volume 9
The Naming
by Karen Elias
Shame
The first time I tried to find the Baltic States in the atlas, it was the summer of 1986, five years prior to Bloody Sunday and the end of Soviet domination. On the map Lithuania looked no bigger than the end of my little finger. It was squeezed between the Baltic Sea and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with only a hazy green line separating the two countries. Both were part of a huge white expanse that seemed blank, as though the schoolchild responsible for this area of the world had not yet decided on the right crayon to color it in.
The day before, I had eaten lunch with my parents. I was on summer break, just finished with an Elderhostel course I’d been teaching called “Telling Your Own Story,” and I’d brought with me the life-questions we had used in class to spark the memory. Describe your most vivid childhood experience. Name the steppingstones that carried you from your beginnings to the present time. Imagine yourself at a crossroads and describe the road not taken.
I was trying the questions out on my parents. Though neither of them had seemed especially interested in the past as I was growing up, my mother now began reminiscing about walking to school in New Haven in the winter cold. I must have asked her then about her mother. Her mother was not a warm person, she said, but one summer the two of them picked blueberries together on the Hamden farm. The blueberry picking was something special. As she talked, I tried to imagine the scene: the ends of their fingers staining blue as they bent and picked, lulled by the low hum of the afternoon, their two bodies close in a way that must have pleased my mother, who didn’t know until this moment how much she had wanted this.
While we talked, my father had lined up his knife and fork on the placemat and seemed to be studying their precise geometric configurations. For forty minutes he had said nothing.
After lunch I followed my mother into her room.
What’s going on with Dad? I said.
She looked at me strangely, took my arm. If I tell you something, she said, you must promise not to repeat it. It’s a family secret.
Okay, I said. I wanted to sound reassuring, so I said it again. Okay.
Not even your sisters. You can’t tell a soul. Promise?
I promise.
He’d kill me, you know. If he found out I was telling you this. Her fingers were digging into my arm.
I waited, making my breath small so she wouldn’t change her mind.
You’re Lithuanian.
What?
Lithuanian. On Dad’s side. His parents came here from Lithuania.
I didn’t get it. This was the family secret? I made a vow to tell my sisters as soon as I could get to the phone.
Lithuania was a surprise. Our father had told us many times as we were growing up that his ancestry was German. In high school we had studied German, joined the German Club, learned all the verses to “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.” On our visits to New Haven, we had never questioned the fact that the grandmother who lived by herself above our Uncle Ed and who wore men’s slippers and a ubiquitous flowered apron and spoke a strange, incomprehensible language--was our German grandmother.
Why, I asked my mother. Why was this such a family secret?
Because, she said.
I could tell she was relieved. This was the last drop, everything she knew, and now it was mine.
They were ashamed.
Storks
Lithuania, 1887
Garnys garnys turi ilgas sparnus
Lekciau lekciau kad galeciau
Tokias sparnus kad tureciau
Kaip garnys.
(Stork, stork has long wings
I would fly, fly if I could
If I had wings
Like the stork.)
—Lithuanian Children’s Song
The new storks have their feathers. Vincent notices them still gathered, clattering busily, in the Great Field beyond the manor house where they’ve been practicing flight since yesterday. Each takes a few mincing steps, then raises its wings, the long feet drawn back and up against the body, and makes a cautious circling against the sky. Vincent is always surprised at the size of their wings--white with black end-feathers spread out like long supplicating fingers--seeming too big at first for the small heads and narrow bodies. He knows that three or four nights from now, while everyone is sleeping, the storks will rise together, circle the field one last time, and fly away. Some say they travel thousands of miles to Egypt, drawn by the scent of a river that overflows its banks in the monsoon rains, and by the scent of frogs flooding the marshes until there are too many for anyone to count. Vincent stops between the house and the barn, remembering how, the morning after the storks have left, he will wake to a desolate silence, will hear his own breathing for the first time in months and know the summer is gone.
For some reason, he hears his uncle’s voice in his head repeating the old saying. The storks have their eyes on us, they make a nest only where good people work the land. The words make him wonder now if he himself has a cold heart. He feels the familiar pull of flight along his spine and knows that if he goes, he will go for good.
Better not to think. Better to merely observe his own arm rising up, as it seems to be doing now in a grand salute to the Great Field and its clattering. To sense along his arm the way the sweet air between earth and sky can be made to hold a body all the way to its destination.
Labas! Vincent calls out to the storks. Hallo!
~ ~ ~
These years would come to be called the time of misery.
