Janie 2 - Deciphering public and private family storiess

I visited Janie in a retirement community in St Louis. In her small living room, her overstuffed couch and chair were covered in blue and white cloth, as is the shower curtain and ironing board cover. Janie was dressed in blue and white. One of the first stories Janie told me was how she ended up wearing only blue and white.

“At the time of my birth, in 1924, there was a tradition in our church for some girls at birth to be dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus. One of the requirements, if one was willing to pick up this challenge, was that the child was to be dressed only in blue and white until she was seven and took her first communion. My mother brought me to the church, dedicated me to Mary in this way, and dressed me in blue and white until my seventh birthday.”
Janie said that for many years she gave up wearing only blue and white, but she has returned to it. She says that everyone now gives her blue and white presents.

As I took in the rest of her living room, I saw books piled from floor to ceiling, photographs of family members from three generations on the tops of the tables and the dressers. A high wooden stand held a huge dictionary crammed with papers. Janie said that these are important papers, bills, cards still unopened from Christmas, and letters that she means to answer. She calls the dictionary her filing system for all the projects that she has to do. It is an important resource for her letter writing and book projects that include a history of The Sisters of the Cenacle the order in which she has taken vows as a lay nun.

Janie is a tiny woman who at eighty moves in a sprightly way. She showed me around her apartment and then she suggested that we sit on her overstuffed couch to speak with each other. Her face was open and warm, and it wasn’t unusual for her to reach over and touch me while we spoke. She exuded a sense of occasion, as if in our meeting she expected good things to happen. Her infectious laughter and merry eyes were irresistible. Her sense of herself is intertwined with many generations of family members on both sides of her family. Each story she told reminded her of another one. As she glanced around her room her eyes lit on a picture and a story followed.

Janie was born into a wealthy Irish Catholic family in St. Louis headed by her grandfather. a well-known and respected member of St. Louis society. Unlike in other parts of the country where Catholics were often among the working class immigrants, Catholics founded St. Louis. The French were the first Catholics to arrive there, and St. Louis was known as the Rome of the west. Lafayette went out to visit it, acknowledging its importance. German Catholics came next, followed by Irish Catholics. Class distinctions were strongly held Within the Catholic community everyone knew his or her place in the pecking order. Janie’s grandfather was well at the top of the heap. As his granddaughter, Janie was known socially as “a Vis girl” because she went to Visitation, a prestigious Catholic girl’s school. Unfortunately, life at home wasn’t anything like the family’s public image.

In Janie’s words:
“The life around me, our big house and all the people, didn’t mean that much to me. My grandfather, who we called Papa, was the important one, according to everyone else, but really by the time I knew him he was an alcoholic. Once when I was five years old he fell down the concrete steps and lay spread-eagled on the basement floor. I didn’t know if he was dead. I ran next door to our house and somehow called my father at work. He came home in about twenty-five minutes and got my grandfather up.

“Papa was a terrible alcoholic. I remember those glasses that had thumb marks all around the bottom. He didn’t drink by a shot glass; instead, he drank bourbon in those old tumblers. You heard about him as ‘the illustrious’ outside the family, but inside the family you were told to keep your distance, to walk softly, and not to disturb him.”

“When Papa, died in 1936, I must have been in the sixth grade. The funeral-- well you wouldn’t believe it. I was as much in awe of that funeral as I was of Reagan’s funeral although it really wasn’t anything like that. I mean it was greater than anything I had ever seen. My grandfather was laid out in the house, and the many people who came to visit him filled our big house.

“I remember that house. When you came in the front door you entered the foyer and there was a big room with stairs that went up around and up again. We called this main room the living room. Around the living room were other rooms with doors entering onto it, like the library and beyond that the dining room. So many people came to see Papa laid out in the main room. When we went to the cemetery after the mass policemen were there to line up the cars for about a mile long, or maybe I just think it was a mile long, but it was long.”

Listening to Janie’s story I imagined her as a small child in a huge house living in the old fashioned tradition of children who are seen, but not heard. Janie another Keeper like Florence defined herself in relationship to her elders. Next time she tells us about her grandmothers.