More About My Grandparents

One of the things about my grandfather Stanley that I would like to understand, but probably never will, is the origin of the distance he maintained, I'm guessing, from  more or less everybody, both family and friends. Part of it is certainly generational. I think everybody from that era was much less communicative and much more emotionally distant, regardless of their ethnic heritage. Emotion was almost a luxury in a day when parents, siblings and children frequently died young. In Stanley's case, his parents died in the year that he turned 3 years old. He had four older siblings who all died between the ages of 20 and 28, possibly three in one year, when Stanley was about 18. And those are just the family members. Probably he had childhood friends who also died young. One need not be a big fan of pop psychology to recognize that those are the kind of events that can shape a personality. It would have only been reinforced when Stanley was 48 and his third child died.

Much as I hate pop psychology, I abhor even more generalizations about nationalities and ethnic groups beyond those that can be made from one's own experiences. With that in mind, I will say that I know some people make a personality distinction between northern and southern Europeans, with the northerners seen as colder and more emotionally distant. I am quite certain there have been studies (it's science!) that show northern Europeans, require more physical space than do the people who live on the Mediterranean. It seems reasonable to think they also need more emotional space. Perhaps this has also been studied, but I don't know. (The stereotype of most Asians as being emotionally distant, but requiring very little physical space, if true, pretty much destroys the thesis that I just said sounds "reasonable.")

Louis's granddaughter Diane makes the point that the first generation born in the U.S. (Louis, Stanley and their siblings) were raised in sub-cultures that were still tied to the old world ways. Along with the practical reasons (death) for avoiding close emotional ties, and a possible northern European need for distance, there may have been specific Polish cultural norms that idealized the strong silent type.

Diane has a fabulous story about her grandfather. She remembers when she was a girl and her grandfather, Louis, would visit, that he would come down to breakfast in the morning and not speak a word. He would tap on his coffee cup with his spoon to indicate that he wanted coffee. He would tap on his plate with....does it matter?....to indicate he wanted his bacon and eggs. And Diane's mother, who was Louis's daughter-in-law, instead of telling him to go suck eggs, actually was accomodating enough to adjust to his old-fashioned ways. Perhaps this charming old-world habit was one of the reasons my mother only sporadically invited Louis, in his final years, to have dinner with us in Genoa, even though he lived just a few blocks away. My mother probably didn't consider herself a liberated woman (she did work outside the home on occasion), but I doubt she was very receptive to plate clinking as a way of communicating. There is also the practical consideration of why would you invite a guest to dinner when you know he isn't going to talk. 

In this regard, I would love to know how different Stanley was from Louis, who was ten years older. For one thing, I think it is true that oldest children are more likely to absorb their parents' values. Also, Stanley was orphaned at the age of three, and wasn't raised by his parents. If the Peters family who became the Pilakowski children's guardians had different personalities or if their household had a somewhat different dynamic, Stanley might have absorbed slightly different influences than did Louis. Certainly the one brother who was younger than Stanley, Vincent Joseph, grew up with somewhat different values. After the 1906 earthquake, at the age of about 21, he left rural Nebraska and went west to San Francisco to take advantage of the money to be made in the rebuilding of that city. He later moved to Los Angeles and became a successful entrepreneur and business owner. Pictures of him show no hint of his rural background.

I just can't see Stanley clicking his coffee cup with a spoon to indicate his desire for his morning eye opener. I have to think I would have heard it from someone if he did that. Rightly or wrongly, I like to believe that Stanley and Josephine had a more equal relationship than that.

I remember two things related to Stanley's funeral in 1960. The first was that just before the casket was closed for the last time, Josephine leaned in and kissed Stanley's corpse. It was the first time I had seen that, but then it was also probably the first time I had seen the final closing of a casket. The second was how distraught Josephine was on that day. After the final ritual at the cemetery, the normal procedure was, and probably still is, that the family returned to the church basement for a lunch/dinner that was prepared and served by the good women of the parish. At some point I went out of the main hall into the foyer at the bottom of the stairs, where the bathroom was, and I encountered my Grandma Josephine, just the two of us. My 15 year-old self was somewhat at a loss because I was old enough to know I needed to say something, but inexperienced enough not to know exactly what. I think I settled on something like “Grandma, I'm really sorry.” I do not recall her exact words, but I know I had never been so close to such anguish. She said something about there being nothing left to live for, or words similarly hopeless. And twelve weeks to the day after Stanley's death, she died of a massive heart attack.

The experience of Josephine at the time of Stanley's death tells me that there is a petty good chance they had a relationship that wasn't entirely patriarchal, in the old world sense. I know about the Stockholm Syndrome and I realize that, after living together for 55 years, a wife could be distraught just from the disruption of the only routine she knows. Happiness or unhappiness need not enter into the equation at all. But I don't think that is what I saw in that foyer. I choose to believe they had an intimate loving relationship for 55 years, and I have never heard or seen anything at all to indicate otherwise. Still I have to wonder how much they communicated with each other, and what were the patterns that their communication took. Still, whatever the dynamics of Stanley's and Josephine's relationship, it must have been satisfactory to both of them.

As I said in an earlier post, I never as a child or teenager had any doubts about Stanley's essential goodness. I may have wondered whether or not he knew my name, but I knew he was a good, kind, and fair man. Similarly I always knew that grandma Josephine was a kind and gentle person. When Stanley would drop her off at our house to visit my mother, my siblings and I would be all over her with grandma this and grandma that. Our mother would tell us, perhaps sometimes rather sharply, to leave grandma alone and go outside...or whatever. Grandma would always say something to the effect of “Oh, Isabelle, relax and let them be. They're just being kids.” So even if I don't have a lot of memories of her, I know she was essentially a good person if she told my mother to lighten up.

There is one memory of Josephine that, whatever may have been the dynamics of her relationship with Stanley, indicates clearly that they came from a patriarchal culture. I remember that grandma, when speaking about a husband, would refer to him as “the mister.” I do not recall if she used that term to refer to Stanley, and I so wish I did remember, because it would be important and telling, especially if she did not. As Diane pointed out when I mentioned this to her, using this term was a way of honoring the male head of the household, and it was also an era when people would use titles like “sister,” “brother,” and “cousin” to address each other, both in person and in letters.

But it is also a reflection of a patriarchal culture regardless, as I said, of Stanley's and Josephine's personal relationship. I do hate to cite this, because it reminds me of the old adage that a little bit of knowledge is dangerous, but Google Translator says that the Polish word for “master,” is “mistrz.” and the Polish word for “mister” is “pan,” so it really does make “the mister” sound like it meant “the master.”

Expressions or patterns of speech probably have a certain life cycle. They begin with a very literal meaning. The head of the household is, indeed, the master. There follows probably a period in which the expression remains, but it no longer reflects the day to day reality of relationships. Finally, the expression is just a curiosity. So, after all of this meandering, I have to admit that the fact that Josephine used the expression “the mister” only proves that she came out of a patriarchal culture, and we already knew that. It doesn't mean a thing about her relationship with her husband.

Before I end this, reflecting on the Pilakowski children's life with the Peters family after the deaths of the their parents, it is worth noting that I have no idea what the term “guardian” meant in 1886. Perhaps it meant that the Peters family took in all six Pilakowski kids as foster children. Perhaps it had a much more legalistic meaning. It hardly seems realistic to think the Peters family took in six additional children overnight. Perhaps they were Saints; I don't know. I hope that Diane's research into the family history comes up with more information about this period.

Enough for now. But with this genealogy thing, one keeps coming up with new observations and new questions. You can expect more.