(Distant) Family Tensions: What Should I do With Great-Grandfather's Sword?

UPDATE: The votes are in! 66% of voters said I should give the sword to my nephew.

When I visited my Great Aunt Jackie a few weeks ago, she made a request that left me feeling a little confused and disturbed. How do you say "no" to the 95-year-old Great Aunt who more or less raised your father?

Here's the story: We were sitting on the couch in her family room. Frink and Aunt Jackie's daughter, Annabelle, were conversing at the other end of the small room, and Annabelle's 30-something son (Lawrence) was sitting in an easy chair listening to both conversations. (It was the first time I had seen Lawrence since he was 7 or 8.) A few minutes earlier, Lawrence had opened up one of the glass doors of a book case and showed us "his" pipe -- an elaborately carved German pipe from 1800 that used to sit on great-grandfather's mantel. Aunt Jackie is leaving the pipe to Lawrence.

Anyway, my Aunt and I were chatting along, reconnecting after not seeing each other for more than a decade, when she sighed and said, "I wonder what ever happened to my father's Knights of Pythias sword."

"Oh," I said. "Dad gave it to me." Aunt Jackie, I should note, gave the sword to my father 35 or 40 years ago. She was at my wedding 25 years ago, where the sword played a small part in the ceremony.

"I would so like to have it back," she said. "When I gave it to your father, I didn't have a grandson. I would so like my grandson to have it."

I looked up and noticed that Annabelle and Lawrence were listening with keen attention. It was obvious that they had all talked about this before Frink and I arrived.

I stammered out that the sword was one of the only things dad owned that had belonged to his grandparents.

"I sure would like it to go to my grandson," she repeated. "I didn't have a grandson when I gave it to your father."
The object in question is an elaborately etched silver ceremonial sword like the one in this photo. Such swords were widely used by fraternal organizations in their rituals from the late 1800's until WWII. It's not worth much -- $250 at the most. But it belonged to my great-grandfather. I have always intended to pass it on to my nephew, who shares his grand-father's and great-grandfather's name. (For the story of how dad changed his name when he was 6, choosing the name of his beloved grandfather, see the related posts below.)

The sword is one of only 5 or 6 of my great-grandparents things that was passed down to my dad, and through him, to my sister and me. Everything else--antique furniture, silver, china, artwork, scrapbooks, photo albums, and so on -- went either to my father's sisters when his mother passed away or will go to Aunt Jackie's daughter and then to her children (including Lawrence.)

I know this sounds complicated, so here's a little family tree:
This conversation left me deflated and disturbed, casting a shadow on an otherwise wonderful visit. I stand in the same relation to my great-grandfather as Lawrence does. If I were a male, I wonder, would Aunt Jackie make the same request? If my father were still alive, would she ask him to give the sword back? Would my father reply that he wanted it to go to HIS grandson? (Knowing him, probably not. He would think it, and he would be very hurt, but he would probably give it to her.)

Thirty-five or forty years seems a long time. At what point did the sword cease to be Aunt Jackie's and become my father's? I think back to the gaudy diamond cocktail ring another aunt left me a decade ago. It wasn't my style, so I gave it to a distant cousin I hardly knew. If I could do it over, I'd give it instead to one of my nieces. But I can't imagine asking for it back.

We saw my Aunt, Annabelle, and Lawrence again at brunch the next day, and the sword didn't come up. But the whole matter tarnished my visit a bit, and left me uncertain about what to do. My sister says it wasn't fair of Aunt Jackie to ask for the sword. But how do you say no to a direct request from the 95-year-old Great Aunt who practically raised your father?

What would you do? Cast your vote in the sidebar at the top of the page.

Related posts:
The Party Grandma
Stumbling Down Memory Lane
Willa Cather and my Grandfather's Peace Pipe
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Stumbling Down Memory Lane

Frink and I spent the weekend road tripping through Oklahoma and Arkansas, putting 1200 miles on the car and doing our part to stimulate the economy. It was a combination tour -- some architecture gawking, some reconnecting with family I haven't seen in years. We spent several hours with my 95-year-old Great Aunt (my grandmother's younger sister.) Her stories confirmed some details of family lore and helped set the record straight on others.

For one thing, the peace pipe I thought was my grandfather's actually belonged to my great-grandfather and is much older than I realized. It was my great-grandfather who loved the American West and traveled all over the frontier in a stagecoach, visiting the area that would become Yellowstone National Park; the Rocky Mountains; and Denver ("Queen City of the Plains"), where he met his future wife. Unfortunately, any letters he may have written from these days are long gone, although my aunt has almost every other object her parents ever owned.

