Readers often ask me whether I write about my own family and the answer is always no. Members of my own family are all such pleasant and reasonable people that there’s just not enough material there to turn into a novel. Eccentricities of dress and speech and behavior are not tolerated; you’ll get your outlandish hat handed right back to you, and I’ve been self-conscious about saying the word Paris ever since I pronounced it in some airy and unacceptable way when I was fourteen. Occasional incidents of truly awful behavior do not fuel feuds and drama. In my family, such transgressors are mocked; they are — rather expertly — made fun of, and while in some circles a measure of glamour may attach itself to behavior which is breathlessly regarded as wicked, it is far less compelling and attractive to be considered, merely, foolish. Young Clarks learn that lesson early and they learn it well, as the few family villains (or clowns) are laughed at, and with just enough mercy thrown in to make them seem pathetic, as well. I have heard other people speak of their terrible families, rife with complex enmities and turmoil. At some point they will pause for breath and insist, You can’t make up this stuff, but my own life has not been burdened with such an ongoing and inescapable narrative and I have been left free to make up any sort of stuff I please.

A recent revelation, however, has turned what had been a slight and perplexing mystery surrounding the early life of my paternal great-grandmother into an unexpected tale as complex and twisted as one that any of those unhappy families could produce. I haven’t made up the following story, but I shall see, now, what I can make of it.

My great-grandmother was Margretta Day, née Douglas. Her father, Charles Douglas, was a surgeon, whose fine Scottish family strongly disapproved of his marriage to Mary Young, an English governess. The newlywed couple fled the wrath of the Douglases and landed in Richmond, Virginia on the eve of the Civil War. Charles Douglas was compelled (somehow) to join the Confederate army; Mary suffered greatly as she carried on alone in Richmond. She was said to have “lost a child” during the Siege of Richmond, although it was never clear whether this was a little boy or girl who was killed or died of privations or perhaps a child who just wandered off in the confusion, as I could well imagine happening when I was little. My great-grandmother was born after the war. Her parents, who had suffered greatly during the conflict and never recovered from what they had endured, died when she was very young. Margretta was sent North to a boarding school in Massachusetts where she excelled in writing. It was never clear to me whether she had exemplary penmanship or was an accomplished essayist and when I was told that I had inherited my own writing ability from Gramma Day, I was not sure whether I was being credited for content or legibility. There were a few artifacts specifically associated with Gramma Day: a very pretty pink flower-patterned china clock: a photograph of her at the age of 12, or so, that had been hand-colored and which showed a dark-haired and unsmiling young girl whose parents had died. There were, as well, some surgical instruments that had belonged to her father which were decently kept out of sight. She met (somehow) my great-grandfather, Albert Cornelius Day, and married him, and bore eight children — Byron, Ralph, Stanley, Elmer (Rip), Olive, Clara (my grandmother), Millie, and Florence (Trot). Gramma Day had some cousins in Richmond whom she visited in the 1930s, accompanied by her youngest son Rip who (somehow) had been left property down there. By the time I arrived on the scene, Gramma Day had withdrawn from the world. She made me think of the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington that hung in every schoolroom, with her white hair and uncomfortable dental work and reserved and watchful expression. Gramma Day sat as still as a picture, as well, and I never heard her speak. Then again, when it came to a roomful of Days, no one could ever get a word in edgewise; they were all hard of hearing and highly opinionated. My grandmother always referred to her “darling Mumma” which impressed and baffled me in equal measure, such affection. As children, we had to be prodded and nudged to stand before our great-grandmother for the moment or two it would take for a flicker in her eye to be detected and interpreted: she was pleased to see us. I think, now, that our reluctance to get too close to Gramma Day did not arise from any fear or dread, rather, we did not want to break her accidentally. As with that heirloom clock set upon a high shelf or the brittle stemware chiming to itself in the china cupboard, avoidance was the prudent policy.

