Good Genes

Between divorces and remarriages in our family, I ended up with five grandmothers. The one I called Nanny Liz was Betty to her friends, although my mom addressed her only as Mother. She lived in Parkersburg, too, in a cinderblock house with wood paneling and olive shag carpet laid over a concrete slab. She had a husband—her third—who was known as Papa Bill, and a dog named Boy, an incontinent toffee-colored chihuahua that trembled whenever we petted him.

During my childhood, Nanny Liz moved only once, and we always lived within a few miles of her. Willowy and platinum blonde, she wore layers of necklaces and thin metal bracelets, with rings on several fingers. She owned a long rack of inexpensive but elegant clothes and ran the jewelry counter at Montgomery Ward.

As a young woman with a beautiful voice and the ability to play any song on a piano after hearing it once, Nanny had hoped to become a nightclub singer. She’d abandoned my mother to be raised by my great-grandparents along the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains in the middle of West Virginia.

Born in the nineteenth century, they were fifty-eight and sixty-three when they took my mother in. Strictness verged on a way of life for them, but they loved her without reservation. The older she got, the more she admired them, until her admiration had passed into almost religious devotion. She pointed to their long, upright, and self-sufficient lives, which continued until I was in elementary school and they were in their nineties. It was all due, my mother said, to having good genes.

Even early on, I understood that those genes must have traveled through Nanny Liz before they got to my mother or to me, but Nanny Liz hadn’t earned my mother’s admiration. Having given up on respectability sometime after her first husband but before my birth, she didn’t care about manners. With no need to be on my best behavior, I entered my grandmother’s house as if it were mine.

A compulsive chain-smoker, Nanny lived on antipasto, iced oatmeal cookies, and hard liquor. Papa Bill drank in his recliner facing the TV and liked company watching The Rockford Files. He regularly got a perm from his half-brother, who wound my grandfather’s hair into tight curls at his shop, Mr. Paul’s Hair Salon.

“Don’t drink anything but milk from the fridge,” my mother warned me—an instruction that baffled me for years, until I realized that every other liquid in the house had been spiked with alcohol.

“How long will you stay? Will you be back soon?” my grandmother asked when we arrived, hugging us with a tight grip, her long nails flashing red. I could feel my mother tensing up beside me.

Nanny Liz smoked so continuously that she sometimes lit a second cigarette without realizing she had only set the first one down for a moment on the edge of the ashtray—which meant she had to smoke two at once.

A nicotine fog floated from waist height to head level in the living room and kitchen. At twilight, when the sun’s rays no longer made their way through the sliding doors to the backyard and the room began to darken, the smoke turned luminescent.

Everything from the wooden captain’s chairs to the counters and walls was covered in a thin film of tar. Whenever we stayed all afternoon, the smog sparked headaches, manifesting first in my brother, who covered his eyes with his hands and spent the rest of the visit outside.

One summer, Nanny Liz and Papa Bill took out a loan and bought a motor home, a building on wheels almost too wide for any lane of a normal road. Not long after they got it, they picked up my brother and me to go on a weekend trip to a state park two hours outside town.

My grandparents started drinking as soon as we hit the road. With a cigarette clinging to one side of his mouth, my grandfather paced himself at the wheel by consuming only beer, working his way through a six-pack can by can. Nanny Liz sat at the built-in dinette booth, an ashtray in front of her, nursing a glass of liquor.

Once she thought Papa Bill wasn’t listening anymore, she would tell stories about articles she’d read in the Weekly World News or National Enquirer. Her particular interest was in medical advances that doctors didn’t want you to find out about. She knew all about colloidal silver and laetrile treatments for cancer that you could get in Mexico. I had no idea what laetrile was, or nearly any of the other topics she discussed, but they were signs of a mysterious wider world.

“We used to sell ocelots at Montgomery Ward,” she told me.

“Real ocelots?” I asked.

“The pet department was at the back,” she said. “But then they made them endangered.”

