Forgiveness In Faith
My grandmother and aunts were feminists. The three of them were a powerful force, my aunts toward a vision of beauty I’d not otherwise had, my grandmother Anna, a white Olympus.
They fought mentally against domination all their lives and were nothing if not strong minded. Anna especially had reason to resist the ties, for she had had trials, first the farm, then the near loss of her first daughter, then the loss of her husband, borderline poverty and the difficulties of her father-in-law. In the midst of all this she struck an original path in both folk art and religion.
For Anna the issues were freedom to create and freedom to be what she chose. It is possible to understand that certain pressures might be brought to bear on a girl so surrounded by religious figures. The greatest obstacle was her stepmother, a classic case of farmer’s wife domination. Her father Henry at this time was still probably shell shocked from the loss of his first love Elisabeth. His three small children added to by two more, he was stuck on the farm. In these times he may have been just as inwardly desperate as Anna. But both had a long way to go. For Henry, the next best part of his life, after the loss of Elisabeth, would come maybe after his second wife died and he moved in with Anna and her Elizabeth for eight years at the end of his life, a three peas in a pod collection of people born June 19, 20 and 21. For Anna the time came sooner. When she was 21, in 1901, she left the farm and became a tailor in the city.
Best Foot Forward
We can’t just pass over those farm years of the barefoot girl. We are helped to an
account by a folk memoir written by her daughter in 1982, “Best Foot Forward.” She presented it to me patchwork, years before she ever showed me anything else, such as Henry Mack’s Ledger, said I should rewrite it. That was impossible, but the facts in it are good, based on Anna’s countless retellings of everything, including that farm domination.
“It was Anna who for sixty years painted word pictures for her daughter about her childhood, girlhood, adult life, who expounded on marriage, child rearing, family life, who at ninety, with a terminal illness, said, ‘I just can’t believe I’m so old! I don’t feel old.’” (2)
I think the farm implicates also the Old Mennonite way, although it was not necessarily so. Both wore their most negative face in stepmother, die mem, who had none of the light and air of either the Bechtels or the Macks. She was the unenlightened Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite, uncomfortable with English, with dogmatic and strong opinions about custom, right and wrong, and enforced them on the only person she could, her step daughter. Besides that, it comes with the territory, she was not affectionate, spoke no encouraging words to “Annie,” “your hair is pretty,” or “you look nice in that dress.”
Necessity demanded she communicate her skills to Anna, but a little punitively when all was said and done. Henry, diplomat and judge, sole arbiter of disputes, gave a little here and a little there. The most celebrated case was the dress Anna had made that die mem felt not plain enough. “Anna’s father was called to arbitrate loud discussion over Annie’s worldly notions as demonstrated by her fancy dress.” Henry’s decision, saving the appearances, was that she could wear it, but not to church.
Habermann’s Prayer
There were a lot of old books left in that attic that keep telling tales. A dual language German-English translation of Habermann’s Prayers (1873) is initialed in pencil on the second front free endpaper, “AM,” that is, Anna Mack. If we assume the inscribed date of another book found there, Christian Spiritual Conversation (1897), as the time Anna also was reading these Prayers, that is, the year she joined the church, and note that one page is especially dog eared (103), that would make Anna 17, half way through her sentence of eight years.
On this dog eared page, “prayer of a child,” we see a girl beset with difficulty, wrestling with her stepmother, trying to subdue herself to the good:
“Give me an obedient heart that I many patiently obey, serve and show myself obliging and ready to do every thing which they desire, that is not contrary to the will of God, nor at variance with my soul’s salvation, so that I may receive their blessing and live a long and pleasant life. Protect me against sin and evil society, so that I may not provoke and grieve my parents with hatred, sadness, unfriendliness, contempt, disobedience and stubbornness, so that I may not bring upon myself here on earth both their and thy curse….”
Her biographer picks up the thread for us.
"Annie had to fight her way. Her mother died when she was five. Her new mother objected to too much trimming on the dress. Too worldly. But when stepmother had a cyst removed from her back on the kitchen table on the farm by the doctor, it was Anna who assisted, participated in the whole operation.”
