Stories of My Life

  In the years since 1946, I have been able to make a number of remarkable friendships with persons who have changed and enriched my life immeasurably. I think this inestimable gift dates back to Gray High School and the unselfish way Pat and Jean welcomed me into their special friendship, and then helped me welcome Audrey into our circle. My observation has been that thirteen-year-old girls don’t often reach out like this. I’d love to be able to thank them for teaching me how to be a friend.

  Three schools later when I was a junior in high school and we moved to Charles Town, West Virginia, this magic of friendship happened again. Barbara Hughes was the most popular girl in the small school, and rightly so. Even as a teenager she was one of the most caring people I have ever known. If I had been a weird little kid in the fourth grade at Wiley School, I was certainly a weird big one as a high school junior in West Virginia. I had come from a number of unknown places, most recently from a large high school in a big city. Most of the students had been in school together since first grade.

  My father was traveling for the mission board and was rarely home, and my mother was in poor health. I had left friends and a fine high school in Richmond. My unhappiness with the move and my natural shyness made me appear, as I was later told, snobbish. But Barbara took me under her wing, and because Barbara liked me, everyone else had to at least tolerate me.

  She married while in college and her name became Barbara Thompson. Thompson Park, the place where Gilly Hopkins finds herself accepted just the way she is, is named in Barbara’s honor.

  Grandmother Goetchius as a young woman.

  Grandmother Goetchius

  Although I was at last able to make friends in America, there was one person very close to me that I had great difficulty getting along with—my grandmother. Of one thing I am very sure: When I speak about my grandmother, I am never fair. She was, in the eyes of most people who knew her, a remarkable woman. I didn’t want a remarkable woman, I wanted the warm lap and unconditional love other people got from their beloved grandmothers. My first cousin Mary told me once that she thought she and I had had two different grandmothers. She was quite right. She and her older sister Elizabeth Anne were the first two grandchildren. They never knew a time when Grandmother was not a loving presence in their lives, and I am quite sure that Grandmother provided for them the warm lap and unconditional love that every child longs for.

  It was a different story when their brother Charles came along. Grandmother had never had a son, much less a grandson, and Charles was all boy. She had no idea how to deal with such a creature. Young Charles was always hoping for the kind of approval she lavished on his older sisters, but nothing seemed to please her. One day in his adventures he came upon a lovely green snake. The perfect present for Grandmother, he thought. He still remembers her scream.

  Mary and Elizabeth Anne loved their brother and tried to help their grandmother understand that, despite his total lack of academic zeal, he was really a great guy. Charles was a high school football star, so the sisters decided to take Grandmother to a game. If she could only see him in his element, she would appreciate him more. Unfortunately, the elements of the chosen day did not cooperate. It was a wet day and the field was a muddy morass.

  Grandmother’s horror increased by the minute, watching these man-sized boys grabbing each other, throwing each other down, and rolling about in the mud for no apparent reason. The older sisters were caught up in the game and when Charles made a spectacular saving tackle, they cried out: “Did you see that, Grandmother? That was Charles!”

  But all Grandmother could see was the depths of depravity to which mankind had fallen. “Oh, daughters,” she mourned, “to think they were made in the image of their Creator.”

  Perhaps the chief source of my difficulties with Grandmother is that I met her for the first time when I was five years old. I readily admit to stubbornness, pride, jealousy, and a terrible temper. Indeed, I plead guilty to any of the seven deadly sins available to a five-year-old. Grandmother saw me, not as a grandchild to dote on, but as a wild thing, desperately in need of straightening out before it was too late. My mother, apparently, was not adequate for the task, so it was up to her. We weren’t in the country long enough for her to complete her mission, so when we came back the second time when I was eight, she took up her assignment in earnest.

  One of her favorite admonishments to me was “Be sweet, my child, and let who will be clever.” Well, I didn’t want to be sweet, I wanted to prove myself clever, especially since those American teachers of mine thought me a bit slow.

