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REMEMBERING THE CHRYSALISJ.J. LoustauWhat I hadn’t counted on, in putting my mother’s affairs in order after she died two years ago, was that it had been left to me to decipher a family riddle and come to terms with truths taken to the grave. You’d be correct in assuming that shame and pride were behind it all, but then it’s easy to criticize in hindsight; to fully appreciate the responsibilities we have to ourselves today, we’d do well to empathize with those who’ve come before us. I dreaded the task of settling mom’s estate because I was sure it would bring back the resentment I used to feel for what she’d refer to as her ‘lot in life’. God, how that would drive me crazy! She’d made certain choices, after all, and being raised by a stressed-out single mom hadn’t exactly been great for me and my brothers. (After the funeral Kevin couldn’t get back to his family in Colorado fast enough, and all John would do was recommend a realtor to sell the house.) Being the eldest, I’d been named mom’s executor, but it was like getting stuck with the hardest chores as a kid: as her daughter it seemed foreordained that she would take out her frustrations on me. Only after my first marriage ended years ago did I begin to see her in a different light. At the time I postulated to a therapist that maybe my stubbornness had exacerbated tensions between my parents, that if I’d been less of a handful she might have been able to make the marriage work. In any event, it’s been my experience that momentous things come in clusters. John was barely four when my folks divorced and two years later my grandmother, the imperious Bern Coakley, died. I was barely ten at the time – King and Kennedy had just been killed, cops were beating protesters over the head in Chicago – and it was all I could do to keep my brothers still during our grandmother’s funeral mass. Afterward, mom had us stand next to her in the receiving line with her brother, Uncle Mike, while they thanked their mother’s lady friends and husbands for coming. The men, business colleagues of my grandfather who’d died eight years before, looked doubtful as their wives offered their condolences, and I got the cynical feeling the ladies were just sad to be losing their bridge hostess. Grandmother Bern had been a formidable figure, even if she was thin as a whippet and only lived to sixty – I used to imagine her born with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She wasn’t one to suffer fools and rarely kept her opinions to herself. Once I heard her say to mom, “Now, Judith, don’t serve Maureen any more potatoes – you simply can’t call that baby fat any longer…” But as much as I detested asides like that at holiday dinners, I admit that she did set a nice table; she also decorated her home just so, with each piece of furniture, every lamp, vase, and seaside watercolor part of a tableau that bespoke refined elegance. This strikes me as ironic now, given that my grandfather’s business was concrete. I mainly disliked my grandmother for the way she looked down on mom. After the divorce we moved into a split-level rental that was soon stuffed with mismatched furniture given to us by well-meaning neighbors. As soon as embarrassing stains began dotting the carpets and upholstery, and the backyard turned into a jungle, Grandmother Bern stayed away altogether. I remember Uncle Mike slept on our lumpy couch the night of the funeral before going home to Houston. I think he felt sorry for my mother; I felt sorry for both of them because they were orphans now. I was very impressionable in those years and my most vivid memory from Grandmother Bern’s funeral was the surprise visitor. I hadn’t noticed her during the service, and she came up to us tentatively afterward. She was tall and dark, not beautiful but handsome in a way, with cat-eye glasses, white gloves, and a handbag in the crook of her arm. She introduced herself as Josephine and explained that she was a distant relative. She lingered for a moment, awkwardly holding mom’s hand, and asked whether she might call on us sometime. Mom scribbled our number on the back of the funeral program and probably thought nothing more about it until Josephine telephoned about a week later. Though she lived up in the city and didn’t own a car, she said she would gladly take the train down to pay a visit. I don’t know if mom was intrigued or exasperated, but she suggested Josephine come Sunday “after church,” which I found comical, but I suppose mom wanted to make a good impression. Indeed, we did make it to church that Sunday – despite howls from Kevin and John, and after an unprecedented day of housecleaning on Saturday. The four of us were a cranky bunch by the time we got to the depot and Josephine piled into the front seat of our station wagon holding a pink bakery box wrapped up with string. At home, with only an assortment of coffee mugs in our cabinets, mom suggested I unpack a box of grandmother’s china, but Josephine politely insisted that she preferred her Lipton tea in a mug. My fidgety brothers were excused after devouring several pieces of cake, leaving mom and me to visit with the older lady alone. She