Life always had a lot to bear for Anna. She was taken out of such school as there was at the end of 6th grade. “The terms were short, often the teacher of the two room school was a farmer who could teach only in winter and early summer when spring planting was finished and harvests not yet begun.” (7) Anna milked the cows. Anna did the dishes, but “wanted to discover the world that lay outside her own narrow environment, inhabited by people who always wore beautiful clothes, lived in elegant warm homes and never milked cows, emptied chamber pots or cleaned the chimneys of kerosene lamps.”
Anna sounds at times like an indentured daughter. “At an early age Anna decided that she wanted to “find people of more culture and education.” Needless to say, the schafige frau (industrious woman) did not approve of this search for refinement.
By the time she was 11 two more boys had been born. “Always there was washing and ironing, water heated on a wood fire, clothes scrubbed on a board in a wooden tub, rinsed, wrung by hand and hung outdoors to freeze into strange shapes in winter or wrap around the clothes line in the March winds. Bedding and underwear were used just as they came from the line, but shirts and dresses and the long muslin petticoats must be smoothed by flatirons heated on the wood stove. Even in summer the fire had to be kept burning briskly to keep the irons hot. And the cooking! Breakfast must be substantial, the cows had been milked, the horses fed and the milk cans filled, ready to take to the creamery before Henry and the hired man came in to eat.”
Retelling
While outwardly this life sounds a little rough, in its telling repeatedly over the
years it probably got rougher, especially in the imagination of the daughter Elizabeth to whom die mem was “sour faced, narrow minded, rigid, very plain.” She would naturally be indignant at any perceived mistreatment of her mother. Harbored a long time, this has more than a little to do with her rejections of the Dutch way she herself never knew.
“This picture of Pennsylvania Dutch farm life in the 1890’s was probably common to many other parts of the rural United States. There was one important difference. In New England, women were realizing the need to be educated; the woman suffrage movement was gaining ground. Among the plain people, there was only one sphere for women, ‘Kinder, Kich un Karich’ – children, kitchen and church…at twelve Anna finished her formal education and the part of her life she enjoyed most.”
There seems to be an important link in a chain here that we should not miss, that is, that the daughter held a kind of unacknowledged grudge against the farm and peasant injustices reported by her mother. Even though they were not probably reported just so, the implications would be clear. You could not do what you wanted, you had to do what you were told. And this produced the most fiercely independent mind possible in a family of independent minds anyway. The structural implications just kept getting stronger as the details piled up.
“For the next nine years Annie spent six days of the week in a round of tasks that today would seem like mindless drudgery. First the cows must be milked, and this Annie hated. Getting out of a warm bed and dressing in an unheated room in the dark was bad enough, but going to the barn and sitting on a milking stool was even worse. Worst of all were the rare occasions when she dozed and the cow became restive and kicked over the milk bucket. This would bring a reprimand from her father and a tirade in Pennsylvania Dutch from her step mother.”
So Elizabeth’s image of the Pennsylvania Dutch becomes pretty negative, not just from the repeated details, the tirades, the drudgery, but from the language itself, which is just about what Ben Franklin meant. Annie would “carry the ‘zehn uhr stuck,’ [to the workers in the field], just like the modern coffee break, though often it was only a pail of cold water ands some rather dry crumb cake.”
The Romantic
All this and more occupied Anna outwardly, but as we know the Mennonites juxtapose the outward and the inward, as does practically everybody. Inwardly, Anna was an incurable optimist and a romantic. Later in life she deeply regretted not getting an engagement ring, but when her suitor, would be husband, skidded his horse to a stop at her door she was thrilled. At the time of which we are speaking, “one summer, Annie carried a pail of milk to a neighboring farm every day. Barefooted, as befitted a teen age girl, she was always ashamed lest a prince in disguise, riding past on a white horse should see her without shoes.” The admission of the factual-realist-phenomenologist, would-be physician, non folk artist daughter is just as telling: “It never occurred to me to ask my mother where she had heard about princes on white horses, but it was probably a story remembered from one the precious school readers.’ Certainly romanticism is hard to understand.
Leaving the Farm
The rough manuscript gives many other details of farm life, foods, going to the
plain church, “no organ or piano, no decoration of any kind,” the plain wooden benches, long visits after church, the abbreviated social life, but after nine years, and anyway at age 21 you were free. So the summer of 1901 Anna inherited some money from Mary Longacre Bechtel and moved to Philadelphia to apprentice herself to a tailor. “Anna and several other girls were taught women’s clothing construction…there were no zippers, no miracle fabrics, each seam had to be pressed, each tiny hook and eye carefully placed and sewn with small but firm stitches. The sewing machine was operated by a treadle, there probably was not even a ceiling fan in that day.”
