by Tod Davies.
My maternal grandparents were a much different story.
My mother’s father died before she was born. My grandmother was six months pregnant when he suddenly succumbed to typhoid. The family had been living in the Philippines where he worked as a Macanese merchant in import export.
When I was a little girl, I always wondered if ‘import/export’ meant he worked as a spy. But probably it was just sales.
My grandmother was left alone with a small daughter, my aunt Celia, and her unborn baby. Celia’s full name was ‘Cecilia Maria’, after the tradition in their family of always giving daughters the name of the Blessed Virgin as a second name. But when my grandmother Amalia was pregnant with my mother, she fell down the stairs. Worried when the baby did not move inside her, my grandmother prayed to St. Theresa and promised, if the baby lived, to give her Theresa’s name. So that became my mother’s name—Violetta Theresa—as well as mine, who was named for her and for my paternal German grandmother—Theresa Ottilie. My initials, then, were ‘Tod’, which became my childhood nickname, and then the middle name of my youngest brother when I was made his godmother. I always disliked the name Theresa. My mother had disliked it as well, but not as much as she disliked the name Violetta. So when I was her first child, and she was alone in the midst of foreigners who managed to imply that she, by dint of her foreignness, was somehow inferior to them, she clung to her own stubborn sense of herself, that same stubbornness that had gotten her a scholarship in a Catholic girls’ college in San Francisco, that same stubbornness that got her to lead her own mother and older sister after her to California, from Japan where they were trapped during the war. She named me Theresa. After herself.
Violetta Theresa came here on a Portuguese passport. After World War II, Portugal didn’t have many people wanting to emigrate to the United States, so it was easy to get in under the quota. My mother was desperate to get out of Japan, where she had spent her desolate wartime teenage years living as a refugee. She was desperate to get to America, the country that had won the war. It didn’t matter that America was the country that dropped the horror of atomic weaponry on the country where she cowered. My grandmother had taken my aunt and my mother out of the convent school where they boarded in Tokyo, trying to get out of the country. The borders closed, and they were trapped for the duration. My poor mother. She was twelve then, and seventeen when the war ended. She lived through the war in Kobe, a city that the Americans firebombed. She and my grandmother and my aunt were living in a small wooden shack when a bomb came through the window where my mother stood. She ducked. It went over her head into the wall behind her. She, my grandmother and my aunt ran out of the burning building. But their three cats and all my grandmother’s family jewelry burned in the flames.
I don’t know if my maternal grandmother was similarly inclined to protect herself from unbearable reality by romance, the way my mother has always done. I do know that Amalia must have had the grit that Violetta inherited. For after my grandfather died, my pregnant grandmother boarded a boat in the Philippines with her toddler, my Aunt Celia. I imagine it and shudder. My grandmother, pregnant, alone, no prospects, a small child, boarding a boat for Japan and the Portuguese colony there, to get help from her own family. Grit, like I say.
I still shudder every time I think about it.
My mother, years later, boarded an American battleship alone as a teenage refugee, to sail from Japan to San Francisco. There the same order of nuns that had so efficiently run the convent school where she had been educated as a child, in Tokyo, ran a convent school and a college—the most beautiful building in San Francisco, that college. Lone Mountain, it was called. It’s gone now, taken over by another university. A friend of mine went to school there in its later incarnation and tells me it is haunted by the ghost of a nun who had taught my mother.
Violetta was all alone on that battleship, not knowing what would happen next. I’ve seen her passport picture from that time. She looks anxious, even terrified, trembling, but game. Far from the saucy, glamorous young woman in pictures that were to come later, when she’d found her feet in the new land. After she had brought her own mother and sister over the ocean behind her. My mother did that. She has a very strong will. And a very strong sense of survival.