The Czar’s edicts--merely irritating at first but becoming more and more repressive as the people chafed under his increasingly heavy restrictions--could be felt even here, in Kumelionys, where the school primers now had to be smuggled across the border and hidden in the oven or the chicken coop to keep from being burned by the Russian soldiers. Beginning at age twelve Vincent, along with his brothers Matthew and Antanus and two of his cousins, had been tutored for four years by his mother after they returned from the fields at night. He copied his lessons from the secret books by the light of a candle, so tired that—though he gave himself the sternest instructions to stay awake—the pen slipped through his fingers and his head toppled forward and laid itself down on the paper, smooth and cool as a pillow. Vincent knew from the underground that schools like his mother’s had sprung up all across Lithuania, like the fire he and Matthew had started once in the dry heat of summer that had hopped to life in five new places at once so they’d had to beat it down with bare feet in an angry, stomping dance until it finally went out. Now that Muravyov, the governor-general of Lithuania—the man his uncle called “the hangman”--had begun to intensify his Russification campaign, the Misery Schools had become too dangerous.
The Lithuanian language and the Latin alphabet had been banned. Everyone had heard the stories of the book smugglers, the knygnesiai, who carried books and newspapers over the border from Prussia, folded into milk cans or wrapped in pieces of pork. If they were caught, Muravyov had them banished to Siberia or hanged in the public square. His mother had begun to go silent. She shuffled now, dragged her feet across the yard, and patches of gray had appeared at her temples. Vincent would catch her standing in the doorway with her apron twisted into knots. Once, when no one else was around, she looked at him hard and said, Go to America.
He didn’t think he had heard.
Go to America, she whispered. Do it for me.
Now the word came from an official in nearby Mariampole that the laws drafting every able-bodied young man over the age of 21 into the Czar’s army would be rigorously enforced. Vincent’s father offered to apprentice him to a cobbler so he could learn to repair boots and earn some pocket money in the army. Vincent’s cousin counseled him not to go. You’ll sleep on the ground, he said, and be forced to steal chickens to fill your belly. You’ll come out of the army an old man.
Or, Vincent said, I could go to America.
Ha, his cousin said. America. Ha!
Once at night on the slope of the Great Field, while he and Matthew kept watch together, they talked about America.
What will you do there? Matthew asked. To live, I mean.
Vincent was poking his staff into the grass at his feet. He turned, and Matthew could make out that he was smiling.
Not sheep, he said. Nothing to do with sheep.
But what, then?
Something will turn up. Others are going from here, from Mariampole. They already have relatives in America. They say jobs are like apples on the tree in America.
I despise the Czar. And I spit on his army, Matthew said. Let me come too.
The moon slipped through the clouds. They looked raggedy tonight, like the spider’s webs that came unstrung along the path when you forgot to duck.
I could keep a tavern there, said Matthew. Like Jonas. Everybody likes to drink. Even in America, I bet.
Well, I figure anything’s better than giving your life’s blood in a cause that’s not your own. But it’s a hard decision, Matas. Think about it.
Hey, look at the moon, Matthew said. It looks like a half-eaten potato-cake!
They were both laughing now.
Okay, said Vincent. Okay. I’ll see what it’s like, this America, and maybe I can send for you.
They sang then--rounds and as the night went on children’s songs, three about Rabbit and one about a boy and a maple tree:
A maple grew in the yard
A maple grew green
Under that maple, under the green one
A young boy liesOne, two
Beautiful Lithuania!
The flowers
Are always blooming
They hammed it up, made their voices linger tragically on Beautiful Lithuania! as the moon dissolved into the morning sky.
~ ~ ~
Between 1891 and 1893, the Russian border patrol confiscated 37, 718 books and newspapers. Between 1900 and 1902, the figure rose to 56, 182. But the resistance continued. An underground newspaper, Auszra, meaning Dawn, began publication in 1883, and when that was forcefully suppressed, another called Varpas, The Bell, took its place. Finally, in 1904, realizing the futility of its campaign, the czarist regime repealed its prohibition. By this time, for perhaps many reasons--poverty, the desire to escape mandatory conscription into the Czar's army, the promises offered by American agents who would mingle with the crowds on market days, or the fact that Lithuania had become a place of suffocation to them—many Lithuanians had left for America. Among them were my grandfather Vincent and his brother Matthew. My grandmother Illia, her father and mother, and four of her siblings followed. Vincent and Illia would meet in America.
Price of the Ticket
New Haven, Connecticut, 1888
[T]he European vision of the world . . . does not describe a [true] community. It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become ‘white.’ No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country. . . . America became white – the people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white – because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle – or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie.