The farm did not last long after Anna left.. Her stepmother was not in good health. Anna returned at some point to help out at her father’s plea. By 1906 the farm had been sold and the whole family moved to the city. Anna married 20 December of that year.
Anna and Elizabeth
Anna’s family, Bechtels, Longacres, Stauffers, Macks, were pastors, teachers, hymnists, musicians, artisans and folk scholars, that is they were folk intellectuals. Elizabeth Bechtel’s death much diminished these influences in the short term in Anna’s life, not only in her reading and thinking. The loss of her mother echoed and echoed, substituted as it was in Anna’s mind and in her daughter Elizabeth’s too with the unattractive Pennsylvania Dutch traits of her step mother.
Thus Anna’s literary remains are sparse. She had few books growing up. Henry’s Ledger mentions a few schoolbooks, but no fairy tales, but she was a born romantic. Aside from the catechisms above there is only an Appletons’ Third Reader, dated Oct 28, 1889.
But birth is irresistible. Anna expressed her hunger for the life of the mind later in the books she got her daughters. Arguably they tell the story of what she thought she missed. She could not have been more proud when she complained she had lost her little girl at age two when she began to read, nor done any more to have fostered all imaginative delights in her. New books were added to the house, the very ones Anna never had. Their inscriptions show that at age 5, December, 1915, Cinderella came at Christmas. According to her daughter this may be the single most important metaphor in Anna’s imagination. Also at Christmas, age 7, came Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but Anna’s attempts to nurture this kind of imagination in Elizabeth were thwarted by that rational mind, what she has dubbed “realism.”
Alice’s Wonderland fell on fallow ground where William Osler would have flourished. In later years Elizabeth read autobiographies, Malamud’s The Fixer with pleasure, liked any new translation of the Aeneid, Tolstoy, Dickens. But both she and her mother were satisfied they had done their part. Wahren Christenthum and Die Wandelnde Seele were bedded down in that attic waiting to be recovered.
Prayer for Strength
Presumably it is obvious that without one life the quality of many subsequent lives would not have been the same. Neither would this memoir exist. That was the import of a prayer for strength Anna gave in 1911 when the one year old folk genius nearly died.
For someone who didn’t want to be a nurse, Anna got plenty of practice. And any thing she learned she was grateful for especially in that summer when she nursed her first daughter back from death of the “summer complaint.”
“The doctor came to the house every day, but after a week the baby had not improved. Anna saw him looking into his black bag at the rows of medicine bottles as though he could not decide which one to open. She realized that the young doctor had reached the limit of his professional expertise. That night Anna prayed for strength to give up this child whom she loved so dearly. Next morning, the doctor returned with a new medicine. Slowly the baby improved though she was now thin and pale. By summer’s end she was once again the plump happy child she had been. The rest of Anna’s long life was a witness to the faith that came through that experience” (17-18).
This sounds awfully dependent, these stories of people who surrender in the face of insurmountable obstacles, praying for strength to give up a child. But it is dependent, and if that is bad why did the doc come back in the morning with a cure, why does the baby recover with or without the cure? Unfortunately we cannot say it is just luck or piety cooked up for the occasion, it’s just too important. When your daughter or son is saved you don’t go around mumbling. You rejoice. It doesn’t do much good to cite all the children who died just to refute this one that lived. Life trumps death in every case, especially when that life is such a partisan issue as to be the muse of a work about herself, which in turn saw its own sacrifice, its own surrender. Surrender for surrender, how is that a way to proceed? So the one year old also sacrificed at 30 because she loved her mother and maybe a way of life, even a level of being, more than herself. A shocking statement and value, everybody giving up all the time. Life surrenders to life and to death. That’s the folk way of honoring the living and the dead. Who cares about justice? What we care about is love.
So Anna’s love reached out in surrender and her daughter was healed. Go to a bookstore people.
Dolls
Whenever you give your life in any part for someone else or something else, as you’re always doing anyway after you grow up, it tends to come back to you. That is, you didn’t do it for yourself, but that very motive may make the act transcendent, any mother knows this. All the folk know it.