My great-grandfather made and misplaced several fortunes; he started businesses and then lost interest in them once they got going. My grandmother remembered having a pony and then not having a pony. Grampa Day served in the Massachusetts legislature for a while. My grandmother, who was science-and-math-minded, told me that as a schoolgirl she had sat at the dining room table one evening and figured out just how far apart the Commonwealth’s new telephone poles would be spaced. I never understood why this should matter until I learned that telephone poles are not buried in the ground and secured there; they are held upright by the strength and tension of the wires themselves, and while I had questioned my grandmother’s story at the time she told it, I am now convinced that she did indeed work out some kind of equation which I can’t begin to understand. At any rate, the Days made many arresting claims and professed many strong opinions and some of them were remarkable individuals, including my grandmother who was a chemistry major in college. I think the bright young girls of her day aspired to become Madame Curies.

They’re all dead and gone, most having lived to tremendous ages although there was a tendency to have long since lost their considerable wits. That would be the end of the story but for the emergence of do-it-yourself genealogy projects and the wealth of information available on the internet. A cousin made a serious effort to research Gramma Day’s doomed and romantic parents, and I dabbled a bit, too, in search of the Douglases.

Because that had been the thing about my great-grandmother — her link to the Douglases which was held to be a very fine connection. My sisters and I were issued Douglas plaid kilts at an early age and we wore them for years, moving the buttons over and letting out the hems, left generous by my grandmother when she made the kilts for us. I was under the impression that (somehow) we were all just a heartbeat away from being rightfully restored to the castle or whatever great edifice housed the Family. It was never quite clear just what we could expect, our prospects remaining as murky as the colors of the representative family tartan which wasn’t one of the pretty ones; nevertheless, it was our birthright. We were given to buying tea cups with the Douglas crest imprinted on the side, and the long-discarded kilts were replaced by the plaid woolen scarves and neckties that we gave to one another on successive Christmases. When we went to Scotland as tourists, we looked about appraisingly and mentioned our distinguished lineage to people on trains.

But the hitch was, no one could find the Douglases in any of the Richmond censuses. There was no record for a Margretta Douglas, born at some time in the 1860s. The Confederate army lists did not note the service of a Dr. Charles Douglas. Death records, combed through, yielded no results for any Charles and Mary Douglas who had died within a logically guessed-at span of time. There was a hint that something was amiss. Another maiden name surfaced (somehow) but it was felt to be a mistake. Margretta Doherty? The old and odd piece of paper attesting to that did not make sense but efforts were undertaken to locate the Dohertys of Richmond who did not appear in any documents. This absence was felt to prove that there had never been any Dohertys of Richmond even as the corresponding absence of Douglases failed to suggest an equal nonexistence and the dogged search continued. The 1910 census listing the members of the Day household, the eight children, etc. said that Gramma Day had been born in Virginia, with a Scottish father and mother who, puzzlingly, originated in New York. A brother, Charles H. Doherty, appears there from out of nowhere, evidently staying with the Day family at the time. He was said (also puzzlingly) to have been born in Massachusetts in 1871. His profession was given as Cigar-maker.

