Aunt Virginia and the Car

Dawn Potter

[first published in the Antioch Review's special issue "Memoirs True and False," fall 2006]

A story is a lie. As soon as the teller opens her mouth, the tale jumps out like a toad and hops into the bushes as fast as it can. She won’t see it again. All she’s left with is the story of the time the toad jumped out of her mouth.

The story of Aunt Virginia and the car is a classic story-as-lie, propagated in this instance by my mother. I first remember hearing the story when my mother was teaching me to iron my father’s handkerchiefs. Kleenex was ascendant in the seventies; my father may well have been the last young man in the U.S.A. to routinely blow his nose on handkerchiefs, but this was no surprise, as my father has always favored the habits of his grandparents. What was a surprise is how long my mother kept up the chore of ironing them. She was not an enthusiastic housewife and would much rather have spent her time drinking coffee and reading D. H. Lawrence, adding her own brief and inscrutable marginalia as she crossed and recrossed her lovely Kim Novak legs.

            But for whatever reason, the handkerchiefs were destined for the iron, my sister and I were destined to iron them, and my mother hung around the kitchen to make sure we didn’t burn holes in them. This was the sort of moment at which stories were likely to jump out of her mouth. At previous ironing sessions, she had entertained us with (1) a reenactment of how Uncle Melvin’s mother, old Mrs. Thomas, used to walk across the room (apparently she looked just like her son, and he looked like a cross between Edward G. Robinson and, of all things, a toad),  (2) the story of how Aunt Sarah and Aunt Rose got involved in naming their mother’s new babies (who ended up as Betty, Babe, and Boy), and (3) the tale of why Aunt Rose married fat Uncle Melvin on the rebound and how that snap decision worked out for them. The material of these stories required much exaggerated slouching and hip-rolling in the case of Mrs. Thomas, a general sense of embellished chaos in the tale of the unnamed babies, and a fervid devotion to the unexplainable powers of Love as evinced in the union of Rose and Melvin, who against all odds lived happily ever after.

            Aunt Virginia was a different matter altogether. The story of Aunt Virginia was a tragedy so complicated that it required my mother to concoct several distinct versions over the years, partly in response to her innate reluctance to mention sex in the presence of her daughters, partly also because foreshadowing and revelation are essential elements of tragedy and my mother was both a shrewd student of literature and a terrified prisoner of her own private history. Her prevarications in this story were a way of shattering calamity into manageable fragments of sadness.

            It’s important to note that all the afore-mentioned aunts and uncles (indeed, most of the aunts and uncles I laid claim to) were my mother’s, not mine. Like her own children, my mother had, for the most part, listened in on the stories of her elders, with the difference that the elders were old when I first met them and young when she did. The listened-in-on elder in this case was my grandmother, not a reliable narrator under any circumstance, though no doubt a histrionic one.

Granny was born Czeswlawa Kulbacki, the daughter of Barbara and Felix, both of whom had immigrated from Poland to western Pennsylvania coal-mine country in the early 1900s. Barbara was twelve or thirteen when she arrived in America and, once she got here, immediately married Mr. Dimick, another Polish immigrant. They had several children, and Virginia was their youngest daughter. (Virginia, like all her siblings, was christened with a Polish name, but I never heard what it was. At school, the nuns took it as a mission to Americanize all strange names. Granny’s Czeswlawa became Jessie, a name she despised and promptly changed to Sally, giving herself a new birthday as well—another story-lie: Granny has always been very good at them.)

            At this point Mr. Dimick died, and Barbara married Felix Kulbacki, an extremely handsome boy from Bialystok on the Russian border who, even as an old man in Milwaukee, could perform Russian dances of the sort that dominate the drinking scene in Fiddler on the Roof. With Felix, Barbara produced a whole second family, including Granny (apparently crazy from the start), and then died at the age of forty, leaving a passel of lonely little kids to the care of her not-all-that-much-older first family.