—James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ . . . And Other Lies”
The particulars I have related so far may or may not be true. I have in folders on my desk a chronicle whose fragments my sisters and I have been compiling and piecing together ever since we learned, by accident, that our father was Lithuanian. But though the place and time are right, these facts make up a generic account, one that could have been reported by many eastern European immigrants at the end of the nineteenth century. I have embellished it, made it into a story, because by the time I was born Vincent was dead; his brother Matthew, having been made to bear the Lithuanian stigma, had become someone whose name my parents never pronounced; and Illia had been transformed into our German grandmother. Knowing something about the second half of my grandparents’ lives, I wanted to give them an auspicious beginning. I wanted them to have a good start.
One of the fragments in my folder is labeled Bloody Sunday: January 13, 1991. Two years before this event, in 1989, two million residents of the Baltic nations held hands across the borders of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to protest their continued dominance by the Soviet Union, and the next year Lithuania became the first of the Soviet republics to insist on the restoration of its independence. In January 1991, incensed at this bid for autonomy, Moscow sent troops to Vilnius to reestablish its authority. On Sunday the 13th, Soviet tanks surrounded the TV tower in Vilnius where thousands of Lithuanians were gathered in protest. The crowds, waving the national flag, chanting slogans and singing songs of freedom and solidarity, stood in courageous defiance against the Russian tanks. When the guns fired into the crowd, thirteen civilians were killed and hundreds wounded. But the years of Soviet dominance were over. In September of that year, the Russian government finally admitted the independence of all three Baltic countries, and Lithuania was recognized by the international community as an autonomous state.
This resistance had its roots in a nationalist movement that began at the end of the 19th century, at the time my grandparents’ generation was arriving in America. I wish I could count Vincent and Illia as heroes in the long and feisty struggle for Lithuanian independence that continued on the new continent. But they were never part of that movement. Instead, America began shaping them to its own ends.
In a matter of only a few weeks, my grandparents, along with thousands of others like them coming from eastern Europe at the turn of the century, had left behind a world just beginning to emerge from serfdom and had entered the Industrial Age. In Kumelionys, whose name means “place where horses are raised,” Vincent and Matthew had lived on an estate owned by Prussian landlords where they worked as shepherds and hostlers. On docking at New York and making their way to New Haven, Connecticut, they discovered quickly that the skills they carried with them would not buy them a meal.
This was the land of the free where, Vincent had been told, a man did not have to be coerced into fighting for his country and where he could save up his wages to purchase his own house. I like to think Vincent cast on New Haven the same gaze of hungry intensity he had applied to his secret books, and though his limited English may have stunted his understanding, he must have realized soon enough that the abuses of power he had run from were still present in America, though here they took on a more personal tone. I imagine the voices on the trolleys and in the marketplace were strident and penetrating. Lithuanians were Hunkies. They were Polanders and Bohunks. As one of them, Vincent himself was a peasant, filthy in his habits, potentially degenerate, fit only for the lowest wages and the most menial jobs.
Hunkies, the natives said, are impervious to dirt, immune to it. What will kill a white man, they can tolerate. Let them work the blast furnaces and the coal mines, jobs too damn dirty and too damn hot for a white man. Some said the Slovaks had much in common with the Chinese and should be sent back where they came from. A roller at the Shenango tin mill remarked that being on the floor with foreigners was like working with Negroes: “The idea of working with them is repugnant to any man who wants to retain his self respect. It’s no place for a man with a white man’s heart to be.”
Some immigrants decided it was better after all to improve conditions in the old country and, unable to stand the new world’s bitter taste, they left, going back to Lithuania after a few short years. Most, believing America was the look of the future, stayed and put money in their pockets so the next generation could have its chance at a little luck. For many, trying to remember Lithuania (the gentle communion of earth and sky, the sound of a mother’s or a father’s voice)--when met every day by so many uncomprehending, even hostile, faces—became after a time like trying to circle places on a map that were little more than long, unpronounceable, slightly embarrassing names.
For us, all traces of our Lithuanian identity would eventually be excised from the family body. Two generations after my grandparents arrived, I looked for explanations by reading works of theory. Here I discovered that, on coming to America at the turn of the century, my grandparents had stepped into a rat’s nest of xenophobia, eugenics and Social Darwinism, a combination that rendered them outlaws and half-castes with the power to “mongrelize” the Anglo Saxon “race.” Like Indians and Blacks, they were forced to take on the designation Other, a racialized category that, in a sense, darkened their skin. For these European immigrants, however, this state of contagion was only temporary. Though being considered “off-white” or “not-quite-white” became a source of shame virulent enough to wipe out the past, the condition could be mitigated. For many of the immigrants who chose to stay, this became their project: to make themselves white.
