a kind of no-man’s-land. A world filled with women who would straighten up if a man walked in, who would set aside the triviality of their own work and quickly move everything out of the way. But the men, whoever they were, never stayed long, and when the door slammed behind them, the house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.
Gladys was the most imposing of the sisters and the only one who made me nervous. She’d sit at the end of the dining room table, always in the same chair, playing solitaire or one-handed canasta while she soaked her feet in a pan of hot water and Epsom salts after working all day at Bullock’s department store in Pasadena. I wanted her to like me the best, but no matter how hard I tried, Ricky was always Aunt Gladys’s favorite. Instead I had to content myself with being my grandmother’s favored child, and when I was little I always felt as though I’d been stuck with the shorter end of the stick. It has taken me a long time to see that it was my grandmother’s sturdy presence in my life—never full of tender touches or hugs and kisses, just a quiet, fierce devotion—that created a rock inside me, a safe spot I’ve always relied on but never knew I had. When I hear a house creaking under my feet, I’m instantly back there, in the safety of my grandmother’s world.