            Thus began the tragedy of Aunt Virginia. During our early ironing sessions, my mother placed great emphasis on this back story of Barbara’s death.  My sister and I were made privy, in her telling, to a great and amorphous sorrow for mothers, emanating from a myriad of sources: from Virginia’s loss of a companion-mother, from Granny’s loss of a parent-mother, from my mother’s life-long lack of a sane and loving mother, from our own vulnerability to some analogous loss. As the oldest daughter still living at home, Virginia, motherless maiden, was required by fate to step into the role of Virginia, mother of children, and this she did with beauty and poise—an angel in the house, a veritable Holy Virgin—and the children loved her fiercely, with a kind of schwarmerei devotion.

             But this was the 1920s in western Pennsylvania, and Virginia was a modern girl with a job in a Greensburg shop and a family to raise. And one day—here my mother’s voice would hush—Virginia was walking along a crowded sidewalk full of jostling foot passengers, and she was accidentally pushed into the street, and she fell under a moving car and was killed instantly. And the little children lost their mother all over again.

            It was a terrible story, and it moved me terribly—the pointlessness of loss, the children’s orphaned loneliness. In real life I had little sympathy for Granny, who smelled bad and was bratty and mean to the adults I loved best. But I could measure out a few grains of love for her when confronted with this tale of woe. It forced me to accord Granny a kind of exculpatory grace.

Then, in my early teens, at a point when my parents’ marriage was fraying and melodrama ruled over all our hearts, my mother suddenly changed the ending.  Standing at the bay window, staring into the rain, my mother said, Virginia might have fallen under the car.  Or she might have thrown herself under the car. The truth was (my mother hinted darkly), Virginia had reason to be unhappy.

            Her misery was, of course, tied to Romance Gone Wrong, but the details my mother provided were hazy; I had the vague notion that Virginia might have gotten herself entangled with a coal baron’s son or possibly a man who owned race horses. I don’t necessarily mean that my mother added the soupçon of social injustice that was now flavoring Virginia’s tragedy.  But both of my parents were ardently self-conscious of their plebian backgrounds, shuttling, in all social exigencies, between working-class pride with its concomitant iconoclastic reserve and a painful longing for middle-class academic pleasure and anonymity. I was inclined to perceive a peasant-versus-prince imbroglio in most untenable situations, romantic or otherwise.

            This is another facet of the story-as-lie: the listener’s distortion of a tale to suit her own distractions and predilections. If my mother chose a crisis point in her private affairs of the heart as the moment to introduce me to a new, non-motherly, man-distracted Virginia, she also fed me this version at a precise, peculiar age, one at which I had no clear vision of physical love but was enraptured by images of romance and heartbreak, both of which fit beautifully into the division-of-the-classes schema I was negotiating in daily life—a strange, clashing partnership between high sentiment and populist self-protection.  And as I applied it to Virginia’s story, her tragedy shifted, in my imagination, from its foundation of mother-loss to the more alarming loss of any sturdy personhood at all. Apparently, Virginia had been the wrong character in her own fairy tale.

            But beyond my impasto impositions on the narrative, a truly horrible question remained.  Assuming that Virginia had indeed thrown herself under the car, how much did she love those little brothers and sisters at home?  Here was my mother staring out the window into a black rainstorm, telling me that Virginia might have been selfish enough to kill herself—that she had reason to be selfish enough to kill herself. The story, now, had become more than a tragedy. It was a warning: Don’t be so foolish as to depend on your mother.  That the woman conveying this warning was herself the only child of Granny, the worst mother I knew, made it matter of course. That the woman conveying this warning was my own mother made it unbearable.

            The story-as-lie changes from telling to retelling, from memory to memory. Aunt Virginia lived in my mother’s thoughts as a figment of her mother’s sickness, of the entwined anxieties of her mother’s sisters, of a portrait touched and retouched by time and circumstance, of a drama, a sorrow, a warning, a temptation. When my own child learns to ask, “Did Aunt Virginia really throw herself under the car?” how shall I answer, that time, the question no one ever answers?