At the time no one knew this or, at any rate, no one said it out loud. Vincent and his brother and my grandmother Illia understood only that they wanted to become Americans. They wanted the eyes on the trolley to slide on past them without getting stuck. If this meant supporting the segregationists or joining the army to fight the Indians, if this meant defining themselves by skin color rather than by country of origin, then so be it. It was a bargain they were happy to make. On the one side, Lithuania would be traded off--not all at once, but piece by piece, in increments, so slowly they would barely notice. On the other side was what they got in return. And that was the right to belong--not in the abstract but in a way that felt enormous and elemental, strong as the craving for breath or food or sex.
It was the price of the ticket, and after awhile you didn’t even have to think. You stepped up to the window or the gate, the turnstile or the trolley-man, and you plunked your money down.
The Naming
Benicia Barracks, California, 1895
From his corner of the room, Vincent sees the pribuveja light the candle inside the stew-pot, the one his mother scours with herbs before every naming ritual. Someone has hung the straw star over the table and placed the sash for welcoming the child beside the dishes of salt and flaxseeds. All the steps are being taken slowly, as if this room were floating a long way under the sea, and with a clarity that makes everyone inside the room—the parents and relatives of the newborn, the godfather and godmother, the pribuveja herself--seem singular and almost radiant. Vincent finds himself looking longingly into each face and is surprised to see his own mother and father standing on the other side of the table, young again and hopeful, waiting to receive the child. On seeing them here like this, his heart lurches painfully in his chest.
From some far away place, the pribuveja says, comes an unknown, never-before-seen guest. He tells me he is a relative of yours. The goddess Laima has sent you a helper, a worker. Do you want to take in this unknown person and call him your son?
This is right. Vincent calls out from his corner, Yes, yes! And now the ladle is taken up and dipped into the mead, and passed from hand to hand. Each time someone sips from it, Vincent feels the angels of the old saying tripping and sliding down his throat, beating their wings warmly against his chest until he wonders if he himself might be just a little drunk.
It is time for the pribuveja to sprinkle salt in the candle-flame. Sparks begin to fly. The entire room is filled with sparking energy, even Vincent’s corner where he has been watching and laughing, trying to keep his balance on the tipping floor. A spark flies into his eye, and the eye begins to burn white-hot. This is not so funny now, having to peer through a burning eye, having to watch as the pribuveja’s extended arm falls just short of his mother’s reach, the infant slipping and sliding onto the floor at their feet.
Vincent shouts a warning, and just then the baby pulls himself up. It’s a little miracle. Without help, the baby balances on one stout leg, then the other, begins lurching around the room with arms outstretched to either side, and though he is surely no more than three months old—too small to know even the simplest words—he recites an entire sentence in perfect English. Look, he has his sea legs, someone shouts.
Vincent, in his corner, wants to hear the part that comes next. Koki varda duosite vaikui: What name do you give this child? But the others, gathered around the reciting baby, seem to have forgotten the ceremony and its requirements. He steps with sudden determination to the other side of the table and swoops the infant up into his arms. But the blankets feel almost weightless, and when he looks down, he sees cradled in his hands some dented nickel coins. He bends his head, but the coins are speaking in such a flimsy baby voice that he realizes it is up to him to say what is needed. When he opens his mouth, the noise that comes out is strange, funny, as though he is angry. Something inside his throat is trying to get out. A sound too big and rough to have a proper language.
The noise in his throat startles him awake, and when he opens his eyes he can’t remember at first where he is. Then it all comes back--the infirmary, the army doctor advising him to stay here so they can check on him overnight, in this room where by the dimmed lamplight he can now make out the sloping form of Reilly snoring in the next bed.
He tries to recall what it is they say here in America. It was almost a dream. No. It was only a dream. He touches the bandage at his temple, remembering the accident that afternoon when his hand slipped and the bayonet on his new-issue musket tore into the lid of his right eye. This was a laudanum dream then, crazy wanderings from that doctor’s medicine chest.
He closes his mouth and swallows to prevent the sound caught in his throat from becoming a sob. He says to himself that he doesn’t want to waken Reilly, but the truth is he’s afraid--if he gives it voice--that the sound might never stop, that it might go on and on, picking up all the missing pieces of his life, going back to his mother whose face he could hardly bear to look at the day he left, hurriedly stuffing the lunch she’d made up for him into his pack without really even thanking her they were in such a rush to be off, then turning around to wave at just the last minute before turning back so he wouldn’t have to see her tears. He tells himself she would be proud of him now, sees himself standing out on the point at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in his uniform before this accident ever happened. He drops a stone into the water and imagines circles moving out from where he’s standing, past the barracks and the plains beyond the barracks where the various tribes of Indians breathe their surrender into the dark, and beyond that the great Pacific Ocean like the end of the world, too vast now for him to cross. He listens. The ocean makes a shushing noise as the waves peak and tumble. And though he knows it’s too late, that the time for naming is past, he listens as his eyes shut and the darkness closes in--to the ocean whispering in his mother’s voice. If her voice is a faint asking at the door of memory, the only answers he has now are here.
