I'm hearing dead people. I'm still going through Grandma L's letters and tossing those that don't apply to descendants. I stopped the night before last (yesterday was Thanksgiving and therefore a day off) when I hit packets of what looks like three or four servicemen that she was writing to in '44/'45. It was late and I didn't want to get into anything that would make the think too much. Or at all.
When I started again, I set them to the side and continued with letters from relatives. Then I found what looked to be a stack of letters from friends. One friend, named Bernice, is a hoot. I put all of hers aside to read through later. The rest seemed to be women that she met during her stay in a sanitarium to get over TB. She cut a lot of sentences out, here and there, and cut the address of the sanitarium off of all the envelopes.
She got letters from relatives, and possibly friends, who were looking after my dad, aunt, and uncle for her while she was away. I could tell because the kids would include letters, too. Dad was about 15 and wrote on his own. It felt really strange to read letters from my Dad that started, Dear Mommy.
One set of letters outlined a little drama. I couldn't tell at first if Chris and Marie were sanitarium friends or neighborhood friends. Joe was apparently married to or living with Marie and was writing to Grandma about an argument between her, Chris and Marie over money owed or paid and a sewing machine. Joe was going to talk to the Singer people in the morning to see who had been lying to him about the matter. If it is Marie, he swears that he'll leave her. It's Joe that has "got his dander up."
Dad always said that life with Grandma was like living in a soap opera, and that he could never watch soaps because being reminded was too painful. But this is the first hard evidence of it that I've seen. One complication for me is that Chris is the name of one of Grandma's brothers and and also name on a letter that seems to be from a woman who met her in Olive View, the sanitarium. Joe's letter called Chris a he, though, and Grandma had been in a women's ward. Per Joe, Marie has always liked Grandma, "She says aside from breaking into her home and taking the sewing machine, she always felt you were a very nice person, and have been helpful in many ways. . . "
I wonder if I'll ever know the end of the saga of the Singer. Oops, it seems that five years of free rent in an apartment is also part of the argument. Also Chris and Marie were married, but have split and she has custody of the kids. The money would have been owed while Grandma was married to Woody, and Chris claims that the rent was swapped for roofing work. Joe is going to check with Woody through the Veteran's Bureau. Chris and Marie also owe Joe money. I don't know who Joe is, but he feels a responsibility to look out for the interests of Chris and Marie's kids. Go Joe.
Aha! In an earlier letter, Joe talks about a divorce and about how neither Chris's family nor Marie's family are qualified to take sides. (Although Marie was hard done by and robbed.) So I'm pretty sure that this is Great Uncle Chris they're talking about. There always was bad blood between Chris and, well, any other relative that I've ever heard talk about him.
Joe first wrote to Grandma to ask about a sewing machine. It and some war bonds were things that Joe feels that Chris is trying to keep away from Marie unfairly. Chris said that the war bonds went to pay for lawyers. And the story of the sewing machine sounds like something that Grandma could spin out sadly in a letter detailing her woes and Chris never bought the machine, they were only renting it from me by making a few payments, oh woe. Seems she told Joe that she didn't know where Red was, which may have been true but I haven't seen any other evidence of that.
Now I'm going to have to check the "Grandma L" sewing machine that Uncle L brought me to see if it's a Singer.
