Secrets

She had a secret.  One that I didn’t know until long after she had died.  One that even her son, my father, did not know.  Once revealed, it explained a lot about her.  But I knew Katharine when I was young and that was long before I knew that most adults had secrets and other lives they wished they had lived.  Before I knew that most people lived the lives they were given, or had chosen out of loyalty, or familial duty, or lack of opportunity.

Her name was Katharine Kinard Strozier and if you say her name with a southern drawl and a couple of extra syllables you might feel some of her essence. She was raised in an unusually progressive southern family with many brothers and sisters, a dad who was the President of the local college and a mom who was a professor there. I got to know Katharine, or Grandmaw, when I was 6 and we moved to Rock Hill, South Carolina while my dad went off to war- to be a battalion commander in Vietnam.  

Three states, three different first grade classes and now South Carolina with my Dad out of the picture.  It could have been a train wreck, but it wasn’t.  Katharine seemed to love having us living with her in her pink house on Ebenezer Road.  I’m sure it wasn’t easy to have your daughter-in-law, your two grandkids, a dog and later a cat join your small living space and share your one bathroom, but she didn’t seem fazed by anything. 

Katharine had a pink house with maroon shutters and a pool in the backyard.  She told us it used to be grey with a big flower garden in the back.  When her husband (my grandfather who I don’t really remember except that I called him Big Daddy when I was little) died, she repainted the house (to match the inside of a cedar chest- although it was much pinker), ripped up the flowers and installed a pool.  She swam laps every morning without fail before she went to work at Snelling & Snelling where she helped people find jobs.  Before that she was an English teacher and to this day, when anyone says “lay” incorrectly, I think of her saying: “You lay a book down, you lie yourself down.” 

I remember most vividly how she answered the phone in the hallway of the pink house.  She would pick up the ringing phone and answer: “2867, this is Katharine Strozier speaking.”  Back in the time when only four numbers identified your location and you wanted people to know who it was on the other line. Back when people answered the phone.

She must have been the only person in Rock Hill to have a subscription to The New Yorker because she loved the writing and the cartoons.  We often watched TV together at night in the living room where the one TV set was located.  I remember once when changing channels that we happened upon a televangelist couple named Jim and Tammy Faye Baker on the PTL, or Praise the Lord, show.  Katharine told me adamantly:  “It’s really the Pass the Loot club.  They are all crooks and God doesn’t really factor into anything except that it helps them steal your money.”  She was right. She was a good judge of character.  She did not suffer fools.

She ate the same meals every single day.  Two soft boiled eggs for breakfast (always eaten in an egg cup) with a piece of buttered toast, a grilled hamburger with a piece of toast for lunch, and a grilled hamburger with a baked potato with butter for dinner.  She baked homemade bread every weekend and we ate it all week.  I remember the smell of the bread baking and how it filled the house.  We couldn’t wait to eat it and especially liked it warm from the oven with butter melting into its creases.

She smoked and we didn’t like that.  We wanted her to quit because we heard it was very bad for you.  We gave her a paperweight that said: “Orphan Annie’s parents smoked.”  She laughed at that and kept it despite how obnoxious that was.  She snorted when she laughed really hard and she did it a lot because she laughed a lot. 

Late in life, long after that year we lived with her, Katharine read a novel called Growing Up by Russel Baker.  She decided that she could write a novel about her life growing up as she thought it was much more interesting than Russel Baker’s life. I found it after she died.  She wrote about summers in Black Mountain, North Carolina where they kept their milk in a tin box in the creek so that it stayed cold; her sister Nell getting burned because her nightgown caught fire from standing too close to the fireplace; and, living in Anderson, South Carolina when they were little and had a donkey named Piedmont Cigarettes.  She wrote about all of this in her beautiful loopy cursive writing in a dime store spiral notebook with Michael Jackson on the cover. What a loss that she didn’t get to finish it.  All those untold amazing stories.

Katharine died of complications from Emphysema when I was in law school. Roles were reversed, and she was living with my family at the time.  I cried a lot; she was the only grandparent I had ever really known.

When I was married with kids, after Katharine had died, I discovered that Katharine had a secret she had only told a few people.  She had gotten pregnant when she was a graduate student and her family had sent her to New Jersey to live in an unwed mother’s home, have her child and give that child up for adoption. Even though her family was progressive, that was not something a college President could have– a daughter with an illegitimate child.  She had a baby girl, gave her up for adoption and came home and was told she was to marry Ben Strozier and live in a grey house with flower gardens. She had three boys.  She never knew what happened to that baby girl. I think I now better understood the pink house with the swimming pool and Katharine Kinard Strozier.