Then, a friend decided to take a break from researching her own lineage and turned her attention to the Margretta Douglas mystery, of which she had heard perhaps too much. My research skills are pretty good, but no one is better than this friend — and in this case, she was not impeded by belief in the the family story. In short order, she sent me an e-mail, the subject line of which read Blarney. One trail had led to another, and the bottom line was this — the 1870 census of Woburn, Massachusetts lists a Patrick. D. Doherty, a farmer, age 35, his wife, Mary, age 29, a daughter Maggie, age 6, a daughter Mary, age 4, and a son, Charles Henry, age 2. All were born in Ireland, except Charles H. who had been born in Massachusetts. Further records showed that the daughter Mary died of scarlet fever in 1871; the mother Mary died of consumption on May 19, 1873. Her parents were listed on that document as Henry and Bridget Young, each born in Ireland. In 1875, Patrick D. died of Bright’s Disease. His parents were James and Bridget Doherty, born in Ireland. Then, my friend located another Doherty household in the Woburn, Mass. 1880 census. John O. Doherty, a tanner, age 63, lived with his wife Bridget and their five children. In addition, there were five teenagers under their roof, relatives of Bridget. There were four boarders as well, and finally, the census listed a Charles Doherty, age 12 or 14, born in Massachusetts, and a Margaret Doherty, age 16, 17, or 18, born in Ireland. This house, crowded with 18 occupants, was just up (or down) the road from the dwelling of Thomas Day, his wife Clara, and their seven children, including Albert C. , age 13. The record for my great-grandparents’ marriage in Lynn, Mass. on Sept. 30, 1886 had been found. My great-grandmother appears on the record as Margaret A., her age given as 20, the same as the groom’s, although she was, in fact, several years older. Margaret’s father was said to be Douglass P. and her mother, Mary Y. Doherty and the bride’s occupation was listed as being “at home”.

When handed this information, there were a few voices of dismay that the Douglas myth had been shattered, but most of the family — after a few seconds of silence — burst out laughing. Laughter had been my reaction, as well, when I first read that Blarney e-mail. But then I began to reflect upon the story and to view it in a professional light, I suppose. Here was a solid piece of carefully crafted fiction that hit all the right notes — a mistily noble heritage, true love defying the powers-that-were, a terrible war intervening, a helpless orphan girl sent (somehow) North to meet and to marry a fine gentleman, thereupon to live comfortably ever after. There were those few plausible objects, well-placed in the background; the picture of the somber, pretty girl, and the presence of the dainty clock that had survived the Siege of Richmond. The gleaming medical implements were kept out of sight but they supplied flashes of corroboration nonetheless.

Everyone seems to have stayed in character, as well. My great-grandmother must have never allowed herself to let slip an inappropriate remark based upon some memory or experience she was not supposed to have known. She must have had to edit herself, constantly. What sort of accent did she have? Was it an ersatz Southern drawl or a self-consciously neutral pronunciation? Did she cultivate, early on, the silence that I remember lest she fall into an Irish brogue or betray herself with a careless remark about Limerick or Cork? I only know that under optimum conditions when I am writing a novel and in complete control of every word, character, deed, and image, it’s a tricky business to keep all the threads spinning consistently, logically, and realistically. All the while, I must remember just what I invented in the previous chapters and still keep an eye on the interesting clock that I set upon a shelf and which will chime in at significant points of the narrative because, of course, everything contributes, everything has meaning, nothing has been placed just randomly there upon the page. And hats off to my great-grandparents for devising such a durable narrative. What an arresting and irresistible tale it was. One hundred years on, the fourth generation of little scions of the Douglases were being costumed in the kilts and having the tartan scarves knotted round their necks as they sat there sipping milk from crested mugs and being taught the Story. Perhaps this answers my old question whether Gramma Day had been commended for her penmanship or composition skills; she may very well have been another Elizabeth Gaskell, given half a chance.

The other vital thing about writing fiction is recognizing one’s reasons for doing so. I have to be highly motivated by my theme and subject when I undertake to spend the two or three or more years it takes to write a novel, and I won’t pretend now that I don’t know perfectly well what strong feelings lay behind the Douglas/Doherty fable. The Days couldn’t abide Irish people. In this, they were in line with the general thinking of the time — Irish immigration was at its peak and anti-Irish sentiments were generally held in the Boston area. I can even understand how the old Yankee Days felt besieged by change and strangeness. When I first read the census listing of the inhabitants of John O. Doherty’s 1880 Woburn household — right on the Day’s own doorstep — I must confess I winced as I pictured eighteen people crammed under the roof of a single dwelling — and it wasn’t the classiest household on the block. By the age of fourteen, the children were sent out to work — in a currying shop, in a shoe stock shop, at the tannery. The four boarders were middle-aged men, all Irish born and all employed as Beemsters which most likely is a misspelling of Beamster, who is “one that worked the beam in a tannery”, whatever that entailed. Sixteen year old Margaret, alone of all the young people over the age of fourteen, was not employed outside the home. The Occupation line was left blank beside her name on the census form, but my own speculation fills her days with the labor of seeing to all the rough housework in her uncle’s house. I don’t like the idea of an adolescent orphan girl being obliged to drudge for those Beamsters, venturing into their bedrooms and changing their linen and washing their clothes and dealing with whatever sort of disorder the Beamsters made of their surroundings.