asked about our lives – we attended Catholic school, Mom worked as a secretary for an insurance broker – and our interests – I was fond of Nancy Drew mysteries, Mom volunteered with the PTA. Josephine kindly replied to our questions – she was a semi-retired research assistant at the Academy of Sciences, never married, was fond of reading, music and art. “And remind me again,” Mom said with a pained expression when silence came over the kitchen table, “you’re related to my mother how?”Here Josephine pursed her lips. “Well, I didn’t want to cause a commotion at the service,” she explained, looking down, “but I’m actually your mother’s sister. Or was…” “You’re my aunt?” my mother exclaimed warily. “No, that can’t be. I knew Mother had a sister, but Michael and I were told that she’d been killed in a car crash.” I looked from my mother to the older lady across from her, who looked stricken.“Oh,” Josephine said, biting her lip, “I’m so sorry. I had no idea that’s what you were told.” She pulled a handkerchief from her purse and as she dabbed her eyes, mom’s face clouded over with suspicion – Was this some kind of hoax? Was this lady a charlatan, a gold digger? I became anxious that mom might lose her temper and order the old woman out of our house. “No, I wasn’t killed,” Josephine said with a sigh when she’d composed herself. “We were from different generations, your mother and I. After our parents passed we had very little in common, though we did exchange letters over the years…I don’t mean to upset you but when I saw that she’d passed, I thought I might introduce myself – to try and re-establish the family connection. Of course, I completely understand if that’s not possible…” Struck by her evident sincerity, mom asked some questions – not so much to authenticate the woman’s claim as to fill in some blanks in her mother’s life. I don’t recall all that Josephine recounted that day – various stories have been conflated over the years since – but the gist of it struck home. Berenice (Bern) had been born in 1908, a bonus baby for her mother, then in her early forties; Josephine was twelve years older than Berenice, and the first-born, a boy named Albert, was killed in France during the First World War. Their father had been a tailor, and though he died in the 1920s, Berenice followed him into the garment industry. She was a hat model for a fashionable department store, then worked in sales before meeting and marrying George Coakley, a successful building contractor fifteen years her senior. Michael was born in 1936, Judith (my mother) in 1938. As Josephine spoke I’m sure that, like me, mom was scrutinizing the woman’s face and mannerisms looking for confirmation that she and Grandmother Bern had been sisters. I found her features faintly reminiscent – even though Josephine’s skin had a suppleness Bern’s had lacked for all her incessant tanning and dieting. (I couldn’t tell you what color Bern’s hair had been, just that it reminded me of cotton candy.) Thankfully the visit didn’t go on too long as mom needed time to absorb this revelation. We saw Josephine off at the train depot but made no definite plans to reconnect soon. I remember mom telephoning Uncle Mike that night, and when I asked about it the next day she said he wasn’t all that surprised by the news. (He and mom were never particularly close, but years later she told me he confided in her that night that the reason he’d moved away from home after their father died was that he learned in the will that he’d been adopted.)I was in seventh grade that fall when Josephine invited us up to visit the Academy of Sciences in the city. My brothers loved the bobcat and the sabretooth tiger panorama in the Natural History museum, we all got a kick out of the live penguin exhibit, and the planetarium show was spectacular. After lunch in the cafeteria, Josephine took us upstairs to the entomology department where she’d been working for years. She explained that her area of focus was butterflies and moths and brought us over to a display case where dozens of specimens from all around the globe had been carefully preserved, pinned, and annotated. I could tell mom was feigning interest to be polite; what had no doubt taken years, indeed decades, to classify we raced through in a matter of minutes. My brothers and I proclaimed it the coolest thing we’d ever seen before bidding Josephine goodbye in a flurry of handshakes and hugs. “She has the patience of a shut-in,” mom said to me as soon we got in the car. “Who else could concentrate on such things for hours and hours?” When I didn’t reply, she looked over. “I’d say she’s a bit eccentric, wouldn’t you?”With my brothers yammering away in the back seat about stuffing dead animals, I said it was neat Josephine had found something she enjoyed doing. Mom grimaced – she’d just started a new job at the telephone company – and feeling bad, I said, “It is strange, I guess.”In November I asked whether we might to invite Josephine for Thanksgiving, but mom felt uncomfortable about incorporating ‘the science lady’ (as my brothers called her) into our family rituals. Something about Josephine’s sense of independence appealed to me, though, so I sent her a