Her living room is furnished with a pair of elaborately carved ebony chairs that great-grandfather bought at least 100 years ago in San Francisco, straight off the boat that carried them from China, and with the same Victorian furniture that graced her parents' parlor (although the silk upholstery has been recovered more than once in green velvet.) The peace pipe sat on a fireplace mantel in the house my great-grandfather built in 1909. That house, where my great aunt was born and my father spent his childhood, is no longer in family hands and is sadly deteriorated. The leaded glass windows are hidden behind an ugly metal storm door, and the floorboards on the once-elegant, wrap-around porch (a necessity in the hot, sultry South in the days before air conditioning) are sagging and rotted, covered with green outdoor carpet.

The family home was lost, in part, because of my ne'er-do-well grandfather (husband of The Party Grandma.) In addition to the heroin and alcohol addictions, which I knew about, it turns out that he racked up huge gambling debts. The mafia wasn't much inclined to let such debts slide, even for men with wives and young children. He also ran some kind of scam, selling policies for an insurance company, but instead of turning the money in, he gambled it away. Aunt Jackie, who would have been around 13 or 14 at the time, remembers a lot of closed doors and tears. The debts nearly bankrupted both sides of the family. Grandfather's parents paid part of it, leaving town not long after to reestablish themselves in Texas. My great-grandfather, who had pledged surety on the insurance money, scraped together the rest. This was just before the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. He had to close his once-thriving restaurant across from the town's finest hotel, and the family never recovered financially.

My childhood recollections of the Party Grandma proved accurate, at least as reflected through the eyes of her younger sister, who had to clean up after her for most of her life. Lily liked to have a good time, as two bulging albums of filled dance cards attest. This was during the Roaring Twenties, the days of bobbed hair, short spangled dresses, and the Charleston. Lily fell for a rakish young man who shared her enthusiasms for drinking, dancing, and good times. After he lost everything, Grandma left her husband and came home in disgrace, her two toddlers in tow. It was shocking to be a divorced woman in 1929 Bible Belt America, no matter the reason, and most of grandma's friends dropped her cold.

Lily's poor choice of a husband nearly destroyed my aunt's chances of marrying at all. Even in 1935, when Jackie became engaged, the taint of divorce hovered over the family. Aunt Jackie's beau was forbidden to marry a woman whose sister had disgraced the family by divorcing. He defied his parents and married her anyway, moving into her family home to help her care for Jackie's widowed mother, divorced sister, and her sister's children.

Like the heroine in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, grandma was not "a mother woman." It was Aunt Jackie who raised my father and his sister, who ironed and mended their clothes, who walked with them to Sunday School at the church around the corner. It was Aunt Jackie who consoled my teen-aged father when his mother remarried, Aunt Jackie who consoled him again when he washed out of Naval flight-training at 17 due to poor eyesight, Aunt Jackie who consoled his sister, a young wife whose husband was shot down over Germany, where he was a POW for two years, not even knowing he had an infant son.

I hope every family has an Aunt Jackie, the unsung caretakers and consolers, the keepers of heirlooms and lore.
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The Party Grandma

I didn't much like my father’s mother when I was a child. I dubbed her "The Party Grandma," in contrast to my mother's mom, the dimpled and doughy "Grandma Grandma," who wore a hand-made apron and baked pecan pies. The Party Grandma had been a flapper in her youth, sporting bobbed hair and cigarettes, and to her dying day at 81 she liked make-up, music, and martinis. She loved a good joke, and when I picture her, she is laughing. But somehow, in spite of the laughter, something about the Party Grandma made me sad. Her eyes rarely smiled, and even when I was very young, I sensed that her exterior was a lie.

I know little about her life, other than that my grandfather, a heroin addict and drunk, abandoned her when my father was young, and that she had to go to work to support her two children -- a humiliation for an upper-middle-class Southern woman in the 1920s. My Great Aunt Jackie, a stable, thick-ankled, religious woman, more or less raised my dad and his sister while grandma spent her evenings out.

Two of The Party Grandma's visits to our home in Colorado became part of our family lore.

When I was four or five, grandma was leaving after a visit that to my mind had gone on far too long. I was sulking in my bedroom, and when my parents summoned me to come see her off, I marched to the door and shouted “Good bye, Good luck, and Good riddance!" I don’t remember grandma’s reaction, but my mother was highly amused, and after repeated retellings that phrase became a family mantra.