Letters
New Haven, 1906
For Baldwin, whiteness involved . . . the desperate belief that all the effort and carnage were worthwhile, a futile clinging to the hope that the pursuit of property really might be the pursuit of happiness. “White man,” he warned, sounding much like American-Indian critics of whiteness, “you cannot endure the things you acquire.” Choosing to opt “for safety instead of life,” white-thinking Americans wound the circle of their experiences and dreams more and more tightly.
—David Roediger, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White
They turned me down, Vincent said. He said it under his breath and Illia had to ask him to repeat it. She was peeling potatoes for the kugela and trying to keep from tripping over the baby as she moved back and forth between sink and drainboard. The older boy was playing under the kitchen table with trains he had made from old matchboxes.
Here, he said, look. He smoothed the letter out on the table and ran his finger slowly along the last line: no presumption of present disability from the alleged injury to right cheek and right eye can be found.
Illia picked the baby up and put him in Vincent’s lap. Though she couldn’t read English, she recognized the letter’s official stamp.
Oh, the pension, she said.
Alleged injury. Vincent repeated the offending words, more to himself than to her.
What does this mean?
It means they don’t believe. . . they don’t think I was really injured.
That’s ridiculous! They can just come to this house, we’ll invite them for dinner, and then they can see for themselves whether you were really injured!
Vincent ducked as she pointed her knife at his eye.
I was so sure this third time was the lucky one. Wiz, the guy from work? He told me this week his brother’s claim just got approved.
So, you keep trying! Illia said. She went back to her potatoes. Now that the apartment is empty again, we have one foot in the poorhouse, she said. We have to find another upstairs boarder, you need to ask around at the Lodge, and then we wait a little bit and send another letter.
Vincent wasn’t listening. It was true, he had to admit, that Wizniewski’s brother had actually been wounded in Cuba while he himself had never left the country. He’d been intending to go. He’d signed up the minute war was declared, but the summer was cold and rainy and he’d started running a fever. He remembered the constant sound of rain on the hospital roof in Meriden, where he was sent from Camp Niantic, as the last months of the war drained away. His old eye wound from the injury at Benicia had gotten worse, he was sure of it, from all those months of typhoid. Now the blind spot had grown to cover almost his entire right eye, and he was having to squint at work as he bent over his machines.
Anyway, he thought, couldn’t this eye trouble still be counted as an injury suffered during service to his country?
The baby squirmed in his lap and began to fuss. I think he’s hungry, love, Vincent said.
Illia continued scraping and said nothing.
Vincent had never told her about the summer he’d spent in the hospital. When they met the next year, she had peered closely at the photograph he showed her of himself standing proud and tall in his army uniform, and then she turned it over. On the opposite side he had written, “Spanish American War,” and though he’d never lied about it, he knew he had purposely given a false impression. But this didn’t mean he wasn’t as patriotic as the next man. And besides, a wife didn’t need to know everything about her husband’s past.
It was that doctor, Illia said.
What doctor?
The one they sent you to the second time. The one you called a fool and a scoundrel when you walked in the door. He gave a bad report, I knew it then as soon as you told me.
Vincent sighed. She was probably right. That second doctor was a surgeon, someone the Pension Office had insisted he go to, even though Hammond, their family doc, had agreed with him one hundred percent that a bad eye would be a definite liability to someone in his trade.
He jiggled his knees to distract the baby.
Fred-ela, Fred-ela. Pudd’n and pie. Kissed the girls and made ‘em cry! He laughed along with the baby and then ducked his head so he could see under the table where Adolis was running his trains along the seams in the pine floor. These two are headed for Yale, Vincent said.
Well, if they’re headed in that direction, Illia said, we’d better make sure they’ve got shoes! She slid the potatoes into their pot.
At least Matthew’s got a way to make a living now, Vincent said. And the two of them are married and living in their own place. I’m happy about that.
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wanted to take them back. It was always better not to bring his brother into the conversation.
Matthew! Don’t you dare to mention his name! The entire time he was living here, he was nothing better than a peasant! Sitting around telling stories about the Old Country, when here we are now in America! I didn’t come to America to hear about Old Country this, Old Country that. . . .
Okay, Okay. But isn’t it true, he looked slyly at her, that if Matthew’s a peasant, then so am I?
She came over to the table and lifted the baby to her hip. Dampness had soaked into Vincent’s pants, leaving a dark circle across his lap.
That’s your papa, isn’t it? she said to the child. My own good-for-nothing peasant! She swung the baby high in the air and planted a loud kiss in the middle of his forehead.
