I remember sitting in the backseat of the car while Dad drove. Mom was in the front, telling us stories from her childhood. Stories of injustice—injustices that continued for a lifetime.
Ella was eight years old when her father died from eating bad oysters. Her mother never recovered from her husband’s death. She wore only black from then on.
I remember Grandma Kroupa in black, never with a smile.
Grandma was an expert seamstress, and tried at first to support her family of two boys and one young girl by sewing for friends.
People took advantage of her, said my mother. She couldn’t make enough money. So she went to the factory.
Eight-year-old Ella, the only girl, was assigned the cooking, washing, cleaning and ironing to make up for Grandma’s absence. The sons, Leonard and Lou, were exempt from these chores.
Before he died, Ella’s father had given her a piano. She got a few lessons from a friend and taught herself the rest.
But Grandma Kroupa, stricken with grief after her husband died, would not let her daughter play that piano for a whole year.
When the brothers, Lou and Leonard, got jobs after school, they were allowed to keep their earnings. When Ella found work, she had to turn over all she earned to her mother.
Those are the childhood injustices. I cried every time Mom talked about them.
I think her own harsh childhood was the reason she never made us do too much housework while we were growing up. We had a few chores, but none deserving of complaint.
What I remember is my father saying, “Go help your mother.”
She didn’t ask.
#
Once patterns have been established, I suppose they can continue for a lifetime.
Every Saturday at our house in Irvington, New Jersey, Grandma Kroupa and Uncle Leonard would come and sit while Mom waited on them. They were Seventh Day Adventists and Saturday was their Sabbath. They weren’t allowed to work on that day, but it was OK for them to watch my mother do it.
Where did I get that attitude? Mom kept her resentment alive throughout her life, and I, a staunch supporter of my mother, took it on as well.
Yet Mom did not hesitate to fulfill a daughter’s duty to her mother, or to offer her brother a hot meal.
After Uncle Leonard married late in life, Grandma Kroupa continued to come alone on Saturdays. The youngest of us six children with a driver’s license got the chore of picking her up in Newark and taking her home at the end of the day. This fact dulled the thrill of independence and achievement I felt when I finally passed my driver’s test. I resented picking up Grandma Kroupa with every ounce of teenage sullenness I could muster.
#
The injustices did not end with Grandma Kroupa’s death.
Uncle Leonard took what he wanted from Grandma’s apartment, then asked Mom and me to come over and clean it out.
It was creepy in the half-empty apartment, sitting on Grandma’s stripped bed—one of the last pieces of furniture to go. I don’t remember feeling any sorrow or loss at her death, just relief that my mother’s ordeal was over.
We could now remove the pot from the pantry—the one kept there for Grandma to use when she stayed with us because she couldn’t make it to the only bathroom upstairs. The smell of urine, the strained breathing, the vast unhappiness of an empty life—all removed by the simple event of Grandma’s death.
As I remember, I didn’t want to go to her funeral, but was forced to attend. At that stage in my life, I thought funerals were hypocritical spectacles. I refused to look in the open casket and sat sulking with my younger sisters, ignoring our aunts and uncles and cousins.
Later Mom told me that Lou and Leonard had spared no expense on that funeral. Grandma Kroupa, who had not spent an extra dime to pamper herself throughout her life, was laid to rest in a top-of-the-line casket. The funeral costs used up all but $120 of the $12,000 insurance policy Grandma had left to her three children.
My Mother was not consulted until it was all over, and then Leonard asked her if she minded if he used the remainder toward a car.
This was at a time when my father supported the eight of us by driving a Fischer’s bread truck. Money was so tight that Mom paid off the dentist’s bill two dollars a week.
#
I kept an inventory of the injustices my mother suffered. I savored those stories and saved them.
Leonard came to visit us once with strep throat, Mom told me. “Mary was just a baby then. She caught it from him and almost died.”
Then there was the big snowstorm when Grandma and Uncle Leonard stayed at our house overnight. The next morning when Dad asked Leonard to help him clear a path to the street, Leonard said he couldn’t because it was the Sabbath and he was not allowed to work unless their were extraordinary circumstances.
“If six feet of snow isn’t extraordinary, I don’t know what is,” growled Dad.
Do I actually remember that day, or just the stories I heard over and over about it?
We have photos of the storm—the snow really was high.
#
Very late in their lives, Uncle Lou sent Mom some beautiful old photographs of their parents, other family, and Mom as a young girl. In one framed enlargement, a young Grandma Kroupa sits serenely gazing at the camera, my mother at age four or five resting securely in her lap.
“I would have loved to have had these photos years ago,” Mom said.
When one of my brothers brought Mom the last batch of family photos from Uncle Lou, she angrily said she didn’t want to see them. Never once had she been considered and included, she said, but was always given the dregs when Leonard or Lou got around to it, when it suited them.
“It’s too late,” she said.
Then a few days later she reneged, went through the pile and selected a few to keep.
I’ve got that enlargement of Mom and Grandma Kroupa now, and a small one of Mom at her eighth grade graduation, framed and sitting on my desk.
#
When I talked to Mom late in her life about how I felt, how I had shared her sense of injustice all these years, she told me she had forgiven her mother and brothers.
I was glad to hear that. It will help me to forgive them, too.