sordid family history!

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er. i realized after posting this that i didn't give any sort of lead-in at all.

so, yeah. i've been meaning to write down my family history -- AS I HEARD IT, i stress, from a multitude of different relatives -- for a while now. this is by no means the complete, detailed account, but it's a beginning. there are tons of stories still left to be told, but... well, another time.

anyway. best place to start is with my maternal grandmother, because that's the story i know best. my grandmother's full german -- it's where i get my quarter from. her family was aristocracy by blood. my grandmother's father's father (my ... great great grandfather) was a penniless younger son of a destitute noble family, and he married a very, very resourceful woman, also a destitute noble. with her business instinct and his family connections, the young couple struck out in trade&industry and ended up making it big in the industrial boom. their son was my grandmother's father, who was technically merchant class considering how his parents made his money, but noble by blood. nouveau riche, old blood. his family was filthy rich at that point, so he had the assets to bag a noblewoman as his wife -- my greatgrandmother, from whom the good looks of the family come from.

i didn't say that, my mother did. and actually that's not true, because my destitute-younger-son greatgreatgrandfather was also rumored to have been a good looking lad. anyway, who knows where the family "look" comes from, but if you look back through the pictures, we all resemble each other to some degree. well, by the time you get down to me, we've been corrupted by my dad's family's big bones and gruff tanned-farmboy-sitting-on-the-tractor looks, but if you look at my mom's side of the family, everyone tends to be thin and tall and narrow-framed. the girls tend to be elegant and slender with graceful shoulders, and the men are whip-lean. shirtless, they're almost all racks of bones (though one of my more distant uncles is a notable, broadshouldered exception), for which my dad never stops teasing my mom, but put them in a suit and they look pretty damn good. and if you go up to my grandmother's generation, everyone also tends to have an aquiline nose (my maternal grandfather spoiled that for my mom) and a lean angular jaw, deepset eyes.

anyway. so, greatgrandpa and greatgrandma (both on my maternal grandmother's side) had ten (i think) kids, of which my grandmother was #3. i think a few of them died in childhood, but most survived. the ones i know semi-well are my grandmother (of course), her youngest sister, her oldest brother (though i think he was actually #2, but #1 died young), and the #4 greataunt in the family, her immediate-younger sister.

moving on. the family took a hit in the first world war, but through their industrial connections (and this is why it's better to be in industry than simply relying on inheritance and title), managed to get back on their feet admirably in the '20s. so my grandmother had a very privileged childhood at the family manor. i think i visited once when i was little -- all i remember are the hexagonal tiles on the great balcony. but my mom, who visited for months at a time in her girlhood, says it was a grouping of four manors around a central courtyard. eventually when my greatgrandmother died, her kids sold the estate and split the money up between themselves. a pity.

back on track. so my grandmother's father was very liberal, probably cuz he was the son of an aristocrat who had fallen from grace and then climbed back to the top tooth and nail. he didn't see his kids much (they were left in the care of a nanny or a governess or whatever you call it), but he always made sure they had a good education, the boys and the girls. as a result my grandmother was very well educated, etc etc, spoke a lot of foreign languages and played the piano. my mom always says that's where i get my musical talent from.

my grandmother actually majored in English in college. so when, in the 30s, the family fortune went down the drain (partly b/c of great depression, partly b/c of generally shit state germany was in, partly b/c they had to split the money amongst 10 offspring, not all of which made wise decisions), she ended up marrying an american intellectual studying in germany, and followed him back to america.

there she settled into a middle-classed life, to which she adapted admirably. i mean, not many people can grow up with private tutors, nannies and chauffeurs, and end up happy to raise two kids and pack them school lunches and teach at the local college. or university, or something. you know, i actually don't even know where they lived at first, i just know it was east coast. and they moved a few times while my mom was growing up.

anyway, they had two kids, my mom and my uncle. then when my mom was a teenager (and i'm not clear on the dates or the reasons, because no one in the family ever talks about this -- but i know it was in the 50's, and i suspect some connection to the Red Scare, seeing as how my grandfather was an intellectual who studied in EVIL germany, and had a german wife, and -- yeah.) my grandfather fell into a deep depression. from what i've heard, he seems like one of those guys who spent their whole lives writing poetry and philosophizing, and as soon as things got tough he caved in like a house of cards.

so he committed suicide, and that was that.