So a lot of Anna’s work only gets remembered because it summoned implications of other things. “Underwear, blouses, dresses, even coats when the children were small, all came from the busy hands and sewing machine of our mother,” does not do justice to it. But not just children’s clothes, doll clothes. But it was especially the dolls, made to give her daughter, made to satisfy her own lost longing too, a kind of memory of her own mother.
“Anna remembered her mother as a rather large woman with beautiful auburn hair. She remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift” ( 6). And that was all the memory she had of her at age 5 when her mother died.
Little of Anna’s constant creations remain and they would have been unnoticed now but for the chance remark that occurred when I was trying to provoke my informant into examining her own developed intuition.
She had begun to relate how she could perceive feelings at an early age, practically from birth, and offered evidence from what she called “the worst Christmas” of her life, at age 4.
Mother Anna had had but one doll, “she remembered the doll and cradle that had been a birthday or Christmas gift,” but the family lived in more than a little poverty, and she never had another. “Perhaps this year she would get a doll for Christmas! But no, it was only an orange, a couple of clear toy candies and a much needed pair of shoes.” Anna of course purposed to remedy this with her daughter, so Elizabeth had dozens of dolls. But at this point the “realist” interrupted her narrative to point out that as a four year old however, "dolls were dolls, not real children." No maternal transference for her! But Anna went to work with much purpose and ingenuity and made the kind of folk doll that would stop an auction today.
Mother Of All Dolls
Neighbor Jenny worked in Strawbridge's fur department and had access to scraps of fur. I was never told what the body of the doll was made of, but Anna and Jenny made this grand doll of all dolls life-size, dressed her up and sat her in a little rocker with a black velveteen coat, a hat and scarf with white fur trimming and a little white muff with two black tails; the mother of all folk dolls, today worth thousands.
But the muff and scarf were wrapped separately, to show how large the doll was. When the child opened the wrapping she mistook the muff as though it was for her and because she couldn’t "get my chubby fist in that little muff!" began to wail. Do you hear the Dutch prejudice in “chubby?” Imagine competing with your own Christmas present.
But the wail induced the mother's tears and Anna too began to cry, which was the point of the story. The daughter at ninety four remembers that at four she thought that it wasn’t right to make your mother cry and stopped. Anna never knew her daughter had had this epiphany, not that she was ignorant of her little Dutch prodigy. Had Elizabeth become the first female surgeon at Women’s Medical Center she would no doubt have boasted that she was a peasant surgeon.
Anna not only made dozens of dolls for her daughter, she continued the practice long after. The ladies of her church made dolls to sell at their annual bazaar. In a photograph taken in 1955 in Anna’s home at least 12 dolls are arrayed for “a private pre-bazaar view at the home of Mrs. Anna Reiff.” The trunks in the attic also contained various forms of doll clothes in finished and unfinished states, as well as some old dolls.
Gardens
Another folk aspect not to be missed, Anna was honored in 1970 at a Woman’s meeting for her life long efforts at gardening and sharing her successes: “she has always had special results in whatever she was growing – whether children, African Violets for her window sills, begonias for porch boxes, or forcing hyacinths in the winter from January until Easter…she would give us leaves from her finest African Violets…one can remember the dolls she dressed and the aprons…another project was the shoulderettes – thirty of them for Presbyterian Hospital and dresses for T. M. Thomas center.
She made quilts for each child and for herself. These were kept and doled out in the breakup of the house. Quilts, dolls, clothes, food, preserves, gardens outside, African violets inside in full bloom on every window sill: Anna’s folk works.
Leaving the Old
Letters were an important part of Anna’s life, not that she kept them. She held the notion that their purpose ceased when read and disposed of them. So she continued to have no significant literary remains. Entirely folk, all her doings were oral, after dinner in her home she would talk absorbingly about the people she had known. What remains of this is the above folk manuscript. Anna did keep decorated postcards, a kind of early Christmas card, sent to the family in the early 1900’s from other family members. Sometimes they have only an address and no writing at all. Folk think the folk are eternal, always remembered and that has been true a long time, so while she kept an old photo album of the late 1800’s, none of the photographs are identified. Nor could her daughter identify any of them at the end of her day. They must be of her greater family however, Bechtels and Macks.
