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Gram’s Pinches

Joshua Adair

    When it comes to pinching, most grandmothers stick to cheeks or maybe even noses; mine preferred pills and paintings – and just about anything else she could carry off. A bona fide kleptomaniac who burned for what’s beautiful – and its power to possess – she stole as retribution against a world that repeatedly robbed her.
    As creative a coping method as it was, it damn near killed her – but not quite. At sixty-two a string of massive strokes – set off by the plethora of prescription drugs she’d been stealing and swallowing for decades – incapacitated her permanently. I was just ten at the time and already completely taken with the beautiful objects she idolized. Even then, I held no illusions about grandmotherly ideals or the inevitable rewards given for good behavior. Gram took what she could get because she had been gotten far too many times, like most mothers, caretakers, and home cooks.
    Gram was a giver – and a grabber. She would gladly gift me something glorious early any given Christmas or birthday morning — and then steal it back (unobserved) before bedtime.
    My mother found her mania infuriating and embarrassing. Gram would visit and leave with a bagful of loot. Whatever she lifted would then have magically integrated into her décor when next we visited. Even from my childish vantage her behavior seemed more like a farce manufactured by Carol Burnett than real life.
    Who brazenly steals stuff and then displays it for all to see?
    My grandmother, that’s who. A lot of people chalked her erratic – not to mention painfully obvious – behavior up to surviving her days in an altered state, others to stupidity. In retrospect, I think they stole her thunder – and completely misunderstood her misanthropy.
    Gram was vivacious, outgoing, and utterly unpredictable. Other grandparents were staid and stodgy (including my paternal pair); Gram lived outrageously and no one and nothing could successfully stop her – except for drugs, that is.
    No one knows exactly when she started, but probably sometime in the 50s – like a lot of postwar housewives. I suspect it began around the time that her nephew and his mistress died by gunshots under mysterious circumstances. Her sister, his mother, often stayed with my grandparents. Valium was her constant companion, unsurprisingly, after the shock of Jack’s death swept up the entire community.
    Gram, the go-to gal for managing family tragedies, was tasked with saving her sister and trying to silence the scandal. Jack and his mistress – a prominent local dentist’s wife – had been found half-dressed and naked, respectively. Her months-old baby, whose paternity the tragedy brought into question, wailed in the next room when Marilyn’s brother arrived to discover his sister and Jack dead in the master bedroom.
    Or so they claimed – though even the most amateur of detectives could see huge holes in the story. Marilyn’s brother and husband, it turns out, were in the house alone for nearly an hour before calling the police. Jack – a member of the police force himself – was inexplicably portrayed in the local newspaper as an ex-cop even though his service revolver was the murder weapon. Other evidence further clarified that Jack had readied his car the day before for a trip.
    In short, what was sold as a murder-suicide by an unhinged soul was much more likely a couple who got caught trying to make an escape. But the dentist had powerful connections in the community – including at the newspaper – and his influence overpowered the evidence.
    Not long after his death, Jack’s mother, Dorothy, swallowed a fistful of Valium – and spilled the rest of the amber prescription bottle all over the floor. Gram found Dorothy just barely undead; the bottle and its scattered contents disappeared.
    Before long, things started to go missing everywhere Gram went.

