I once watched my gentle, white-haired grandmother browse through Last Exit to Brooklyn, the avidly obscene novel of life in the projects ca. 1960. When she had finished, Grandma put down the book and said with great dignity, “Well, when I was growing up there, Brooklyn was a very refined place.”
Now I have come across some evidence confirming that. On Grandma’s fourteenth birthday — December 25, 1901 — an aunt gave her an autograph book, which I’ve been looking through. Some three dozen of her school friends and cousins and assorted adults signed it, most of them adding an uplifting proverb or stock rhyme.
It is a pleasingly substantial object — diamond-shaped and ornate in the Victorian manner. The hard, shiny cover shows a neoclassical nymph in a one- shouldered dress, holding an urn as if to pour. The back cover is parti- colored green velvet, threadbare now. The contents are from another world.
The pervasive theme is friendship (To Anna: In the golden chain of Friendship, Regard me as a link. Lester Frank, Dec. 30, 1901). The tone is earnest, reverent, straight, with flashes of humor but a disconcerting near- total absence of irony. The wishes expressed here are for health and the prizes of the spirit.
Here’s as materialistic as the sentiments get: A little health, a little wealth, / A little house and freedom, / A few good friends for certain ends, / And little use to need them.
Here’s as saucy: Remember me and my good wishes / When you and he are washing dishes. Yours truly, Happy Gohooligan (Hazel W. Gruner) July 19, 1904.
Here’s as irreverent: You asked for something original. / Where shall I begin? / There’s nothing original in me / Except original sin.
More typical is the serious message Grandma’s mother wrote to her only child on the day she turned fourteen: Remember the will to do rightly, / If used will the evil confound; / Live daily by conscience, that nightly / Your sleep may be peaceful and sound. / In contest of right never waver, / Let thy honesty shape every plan, / And life will of paradise savor / If you do as near right as you can.
Even beyond the moralism, what seems furthest of all from the mental universe of the young teenagers I know is the sense of life as grave and potentially fraught with sorrow — and the intimations of mortality. The first entry, written in flawless copperplate by Grandma’s best friend, Bella Beck, is poignant: Ah! May your life, dear Anna, be / A dream from care and sorrow free; / May every joy that love can yield / Be to your gentle heart revealed; / May faith, and hope, and wisdom lead, / While o’er life’s trackless tide you speed, / Until the voyage of life is done, / And you eternal bliss have won.
Even in old age, Grandma kept Bella’s picture on her dressing table, loyal though the friendship was brief. Bella was buried in what would have been her wedding dress. She died of consumption at 19.
In some obvious ways, life was more precarious in those days than it is, say, for my Leonardo DiCaprio-smitten fourteen-year-old niece (another Anna). Back then, the necessity of steeling the young for adversity and girding them with realism about moral danger was generally agreed (Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe). I suspect the practice helped make Grandma strong.
After finishing high school, she became a librarian and worked at the Brooklyn Public Library for seven years. And she taught Sunday school in Chinatown. She always wanted to be a nurse, but her parents thought that wasn’t genteel.
Then after seven years’ deference to their wishes, she won their consent and registered at the Harlem School of Nursing. Eventually, she worked both as an independent nurse and on hospital staffs, attending births and deaths and all the dramas in between.
In the shadows of life you may need an umbrella. / May yours be upheld by a handsome young fellow. Grandma was in her thirties before she traded the secret dream of being a medical missionary in China for domesticity. With husband and children and a house in Bayside, her life assumed a conventional pattern. Always, though, a coherent world-view remained her anchor on the trackless tide — a religious world-view formed in her childhood, acknowledged by all the people she knew and reflected in these sing-song verses, so foreign now.
CLAUDIA WINKLER
