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GrandpopOctober 31, 2009 For at least a couple of years I've been thinking about and making notes toward a sort of memoir in the form of incidents, epiphanies, people, and places that have shaped the I that wanders the world. Today, what would have been my mother's 87th birthday if she hadn't died at 73, I seem to have started writing it. The working title is To Be Rather Than to Seem: A Writer's Education. "To be rather than to seem" is a translation of the Sturgis family motto, Esse quam videri. Most of the pieces will be fairly short. I'll be posting them as they come. How they fit together I hope I'll know by the time I run out of things to say. Grandpop was a scary man. Standing straight he was tall, but as I remember him he was always either bent, walking slowly with a cane, or, more vividly, sitting in a leather-upholstered easy chair in the corner of his dimly lit den. Dark built-in bookshelves rose from his shoulders to the ceiling. His head was bald and liver-spotted. So were his hands. What his arms and legs looked like I can't tell you: he was always formally dressed in long trousers and long-sleeved suit jackets or morning coats. His hands, gnarled with gout, and his taciturnity were what made him so scary, and scariness isn't mitigated by any grandfatherly recollections. Did he never get down on the floor to play with my younger brothers and sister and me? When we visited our grandparents -- which we did fairly often, since they lived only eight miles away -- the four of us delighted in the old-fashioned toys, especially the two trucks that were always waiting in the foyer, one a black dump truck, the other a white and yellow delivery truck with cargo shelves running along its sides. We loaded both with fat marbles and drove them over the Persian carpets in the front hall, and into the adjacent parlor and dining room if we could get away with it. Possibly it was physical infirmity that kept Grandpop from joining us on the floor, but I doubt it. Physically he was gnarled and bent, but he was not a bending man. As a member of the U.S. Consular Service, his inflexibility often got him into trouble, and it was his far more flexible and gregarious wife, my grandmother, who usually got him out. He was Harvard class of 1907; she had a high school diploma. She became fluent in Spanish and French; he, according to my mother, their daughter, expressed himself clumsily in either language. Grandpop's funeral was probably the first I ever attended. I was eleven. At the reception that followed, at what was now my grandmother's house, the minister sat on a stool near the fireplace in the cozy parlor and told funny stories. Everybody laughed and talked and reminisced. This surprised me: I hadn't expected that people would laugh after someone died, and it seemed especially odd for a minister to be instigating the hilarity. Since no one shushed him, I assumed it was all right. Looking back, I think laughter and light entered the house after Grandpop left it. My grandmother, who stretched the truth when she claimed to be five feet tall, didn't get any bigger but she visibly took up more space. My deepest impressions of my grandfather were made by stories told after he died, mostly by my mother. Through my adult life I've come back often to those stories, catching new depths and facets depending on the light and the evolving filter of my own experience. Grandpop's direct effect on me was minimal. His effect on his three children, of whom my mother was the second-born and the only daughter, was huge. My mother's effect on me was likewise, and like her father's effect on her it took the form of a heavy, unwieldy weight that singed the fingers that tried to rearrange it. So I was considerably shaped by my grandfather's gnarled hands, albeit through the shifty medium of the intervening generation. He remains a puzzle, sometimes a curse -- a fistful of half-shielded plutonium living in the air I breathe and in my genes. My grandfather was an amateur chess player of some renown. I just searched the Web for his name, Ward Mayhew Parker Mitchell, and several of the top links were about chess, including a game he played with one Max G. Sturm in 1954 and another with Isaac Kashdan in 1938. In his den was a small table whose top was a chessboard perfectly crafted in contrasting woods. He had many other chessboards, ranging from standard size to pocket-size portables. His friends came in to play, and he also played with more distant opponents: the adversaries exchanged their moves by postcard. Story had it that he once had two hundred games going at the same time, and he kept track of some correspondence games in his head. I was awed. My memory has conflated these two feats. Could he possibly have had two hundred correspondence games going in his head all at once? I don't want to believe it, but maybe it's true. Grandpop played chess with Robert Welch, founder of the arch-conservative John Birch Society, which is how we came to have a signed copy of The Life of John Birch in the house I grew up in. He also played chess