  I may have been shy in most public settings, but at home, as the middle child of five, I did whatever it took to get my share of attention, and sweetness didn’t do the trick. Worse yet, if there was any opportunity at home, at school, even at church to show off, I would—much to Grandmother’s distress. Ladies, even small ones, did not show off.

  Grandmother had no home of her own in those days. So her daughters’ homes became her homes. From the time I was nine until I graduated from high school, Grandmother lived with us for four months out of every year. We children dreaded these visitations. Our mother would become more and more tense as our family’s turn drew near, because I wasn’t the only person or thing Grandmother would begin working on as soon as she walked in the door. She’d start by rearranging all the pictures and whatever furniture was light enough to move, and then start trying to rearrange Mother and the five of us children.

  The only person spared criticism and improving instruction was Daddy, whom she adored. He could do no wrong. She became almost starry-eyed when she talked to him, and she basked in his attention. Daddy couldn’t resist teasing her. We’d watch with fascination the exchange between them at mealtimes. Surely, Daddy had gone too far with his joking. Grandmother couldn’t possibly appreciate his wry sense of humor. He’d surely hurt her feelings, she’d stop worshipping him, and then we’d really be in trouble. We were wrong, of course. At first she’d look puzzled, and then she’d break into a coy smile. “Oh, Raymond,” she’d say, “you’re teasing me.”

  By the time I reached the last years of high school, Ray was in the navy and Liz was in college. So I was suddenly the oldest child. During my junior year, we moved to Charles Town, West Virginia, and were living in an upstairs apartment. Daddy was traveling for the mission board and wasn’t there to help with anything, much less Grandmother’s visits. Until Barbara and I became close friends, I was totally miserable in Charles Town. Often I would come home from school, and, without even taking off my winter coat, throw myself down on the living room floor to read my current book.

  The particular day I remember best, I was totally engrossed in A Tale of Two Cities. I guess I was vaguely aware that my mother was sweeping the floor around my prone body, but I was too lost in the book to care until I heard my grandmother’s voice, weary with the burden of having failed to make me over, “Sweep, sweep, sweep,” she said. “You are going to kill your mother.”

  I’m sure I should have felt guilty. I was simply annoyed. Grandmother should have been proud to have a grandchild so absorbed in a classic that she ignored the world around her. My mother loved to see me read, and I was quite sure my reading was not going to kill my mother, whatever Grandmother might say. And if you’re guessing that I had the grace to get off the floor and give my mother a hand, you’d be wrong. It was at about this time that Grandmother seemed to accept the fact that improving me was a lost cause, announcing sadly to Mother: “I’m afraid Katherine is a lover of luxury.”

  But I started this by saying that I have never been fair to my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, and I have stories to prove it.

  After the difficult birth of her third daughter, Grandmother “enjoyed ill health.” Mother recalled countless afternoons when she came home from school that she was hushed by the African American housekeeper with the warning that her mother was resting. But Grandmother didn’t spe
nd all of her time abed. She was, apparently, noted in Rome, Georgia, for her good deeds. There was a tiny apartment connected to the house, and Mother recalled that it was nearly always filled with some pitiful person or another who would otherwise have been homeless. Every month she sent money to Dr. Harry Myers, a friend who was a missionary in Japan. Dr. Myers wrote that her gift was being used to support a penniless student named Toyohiko Kagawa.

  Kagawa went on to become known worldwide for his work with the poorest of the poor in the slums of Kobe and Tokyo. He was imprisoned on a number of occasions because of his activism on behalf of labor and because he opposed the Japanese military, going so far as to apologize publically in 1940 for Japan’s crimes against China. He was a prolific writer, often using his time in prison to write, and was nominated both for the Nobel Prize in literature and the Nobel Peace Prize. After his death, the Japanese government, which had so often opposed him, awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, its second-highest honor. Dr. Kagawa died soon after I arrived in Japan, so I never met him. But I was in Tokushima Province when his widow brought part of his ashes to bury them in his hometown. I was able to tell her about my grandmother’s pride in having played a part in her great husband’s life.

