How odd to have little more than brief anecdotes of a person’s life, my grandmother, my father’s mother, tailored into laconic sentences to describe the hells of suffering and paradises of joy; excerpts, snip-its, as if that could suffice; a life like a telegram. “She died of cancer in a Florida hospital…punto.” “She had long red hair that reached down to the ground…punto.” “She abandoned her four young boys to their father, who retreated to his tiny village in the Valley of Aconcagua, Chile…punto.” Words hollow of emotion, details excised, judgment implicit.

     Can that be all? How could such a person not have had preferences about the color of her clothes, loves and likes, a favorite book, aspirations, minor annoyances, morning habits, a choice of food? As if the very fabric of her life were dyed a spectral white --all colors diminished to none. Who was she? What fine-tuned routine kept her personal darkness at bay? What subtle methods did she use to coax and conjure the light? We’ll never know, but no doubt she was more than the sum of language, more than a descriptive string of dry words tripped up by commas marking the hesitations to some finite reality.

     What I am writing now is all I know about her. The story of her visiting us in Denver, sleeping all night upright in a stiff-backed chair, her cornflower-blue eyes penetrating the penumbra of the living room at early dawn, the finale of a fitful dream…nothing said and leaving on the morrow. An actress in the silent films, ambitious perhaps and beautiful; a guide in the World’s Fair where she met my grandfather around the turn of the last century; a San Francisco girl from a railroad family nurtured by the dual whistles of trains and boats on the Pacific Coast and witness to that terrible earthquake.

     Later, she was to wend her way, four small boys in tow, from Riverside Drive to the Museum of Natural History and the Nicholas Roerich Museum, a master at revealing marvels and unraveling the boys’ tangled curiosity as she went. And then much, much later, the break…a violent row with my grandfather under the streetlamps of Fifth Avenue on a wintry New York City night, four sons confused and divided, while she and he stubbornly went their own separate ways, Uptown and Downtown, taking two children each by the hand.

     I know her like a reflection, a simulacrum maybe, and have found just one true anecdote about her, enigmatic at best, almost ironic given her alleged intellectual capacity, printed in the religious gazette of an obscure Southern esoteric society, which reads: “Charlotte was honored today for her heroic job at picking mulberries.”

©Vincent Montenegro

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