~ ~ ~ ~
Thanksgiving, 1920
My dear sons--
This letter is because of the dream, the one I told you of today at our table. I am writing because I never told about the final part.
Vincent held the pen over the paper, hoping the next words would come by themselves. His gaze wandered to the windowsill where his perpetual motion machine sat, unmoving. Over the past several months he had taken the pieces he knew he’d need home from work in his pocket. Just yesterday he had carefully wound the wire around the armature three times and then connected it to the magnetic disk. He had discovered, in a series of little experiments, that when the disc was set in the sun for several hours and then allowed to cool in the shade, its surface temperature varied enough to change its attraction to the steel cavity. Once the disc was attached and the machine set on the kitchen windowsill next to Illia’s geraniums, it would, he’d hoped, run on its own.
Today he realized the machine needed more than temperature change to work. It stared at him from the windowsill like an animal with an open mouth. For a moment, Vincent saw his own finger resting in that mouth and then the pointed metal teeth biting down. He blinked and bent again to the page.
No Angel came down in the dream, my sons--but it was very quiet there and everything stopped. Even the clock ceased its ticking. And I knew--it was my death.
Back in the Old Country he had seen a duck once with a broken wing hobbling along beside the river. Its wing made a feathery track in the mud. Up on the embankment, before he could act to save it, one dog and then another began baying as it continued its halting dance, unable to launch itself into the river, unable to escape. It ran, lifting its good wing in an effort to fly as the dogs closed in. This is what it’s like, Vincent thought, to see death on its way.
Do not be afraid. I think soon I will go to be with my own dear Mother and from there I shall watch over you my dear sons--all we have left in the family. Maybe I will see your brother and sister in this place where it is so very still. Maybe they are at peace.
Another man could find strength to fight such a prophecy but I am tired. I tried to earn us the gift to live another way. Ask your mother. No, it was not to be.
This language was hard in its written form. Vincent knew the words he struggled over were not enough to say what it had been like for him, to come here to America with excitement brimming in his heart, to earn enough over the years from his job working with machines to buy this property on English Street. He had tried five times to get a pension from the government for his military service, and five times he had been turned down. But today, writing at what he knew was the end of his life, in this house he had purchased for his family with his own money, it seemed that perhaps the old gods had been happy with him, happy enough with his choice to come here that they had brought him to a street with this name.
What I wish for you, he wrote, is to study--practice practice! And then you might go on to university. Keep the photograph from the war. Take care of your Mother. Be proud to be American in this Land of the free!
Outside the window Vincent heard the hollow clopping of horses’ hooves and the clattering of metal pans as the milk wagon moved past the house. The letter would have to do.
I have one philosophy that I told to the nurse during the War. She asked my Religion. I said to do Good. That is what I wish you too.
Your loving father.
Vincent
~ ~ ~
A month later Vincent was dead at the age of 57, crushed while moving heavy machinery from a conveyor belt onto a truck. Perhaps after Vincent died and she was no longer tied to him as living proof of her Lithuanian heritage, Illia felt she could claim a more respectable identity. The family name, Pasetskas or Peseckas, had already been shortened at Ellis Island to Pasetsk. Now she would encourage my father to change his name to Pass. And she herself would continue living for another 43 years-- claiming, as a family member once said of her, “ the imagined glories of the German Empire.” She took solace in whiskey (which she drank neat) and the occasional male visitor (who left before her rooster announced the coming of dawn). Her sons wrote letters for her to the Pension Office, asking that she be given an increase in her monthly allowance because she was now a war widow. The head of the office wrote back to say there was no evidence that Vincent had ever served in a war.
Is this what it meant, for some, to enter the industrial age?
Whether from willful betrayal or unfortunate accident, family memory-- broken in half in the catastrophic trek from one country, one mode of survival to another--could no longer supply the threads that connected and sustained. Identity, from this time forward, would be patched together from wishes, lies, the blindness of faith, the needs of the isolated heart.
My Father’s Birthday
My mother, sisters and I are sitting in the sunroom at my father’s nursing home pressing our forks into the last crumbs of chocolate cake still scattered on our plates.
Anyone want another piece?, my sister Wendy asks, her knife poised over the last remaining yellow rosette. When no one answers, she cuts this piece for herself and sits down again in the wicker chair by the window.
The immediate family has gathered for my father’s 85th birthday. I’m feeling nervous. My sisters and I have spent the past year trying to understand, with little success, why our Lithuanian past was such a shameful secret. Now everyone is gathered in one place. It’s time to see what our father has to say.
We avoid each other’s eyes. The only sound in the room is the hum of the air conditioner. Now, my inner voice is singing. Now. I clear my throat.
