Escaping the Legacy of “The Stolen Child”

My grandmother spent her entire life trying to escape her life.

Her secret weapon for escape, which she kept tucked like a magic key pressed against her breast, was the promise that, if all else failed, one day she would die and pass from this world.

I always thought my grandma resembled one of the heroines in my novels—someone misplaced in the wrong dimension or time, a tragic figure who couldn’t understand why she had been dropped into an unacceptable and confusing situation.

Because my grandmother just did not belong in a world of poverty and sorrow—and that is exactly where she found herself her entire life.

Grandma was born in 1922 to a family in Ironton, Ohio, that was wealthy and educated, consisting of politicians and business owners. But grandma’s father did the time-honored, unthinkable cliché: He married a beautiful young woman who lived on the wrong side of the Ohio River, a Kentucky native from a poor family. He became the proverbial black sheep of the family because of the marriage.

Tragically, grandma’s mother died of pneumonia when she was only thirty-four years old after giving birth to twin daughters. One twin died within hours. One twin was given away to someone who, unlike my great-grandfather, could care for a newborn.

Grandma was only two years old when her mother died. She spent her childhood being passed among her affluent relatives who, she said, treated her like hired help.

“Cousin Drusilla would sit in a chair reading a book while I ironed the family’s clothes—all those tiny pleats on the skirts and dresses. I hated pleats. I wished that I could lounge around all day reading.”

A modern-day Cinderella who, rather than finding her Prince Charming, encountered, instead, an abusive pedophile who married her after she became pregnant at twelve years old.

By the time Grandma was twenty-four, she already had given birth to nine children, losing three in infancy—ghosts who haunted her for the rest of her life.

I don’t know the details of how Grandma met my grandfather, who was ten years older than she was.

Why did her father allow a 22-year-old man to hang around his prepubescent daughter? Was he a friend of the family? Was Grandma raped? Was she just looking, in the theme of her life, for an escape?

Grandma only released certain details about those early years, years shrouded in secrecy and guilt. She refused to speak about things she found sad or uncomfortable, focusing instead on how she had survived.

Much of the story of Grandma’s life was about survival, escaping one mishap to wind up in another. From losing her mother to dropping out of school to being a victim of violent abuse, Grandma survived.

Although Grandma’s formal schooling ended in the eighth grade, she was the smartest person I knew. She loved to read and draw. She could spell anything—even words she had never encountered. She used to enchant my sister and me by reciting poetry and risqué ditties that she remembered from her youth:

"Tattle tale, tattle tale,

Hanging on the bull’s tail.

When the bull begins to pee,

We shall have a cup of tea."

I often wondered if Grandma made up some of those poems she sang to us. I knew she had learned “The Village Blacksmith” by Longfellow in school, but the others had no reference. Poetry and books had always been an escape for her as well.

"Under a spreading chestnut-tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands."

Grandma’s interest in poetry and reading led me down the same path of books and words even before I started kindergarten. I incorporated early the belief that I, like Grandma, could slip into other worlds using stories.

My favorite book when I was in first grade was a collection of children’s poetry called "All the Silver Pennies". Here I encountered poems about the fairies and gnomes and pixies that I so staunchly believed existed just out of sight. Grandma and I read the poems over and over. I would always return to the phrase written on the first page of the manuscript, the phrase that generated the title of the book:

"You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland."

I wanted desperately to disappear into Fairyland. At only six or seven years old, I had already been indoctrinated into grandma’s philosophy of escaping to enchanted, other places—places that were anywhere but where I currently was.

When Grandma told me she had an actual silver penny, I was ecstatic.

Tucked away in one of her old purses, purses that smelled of cigarettes and faded perfume, among black-and-white photos and letters from Uncle Donnie’s tours of Vietnam, Grandma drew forth a silver penny. Minted in the 1940s to aid the war effort’s use of copper, the “silver” pennies were actually made of nickel. They were, however, shiny metallic silver in color.

When Grandma slipped the penny into my outstretched fingers, I knew Fairyland was only a whisper of longing away.

“Aunt Lulie used to have an entire jar of silver pennies setting on the counter in her grocery store.”

Imagine an entire jar filled with magic escape tickets to Fairyland, I remember thinking. Why hadn’t Grandma used them long ago?

From silver pennies I progressed to other escape hatches from dreary reality to the exciting lives I read about in the books I devoured.

