Walking the Wall

We all have those stories that have taken on almost mythic proportions in our family–we all have an Old Uncle So & So who use to be horse thief or some such. We have a lot of those in our family–a multi-great aunt hung as a witch, a great-grandfather, part Chippewa, who came down the river on a raft, and (a personal favorite) a ancient Irish ancestor that was born of an Irish goddess or fairy queen, depending which version you read.

One of my favorites as a young girl, swayed me by its wonderful romanticism even as it seduced me away from righteous indignation for my grandmother, who I loved dearly. You see, my father’s father was a soldier in World War II and his job was to take photographs for military accident investigations–we have an album of some disturbing images from that time. Anyway, he was injured and placed with a diplomat’s family in India to recover. He had only been married briefly when he went to war and hadn’t seen my father for some time after his birth. My great-grandmother (the wicked step-mother archetype in this story), who was not fond of my grandmother, had been writing my grandfather and telling him she was cheating on him and who knows what else kind of cruel and untrue things.

This deceit on the part of my great-grandmother was the one thing that, as a young girl, allowed me to revel in the story without passing so much judgment on my grandfather, as he had been tricked, much like Snow White was tricked into eating that apple! Well, the Indian diplomat had a beautiful daughter who nursed my grandfather back to health, they fell madly in love and he eventually married her and brought her back to America where they lived…

Well, they did get married and come back to America, though the happily ever after wasn’t quite the true ending. He died when I was quite young so I was never able to ask him about it–but it is the uncertainty about the details that makes it all the more delicious. Still, the whole story seemed so much like the English Patient and was one I remember asking my mother about over and over–”Tell me about grandpa and the beautiful Indian lady,” I would ask, and we would pull out her picture to look at it and go through the tale once again. At some point, it doesn’t matter about the details and the line between truth and myth have blurred and the story has taken on its own wonderful life.
Tonight I stopped at my mother’s to take some pictures of some old stamps, but in trying to find them, she came across a few boxes of coins that were this same grandfather’s and many of them were coins from India–which reminded me of the tale.