Someone Else's Memory
On Reading Letters to My Young Mother
Anita was able to leave her home town to study piano at the University of Washington only because an anonymous donor paid for her tuition after hearing her play a recital
On the anniversary of my mother’s birth, I think of my grandmother, and what that day might have been like for her. A cold, spring day in Rugby, North Dakota is all that I know for certain. Everything else is a scattered and unretrievable history. There’s simply no one alive to ask about it. I wonder, did my grandmother even want to be a mother, or was it just an expectation, a foregone conclusion for a newly married young Catholic? The question of her own agency aside, on March 26th, Barbara Shaan gave birth to Anita Jane. She would be the first of seven children.
Last year, I opened a box that my sister brought me, and began reading letters written to my mother - several of them from my grandmother. The letters span the time period between Anita leaving her small house in Wapato, WA for college, to around the time I myself graduated high school. As I open each fragile envelope, I take pleasure in the fact that this transition in mother-daughter relationship unfolded during a time when people relied heavily on letter-writing as their primary form of long-distance communication. With each letter I pull out of the box, I note a few sideline trivial facts such as: this is a time before zip codes and the official two-letter abbreviations for U.S. states. This is a time when a majority of people could not even afford a type-writer. And I take note of non-trivial facts such as: my mother grew up always having to think about whether there was enough money, and I did not. It takes time, and the reading of an assortment of letters to learn how to decipher the specific penmanship of my aunts, my grandmother, and my mother’s admirers (of which there were many).
You neglect to ask the people closest to you all sorts of questions while they are alive. You mistakenly believe that you know who they are because of the way you personally have experienced them. I can say: my grandmother was quiet and liked to bake cinnamon rolls and fry bacon; she wasn’t very intellectual and had few interests beyond her vegetable garden, her family, and going to church where she played the organ at services. To me, she wasn’t a particularly playful or fun person, but there was nothing not nice about her either. But this outline of a woman is only the grandmother of my childhood memory. And this, I understand now, is not really Barbara Schaan at all.
Similarly, my younger self could only perceive the value of Anita as a person in terms of the quality of her “motherness.” And like every other facet of how women engage with and are judged by their fellow citizens, being a mother is competitive and prone to evaluation. You are either good at it, or you are bad at it, and everyone has an opinion on how you as a mother are faring. She was affectionate and encouraging. She was working most of the time, and not like many other mothers who were waiting for you when you returned from school. She was busy, she was always practicing. Only later, could I see a little further, into the depths of her individuality.
Anita was able to leave her home town of Wapato, WA to study piano at the University of Washington only because an anonymous donor paid for her tuition after hearing her play a recital in the nearby town of Yakima. She had applied to numerous other colleges in the state, but the question of how higher education could possibly be paid for, even if she were to be accepted to any school, was always looming. My grandfather, John, was supporting a family of nine on a grocery store butcher’s salary and he liked to drink and play poker—oh, and it turned out he had a mistress for several decades—all of which meant that the money he brought home didn’t go very far. So it was a great relief when someone took notice of her talent and ambition, and generously paid for her to go to college. While attending school at the UW, she soon met Roy Cummings, which led to her eventual decision to give up her more bold career ambitions and become a wife, mother and piano teacher because, even more than being a world-renowned pianist, Anita wanted to be a mother. She never did find out who the anonymous donor was.
-Anita’s upright Steinway, her first piano bought for $500.
Through these letters, I have had the opportunity to be newly introduced to the people I met long ago - my aunts and uncles, grandparents, and the young person who became a wife and mother and gave birth to me.
From a letter dated February 24, 1958.
Dear Anita,
Thank you for your letter – glad you liked your Valentine.
Daddy left Fri. evening to bowl in Spokane. Came home about 9:00 last evening (Sun.) Says he bowled so poorly he’s all fed up, but that’s what he said last time. Used our car too. I keep hoping he’ll be home more.
We all went to Rosary and Benediction last evening. J— is so bad in church. Took him twice Ash Wednesday. When Father put ashes on his forehead he cried out, “No!” and rubbed it off. When Father prayed, “Blessed be St. Joseph etc.” he looked at me and said aloud “Me?” He always tells me, “Your John, My Daddy,” so we don’t have to fight about whose Daddy any more. Gosh, Daddy missed him so very much this past week-end.
You didn’t tell me anything about your organ lessons. Hope you’re getting much out of the course.
It rains here so much. Otherwise weather is warm. Spring is here for sure.
Am not doing so good at the puzzle. Have 6, 8 or more wrong each week so may as well quit.
Wanted to write to wish you the best of luck in your trying for the Scholarship. It will be good experience and it is an inspiration to practice. Play with feeling and best you know how and that’s all you can do. M—’s been going to Mass each morning in Lent and I’d love to make the sacrifice but found it impossible this morning. But will pray for you.
Am glad you’re having other boy dates besides Danny. Just live right and God will take care of you.
‘Bye for now.
Love and best wishes, Mother
Years later, dementia would take hold of my mother’s mind so that she was stuck in a period of her life that I had never known, but perhaps was crucial to her sense of her self. I would talk to her about “our house”, the one I was brought to after I was born, and lived in with her and my father and siblings for the first 20 years of my life. When I would refer to “our house” she would respond back in a way that made it clear that the only house that now existed in her mind was the one where she grew up - the little house in Wapato. I wish I had known about my grandmother’s letters then. I would like to have been there with her, in the vault she unlocked for herself, where her recent life and her origin collided. I would have read those letters to her, and maybe I would have learned something sooner about the person who was a curious child, a serious student, an ambitious musician, a young woman whom men fell deeply in love with but never felt worthy of. And then I could have looked at her and said, “Anita, it’s lovely to finally meet you.”
Unfolds nicely, naturally, like an old family quilt, gently unfurled. Well done Angela.