with George Sturgis, my paternal grandfather, and that -- again, so the story goes -- is how my parents met. Quite possibly both my parents would have been better off if they'd never met, or never married, but then of course I wouldn't be sitting here typing these words. What I mean is that both my parents would have been better off if they'd managed to uproot more of the radioactive legacy they inherited from their respective families, and that each of them probably would have been more successful at this if they'd married someone else. Some partners encourage each other to transcend their limitations. With others the limitations feed into each other and drag both parties down. My parents were like that. I don't blame chess for my parents' marriage or for their failings, or mine for that matter, but the game retains a peculiar resonance nonetheless. My father taught us all to play as kids. Sometimes we'd play out the games that were published in the morning paper. I don't recall ever playing with my mother, though she certainly knew how to play and we probably did from time to time. My father also taught us poker not long after we'd mastered Crazy Eights and Old Maid; Poker According to Maverick was another book I grew up with, and Maverick -- a classic Western about two wisecracking, poker-playing brothers -- was one TV show my parents, my brother Roger, and I regularly watched together. When we were a little older, he taught us bridge. In the suburb of my youth, bridge parties were a staple of adult social life. My father took his bridge seriously and after a couple of tricks had been played he seemed to know who held every damn card in the deck: Grandpop kept track of chess games in his head, and Dad kept a whole deck of cards. I didn't like playing bridge with my dad. He took it too seriously and was too good at it. For my mother, who had zero self-confidence about her worthiness to engage in any intellectual activity, it must have been hell. My mother was born on Halloween, October 31, 1922, in Mexico City, where Grandpop was a U.S. consul. Since she was a ten-pound baby born to a ninety-plus-pound mother, the attending nurse exclaimed, "Ay, que chiquita!" My mother was Chiquita ever after; if anyone called the house and asked for Joan, the name on her birth certificate, we knew for sure it was a telemarketer. Whenever her birthday rolled around, her father would remark, "You were born on Halloween, so you're a witch. If you had been born a day later, you'd be a saint." Hammer hard enough on something and it tends to stick. That stuck. My mother repeated it often, on her birthday and at other times of year, but never exorcised the conviction that she was a witch and would never be a saint. To make it worse, her mother was widely held to be a saint, not least because she not only put up with her "difficult" husband but bailed him out and made him look good. As young Chiquita understood it, and quite probably as her father meant it, consciously or not, being a witch meant she couldn't hold a candle to her mother. My grandmother gave birth to her third and last child, my uncle Hugh, in Alicante, Spain, ten years after my mother was born. Grandpop liked to frequently remind Hugh that he was "a mistake." Through much of his life, Hugh seemed determined to prove his father right. In an early poem I described my mother as "the daughter of an ogre and a saint." She came to be both ogre and saint herself: a pleasant, soft-spoken, intelligent woman by day, a red-faced harridan when she was drunk, which by the time I got to high school was most nights. Which was my real mother, the one who cooked supper and gave me rides to the barn, or the one who screamed, "I hate you kids! You're as bad as your father"? The harridan-witch was more powerful: surely that meant she was the more real? Many years later I came to understand that neither half of a dichotomy is ever the whole truth. Ogres aren't entirely ogres and saints aren't entirely saints, and bad things happen when the various contradictory aspects of our selves lose touch with each other. I was so determined not to become an alcoholic that I didn't touch alcohol till I was twenty-one. I didn't immediately turn into a raving drunk. I didn't have to: several years before, as a sophomore in high school, I had started binge eating. I gained forty pounds in the course of a school year; neither I nor anyone in my family noticed. Well into adulthood I finally got it: I was using food the way my mother used alcohol, as a tranquilizer and as a way to make the people around me lower their expectations of me. Grandpop was a teetotaler. By all accounts he had an explosive temper as well as a run-of-the-mill mean streak -- his inner ogre could take center stage without any chemical assistance. Perhaps his abstinence from alcohol was an attempt to keep the ogre under wraps? My mother and I speculated that he might have been manic-depressive -- bipolar, as it's called now. Very possibly. Whatever it was, he passed it on, perhaps in the genes but most definitely in the home.
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