Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [6]
The dress stayed in a long, plaid cardboard box tied with twine on the top shelf of her closet at 142 East Seventy-first Street, the prewar building off Lexington Avenue that we moved to when I was three. It sat next to a portable green sewing machine and the hard case that held my father’s letters home from the war. I’d look up at the box sometimes and wonder, even though I already knew that the puffed sleeves, sweetheart neck, and fluffy, girlish lines were not for me. I wanted satin—a dress that looked like the nightgown of a 1930s movie star—and an ivory mantilla that trailed the floor. During the Depression, my Nebraska grandmother had eloped a month shy of her seventeenth birthday in a red traveling suit with a cloche hat, and this fascinated me—along with the fact that she was one of the only divorced people I knew.
When she was twenty-nine, my grandfather took whatever he could sell and left her with two kids and 320 acres of family homestead on South Pasture Creek. It was 1943. The land was worthless from drought and crop failure, the farmhouse would burn the next year, and she was a woman alone. But she worked hard and saved her money, and eventually she had a dress shop in town and a slew of admirers: the auctioneer for the county, the town solicitor, and the one she loved—a married man who took her dancing when the big bands came to town.
She held on to the land until she died, and by the time my brothers and I visited in the summers, she lived in town, leasing it to ranchers and alfalfa farmers. We always drove out there in her gold Oldsmobile, and when we reached the cottonwoods by the creek, she’d direct one of us to run and take down the barbed wire gate, hold it open as the car passed through, and then hook it back on the fence post so the cattle didn’t get out.
My grandmother walked with a pronounced limp, the result of a near-fatal car accident the year before I was born, but she’d point out the milkweed and the musk thistle or the face of a particularly forlorn calf she’d fallen for that spring. My grandfather had been dead for years, and she never mentioned him. My mother rarely did. Although a cousin might say something, it was always hush-hush, and no matter how much I prodded, she remained silent.
I became obsessed with old family pictures. Afternoon farm picnics, with straw boaters and white dresses, and slicked-haired men, stiff in their studio portraits with the hard paper frames. It was my mission; I didn’t want the faces to be lost. I’d cart the photos to the kitchen table, and while my grandmother smoked her Pall Malls, I’d scribble dates and names, whatever she remembered, in pencil on the back.
I found one picture—small and insignificant, with white matte borders—of a man on a big paint horse with a lasso in one hand and a bottle in the other. Even though it was blurry, I could make out the jaunty grin. “Is this him? Is this him, Grandma?” I was like a miner hitting pay dirt. She stared at the image for a long time, and although it wasn’t exactly a smile that crossed her face, it was enough. As I held my breath, she lowered her chin and made a small clicking sound at the side of her mouth, the way you do when you urge a horse to go faster. “Son of a bitch,” she said softly before returning to her cigarette.
My mother’s dress was brought down from the shelf three times—twice for cleaning and once, five years after my father died, when she moved out of the apartment that had been her home for thirty-five years and where she had raised us. The dress was the last thing packed. I stood on a piano stool and handed her the box. It was lighter than I remembered. She took it to the bed, careful of the broken edges, and when she opened it, she wept.
The Otto Kahn mansion stands at the corner of Ninety-first Street and Fifth Avenue, on the far reaches of Millionaires’ Row on New York’s Upper