My Grandmother

Frances Kornbluth, my grandmother, was a hard woman whose ice blue eyes and hefty girth reflected her steely, obstinate personality. She was full of contradiction, hypocrisy, and black and white opinions; no matter how much knowledge you obtained, you could never be right and you could never know more than her. She demanded and deserved reverence for her remarkable ability to survive, but her tactless and harsh treatment of others turned her into caricature.

My grandmother claimed to be an authority on everything without having the proof or experience to back it up. She bellowed her politics but rarely voted. She lectured my mother (her daughter), a real estate agent, about the housing market. She lectured my father, a criminal defense attorney, about the law. She lectured me, a brimming baseball scholar on a sport about which she knew little.

As a kid, my grandmother’s braggadocio, backhanded compliments, broken promises, and obvious barbs intimidated the hell out of me, and I used to cringe whenever I knew we were visiting her or when I heard her gravely voice destroyed from decades of heavy smoking. She even had these talon-like fingernails, always painted dark red. I wondered if they could pierce my flesh as easily as her tongue punctured my self-confidence.

“You had better not ever bring home a fat girl,” she once told me, her ample frame stuck in the restaurant booth where we sat. I sucked in my stomach to mask my own chubbiness.

“You’re not a real baseball fan,” she once admonished me, her finger pointing accusingly at my youthful face after I’d expounded on my beloved New York Yankees. There were no further comments from her, just those painful words deflating my childhood enthusiasm.

Her worst offense came when I was fourteen. At the time I was a struggling junior high school kid. I was lethargic in my studies with a massive procrastination problem. I was the poster boy for a supposedly “gifted” student failing to live up to his potential. Disgusted by my poor work ethic, my grandmother decided to make me a deal; if I would bring up my grades beyond a 90 average, she would quit smoking, a habit that she’d practiced for more than forty years and absolutely loved. The deal was struck in a restaurant and my parents, sister, and best friend were witnesses. No one except me believed my grandmother could quit smoking if I came through, but she was adamant. She could quit whenever she wanted.

By the end of the school year, my grades had improved dramatically and I had far surpassed the agreed-upon threshold. I had held my end of the bargain and consequently, it was time for my grandmother to do the same. As promised, she quit. I was so proud of myself, not just for getting my grades up but for getting my grandmother to quit a habit I found repulsive. And I was so proud of her for quitting. When I caught her outside smoking a cigarette a few months later, my heart sank, but it wasn’t until I accused her of going back on her promise that it actually broke. “There was no deal. I never said such a thing.” She never did gain back my full respect.

By the end of her life, my grandmother’s power over me had considerably weakened for I had adopted my father’s approach to dealing with her. To my mother’s chagrin, we goaded her into making buffoonish statements. By doing so, we made her into a cartoon, a mascot. At family get-togethers, we’d challenge her until she said something outrageous that could get the whole family (except my mother) chortling behind her back. No longer did she have the power to split the family as she did once when she told my cousin, who had just had a nose job and finally felt good about herself, that she should have corrected her “ugliness” years ago.

Now in my 30s, I can understand what caused her inability and outright refusal to appear weak or vulnerable. She came to New York from Poland when she just sixteen. She spoke no English and had little family in the United States. She was supposed to be followed by her parents and brother but they fell victim to Adolph Hitler and the Holocaust. Like most immigrants, she learned American ways and values on the fly: hard work, persistence, family. She married a brilliant doctor and had a child but lost her husband at a very young age. Moments before he died in fact, my grandfather apparently diagnosed himself and told my grandmother that a brain aneurysm was about to take his life. She spent most of her life working. She took a job at Lord and Taylor and eventually retired with a prestigious title but little in the bank. She suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure. She relied heavily (but without recognition) on the good will of my parents who paid for her apartment, drove her wherever she needed to go, and took care of her when she fell terminally ill. She led a difficult life of heartbreak and it only makes sense she would construct mental walls of the thickest material. By the end of her life, even her accent had disappeared.

In her final months, as she lay ravaged by lung cancer, my grandmother finally praised her family and told us how much she loved us. This woman, who for as long as I knew her would never acknowledge her mistakes even when faced with blanket proof, finally admitted she had been wrong. She told me she was proud of me, proud of all the things I had accomplished and all the successes she knew were in my future. She called my girlfriend at the time (now my wife) beautiful and wonderful. I sometimes wonder, though. Had she made some miracle recovery, would she have denied ever saying these words?

“There’s a lesson in this,” my mother said to me as my grandmother finally lay quiet in her bedroom. We both had tears in our eyes, though I don’t think either of us knew if we wept from grief or liberation. “Never wait too long to tell people you love that you love and appreciate them. It’s just not worth it.”