Papa Bill, who had overheard, called out from the driver’s seat, saying, “Betty, you’re full of shit.”

“No, you are. You’re full of shit,” she said, then turned to me with some new piece of information, conveyed in a tone she reserved for scientific discoveries and gossip.

It was less than a hundred miles to the state park, but near the end of the six-pack, my grandfather started to swerve and nod. He looked for the first wide shoulder, turning the wheel with both hands to veer off the road and take a nap. He shifted into park, turned the ignition off, then passed out pitched backward against the headrest.

A gentle muttering followed. My brother and I crowded closer to the front, settling in the passenger seat and on the floor next to him to hear what he was saying. We deciphered whole words—motor, canister, spare parts—eventually realizing he was reliving his day job at Sears. My dreams were about disaster and escape, but he was dreaming about selling home appliances.

While he talked with his imaginary customer, we interrupted with questions: How long was the warranty? When could we get it delivered? When he mumbled real answers, we turned away, collapsing in silent laughter.

As we carried on, our questions grew more ridiculous, confusing him. My grandmother eyed us with disappointment and woke him up, putting an end to our experiment.

 ***

Papa Bill’s sister—Sister Marie Antoinette—had taken a vow of silence, living at DeSales Heights convent on top of a hill in my hometown for more than thirty years. In all my time there for Montessori classes, I’d never seen her. I visited the ornate altar, the stained-glass window, the courtyard and garden with its shrine to the Virgin Mary, but not the nuns who were cloistered. I pictured them praying and sitting alone in attic cells, above it all.

In my mother’s telling, Sister Marie Antoinette and Papa Bill had been raised in a brothel, and their family had been part of the Irish mob in town. Sister had wanted to be a nun from a young age, but her mother sent her to Europe at eighteen, so that she could see the world for a year before she committed to leaving it. Papa Bill had gone away to college at Notre Dame, where he’d spent a year as a roommate of Al Capone’s son.

Was any of this true? All of them are dead now, but my great-aunt's obituary describes her taking her first vows at age nineteen. My grandfather, a few months younger than Capone’s son, went to Notre Dame the same year. He later returned to Parkersburg but, according to my mother, refused to work in the family business, just as Capone’s son had.

Because we weren’t related by blood to Papa Bill, my mother told these stories to me without hesitation. His link to organized crime didn’t reflect badly on our genetic potential, and in time, he became an object lesson in how hard it was, even if you wanted to do the right thing, to overcome an inferior family and make something of yourself.

 ***

On occasional weekends, my mother would drop me off at Nanny’s house alone. Nanny seemed to know that my mother disapproved of her, and as a result, was somehow more herself whenever my mother wasn’t around. Her behavior wasn’t fundamentally different but became less restrained. And she drank more.

One Saturday I went to spend the night, and Nanny taught me how to sew a fitted skirt. Before Montgomery Ward, she’d worked at Singer and knew how to stitch together beautiful clothes, with or without a pattern.

Wrapping a bolt of crimson cotton around me and pinning it at the widest part of my hips, she left extra for the seam. After cutting a single piece of fabric in a straight line for the body of the skirt, she had me sit at the machine and make a tube out of it by stitching an angled line up the middle of what would become the back.

“You’re practically done,” she assured me, busy with a glass of Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other, reading glasses dangling from a chain around her neck.

She coached me on how to pin and dart the top of the tube to taper the waist. I struggled to duplicate the ease with which she finished the first dart. It took her only minutes to stitch in the zipper while I measured and cut the waistband under her direction. While I sewed it on, she found an ancient packet with two hook-and-eye closures for me to attach by hand to finish the top of the skirt. When I tried it on, she pinned the bottom hem for me to stitch myself. The whole project took all of two hours.

Nanny had a junk room piled with papers, files, and bulky, obsolete electronics. I sat down to read old issues of her magazines, intrigued but confused by the articles, which seemed neither real stories nor real news: “Exorcism Horror.” “Three Survive UFO Attack.” “Man Carries Unborn Twin inside His Head.”

