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As we drove up to Minna and Granddaddy’s house in Bedford, New York, our car crunching on deep gravel, I spotted my grandmother, Minna, motioning to us just outside the majestic front door. One hand gripped the cast-iron railing above the cement front steps; the other waved us into the house. My grandparents’ enormous Georgian mansion loomed like a cathedral at the edge of their manicured lawn.
“Come in, come in,” she greeted us, with the enthusiasm of someone hailing troops returning from war.
I smiled from the back seat of our gray Rambler while Dad unloaded our suitcases. I was about seven or eight, a skinny, shy thing with Frankenstein monster bangs straight across my forehead. My parents and I were coming to stay for a few weeks under the classical eaves of Minna and Granddaddy’s house while the kitchen was being renovated in our modest single-level ranch house across town. I felt both excited and vaguely fearful about the visit, troubled by the thought that I might have to be on my best behavior for such a long stretch.
The house sat on well-groomed property, including an English garden in the backyard, with several rock gardens expertly terraced, one above the other, beside a stone pathway. I remember posing on the stone pathway with my twin cousins, a year younger than me, all of us wearing summer sheath dresses, while an aunt snapped our picture. The flat backyard was large enough to host a team sport, but no one ever played or sat in chairs on that massive field.
There was a large rectangular swimming pool in front of the driveway where us relatives sometimes gathered in summer. The pool was a single depth, about six feet, which was not ideal for children, and I remember Granddaddy cleaning out the filters with a large net. He sometimes caught and released frogs.
“Annie, go on into the kitchen and help cook,” Minna said, after I had walked into the foyer, my grandmother had given me a welcoming hug, and Mom and Dad had taken our luggage upstairs. A few minutes later, the cook, Charlotte, held me dangling over a large vat of chocolate pudding, stirring in the milk, as though I were an apprentice chimney sweep. Minna’s formidable stove was a gleaming block of copper-toned enamel and polished chrome that spanned an entire wall, resembling a culinary behemoth restaurant stove. With six burners on the huge cooktop and two ovens below, it could have served a banquet hall. I couldn’t wait to eat the pudding at dinner.
After a few moments, Mom came and found me. “Come on, Annie, let’s look around the house. Everything is so elegant,” she said. We hadn’t visited my grandparents since last Easter.
The house had an interesting, complex layout. There was a screened-in porch, just outside the dining room and behind the kitchen. My grandparents’ spacious kitchen was accessible to kitchen staff by a discreet, interior hallway that led to the front foyer. Small maids’ rooms on the second floor were also accessible via the interior hallway and a private staircase with rubber-coated steps designed to muffle sound from the serving staff. Although no one now inhabited these rooms, Dad remembered growing up with a live-in Irish nurse. Granddaddy filled up a second tiny maid’s bedroom with keys from hotels he collected during his wide-ranging Navy jaunts.
Eventually, we settled into the guest bedrooms upstairs. Mom and Dad took the large room, which featured two double beds and a view of the lawn. I settled into the former nursery, a room away, near the hall.
A moment later, Minna whooshed into my bedroom, where I was unpacking a green corduroy jumper. “Let me look at you, Annie. My, how you have grown.” The next minute, she crushed me to her bosom, as if I were a treasure she feared losing, overwhelming me with a perfume-scented hug. I feared being smothered by Minna’s large emotions, which were frightening to a shy child like me.
Much like her house, Minna was large, complicated, and beautiful. If I had understood her background, perhaps I would have accepted her for who she was.
Mary Elizabeth “Minna” Woodbury Blair was born in 1898 in Washington, D.C., into a prominent Maryland Eastern Shore family. A granddaughter of Montgomery Blair, President Lincoln’s postmaster general, she grew up with four siblings in Wheaton, Maryland. As a young woman, she was tall and athletic, a tennis player, with high cheekbones, a broad forehead, wavy, dark-brown hair, and deep-set blue eyes. Before Minna married Granddaddy in 1920, she served as an officer in the Junior League and worked for the Red Cross during World War I. Their wedding photo showed Granddaddy dressed handsomely in his naval uniform, his square jaw, his dark brown hair parted straight down the center. I suspect that they married for love as well as social propriety.