Christmas card, to which she duly replied after the New Year. She wrote that she was curious about my interests and plans for high school and invited me up for lunch if mom gave me permission. Probably thinking I could use a mentor, Mom agreed to drive me to the commuter train one Saturday.When I got to the city Josephine was waiting on the platform. We took a trolley, I remember, and had lunch at a musty café where she introduced me to German food like schnitzel, potato pancakes, and tangy red cabbage. The sharp facial features of the other patrons were unfamiliar to me, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable. When the waitress mistakenly assumed I was Josephine’s niece I didn’t object. Afterward we walked to the park and entered the Academy of Sciences building through a side door. Upstairs in her department Josephine pulled out four glass cases which illustrated the remarkable metamorphosis of butterflies: the first case showed eggs deposited on plant leaves; in the second case caterpillars were depicted molting their skins in stages; various cocoons were attached to the underside of branches in the third case; and the fourth case featured a glorious display of adult butterflies. As beguiled as I was by the vivid markings and astonishing colors, Josephine drew my attention back to the third case, explaining that inside the cocoon – “also known as the chrysalis,” she said, a new and exotic word for me – the metamorphosis that takes place over a two-week period depends upon the energy the caterpillar has consumed beforehand. Pointing to the first case, she described how the female butterfly chooses the plant on which to lay her eggs because the leaves will provide the nourishment necessary for a wide variety of butterflies. As profound as all this was, I can only recall asking where she’d gone to college. She told me college hadn’t been a consideration for women back in her day, not even for many of the men she knew who’d been called up to fight in the First World War. I liked her a lot when she said that many women her age had the fighting spirit, too, and that all she ever wanted to be was a ‘suffragette’. She mentioned the names of women who’d fought for the vote, but others as well who founded settlement houses or championed fair labor practices. I learned that Auntie Jo, as I came to call her, had worked as a switchboard operator and a stenographer before responding to a Want Ad seeking help organizing an office – it turned out that the Academy of Science’s bug department had become overwhelmed by their growing collections. Jo’s organizational skills and reputation for being meticulous about preserving the delicate specimens eventually made her indispensable to the curator – so much so that she accompanied him to an international conference in Vienna in 1937. As interesting as her work sounded, what intrigued me more was imagining Auntie Jo’s independent life, for it hadn’t occurred to me that a grown woman might not have children, or even a husband. She told me that whereas in her mother’s generation such women were cast aside as spinsters and Old Maids, unmarried women in her day were a new breed – whether it was the flappers of the 1920s or the women abandoned by men during the Great Depression for lack of work. She said that ‘modern women’ – I liked the sound of that – didn’t have to be in a romantic relationship with a man to be happy. And so began a friendship with a woman old enough to be my grandmother. With everybody so cliquish in high school and the suburbs so boring, I went up to the city often to visit Auntie Jo. The first time I saw her apartment I was taken aback by how bright and cheery it was – for an older lady, I’d imagined frumpy and cluttered. Instead, the sofa and armchair were covered in brightly contrasting chintz, there was a glass coffee table and a floor lamp with a pleated shade. The walls were mauve, as I recall, with floor-length curtains that complemented the floral hues of the upholstery. The fireplace bricks were painted white and the screen was chrome-plated, not very practical – there were burn marks on the deep-pile rug where sparks had landed – but still eye-catching forty years after Art Deco’s heyday. By contrast, her kitchen was utilitarian, an afterthought. She explained that ‘live-aloners’ didn’t go in for cooking much, that the last thing a working gal wanted to do when she got home was stand over a cookbook. She kept canned tuna, crackers, and soup on hand, and might roast a chicken if a friend was coming over, but when nice food was called for, they’d go out to eat. Eventually I surmised that of her lady friends – whom she’d refer to by name as if I knew them – only Midge, Irene, and Jodi were left. One had been an accountant, another a painter (several of her oils were on Jo’s walls), and I don’t recall what the other one did. There’d been men in their lives once, but divorce or strokes had claimed them by the time the ladies formed their foursome. I loved hearing Jo talk about the fabulous parties they’d thrown over the years, where they’d invite all sorts of interesting people, dance to swing music and serve cocktails with names like ‘Rickeys,’ ‘Slings,’ and ‘Fizzes’.Auntie Jo loved going to the movies and took me to films that didn’t appeal to mom, period pieces like Barry Lyndon, or that mom thought I wasn’t ready for, like Chinatown. (It was years before I watched the old movies Jo talked about, with the likes of Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, or Barbara Stanwyk, and got a sense of the unsentimental heroines she admired.) I remember being pretty upset by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and over ice cream afterward Jo helped identify what disturbed me: not just mean Nurse Ratchet but that whole institutions could conspire to erase people as intelligent and inspiring as McMurphy. Auntie Jo talked about how difficult it can be to stand out in a crowd. She said women like her were often dismissed as man-hating lesbians, told me about the contemptuous looks she’d sometimes get from other women on the streetcar, the whisperers in restaurants insinuating that she must hate children, that someone like her couldn’t get (or keep) a man. When it came to men, she was self-deprecating– “being tall and gangly, and with no cheekbones to speak of, I never won any beauty contests,” she’d say – but maintained that the intelligent ones weren’t threatened by a smart woman with ambition. I distinctly remember her telling me, “Never let other people define you,” that the important thing was getting to know yourself so that the opinion of others didn’t matter so much. For my sake, Mom invited Auntie Jo to my high school graduation – I’d been named valedictorian. I knew it was a hassle driving up to the city to get her, but mom didn’t think it was polite to ask an old lady to take the train any longer. Over the years, the two of them were always pleasant to each other; they’d exchange Christmas cards and sometimes mom had Jo join us for Easter brunch. Still, mom dreaded it whenever Josephine would call just to chat – she was on the phone enough at work, she’d grouse, and just didn’t get Jo anyway. “You get along with her, Maureen, and I’m glad for you,” she’d say, “It’s good to have older people in your life.” It’s not hard to see how Auntie Jo was influential in my development. Had I been more of a typical girl perhaps our friendship wouldn’t have amounted to much; we never talked about fashion or celebrities, hair and makeup. She’d ask about the dances I’d go to and might suggest a movie she thought I’d enjoy in the company of a boy, but she never pried. I recall her telling me once that love was a very special part of life, but that it doesn’t always work out.I thought of Auntie Jo as indomitable, which made one episode particularly distressing. We’d gone with her friend Midge to dinner at a Moroccan restaurant, which entailed the three of us sitting on cushions on the floor, drinking mint tea and eating with our hands. Midge was short and round and had a cackle of a laugh, which I learned as soon as we sat down and she rolled backward into a decorative screen. Her sense of humor was infectious, and it was fun seeing her play Lou Costello to Jo’s Bud Abbott. After dinner Midge suggested we see the movie Julia because she was a big fan of Vanessa Redgrave. As the girlhood friendship develops between Lillian and Julia, I was glad we were seeing a period picture with strong female leads – Julia goes off to Oxford and the University of Vienna, Lillian follows her dream of becoming a playwright. Seated between the two older women, however, I felt Auntie Jo stiffen when Julia gets caught up in the political resistance over Nazi brutality in prewar Austria. I heard her whimpering as Lillian reunites with Julia to smuggle money to Russian Jews, as war clouds gather and Julia’s grim fate is sealed. After the war, Lillian tries in vain to locate Julia’s orphaned daughter, then back in America finds Julia’s family has excised their memory of Julia for having brought shame on their Viennese relatives in the years leading up to the war.When the lights came up Jo’s eyes were red from all the tears and her attempt to muster an apologetic smile is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. Midge insisted on driving me home rather than taking me to the train station as planned, but seeing her friend so exhausted she decided to first drop Jo at her apartment. I walked Jo to her door and stepped inside to call my mother to tell her I was getting a ride home. Then I gave Auntie Jo an awkward hug, and I can still hear her quickly latching the door as soon as I’d turned to walk back down the stairs. Midge said little during the drive, then a few blocks from my house she suggested we stop for hot chocolate, saying she needed a pick-me-up before returning to the city. Sitting across from each other in a glaringly bright fast-food restaurant, hesitant before our scalding drinks, Midge apologized for having suggested the picture, saying that it probably cut rather close to the bone for Josephine who’d been in Austria before the war. I told her that I’d heard about the ‘symposium,’ hoping the word might convey my maturity. Midge said that actually it had been a research sabbatical, during which the entomology curator had negotiated the acquisition of a rare collection of South African