The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
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of nineteen, she married a Polish-American boy from the community who had just been drafted. Together they had three children. Her husband supported the family comfortably on wages from his skilled, unionized position in a subsidiary to the auto industry. She stayed home and cared for the children until her midfifties, when she took a full-time position cooking school lunches at the local parochial school. Caroline lives with her hands: in the dirt growing hydrangeas and irises, weaving baskets, baking raisin-laced breads, sewing banners for the altar, and making crafts to sell at church bazaars.
Fig. 2. Gene and Fran, c. 1946
The next daughter, Genevieve Irene (Gene), died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1962 when she was thirty-six years old. She never married and never had children. Gene was an “A” student in grade school. She entered the convent after the eighth grade, stayed one year, and then returned home and worked as a domestic instead of completing high school. Later, she took secretarial courses and worked for an insurance company. Gene is remembered for having the best wardrobe of the sisters (her paycheck afforded her this), taking pictures of the family, and playing the piano. The older sisters are protective of her memory, and, without her own voice, I had to surrender to many of their edits regarding Gene’s life.
Frances Ann (Fran) knew Gene the best because she was closest to her in age and they lived together for several years before Fran married a Czech American from Cleveland. Her husband earned an accounting degree (on the GI Bill) and they moved into a middle-class neighborhood where they raised three children. Fran dresses in expensive clothes that are easy to remember: a classically tailored beige short set, off-white pleated skirt and soft cashmere sweater, a jacket of rich burgundy and rust. She gets her hair done once a week and always has a well-cared-for public face—tasteful makeup, fashionable glasses, attractive jewelry. She does not drive and never needed to work (although she was an antique dealer for a while). She has had a comfortable and privileged life centered around her family and the church.
The only son, Joseph Stanislaus (Joe), was born after Fran. His sudden death at the age of fifty-eight (he died from lung cancer only six months after diagnosis) was one of the Grasinski Girls’ greatest sorrows. His sisters feel “a special kind of love for him.” He was talented musically and artistically, and, like his mother, he was a wanderer. He lived in Arizona and Colorado before returning home to southwestern Michigan. He married and had four children and eventually designed and built a house near the Polish farming community of his childhood. He was a country-and-western singer early in his life and later became a commercial artist; when his company downsized and he was laid off, he reinvented his career, first as a prison warden and then as an auctioneer. Joe had an empathetic personality, a brilliant, flashing smile, and a hearty six-foot-three laugh. His sisters wanted a whole chapter devoted to their brother in this book. I compromised and gave them this paragraph.
Joe was closest in age to Patricia Marie, who took the name Nadine when she entered the convent. Nadine was a Felician nun for twenty-two years, during which time she earned a master’s degree in home economics. After she left the convent, she kept the name Nadine, and acquired a French surname when she married a former priest. At the age of forty-five she conceived and delivered their only child. They built a winery and bed-and-breakfast near the upper peninsula of Michigan and today live as a modern-day baron and baroness. She challenges this description by noting that they “both work all day” running the business—and they do. She prepares gourmet breakfasts for the guests, and sews items she markets under the label Nadja. One sister describes Nadine as a “Russian countess.” I see her as Polish. She has high cheekbones, a gracious manner, and almond eyes. Her clothes are detailed with ruffles and gold lamé, and, at the age of sixty-seven, when she walks into a room, people still turn their heads.
Fig. 3. Nadine in front of her home, 1977
Angela Helen (Angel), the second youngest daughter, also started her adulthood as a Felician novitiate, but she left the convent after a year. She married the boy next door, a Dutch-Polish American, and together they had six children. Angel is located solidly in the working class. Her husband, a tool-and-die maker, worked forty years in the auto industry before he retired at the age of fifty-eight with a comfortable pension. Angel worked on and off as a secretary so that they could save up a down payment for a house, convert the basement into a family room, and buy a new car. She and her husband like to gamble in Las Vegas and take three-week group tours of Europe. For over forty years they have lived in the same house in a well-maintained, white working-class neighborhood of ranch homes built in the late 1950s.
Fig. 4. Angel in front of her home, 1967
Fig. 5. Mary, Angel, and Gene at their home, 1952
Mary Marcelia (Mari), the youngest daughter, straddles the decades of the happy housewife of the 1950s and the return-to-college feminist of the 1970s. Like many white working-class women in her generation, she married a few years out of high school. She put her Irish-American husband through college and professional school and raised their four children. By her midthirties she was divorced and back in school. She earned a degree in fashion merchandizing, but never had an opportunity to develop this career. She worked instead as a nursing assistant. In midlife, she changed her name from Mary to Mari, moved to San Francisco, married a Filipino, and moved again to Manhattan where she lived for more than fifteen years with her husband before retiring to Phoenix.
These are the Grasinski Girls. Some will object, I assume, or at least wonder about the use of the term “girl” to describe the lives of women. Let me say first that the sisters themselves do not object to the term. I use “girl” because it captures their laughing personas, their gaiety and lightness, and, in many ways, the frivolity that comes from a combination of privilege (race and relative class privilege) and disadvantage (the “silly” gender). I also like to use the term because doing so subverts the power of the dominant group by co-opting a term that subordinates women. But this is not why the Grasinski Girls like the term. As “strictly a female female,” they all simply “enjoy being a girl.”30
PART I
Migrations and Generations
Fig. 6. The Grasinski Girls’ family tree
INTRODUCTION
St. Stan’s Cemetery
I WENT HOME to visit the family graves at St. Stanislaus Cemetery in Hilliards, Michigan. It was the time of the year when, more than a century earlier, the Grasinski Girls’ grandfather first stepped off the train, the time of year when the hush of dense summer green muffles the afternoon crickets and the smell of clover expands in the heat of the day. St. Stan’s connects me to the country—not the old country, but the farm fields of Hilliards.
In the cemetery, I record the names of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Hilliards: Fifelski, Jan, 1841–1916, and Maryanna, 1848–1924; Zulawski, Pawel, 1855–1939, and Krystyna, 1859–1922; Grusczynski, Joseph, 1848–1937, and Anna, 1858–1939; Fifelski, Ladislau J., 1870–1955, and Frances V., 1883–1962. I locate my bloodlines etched in stone—Fifelski, Zulawski, Grusczynski—and find my beginning in the cemetery, my connection to immigrant farmers and thick-waisted women who married young and had lots of children.
On a blustery March day in 1884, when he was fourteen years old, Ladislaus Fifelski, the grandfather of the Grasinski Girls, departed from the port of Danzig (now Gdańsk) with his parents Johann (Jan) and Maryanna.1 They immigrated to Chicago to join his uncle, who had sent the family