“Why didn’t you speak?” Lee, my sister, asked on our way home from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. “I thought you would.”
“Me, too,” I answer limply. I thought I would but listening to those who really knew our two cousins, I felt mute. My mother built her life, our lives, around her family. My father’s relatives felt important to me, but unfamiliar.
“It’s too far,” my Lee texted, when we learned that our cousin Margy’s daughter, Megan, who died of breast cancer, and our first cosin, Johnny, would be celebrated in Manomet at the end of July. “We can’t go.”
“Agreed,” I texted back.
“Beth found us a place to stay,” she texted a few days later. “I think we should go.”
So, we went, my sister driving and me as navigator.
Manomet is to the Young clan what Eagles Mere is to our family—generational webs with family shorthand, shared lingo and plenty of in-jokes. The places, themselves, summon us, nestle into us. We return, pulled by the lake as the Youngs are pulled by the ocean. As Bill tells me, “I’ve realized the memories are with the people; the walls, themselves, are less important.”
As soon as we arrived, I noted the blue of the ocean in the sun. I recognize Aunt Peggy’s inimitable blue Flair pen print on the back of photographs. I am enchanted by the lapis lazuli blue hydrangeas. I miss my dad and Aunt Peggy’s blue eyes, so different from my own brown ones. This enclave centers on sand and boats, gray-shingled cottages, rituals.
I knew Megan only slightly, meeting her last at my own wedding. Aunt Peggy, my dad’s sister had chronicled the event on the back of a photo of the Robb family—Eagles Mere, 1985. That picture and hundreds of other snapshots were displayed on a table. On a trifold collage, Megan sparkled, so full of life and love that it seemed inconceivable that she no longer lives. There she was: tall and laughing, vibrant with a wide smile, blonde and confident. On Facebook, as she battled metastatic breast cancer, I noted her siblings’ fierce love for her, felt the hole she left even far away in Ohio because I, too, lost a sibling long ago. Her mom, my cousin, Margy, had died of breast cancer, too, in 2006. In Susan’s littlest daughter, I glimpsed a face I knew from black and white photographs of my father and Aunt Peggy as toddler in the 1920’s. Genes are powerful.
At the first gathering in Manomet, welcomed warmly by Mason—the last of my four sibling cousins—and Beth, his gracious wife, I felt a stranger to myself. All these Young cousins—generations of them—knew one another, their genealogy linked so intricately that they identified themselves by numbers that explained their place in the lineup: 5512, if I have it right, is my cousin Bill’s number. I kept looking for Johnny and Aunt Peggy, remembering over and over that they were gone. I felt like an intruder, as if we should have stayed away. John and Megan were ours, too, but connected by a slender filament dangling from a complex web of Youngs. My sister, braver than I, introduced herself, took an interest in other people—she was so much like my mother that I lost my breath. I shadowed her, appreciative.
We introduced ourselves to Jacy, John’s oldest daughter, whom I had not seen since the 80’s. She is a writer, too, and the mother of daughters.
The next morning, singing, “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” under the tent, wrapped in the familiar Episcopalian liturgy our branch of the family shared with the Youngs, we bid goodbye to Megan. Her friends dressed in Lily Pulitzer, the bright fuchsia and orange hues an antidote to sorrow. “A symphony is never finished,” the minister explained. A symphony is never finished. We sat with gracious Kitty and her family from Charleston, with whom we had discovered mutual acquaintances. We ate lobster rolls. I relaxed, moved by the group of people assembled to honor this young woman, moved by the composure her brother and sister showed.
Between events, Lee and I wandered, meeting my best friend to eat ice cream in Plymouth, strolling through touristy shops, marveling at the blue, blue hydrangeas.
“Maybe, in my next life, I’ll breed hydrangeas,” I suggested to my sister, who was patient with my continuous raptures about every different shade I noticed.
“The color depends on the acid in the soil” she reminded me, ever-practical.
At dinner the second night, eating pizza, I sat with Jake, John’s son, and his wife, Liz, talking about teaching and a writing and Covid. We are a family of writers and teachers. Conversation felt more natural. This group understood, perhaps, why we had come. Beth brought out a friendship quilt--its twin hangs in our home. Almost 200 years old and lovingly embroidered with names of people we do not know, its silk and velvet squares still dazzle. We think the quilts were made for Big Dada’s grandfather’s second wife, but there is no one left to verify our half-remembered truths. I told Beth of restoring ours and sending daddy the bill. Our father, the ultimate cheapskate, paid up when I said the expense was for family.
Beth shared a story about my dad being greeted by name by all the parking attendants at the Head of the Schuylkill. Dad had rowed for Penn. Paige, Mason and Beth’s daughter, rowed, too. Now, Riley, John’s youngest son, rows for Bates. I was happy to hear a story in which my dad was the hero, not the butt of a joke. He was a man who, like Willy Loman, was liked, but not well-liked, but here, in this family space, he is loved. We drank wine, shifted seats. I chatted with Zora, seven, then moved inside and sat with my cousin, Mason, a sculptor—the first artist I ever knew—his arm in a pale blue cast. We talked about our shared inconvenience in having only one hand…more stories spooled out. Mason’s calm reassured me. I felt glad to be included in the circle of his love.