By the time I knew Minna, she was a Grande Dame in the town of Bedford – president of the Garden Club, and a stalwart volunteer at the Bedford Women’s Correctional Center. She trailed a cloud of cocktail laughter and bridge-club smarts. I remember Minna smoking cigarettes in her study and tapping the ashes into a large crystal ashtray, her gold bracelets jingling. She often sat at her large mahogany desk, studying the Social Register to arrange get-togethers and writing short letters to her grandchildren. Her blue-framed reading glasses were perched low on her long, patrician nose. When Minna laughed, the enormous, booming sound would fill the house.
Minna could be playful and charming to us grandchildren. In Baddeck, Nova Scotia, where we vacationed with Minna and Granddaddy periodically, she taught us kids to play “Hearts” for pennies.
“You must follow suit,” she told us, eagerly displaying a spade so that we could identify these cards.
When I won a hand, she congratulated me. “Since you won, you lead the next trick,” she told me joyfully, handing me a penny as my reward.
But there was another Minna. In an oil painting of her that Dad hung above our dining room table at home, Minna’s pale oval face, framed by short, naturally curly black hair and dark arched eyebrows, seemed shrouded in purple, as though a tragic Victorian heroine had taken possession. Her eyes were bruised with a knowledge of darkness. Born a blonde, Minna said that childhood influenza had left her with black hair, an inky halo.
I had contracted a mild case of chickenpox before this particular visit with my grandparents, forcing me to stay home from school at their house for a week to recover. The illness felt trivial to me, but I was isolated. I missed the bus ride to school and silent reading periods in the classroom. All the kids in my second-grade class sent me smeared riots of color: finger paintings announcing, “Get well soon, Annie.” I stacked them by the window in my grandparents’ guest room, a little shrine of childish sympathy. My teacher, Mrs. Wakes, also mailed me a spelling book with homework assignments.
Mom explained that it was tradition back then for married couples of my grandparents’ generation to occupy separate bedrooms. Minna’s small bedroom was sun-warmed and butter yellow. It featured a double bed with a white bedspread under a canopy, and an ornate French dressing table with a glass top covered in lace, a mirror, and an embroidered stool. The drawers yielded up “eekie-weekies,” moist wash n’ dry towelettes with a medicinal, faintly floral smell. Minna bestowed them on us grandchildren with a regal air, like a queen giving presents to serfs.
Granddaddy’s bedroom next door was an enormous dark-blue cavern like a ship captain’s quarters, rank with pipe smoke. We children avoided it and the tobacco smell.
Holiday meals in Minna and Granddaddy’s dining room were grand: a large oval mahogany table, embroidered napkins and tablecloth, proper silverware clinking against porcelain like nervous teeth. While a cook served, Minna toasted raisin bread from a Toastmaster at the dining room table, slathering the slices with whipped butter before passing them. Minna loved discussing politics, her beloved Yankees and Mets, and reading Tennyson or Edna St. Vincent Millay poetry aloud at dinner. Dad enjoyed participating in reading poems aloud, but Mom and I dreaded it. “I hate reading poetry out loud at the table too, Annie,” she had confessed. Mom mostly sat quietly at these meals. Granddaddy held his own at the end of the table, lifting his wine glass to toast us, puffing on his pipe, and reciting a light-hearted limerick or two.
But as night deepened and the last cocktail tipped, tempers sometimes flared. By then, we had retired to the study. My grandparents’ voices, those two great forces, shattered the night. We grandchildren, hovering on the carpet near the adults, froze like figurines. I clutched my brother’s sleeve. An ex-Navy man with a stutter, Granddaddy was stubborn and chauvinistic. He loved to argue and goaded Minna. Meanwhile, my parents, masters of repression, acted like nothing unusual was happening, like a couple of Swiss ambassadors during an argumentative UN debate.
“Minna, m-m-m-m-make me a martini,” Granddaddy said. Minna’s eyes widened as if she had just received word of a hurricane.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” she asked him.
“I j-j-j-just want to relax. Stop o-o-o-overreacting.”
“It’s not overreacting to be worried about your health.”
“You’re making a f-f-f-fuss out of n-n-n-nothing.”
“It’s not nothing to me. I think you should … ”
“N-n-n-nobody cares w-w-w-what you think!” Granddaddy bellowed at Minna.