The Hat
The most important letter Anna ever received was from her Uncle Andrew in 1914, no doubt in German, to the effect that if she came to take the yearly communion at Bally (Hereford) she must wear a bonnet.
This complete narrative of this event is omitted from BFF, except to say that in 1897 when “Anna joined the church, local custom did not require the wearing of the prayer covering and bonnet. A plain, untrimmed hat was acceptable, and the prayer covering could be put on just for Sunday worship.
It must be remembered how warm an attachment Anna had for her uncle Andrew and aunt “Lisbet.” “For the rest of their lives Anna felt closer to this uncle and aunt that to the rest of her relatives” (6).
Different people had differing views of this. For one, the Mennonite division of 1847 involved a kind of dress code. The proponent there, Oberholtzer, believed in his freedom. The Old Mennonites believe in the “doctrine of simplicity and separation.” People on both sides had individual takes. . Oberholtzer would not wear his coat, thought he had a right not to wear the plain coat (Ruth, 245), although it is not quite as simple as that. His choice became a symbol of liberty against the Mennonite high doctrine of mutual submission.
Noah says, considering the whole spectrum from 1847 to 1914. “Hats were banished, not altogether without the loss of some members….” “During the years since then some of those who had refrained from taking communion because of this restriction have been reconciled to the church again. Just lately a few have come back to the joy of the church in general. Joy…because the church has been spared from breaking away from her doctrine of simplicity and separation” (7).
The doctrine of simplicity and separation was the main thing.
There is a background for this kind of thing among the Mennonites. In 1909-1911 definite decisions had been made about how to dress. “At every conference session the question of the woman’s covering was belabored. Fancy hats were more and more common among the younger women” (Ruth, 425). So Anna, who had been attending the “new” First Mennonite in the city anyway, which was a lot closer to her home, conferred
with her husband and decided not to go to Hereford.
Not to go to communion is a big statement among Mennonites. It was held only once a year. At least the week prior the Mennonite preparation for the event is more elaborate than most Protestant services, a very personal service where everyone in the congregation attempts to reconcile themselves with everyone else. It is a little formulaic: “So far as I know I am at peace with everyone and everyone is with me and if not please come and tell me.” Refusing the bonnet would make that vow impossible. While she loved her uncle, who was speaking for the community, she chose the hat!
Admittedly sometime between 1897 and 1914 they had changed their rule on this, but by then it was a much older point of contention over whether the bishops and congregations did rule, this from Funk to Oberholtzer, hence the change was binding. The Rules and discipline of the Franconia Conference, revised as of July, 1933 state clearly that”…Sisters shall not wear hats” and “…if they would not comply, would have to be rejected” (Wenger, 433). Certainly these rules were not enforced universally, but how could you not see whether a woman wore a hat? “Pride in dress caused quite a bit of trouble in the church in those days “ (7
The influential precedent of such behavior in her grandfather Bechtel’s life could not have been lost upon Anna, how he had been engrafted to fill the gap left by Clemmer’s release in the Oberholtzer affair Maybe Anna too thought the coat/ bonnet laws a “human commandment.” (Ruth, 247) But we hear in all this insistence for personal liberty just the complaint preachers had made for 200 years about people making their own decisions in Pennsylvania.
She was no doubt caught between irresistible forces. On the one hand her Uncle and the past and on the other the force of modernism and all that entails. “There were a few, as might be expected, who revolted against the tyranny of the farm, as they were pleased to call it, even before the eighteen-nineties, but they were exceptions. Now, [1929] fully half of the young folks, boys and girls alike, are gone to town…” (Weygandt, 7). Anna left in 1901. For the Old Mennonites these issues impacted worldliness. Noah Mack says, “he had no compromise on separation from the world tho even sixty and more years ago hats were worn by some of the young sisters in various parts of the church in the conference district where he labored. This was true in his own congregation” (7).
.” The bonnet vs. the hat as always was a sticking point among Mennonites.
It adds some poignancy to Anna’s apprenticeship as a tailor that she left the Old Mennonites precisely over the issues of dress that caused the Mennonite division of 1848.
In the end Anna made the decision for subsequent generations not to be what she was, whether farmer, plebian or Mennonite, forced her children out into either open conflict or conformity in the war between truth and the world, why the giants had been left behind in the promised land in the first place, to prove that because the law of God is in their heart their feet do not slip. So they slipped and were rescued, slipped up, stood up.
