Sermon on Inheritance

At age 29, I broke off an engagement.  I had too.  My fiancée believed in a God that did not resemble any God I could praise or worship, or even curse.  A God who wore his belt cinched tight around his waist, sported bland ties, a side-part in his straight hair, and required clean, white walls in his temples, wood-paneled ceilings like the underbelly of a capsized boat.  For weeks after our dissolved engagement, I couldn’t eat.  I couldn’t sleep.  Hives sprouted up from my chest, angry pebble-shaped spots scattered between my breasts.  I passed though the world as a giant, exposed nerve.  The air-conditioning hurt me; everything hurt me, even the trees, even the sun.

One afternoon in the deepest dark of my despair, I sat in the passenger seat of my father’s car.  The car moved south toward downtown along I-45, the same highway that once connected me to my grandmother.

“You know that mirror and brush you have, Sis?” he asked.

“From Grandma?”

“Yes.”

When my grandmother died, I inherited from her an antique silver brush and oval-shaped mirror, along with the oak vanity table on which these objects lay.  In every apartment I’ve lived in, I’ve placed that table and that mirror and brush into my bedroom first, a consecration.

“You won’t believe what I found out,” he said.  His incredulity raised his pitch a notch higher.  He almost squeaked.

“That mirror and brush belonged to a man my mother loved before my father.  In her twenties.”

“What?” I asked in a puny voice.

“I almost didn’t happen,” he said.  “I never imagined or thought of her having an adult life before me or my father.”

He slowly unraveled the story for me: my grandmother was engaged to a man before my grandfather.  Her own mother, my great-grandmother, disapproved of the match.  She approached the local parish priest and persuaded him to refuse a marriage service.  My grandmother left home.  By the time she met my grandfather on a blind date in Tuscon and decided to marry him, she had learned her lesson.  The second time she did not ask permission.

How my grandmother would choose to bestow the objects from her first love to her first grandchild.  How I always thought she loved only one man.  How even after my grandfather died suddenly when her children were still adolescents, my grandmother never remarried or even dated much.  How I always assumed a second love would have come after my grandfather, not before him.  How the objects were a secret whispered only to me: I was once a woman like you.  It’s not too late. How a God might conspire to have this information revealed to me in the wake of my own broken engagement.

Imagine my grandmother standing on a street corner—Lower East Side, because I’ve walked through that part of New York and can picture it, maybe Ludlow and Houston. 1939 or 1940, give or take a year or two. It won’t matter. She is 24 or 25, maybe, having finished college at St. Mary’s early, and she feels relieved to have escaped the Midwest, escaped Southbend with its wind and monotony, its gold helmets. A white dress, a thin metallic belt I saw once in an old black and white photograph, her shoulders bony against the skyline, her auburn hair crisply bobbed—she was a woman of her time.

She stands on a street corner, my grandmother, full of hope and longing. She stares down the concrete hallway of buildings, the car-infested street. She sees a future: a husband, children, grandchildren, some loss and regret but all these remain shadowy. For instance, she does not see me. Because she is young, she does not know she will indeed get this future she imagines, but that she will miscalculate the particulars. She does not see yet a giant war, can’t imagine one for her husband’s time, for her son’s too, and her grandson’s, and maybe more.

She thinks she will marry this Kelly. Kelly is his first name or his last name. No matter. He is Irish, he is hot-blooded and easy on the eyes, a liberal pourer. I say he has blue-green eyes. I loved a man once with sea-green eyes and I know they can get a sensible woman to promise the world. 

It is a dangerous neighborhood, tenement houses glued together like model planes. Elegant and tall, my grandmother, so people glance at her. She does not belong here, and will never. Kelly is a poor young man, or a little poor. He pays the bills as a boxer, say, and he often wins bouts, and when he does he buys my grandmother steak and top-shelf Whiskey she never drinks. He drinks it. Orders another. He loves her in stupid excess.

Before dates my grandmother sits at the dark wood vanity table.  She sits with her back straight at the top edge of the bench whose seat is upholstered in a fashionable coral-colored fabric.  She cannot decide which necklace to wear.  A string of dime store pearls?  A stern, silver choker?  A bare neck? Or is that too brazen? She cocks her long neck and runs a finger over her cheekbone, studying her reflection in the narrow mirror.  Who is she?

I rewrite and rewrite the story ever since that day in the car with my father.  The facts change; the truth remains.  The Reverend J. Pittman-MeGehee once wrote that “myths kill time”, and so this story collapses the distance between women of the same lineage, and also comforts me in my most restless, distracted moments, like a good New York Times crossword puzzle or Reality TV. I have canonized the story inside the sacred text of my life. The story nourishes me down to my soul, whichever way I tell it. I have these fragments, these words: mirror, brush, fiancée, Irish, vanity. One phrase: before your grandfather. One place: New York. I have all these fragments of history and now I can adhere them to something, to my own first, sad engagement story, to my heartache, to a hope for a happy future, and this will be a grace my grandmother gives me.

Last month, I entered into another engagement.  My partner knelt down in the street between the University of St. Thomas and the Rothko Chapel—a place I’ve walked before, a place that could leak a few stories about me—before he pulled out my grandmother’s engagement ring to place on my finger.  The same diamond, reset in a simple white gold band to resemble the original.  The old cradled inside the new.  And shining. 

And last week, my Aunt Mary gave me my grandmother’s more simple wedding band, a gold and silver ring my Aunt Lore wore for many years after my grandmother’s death.  I don’t know what love I feel most wedded to: my fiancée’s love or the love handed down from woman to woman to woman.

I think of a poem by Mark Doty, “Broadway”, from his book, My Alexandria.  It ends with these lines:

I will write a poem for you tomorrow,

he said. The poem I will write will go like this:
Our ancestors are replenishing
the jewel of love for us.

Amen.