of course, this traumatized my mom deeply. i mean, she seems a very balanced, well-adjusted, bright, friendly woman, but if you knew her the way me and my sister do, you can still sense the scars. or well, i could after i got a little older. she has a bit of an instinctive distrust of the dependability of men, i think, and tends to doubt that the men in her life will always be there -- because her father literally jumped out the window when the going got rough. anyway, i just remember there was a period, around when i was about to leave for college and my dad was on a bunch of business trips and also thinking of going overseas on some venture capital shit, during which my mom seemed really convinced he was going to cheat on her. i remember my sister mandy enduring all these conversations disguised as "advice talks", during which my mom was really just railing against my dad and men in general, and how they only want the young and the beautiful and what they can't have, etc etc. she got over it, but that was the first (maybe only?) time i realized my grandfather's suicide probably left some serious emotional scars there.

anyway, back to the story. after my grandfather took a flying leap, my grandmother, a single woman in her early 40s, an immigrant, a post-WW2 german in america and the daughter of aristocrats at that, proceeded to work her hands to the bone to raise her two kids herself. she never remarried (and, btw, my grandmother was, like her mother, stunningly beautiful in her youth. it's where i get my good looks from. heh! though, alas, every generation seems to be a little uglier/less classy than the last. i don't remember my greatgrandmother well, but my grandmother's a real lady. it's in everything she does. it's not arrogance, either. quite the opposite. it's more this grace and dignity with which she holds herself, and also -- more importantly -- with which she treats other people. i've never seen my grandmother rude, ever. on the other hand, my mom's classy for her upbringing, always still a cut above -- but by the time you get to mandy? heh. my sister's a fucking hoyden.), never asked for help, and never gave up.

it was a tough time, y'know? but she pulled through all on her own. she's hands-down the most resourceful, intelligent and diligent woman i know. and SO talented. i mean, you think i'm multitalented? she can cook, sew, embroider, play piano, draw, paint, garden, write prose & poetry, and raise her kids right. and when push comes to shove she'll do whatever it takes to get through it.

so my mom got her selflessness from my grandmother. my mom's devastatingly intelligent. i mean, she's really, really smart. and she has charisma and people skills out the wazoo. but she never went to college because she got a job instead, and saved up money so my uncle, her younger brother, could go. then the wastrel went and blew his opportunity on girlfriends and drugs in the '60s, and ended up going to trade school. but then by some stroke of sheer luck he ended up making a living off his innate artistic nature (which he got off my grandma, i think), and became an architect, and then started up his own company (or jumped aboard a start-up and rode it for all it was worth, whatever). he married his teenage girlfriend, too, when he was a little older -- that's the stunningly sexy aunt i talk about. they got married the year i was born, i think. i can't remember.

anyway, not the point. so my mom got a job. and eventually, she met my dad, who was going to university at the time. and the way my mom tells it (my dad's mum on the subject), she despised my dad at first glance, and almost stood him up at their first date. in fact, she was lazing about moaning she didn't wanna see him until my grandma dragged her up and gave her a tonguelashing (something about keeping promises), and then she went, 30 minutes late and surly. and she made herself a promise that if my dad said ONE word about it, she'd dump him then and there. miraculously, my dad, usually hot-tempered, held his tongue that time, and the rest is history.

so that's my mom's side of the family. after my mom got married and moved to seattle where i was born, my grandmother moved back to germany to be with her siblings. so, that's where she is today.

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i know a lot less about my dad's side of the family because my dad's a lot less interested in family history and stories. but i know my family's doctors and soldiers. from like, heartland america, i think. i think there might've been a few accomplished doctors somewhere back there, but most were country doctors.

both my grandparents were in the military (and before you start thinking i think all my ancestors were handsome, i'll say right now that my paternal grandmother is and was not a beautiful woman. she's squat, dumpy, loud, and coarse. my grandfather isn't ugly, but he isn't handsome either. he was passable when he was younger, but love's blind, and he wooed and won my grandmother, from which the loudness of the family thereafter stems. my god, when my dad and i get in a shouting match, the walls shake. my paternal grandmother's also the reason the ladylike-ness of the women of my mother's line stopped short at mandy, and she ended up a goddamn shrieking banshee.), and my grandfather's father was definitely a country doctor. i think his father was a soldier, but the one before that was another doctor, etc. so since it was skipping generations, i think i was supposed to be a soldier. but my dad wasn't a doctor (he's a PhD, not an MD), so i guess i had to take over.

