Grand Mary

The last few days before my grandmother’s death, she was mostly unconscious, but we would go over and sit with her and read or pray. Once when I was sitting with her, she suddenly sat up in bed and pointed her extremely long and thin index finger in the air. “My name is in the book,” she said, and then lay back down on her bed. On this her 125^th birthday, I wish to ponder anew her great love amid her great heartbreak.

Actually it was “Granmary.” Or was it “Grandmary”? Or perhaps “GranMary”? She herself was never completely consistent on this. When she decided things should change, even her own grandparental name, they changed by force of her will and instantaneously. My father, whose birth certificate read “Russell Phil Deavel,” was informed by her that his legal name was “Philip Russell Deavel.” He only discovered the truth when he was drafted for the Korean War.

Occasionally cantankerous, ornery, and vain, she was also charming, talented, loving, occasionally remorseful, and full of faith. Today, August 13, marks the 125^th anniversary of the birth of Mary Ellen Harbaugh Deavel. Born in 1896, she was the ninth of eleven children born to George Harbaugh, a rural schoolteacher, and his wife, Margaret Long Harbaugh. Like all our family, I loved her dearly.

My first memories of her are as a toddler going to her apartment in South Bend, Indiana. I liked it because it was an upstairs apartment and I could run in and out onto her balcony. She did not like that and bawled out my mother for not controlling me. My mom cried when she got home. It was not that Granmary didn’t like my mother. She just didn’t take toddlers very well. She yelled at my cousin Jennifer’s younger son one time at the nursing home, essentially for being a toddler. My dad said she once chased him out of the house with a broom when he was a boy. Aunt Deane recalled she chased her down the alley with that broom.

She did not fare well living with her adult children as attempts with both daughters revealed. Though Aunt Shirley had a much mellower relationship with her mother than Deane did, there were tense moments. When cousin Debbie was visiting Shirley while Granmary was living with her, Granmary wanted to hold baby Wally. Wally was a bit colicky and set off on a crying jag. Granmary was determined to calm this great-grandson, however, and would not give up the baby. After approximately an hour, she still would not give up, and Aunt Shirley defended her daughter, yelling that she needed to give Wally back. Yelling was returned, but so too was the baby. Debbie later found her crying, saying that she was “just an old fool.” She could be unfair and stubborn, but her repentance was hearty.

Was she always that cantankerous? I suspect she may well have been, given that there was a fiery, ill-tempered streak in her family. Her oldest brother, Oliver Delbert “O.D.” Harbaugh (b. 1880) was known for his temper. Family legend has it that, frustrated with a wallpaper job he was doing, he threw all his materials out the window. Her own frustration may also have had something to do with her own history.

A talented woman, tall and slender—a trait accentuated by her use of old-fashioned feminine fashion tools such as corsets—with a quick and sometimes sharp tongue, Granmary played the piano by ear and recited poetry by heart and with feeling—a practice that outlasted even her piano playing. My Uncle Gary recalls sitting on the floor as she would pick out hymns and popular tunes of the 1930s on the piano. He was very excited when she arranged for him to have piano lessons. She had also proven herself academically, having completed a six-month teacher training program at Manchester College and then taught in a one-room schoolhouse just as her own father had. And she had fallen in love with Harold Russell Deavel, a handsome young man almost three years her junior, and married him.

Harold or “H.R.” was perhaps a bit too much like Mary. My Aunt Deane, the oldest child and born in 1920 when Mary was 23 and Harold was 21, told me once that at parties the two competed for the oxygen, or at least the attention, in the room. I suspect their marriage was hot-and-cold. After Deane’s birth, there were no children until 1924 when a baby girl was born who only lived a few days. There is no name on the headstone for that girl and when I mentioned it to my other aunt a few years ago, she claimed to know nothing about her. No further offspring appeared until a burst of children appeared starting with Gary in February of 1929, Shirley in April of 1930, and my father, Phil, in January of 1932. Aunt Deane often babysat for the younger children when her parents would go out late in the evening to dance the night away. She would sit in the dark waiting for them to come back and then scamper back to bed when she saw their car come in.

Perhaps some of the hot-and-coldness had to do with jobs during the Depression. Harold switched jobs often, resulting in quite a few moves for the children.  In 1937, Harold told Mary that he was taking a new job in Denver, Colorado, and would send for her and the children when he had found a decent place to live. He was not heard from again. Instead of going to Denver, Harold stopped in Michigan where he picked up another woman whom he took to California with him and married. This was not known until much later.

