The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans

      MY AUNT FRAN, the third Grasinski Girl, is steeped in memories and things of the past. A weekend antique dealer, she has a large house with bedrooms now empty of children and full of valuable dolls and Depression glass. She has boxes of black-and-white pictures and can produce detailed, sensuous images of her childhood: for example, discovering empty brown candy papers in her mother’s apron pocket and holding them to her nose to inhale the lingering scent of chocolate. Fran is an engaging storyteller and I sought her out at family gatherings to listen to her. She talks about people and things that came before me but still seem to matter: my great-grandmother who had thirteen children, my aunt Gene who died of a cerebral hemorrhage, my grandfather who smoked cigars, the house they lost in the Depression.

      I went to Fran’s house on a Sunday afternoon and we talked for several hours in her prim, soft-colored, floral-patterned living room while her husband Albert whistled in the den. He never came into the front room, but we were never alone. Later, when I transcribed the tape, I could hear his whistling.

      When we finished the first side of the ninety-minute tape she was only at age six, and she said, “That’s as far as I go.” I coaxed her through another forty-five minutes by asking her some questions about her parents, the other houses they lived in, her ethnicity. She responded to the questions and they became springboards for more storytelling. At the end of the second side of the tape, her story was up to the age of sixteen. She was flirting with sailors, hanging out with her sister Gene, taking singing lessons in Kalamazoo (she inherited her mother’s beautiful voice). And then she stopped and wouldn’t tell me any more. I tried several times to interview her again, and finally, two years later, after I sent her a small piece I had written based on the first interview, she agreed to another session, in part because I had not written enough about her being a mother. When I arrived, she had an outline I had sent in front of her and she wanted to know why there were only question marks after her name in the section on motherhood. I said it was because she had not yet told me anything about mothering. She was surprised. “We talked so long and I didn’t say anything about them?” I told her No, she didn’t say anything about getting married or the children or her antique collecting. “Those antiques are nothing,” she said, but she did want to tell me about her children and her years of work with the Boy Scouts and Campfire Girls. She also talked about her sister Gene, her involvement with the church, and the gratitude that she feels toward her mother for instilling in her a strong faith and love for Jesus.

      . . .

      After she finished high school, Fran worked briefly at Fannie Farmer’s candy store in downtown Grand Rapids, and when she was twenty she married Albert Hrouda, a Czech from Cleveland who graduated from Case Western Reserve University. She met Al only six times (though some visits lasted for five days) before he proposed to her. She got to know him as a pen pal while he was in the army. They were married at St. Stan’s in Hilliards and then moved to Cleveland for a few years, where she remembers riding the trolley to “the other side of town” on Wednesday nights to dance the Slovenian polka. After a few years they returned to Grand Rapids and she has been in the city ever since.

      Fig. 12. Fran and Albert Hrouda on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, 1998

      Her husband became a successful certified public accountant, and she raised their three children. Now they have four grandchildren whom she enjoys greatly. She doesn’t drive. From her middle-class suburban house she can walk to a small shopping center, and her husband takes her to the other places she needs to go. When she was in her forties, she started buying and selling antiques, dishes and dolls mostly. She is a devout Catholic and has always been active in the church, but even more so nowadays. Currently she organizes prayer groups and works for the pro-life movement. Every Christmas she sends me a Christmas card with a pro-life card tucked inside or a “pray the rosary” sticker on the envelope.

      This is her story of the Grasinski Girls’ early years.

      The Lights of the City

      I was born in Grand Rapids on Tuesday, at home, we were all born at home. All the way up to Mary. We lived on Powers Avenue until I was about eight months old, and then they moved to Valley Avenue. They just rented that house on Powers, but they owned that one on Valley, and they lost it during the Depression. They needed 345 dollars and they didn’t have it. I guess they were too proud to ask anybody in the family, you know, for that, so we lost that house. That was in ’32 or ’33 and I was born in ’28.

      When we moved away I was four and a half, but it seems like I remember the most of my life there. The day we were moving I can still remember, we came down the driveway and we had all our toys and everything in this red wagon. [starts to cry] I can’t talk about it. And in this wagon, piled up in this red wagon, [muffled tears] and we were pulling it to the house, to our new house, which was, oh gosh, I don’t know how many blocks away, long ways away. But we had to take it there. They had a small van, I guess to move the big furniture, but I can still remember coming out of the driveway, Caroline had the handle and Genie and I were holding all the stuff so it wouldn’t fall off the wagon. Here I’m only four years old, Genie’s seven, and Caroline is ten.

      We took that wagon with those toys and we pushed it all the way to our new house. [laughter] And I’m trying to think, that was on First Street. It was probably about six blocks, maybe, that we had to go, maybe more than that. I don’t know if you want to listen to all of what I’m saying. [Me: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.] Then we went from First to Fifth. Then we moved to Third. We tried to figure out, Caroline and I, why we moved, why we moved as much as we did. It was on rent, those three times were on rent, and then they bought, out in the country. I was ten when we moved out in the country. But like she [her mother, Helen] says, Valley Avenue was her home. That’s the house that she really loved and it was really nice inside and everything. It was a stucco house and it had the three bedrooms, and it was nice. Anything we lived on rent didn’t compare with that.

      I can remember from the time I was probably three to four and a half. That’s a lot. I can’t figure out how I can remember all of that, I mean, I can still feel ’em! [laughter] I can still feel all of that. I think I took everything in. There was a little porch where we used to shake the pierzyna [down quilt] out every Saturday morning, and then there was the fence in the backyard with all the hollyhocks. She used to hang up the clothes