Although holiday visits to my grandparents were mostly enjoyable, It’s no surprise that living there week after week during our kitchen renovation was anxiety-provoking. At night, my bedroom was miles away from the bathroom, a dark journey past bookshelves heaving with bound editions of St. Nicholas Magazine, Treasure Island, dusty histories, and all the Frank Baum books. The staircase loomed like a scaly dragon. I tiptoed barefoot across the oriental rug, a mouse afraid to wake the household. The black-and-white bathroom tiles froze my soles. I sometimes imagined Minna’s face in the mirror, peering out just behind mine, as though she were the Wizard of Oz.
After the pox cleared and my skin stopped itching, restlessness set in. One Saturday morning, Minna had gone to the women’s prison to volunteer. Mom was across town, looking over the handiwork at our half-gutted kitchen. I stood on my tiptoes and stared out the window on the front staircase, gauging the length of the front driveway, plotting my escape. I had too many interesting things to think about and was tired of staying indoors.
With a quivery feeling of excitement in my stomach, I slipped into my play clothes, a red-striped shirt and blue shorts, and climbed the hill to find Jeffrey. I was weary of being well-behaved. At home, I was a tomboy, accustomed to playing outdoors. Jeffrey’s family, the Browns, were the groundskeepers — Jeffrey, 8, tanned and gregarious, and his older siblings, Alice, 10, and John, 12, red-haired and unpredictable. Jeffrey was home, and he let me ride his bicycle down the dirt driveway to the main road and back. My bike had been left at home. Under me, Jeffrey’s bike wobbled. Riding back was easier. The snack that Mrs. Brown fixed for us, milk and apple pie, was a welcome change from the cook’s prepared snacks of applesauce and brown sugar. Jeffrey and I played on for another hour, bouncing a rubber ball in the driveway and climbing trees until the sky blurred.
But when I returned, dusk was falling, and Minna waited in the front hallway. A monument in a blue floral dress beneath her wool car coat. Her figure swelled with disappointment that filled the hallway, blotting out the black-and-white tiles. I wished that Mom were around to intervene on my behalf, but she had not yet returned from visiting our kitchen. During our entire stay at my grandparents’ house, however, Mom lived by their rules. So, she would probably not have stepped up for me now.
“Where have you been?” Minna’s voice was a whip. I stood, shivering slightly, my shirt dirty, my face bowed, my skin still warm from playing.
“I went up the hill to play with Jeffrey,” I said in a small voice, confused by her anger. She had never been angry with me before. “His mother was at home.”
“I was worried sick,” Minna said, not kindly, but with a note of accusation. “How could you leave and not tell us where you were going? I’m very disappointed in you, Annie,” she said.
Her words landed harshly.
“I was just playing, Minna,” I mumbled somewhat childishly, as though pebbles were stuck in my throat.
“How dare you talk back!” Minna said. I was terrified that she would slap or spank me, adding injury to her anger.
“There will be no dinner for you tonight. That’s all!” Minna flicked her wrist dismissively, her cheeks flushed.
I stumbled up the green carpeted stairway to my bedroom, horrified. I imagined starving to death in the former nursery. None of my grandparents had ever spoken to me like this before. I realized that my playing off the grounds had scared Minna. Wasn’t I a good child? It was my younger brother who was usually in trouble. He had once lit a match as a toddler and burned a hole in Granddaddy’s armchair. Ashamed and without comfort, I put on my pajamas and went to bed, dwelling on the dim knowledge that I had failed Minna in some mysterious way.
Years later, an older female cousin revealed that in an almost identical painful scenario to my own, Minna had scolded her for playing too enthusiastically with Jeffrey’s older brother, John. Nearly word-for-word, the same outburst Minna had had with me regarding Jeffrey. It was like discovering Minna ran a reform school for any girl who stepped off the property.
Then there was the story we cousins carried like a hereditary bruise. Dad told us that Minna had been asked to leave Westover at the age of 16 for speaking to a boy. “Speaking,” he told us. Which was the family’s way of saying ‘something happened, but we’ll never acknowledge it.’ Our inherited silence was pervasive.