***

    Born in 1923 to a recently impoverished family, Helen Elizabeth Porter was not the oldest, youngest, or even the dreaded middle child of her family. She was the penultimate Porter progeny – thirteen years younger than Dorothy the eldest – and that put her in a poor position.
    The Porters of Warren County roared into the 20s rich and then descended rather rapidly from the family that endowed Monmouth College to clipping its hedges and cleaning its water closets. They felt this fall keenly and taught Helen and her siblings that possessions were of the utmost importance in this world. Her father, in fact, spent most of his time recounting genealogies of the furniture and other finery they carried off their farm before its forfeiture.
    Most poignant, perhaps, were the fables he proffered about phantom furnishings they were forced to leave behind – those that vanished forever.
    Like so many aspects of the Porter family, how the money made off was a mystery. Their scandals were silenced as quickly as possible, usually so they could focus more fully upon great aunt so-and-so’s precious hand-painted parlor lamp or Great-Grandpa Porter’s 18-carat pocket watch. Household inventories replaced prayer books for them and listening to their litanies about Limoges or their raptures about R. S. Prussia proved truly transcendent.
    Anyone asserting absence of soulfulness in objects clearly never heard a proper Porter property paean.
    Unfortunately, these passions ultimately directly opposed their financial powers. They entered their Great Depression nearly a decade before the world unwillingly followed suit. From her earliest days barely surviving on sassafras tea and poppyseed cake – the most unlikely of hardscrabble sustenance – Gram feasted on her father’s fine-furniture-and-frippery fictions as they made do in a decidedly down-at-heel rental house. As he spun domestic mythologies and engineered homemaking hagiographies, he indoctrinated his brood with his ballads about the sublimity and solemnity of objects.
    Thus Gram grew up equating/conflating/imbuing possessions with power, privilege, and prominence. The Porters – though I feel certain they’d have chosen a different word – cathected with their collections. For most of them, it was their primary emotional bond. Helen was, without question, possessed. She and her siblings dreamed of inheriting their father’s collection and cast about considering how to build their own.
    Three of her siblings became quite successful as a federal judge, an insurance executive, and a nurse, respectively. They earned enough to make materialism manageable. Dorothy had found money and a most impressive collection of antiques in a second marriage that required her to perform less as a wife and more as a nursemaid. In return for such bounty, she obliged.
    Gram, however, married young and for love, dropping out of high school the January before her impending May graduation. She was besotted with Gerry, my grandfather-to-be, a man so handsome that she surely saw him as an object. She carefully collected him – and he reciprocated By ’41 they were married in Dorothy’s undeniably well-appointed living room. She was the beauty of the group marrying another, and even though they all had more than she did, each bristled with jealousy at the objectification of Helen and her husband.
    It didn’t last. Gerry was drafted not long after Helen got pregnant. He went to Germany and she returned home to dream of her gorgeous husband and post-war life. Once her daughter was born in ’43, she had a living doll to dote upon and that helped pass the time as her father spun his stories and everyone awaited bad news. Times were tense and there wasn’t a dime to spare; talk of their treasures was the only escapism they could afford.
    When Gerry returned in ’46, he quickly gathered his resources and moved Helen to a farm ten miles from town. It lacked indoor plumbing and boasted abandoned gravestones for a back sidewalk. She hadn’t imagined her white knight moving her down in the world, but there it was. He wasn’t the same soldier who left, nor would he ever be. Somewhere inside his duffel he carried a roll of film from his Brownie that showed the boxcars full of bodies, exterminated by the Germans, that he had witnessed when liberating the camps. Outhouses and displaced graves are of little concern after witnessing such horror.
