Speak, Ghost Whereat the ghost of "Memorie" inton…

Speak, Ghost

Whereat the ghost of “Memorie” intones the language of “Memoir”

My Grandmother

We are in the Impala on our way to Manasquan. I’m sitting in the back seat behind her straw hat with the flowers. Grandma is driving to the Garden State Parkway, taking the same route she has since the Parkway opened in the early 1950s–a meandering course through downtown Newark. My father could never persuade her to hop on at any of the several Parkway accesses closer to the burgeoning suburban neighborhood where she had come to live with us in 1961. Now it’s the summer of 1967, we’re headed for the Parkway, and downtown Newark is hosting a riot. “Hey Grandma,” I say, excited as only a ten-year old could be at the sight. “I see a tank!”

She ignores me. She was all too used to silliness coming from the back seat, and she was looking for the Parkway. I would have one more year with Grandma.

And she with me. You see, I was Grandma Mullin’s raison d’etre. Her boy. She took me every week during the summer to spend two or three days at her sister’s little white house with the red roof on the Shark River Inlet, which runs between Manasquan and Point Pleasant, NJ, into the Atlantic Ocean. My first memory of her is at the shore, in fact, at the house with my Aunt Mabel, Uncle Adrian, and my beloved cousin Steve. A second cousin, about a year older than me, Steve initiated me into the ways of the beachcomber. That’s basically what we did half the time we were together.

The other half we spent in the back seat of the Impala being driven by our grandmothers, usually to yarn shops. We would roll around on the floor of the car with whatever toys we’d brought until we attained a state of what our grandmothers simply called “silliness”. They would recognized simultaneously when we’d cross the line, and would begin flailing their arms-of-many-clunky-bracelets randomly in our direction with no pause in their conversation. Steve and I would laugh about it on the back porch later.

Memory is a multi-sensory function. Heavily olfactory. I remember the smell of Aunt Mabel’s kitchen, which was either the smell of breakfast or of fish when Uncle Adrian and Uncle Bert—our grandmothers’ younger brother—came back from fishing on Uncle Adrian’s boat in the afternoon. The Grandmas and Aunt Ches, Uncle Bert’s wife, cleaned the fish in the kitchen sink with their hair tied up in blue and grey scarves. There were other smells from a wooden cupboard that I remember—black liquorice, Hydrox cookies, and big, salty stick pretzels. Then there was the smell of my grandmother. That I knew better from home, where, when I woke up in the middle of the night or on most mornings, I would climb into bed with Grandma. That is something only I know.

But, wait! Steve remembers smells as well. The following is from an e-mail that he dashed off when I hinted I would be posting something on Grandma: “I’m almost too frightened to read anything on a blog created by you, let alone reminiscences (true or fictional) about childhood. Please don’t shatter my images of your grandmother, all I really remember is an extremely nice lady who smelled good and whose bracelets made the same horrible racket as my grandmother’s did”.

Yeah, when they were whacking at us in the back seat!

Steve goes on a bit about their hairdressing habits. That made less of an impression on me, but he’s right. They shampooed once a month in order to get full value out of their elaborate hairdos, hitting the beach in neoprene turbans that looked pretty swell with their bathing suit-cum-apron outfits. Walking us to the beach, past Carlson’s Corner, the big white soda shop, in their better-living-through-chemistry beachwear of the 1960s, they were wont to remind us of an afternoon not to gawk at the young couples “necking”. On such occasions, they demonstrated that their reflexes were far faster then the synapses of little boys. The swats were landing before we even had a chance to laugh. Dodging this fusillade, we’d collapse onto the crunchy-clipped grass and gravel of whoever’s front yard we’d reached when the “neckers” were spotted, laughing our little asses off, as a fun song about a Pinball Wizard played on the juke box at Carlson’s.

It was a good thing for me that in Grandma’s Copernican worldview, I represented the Sun. She was a fairly unyielding woman–the term “Prussian rectitude” comes to mind. My Grandfather left her for, of all places, Texas when my father, their only child, was about three. Grandpa’s story was carefully kept out of circulation in my home. Whenever I asked about my grandfathers, they would say they both died when I was a baby. That was true of my mother’s dad. Dad’s dad eventually died when I was in second or third grade. I distinctly remember them telling me that Grandma and Daddy had to go to Texas.
“How come?” I ask.
“Because your grandfather died.”

“Again?”

Years later, Uncle Bert, the only one in the family who’d gladly talk about Grandpa Mullin, told me Grandpa, “took a fall for a crooked judge in Newark.” Great. Uncle Bert painted it in rather broad strokes, unfortunately. But as he got older, he remembered it differently. My grandmother was the oldest of the six Bergesser children. Bert, the youngest. “She raised me, and I loved her like my mother, see,” sez Bert. “But she was a cold woman, see. I liked Bill Mullin.” What are you saying, Uncle Bert? That Grandma drove her husband to Texas? “Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” sez Bert.

I will die confused on this point. My mother, a Massachusetts-stock Episcopalian who converted to Catholicism at Grandma’s insistence, knows about as much as I do. Dad never talked about it. He died when I was 24, and I’ve pretty much pumped Bert dry.

I do know, however, that Grandma’s rigid Catholicism meant that she would never grant my grandfather a divorce. (Two strange ladies in Texas used to send us Christmas cards. I believe they are my aunts.) Grandma was proposed to repeatedly by her boss in later years, an Italian gentleman who started on these shores as a ragman in Newark and went on to own an insurance company.(1)

Grandma, a one-time Navy WAVE who largely ran this man’s insurance company, was very strict with my father. Of course she was—She raised him during the depression, a single mother endowed with a Prussian rectitude. My father never defied her authority, even in his own house as an adult.