Young Margaret must have toiled from dawn to dusk, and I wonder how she found the time to catch the eye of Albert Cornelius. Did she steal away for evening strolls past his front gate, catching glimpses of him, catching glimpses of scenes from the prosperous and orderly Day family life? Had she staged some encounter, falling on an icy sidewalk just as Albert C. rounded the corner? Or had he noticed her, working too hard and carrying too heavy a load and had he offered to assist her, one day? Albert C. had a magnanimous streak; at one point, he worked at a cousin’s investment house and personally repaid a then immense sum to a client who had risked and lost. This act of noblesse oblige was not well received within the family firm, nor within the family, and there were subsequent incidents of substantial sums being lent to underwrite business ventures that were never repaid even as the business ventures did conspicuously well. He had a quixotic streak and perhaps that is what caused him to defy his family and convention and to marry Margaret. I wonder whether she was ambitious and had cultivated dainty manners and managed to present herself prettily enough to have turned the head of a fine young gentleman. Whatever brought him to her notice, or her to his, he had to marry her because that era could support no other relationship between a young man and a young woman, and compassion may have become all mixed up with passion, anyway. Going to his parents to tell them of his intentions can’t have been easy. The Days had dark eyes and hawk-like noses and strong tempers; their conversation carried the echoes of thundering Puritan sermons. I have no idea what the Dohertys were like, and I can’t speak to the feelings of Irish immigrants toward the old Yankees and Protestants who excluded them. Did they wish to join the club, or were they intent upon establishing their own society and institutions? I can see people feeling one way or the other at one time or another. Had they approved of Margaret’s marriage, or warned her against it, or merely noted that there would be one less mouth to feed, or one less pair of hands to fetch and scrub?

After my great-grandparents’ marriage they lived in Saugus, Mass., some miles away from Woburn, and I suppose that is where the storytelling began. Was Margaret free to reinvent herself there, where no one knew her? Maggie had become Margaret A. who became Margretta. Her father, named Patrick D. in the 1870 census, appears as Douglass P. on the 1886 marriage document, and one can see where the surname Douglas comes from, with another slight adjustment. Did the lies arise with Margretta, or were they forced upon her, or were she and Albert C. of a single mind? My guess is that Margretta was happy to put the past behind her. And now that I think about it, I can almost hear Albert C. saying that Douglass P. “must have” been related to the Douglases (somehow) and I can almost imagine Margretta remembering that she “may have” heard something to that effect during those early, wistfully recalled childhood days before the death of her parents and sister. In retrospect, her early childhood may have been remembered as a golden age from which she had been exiled and it would only follow that her parents too, had once known happier circumstances; perhaps they had not worked in a manor house, rather, they had lived in one. I think this kind of thing can start innocently enough. And as for the younger sibling who was said to have died during the siege of Richmond, I find it touching that Margretta remembered her sister who died, but terrible that Margretta could never truly speak of little Mary Doherty who had died of scarlet fever when she was five. Then again, Margretta may have felt that she had been through a war, surrounded as she was by death in those early years.