    He never mentioned the war or its monstrosities. In fact, he barely talked at all. His demeanor demanded she adapt to their hardscrabble life and pull as much weight as she could bear – and then some. He managed his trauma by flying into rages and muttering the foulest filth most anyone had ever heard. He never laid a hand on any human, but he could be savage with unruly livestock. I know now he had PTSD and needed help, but even had he known he probably wouldn’t have submitted to any.
    He once told Helen after showing him some of her improvements to the house that he “wouldn’t care if it all burned, so long as he got out with his shirt.” To her, there was no more cruel a sentiment. His disregard devastated her. She invested herself in that uncomfortable place with its spider-ridden outhouse and cold-water kitchen pump. He said, or at least implied, that those efforts were unnecessary, beneath contempt. To him, she was completely feminine – and that was no compliment.
    She was often charged with frivolousness and foolishness. She believed in the value of living among beauty and having delicious food to eat. For all its appeals to materialism, her father’s philosophy promoted an important truth: what we surround and nourish ourselves with profoundly affects who and what we become. My grandfather would read that sentence, I feel certain, and call me feminine, too. To some, we really are silly, superficial people.
    Though I’m no kleptomaniac, I am my grandmother’s spiritual heir, my generation’s caretaker of treasured possessions. After ’86, she never returned home again though she never stopped eulogizing that haven she had created. We did the best we could for her in a professional care facility, but no one ever really makes those places pleasant. We offered to decorate with some of her favorite finery, but she was too afraid someone might end up stealing her stuff.
    She had a point. After all, she had been working as a nurses’ aide for nearly a decade at that point and during all that time she had been purloining pills and pocketing patients’ keepsakes. Oddly enough, there was an ethics informing those escapades, indefensible as it was. She only stole, it seems, from patients with cognitive issues who knew not what they had lost. She took their treasures for safekeeping, to guard against unscrupulous co-workers who might just fence such finds in off hours. As for the pills, the doctors expected theft and usually replenished prescriptions that had vanished without much fuss.
    These ethics informed much of her thieving life. She often stole beautiful objects to redress some wrong. In the mid-50s when she started “cleaning” houses for extra cash, she took from employers who were condescending or cruel. Her favorite target in those days was her very own landlord, who lived in luxury while Helen still used a latrine. All her culls from Addie’s collections are incalculable; she pinched everything from pennies to pearls from that “puckered old persimmon,” as my mother called her.
    She stole an original Currier & Ives lithograph from Addie’s attic and then hung it in her stairwell, far away from visitors. She even snatched Christmas cards, covered with personal messages and of no value – or aesthetic appeal – whatsoever. Perhaps she liked to imagine herself as the recipient of such kind, caring good wishes.
    Affection and praise evaded her; in their place she forged emotional relationships with alluring objects. Like Wilde and his blue china, she found something redemptive and restorative in aesthetics. Her attachments were profound, if misplaced, and I doubt she ever thought of herself as anything other than a rescuer – and perhaps as a restorer of Justice. She either wanted to save beauty from the undeserving and indifferent or she wanted someone to pay for their perfidy. She was the Robin Hood of domestic goods.
    Over time, as her collections grew, she developed complex mechanisms to explain the accumulation. She rarely had extra money and my grandfather did not give gifts. This was not necessarily cruelty or even unkindness, just the economic reality of their working class existence. They ate well thanks to the farm and they got by better than many. They did not, however, have the funds for hand-painted chocolate pots or original watercolor paintings. He wasn’t even keen on the milk glass purchases she legitimately made at the local five-and-dime.