 **

After the birth of my eldest son, my mother came up to Maine to stay for a few days with the idea of helping his confused parents to cope. But what she mostly did was flounder with us in a cloud of bewilderment—first baby, first grandchild, tacit acknowledgment that her daughter had been having sex, and, what seemed most surreal, the idea that such congress had produced the first boy in a family dominated by girls. With this restless situation and a few broken nights as backdrop, my mother eventually brought forth version number 3 of the story of Aunt Virginia and the car.

When Virginia met her death, she was not living snugly at home with her young stepfamily. She had been banished to a boarding house in Greensburg. This was because Felix, her mother’s handsome second husband, had thrown her out of the house after he found out she was pregnant. The father of the baby was a Connellsville boy, a regular poor local sort, nothing coal baron-ish about him, with an older sister who lived with him and dedicated herself to managing his thoughts and opinions.

In the sister’s view Virginia’s unfortunate good looks had led him down the path of sin; but what was done was done, so the sister took steps to solve the problem. Virginia was kept under surveillance until her baby boy was born. Then the sister demanded the baby for herself. Her reasoning was thus: You are a bad girl. Your family are Polacks. They are sick in the head.  Faced with such a litany, what could a lonely girl do? Virginia gave the evil sister her baby.

Briefly she was allowed visiting rights. Then one day she arrived at the house, and the sister refused to open the door. Virginia never saw her son again.

But my mother did.  One afternoon, in the 1940s, my mother and Granny went downtown to see a minstrel show. (Those were the days when Granny still got dressed.) The show was a home-grown event; all the black-face singers, dancers, and joke-tellers were middle-class locals: merchants, insurance salesmen, rising young cousins and nephews and fathers.

At the end of the show, Granny waved a hand at one of the minstrels and informed my mother, “That’s Virginia’s son. Go tell him who you are.”

            Trapped, unhappy, but nonetheless giddy with knowledge of Virginia’s tragic story (which version? I have no idea) and her own possible role in its dénouement, my mother timidly approached the backstage door and asked if she could “see her cousin.”

            And this is the point in the story when I want to shut up my ears, send my mother back to Massachusetts, and refuse to listen to another word about Virginia. Because what happened next is intolerable: Aunt Virginia’s son glanced at the little girl standing in the doorway and said, “No.”

            Witnessing a parent’s humiliation is a dreadful weight for a child, one that gets harder to bear as the years erode.  And how the humiliations crowd this stage. Here is Aunt Virginia’s black-face son, confronted in the flesh by the shade of his dead mother. What lurid tales had he suffered, year upon year, that he recoiled so cruelly from her small niece? Here is Granny, lighting a cigarette in the dark theater. Who knows what she expected her daughter to manufacture—a happy ending? revenge? Here is my mother, hurt, embarrassed, young, powerless, failing a test she never understood. Here am I, hating this story; wincing, ashamed; rocking a wailing infant who will not be comforted.

            But which story is true? Here am I, ten years after hearing the third version of Virginia’s tragedy, not sure what I remember from the telling and what fictions my memory has imposed. Did my baby cry all night long? Or did my mother and I bask side by side in the August sunlight as he watched us peacefully from his puddle of shadow? Did my child-mother really linger like an orphan at the stage door of that minstrel show? Or did Granny, in some fit of goodness, stand alongside her, a fellow waif in search of an ending? When Virginia’s son met their eyes, did he turn away to cry? Or was he looking back at something he’d lost?  Did Virginia throw herself under the car? Or did the earth leap up to meet her?  Did the stars speak?  Did the snow on the pavement of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, sing a faint, thin tune, a song as sweet as a nursing infant’s, as quiet as dawn, as pale as a dreamer’s last sleep?

Tell me a lie, Virginia.

I don’t care what I know, so long as I know it’s you.