Of the sisters, my mother was the beauty. The glamorous one, with a knack for turning herself out elegantly. The ambitious one. Even the snobbish one. “Leli” was her nickname; it’s her nickname still, at age 93. It means “little sister.” “Mona” was what my mother called Aunt Celia: “Big sister.” My mother forgets, now and then, that my aunt has been dead a few years. She calls my second brother’s wife, my wonderful sister in law Cindy, “Mona,” thinking she is talking to Celia again. And she calls me “Mona.” When she doesn’t go farther back and call me “Mother.”
Her mother Amalia. Amalia’s childhood nickname was “Dry Champagne.” She was glamorous too. Amalia was born into Macau’s haute bourgeoisie, and, having married my grandfather on the rebound from an unhappy love affair, was thought to have done so beneath her. At least, so my mother always said. Always very concerned with matters of status, my mother. Although her heart wasn’t really in it. It struck me—it strikes me now—more as a matter of survival for her, coming as she did from a place where her status as a girl, first in Macau and Hong Kong, made her valued less than a boy would have been. And then her status as a foreigner in, first, Japan, and then San Francisco. It was very important to her not to drown in the perceived cultural insignificance of those categories.
When I was small, she would tell us her recurring dream, as she drove me and my two young brothers to the expensive convent school run by the same nuns who had educated her in Japan. I never could understand what I was doing there, given that I lived in a working class Irish neighborhood, and every other girl I knew lived on the other side of town. “Why are you sending me to this school, Mama?” I would ask. “Because it will help you later. It will teach you that rich people aren’t different from you. They’re no smarter. In fact, they are usually really stupid.” A good lesson. She was right: that was something I learned in my elegant, expensive school in a robber baron’s mansion on the heights in San Francisco. Something I never forgot.
If her dream was not a summary of her feelings about her status and her brave battle to fight for it against all comers, it was at least a small poetic joke on the same theme. “I’m at a wedding, but I’m wearing my pajamas! And some snobby person asks me why, and I say,”—this now in a sashaying, superior tone of voice—“I say, ‘What! Don’t you know? It’s the latest style!’” How we, her loyal audience, would laugh with glee at that. And I, having less need of defense because of the care she spent in my upbringing, still see that strategy of hers repeated by me, unconscious, over and over, unawares. The white fleece coat she made a small schoolgirl me, from a cheap remnant bought on sale at the local fabric store. I called it my Snow Queen Coat, and I made Susan Jobs cry. Her mother called my mother, angry, because Susan wasn’t happy with her expensive camel’s hair after that. Susan wanted a fairy tale coat like mine. I still remember how unhappy this made me.
It made my mother laugh. A bit meanly. That confused me too. Was it funny? I had never wanted to make Susan Jobs cry. I had just wanted to tell a story about my coat.
At least, I think that was all I wanted to do. Who knows?
It was true that Susan Jobs’s mother was blonde, tall, dressed like a model in a catalog, and lived on the other side of town in a house decorated like a page in a catalog. It was true that she, like many of the other mothers of girls in my class, made snide remarks about my mother behind her back. Maybe it was funny. I pondered that. One thing was certain. My mother was competitive with other women. Even with her much loved sister Celia.
My aunt Celia was an easy target. She let herself be that. She took a lot from Leli, with a shrug about it, and a joke. Mainly because she had a sense of humor about everything, including herself. She was strong. She took care of my mother. My mother was ‘Little Sister’, and my aunt was one of those people who care automatically for anyone who needs it. That my glamorous mother pretended she never needed care put her at the top of the list.
My equally good-humored uncle John was from a Mexican immigrant family in Chicago. His children, my cousins, teased him when he claimed they were Spanish, the same way we teased my mother when she claimed we weren’t part Chinese. (DNA tests later proved my generation right in both cases, no surprise.) My uncle was a conscientious objector in the war, sent to post-war occupied Tokyo as assistant to an Army chaplain. My aunt was a secretary in the American occupation. They fell in love.
But my aunt was made of stern stuff. She told my uncle-to-be that she had no intention of being a war bride. When she and my grandmother followed Little Sister to San Francisco, my uncle followed too. They married there. He took a job as a librarian in an oil refinery. They bought a small, beautifully put together house in a neighborhood that their mainly Black neighbors jokingly called ‘Hershey Hill’.