there's a coupla cool stories in my dad's side too. i think one of my ancestors was caught in the civil war (i'm not even sure which side, but i'm inclined to guess the south because of the nature of the story -- fleeing and refugees, and whatnot). he wasn't actually a soldier, but he lived in the path of an army. so when they burned the plantation or whatever down he carried his stepmother, who'd always treated him like shit, on his back for three days on foot while he fled the soldiers. or so the legend goes.

oh, and on my mom's side, there's the story about how my grandmother's father's father, when he got married, had to borrow the sheets he slept on for his wedding night because he was too poor to afford nice sheets.

and also, the great stories of bloody jealousy in my family. they're all on my mother's side, ironically -- or maybe my dad doesn't talk about it. but this is where i get my jealous/violent streak from, obviously.

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so, one of my german great-great uncles (i.e. my greatgrandparents' generation) was a notorious womanizer. supposedly he was a very dashing guy, a strapping 6'5" and coal black hair.

i think he was the spoiled youngest son of the family, and this was back when the family had money. so in the roarin' 20s he was all over the gambling scene, wine women and song and all. and his wife had to stay home with the kids, over in their wing of the manor, and she had a bit of a wild streak of her own before she got married. so one day she decided fuck this married shit -- and started having parties of her own. so my great great uncle would be out running about cheating on her with a parade of women, and meanwhile she was at home cheating on him with a parade of men. so for a while the ancestral manor was quite the bawdhouse.

then finally my great-grandfather, the head of the household, put his foot down, marched into his little brother's clubs, and said 'control your woman or i'll throw her out myself.' so my greatgreatuncle came home to control his woman, but of course, he barged in on his wife shagging another man (...or two or three, depending who you hear the story from) and flew into a jealous rage.

details get all blurry here, but he either knifed her, or else pushed her down the stairs. either way, she ended up dead, and then he hacked her body up and stuffed it in a trunk. obviously, then the trunk started to stink, and he was caught. this is actually another reason the family fortune went down the drain -- his big brother spent INORDINATE amounts of money hiring lawyers and bribing people to try to get him out. but it didn't work, and he ended up facing the firing squad anyway.

so that was my notorious, violent, womanizing great great uncle. like a fucking movie char. in fact i think there was a made-for-TV miniseries in germany about him, or something -- or that's what my mom says. but then when you have a family as huge as mine, and with stories passed back and forth across the generations, they always get so embellished they end up indistinguishable from fiction.

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actually, my grandmother's big brother (this is one generation down from the notorious womanizer/murderer) ended up in a similar situation.

my greatuncle, my grandmother's eldest brother, stayed in europe after my grandmother moved to america. he went abroad -- either france or switzerland, i can't remember which -- and fell in love with a frenchwoman (this, obviously, is where i get my genetic disposition for frenchwomen from). so he had a torrid affair with her for like a year... and then she got sick of him. my mother, who's a romantic at heart and a storyteller, always says it's because she was a wild soul and my greatuncle was very dour (which he is), and she got bored. anyway, he went mad with jealousy, hurt and rage, and went out and bought a knife to kill her with.

i think they were actually married, now that i think about it. yeah, that was his first wife.

so as story has THIS one, he went and hid in the shadows at her doorstep for hours and hours, waiting for her to come home so he could kill her. but, by some stroke of luck (or probably just cuz she was out getting schtupped by her new bf), she never came home. so eventually he got miserably cold, and he left. the next morning he threw the knife into a suitcase, locked it, and never looked at it again, and ended up divorcing her. a few years later he married an opera singer.

oh. interesting appendix on this one. my mother actually keeps in touch with my first great-aunt, oddly enough. she likes my mother and i think my mother likes her, too. she lives in switzerland these days with her second husband, who owns vineyards. every christmas me, my sister and my parents would get swiss chocolates from her. when i was applying for college, she had apparently made some generous, though vague, offer to put me through one of those combined BA/MD programs in germany -- which my mother turned down, because 1) i don't speak a word of german and 2) who knows when my eccentric greataunt would lose interest in being a fairy godmother and leave me penniless?

