2001-09-15 - 11:05 p.m.

Aunt Annsie (2)

When I was a little boy my family used to occasionally take car trips down to visit my grandmother in Connecticut. She lived in this big gray house on an acre of land in one of the posh suburbs of Bridgeport.

I remember seeing Aunt Annsie a couple of times. She seemed very pretty in an icy sort of way, in spite of her bright red hair. I remember her showing me her room in my grandmother's house. It seemed like an idealized teenaged girl's room, although Annsie must have been in her 30s when she showed it to me. I remember that the walls of the room were lined with shelves, and these shelves were crowded with little wooden puppets. She called them "finger puppets" but I haven't been able to find any pictures of them searching on that. Basically there were little wooden animals, no more than five inches high, on a little wooden dais, and when you pushed a button on the bottom of it, the puppet collapsed. By carefully manipulating the button you could make the animal nod and sway.

I'm not describing these things from memory: I have three of them sitting in front me: A lion, a giraffe and an elephant. Annsie sent them to me when I told her about remembering them.

The thing is that I maybe only saw her once or twice, and I couldn't have been more than nine years old.

After that I only heard about her, and everything I heard was unfavorable.

I don't know the hows and whys, but my mother's family was a lot like ours: children constantly fighting with each other, but really just fighting for affection from the parents. My mother and Annsie had this unbelievably intense rivalry to try to get the affection of their father, my grandfather. The little tiffs that Harry and I had were nothing compared to the hostility between Mom and Annsie.

I remember Mom telling me once that her father promised her a car as a high school graduation present. In the mid 1940s, a car was not a trivial gift. When they were alone, Annsie said to her: "I bet I get a car before you do." Well, she was right. Annsie got a car, and Mom never did. I could tell that really burned her up.

My grandfather died in 1966, and my memories of him are very hazy. For the next twelve years my grandmother, whom we called "Gammy," lived in the big house in Connecticut by herself. Actually, not by herself - there was a live-in nurse for the last few years.

Looking back, the infrequent visits down to Gammy's seemed rather tense, although nobody really spoke of it. Of course, nobody really spoke of anything important in our family. I wondered if my grandmother noticed that my father never went along on these visits after 1972? I bet she did.

When my grandmother died in 1978, she gave 90% of her estate, including her house, to Aunt Annsie. Of the few things that were bequeathed to my mother, Aunt Annsie tried to get them from her, too. I remember my mother complaining about it - couldn't Aunt Annsie be content with the lion's share of the estate? Why did she want it all?

Looking back as an adult, I can see that the rivalry for the parents' affection continued even after the parents were dead as the two sisters squabbled over the parents' belongings. Of course the argument wasn't really about the items but over ancient, deeply held resentments.

Of course, I was seeing this battle from only one side.

I remember after months of squabbling the estate was finally settled. And thereafter very little news was heard from Aunt Annsie. After being single for many years, Aunt Annsie had married a widower some years her senior. Shortly after her mother died, he lost a long battle with cancer. I'd seen pictures of him, but I’d never met him.

That was about all the news I heard from Aunt Annsie, except for Mom repeating the old stories of their rivalry.

And now we jump ahead almost 20 years.

After my mother died, I had the melancholy task of taking care of my increasingly feeble-minded father. At length I managed to move him out of the family house, but then I had the seemingly-overwhelming task of cleaning out the house and selling it.

After my father had retired in 1995, for some reason that I never was able to figure out, he had the old desk and file cabinet from his office moved into the garage. Well, he didn't actually choose to put them there - they were simply too huge to fit through any of the doors.

Both the file cabinet and the desk were filled with papers, and going through them and throwing out the crap was a nightmarish job. I found all sorts of things I didn't want to see - letters from his girlfriend, reprimanding memos from his boss, etc. Dad never threw anything out.

Among this blizzard of paper I found a letter to Dad from Aunt Annsie, dated 1977.

In the letter, Annsie beseeched my father to get my Mom to pay more attention to Gammy, who was now very ill. Although the tone of Annsie's letter was bitter and accusatory, I definitely felt a pang of sympathy for her. In effect, she had been in the situation I now found myself: taking care of an elderly, ailing parent all by herself. It was apparent that she was very close to the end of her rope.

I was also aware of a devastating irony. She was writing to my father to get him to prod my mother into action, but in point of fact he was the reason that she wasn't much help. By that point, my mother was so deeply depressed about my father's virtual absence that she seldom left the house. I'd be willing to bet my father never even read the letter, he just shoved it away in his desk.

But this letter did something important, 21 years after it was mailed: It planted a seed in my head. It made me wonder what her side of the story was. Therefore, when her letter to me showed up a few months later I was a lot more receptive to it than I might have been otherwise.

Continued