It all started for me when my father passed away. My grandfather had been dead for a long time. That’s how it all ended, of course, with my grandfather’ death. He was the last one.
My grandfather—his name was Raymond—died some years after my grandmother, Jane. I was too young when she died to remember anything of it—I don’t even remember anything of her as a person, although I came to know her quite well afterward—but I vividly recall the evening we learned the news of my grandfather’s death.
Every night my father read to me before I went to sleep, both of us cramped together side by side in my single bed, me tucked in the blankets and he lying on them. It was our ritual. He always read books of his own choosing, and they were never children’s books. He read me things like Great Expectations, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and the Selected Stories of Jack London. It could take us months to get through a single book, but we always finished them.
That night I had taken my bath and I was in my pajamas, ready for bed. I had the book we were currently reading open at the right page on my lap. As I waited for my father to come up I tried to remember what had happened in the book before we’d stopped the previous evening. Sometimes it was a bit blurry because if my father read for a long time I fell asleep and missed the last page or two.
I heard the phone ring. My father answered and I knew he would be a while yet. It was an unusual hour to get a phone call. I knew from the tone of his voice when he answered that something had happened, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He talked for a while and eventually I put the book down on my bedside table and I went downstairs to see what was going on.
My father had just hung up the phone when I walked into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with his back to me. He let out of sigh and his shoulders rolled up and down. I thought he was crying, but then I heard him chuckle so I wasn't sure if he was sad or not. He said, to no one in particular, “so that’s where it finally ends.”
He never did tell me what had ended that night—I only figured that out much later—but oddly, it struck me at the time, after I'd sat in front of him at the table and he told me that my grandfather was dead, as something odd to say in the circumstances.
Now, of course, I understand what he was talking about better than he every did. I think my father never meant for me to know about it, though. Or perhaps he did, or else he would’ve never left the clues behind. I'm not sure because he could’ve very well told me at any time—and he was usually quite honest about that sort of thing, he liked talking about the history of the family—but he didn’t. My guess is that he thought it didn’t concern me, and that therefore it wouldn’t interest me. There’s probably some truth in that; even today I’m sure most of my cousins would care. But I can’t explain why he didn’t say anything about it by the time I was older and my own interests in history and inheritance had become clear. Maybe he had forgotten about it by then, or maybe it had never really been that important to him.
The information had come to him from his own mother, my grandmother, and he must’ve seen himself as the story’s last inheritor. With my grandfather’s death, the story ended and there was no purpose to carry it on. Whatever he thought, and whatever my grandmother thought, I can’t ignore the knowledge that was eventually passed down to me. I think all the descendants of this strange anthropological anomaly are concerned, whether they know about it and are interested in it or not. Inevitably, it’s part of who they are. But at the same time, while I am fascinated by this thing, as my grandmother clearly was, I sometimes wonder if, in the larger context, it’s inconsequential. Is a quirky family anecdote worth calling up distant cousins for? Is it worth spending evenings at the library looking through page after page of newspaper microfilms? I’m not so sure.
*
The information came to me in the form of a 7 by 4 inch notebook with lined pages, bound in tan leather. My grandmother Jane had used it as her diary sometime at the end of the 1940s; she had covered nearly all of its hundred or so pages with her cramped, no-nonsense handwriting. I found this notebook three years ago, while emptying out my father’s house after his death. When I found it, at the bottom of an old box full of bills and files, I expected it to be an accounts book to be stuffed in a garbage bag with the rest of the junk my father had accumulated during his lifetime. When I cracked open the cover and saw the name and date on the top right corner of the first page I turned to my sister and told her I’d found something that had belonged to grandma. "Keep it," she said. “I’m sure you’ll find it a lot more interesting than I ever could,” she said.
I began reading the notebook a couple of weeks later, with a glass of scotch on a quiet Friday evening when the kids were over at their mother’s. My grandmother was in her seventies when she kept the diary. It begins with a kind of long digression in which she talks about the war: who in the family was affected and how, who had gone off to fight, who had come back. She mentions a lot of names I didn’t know, cousins twice removed and brothers-in-law and so on.