Death of a Husband
Anna wanted to be free, so it was hard to bear the constraint which she did when her husband died, leaving her dependant on her father-in-law, Jacob, for her husband had a large investment in Heister and Reiff that his father owned.
Old Jacob had been a storekeeper in the world of Hereford and Clayton and Reading before 1900. One of the reasons Anna chose his son for a husband was because he was not a farmer. She was severing ties forever with that world. Yes Jacob had a reputation, was reported as sharp dealer. There were implications that he couldn’t keep a
location for too long. In at least one of these alleged cases he has been proved innocent.
Over time the attempt to understand Jake has produced a realization that his daughter in law didn’t like him any more than he liked her, but showed it in more pleasant ways, always inviting him and his wives to family events. Secretly in their beds they all thought his son Howard was dominated. The party line ever since has been that Jake, as she has listed in her notes, was a “big shot, unfeeling, dominating, jealous, sharp trader, cheap skate, cigar smoker, reprobate in early life.” She could have added “bad influence” since her father, like Jake, began to smoke a cigar a day at age 40! In some sense Howard’s early death is attributed to his father, who either worked him to death or caused his heartburn: “in later years, Howard attributed his chronic indigestion to those hasty and interrupted meals which were a way of life when the family lived behind the store” (4). But now of course we can say it was hardening of the arteries.
A lack of freedom loomed all around them, most seriously from economic circumstances. Father, Howard R., died at 46 without life insurance. Old Mennonites, she says, didn’t believe in insurance, much the way 18th century fire companies didn’t believe in putting out fires since obviously the fire was a signal from above identifying evildoers. The fire company was there to protect the neighbors, hose down their properties, separating the just from the unjust by water. Howard R. did take out a life insurance policy after his first two children were born, a $7000 policy on the quiet. Just in time.
Her mother chose her father chiefly on the basis that he had left the proletariat on the way to business school, just as, at the same time, her mother left the farm and sought him as a husband. Elizabeth’s brother graduated Penn State and went up the executive beanstalk. Her maverick sister wrote limericks, the first text for minority slow learners. But she studied art and longed to be a doctor. So they all escaped the farm, even if business was equally stultifying.
Inferences have been made and reports of memories given. She knew the mind of this father who died at 46. She could talk to him, was proud that he could add columns with both hands while talking on two different phones, and that he sent left-handed postcards. She hugely understates the pain of his loss when she was 17. He was a vigorous looking man, somebody other men took seriously, piercing eyes, but he was just sitting down to read his own philosophy under the palm at the end of the mind when he was stricken.
Old Jake
If you offer a sympathetic ear and a disembodied presence, as I do by phone, you eventually wish you had the power to forgive sins, for it is much like a confessional. She’s been thinking that she shouldn’t have hated grandfather Jake, even though he had a domineering disposition, wanted to be in control. He was youngest, she says, and the youngest often feel like they “don’t quite make the grade.”
Widowerhood had taken Jake as well as Henry Mack, except that it kept on taking Jake. From Jake’s point of view when he got married at 21 everything was rosy. He had a son, but his wife got TB and died. He remarried and his second son died, followed later by the death of his wife. He remarried a third time and again an infant son died. Out of this remark comes the realization for the first time that what Jake said to his grandson Howard about his mother remarrying when her Howard had died was only a replay of the expectations of his own life. He’d lost his wife and he remarried, not too extraordinary that he’d think Anna would too. This understanding is way too late.
Of course she admits her mother, Anna, was independent, had all along wanted time without Howard’s father present, although she invited him to all the family dinners with all the others: (maternal) Grandfather Henry, stepmother Sarah Ann, Jacob L., and wife Willomena. The two middle of these people were not Anna’s favorites.
Jacob L. bought his son Howard a car in 1917, a 7 passenger Buick touring car, with stick-on curtains that hung on pegs. The proviso was that Howard had to drive Jake around. On these excursions men rode shotgun and spit out the window. Now you see why I walked on tiptoe around these ladies, they had legitimate grievances. Boorish behavior at best. Jake sat in the front while Anna and the children, or Wilhelmina, Jake’s second wife, sat in the back. Jake would light a cigar but not smoke it. He chewed it.