Dad, I say. He looks up, his face wearing the mask of the Parkinson’s disease he’s endured over the past decade.
We’d like to ask you about our Lithuanian heritage.
The secret is out.
Whatever we might have been expecting never comes. He barely registers surprise. Maybe it’s the icy grip of his disease or the measured habits of a lifetime. Or maybe my mother has told him about last year’s conversation at lunch and he’s been expecting this.
I never thought, he begins--as though it were merely lack of interest that has kept us in the dark all these years--I never thought we would get to the point that such things would be of interest to you.
Barbara shoots me a look of disbelief, but he doesn’t notice. There’s a long pause, during which he examines the backs of his hands. When he begins speaking again his words, carefully chosen as always, take on added formality, as though stepping out of solitary confinement where they’ve been held for decades: stiff, hesitant, blinking against the sun.
My parents came to America, he says, to live more prosperously. Upon his arrival, my father immediately enlisted to fight in the Spanish American War. While he was stationed in Cuba, he contracted typhoid fever.
(Later I’ll be able to ask, Was this my father's version or did Vincent--in his drive to be more than an immigrant peasant--distort the truth? But today we are hearing this story for the first time.)
Vincent would say, my father tells us, that when the nurse came around with a form--she was asking his religious affiliation--he would always answer, To do good.
Dad goes on talking, his voice gaining strength, telling us about a photograph Vincent had taken in his army uniform, a photograph passed on to our Uncle Ed. I have never seen this picture, and I realize, as Dad is talking, that I have no idea what this man, my grandfather, looked like. To maintain the story of his fictitious heritage, my father has had to erase Vincent from his life.
Finally, for the first time, it’s possible to talk about him.
He was a proud and patriotic man, Dad says. He stood straight as a ramrod in his uniform.
He tells us about Vincent's interest in mysticism and socialism, says he once bought a book on hypnosis and that one summer he tried to make a perpetual motion machine by setting up gears and counter-gears on the kitchen windowsill so that his machine could be activated by the sun.
And I remember, before there were cars, he says. Maybe when I was 10 or so. I would show up at my father’s place of work, wait for him to get out. Oh, around 5:30 or 6. And then we’d walk hand in hand up the hill to the Lithuanian lodge. I’d help him set up chairs for the meetings.
He smiles at the memory. It’s as though the rivers of his blood and breath have suddenly been allowed an unexpected thaw. Tears are running down our cheeks as we listen.
And on Sundays, when the Lodge had picnics, I would hang around the ice-cream table. Even then, Dad says, I loved chocolate ice cream.
It’s time for him to be wheeled off to dinner. At the door he turns around.
One last word, he says. Our family started with nothing. They were impoverished farmers in Lithuania and completely uneducated. Everything the family has done since then, we have done through our own efforts!
I know that Vincent saved his money so Dad could go to Yale, that he died while Dad was in his first year and never saw him finish. And I know that--after Vincent's death--my father worked his way through Carnegie Tech at night and then went on to earn a degree from the University of Chicago.
Vincent would have been really proud of you, I say
My father then says something startling. No, he replies. That still has to be proved. I wish our family owned some buildings.
The Tin Elephant
It is Illia who tells my father the old stories when he is a boy. His full name is Adolph Henry Witold Pasetsk, and when he asks about Witold, the answer comes from a coin she carries in her apron pocket and rubs with her thumb to keep the New World's loneliness at bay. On its face is the figure of a knight on horseback, sword raised, plunging into battle. This is Vytautis, a fierce warrior often called “The Great,” who ruled Lithuania between 1392 and 1430. Everyone was told these stories. Illia recites them to her son--the legends that say he defeated the Teutonic Order, extended the boundaries of the kingdom to the shores of the Baltic Sea, brought great prosperity to Lithuania. For this reason, his name comes to mean “protector of the nation,” and his emblem becomes the official national symbol. In Polish, the language spoken in Lithuania by the 19th-century nobility, Vytis translates as Witold: white knight.
Now shortly after Vincent’s death, Illia--ashamed of her peasant culture--encourages my father to forge a new name. Witold has become the heaviest of his baggage and the most dangerous. Witold is the sucking mud, the undertow, the stone that in my father’s dream can fasten itself to his ankle and pull him down and down until he drowns. Each of my father's names will eventually be abandoned or disguised, but Witold will be the first sacrifice.
My father comes to be known as Arthur and even sometimes Art, to his friends. Art Pass is the name he likes to go by. It's a no-nonsense name, a name swept clean of implication. A forward moving name, lean and muscled.