Once the Douglas father had been invented I can see how the English governess mother wandered onto the scene like a character from a book and that pair’s ill-starred romance and elopement and flight replicated Albert C. and Margretta’s story neatly enough. But why send the Douglases to Richmond? It was not long after the Civil War and strong feelings still existed. A Day cousin had sponsored the raising of a tall and aggressive stone monument to the Union dead in the center of Saugus whose eagle finial was visible from an attic window of the young Days’ house. I should think that the shedding of an Irish skin and the assumption of a Southern one was almost a case of jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. But I believe the enhanced Virginia story rose from a real situation. I think Gramma Day’s brother Charles had made his way to Virginia, early on. When he was sent out to work at the age of 14 had he been determined to avoid the tanner’s trade which would have been his fate? I don’t know what opportunities there were for young, untrained boys in the early 1880s in Virginia, but he appears on the 1910 census as a Cigar maker (and it’s funny, but several pairs of eyes read the 1910 census listing of the Day household and overlooked Charles Doherty who appears on the final line before I noticed him which — somehow — makes me think of him as being mine to imagine). I’m willing to jump to the conclusion that he was rolling those cigars with Virginia tobacco in Virginia. He and Margretta had, obviously,remained in touch over the years and it must have been considered all right for Margretta to possess a brother who was doing well in the Cigar trade down South. I can see how aspects of the story began to take root in Virginia, perhaps in answer to the questions of the curious. You have a brother in Virginia? And do you hail from an old Southern family, Margretta? How did you end up living in Massachusetts, if I may ask? What did your father do in the war? I’m going to guess that Charles had made good; I think he was, in fact, a Cigar manufacturer but there wasn’t room on the census line to write that out. His marital status is given as Widower and perhaps he was making a long visit to his sister after the recent death of his wife when he was included in the Massachusetts census. I’m going to speculate that Charles’s late wife was the granddaughter of a Confederate surgeon; the surgical instruments belonged to him and Charles brought them North on his visit because they were historic curios and easily portable. Perhaps he meant to give them to my grandmother’s oldest brother Byron. Had Byron been making noises about going to medical school before he dropped out of Harvard, which was happening around about this time? Who knows when and why Margretta adopted the Confederate father. Perhaps she had been fond of Charles’s wife and the appropriation of her history had sprung from a feeling of sisterhood. Some verifiable pieces can be made to fit here. Uncle Charles (who was presumably childless for now I’m inclined to believe his wife had died in childbirth) took a shine to my grandmother’s youngest brother Rip, whom everyone was always fond of, and the legacy in Virginia which had initiated the trip South in the 1930s, had sprung from Uncle Charles. That pretty china clock could have come from anywhere, even from Gramma Day’s own family. I have no idea whether the Dohertys arrived in America with just the clothes on their backs, or whether they had brought a few fine pieces with them. I suppose I should try to find out something about them but I confess I don’t find them nearly as intriguing as I had the Douglases. I am glad that at some point in her girlhood, someone cared enough and there was money enough to arrange to have a photograph taken of young Margaret which was then hand colored and placed in a dark green velvet frame. I am bothered that there was such confusion about Margaret A.’s true age in the 1880 census. Had everyone in the crowded Doherty household lost track, or didn’t care? How many birthdays slipped by, unnoted and uncelebrated?

So, that’s what I have made of the origins of the story given the material I have at hand. If this were a novel, it’s the sort of thing I’d have worked out on a notebook page as ideas came to me, one thing leading to another, much as in real life; that is the situation, these are the characters. But what, now, am I to do with all of this material? How did Margretta and Albert C. fill the ensuing seventy years of their long and rambling family saga? The real question seems to me to be how well the deception wore upon Margretta. Whether she had been complicit from the beginning, or whether the story had been dictated to her, I wonder just how she managed to sustain the fiction. I have so few scenes from the Day family life to work with –or, at any rate, scenes in which my great-grandmother appeared for Albert C. always dominated the show. I know his sisters Adria and Mina despised Gramma Day. Even now, elderly family members remember how very terrible they were to her but no one ever gives details. I don’t know what, specifically, they said or did to her but my understanding is that the sisters were generally vicious to everyone. Their respective husbands died at young ages. They are buried on the hillside spot where a host of Days are interred, and even dead, even now, they are referred to as those poor fellows who checked out early in order to escape from their wives — browbeaten to death, evidently. But it must have been especially satisfying to Adria and Mina to have something really big to hold over Margretta. They could strike at her with extra deep and extra sharp infusions of their venom for what choice did Margretta have but to take it? The sisters would have remembered the poor Irish servant girl always sweeping the front steps of the shabbiest house on the block as they walked past, pretending not to notice her, yet seeing everything. Albert C. would have been no help. It is a characteristic of the Days to care most about other Days. They have always been excessively clannish and even now nonsense is talked about who is and who is not a “blood cousin”, whatever that means. It sounds unpleasant.

