Another book read, with lots of thoughts

What do you learn about someone by reading their favorite book?  This is the question in my mind having just finished The Blue Window by Temple Bailey.  The book belonged to my paternal grandmother, Helen, the one of my three grandmothers I knew least.  My Nana, my maternal grandmother, fostered the connection with her daughter, her son-in-law, and my brother and me through visits and phone calls from Illinois.  My Grandma Marian, my grandfather’s second wife, lived with him (and later, without him, when he had died) about an hour away from us, even closer when I left home for Berkeley.  I loved her dearly.  But my Granny was different.

***

She never visited us in California.  We didn’t stay with her when we visited Illinois—she lived in a dark little house with my Aunt Sylvia.  The house was infested with a pair of evil schnauzers named Bounce and Poppins; they had to be confined, snarling and scratching, to the kitchen when we came.  Aunt Sylvia looked like a gypsy with her dark hair and her hoop earrings and she let me sit on the floor of her bedroom and play with all her costume jewelry.  Granny sat with the adults on the sofa in the living room.  I don’t remember ever speaking to her or even hugging her, although I must have.

I remember her as quiet, severe, suited.  She carried the kind of constructed handbags I associate with Queen Elizabeth.  She had pointy glasses and tight gray curls.  Here is a photo of her with my parents on their wedding day.

My mother did not like her mother-in-law.  She still tells, with vivid resentment, about a Christmas soon after she and my father were married when my grandmother gave gift after gift to him and to my aunt and only a half-slip to my mother.  In my mother’s telling, my grandmother loved no one but her two children.

My father doesn’t look back.  He had a complicated relationship, I think, with his parents.  Again, as my mother tells the story, he and my aunt discovered, quite by accident, that their mother had been married before and divorced.  And then, when my father, the younger child, went off to college, his parents divorced.  They had stayed together “for the children” and now the children were grown.  When my grandfather fell in love with Grandma Marian, there was more hurt.  Grandma Marian was Catholic.  There was a tense conversation about annulling the marriage and, by extension, labeling my aunt and father illegitimate.  As a result, my father cut ties with his father for some time.

Reconciliation eventually happened somehow.  I think that Grandpa and Grandma Marian moved to California before we did.  I know I grew up knowing them.  And yet, I think that reconciliation cost some closeness on the other side.  I wasn’t paying attention, and yet I felt tension in the dark little house when we visited.

The first time I saw my father cry, however, was when I was ten.  Granny had died, of cancer.  My brother and I did not go to the funeral, but I remember going to the viewing in the funeral home beforehand.  My father gave me a rose out of one of the arrangements and I pressed it in a book.  I was shaken by his tears.

***

I sometimes think my family is more defined by the gaps in the relationships than by the relationships themselves.  For many reasons, there have been more gaps than togethernesses in my father’s relationship with his sister during my lifetime.  The most obvious and neutral of the reasons was distance—she lived near Chicago for a long time and then for a while in Boston.  There was a period when I was in high school when she moved to the same town we lived in, but that didn’t work out well.  I think she moved back to Boston after that.  When Syd was small, Aunt Sylvia moved back to California.  She lives in Santa Rosa now.  On and off through the years, I’ve had more and less connection with her—she is both fascinating and difficult, glamorous and impecunious, vivid and irritating.  From time to time, I have lunch with her and she tells me stories.  It was from her that I learned how much my Granny loved fishing.  She told me about the pet duck named Solitaire that loved my Granny so much that she sat on her feet while she did the dishes.  And, last time I visited, she gave me the book, telling me it was Granny’s improbable favorite.

***

The book is worn and faded.  It cost 75 cents and came from the Fred Harvey Book Shop, Union Station, Chicago.  The copyright page indicates that it came out in 1926 and implies that this particular volume was part of the fifth edition, printed in August.  According to Temple Bailey’s Wikipedia page, the novel was the number 10 best seller for that year in the United States.

(Irene) Temple Bailey wrote many novels, selling over 3 million copies before she died in 1953 when she was in her eighties.  Several of them were bestsellers and a few even became movies.  She seems to have focused on romance, her career beginning, according to the brief autobiography in the back of the book, with winning a love story contest in The Ladies’ Home Journal.

The Blue Window tells the story of beautiful Hildegarde, who, upon the death of her beloved mother, finds out that her father is not dead, as she had been told.  Her mother divorced him because he loved another, leaving behind the elegance and money of his house in Baltimore to return to the family farm in Colorado to live a life of poverty and hard work with her sisters.  Hildegarde’s father never knew she existed, her mother having left him before telling him she was pregnant.  The aunts send her off to her father.  Crispin, the young and handsome fellow who is in love with Hildegarde, swears that they will be married someday no matter where she goes, although at present he has to finish college and Hildegarde has yet to agree.

Off Hildegarde goes to Vanity Fair, so to speak.  Her father is charmed by her, as is everyone she meets.  He has fallen on hard times, but keeps up appearances.  Hildegarde is scandalized and seduced by the luxury available despite increasing debt.  Her father’s young and handsome secretary, Meriweather, falls desperately in love with Hildegarde.  This is complicated by the fact that Meriweather has fallen out with his rich uncle, who did not want him to enlist in the Great War and has cut him off.  Further, Sally, Hildegarde’s new best friend, is in love with “Merry” herself.  In this confusing new landscape, Hildegarde finds solace in the window seat of the blue window on the upstairs landing with its view of bay and sky.

In order to rescue his fortunes, Hildegarde’s father sells his influence to an evil but wealthy politician.  Sally, despairing of ever winning Merry’s heart, agrees to marry the man.  Crispin comes to visit and Hildegarde’s father does not like him.  Hildegarde is torn between love for her father and her dear and handsome old friend.

Of course, in the end, Sally recognizes that she can’t possibly marry the evil one, Merry realizes that Sally, not Hildegarde, is the girl for him, especially since he is reconciled to his uncle and now has means himself, the father goes down in the ruins of his moral fiber, and Crispin and Hildegarde live happily ever after.  The story and its conclusion are almost entirely predictable.  It’s punctuated with lovely frocks and parties, elaborate descriptions of beautiful scenery, and occasional delicious meals.

The book is frothy, scenic, and satisfying.  It is not Great Literature, but it was a good way to spend an afternoon.  It has the flaws of its time—a deep belief that girls must marry and marry well, a casual racism, implicit classism.  And yet, it also has the virtues—the good prosper, the bad get their just desserts, ending up lonely and unhappy.

***

I return to the question:  what do you learn about someone by reading their favorite book?

My twice-divorced grandmother loved a romance in which the plucky heroine chooses the right man, the one who will love her always.  She could console herself with Hildegarde’s words to her father, when she left him to be with Crispin, “Love doesn’t mean being weak because others ask it.  It means being hard because one is right.” (p. 296)

Or maybe this is what she found to love in the book:  “Etched black against the wide green expanse, the geese flew in wedge-like formation, a few laggards trailing in a whipcord behind.  Steadily they passed, their strong wings bearing them on, their clamorous voices calling.  It was a thing to lift the heart.  To feed the soul.  Up there in the infinite sky was a faith that carried those feathered things through miles of uncharted flight.  Who told them when to go and when to come?  Who showed them the way?  Who held them thus together?  A brave company on a brave adventure?” p. 19-20

I hope her heart was lifted.