butterflies. I nodded, remembering Auntie Jo showing me the collection. Midge mentioned something about those having been treacherous times. Having just finished high school, I had read about the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, and asked whether Auntie Jo had been caught up in all of that, but Midge told me that Jo had returned to the states in December 1937. She said the trouble began the following spring when the Nazis invaded Austria and that Josephine was very anxious because she’d become friends with people there and was worried for their safety. “I believe she had a beau,” Midge said after regarding me a moment, then went on to describe how chaotic everything was, that mail was hard to come by and eventually stopped coming altogether. Looking to the side, she said it had been a dreadful summer for Josephine. The story was so sad I didn’t know what to say. I don’t even remember Midge dropping me off. She may have told me to keep what she’d said in confidence but recalling the hollow feeling I got when I hugged Auntie Jo goodbye earlier, I never dared bring it up with her. Instead, I went away to college and Jo wrote me letters, asking about the classes I was taking and the friends I was making. I regret now that I wasn’t a more faithful correspondent. We did get together during the holidays and the summers I came home, but unfortunately, after Julia I never felt the same about Auntie Jo – still indomitable in her way, but a tragic figure as well. After I turned twenty-one, when I’d visit, she would fix up one of those cocktail concoctions from back in her ‘salad days,’ which led to some humorous moments, but the introduction of alcohol into our relationship was a bad omen. Her speech became sloppy, her reasoning flawed. I suspect her eyesight was deteriorating (she was eighty-five when I graduated from college), but I began to associate lapses in her appearance (a stain on the front of her dress, lipstick poorly applied) with drinking. More than once she’d slip into a maudlin rumination after a first cocktail, and I’d suggest she lie down before I left.These were the sorry impressions that came back to me when mom called to say that Auntie Jo had passed. I hadn’t written Jo in months and was nagged by guilt that I should at least call, but I worried that she might fall while rushing to pick up the phone (this was before message machines). Mom only found out when a letter arrived from an attorney informing her that Jo had left me a silkscreen print of South African butterflies that I’d always appreciated. A decade clipped by and that silkscreen print accompanied me everywhere – to business school and an internship in Cincinnati, to New York for a stint in investment banking, then back here where I went to work for a brokerage house. I was determined to break the proverbial glass ceiling in the financial services world! Looking back over thirty years, though, it’s bitterly disappointing to see how little progress has been made: from calls for the Equal Rights Amendment getting drowned out by Reagan-era traditionalism to today’s #MeToo movement, is it any wonder that ‘equal pay for equal work’ remains a pipe dream? Only after divorcing my first husband – a venture capitalist who would’ve been happy to start a family as long as he could keep traveling – did my father open up about his failed marriage to mom. I was visiting him in Denver, where he lives with his second wife and their kids, and sitting in the backyard one night under the stars, he said, “The truth was, Maury, your mom was in a prison of her mother’s making back then: be the beautiful wife and perfect mother, with fawning children, a devoted husband, and dinner on the table by six.” Dad laughed and reached for his Scotch. “Hell, as a salesman I was on the road two-to-three days a week! When I did get home, dinner would be a warmed-over casserole, with your brothers bickering, you going on about how backward the nuns were, and your mom smoking a cigarette, bitching about the house needed repainting or some damn thing – nothing was ever like she expected it to be…”Mom admitted as much. She never remarried, and I got the impression she saw marriage as a curse – that meeting another person’s expectations was impossible so why put yourself through the heartache. All she said after my divorce was, “Thank heavens you didn’t have children – that changes everything.” After settling into a career as a management consultant I was able to see mom more regularly. It was good a good period for us: she was nearing retirement, more reflective than usual, and I found myself more sympathetic to what she’d faced as a single mom. When I asked if she had liked being a housewife, she said she really hadn’t had a choice – she was twenty when she and dad married, all her friends were getting married and moving to the suburbs, too. When I suggested that her mother had pushed her into it, she countered that there were hints in all the women’s magazines, on TV and in the movies. She said it was easy to see how housewives had been groomed by advertising agencies to be big consumers, from wedding registries and home furnishings to appliances and kitchen gadgets – and all