In college, sometime over the next several years, he writes a short story. The story is set in an indeterminate city at the beginning of winter during the Great Depression. My father, omniscient at his desk, who knows he can bring anything he wants into the world of this story, decides first on the wind. It is a cold upsweeping wind, the one he chooses, a wind that disrupts and scatters, that lifts the warmth from the sleeves of the men who now begin slowly to enter from the wings. There is also a fire, but due to my father's November wind, it offers light rather than warmth to the men huddled around it. Made visible by the fire are the faces of two men. The younger one my father names Buck. The other is older, nameless and suffering from amnesia.
There was something about this man that pulled at Buck, in spite of the man's apparent despair. The light from the fire seemed to reveal a void in the man's eyes, an emptiness and a loneliness not unlike that of a stray animal.
My father, wanting these two men to end up face to face, at first can only move them awkwardly through the city. He allows their paths to cross. He allows them to lose sight of each other. He feels he's in a bit of literary hot water until he gives Buck a job as a truck driver so that one day his truck can--entirely by accident--hit a man who is crossing an intersection. It is now possible for Buck to take the man--yes, his old friend--back to his room and care for him. My father likes this about his story because now they can get to know each other. He names the older man Joe.
By page six, it's time to start the rising action. Buck tells Joe he is leaving, going back to his hometown. My father, who perhaps at this moment is remembering Robert Louis Stevenson, decides to have Joe offer as a going-away present a treasure map, a square piece of soiled linen cloth he's been hiding in the lining of his coat. The lines on the map are paths leading to buried treasure in a place called Orogrande (Big Gold) which, my father knows, is their place of origin, the place from which both of them have come. But that's jumping ahead. For now we know only that Buck is excited. This is an adventure. He says both of them should go to Orogrande to look for the gold.
Once my father, still feeling a little tentative in his role as omniscient narrator, moves them to the place with the buried gold, he decides that Joe should be knocked unconscious while tripping over a stump. When he awakens, Joe remembers everything.
The man was bewildered for a minute, and then a smile came over his face. The void was gone from his eyes and in its place a brilliant sparkle lit up his whole face.
Surely we can anticipate what happens next, though the narrative becomes more intricate as it unfolds. Toward the end of the story, Buck takes a small tin elephant out of his pocket, a lucky charm, he says, that his ol' man gave him a long time ago. Joe recognizes it and asks the right questions. My father saves his revelation for the last page of the story: Joe and Buck are father and son.
He sits back when he is finished, feeling that something inside him has been smoothed over and repaired. This story is a gift to himself. It has given my father a chance to write past the moments in his own life when everything stopped, past his father's death and his family's necessary forgetting.
Just before Buck takes the tin elephant out of his pocket, my father has Joe comment on his amnesia:
". . . I didn't know how I got there, in fact the past was blotted out almost completely. . . . Since then I've been wandering around not caring where I went, or what happened to me."
Though not aware of it in this moment, my father has himself become complicit in this blotting out of the past. Vincent has become a ghost whose name, perceived as shameful legacy, will be mentioned less and less over the years until it is virtually forgotten. But sitting here at his desk, he is happy. He decides he will call his story “The Tin Elephant,” and now, imagining the object in his own pocket, he can almost feel it--tiny and a little cold to the touch--meeting his fingers when he digs for spare change. The elephant will remember his story, but it will be coded and silent, and after awhile my father will be allowed to forget it’s even there.
________________________
Works Consulted:
Allen, Theodore W. The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control. London & NY: Verso, 1994.
Brody, David. Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
________. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle. 2nd Edition. NY: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Bruegmann, Robert. Benicia: Portrait of an Early California Town: An Architectural History. [Sponsored by Exxon Company and the Historic American Buildings Survey, Heritage Conservation and Recreation Service, United States Department of the Interior.] San Francisco: 101 Productions, 1980.
Fainhauz, David. Lithuanians in the USA: Aspects of Ethnic Identity. Chicago: Lithuanian Library Press, Inc., 1991.
Greimas, Algirdas. Of Gods and Men: Studies in Lithuanian Mythology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Knight, Oliver. Life and Manners in the Frontier Army. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978.
Pass, A. “The Tin Elephant.” Unpublished short story.
Roediger, David R., ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White. NY: Schocken Books, 1998.
________. Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. London & NY: Verso, 1994.
________. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London and NY: Verso, 1991.
Sabaliauskas, Algirdas. We, The Balts. Vilnius, Lithuania: Science and Encyclopedia Publishers, 1993.
Smith, Sherry L. The View From Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.
________________________
Dr. Karen Elias has had poetry, book reviews, and academic and personal essays published in a variety of literary journals. In 2001 she received a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant for her memoir-in-progress, from which The Naming was taken. She has taught college English for over 40 years.