The next morning, in a leafy cemetery, his children offered the end of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” from which Fitzgerald took his title for Tender is the Night; an original poem by John’s daughter, Julia, Frost’s “Into My Own”. It seemed right to send John off on a wave of words; he was a lover of language. We dropped handfuls of dirt into a hole too small for John’s gigantic presence. That night, we gathered one final time beneath the tent. By now, I knew the players, understood more about this side of the family with whom I almost lost touch when Aunt Peggy died.
In childhood, my family would pile into the station wagon on Christmas afternoon, leaving our presents reluctantly, to drive to Montclair, where our father’s parents lived on Midland Avenue. The Youngs would all be waiting for us—Aunt Peggy and Uncle Bill, Peter, Margy, Mason, Johnny—hungry, annoyed by the dried out turkey, but I, the littlest by far, remember Margy’s kindness and the the crew of hulking boy cousins—they tossed me high and laughed at my shrieks. We were surrounded by Toby pitchers and Christmas decorations, my third-floor bedroom papered in huge cabbage roses, my father’s childhood bedroom—where my brother slept—done up like a ship’s berth.
As an adult, no doubt prodded by my mother and Aunt Peggy, I went to see my then famous cousin Johnny in L.A. with my husband, Seth. Aunt Peggy was so, so proud of Johnny—whenever one of his shows was on TV, she wrote to tell me to tune in. She was a one-woman PR machine, so rich in love. After Jacy and Jake had gone to sleep, Johnny and Jenny and Seth and I spoke of Grammie’s twin brother, Frank Sliger, a shadowy figure neither of us ever knew, but whose absence intrigued us. His army records had been sealed, then burned, his discharge dishonorable. Was he gay? A spy? John had worked hard to unravel the enigma—he loved puzzles. Grammie, he told me, used to meet Frank on a street corner in Manhattan because Big Dada, her husband, did not approve of her dissolute brother. What became of him? We do not know.
Johnny told me, too, the story of spending one winter after college in Manomet at one of the houses—the Tennis Court House? The Big House? I cannot remember. He went there to write. A plumber, called to fix something, noticed a small lamp and said to Johnny, “I’ll give you a hundred bucks for that lamp.” Though he could have used the cash, John declined. A few days later, the plumber—or perhaps it was an electrician—tripled his offer. John still said no, but when the guy had gone, John picked up the little lamp, turned it over and saw that it was signed by Louis Tiffany. It had been a wedding gift, Aunt Peggy confirmed, to Grammie and Big Dada, from the bank. John’s wife, Claudia, told me it was still next to his bed when he died.
Perhaps I should have told that story that evening. Others offered funny anecdotes, a list of likes and dislikes, favorite memories. But I didn’t speak.
A few years ago, Johnny and I had re-connected. Through a group email, we discovered we had a person in common.
“How do you know my cousin, Ann Klotz?” John typed to Merle.
“She’s my sister’s best friend,” Merle rejoined.
After that unexpected connection, my mother and Aunt Peggy gone, I asked John and Claudia to have lunch with me when work took me to L.A. For several hours, we laughed as John told stories about my dad, his godfather. John knew the contours of my family—my parents, my sister, my brother, our shared grandparents, his mother’s penchant for sending Advent calendars to every child she knew—including mine and his. As we grew older, the gap between us narrowed. We saw each other again in Princeton, his alma mater, at a reading of his lovely book, Pieces of Glass, and it was that event that reconnected me to his nephew, Bill, Megan’s brother. You need an American equivalent of Burke’s peerage to keep the relationships straight. We emailed from time to time, but, when I went to check, I realized it had been June of 2020 when we last wrote. When the pandemic came, I was buried under Covid protocols, and he contracted brain cancer and died fast. We were not close enough to know.
“You could have started with, “There are two sides to every story,”” my sister suggested on 495, “And I am here to tell the other side.
“That would have been good,” I agreed. But I didn’t speak.
Early that first morning, in the unfamiliar ocean landscape, Lee and I climbed down a steep set of stairs to the narrow beach. We walked along, looking for pieces of sea glass, noting the huge piles of rocks that seemed to have been recently erected to shore up the bluff. Erosion, we’d been told, has threatened the houses built on the bluff. The changing tides, the ocean’s power, climate change—all of it has rendered the old houses vulnerable. Families, too, I think, erode when we do not take care. We believe we will have more time, but we wait to connect, wait to speak or write, and then people we love are swept away.
I wish I’d spoken. Going forward, I’d like to worry less about not belonging and keep hold of my new connection to my Young relatives. Forged in loss, these new relationships feel like a gift. Keeping hold feels like one way to honor those I miss.
