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Clara Gundelach circa 1935 |
If you go back to see what happened on this day in history, you may want to focus on March 25, 2011, when a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist Company a block east of Washington Square in New York City. The factory employed mostly teenaged immigrant girls, many of whom spoke little English. There were four elevators but only one was working. It could hold only twelve people and it broke down after four trips. The only other way out were the two staircases to the street, but the door to the street in one of them was locked and the other opened inwards, meaning the mob trying to escape only blocked the door. 146 workers died. The families of the victims received $75 each from the insurance company; the owners of the sweatshop received $400 for each victim.
In my case, I'd go back to a totally unrelated event four years later. My mother was born on this date in the House of Midwifery in Celle, Germany, one year into the First World War. Her father was off somewhere in France fighting for the Vaterland and ran off, as our family tells the story, with a French woman. Her mother, a woman who two months before was still a teenager, asked her sister to take the baby because she was married to a farmer and they had enough food to eat.
I am not inclined to look back on anything I'd want to call "the good old days."
I have now lived nearly twenty-three years longer than my mother did. She died at the age of 60 because when she had a heart attack she went to bed hoping she'd feel better in the morning. Instead she lived only three more days. People didn't go to doctors except in absolute emergencies, and apparently a bit of pain in the chest didn't count as one.
Another thing people didn't do in my family when I was growing up was share the misery in their lives with their children. I had no idea of the circumstances in which my mother grew up. She was a good mother to me and my sister when we were small kids, but in our teenaged years she lived with profound depression. If divorce were acceptable, she would have left my father. Instead, she stayed and they fought and made me dream of the day I might get away from it all, seek my fortune, and never go back.
I ran ultimately as far as one could go in the United States, from New England to California. And for many years I did not go back. As the years gave me time, however, to process the bits and pieces of my mother's life and make sense of them in later years, I began to develop the feelings I have today. I would give anything to be able to go back in time, grab hold of my mother - and my father - and let them know I understand the challenges they faced. I would not forgive them for their foibles. I no longer believe there is anything requiring forgiveness. They lived their lives playing with the cards they were dealt. I would simply use every available moment to hang out with them and get them to tell me more of their stories. And I wonder now if it's the case that they simply didn't share their lives with us kids, or whether it's that they did and we simply were too busy growing up to want to pay attention to what they had to tell us.
My mother was born Clara Schultheis. Her aunt and uncle who took her in when she was a month old and raised her as their own daughter were Paul and Johanne Gundelach. Paul Gundelach, too, had fought for the Vaterland, in his case in Russia. He came back to the wreck that was Germany resolved to get his family to America one way or another. In time, when my mother was eight years old he got an uncle to pay his way and lived the first decade or more as an indentured servant in Torrington, Connecticut. Four years later, my mother's birth mother, who had found a job as a stewardess on the Hamburg-Amerika Line, landed in New York, jumped ship, i.e., went up to Torrington and reclaimed my mother and never went back. Years later, she would be discovered as an illegal German alien during the Second World War and arrested, brought to trial as a spy. "Do you know that the German soldiers cut off the hands of Belgian Children?" "You are liars. No German would ever do anything like that. Send me back to Germany. I don't want to live among people like you who tell such lies." She was found innocent.
I don't remember where I heard this story. All the people who might have told it to me are gone now, and there is no way I can check its veracity. But it does ring true, and I seem to remember that my father confirmed it. He went to the trial as a worthy white anglo-saxon character witness. They had married and I had just been born and there was no reason to see my grandmother as anything other than an innocent, even naive, young woman whose actions were transparent.