Then there was the time grandma drove into the Safeway on Main Street, which, until she got there, was not a drive-through. I suppose she was getting up in years -- the previous week she had backed into a tree when she had taken us on a picnic. On this particular morning, she was driving my older sister and me to the grocery store. As she pulled up to the curb directly in front of the store, her foot hit the gas pedal instead of the brakes, and we ended up in the frozen food section.We weren't wearing seatbelts (I’m not even sure they existed then), and my sister, who was in the front seat, broke the windshield with her forehead. I was in the backseat and flipped over it to land in my sister's lap. We weren't hurt, although Molly had a small cut, but grandma was considerably shaken, and she cried for what seemed like days, terrified that my father would decide that she was getting too old to drive. What I remember most, however, is some old boy in a trucker hat surveying the damage. He took a long look at the cracked store window, the crumpled front end, and grandma's license plate. "Yup," he said laconically, "just like a Texan."

Grandma spent her entire life in Texas and Oklahoma. I don’t know when she moved to Odessa, but it must have been after she had remarried. My father had joined the Navy by this time, signing up at 16 by lying about his age, and he never really got to know his half-sister, born when grandma was 44. Grandma's second husband was a low-level oil man, and the family lived in a clapboard house on the edge of town. No Country for Old Men got the look of that flat and dusty West Texas town, with its hammer-shaped pumps and desolate vistas, just about right. Sometimes I wonder if Lillian Lemont was disappointed by her life, whether the no-longer-young woman with the bobbed hair ever looked out at the scraggly trees and the laundry drying in the sulfurous air and dreamed of something better.

I never met grandma's second husband; he had died before I was born. But I do have some rustic, post-card-sized watercolors he bought in Peru in 1918. My grandmother gave them to me when I was visiting her once in Odessa. I was in college, and I was fascinated by old family photographs. We went through them together, and as she told me who the people were, I penciled their names on the backs. But that was all she shared: names, birthdates, a few key places. Like my father, she never talked about the things that really mattered, and she never once mentioned my grandfather. When she died, the bulging envelope of photographs, along with her red '66 Rambler (my first car) came to me. Her two daughters took most of the antiques – the carved ebony chairs and the fine porcelain knickknacks, reminders of a more prosperous time -- which left my father feeling mutely hurt. My father was one of the least acquisitive people I've known, but I think he would have liked to have a few more things that had belonged to his ancestors.

One thing he did carry home from the funeral in Texas was a tall green and gold china vase that had long ago been promised to my mother. My parents were divorced by this time, my father happily remarried, my mother single and bitter. The vase was a focal point of her resentment. It had actually belonged to my great-grandmother, who, following our family's tradition, had willed it to my mother by writing her name on a piece of masking tape stuck to the bottom. But instead of giving it to mom, my grandmother kept the vase after her own mother passed away. It sat in a prized place on her mantle, making her living room a bit less shabby and my mother absolutely livid.

My mother had never liked her mother-in-law. One of her favorite resentments was how grandma had tricked her into spoiling dad's favorite meal. Dad loved beef stroganoff, and as a young newlywed, mom asked her mother-in-law for her recipe. Grandma complied, but she craftily altered a key ingredient, substituting water for milk. In this way, she insured that mom's beef stroganoff could never compete with her own. The vase only added fuel to the flame. And when mom learned that dad—and thus, his second wife Betty—had taken possession of the coveted vase, she seethed with indignant anger.

This green vase, my dad's new wife, and Grandma were all tangled together in my mother's mind. Mom never felt accepted by dad's family; even as I child, I could see that she was an outsider when grandma and dad's sister were around. The three of them shared the same sense of humor and bon vivant good times, and my mother was always on the periphery of their laughter. And, after she and dad separated, mom was hurt and humiliated when dad took Betty to Texas to meet his mother, even before telling his own wife that he was seeing another woman. Mom simply could not tolerate the idea that Betty now owned her vase, and for years almost every time I saw or spoke to my mother, that prized piece of porcelain inevitably found its way into the conversation.

Finally, whether to bring peace to the family or to save myself from listening to her complaints, I asked dad for the vase. I drove to his house, in a town a few hours away, wrapped it in an old towel, and took it to my mother. Although it clashed with her décor, she put it in prominent spot on her mantel, where it sat until the day she died.

And, just as my father did after his mother died, when mom succumbed to cancer, I returned home with that green vase in my arms. It doesn’t go with anything I own, but I will always keep it, a gilded symbol of the complex dynamics that make a family. Read more!