on credit! As to whether parenting had weighed her down, she said it was what she’d been trained to do, that it was her purpose in life. I asked if she ever resented not developing interests of her own, but the question confused her. She said she’d derived satisfaction from helping us with our homework, that seeing us get a good grade or win an award was a validation of her worth. She didn’t know what I meant by “seeking validation as a woman, as just a person.” She only saw herself as a mother. I wouldn’t have lasted a year in her shoes – the idea of plugging away at a job you didn’t like just to make ends meet sounded dreadful to me. That ‘free time’ was simply a chance to unwind from the stress of work – Saturday afternoons at the hairdresser’s, dinner out with the girls once in a while, a trip to Maui with a friend every few years – seemed so paltry to me, small consolation for all that she’d sacrificed. But how do you develop personal interests when you’ve never spent time getting to know yourself?I was approaching forty and had been seeing David for a couple of years, a divorced father with a young son, when I told mom I was thinking about getting married again. She was happy for me, said I deserved a life partner, but I know she doubted whether I was suited to be a mother. She kept such misgivings to herself, however, when at forty-two I had a baby of my own – she was simply delighted to spend time with us and be a part of Isabel’s life. Alas, the retirement she so richly deserved was fraught with illness: she beat breast cancer at sixty-eight but the years of chronic pain from fibromyalgia that followed surely dampened the satisfaction I’d hoped for her as a grandmother. With my bonus baby now away at college, David recently proposed that we all go to South Africa next summer to visit my stepson who works in Lesotho with the Peace Corps. It’ll be a treat given how busy I’ve been since mom’s passing, what with selling the house and all.Amid all the crap mom held onto over the years, there was a sealed box of Grandmother Bern’s effects – photographs of people I don’t recognize, four thick jazz records, some gaudy costume jewelry. In a bundle of old correspondence tied with twine I found a letter written by Auntie Jo in 1959 – the year of my birth – in which she asks her sister, “Berenice,” for an opportunity to meet Judith (my mother) who was turning twenty-one at the time. It’s a sad letter – Jo proposes being introduced as an American cousin visiting from abroad and promises to leave her in peace afterward – which ends with Jo justifying her request by “having scrupulously honored my end of our agreement.” When I telephoned Uncle Mike last night to tell him about the letter, he said it didn’t surprise him. We hadn’t seen each other since mom’s funeral, but I could picture the resignation in his eyes. “Who knows what went on between those two all those years ago, Maureen?” he said. “Sure, Bern could be a hard woman, but she was no monster.”I asked if he and Josephine had talked over the years – they were both at my college graduation party – but he said he hadn’t gone out of his way to get to know her. When I asked what agreement she may have been referring to in the letter, I caught an edge of exasperation in his voice when he said he had no idea, then his phone crashed to the floor. When he got back on the line, he was curt, saying, “Listen, I don’t resent being adopted, only that I wasn’t told the truth about it.” He told me Bern had been furious that it came out in her husband’s will, but Mike was twenty-one then and had a right to know – she made him promise to keep it to himself or she wouldn’t leave him anything.“God, I’m sorry, Uncle Mike,” I said.“Just be glad your mother isn’t suffering anymore, okay?” Uncle Mike said wearily. I could tell he was anxious to get off the phone, so I thanked him and hung up. A half hour later I was getting ready for bed, still upset by our conversation, when the telephone rang. As soon as I picked up, he said, “The last thing I ever wanted was to hurt your mother, Maureen. You see, I learned from my father’s will that he and Bern hadn’t been able to have children…Anyway, I never found out who my birth parents were – the agency closed after the war – but when Josephine turned up, I figured if she wasn’t going to tell Judy, it wasn’t my place to.”And so, my dear Izzie, when you put this letter down, I want you to close your eyes and think back to what you’ve read about the rise of Nazism in the years before the Second World War. I want you to imagine love resulting in an unwanted pregnancy, discovered only after Jo came back to America. Imagine her anxiety not being able to locate the father and fearing that maybe he’d been captured or killed, her realizing that she could never really be a mother, that it wasn’t something she was equipped to handle. Imagine she approached her sister who was anxious to start a family of her own, who agreed to ease Josephine’s crisis in exchange for silence – silence at least until her daughter was old enough to know the truth. Well, what my mother never knew my daughter deserves to know. ................
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