The result of this turmoil is that I have two sets of grandparents on my mother's side. My mother's birth mother clearly saw in me the chance to make up for her inability to raise a child in the first decade of her life, and treated me like a little prince. I called her Grossmutter, a more formal word than Oma, which I think most German kids call their grandmothers. I credit to her the psychological grounding I needed to get through some tough times in later years. She flooded me with affection and gave me a powerful sense of right and wrong. She modeled the good German virtues: punctuality, cleanliness, duty and the belief that life is what you make it. My mother's aunt and uncle became Mutti and Vati, German for mommy and daddy, the name everybody I knew growing up came to call these people who seemed willing to take in the whole world and care for them. They called her Klärchen, "little Clara," a name that struck me as ridiculous when I was a kid and couldn't yet see my mother as a small object of affection.
My mother went to work in a factory, as much out of boredom as to make ends meet - although there's no doubt we needed the money. As a result, it was to Grossmutter's house that I went after school every day. And even before then, when she still lived in Torrington, I used to spend many days and nights at her apartment next to the train station, across from the Brass Mill where my father worked.
I have two clear memories of those early days when I was four or five years old. One was of the end of the war when the factory whistles blew and everybody poured out into the streets to dance and whoop it up. Another was the time my grandmother started teaching me things like "Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich...", sparking an interest in the German language and ultimately all things German.
The contrast between Grossmutter on the one hand and Vati and Mutti on the other was striking. I know there has to be a world of tales of family anxieties there, but as I've mentioned before, they kept the drama away from me. Vati and Mutti walked the tightrope between love of German language and culture - they became caretakers of the German Singing Society in Torrington - and a fierce dedication to becoming good Americans. Which, in those days, meant hiding their German identity, certainly never speaking the language to each other in public, and cutting all ties with "the old country." The day they arrived, so the story goes, my grandfather announced, in German, of course, "From now on we speak only English." And they loved to tell the story about my mother responding, "Aber Vati, Du sprichst nur deutsch!" (But papa, you only speak German!")
Grossmutter, on the other hand, was a fierce booster of all things German, and instilled in me a pride which I hold to this day, in being German. No mean feat, given her experience of being tried as a spy, and having to watch people in the early post-war years throw stones through the stained glass windows of St. Paul's Lutheran Church, known to all in those days simply as "the German church."
My mother straddled this identity divide. She spoke only Plattdeutsch to start with, although one of the reasons I acquired German as a kid is that she and her mother tended to speak to each other in different languages, my mother in English, my grandmother in (standard) German. I like to say that I grew up bilingual and that my two first languages were English and "Code-switching."
I was a perfect shit as a teenager. My mother and father, possibly out of a sense of guilt at being young parents with no parenting experience, possibly simply out of a nature to be forgiving and indulgent, let me get away with murder. I remember a time when my mother was on the phone, probably one of those times when it would ring and she would pick it up and talk to whoever was on the other end. In those days we had a party line. Our ring was two long rings, but if you didn't listen carefully you could get it wrong and answer a call meant for somebody whose ring was one long and one short. People were apparently all right with talking with whoever picked up the phone and my mother was always happy to take a break from her True Confessions and Photoplay magazines.
I was sitting across the room from her on one of those occasions and mimicking everything she said. She signaled for me to shut up and when I kept on she picked up one of her shoes and threw it at me, missing me entirely and breaking the window behind me. I got a ton of mileage out of that one, never let her forget it.
After college I went into the army. I was no longer a snotty teenager, but I still wasn't much inclined to give my mother much space. While I was serving in Berlin I got a letter from her once telling me how proud she was that all three of the McCornick boys, me and my two cousins, Brian and Billy, were in uniform serving their country. Brian was in the Air Force, Billy in the Marines in Vietnam. I wrote her back and said if she ever said anything like that again I'd tear up her letter and never read anything from her again. So overpowering was my sense of the wrongness of the Vietnam War and the role of the American military in messing up the world. And so impatient was I with my mother's ability to handle anything political.
All bits and pieces of family history soon to be lost once I move on. I'm the last in my family to speak German and the generations on both sides don't even know of the other side's existence. All these events, as overpoweringly important as they were when they happened, are now too trivial to register anywhere.
But it's March 25th, and I am remembering my mother.
Happy Birthday, Mom.
I'm sorry I made you break the window.
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