We had the rest of the evening to go, and I delighted in the prospect of staying up and watching late-night shows after my grandparents fell asleep. The only drawback was that I knew Nanny Liz and Papa Bill would bicker, because they argued all the time.

The drunker he was, the more he wanted to correct nearly everything she said, and to do it with scorn, as if it were a matter of morals or honor. The drunker she got, the less likely she was to put up with a lecture.

I didn’t witness what set them off that night, but I noticed something was wrong when he left the living room for the kitchen.

“Where did you get that idea?” he said.

“It’s true,” she answered, without otherwise explaining herself.

“Kiss my ass,” he said.

“No, you kiss my ass.”

“I said to kiss my rosy, red asshole,” he said, wanting the last word.

By this point, my grandmother was enraged, but lacking the ability to improvise obscenity, she could do little more than parrot his words back at him.

“Well, you kiss my rosy, red, hairy asshole,” she yelled then went to the bathroom and slammed the door, which had swollen in the damp air and could not fully close, so it delivered only a dull thud. They were the worst words she could think of in the moment. She wasn’t mean enough to be vicious, but she’d married enough husbands by then to know that she wouldn’t be taking a vow of silence.

They didn’t frighten me; unlike at home, I understood there was no threat of violence with them. But I listened in amazed horror. My mother had never once cursed in front of me. The closest she would come, when absolutely furious, was saying the word “spit” in anger. My grandparents’ arguments were an education.

Visits with Nanny made me wonder if good genes might work like windshield wipers, if they were things you had to turn on. The older I grew, the more suspect my mother’s theory of genetics came to seem.

It was a legend known to even children in our family that my mother’s father was the real champion drinker among our forebears—and that he taught Nanny Liz to like liquor during the brief window in which they were married. But when I asked my mother if they were alcoholics, she would not say a word against her father, whom she always referred to as Daddy. And about her mother she said only, “If anyone with normal genes drank and smoked as much as she does, they would already be dead by now.”

She was never anything less than kind to my grandmother, but Nanny Liz remained an object lesson in how not to live a life. Sometimes in the car after a visit, she couldn’t contain her judgment.

“That woman is not my mother. I didn’t have a mother.”

She claimed to have forgiven Nanny for abandoning her as a baby, but not for continuing to set such a terrible example for her, for me, for humanity.

After Papa Bill died, Nanny ran the campsite rentals at Mountwood State Park outside town, managing payments, cleaning the shower house, and socializing. Years later, after my mother finally left my stepfather, Nanny introduced her to the man who would become her third husband. At that point my mother had caught up to my grandmother in the sheer number of marriages and had one less arena in which she could sit in judgment.

In her last decade, Nanny became a lay minister for St. Margaret Mary’s, wheeling around Parkersburg in her little car to deliver communion to the sick and homebound. When the daughters from her first husband’s second marriage entered the Church as adults, she was their godmother.

For reasons I’ve forgotten, we held her 80th birthday party a few months early at the Knights of Columbus hall. Before the real anniversary came, Nanny went into the hospital to get an abdominal aortic aneurysm repaired. After slicing her open for the procedure, the doctor realized the impossible challenge before him: whether due to age or a constant bath of alcohol and nicotine, her blood vessels were in tatters. There was little he could do, though he tried. She woke up from the procedure but did not live long enough to return home. In her last hours, as she was dying, she looked around the room and greeted the angels she saw descending.

Even after my grandmother had embraced a life of service, her first-born daughter could not quite forgive her early failures. Yet my mother never lost her conviction that we had good genes. An unshakable, even delusional expectation of living a more extraordinary life, of being more extraordinary than other people was the only thing she could seem to hold onto. It was a trait she, without realizing it, inherited from her own mother and paid a price for—a defect she passed on, for better and for worse, to me.

[You can read another story in this series about my West Virginia childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter in my introductory post.]