The women on my father’s side of the family were fury stitched into velvet gloves. It was just the women. They had quick tongues and bright spirits, meant to be folded into obedience. We should learn how to swallow what burned. I wondered how long we had been this way, punished for daring to express our emotions out loud. So, this was the inheritance I absorbed at the dinner table.
Still, Minna, like a stubborn weed that kept thriving, was a contradiction. With her strong interests in politics, history, social justice, and literature, Minna was the most intellectual of my four grandparents. She read voraciously, despite being self-taught. Her marriage to Granddaddy was stormy and clouded with silences; thunder trapped in ice. Once, when he vanished back into the Navy and fell out of touch for months, she took a job selling coats at Lord & Taylor’s. Women like her were not supposed to work, but Minna was determined to stay connected to the world. When Granddaddy eventually returned, Minna gave up her job.
Divorce was not an option back then, and Minna never discussed being unhappy. Granddaddy, an engineer by training who later practiced real estate in New York City, was not considered Minna’s intellectual equal. Minna wore her cerebral energy like a mink stole. She must have craved a partner who shared her scholarly interests.
“We don’t talk about things we don’t like,” Minna said once at the dinner table when my brother wouldn’t eat his vegetables, smoothing her napkin with surgical precision. She espoused this attitude toward airing any unpleasant topic. I remember her long fingers, white with blue veins, and her ring-bejeweled fingers moving restlessly. If she had been allowed to talk about sad things, I felt, her conversation could have filled an ocean liner. But her self-restraint and repressed anger must have contributed to a charged domestic atmosphere. Both of Minna’s daughters, my two paternal aunts, married and moved as far away from Minna and Granddaddy as possible. One left for Maryland and the other for California. Perhaps they sought escape from Granddaddy’s repressive regime.
Had Minna been born later, she might have been the head of a large nonprofit or even a local politician. Instead, she ruled from her desk in the study, managing the universe via ashtray, letters, and telephone.
As the years passed, I grew up to be bookish and scholarly, like Minna and Dad. Boys bewildered me; books did not, much to Mom’s disappointment. In the fifth grade, Peter Jones, a stocky, auburn-haired classmate, left a love note in my locker. His handwriting was blocky, brave. “I should stop now, but I could write about you all day, Annie.”
Although I wanted to acknowledge the note, I folded it into a tiny packet and placed it inside my pocket. I was too timid to respond; my throat sealed with embarrassment and a guilty pleasure. I never spoke to Peter about it. Silence, after all, was the women in our family’s second language.
Throughout my adolescence, Minna continued to approve of my intellectual endeavors. When I was accepted into Smith College in 1976, she sent me a lavender-scented congratulatory letter, her looped handwriting singing like a violin string. “So proud of you,” she wrote, and I could almost hear the unspoken, Do what I could not. I imagined her writing the note from the dressing table in her butter-yellow bedroom. However, by then my grandparents had retired to a modest, one-level house in Manasota Key, Florida.
The ink barely dried before Minna died. It was the last thing she ever wrote to me.
Looking back, I can see that Minna’s emotional legacy was less a neat bequest and more a package you’d find in the attic: mismatched, slightly dusty, and confusing. I spent the next couple of years as a tomboy, building forts with my neighbor Craigie, a small blonde girl, in our woods, riding bicycles, and hiding a pack of my parents’ cigarettes in a hole I dug under a forsythia bush.
Quiet rebellion, it turns out, was as much my inheritance as migraine headaches or my shyness and tendency to squirrel away love notes. I received a couple of hand-me-down dresses from my neighbor, Jenny Swan, with flared skirts, embroidered waists, and puffed sleeves. I promptly hid them under my bed. The dresses were three sizes too big for my skinny frame and I preferred pants with pockets. Around this time, I discovered the book, Harriet the Spy, about a girl who writes down unflattering notes about everyone she knows, and it became my favorite.
In the end, I suspect that Minna also left me the family’s tradition of polite subversion, tucked between the lines of her disapproval like a bookmark. That may have been her greatest gift: the quiet suggestion that an intelligent woman should go along with expectations, follow suit, right up until she decides not to.
Rebellion became my trump card, and I learned to play it with the same finesse Minna used to wave guests into her home: graciously, decisively, and with just the slightest hint of mischief.
