A Well-Packed Suitcase

Here's my take on the prompt from earlier this week: Write about a disappearance…

My grandmother disappeared once. It was years before I was born. Actually, my mother, her daughter, was a mere three days old when she pulled it off. Effie, with help from her sister, efficiently packed a large brown suitcase on an October afternoon with enough clothes for herself and six children to begin a new life. My mother, the sixth and being a newborn, had only a very few things to contribute: a couple of blankets, two dresses, four pairs of tiny socks, and a small supply of cloth diapers and pins.

It was 1933 and Effie lived in a small paper mill town in southern Alabama with her husband and six children - Pat, Lorraine, Gwen, Helen, Jerry, and just recently, my mother. Effie chose Mildred Delores for the baby’s name - quite an albatross to hang on an innocent infant. I always thought you could tell the frame of mind my grandmother was in at the time by the horrendous name she chose for her baby. (My mother never went by Mildred, thankfully, but Betty instead. That’s another story.)

At some point in her sixth pregnancy, so the story has been told to me, Effie discovered that her tall, dark, and somewhat handsome husband, Leroy, had a second family – complete with wife, children, and even a dog. They were living just one county over from Leroy’s home with Effie and her brood. Sometime in one of those months of crankiness, swelling, and nausea, Effie decided that this was not a situation she was prepared to live with. My mother was born in late September in the Deep South – sans air conditioning – so I can imagine the ill moods and bad tempers that must have visited my grandmother upon finding out about her husband’s adultery. I’m only surprised she didn’t kill him.

So, with my mother just a few days old, Effie enlisted the help of her sister who, as an aside, was married to Leroy’s brother – the “good” brother family legend has it. Great Aunt Lorna, watched the children and rocked the baby while Effie packed. Once finished, my grandmother hid her suitcase beneath her bed, cooked her husband’s dinner, and waited for Leroy to come home from his work at the paper mill. I imagine they slept together in their bed one last night, Effie scooting as far away on her side as possible, lying over the well-packed suitcase. After my grandfather left for work the next morning, Effie grabbed the suitcase from under the bed and Mildred Delores from her cradle, told the other five children to link hands, and darted off to the bus station heading to Louisiana, her older brother, and a new life.

Once there, Effie quickly rented a run-down white clapboard house with her brother’s help. She found a job as a sales lady at the local Sears & Roebuck store (from which over thirty years later she retired.) Let me mention again – this was 1933 – when few women worked outside the home and even fewer dared to leave their husbands, even no-good husbands, with six children in tow.

I like to imagine Leroy when he came home from work that afternoon expecting to find Effie still convalescing yet managing to cook his dinner in her small, hot kitchen. He probably thought he would find the baby sleeping in her cradle and the other five children doing their chores and homework. Instead, he came home to a stuffy, empty house. I wonder if she left him a note. If so, it was never part of the story passed down to us grandchildren. I wonder if Leroy was even aware that Effie had found him out? I can’t imagine she would have been able to keep her mouth shut in those long miserable summer days carrying both the heavy burden of his sixth child and his infidelity.

From the little I know of my Meme (as we called her) from my childhood, I think she more than likely did manage to hold it all in, that even as her belly tightened and her ankles thickened, her heart must have hardened with quiet resolve. I like to think that her leaving was a total shock to him and that that was part of what he deserved.

Effie never remarried though my mother tells me she did have a persistent suitor, a wealthy widower, who repeatedly asked for her hand. I guess one marriage – one man – was enough for my grandmother. I can’t say that I blame her.

Also, my mother never saw her father again. He kept in touch with, and even visited, the other children, but never showed an interest in little Mildred. I wonder if he somehow blamed the birth of this new baby, instead of his own appalling unfaithfulness, as the cause for Effie’s disappearance.

I keep a small portrait of Effie in a sliver frame on my mantle. She died when I was only eight so I was far too young to have discussed any of this with her firsthand. My mother and my aunts have fed me the story in bits and pieces through the years. (Oh, the questions I would ask if I could have just an hour with her now!) In the photograph her eyes are squinted and she has a sharp, harsh nose. A slight smile plays across her thin lips but never quite makes it to her eyes. One would not call Effie a beautiful woman. But I would call her brave.