The first hint seeped out at a family Christmas celebration when I was seven or eight. The house was crowded and noisy. My cousins and I chased each other from room to room. A sudden commotion caused everyone to freeze in place. The room fell silent. Then my grandmother was crying, my aunt was apologizing, and my mother, when I asked what was going on, told me to hush up. My grandparents left in a rush. We hadn’t opened our presents yet, so I knew it was serious.
No one would explain. My mother told me it was something that made my grandmother very sad, never to mention it again. That planted a seed in my mind, the way the unspoken always does.
I had to wait until I was an adult to hear more. “I had an older brother,” my mother told me. “He died.” The truth was slowly squeezing out. “Nana kept a pair of baby socks in her nightstand,” she went on. “She circled his birthday on the calendar.”
I wondered why any mention of this child was forbidden. Certainly it was painful to my grandmother. I could see why she wouldn’t want to talk about it. But, like most kids, I knew when I wasn’t getting the whole story. This one carried an emotional charge fueled by more than sadness. There was shame, too, and fear. Something I wasn’t supposed to know.
When my grandmother died, I was given her Bible. I was surprised she owned one at all, since all I’d seen her read was the National Enquirer, biographies of Depression-era politicians, and smutty novels. Pressed between the pages were narrow strips of paper with references, chapter and verse, to passages in the Bible. There was a cartoon she’d clipped from the Saturday Evening Post, a newspaper announcement of her marriage to my grandfather, and a family tree. On a separate sheet of paper, she’d listed all twelve of her mother’s siblings, along with the dates of their birth and death. On the other side she’d subtracted the one from the other to see how long each had lived. Everything was written in her measured handwriting, which she was proud of because it bespoke her high school education.