The Girl in the Plastic Tent

Everyone who sees my doll shrinks in mock terror. I can understand why. With her pug nose, fixed grin, and spiky orange hair, she does bear a likeness to the maniacal Chucky of horror movie fame. If you picked her up, you might notice a missing arm, a permanent smudge that mars her face, and hair that shows evidence of a child's clumsy scissoring. But when I catch sight of her, I see comfort and companionship, a reminder of two dreamlike days I spent in the hospital when I was six and had my first confusing brush with death.

I can't imagine the anxiety that made my parents decide to leave my two sisters home with dad while my mother, who didn’t drive, took me by bus to the hospital in Denver. Was the medical care inadequate in our small Colorado town? How expensive were those tests, with all the electrodes and brain scans, and how did my parents pay for them? Did they even have health insurance back then? It’s too late now to ask. My mother and father are gone, unable to answer questions I never before thought to ask. All I know is that as a child I suffered from seizures, fainting spells, and temper tantrums that frightened even me, and I had to go to Denver for an EEG, the result of which was ten-plus years on the epilepsy drug Dilantin, which made my gums grow over my teeth and which I’m now not sure I even needed.

The drive to Denver is a hazy blur punctuated with moments of Kodak clarity: sitting in a Greyhound bus on a mountain pass, stalled for hours while road crews cleared tons of snow from an avalanche that had struck the cars in front of us. The mesmerizing glow of Denver’s countless stoplights, new to my small-town eyes. A store with a glass case full of tiny, exquisite ships made of spun sugar. And the distinct memory of standing in the bright aisle of a toy store, my mother waiting as I tried to choose the new doll she had promised I could take to the hospital, where I would be spending two days alone. I wavered between a pretty doll with a beautiful dress and a funny-looking one with an enormous plastic head and orange hair. Of course I chose the latter. I named her Orangeeta, and everything about her made me smile, from her gigantic feet and ears shaped like tea-cup handles to her round little belly with an innie that at some point I colored in with blue ink.

The hospital is another mélange of memory: fluorescent white halls, nurses in crisp white dresses and airplane-shaped caps, an antiseptic room with a pastel quilt that seemed insultingly infantile. For some reason, I had to stay up all night for the EEG that would be performed the next morning. At first it seemed like an adventure. The nurses marched smartly up and down the halls, and they brought endless paper cups of red Kool-aid. But as the night wore on, I became bored. There was nothing to play with except a jigsaw puzzle, and I was outraged by the betrayal of finally finishing it only to discover that it was missing a piece. I wanted desperately to sleep, but every time I dozed off, an impatient nurse shook me awake and gave me more Kool-aid, which quickly changed from a treat to a torment. If I followed the nurses around and asked questions, they became even more impatient. So I talked to Orangeeta and wandered up and down the florescent halls in my robe, scuffing in unfamiliar slippers.

That’s when I saw the girl in the tent.

Down the hall was another room with an open door. Inside, a little girl was lying face-up on a bed, completely enclosed in a clear plastic tent. A gray, tired-looking woman sat in a chair in the corner. The woman told me that the girl in the tent was her granddaughter and that she was having trouble breathing. I padded down to the nurse’s station.

"What’s wrong with that girl,"I asked. "Why is she in a tent? "
"She’s very sick,"was the brisk reply.

I remember the odd feeling of being a little jealous. After all, I wasn’t the least bit sick. I was just there for tests. No one sat up at my bedside all night, as the sad grandmother did. I went back down the hall and sat with her. I don't remember what we talked about – I seem to recall that she was also from out of town and had come on a bus, but I might be imagining that, conflating her story with my own. I do remember liking and trusting the old woman, who was kind and soft and wore a cotton dress with pale flowers, like the ones my own grandma wore.

The next day, I was taken for my tests. I was fascinated by the electrodes placed on my head and by the squiggly lines that printed out on a big roll of paper. But I was also achingly tired. Finally it was over I was allowed to crawl into bed and sleep.
When I woke up, the hospital was very quiet. I walked down the hall to visit the grandma. As I approached room, a nurse grabbed me by the arm and spun me away, whispering that the little girl had died. I was stunned with the thrilling enormity of this information, with the exquisite sadness. Suddenly I was no longer jealous of the little girl in the tent.

I sat in my bed and hugged Orangeeta, waiting for my mother to come and take me home.

(Check back later for a story about how Orangeeta is connected to my parents' divorce.)
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