    In order to account for her burgeoning bounty, she first started to “find” treasures in unlikely places. She used this strategy to explain a watercolor portrait that now hangs in my living room. It is a wonderful work and one I can clearly imagine in her last house on the morning we arrived after she had been hospitalized with the stroke. An oval japanned frame with gilding surrounds a prototypical “Gibson Girl” figure in an ostentatious ostrich feather-laden hat. Her hair is piled high and she wears a high pearl-buttoned collar to accentuate her impossibly long, elegant neck. She hung for years over Gram’s sofa, in pride of place, and everyone in my family hoped to inherit her.
    When she first appeared – sometime in the 60s – she had apparently just emerged from a kind of witness protection program. Gram blithely announced one afternoon that she had found this wayward New Woman hiding behind a workbench in the barn. Miraculously, she insisted, she had been living there for decades, apparently, without incurring even the slightest damage – even to the delicate frame. Her story beggared belief, but no one pressed the point. They knew she sometimes stole and that the sedatives she slipped made her vicious, so they opted to pretend they bought her baloney rather than face a confrontation.
    
    And so it went, her fine lady took over the living room and no one asked. They knew since she was in plain sight that wherever she had come from, the original owner was clearly never expected to visit. They reluctantly respected the routine: some objects were displayed in family-only spaces, some were hidden for good, and some went on show. Either way, my fancy lady came to me with unquestionably mysterious antecedents.
    These antecedents grew considerably more complex when I discovered that Gram’s Gibson Girl is, in fact, a “Fisher Girl” who originally graced the cover of the March 1907 Ladies’ Home Journal. Originally painted by Harrison Fisher, a contemporary and rival of Charles Dana Gibson, the image has had quite a life. The model, Margery Allwork, appeared on numerous magazine covers, postcards, and books. She was apparently something of a celebrity – and a sex symbol – at the time. I stumbled upon this one day as I wandered through an antique mall and discovered the more refined, nuanced version of my painting in the form of the magazine cover. It only made sense that Gram’s kidnap victim should have a somewhat saucy past herself.
    The painting is poignant for me because its subject evinces much of what Gram never achieved – at least not permanently. Superficially speaking, the woman is arrestingly beautiful – which Gram only enjoyed for about twenty-four years – and an indisputable sex object. While I know that would also have appealed to Gram, I am more interested in the woman’s manifestation of personal power: she sits bolt upright with a defiant look on her face. She clearly enjoys her beautiful clothes and perhaps even the power she draws from controlling her own image. She narrates herself; she is no character in someone else’s story.
    For a woman who frequently fell prey to the machinations of her family – and the misadventures and traumas of life – I can easily imagine Gram drawing inspiration from this image that evinces defiance and determination. I also find a feminist-inflected resistance in knowing the model herself chose to participate in that role for nearly twenty years and drew an income doing so, long before such independence was the norm.
    Somehow, she always kept trying to improve and provide. Even as she stole to satiate her desire for beauty, she was an incredibly generous person who everyone said “would give you the shirt off Gerry’s back.” Perhaps that attitude was her retribution for his casual disregard of her homemaking, forfeiting the one object which he stated a desire to keep. No matter the intent, she fought to overcome, like so many wives of that generation, and developed some deeply problematic – not to mention colorful – coping mechanisms along the way. “Mother’s little helper” in her case turned out to be much more than just Valium.
    It is also amusing to realize, decades later, that her cherished painting, despite its fine quality, hails from the “school of” Harrison Fisher and is not the original artwork. It has not been signed and has been cut to fit into the fancy frame, which likely diminishes or destroys its value. She may have undertaken that particular debauchery herself; she treated that Currier & Ives similarly to force it into a gilt frame, decimating its desirability in the process. When I remember this, I often imagine telling her “this is why we cannot have nice things” in a reversal of paternal chastisement, though I do not truly care if the painting is valuable or not. I find genuine amusement in imagining her fiendishly brandishing scissors to assemble her stolen masterwork. In that way, she made that art her own and inserted herself into its narrative.
    I sometimes also wonder about the artist who chose to re-create that magazine cover for her or his enjoyment. While I suppose it could have been a male artist taken with the model’s feminine allures, I prefer to imagine a young woman finding inspiration in admittedly sparse possibilities and conjuring up the chance of creating a different kind of life for herself through artistry. I enjoy envisioning her as someone who could appreciate the transformative – or at least influential – effect of living among beauty and trying to be beautiful – in one form or another – one’s self. I hope, too, that she might have been the kind of person who could take perverse pleasure and find some fun in a burglarizing granny overcome by beauty.
    I hope I never find out the so-called real answers to these uncertainties. I keep a framed copy of that magazine cover hung outside my bedroom, where she is most often obscured by the hall door. She, to me, is the copy, and I can’t chance her coming into contact with the original who resides just around the corner. They each have their place and importance. I wonder what Gram might have thought had she discovered her piece to be an imitation. It might not have mattered; if she loved something she didn’t care about it for pedigree alone. She cared about the attachment she felt and the way its beauty made her feel.
    And of course that’s why I love the painting and afford it prime real estate in our living room: it is imbued with feeling and meaning for me. It reminds me of an erratic, impassioned, audacious woman who led a difficult life and managed to leave it never having conformed completely. She possessed a sense of style and sensibilities about how things ought to be done and no one bullied those out of her even though they tried. She too needed help – but we knew nothing of those possibilities then.
    My purloined picture, the best of Gram’s pinches, reminds me about the necessity of borrowing when you cannot buy, coping when you can find no cure, and hoping someone will understand – and perhaps even forgive – the mistakes we make.

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