I said that Gramma Day had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire in reference to her adaptation of Virginia roots, and I know that was an issue for I recall hearing both sides of the Civil War being refought by a Great-Aunt who vehemently contended that Lincoln, whom she worshipped, had been misled into starting the conflict, though misled by whom she did not say. But I think the aspect of the past that really came back to haunt Margretta were her early days of drudgery. Albert C. and the children, too, as they grew older, were accustomed to inviting anyone and everyone they met to come home to lunch with them, and Margretta was expected to cook for a crowd every day. Elderly family members are still shaking their heads over that practice; Gramma Day was a workhorse. But I also think that Margretta gave as good as she got. My grandmother used to point out various dark-stained and heavily carved pieces of furniture in my great-grandparents’ house and remember how she had been required to dust them. She had to polish every whorl and crevice and flourish and couldn’t miss a single spot lest her mother come down on her like a ton of bricks. I used to think that Gramma Day’s exactitude had its origins in some ancestral memory of gleaming surfaces and bustling maids, back at the castle. Now, of course, I can only believe that Margretta was giving as good she got back in the days when she was the lowly servant and subject to harsh treatment. (I shall add that the lesson my grandmother learned from all of this was never to ask anyone to do anything she wasn’t prepared to do for herself.)

I remember too, hearing my Great Aunts and Uncles, in reminiscent moods, speak of the barefoot Irish workers that they used to watch coming and going from work at a shoe factory. It was held against the Irish people that they were too poor — or feckless — to have shoes, but since my great-grandfather owned the factory at one point in his career, I used to wonder why he couldn’t have paid them enough to be able to buy shoes although I knew well enough not to ask. Did Margretta hold her tongue, too? Or was she just glad that she had shoes, and her children had shoes? And I’m not so sure now that those factory workers really didn’t have shoes (in winter, in Massachusetts?). I’m inclined to believe that they just weren’t very stylishly shod, because what Grampa Day’s factory made were the embellishments for shoes — bows and buckles and such.

I have no idea what Margretta’s religious practice was. She had to have been Catholic, but did she ever go to her own church, or to none at all? I can picture the Days bundling off to church, the Congregational Church, of course, and cramming themselves into a front and central pew and becoming alternately transfixed as they were being told things they agreed with and then turning restless and muttering back at the parts of the gospel that did not sit so well. Most likely Gramma Day stayed at home for I think in those days it would have been too immense for even a secret Catholic to enter a Protestant church and whomever else she may have deceived, the inescapable fact was that God would have known. I don’t think she would have risked that, nor would Albert C. have let her. But perhaps for Gramma Day those few hours during which she was left on her own at home gave her a rare Sunday morning sense of peace and understanding which served her spiritual needs. Then again, she would have had to get started on another enormous lunch, anticipating the crowd that would be hauled home after church, so perhaps Sunday was a day like any other for her and perhaps she was glad for the distraction so she need not reflect too deeply upon theological or philosophical or moral or ethical matters.

