My grandmother's secret

She is the reason I decided to write this, because her strength amazes me.

...........

During his 30-year career in electrical engineering, my dad traveled often.

Europe. Tokyo. California. North Carolina.

He was often gone for months at a time, especially when I was young.

My memories of that time aren't of my father's absences. They're of my mother's reaction to them, the way she cried on the phone to him each night, the way she compulsively checked the locks on our doors and windows, the way she hovered over my younger sister and me.

She was immersed in fear of being alone.

Her anxiety carried over into other areas — the playground, state parks, the local pool. At the time, I didn't realize she fretted more than the other mothers. I thought all her panicking was the norm, that all moms hovered with outstretched arms.

As I got older, I attributed the constant worrying to her upbringing in an evangelical, fundamentalist, communal setting. My mother fled that place in her early 20s, but we visited my grandparents there twice a year. I hated it. We had to wear dresses all the time and people were always watching, evaluating your behavior and eager to chastise.

Everything, it seemed, was a sin.

For years, I blamed this watchful, judging environment for my mother's behavior.

And I blamed my grandmother, a cold and rigid woman who never hugged us or said, "I love you."

My grandmother was a small woman who pinned her hair up each day into a steel-wool bun. She wore dresses with three-quarter sleeves — because bare upper arms were believed to incite lust — and sensible shoes.

My grandfather was a quiet man. He didn't say much, but, in his own awkward way, sometimes tried to play with us. I have few memories of him.

My grandmother died suddenly when I was a college senior. My sisters and I flew to Kentucky.

I hadn't been there in years, having chosen to shun the place I hated as a child.

My grandparents lived on the campus of an evangelical boarding school for children -- kindergarten through high school. It was nestled deep in the mountains, in the midst of cabins belonging to coal miners and their families. My grandparents headed there in their early 20s, drawn by a firey woman who had founded the "Holiness Movement."

They were engaged to be married and hoped to spend their lives converting the mountains' unsaved souls.

My grandmother was assigned to teach school in an isolated outpost. She lived with a young woman, also a teacher, who had grown up in those mountains. Grandma was an outsider. She was from Pennsylvania.

Years passed. By the time I was born, my grandfather was running the school and a junior Bible college with Grandma as his assistant.

For decades they lived in an immaculate small house on campus.

In the years before her death, my grandmother began sorting and labeling things. It would make her passing more efficient, she told my mother and aunts.

When we arrived at the house after the funeral, we found stickers on every single piece of furniture. They indicated who was to receive each item. The only thing she hadn't marked was a box tucked away in a closet.

It was filled with cards and letters from my grandfather, written during their lengthy engagement.

And in those cards we learned my grandmother's secret, one she had kept ever since her early 20s, when she lived in that lonely outpost cabin.

One night, as she and her fellow teacher slept, two men broke a window and crawled into the cabin. They raped my grandmother and her friend.

She must have been badly injured. We pieced together a timeline from my grandfather's letters. She was hospitalized for several weeks.

Those letters revealed something else — the love my grandfather had for a woman I had always believed to be unloveable. He wrote lyrically, passionately, of the life they would share after their wedding. He filled each note with endearments, promising lifelong devotion.

He wrote all this while my grandmother recovered from being raped.

My mother, aunt and I read these letters and cried.

They had always suspected something bad had happened, but never knew the details.

The letters told us everything, how one of the rapists was the brother of my grandmother's teacher-friend. How her family, prominent and powerful within the small rural community, instructed her not to testify against either man. How my grandmother refused to be bullied and described, in painful, intimate detail the horror of that night.

I imagine the time in which this happened. I imagine my grandmother's prim nature. I imagine how difficult that must have been for her, to share something so graphic with strangers.

The men were acquitted. And for the rest of her life, my grandmother lived in the same county as the rapists.

This I cannot imagine.

As we sat there, on my grandmother's guest-room bed, my mom and aunt recalled how, every time my grandfather went out of town, Grandma nagged them to stay close to the house. After dinner, she flitted from room to room, doublechecking the locks on windows and doors.

Oh.

My mother made the connection at the same time I did.

"I think that's why I got so upset every time your dad left town," she said. "I never realized it, but we grew up sharing her fears, even though we didn't know what caused them."

We sat there silently, amidst all those cards and letters piled on the bed, and I remember thinking how sad it was that unrelenting, constant fear -- though no fault of her own -- was my grandmother's legacy to her daughters.

And the men responsible went unpunished.


At Julie's request, I've added this post to Hump Day Hmm. Go here to read other contributions.