After about five pages of this my grandmother mentions that she received a letter from a man claiming to be a distant grandson, who seemed to have figured out that they have some ancestor’s in common. His name was Richard Stern, and he apparently asked my grandmother to confirm some information concerning relatives they may have had in common, as he was working on a comprehensive family tree. My grandmother writes in the diary:
I wrote back to this R. Stern in order to provide him with the names and dates I remember. What I can’t figure out is how any of the people he asked about can possibly be related to his family. We aren’t related to any Sterns. The connection must have to do with Jonathan, of course, but how can this be?
I looked through his old things this morning. Angela’s given name was Lawrence.
At this point in my reading I thumbed through the notebook to make sure my grandmother hadn’t tucked Richard Stern’s letter anywhere between its pages. I found no original letter. Instead, a folded square of yellowed paper fell out of the diary. I unfolded it and discovered a sort of family tree my grandmother had traced on it. On the top right corner was my grandfather, Raymond. He was connected by a line to the left with Jane, my grandmother. Another line connected her to the left with Jonathan Price, her first husband. It was common knowledge in the family that Jane had been married once before with this man, a lawyer, who had given her three sons. My father didn’t see much of them when he was older, but he often told me about them; they were in and out of the house while he was growing up. On the paper, however, Jonathan was connected to the left with two names: Angela L. and, underneath it, in a different-colored pen, Mary Stern. So that’s where the mysterious Sterns came in. I don’t know when my grandmother put that name into the diagram, but it must’ve been later, towards the end of her research. Finding out about Mary Stern, her husband’s first wife, was the end result of her years of enquiry. I’ve since completed the top section of this same family tree with many other missing names and dates, but at the time it was quite a shock for me to realize that even my grandmother’s first husband had been married before as well—twice. Jane’s note about Angela at the beginning of the notebook made it clear that she'd known about her husband's second marriage, but not about the first until long after his death.
I poured myself another scotch and picked up my reading where I had left it. My grandmother, after having received the letter from her long-lost relative Richard Stern, began researching into the family history herself by looking through her first husband’s papers. She noted and worked out all of her discoveries and questions in the diary. Meanwhile, she received another letter from Mr. Stern, in which he thanked her for the information and promised to send her the results of his research. But my grandmother never got anything from him. She sent him another letter a few months later, to ask him how it was coming along; all she received was an answer from this man’s daughter, informing her of his unfortunate passing—no mention of Richard Stern’s research into the family history.
By searching through her first husband’s documents, my grandmother eventually came across a legal letter, dating from before his wedding to Angela, concerning his deceased wife’s testament. From then on, it was only a matter of finding out who this mysterious first wife had been. Jane began searching newspaper archives at the city library, and finally unearthed a wedding notice for Jonathan Cooper and Mary Stern (born Bradbury). This would’ve been revelation enough, but my grandmother did not stop there. She had underlined the “born Bradbury” several times; evidently, Mary had been married before as well, to a man by the name of Stern. My grandmother had drawn an arrow issuing from the name, but it pointed only to a blank space in the page; she had never figured out who this mysterious Mr. Stern was.
The diary ends with a small note, in which my grandmother muses on the meaning of marriage. She was obviously shocked by the discovery of her first husband’s first marriage—she wondered if any children had been born from it—and equally struck by the coincidence that this first wife of his had been herself married before. Coupled, as it were, with the fact that she herself had remarried after Jonathan Copper had passed away, the oddity was complete. Her husband Raymond, my grandfather, was the last link in a chain of marriages that descended back into history, all the way to this Mr. Stern. In a way, my grandmother writes, it is as if I were myself married to Stern, Mary’s first husband. I am no different than Mary, who remarried my husband, for I have remarried after this same husband died. We are all part of the same union. We are all connected.