We now come to a twist in the plot which is so 19th century, so coincidental and neatly arranged and retributive that I’d never have contrived to make it up nor been allowed to get away with it by any editor, reader or reviewer. It happened when my grandmother married my grandfather in 1918. My grandfather’s father was Walter Scott Clark, a real old Yankee from Montpelier, Vermont. My grandfather’s mother was Margaret Powers from Portsmouth, New Hampshire and she was Irish. Her parents were born in Ireland; Gramma Clark and her sisters and brother were all born in New Hampshire. Her mother died when she was young, but there were older sisters around to pick up the slack and she had a pleasant childhood. The brother went to West Point and became a general, eventually. I have no idea how my Clark great-grandparents met. Grampa Clark was very much on his own. His father left home and his mother disappeared from the record and the three boys were farmed out with local families. When he married Margaret Powers, Walter became a Roman Catholic and their five children were raised in that faith. I was always told that my great-grandmother Clark had built the Catholic church in her small town and I used to picture Gramma Clark up on a ladder and bashing away a hammer, laying down the roof shingles. It was not that unlikely a picture, for as much of a waxwork Gramma Day was, Gramma Clark was a vivid and active presence. At any rate, she paid for a good portion of that church to be built which was called St. Margaret’s and I was pretty sure they named it after her. I longed to go there (and show off, I’m sure); I was somewhat consoled by being told that my own Episcopal church was “almost Catholic” by the Day side of the family, although they hadn’t meant to make me feel better by that assertion.

Fate seems to have arranged everything as a contest between the two women. Margaret Powers had also worked as a maid during the summers when she was in high school. An older sister was the housekeeper at the writer Celia Thaxter’s Appledore House on the Isles of Shoals just off the coast of Portsmouth where other writers and artists gathered. In the summer, Margaret and her sister Catherine had jobs there, too. I suspect conditions were quite pleasant and that the two attractive girls were well received. For some reason, I am convinced Gramma Clark used to serve John Greenleaf Whittier his breakfast. It is also my belief that such early associations turned her into a lifelong reader and buyer of books — and young Clark also had books showered on them. Whether or not Gramma Clark had minded the dusting and polishing that had once occupied her, when she had her own home, she kept two sets of furniture — one for winter and one for summer. She’d send the heavy tables and upholstered chairs and carpets out to be cleaned every May in exchange for light wicker pieces and rush floor mats. For that matter, Gramma Clark spent a portion of the winter in Cuba, and then, after a demonstration of revolutionary gun play in the piazza outside her window, she discovered Key West. There’s also a rather fine connection; the Powers were connected (somehow) to the Guinness family. Another will was probated in the 1930s, although my understanding was that Gramma Clark had to sign away certain rights to which she was not entitled anyway, in order to facilitate the settling of an estate in Ireland.

Margaret was everything that Margretta was, yet wasn’t, yet might have been. The difference between my great-grandparents’ household was like that between day and night, although the confusing part is that the Days dwelt in the night. There were light voices and laughter when the Clarks gathered. I know some very fond and funny stories about Gramma Clark who, above all else, remained an upright and estimable lady. I liked being around her although I don’t think she was all that interested in me because I was not yet interesting, which I wholly accepted. The one object that I most associate with Gramma Clark is an old wooden bowl made from a piece of a tree that had been struck by lightning — you can see the jagged burn mark seared into the grain of the wood. Eventually, the bowl came into my possession and I keep it filled with the fossils that a Clark Great-Aunt gave to me when I was young , informing me that the little creatures embedded in crumbling slabs of stone had lived and died a million years ago, or a million and forty-five years ago, at this point.

I have something that belonged to Gramma Day, too. When I was in high school, it was decided that I should be given what had been her writing desk. It’s a highly Victorian object, made of dark stained and heavily carved wood which I don’t keep very well dusted. There are drawers and pigeon holes and bookshelves fronted by a curved glass door which I’m always afraid of breaking for I have no idea where and how the glass could ever be replaced. There’s no space for my knees when I sit down at the desk space and the surface isn’t adequate for writing anything more than the briefest of thank you notes, nevertheless, I know the idea behind giving me the desk was to encourage me to cultivate that flair for composition I had inherited from the Douglas side of the family, their gift to me, if you will.