Allison Glock - Beauty Before Comfort - A Memoir

Edna told no one about her illness because she knew how pity hollowed a person out. She had felt it from her own mother, Mewey, who had unloaded her like bruised fruit on the first willing taker, love being a luxury someone as damaged as her unhealthy daughter couldn’t afford.

Edna had been working as a court typist when she met her future husband. He was selling shoes. Mewey took one look at Andrew in his sharp wool suit and decided here was the man for her baby girl. Andrew married Edna because, sickly or not, she was beautiful, with loosely pinned hair that curled around her ears like ivy. Besides, dating was not his priority. Edna had other ideas, but she knew she could not disappoint her mother. It didn’t matter that adoring Andrew Blair was about as easy as falling up a well.

“You’re sick, girl. Who else is going to marry you?” Mewey said.

And so, married off, Edna headed upriver to join a new class of people. She and Andrew were wed in Columbiana County on August 26, 1913. After the wedding, Edna did her best, but Andrew Blair was not one for pleasure. He was temperamental, moody, and prone to meanness. He was also exceptionally handsome—tall and svelte, with a thin nose, wide-set eyes, and blond hair, which he slicked back with vigor. He had a plump bee-stung mouth, which shamed him. As soon as he was able, he grew a mustache to cloak his lips, and any remaining trace of carnality. He shaved it once, and it made my grandmother cry, so shocking was it to see his beautiful lips.

The Blairs’ first apartment was in Wheeling, West Virginia, a flat in a line of brick row houses, two stories high, with cement porches and shuttered windows. Each floor held one apartment, as did the basements. Because the interiors were cramped and dark, people kept outside as much as possible, congregating on the porches, legs swung over the ledges, or sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the stoop. The tight quarters left no room for privacy, an irritation to Andrew, so the Blairs moved to Chester as soon as they could afford to.

There, people quickly learned that Andrew Blair was a stern whip of a man, a taciturn Scot purged of any inclination toward revelry by that train that had flattened his mother and knocked his father into a lifelong wall of silence. The only things that brought Andrew to life were music and his garden. He was known for growing the tallest peas in the valley and for his skits in the pottery minstrel shows, where, behind his blackened face and floured lips, he felt safe enough to sing, dance, and run his body hobnobby-wild across the stage.

There are two photographs that capture Andrew best. In the first, he is sitting cross-legged on a tree stump. The trees behind him are leafy with the outgrowth of late summer, their wilting shadows dense and far-reaching. Despite the season, Andrew is dressed in a long-sleeved dress shirt, cuffs ironed and buttoned. His trousers are wool, also with ironed cuffs. His boots are snugly laced to the ankles and his tie is knotted up around his throat. On his head rests a wool cap.

His hands are loosely folded in his lap, arranged like flowers. His face is stiff and marked by measured boredom. The net effect is prim sophistication, a look wildly out of place in the rural West Virginia summer heat, or in West Virginia at all, for that matter. Here is a man who has forgotten, or is trying his damnedest to forget, that he is perched atop a stump in the middle of a disregarded nowhere.

The second photo was taken in the fall. Andrew is again in formal attire, this time a wool suit. He has been photographed from the feet up as he lies prostrate atop a stone wall. It’s a silly angle, one obviously contrived in the fun of an afternoon at the park, a horsing-around sort of snapshot, except that Andrew is not smiling. He has assumed the position of a goofy young man, but his face will not relent. It remains a tight mask of thinly veiled annoyance. The soles of his shoes appear to have been, God love him, scrubbed.

When Aneita Jean was born, her father held her at arm’s length.

“Well,” he said after a time. “She’ll do.”

It was Andrew who decided to name my grandmother Aneita Jean after his sister Jean, whom everybody called “Jean Jean the Beauty Queen.” In retrospect, this may have been a mistake, but that did not stop Aneita Jean from later naming her own daughter Jody Jean, nor did it stop Jody and her sister Jennifer from naming their daughters Jean. Names are history, constant and resonant, and so what if the first Jean turned out to be a loon.

Jean Jean the Beauty Queen was married to Robert Woods, a navy captain of some note in Pittsburgh high society. She had a daughter, Dorothy Jean, seven years old, who had flashing green eyes and auburn ringlets that bounced beside her cheeks. They were an abundantly happy family, and so it was a full-on tragedy when Robert’s fighter-bomber went down in the ocean, leaving them alone. They managed for a few months, but things were never quite square. Jean Jean took to her bed or to walking around the house, circling like a ghost, nodding her head to no one. Dorothy was left alone, and she, too, grew quiet. Then spring arrived. The sun shone hot and clear and Jean Jean decided she would drive her daughter to the beach in Maryland. There, they dug sand castles and played guess which hand has the button. Dorothy ran along the shore and Jean Jean chased her, scooping her up from behind, making Dorothy squeal. For lunch, they ate bologna sandwiches and oranges. Then, after a rest, Jean Jean the Beauty Queen took her daughter’s hand and walked into the ocean.

“We’re going to see Daddy,” she said.

By all accounts, it was ponderous going, but she persisted. Dorothy Jean struggled and broke free, making it to shore and into the arms of bewildered strangers. Her mother kept on. Never looking back to her child, she pressed farther and farther into the sea, her body bobbing in and out of view like a buoyed cork. The last thing Dorothy Jean saw was a froth of white sliding over her mother’s hair, as if she were removing a slip.

After the funeral, seven-year-old Dorothy was sent to live in Indiana with her uncle Rob and his wife, Mildred. No one mentioned her mother until a generation later, when time had made it safe to talk about.

“Crazy, she was,” says my grandmother. “Like me.”

Grandmother had met Uncle Rob and Aunt Mildred in Indianapolis the summer before she turned ten, a year before cousin Dorothy would move there.

“I’m not saying they were dull people, just that they were dull people,” Grandmother joked.

Aneita Jean and her father drove the Nash Ambassador to Indiana. Not many people in Chester, West Virginia, had cars, and the Nash, a blue-and-orange beauty, wasn’t driven all that much. Usually, it sat idle in the shed, a monument to Andrew Blair’s hard work. The car was intended for special occasions, like the Fourth of July parade, or hauling ware to sell on the road. So when her father announced that the two of them would be taking the Nash to another state, Aneita Jean nearly fainted.

It was strangely humid the weekend the two of them set off for their visit. They were sweating before they left Phoenix Avenue.

“Daddy …”

“Too warm to talk, Jeannie,” her father snapped, sitting tall as corn in his suit and tie, even though it was hot enough to make the pavement bubble.

They drove in silence. Aneita Jean wore a starchy dress, which clung to the backs of her knees. She tried to peek underneath to see if it was staining, but she didn’t want her father to notice, so mostly she sat very still and counted farm silos. These were the safe years, the comfortable years between father and daughter. Before the girl starts looking too much like her mama and dragging boys home like baggage. Before the father sees her growth and feels his age and his helplessness and it roils in his stomach like a beehive. No, those times would come later, replete with whippings and restrictions and all the other futile gasps of a parent losing control of his child.