Katherine Fleming, who somehow finds time around the edges of her bi-coastal, intercontinental professional life to be an exemplary wife, mother, and daughter, is encouraging me to go full-bore autobiographical in some of my blog posts. Though my protestations of a poor memory are sincere and appropriate, I am willing to give it a try, as I did in a previous post dealing with two or three fugitive memories of my birthplace, Gary, Indiana. The next acts were played out in Baxter County, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, which I would come to speak of as my home, to the degree I had one, and in Denver, Colorado, where I spent the War years living with my maternal grandparents in a house, still extant when I last checked about twenty years ago, at 1600 Albion Street in Park Slope on the east side of the city.
My mother’s family name was Janet Elizabeth Davidson (1909-1979). Her father, James Alexander (Alex) Davidson, was a railroad engineer who spent many years working for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad Company on a narrow-gauge line that began in Salida, Colorado, and ran down, eventually, to Lordsburg, New Mexico. This is probably among the most scenic railroad geography in the world. And in his day, it could be exciting. He told me that on his very first trip to that destination, he found most of the town’s citizens industriously engaged in hanging a man. Grandad Davidson was a native-born American of immigrant Irish parents. Janet’s mother, Cora Louise Nelson, of English stock, was an orphan girl born in Vincennes, Indiana, but mainly raised by a great aunt on the Red River in northeast Texas. This woman, whom I of course never met, was named Montgomery, and referred to by my grandmother, with affection, as “Auntie Gommer”. I do not know how Cora Louise came to be a school teacher in Salida, but it was there she met and married Alex. The eldest of the four offspring of James Alexander and Cora Louise, who must have been born some years before 1900, was Vincent, to whom I owe my own middle name. He was for my grandmother a never-ending grief, a perfect first-born young man struck down in youth by dread disease (poliomyelitis?), living first on crutches and then with an amputated leg. He died before quite having come to his majority. As a father I can but speculate about the effect of this loss on the parents, but it seems to have been an indelible sadness, and perhaps unhealthily repressed. To my grandmother Davidson I owe many debts, but especially my serious, if unfortunately slacking and intermittent, engagement with Christian church life, which continues to be an important aspect of my world view.
These were the heady days of democracy in America. My grandfather, a railroad engineer, was (with several other proletarians) an elected member of the state legislature. When his second child, a female, was born, she was officially given the unusual Christian name Heartz by legislative act. A Mrs. Heartz had been the first elected female legislator in the new state, and I believe was still serving at the time. About twenty-five years ago, at one of the fancy dos I used to attend, I met a high official in the current Colorado legislature who was interested in this story and later did a little research and sent me the confirmatory results.
There are mysteries surrounding my mother. Physically, she was striking, slightly more than six feet tall. She had been married to, and divorced from, a man referred to as Van. His full name was VanDeventer, and he was a native of Elberon, New Jersey. (This coastal place appears to be about forty miles due east of where I now live, and may now be a neighborhood rather than a geographical entity.) But around 1928 Van was trying to find a gold mine in the Rockies. There is a Vandeventer Street in Princeton, which I ought to try and research a bit. Van was the biological father of my elder brother—so technically half brother--Peter, though neither Pete nor anybody else had any sense of “halfness”, and never expressed interest in exploring it. There is much that is opaque about this first marriage of my mother, which played no part in her later life.
The war had hardly begun before my father (Marvin Dale Fleming) enlisted in the Navy and it was decided that my mother, my two brothers, and I would take up residence with my maternal grandparents in Denver. Here precise memory fails me. All I actually remember is that one day I was somewhere and another I was in Colorado. In all the years I knew him, that is, the War years, my grandfather Alex was already very old and totally blind. He seemed to me infinitely noble, patient, heroic even. He spent his days in a living room armchair endlessly listening to the news, practically all of it war news. The radio was huge and somehow rather ecclesiastical in appearance, topped with a Gothic arch. He moved about a bit, having memorized the route to the bathroom with such perfection that he always made the trip with the same number of counted footsteps and the precise repositionings of his walking stick. He became expert at lighting and relighting his unseen pipe with unseen matches, and we simply learned to live with the daily fire hazard. The house is still there: still 1600 Albion Street.
One day I had the following strange encounter. After ascertaining that nobody else was in the house, Grandad asked me, “Johnny, do you ever play with yourself?” I was puzzled. “Yes, I guess, if there is nobody else to play with.” I had in mind that vast imaginative world to which all young children have access, in which they by an interior magic become explorers, inventors, war heroes. Only years later did I realize that my grandad was talking about masturbation, concerning which, at the age of eight, I was innocent and of course uncomprehending. But though I had not the slightest idea what he was talking about, I was nonetheless shocked to hear the confidential attribution of his blindness to having played with himself seventy years earlier.
Our neighborhood was surprisingly “multicultural”. Just across the way was a sweet old couple of Italian speakers. A German-American neighbor named Geiseking, an enthusiastic ham radio guy, had set up in his back yard a kind of miniature Eiffel Tower. There were several Jewish families living in the neighborhood. I remember being nearly awestruck by the old, bearded grandfather of one acquaintance who in the summer sat endlessly reading on his side porch, eye glasses a half inch thick, hair wild like a woman’s. I also came to realize that the Jews, like the Christians, came in different denominations. One Jewish contemporary of mine, speaking scornfully of another, said “He calls himself a Jew, but he…” (unfortunately I cannot remember the specific disqualifying vice practiced by the pseudo-Hebrew.) Funnily enough, one of the Jewish kids in the group sort of blipped across my radar fifty years later as having spent a long career as a teacher of Dante’s Commedia at Wesleyan University and a fellow Rhodes Scholar of 1958. What are the chances?
At the time I was unaware of the tensions and frictions that our invasion of four had inflicted on my already elderly grandmother, but I later came to realize that they had been substantial and contributed substantially to the already difficult situation in which my mother was living during the War years. The house on Albion Avenue was large enough provided that my elder brother and I slept in the attic, which was a pretty spooky and chilly place, necessitating what seemed a long walk up a dimly lit staircase. We fought against the winter chill with ceramic hot water bottles in the shape of pigs. These strange warming devices had to be handled very carefully, and more than once one of them would leak, so that we were not merely sleeping in the cold, but in the wet cold. A child’s view of life is often vivid, but of course very partial. Only eighty years later have I come to understand the force of the famous French maxim attributed to Mme de Stael, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardoner. To understand everything is to forgive everything. And though it is never possible to “understand everything,” I can but hope our own children can understand and, understanding, forgive, most of it.
Totally fascinating! Thanks for sharing.
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