I loved that house. I loved that neighborhood. Many years later, when I lived and worked in England, in the city of Liverpool, I finally understood why I so comfortably settled to work in Toxteth, the oldest Black community in England. It must have been the early memories of playing with my cousins on Hershey Hill.
My mother was determined to beat my aunt. My aunt was not oblivious to this ambition of my mother’s, but shrugged it off as a joke. Celia was competitive also. She had been school president, and captain of the sports teams, and she played poker to win. But I imagine she thought letting Leli think she was better would help her, if only in calming the natural anxiety of an anxious young woman trying to make her way in a new world.
My mother married my father. I asked her why she had chosen him, one Valentine’s Day, as she ironed his shirts. “I had five offers,” she said, hitting one of the shirts in a fury. “I picked your father because he was good around the house. If I’d known about the drinking, I probably would have picked someone else.”
Many years later, after my father’s death, she confided in me that she, too, had married on the rebound. “He was Italian,” she said in a wistful voice. “Back then they only married Italians. He walked in the room, and it was love at first sight for me.”
Still, my parents did all right. Better than most. Which is what happens when you commit to something and see it through to the end.
But in the beginning, all that was clear was that my mother was in a fury to prove she was better than everyone else. Having chosen wrongly only added to her passion. My father was the first to graduate college in his family; as an engineer in the postwar boom, he was a good provider. And they enjoyed a good love life. That was always true, even well into their eighties. They fought all the time, but they enjoyed themselves behind closed doors.
So I was born nine months and ten days after the wedding. I once asked my mother why, and she said, “I wanted to prove I could have a child faster after I got married than your aunt Celia.”
My aunt had trouble with miscarriages, so I had no trouble identifying that as mean rather than funny. It was always a problem for my mother, being mean. It usually rebounded on her. But it was a defense learned early, and in her situation, you don’t give up a defense.
Which brings me to Cymeric. Cymeric was my cousins’ dog. There were three cousins, Michael, Lisa, and Stephen, one for each of the three of us born in the first four years of my parents’ marriage. We loved all of them. So it was like having a holiday when I was five years old, and Bill was four, and Peter was two, that my mother just announced to my aunt that she was leaving us with her while she and my father had a second honeymoon in Europe.
Imagine. My poor aunt, who worked as a secretary, already had three children under six. In a three bedroom, one bathroom house. With my grandmother in a flat downstairs. And a dog.
Now she had six of them. With my grandmother. And a dog.
Years later, at my uncle’s funeral, she jokingly grimaced about this, and laughed. “She just left you with us!” she said. I laughed, too, and apologized.
Oh, and that dog. Cymeric. An apricot colored Welsh Terrier. I don’t remember much about Cymeric. My cousin Steve tells me Cym was the dog of one of my uncle’s coworkers. When this man found he was dying of cancer, he saw my uncle’s family as a good place for his dog. He was right about that. It was a good place for us kids too. I loved that house, and when I return there in memory, I can smell the comforting scent of dog. And of cooking. And of the back porch warming in sunlight.
I remember so well my feelings of safety, of being cared for. Of being loved.
One anecdote. My aunt was downstairs doing laundry when my youngest brother and my youngest cousin were upstairs in the bathroom pouring buckets of water onto the floor. As my aunt tells it, she came roaring up the stairs only to find me at the top with my arms outstretched. I was saying, “You wouldn’t hurt a small child, would you?” I remember her laughter at that, and no, she didn’t hurt two small children. They did have the bucket taken away from them, though.
And when Cymeric, fierce and protective, bit the mailman who blamelessly patted my little cousin on the head, it was my aunt who went to the postmaster and coaxed him into continuing postal service to the house. She was like that.
In memory, everyone was happy in that house. That is what I remember about Cymeric. He was happy, too. Happy and protective of those smaller than him. As my aunt was. And as I hope I am, after her.