PEEPSIE

I have a letter in my hand from my grandfather, Richard F. Giersch, to "darling Peeps", then in her late teens. Richard Giersch was a first-rate engineer involved with the invention of air conditioning, and he talks about his projects in the letter. But the burden of the letter is an appeal to his daughter to answer him frankly on a matter of "fact": did he, on her confirmation day in the church(around age 14) tell her that he would KILL her? He then describes his struggles with his wife's "mental attitude" in a "trying period of life". At this time, BB, Lil's mom, was about 50, possibly going through menopause, which was little understood at that time.

The conflict of Lil's parents figured large in her life. There is the often repeated story of teen-aged Lil retreating to the shower so as to drown out the sound of her parents arguing. It is apparent from the letter that Richard was "on the run" from BB from early in their marriage, that her paranoia could turn a harmless expression into a death threat, putting Richard under a permanent cloud. It sounds similar to what happened between me and Muz. Since Richard died in 1952 when I was four, I never knew him, but Lil always spoke glowingly of him as a hero: inventor, musician and adoring father.

My impression of BB, as she visited periodically in the 60's and 70's(dying in 1981), was of this immense dignity floating through the world in a cloud of sweet-smelling emollients and powders, supported by a complicated system of undergarments. She was the aging belle, secure in her social superiority, telling stories about what seemed to me the ante-bellum South(though in reality it was the Jim Crow era). Her feelings could be hurt easily, so leave it to me during one of her visits, in the coltish aimlessness of adolescence, to blurt out "Why don't you go home?" I can still remember that look she gave me, with her swimmy eyes behind thick glasses--there were worlds of disappointment and hurt back there. My remark became a family horror-story, but I wonder now how much it reflected the uneasiness of those visits....not to justify my rudeness!

So, in 1944, as Lil headed into marriage and family fueled by a genuine romance, there was another kind of running away going on: the pointless, endless wrangling of BB and Richard would NOT be carried into the next generation.