The Misanthrope's Corner - memories of an 'adopted' aunt are recalled - Brief Article

National Review, April 22, 2002 by Florence King

I'm in a nostalgic mood. I just put in for Medicare and Social Security, so we're talking milestones big time. Since I feel like reminiscing, I've decided to tell you about my Aunt Ellen.

She wasn't really my aunt. I don't know what to call her; she wasn't legally adopted, and foster-care programs didn't exist when she came into our family. I suppose she was the ward of my grandparents and they were her guardians, but if so, they were merely courtesy titles because there was never any legal arrangement.

It happened in 1919. The now-sprawling D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, was then a little country town with dirt roads. Ellen was two months old, the youngest of four in a family who lived nearby. They were having a bad time; the father, who drank, had run off, and the mother's epilepsy had worsened since the birth of the new baby, so my grandmother and the other townswomen did what they could to help.

One day, Granny sent my mother over with something for them. The kitchen door was open and the woman was standing at the stove with the baby in one arm, stirring a pot. Just as Mama walked in, she gave a high-pitched shriek and fell into a fit, dropping the baby on the hot surface of the old wood stove. The blanket started smoldering.

Mama grabbed the baby, tore off the burning blanket, put the baby on the floor, and grabbed the wooden spoon from the pot and put it between the woman's teeth. Quick thinking for a ten-year-old, but so typical of the mother I was to know: She never read a book in her life, including mine, but she had the sharpest brain I've ever encountered.

Picking up the baby, she ran down the road to get the sheriff (nobody had a telephone). The upshot of the situation was grim; the mother had to be institutionalized and the four children had to be what was then called "taken in." The sheriff handled it very simply by parceling them out on the spot. The older children were easier to care for and could make themselves useful doing chores, but nobody wanted the two-month- old baby. Since Mama had simply taken her home and Granny had been caring for her, it was a fait accompli. No forms to fill out, no charges of abuse and kidnapping, no armies of social workers bearing anatomically correct dolls, no petitions to recall the sheriff: They just kept her.

Whenever I think of Ellen I always recall Queen Victoria's wish that her pale blond family could import "some olive skin and dark hair." Ellen was our import, a Celtic brunette with jet-black eyes, a dead ringer for Jane Russell. My first memory of her is when Gerry, who was stationed in Hawaii and whom she later married, sent her a grass skirt and she did the hula. Though she looked like a sensuous island girl, her outward femininity and glamour concealed an essential remoteness: She was a hula dancer who kept herself to herself. To say "she loved to read" is inadequate. She read voraciously, as though using books as literal shields to keep the world at bay. Maybe it was her knowledge that she was "adopted," but she refused to let herself need.

She proved that at her wedding. Various male relatives offered to give her away, including my father, but she chose to go up the aisle alone. She was the only solitary bride I've ever seen and I was enchanted, even though I had an ear infection and a fever of 102. It was February and they tried to make me stay home, but I set up such an outcry that they relented. I ended up in the hospital but seeing dark Ellen all in white was worth it.

Whenever Ellen was physically demonstrative it made family news. One such occasion was after the war when we visited her and Gerry in upstate New York. When they met our train, she hugged Mama. It was the first thing we told Granny when we got back home, and she promptly got on the phone and spread it around. She didn't hug me, but she belonged to the Doubleday Dollar Book Club and I read all of her historical novels that summer, so we talked a lot. That fall, I showed the kids at school our vacation snapshots of myself with Ellen and told them she was my mother.

I was the official family letter-writer, so Ellen's were always addressed to me. It went on like this, letters and summer visits, until Gerry decided, rather late in life, to go to college on the GI Bill. They moved with the children to a cramped university apartment and we couldn't visit anymore. Since I was in college myself by then, I bombarded Gerry with advice on tricks of the student trade -- e.g., you don't need to buy all the textbooks, especially the Samuelson for Econ I, etc. I turned into a compulsive tipster. Not for him, though I liked him, but for Ellen; the move was rough on her, so I wanted to get Gerry through college as quickly and cheaply as possible.

Much later, I dedicated my second book to her, and when I started reviewing and blurbing, I sometimes did it with her in mind. I took historical novels I didn't really want to read because I knew she liked them, so I could send them to her with a copy of my review. I also blurbed a novel about the WWII homefront because it reminded me of her hula period; I didn't particularly like it, but I wanted Ellen to see my blurb on the cover, so I raved it.