I had just spent several minutes looking through my paternal great-grandfather’s meticulous log of every theatrical performance he saw during the early years of the 20th century, complete with ticket prices, written in flowing, precise script. I was fantasizing about ancestors I never knew, wondering what other family stories lay buried in our cupboards and how many of them I might never really understand, now that my father had died a few months ago. Mom and I were trying to sort through mountains of paper still looming from his death this summer and the preceding years.
“A piece of paper was underneath a chair I moved the other day,” said Mom. This sounded exciting. She continued, “It was a legal document naming Herberta Moran, bringing a formal complaint against John Painter Sr. for abandonment.”
Shit. I had a different feeling where this was going now. Herberta and John were my paternal grandparents, and my father had been born a good bit less than nine months after they were married. My grandfather never lived with his wife and son, much less provide any kind of home — no house, apartment, room in a boarding house. It sounded like a sad situation, to be sure: difficult, heartbreaking, lonely, disillusioning. In the 1940s, it was still difficult for a woman to initiate divorce proceedings, so my grandmother and her infant son lived with her parents for the two years while they waited for the divorce, and possibly longer.
My father’s conception was always a touchy subject with my mom; not only had her relationship with her mother-in-law been awful, but my mother has always held some pretty black and white views on sex and relationships. And they are very different from mine in ways that tend to feel a bit like a demented carnival ride when we try to talk about them. My mother spoke again.