I crossed her only once–but she was dead wrong! Lemme tell ya:

Grandma took me to Radio City Music Hall to see the Christmas show. I had a remarkable little suit on. It was probably about 1965 or -6. (All my memories of her have a kind of old photograph, Technicolor, Turnerized tinge to them—especially the memories that involved New York City, of which there were a few). So, here we are on a serpentine line on Sixth Avenue. She strikes up a conversation with the woman in front of us. Soon she wants coffee. She tells me to stay with the strange woman while she goes somewhere in the big crowded city to get coffee (later in life I would understand this kind of coffee addict’s behavior). The line is starting to move. The woman clearly grimaces a “What, are you kidding lady?” grimace. Then I say it, I think, for the first time ever to my grandmother: “No”

A few minutes later, we are sitting in a coffee shop on the spinning round seats at the counter. Grandma is going on at length to the cigarette-smoking hash-slinger behind the counter about what a bad boy I’d been.

“Why don’t you listen to your grandma, kid?”

….Shadd-ep, bub.

When I get home, my father feels he has to make a great showing in response to my transgression. He proceeds, unbelievably, to make himself the moax in all of this by coming down ridiculously hard. We was actually taking off the belt! (Grandma was not there and would not have gone for this, mind you). Mom is the hero in this scene, not only stopping my Father, but telling him that Grandma did an insane thing and that I was in the right. Sometimes Mom and I recall this eventful day as, perhaps, the most crystalline manifestation of “the Mullin problem.”

Phew! Now….. That was the worst of it.

The best, other than waking up and snuggling into bed with her on a cold winter morning, may have been those rides to Manasquan. She gave me a feel for the old cities where she lived most of her life. Newark, the Oranges–the world that all her gab with Aunt Mable tracked back to. Living in the fast-developing greenery of East Hanover, I may have learned to fear these places. But now, cruising under the giant Pabst Blue Ribbon Bottle water tower at the factory in Newark– a famous New Jersey landmark situated near Grandma’s preferred entrance to the Parkway–I’m in my element. The bottle tower and its environs will always bring back a sun-filled scene and the vision of a straw hat bobbing in front of me.

Somehow, I managed to sleep through the night that my grandmother had her heart attack. The first aid squad carried her downstairs from her room, which was across the hall from mine. They knocked over a card table on which I had been working a rather difficult puzzle—hundreds of pieces—of Leonardo’s Last Supper. My mother told me that Grandma, strapped to the gurney, mid-heart attack, actually yelled at them for messing my puzzle up. I never saw her alive again.

At her wake, I stood alone with my father when they opened her coffin. He collapsed, crying uncontrollably. His mother was his world, and the future must have seemed unbearable to him. That’s a hard thing for an 11-year-old to watch. Uncle Bert came in and picked him up, as he had done for my grandmother so many times when Dad was a boy. The childless Bert had paid Grandma back for all the love and protection she’d given him by being the man in my father’s life—a man of Prussian rectitude, as my father usually described him.

“C’mon Dick,” Bert said to my father that evening. “Stand up.”

Twelve years after this scene, my father committed suicide. He hid or destroyed his wallet, smoked, by my count, the second cigarette of his life, and left no note–just a cigarette butt and another guessing game for me and Mom, who was, by then, the mother of three (my sister Patricia had been born a month before Grandma died. Jennifer came two years after that).

Grandma is still with me, of course. You don’t watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with someone and forget her. You don’t sneak into someone’s bedroom at the age of ten to watch the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and forget about her. You always remember the adult that makes you eat egg salad sandwiches on the beach. If Uncle Bert is wrong about anything–and I think he may be–it is that my grandmother was cold. She was warm. And she smelled great.

And of course there are still constant reminders, though some are on their way out. I recently switched jobs after 25 years of commuting to New York on trains. I now drive to an office in Edison on the Parkway. Every morning, usually under a Van Gogh sunburst, I see the Pabst bottle (2) dominating the angel statuary in the big cemetery by the Parkway and casting a shadow over the row houses next to the big blue building called Stock House 14. I read in the Star Ledger about an archaeologist in Newark scavenging the factory and making furniture out of its bizarre fixtures ahead of a demolition crew that, no doubt, has the water tower on its list.

I still have Uncle Bert, who will really be 100 in about a year! He is down in Cape May with the feisty, 96-year-old Aunt Ches, that lovable, loud-talking Detroit woman who fit right in with the Bergesser girls. And I have cousin Steve, the best man at my wedding, a rare, kind and giving soul. Look at him in that picture up there. He’s perfect! He is my Grandma channel, in a sense. I hope he will not be too aghast at my remembrance of our grandmothers.

Closer to home, my wife wears Grandma’s diamond in her engagement ring, as Grandma had hoped my wife one day would. Not exactly a good luck charm, you might say. But, hey, it’s worked for 21 years.

And, of course there is my beautiful daughter, Marguerite, Grandma’s namesake.

(1) Catholicism, I’m convinced, is Western civilization’s grand conspiracy against me.
(2) Which, after a doing a stretch as a Schweppes Ginger Ale bottle, is now just a rust-red bottle shape on War-of-the-World spaceship legs. A beautiful rust-red bottle shape, that is.

Photos: Top to bottom
I see a Tank: The National Guard move into downtown Newark, 1967.
Before I knew her: Marguerite Bergesser in East Orange, 1920s.
Beachcombers in Saddle Shoes: Ricky, left, and Stevie.
Tex: Grandpa, we hardly knew ye!
The Lost World: Pabst! Blue! Ribbon!
Marguerite: Apple of our eyes.

Go back for a great picture of Grandma in an earlier post