Grandma Rachel

Grandma Rachel
I remember nothing
Just the shifting
Memories and rumors
Never in your own voice.
Now I am my father
A boy of eight
Watching a stolen kiss,
A note passed between you
Or Pop-pop, losing you
But not caring
“Just take her, you damn fool!”
Turning his eyes away.
My father, again, grown
And unfaithful
Asking who to blame
For his wandering ways.
"We like the name Rachel"
I tell my mom
“No. Anything but that.”
The stain never fades.
I wonder who you were.
What did you want?
Did you ever love them?
Did they ever love you enough?

The story, as much as I know:

My grandfather was married at 21 and widower five years later. Within a year, he married his 18-year-old housekeeper and printing apprentice, Rachel. They had two sons, Joseph (1916) and my father, Robert (1921). She had at least three affairs before she left the family in 1929 with the man who would become her second husband. My father remembered seeing them in a passionate kiss and later finding a note from her lover in her apron pocket. When Bob Hanby asked my grandfather to give Rachel a divorce and threatened to kill himself, Pop-pop famously said “Go ahead, you damn fool.”

Rachel was divorced in 1934, but did not marry Bob Hanby until 1942. I found them in the 1950 census, when she was 53 and he was 37. Yes, she had run off with a teenager when she was in her early thirties. By 1952 Bob Hanby was dead and she was staying with us, trying to mend her relationship with her only surviving son. Joseph had died in a car accident in 1941, along with his girlfriend, leaving behind a wife and four children under the age of six. What a family, right? Rachel married a third time, and survived him, too.

When I was little, I felt pretty special, having three grandmothers and three grandfathers. (Sometimes I even cheated by claiming poor Emma, Pop-pop’s first wife.) But the truth is, with all those grandparents, I barely knew any of them. and thanks to Ancestry, I know Rachel well enough to wonder if Pop-pop was really my grandfather.

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