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and finally, one generation down from that, my uncle -- mentioned earlier -- had his wild days in the late '60s, when he met a stunningly beautiful young girl. they got married the year i was born (i think), and i think they were both in their early/mid 20's. they had a kid when i was 5, my cousin, and soon after that my uncle, who had always lived by the seat of his pants, somehow hit it pretty big in architecture.

see, it's kinda weird -- my mom's side of the family is marked by either total destitution or filthy rich-ness, and it's always in things that seem to hinge halfway on luck. they swoop from one end of the spectrum to the other in a single generation, and even when they work for something, it's still got elements of luck in it. like entrepreneurial...ism, which is what took the family through its renaissance after the (way way way) ancestral funds dried up. on the other hand, my dad's family is slow and steady, hard work and brains over luck and wits, and while they're strictly middle class with every generation a bit better off than the last, they won't ever be filthy rich, and they probably won't ever be totally penniless either (barring major disasters like civil wars).

anyway, digression.

point is: my uncle hit it big, either started his own company or joined a startup that boomed suddenly, vaulting him up in the saddle. so he started livin' the good life, which meant, of course, he went out and started wining and dining and womanizing. and his wife, who was a celebrated beauty of her time (i.e., had quite a few men chasing after her before she picked my uncle), started renewing old acquaintances.

i don't know when it started, but i do remember when we had a family reunion back east, my uncle and aunt were barely EVER home. and they kept being away until like 2am, and when they'd come home, they give the usual excuses of working late. so i was amazed at how hardworking my relatives were! and of course, the rest of the family hemmed and hawed when i expressed amazement, and quickly changed the subject. YEARS later, i looked back and realized it was cuz they were running off having assignations all-but-publically, and everyone knew about it, and no one said anything. god, my family is so full of skeletons in closets.

i should probably add my own little bit of sordidity to the tale. my aunt was, as mentioned several times now, STUNNINGLY beautiful. i mean, i had the first real crush of my life on her, i think.

NO BLOOD RELATION! SHE MARRIED INTO THE FAMILY!

...just to make that clear. anyway: she had long dark hair, very sleek, and high cheekbones, the arched and graceful face of a dancer. at least that's the way i remember her. she had these incredible eyes, too, hazel-brown, but when the light hit them right they'd glow a resonant amber-gold. i remember being UTTERLY smitten with her, to the point of having a bizarre dream where i was being executed, and she and some other family members were standing there bearing solemn witness. i was marched past them and i pulled away from the guard to kiss her passionately (i had also grown like a foot in my dream, so i was bending down to kiss her, my hands shackled so i couldn't put my arms around her), and i didn't care who saw. then at the moment of my death (which was amazingly painless and beautiful -- i was dying on the electric chair for some crime and all i saw was bluewhite electricity expanding across my vision until the world was FULL of it), i declared my everlasting love to her. heh. oh man, freud, eat your heart out. even i can see so many damn symbols in there.

god, digressions. point is, i was so smitten with her. but that's not even the main point. the main point is: she was cheating on my uncle who was cheating on her (and this sucked for my cousin, obviously, who was totally neglected in his parents' cheatwar), and then suddenly one day someone snapped -- again, details grow vague -- and either my uncle or my uncle's girlfriend, or the wife of one of the men my aunt was seeing, grew insanely jealous and attacked my aunt with a razor. she ended up with a scar on her face which she covered with makeup, but she, always having been beautiful, was very sensitive about her face thereafter.

so i remember, in my bumbling adolescent attempts to woo her, telling her as earnestly as i could that i thought she was beautiful without or without the scar, which you could barely see anyway, and oh by the way, she had the eyes of a tiger.

(OH GOD. the SHAME.)

i think i had vague concepts of stealing her from my uncle, who obviously didn't deserve her (even though i was unaware of their mutual infidelity at the time), and protecting her from the world. etc etc. but, as these things go, the reunion ended, i went home, my uncle and aunt divorced, and she barely ever comes around anymore. she still keeps in touch with her son, i hear, but she just comes by to pick him up and she doesn't ever go into the house. i haven't seen her since i was fourteen. i heard after she got divorced she didn't do very well, though. she was beautiful, but didn't have many talents of her own, so when that began to fade, it was pretty rough on her.

anyway. heh. so that's the latest generation in my mother's line. i guess now it's my generation, so we'll see which one of us -- me or my cousin -- turns out to be the unfaithful, violently jealous womanizer of the family. i think it'll be him, though. i'm pretty damn faithful, and i'm more focused on career, stable life, yadda. he's about to graduate college now, i think, and he's a goodlooking kid. kinda the lanky, supercool kind with a burgeoning rep as a ladykiller. parties all the time, doesn't work hard. like father like son, though these days his dad is wigging out because he's such a slacker.

hmm. okay. out of stories for now. more later, maybe.

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