Directing me to tell her all my troubles as I lie on the analyst’s couch, but then continuing her own saga, she says that Jake couldn’t grasp his first and only surviving son’s sudden death in 1927. Filled with grief he wanted to “kick the cat,” i.e., lash out in grief at something or someone. That turned out to be Anna, she feels. Jake went a little wild in his fantasies, thought he was going to have his grandson Howard run his business. Instead his grandson gave him the business.
I’m wondering how in the world I’m going to pay for all this insight at the current rates:
“It was the time and the place of his saying that angered Howard. When I needed money (at the College of Design) I went to see Jake [and hated it, she doesn’t say]. He would show me some of the things he had, he gave me some old pottery.”
You notice though that she’s not giving the old pottery away, at least not yet. Then suddenly, ironically, she commits herself to that old institution of life, for life, and gives it all up at once, in toto, except for a chair, a bookcase and a testament of acceptance. I expect Billy Budd to come leaping out. Mennonites either fight to the death or give up the ghost.
I Cried With Her
At the demise of the accused misanthrope diabetic Jacob L. in 1929, Anna reverted again to the girl on the farm solving problems, brought the bed down the stairs, wept with the wife at his condition, did the dirty work in a pinch:
“He sat in the rocker with his foot on the table and he had sat there all day unable
to move, suffering agony with that leg, sleeping most of the time from dope which the doctor gave to relieve him, moaning with pain as soon as he was awake. Grandma cried and for a bit I cried with her as the enormity of the situation dawned upon me. I tell you I never missed Dad more, so I pulled off my coat and hat and decided to stay till we got him to bed, but alas, he could not get upstairs, so I and the housekeeper took the bed apart and brought it down (took the table apart). We even had to pull him into the front room in his rocker till we put up the bed.”
No examples of Jake’s dominance of his son are given, unless it’s the interruptions at dinner, it is just assumed, like her question of Jake’s second wife, Wilhelmina, “how did she cope with her husband’s domineering nature?” (5) along with the anecdote that she died of pneumonia after scrubbing the cellar floor on her knees in winter. Like one of Faulkner’s characters, “her life had been worn out by the crass violence of an underbred outlander” (Knight’s Gambit, 6). If Jake had tried a palace coup
he would have found the army, navy and air force against him.
She interprets inferential evidence of grandfather Jake from photographs: “he is serious, with his full lower lip thrust out aggressively, and rimmed with a scraggly beard.” But she also admits, “my personal memories from childhood and early youth are colored by my mother’s stories and analysis of his character in later years.” Her mother had been much offended by the masculine in the form of four high spirited brothers of her childhood. In adulthood the daughter remembers that her uncle was crude, her father as being dominated by his father and the grandfather was worse.
Forgiveness in Faith
At the end of his life, my old dad, grandson Howard, had told the story of Jake’s peccadillo so often I knew it well. I always listened for slight changes, nuances of expression. One evening in 1993, the first time I took the trip to Philadelphia with son Aeyrie, then seven, all light and joy, he told it for the last time. The day after his father had died he and his grandfather were in the garage. Jake was just leaving, but turned at the last moment and said, “don’t worry, your mother will be remarried soon.” The nineteen year old ordered him off the property! At the time of this last retelling we were standing in the middle bedroom looking at Jake and Kate’s framed wedding certificate. Dad was 85, his voice was raised and he was sputtering a little. I put my arm around his shoulders. “Dad, what do you say you forgive this man? Can you do that? Can you forgive him in faith?”
“Yes.”
Works Cited
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. “To Elizabeth / From Mother / Dec. 25, 1917.”
Christian Spiritual Conversation…with an Appendix. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1892.
Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper. And other Stories. NY: A.L. Burt. “Dec. 1915. Elizabeth Reiff.”
William Faulkner. Knight’s Gambit. London: Chatto & Windus. 1951
MORNING AND EVENING / PRAYERS / FOR EVERYDAY OF THE WEEK/BY / /DR JOHN HABERMANN. Philadelphia: IG. Kohler, 1873.
Gerhard Roosen. Christliches Gemuths-Gesprach. Lancaster: John Baer’s Sons, 1869.
John L. Ruth. Maintaining the Right Fellowship. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1984.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference. Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.
Elizabeth Young. Best Foot Forward. Manuscript biography of Anna. Winter, 1982