To be alone with four children in the midst of the Depression was a trick. Aunt Deane, who had graduated from Dayton High School as valedictorian, was convinced not to go to college but help out with the family. Granmary ended up moving back to northern Indiana and living with her own mother out in the country with a big garden where, as my father told me, they did not feel as poor as they might have in a city.

She got those children raised and continued on with her life. The other shoe, speaking of her marriage, fell when her daughter made a discovery. Aunt Shirley, who had moved with her husband to California, found out from a friend that there was a “Deavel” who had a business in Pasadena. She drove down on a Saturday from the Bay Area and left a letter with some pictures of her children because the office was closed. When there was no response, she tracked down a home phone number and called. When Harold indicated that his daughter should not call at this number because it disturbed his “wife,” Shirley told Granmary, who was, as far as she was concerned and as far as the law was concerned, still his wife. The lawyers worked things out, but it was a blow indeed. One of the more hurtful things was that Harold’s parents had known where he was and what he was up to (he had periodically come back to visit them) but they gave no hint of this to Granmary or the children.

The most hurtful thing, however, was that, with Shirley’s discovery of Harold, the details of the betrayal were fleshed out. Granmary moved out to California for a while, living first with her daughter and then on her own. She lived an active and in many ways happy life there, working in a youth sanitarium for tuberculosis patients and doing many things socially. My cousin Elizabeth remembers the fear she had that Granmary would never come back. I have her “autograph book” somewhere in my possession, and it includes a few famous names including that of Orlando Cepeda, the San Francisco Giants star. Perhaps she had moved out in hopes that proximity to her now-legally-remarried-and-ex-husband might cause something to happen. One California cousin told me she was “searching for Harold” in those years.

She never remarried. I don’t know when it was, but, my Aunt Deane told me, she had another offer at some point. She refused because ultimately, my aunt thought, she was still in love with Harold. One interpretation of these events is that she should have just gotten on with life and someone new. Yet there has always been something, well, grand about a marital love that would not just “move on” even in the face of abandonment but would last till “death do us part.”

She did come back to Indiana again, to the delight of her grandchildren, who had received her hard-to-decipher letters “in the old style,” as cousin Elizabeth says, full of good humor and detailing the events of her life. Her son-in-law, John, would bring her over to Aunt Deane’s house on Koontz Lake to swim in the afternoons, though it is not clear how good a swimmer she was. All the grandchildren on visiting her found to their satisfaction their own pictures covering the living rooms of the little apartments she lived in. Several of my cousins remember a little place on Eckman Street in South Bend with a Murphy bed—the beds that pulled down from the wall in the kitchen. From this apartment she could walk down the street or take the bus to the grocery store—a handy thing since she never drove. Perhaps it is this place my cousin Christy remembers:

I remember when she lived in an upstairs apartment in South Bend when I was a young girl, and my parents and I came to visit. I had never been there before and found it all intriguing, climbing the stairs to her, and then walking into the neat and warm home she had created. In anticipation of my presence she had bought and wrapped for me a little cardboard puzzle—an unexpected and somehow magically right gift. I think I sensed she took me seriously.

One can see in this memory Granmary’s penchant for neatness—perhaps the reason she did not suffer toddler grand- and great-grand-children quite so gladly as daughters-in-law and granddaughters might have hoped. (Though I was never chased with a broom!) A neat house was deeply satisfying to her, and keeping it neat herself was something that gave her satisfaction. Alas, she would often, when visiting her children, both clean and rearrange cupboards, much to their annoyance. Aunt Deane could never find anything after such visits. Christy says that, toward the end of her life, Granmary once said that she just wished she could do her own dishes.

But in Christy’s memory of that apartment there was also that sense of taking her grandchildren seriously, perhaps best illustrated by her gifts to them—“the best gifts,” as my cousin Jennifer says. My cousin Melanie still has a set of iced tea spoons that were made in the shape of a leaf. Her sister Elizabeth recalls the best gift of all—a pair of white and cranberry striped slacks and matching striped blouse. In a great scandal, Elizabeth wore them in the junior play—pant suits being forbidden for girls then. It wasn’t the first envelope-pushing gift Granmary had given. Elizabeth’s mother, Deane, and her guests had been presented with cigarettes for her thirteenth birthday party. Ah, 1933.