  After her daughters had all grown up and left home, Grandmother wanted to be useful. She ceased her role as a Victorian semi-invalid and moved to Baltimore, where, I was told as a child, she became a “missionary to the Jews.” The word “missionary” was not a derogatory term in my family, but “missionary” is a misleading description of what she actually did. It seems that the Presbyterian Church was very concerned for the immigrants in Baltimore, many of whom were Jews, who in the 1920s and ’30s had fled Europe and settled in the city. Grandmother’s job was to teach English to a group of Jewish women immigrants. I think it was a volunteer position, rather than a paid one. One remarkable thing about my grandmother was her ability to manage on very little money.

  She grew quite close to the women she worked with. One of the rare lovely memories I have of my grandmother is listening to her describe her Jewish friends preparing for Passover. She was awed by the way they approached this sacred rite—the beauty, the purity of it. She’d never seen anything like it in her own church. She was sure, she said, that the Holy Spirit was present with these wonderful women.

  Often she would take my mother’s letters from China and share them with her friends. She remembered that awful time when she had been in too big a hurry to read the letter first, had simply opened it, only to find herself reading aloud my mother’s account of little Charles’s death. If my grandmother was broken-hearted, so were her friends. “How can God let a little baby die so far away from his beloved grandmother?” one of them cried as they wept with her for her husband’s namesake that she would never know.

  I think Grandmother left Baltimore about the time we moved to Winston-Salem. Perhaps if she’d stayed and been nourished by her friends and the work she did there, she and I would have had a different history. I’ll never know.

  Grandmother lived to be ninety-six, but in 1955, when she was eighty-seven years old, she was living with my aunt Anne in Alexandria, Virginia, and running about visiting sick and elderly friends in Washington, DC. Anne often said, “Mother, you have to watch for cars in the city. You aren’t careful.” To which Grandmother would invariably reply: “Nobody is going to hit an old lady.” But, one day she stepped off the curb and somebody did. Her hip was shattered. A skillful surgeon put it back together and she was able to walk again, but something happened to the grandmother I knew in the process.

  After the operation, the iron lady that had frightened and judged me for most of my life simply disappeared, leaving the sweet granny I’d always longed for. I went to see her before I took off for Japan. She seemed particularly fuzzy that day, so I said, “Grandmother, do you know me?” She peered at me closely. “No,” she said, settling back in her chair, “but I know you’re somebody nice.”

  My older sister Liz thought she saw Grandmother in Louise’s grandmother in Jacob Have I Loved, but I really didn’t. Louise’s grandmother is closer to the mother-in-law of one of my friends, who in her dementia was cuttingly cruel. Until her accident that softened her personality, my grandmother was not demented. She was stern and used Scripture to bolster her arguments, but she was not intentionally cruel. To hint that she was would have been totally unfair to that remarkable woman.

  An example of the brass buttons from the Confederate uniform.

  Two Brass Buttons

  By now you will have realized that my relatives were all Southerners. My father’s grandfathers Womeldorf and Clements were Virginia farmers and never owned slaves. Grandfather James Clements (sometimes spelled Clemens) was the younger brother of John Clements, who left Amelia County for Missouri and became the father of Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. Which makes me in Southern relative counting, the first cousin twice removed of Mark Twain, if the family history is to be believed. Grandpa Clements lived past his hundredth birthday. He was not a Union sympathizer, but he did not believe in either slavery or war, so he paid someone to join the Confederate Army in his place.

  My mother’s grandparents, coming from Georgia and Alabama, were Confederates through and through. Great-Grandfather Daniel was a slave owner, although my grandmother told me that he granted them all freedom in his will. Which sounds nice until you consider that he made sure he had their service all his life. Since I have yet to meet an African American named “Goetchius,” I don’t believe my other great-grandfather was a slave owner, but one of my favorite “kitchen sink stories” comes down from Goetchius family lore.