I was forever trying to discover secret worlds at the back of closets. We didn’t have any Narnia-era wardrobes, but I assumed a closet would suffice. I spent a great deal of my childhood immersed in a jumble of shoes with freshly laundered clothing swaying against the top of my head.

From closets, I proceeded to contests.

I entered lots of contests for Grandma, carefully printing out her name and address on entry forms for all-expenses-paid trips to Ireland.

Oh, Ireland. It was the land where all the fairies and magical creatures from my books resided. It was also Grandma’s ancestral home, a place her father had talked about often, playing sad songs on his violin, invoking memories of washerwomen and emerald fields, memories of a mother country he had never visited.

I imagined that if Grandma won the contest she would, of course, take me along with her. But looking back now, that seems highly implausible.

My grandmother couldn’t drive. She had never in her whole life had a driver’s license.

Grandma had no income or job. She hadn’t worked since her days as a waitress at a small truck stop, where all of her money went to provide necessities for her six living children.

The only savings account with Grandma’s name on it was shared with my aunt. She was dependent on her children for everything: food, clothes, shelter. She lived with one of my aunts or my dad her entire life after refusing to stay with my grandfather after their children were adults.

In return for their support, Grandma watched her children’s children, cleaned their houses, mowed their lawns, and did their laundry—similar to her childhood experiences with her wealthy relatives.

She wistfully wished for a little home of her own.

So how would Grandma have managed, if she had won the contests I entered her in, to take a 10-year-old girl on a tour of Ireland?

Grandma’s utter dependence made me desperately independent. There was such a feeling of freedom when I obtained my driver’s license and was able to take Grandma for rides down the rural roads near our home.

I couldn’t imagine spending my life having to ask someone to take me somewhere, to not even be able to go shopping alone. Always, there was someone with Grandma.

That dependence made Grandma depressed.

Grandma’s favorite phrase, when she was disconsolate or wanted my sister and me to imagine that life could be different, was, “Let’s run away and join the circus.”

Even when I was in college, I would find that phrase circling in my brain and slipping from my mouth when I had exams or had endured an especially rough day.

“Let’s just run away and join the circus,” I would tell my boyfriend and eventual husband. He never understood the allure.

What exactly my sister, Grandma, and I would have done in the circus is beyond me. We had no unique “circusy” skills. No high-wire training or acrobatic talents. Perhaps Grandma could have been the circus cook, my sister and I clowns or ticket takers at the tent flap.

While she was not suited for circus life, juvenile Grandma was an excellent cook. I never tasted her homemade biscuits or pies, however. Her youth was spent cooking for an abusive husband who demanded dinner promptly on the table at a certain time.

Because of those desolate cuisine recollections, Grandma was anxious in the kitchen. She would start shaking if she was required to make anything more complicated than apple butter-topped toast or sandwiches.

For most of my life, Grandma was depressed and sick, seemingly, to me, on the verge of dying.

In her later years Grandma descended into mental illness, losing touch with reality until she was placed on medications that wiped out most of her short-term memory and caused her to remember her past in sweet, rose-tinged hues.

That, too, was a way of escaping her life.

For a time in high school, when Grandma refused to get out of bed following my uncle’s death (her fourth child lost), I was obsessed with suicide, writing stories and watching movies in which the main characters took their own lives.

In literature class we read the poem “Resumé” by Dorothy Parker. I copied it from my English lit book and posted it on our refrigerator.

I think now how freaked out people would be by a teenager hanging a poem about suicide on the door of the family refrigerator. My parents read the poem (I was always placing quotes and sayings on the refrigerator door), but just thought I was being my quirky, moody self. Grandma thought the poem was funny:

"Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live."

Reading over the words as an adult, I realize that I actually was not hoping to escape my life like Grandma. I wanted to live. I wanted the adventure that was my life.

The words that my sister and I chose for Grandma’s headstone came from William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Stolen Child”:

"Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand."

On the front of the headstone, we glued the silver penny Grandma had given me as a child. Etched above the penny were the words, “You must have a silver penny to get into Fairyland.”

Even Grandma’s headstone reflected her search for an escape. Finally, she found what she had been longing to achieve.

While Grandma taught me to use words and books as my vehicle for fleeing the heartbreaks of my life, I have never felt like a displaced traveler, a “Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Grandma did, however. She finally used her magic powers to push past the fur coats in the back of the wardrobe, and, with the smell of pine in her nose, venture forth past the light post and into another world.

I hope she is where she is supposed to be, happy and no longer searching.

THE END