The letters and the presents were also accompanied by the food. The coup de cuisine for Granmary was “beef and noodles,” which you might not know from the name always included mashed potatoes upon which the titular items were poured. Low carb it was not. But she made the noodles herself and taught a number of grandchildren how to make them. Cousin Debbie still continues to make the dish but eventually allowed herself to skip the potatoes.

Yet it was the pie that still wins my heart. As Christy tells me, Granmary was very good with custard pies, but also had a delicious blueberry pie. What many of her grandchildren and great grandchildren were delighted by, however, is a caramel pie that she brought to family gatherings and served when you visited. I do not know if there was a recipe for it, for I think this pie was one of those secrets of the head and heart, but my mom gave me a recipe (as part of a family recipe book for my wedding) that at least attempted to mimic it. Alas, there are also numerous memories of Granmary tripping and dropping the pie on the way to family events.

Was this intentional? A cover-up for a misbegotten dessert? A bit of vaudeville? I don’t remember it happening, but she had a clown streak in her a mile wide. She convinced my cousin Melanie that she was pursuing a plan to market seaweed nationally with cousin Philip. When in her nineties she went to the town fair, she caused a stir by being on the very top of the ferris wheel when it broke down. We thought she’d be worried, but she thought it was glorious to survey the town from a swinging throne. She also had a mocking side that was pretty amusing. When she was in the nursing home at the end of her life and I would come visit, she would make wisecracks about the sometimes absurd fashion decisions of fellow elderly passersby. Unfortunately, her own high standards of appearance were in part the cause of her own nursing home address. She was no longer able to walk in part because in her late eighties she had hurt her back by lacing her corset too tight for an event.

In those last years I got to spend a lot of time with her because her last apartment was a block from our house and the nursing home to which she moved was just across the street. I loved going over to talk to her and hear her recite poems, sing songs, make those wisecracks, and listen to my attempts to match her in that category. It was an old tradition, for Elizabeth tells me one of her favorite things to do with Granmary was to mail to each other insulting Halloween cards each October in a kind of contest to see who could roast the other one best. There was a reason she was always, even in old age, the life of the party.

We all wanted to be as funny as Granmary and we all wanted to hear that laugh. Christy describes it as “a kind of glissando, starting out high and sliding.” Elizabeth describes it as a “cackle.” Whatever it was, it was unforgettable, even delivered from a toothless mouth—Granmary had decided that gumming food was preferable to the annoyance of dentures. Of course, as much as I heard her laugh, I also heard her cry in those years and I did not know how to comfort her.

Once when I went to visit, she was crying. When I asked what was wrong, she replied, “Everybody I know is dead.” As a teenager, I had no idea what that meant. She knew me and her own kids, right?  In midlife I begin to see what she was getting at. Cousin Melanie remembers her being low in spirit in those years and singing the Tin Pan Alley song “Hello Central, Get Me Heaven,” which was a popular number in the first decade of the twentieth century, with a movie of the same name appearing in 1913 when Granmary was seventeen. The song describes the loneliness of bereaved family, longing to speak to a deceased loved one over the telephone.

She really did believe in heaven, however, that being a topic of which Granmary wanted to be very certain. In the tradition of “once saved, always saved,” she disliked any view that might mean salvation once obtained from Christ could be lost. When she lived with Aunt Deane and attended their Lutheran Church in America congregation, she was offended that the offertory hymn was David’s plea in Psalm 51, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” She thought that this implied that salvation had been lost. I do not agree with her about this matter of liturgy or theology, but I am quite glad that she thought the most important thing was to be in the hand of the Lord Jesus. The last few days before her death she was mostly unconscious, but we would go over and sit with her and read or pray. Once when I was sitting with her, she suddenly sat up in bed and pointed her extremely long and thin index finger in the air. “My name is in the book,” she said, and then lay back down on her bed.

She died a day before my eighteenth birthday. We decided that she who loved parties so much would want me to go on with the one planned for the next day. It has been over twenty-nine years since she departed this earth, a few months shy of 96. I think of her quite often. On this her 125^th birthday, I wish to hear that cackle and those wisecracks again, to watch her pick out a tune on the piano. I wish to ponder anew her great love amid her great heartbreak. I wish to taste that caramel pie.

I may spell it “Granmary,” but she was a Mary who was truly Grand.

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