  Slave owners or not, the fact remains that all my ancestors were from the South and some even fought and died for the losing side. Perhaps that’s why I was long resigned to my failure to publish. Southerners are much more comfortable with losing than winning. It seems more romantic, somehow. And now for one of my favorite family stories.

  My grandfather Goetchius’s two eldest brothers, John and Edward, were both killed while serving in the Confederate Army. This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry.

  I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett’s Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. Actually he was mortally wounded very close to Cemetery Hill on July 2 the day before that tragic charge. He was carried by unknown hands to a Union field hospital, where a chaplain, who was ministering to the injured, realized that the young man was dying and asked him if there was any message he would like to send to his loved ones. John asked him to cut two of the brass buttons off his uniform and take the flags from his lapels and send them to his parents and his sweetheart.

  He lived long enough to give the chaplain his name—John Goetchius—but died before he could tell the kind man where his home was.

  For many years the chaplain carried the two brass buttons and Confederate flags around in his pocket to remind him of his unkept promise. Then one day he happened to be boarding a ferry boat somewhere in the South and heard the African American ferry boat attendant greet an elderly gentleman as “Marse Goetchius.” The name was so unusual that the chaplain immediately approached the stranger. He introduced himself and asked if by any chance Mr. Goetchius had lost a relative in the Battle of Gettysburg. Yes, the old man said, one of my sons died there. The chaplain produced the buttons and the flags, and later accompanied my great-grandfather to Gettysburg. They found the trench where the dead Confederates were buried, I was told, because the corn was so much greener there. How long it took, I have no idea, but they found my great-uncle’s body, identifying the remains by the dental work, and took them home to be buried in the family plot.

  My mother was born more than thirty years after her uncle’s death, but she remembered John’s fiancée, who carried the brass buttons with her always and reminded the Goetchius girls that she should have been their aunt.
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  Article in Episcopal magazine about Maud Henderson.

  Courtesy of the Archives of the Episcopal Church, USA.

  Maud Truxton Henderson

  During the time we lived in Charles Town, West Virginia, we had a visit from an old friend from China days. Her name was Maud Henderson. Maud had spent most of her life saving those Chinese baby girls that their society had too often regarded as disposable. Mother told me the story of how she had stood at the gate of her compound and told the Japanese soldiers there that if they tried to come in and get her girls, they would have to do it across her dead body. This story alone made her one of my childhood heroes. Maud felt particularly close to my parents because she and my father both came from Lexington, Virginia, though they only met when we were in Shanghai. The last time we had seen her was just before we left China in 1940.

  When she came to visit us in Charles Town, West Virginia, nine years later, her round face was as wrinkled as a dried apple and she was almost toothless. Her hair, peeking out from under her deaconess headdress, was white, and when she took off the headdress it barely covered her pink scalp.There are two things she said that I have remembered all my life. One was said as she was smacking her lips over some particularly delicious dessert my mother had made: “I’ve only got one tooth left, but it’s all right. The dentist says it’s my sweet one.” The other: “I was the last person Robert E. Lee kissed before he died, and now I have kissed you.”

  There is, of course, a lifetime between that second sentence and the first, and although the last time I saw Maud she was eighty and I was sixteen, it is now that I am over eighty myself that I have been able to fill in those long decades between. As I mentioned earlier, Kate DiCamillo was fascinated by the story of the famous kiss and told me if I didn’t write about Maud, she would. But Maud was my hero, so I set about to find out more than the little I could remember from knowing her and hearing my parents talk about her. To my amazed delight, I found that her niece had donated many of her letters from China to the University of North Carolina and that there were a few letters from and about her in the Archives of the Episcopal Church. So over the course of a couple of years, I gave myself the task of putting together her life story. It’s not part of my family history, but it touches it, first in Lexington, then Charles Town and Winchester (where my parents lived for thirty years), and, most importantly, in China.