Under the Dust Ruffle…
My mother and I sit on the floor of my old bedroom and smile like school girls sharing a secret. She lifts the dust ruffle on the old four poster bed and reveals a row of ripped and crumbling cardboard boxes. They sag and strain at the seams, barely able to contain their contents. My mother opens the first box and rifles through a thicket of file folders. They are neatly sorted and labeled in my mother’s hand. She finds what she is looking for, raises her index finger erect to the ceiling and gives a triumphant, “Ah ha!” She grins, pulls out a well worn coffee-colored page, and hands it to me.
“Take a look at this one, Lis.”
Small block letters crown the top of the page: “Vassar College.” The sheet quivers in my hand, fragile like a moth’s wing even as I read and the voice emerges clear and strong.
Mother dear,I’ve wept too – but I can’t decide just why you are so disappointed – because you expected me to marry some day, didn’t you? … Also do you know that, nine chances out of ten, I would have become engaged next summer anyway? Only I wasn’t sure I cared for the man. No, Mother, aside from not being with you in Boise, I feel I am giving up just this – a year or two at most of care-free good times – which I do adore .. and you never approved of ….
…As for the last 20 years being in vain – What did you expect me to turn out to be? You know after all, I’m just a plain girl & haven’t even the extraordinary abilities that most girls around here have. And what were you going to do with me?
I stare at the letter, look up at my mother in disbelief, then look back again at the letter. It’s definitely Grandmother’s handwriting. But the voice? It’s the voice of a young girl split open, raw emotion pouring forth. She’s despairing, vulnerable. I look back at my mother once more.
“Grandmother…?
” I whisper. “This. this is Grandmother?”My mother nods and smiles.
“What…? How can this be the same person? What happened? How could she have changed so? Who was she?”
Still smiling, my mother reaches for a different folder, sets it down beside me, and pats it gently with her hand.
“You might want to start at the beginning.”
I knew my grandmother, Henrietta Simons Weil, as the coolly elegant New York widow, the distant grand-dame of 1130 Park Avenue. Aunt Helen would purse her lips and say, “Henrie was very Prop-Ah.” Dad would say, “She was poised. A real lady.” Aunt Joan was more pointed. “She was the ice queen.”
When my family moved Henrie, incapacitated at 94, to a nursing home, we found a treasury of letters from the 1920’s – and met an altogether different person.
She was the granddaughter of Moses Alexander. He was a German immigrant, a clothing merchant, and the country’s first elected Jewish governor from the state of Idaho. She was a naïve Jewish girl from Boise who, in 1920, traveled East to attend Vassar College and discover life in Manhattan in the Roaring Twenties.
She had been East once before.
A Christening
In the photo the girl, just fourteen, stands on the docks inside the Camden, New Jersey shipyards, home of the New York Shipbuilding Company. She is there for the christening of America’s newest giant sea fighter, the United States Superdreadnought Idaho. It is June 30th, 1917. The ship’s completion and launch have been planned under a veil of secrecy. The public has not been invited. There will be no parades to hail the mighty vessel, no fleet of river craft to escort it, no sounding of whistles or horns, no popping of firecrackers. The enormous, dark, phantom, made of steel plates and bolts, armed with more than thirty mounted guns and two torpedo tubes, hovers in the background behind the girl.
The girl’s name is Henrietta Simons. She wears a light summer frock with a sailor’s collar and a two-tiered skirt with accordion pleats. A broad brimmed hat frames an oval face and a pair of dark, almond-shaped eyes. She offers a tentative smile for the camera. Balanced in her right hand is a bottle of champagne adorned with ribbons and streamers. In her left arm, she cradles a bouquet of two dozen long-stemmed American Beauties. The bouquet weighs, arguably, more than the girl. Henrietta will wait for the obligatory round of photographs, a prayer by the Naval Chaplain, and then for the workmen to knock the blocks out from beneath the ship. With the words “I christen thee Idaho,” she will dash the bottle against the steel prow. And at 9:46am, the behemoth will begin its slow descent down the shipyard ways, emerging out from under safe cover, to slip silently into the Delaware River and make its way out to sea to confront the Germans.
The christening of the Idaho will be splashed across the pages of the nation’s newspapers, featuring Henrietta, the ship’s maiden sponsor, as the symbol of youth and innocence reflecting the romantic hopes of a country at war.
Lisa Weil holds a BA in Political Science from Wellesley College and an MBA from Harvard. After years working in the high technology industry, she left the world of business to travel, write, and become a mom. In 2001, she adopted her daughter Carrie from China. Lisa and Carrie live in Seattle where Lisa is currently working on Seeking Henrie: A Love Story, based on her grandmother’s love letters from the 1920’s.
NEARBY HISTORY 2007 - WORKSHOP PROJECT
Seeking Henrie: A Love Story
Read About Lisa's 2007 Project at Nearby History Writers
Museum of History and Industry - Seattle