Adolf Hitler's "Trolley Car"

It is human nature to classify things polarly, black or white, good witch or bad witch, snakes and snails and puppy dog tails or sugar and spice and everything nice.  Yet, life doesn’t work that way.  Even Hitler had artistic talent though many are loathe to admit it.

As I read Sally’s “Tale of Two Grandmothers” yesterday, the good witch/bad witch vibe was palpable, textural and tangible.  Granny was kind, hip, and loving; Grandma was rude, hateful, and bitter.  I found myself involuntarily sympathizing with “Grandma” and wondering what had happened in her life to create this caustic behavior.  Seldom does a young girl preach about the importance of bowel movements or call their relations “nigger-wops”.

And I found myself thinking about my own grandmothers, two very different women, though neither arrived on broomstick or via fluffy pink bubble.  One I knew well and felt close to, considered her presence vital to my well-being and her love necessary for my continued existence.  The other, whom I saw like a semi-practicing Christian, on Christmas and Easter (and admittedly Thanksgiving), I did not know well.  My mother insisted she was once a powerhouse that the years had beaten down watt by watt.  Yet, each woman faced untold hardships in her life and one emerged strong and the other weak.

My paternal grandmother, Gramma, was a large German woman with a work ethic a mile wide, an opinion bullied from her personal pulpit, and a heart large enough to wrap around us all.  Her good qualities were just as easily her bad.  She expected the same level of effort from those around her and criticized others harshly when she did not receive it.  She often hurt people’s feelings with her outspokenness.  To the love, I have no negative counter.

Gramma was raised in a mansion on Charles Street in Baltimore, the stuff of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” with personal servants and drivers and scullery maids and gardeners.  I have photos of her and her sister dressed in white pinafores adorned with pin curls and surrounded by their handsome father and lovely mother.  The Mueller-Kronebergers were a family of wealth and distinction.  In 1929, Pop Pop, as I called my great-grandfather, learned a tough lesson about diversifying income and lost his fortune in the stock market crash.  He sold the mansion, dismissed the servants, and moved his family into a rowhouse in downtown Baltimore.  Shortly afterward, my great-grandmother died, and Pop Pop remarried “the hooker” whose name I do not know and whose moniker derived more from the negative feelings on my grandmother’s part than from the woman’s actual profession.  Eager to leave her family in an era in which women did not leave home without the benefit of marriage, my grandmother married a man she did not love and shortly afterward, to the scandal of all, divorced him.  She got a secretarial job and rented a room and paid her own way in life until she met my grandfather, Noble Dorsee, formerly of the Prussian von Dorstewitzes. 

Initially, things went well. Noble was a beautiful, charming man of aristocracy and substance.  He graduated from Brown and, after explorations already spoken of here, he became a sales manager for a liquor distributor and made a good living at it.  Gramma and Noble bought land in the country as well as a modest home in Lutherville, MD.  After initially unable to become pregnant, with the help of medication, Gramma gave birth first to Noble, Jr. and then to my father, Robert, her muffin.  She became pregnant a third time without medical intervention and, at seven months’ term, lost the fetus in utero.  She then had to wait until her body naturally expelled her dead daughter, still forced to carry on with her days, still enduring the murmurs and pats of a public magnetized by a new-life-carrying belly even though that particular belly was lying.

And things went downhill from there.  Noble, shades of Tony Montana, began partaking of his own supply and began disappearing on binges for days on end.  My grandmother received the bills for his misbehavior in the mail and was forced to pay them.  She sold their land in order to both support her family and pay Noble’s debts.  Then one day, Noble declared he was traveling to California to a clinic to dry out.  I suppose you can say he did.  He died.  Gramma was left with two teenaged boys, a mortgaged home, and no career.  Both boys took jobs and she joined a secretarial pool.  Like the dream land, she sold the house on Greenridge Road and moved into an apartment, her dreams and expectations squashed.  Yet, Gramma was not a brooder.  She pulled herself up and eventually became the first female head of the Baltimore Chapter of the March of Dimes.  She was a woman to make women proud and, despite her faults and her occasional vitriol, I loved her with all my heart.

Grandmommy’s story is shorter as it comes from a side of the family that is rife with skeletons and closets and the never-ending desire to keep those bones hidden.  Evelyn was a beautiful woman, girl actually, with red Irish looks, high cheekbones, and luminous skin, as well as a figure to stop traffic and gape mouths.  When she was 15, my grandfather, who I have also spoken of here before, seduced her, impregnated her, and married her.  This is the tale of how my proud mother entered the world though she would rather it not be told in this manner.  She’s above all that now.  My mother’s birth was followed by five others, two girls, three boys, the last boy a desperate win-one-for-the-Gipper marriage band-aid.  Their entire marriage was filled with anger and regret, screams and cries, beatings and caresses.  They couldn’t stay away from each other; they couldn’t be with each other.  His drinking made a bad situation worse and the house was filled with an air of fear and insecurity that no one lost in their own lives, no matter how hard they tried.  I’m repeating myself, but of the six children, three are dead, of murder, suicide, and drug overdose, and one is in habitual prison (update, he died in prison in late 2011, he was 49).  My mother, the eldest, turns 66 this September.

Finally, Granddaddy and Grandmommy got divorced and shortly afterward, Grandmommy was in a horrific car accident which, obviously before the advent of seatbelts, hurled her through the windshield, back, and through again.  She came close to death and perhaps that would have been best but we don’t make those decisions.  I don’t know who does.  Grandmommy led out the rest of her life unremarkably, on disability, on welfare, and addicted to one drug or another.  I don’t recall her ever uttering a witticism or profound thought.  I just remember everyone having to care for her, poor Grandmommy who’s been through so much, who’s so frail and helpless and I find myself terrified to my core that this is going to be the grandmother that I emulate instead of the other, the strong one.

Gramma and Grandmommy both led very challenging lives.  One made a conscious decision to rise above adversity and strife and beat those motherfuckers because damned if they were going to beat her and the other chose to wimper and simper and waste years doing nothing but staring into space.  Perhaps she spent her time wondering what her life would have been like had she chosen a different path and not met the likes of Leonard Rakes though one could argue she could have used those musing hours making a positive change and, although unable to reverse the past, improve the future.  But it was not to be.

What makes one person weak and the other strong?  What makes one biracial kid raised by his grandparents a presidential candidate and another a gangbanger? Who works to find that American Dream and who gives up on it before hitting the REM cycle? Is it genetic? Cultural? Physiological?  Psychological? What makes us tick and, in particular, tick well?