Don't Leave Your Past Untold

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

They told their stories and I listened. But I'd heard them before and I knew I'd hear them again, so there was no need to pay strict attention to details, to memorize names and dates, to note the people and the cities they mentioned.

For the stories were predictable, like songs on a radio. You could count on them the way you can count on hearing "Dancing Queen" when you're driving and switching stations. My mother-in-law, my father, my Aunt Lorraine - each of them regaled me with tales that I didn't write down because I didn't think I had to. Because all I had to do was nudge them and say, "Can you tell me that story again?"

And they would.

But they aren't here to nudge anymore.

My father was 77 when he got a phone call from a brother he didn't know he had, and a new story to tell.

George Quinn Curtin was his parents' first child. He had been born out of wedlock, and quietly given away to people who raised him in North Cambridge as Timothy George Keane, just miles from East Cambridge where my father lived. There had been four Curtin boys, not just three, as we'd all believed.

We had questions, my father and I, and flew to Florida to meet Tim. But he had questions, too, and there was no one who could give us the answers.

When my father died, five years after they'd met, Tim flew from Florida to Boston to attend the funeral. And he told us again, because this is his only story, about the day he met his mother, my grandmother. How he found her, finally, when he was in his 20s. How they had lunch at a coffee shop on Tremont Street. How she had nothing good to say about his father, who had left her with a young family to raise on her own. Tim told us about how she didn't hug him that day. And how she never kissed him goodbye.

My Uncle Tim and I know almost nothing of his father, my grandfather. We've never seen a picture of him. He walked out on his wife and boys when my father was 5, and for all of his life my father refused to talk about him.

Except once.

He had brown eyes and black hair, he told me. He served in the Army. He drove a horse-drawn milk cart and took my father with him now and then. And on warm summer nights my father could hear him singing and playing piano in a bar across the street.

After he left, my grandmother worked at Liggetts Drug Store behind the counter. She made sodas and sandwiches, and served coffee. She dyed her hair red and wore high heels, always, even to hang out the laundry to dry.

She read to me and sang to me and told me stories about children who had great adventures. I remember all this.

But I also remember her as happy.

Was she?

I wish she'd kept a journal. I wish she'd written letters to her sons, all four of them, and to me, too, to be opened at her death. I wish she'd given us a clue about who she was and what she felt and what her life was really like. I wish she had told us about my grandfather. But all I have left of her are a few greeting cards signed in her familiar script, "All my love, forever."

People don't keep journals or write their life stories because they say, "Who would be interested?"

Everyone is interested, eventually. Because the past is like wine. Put it away for a while and it grows fuller and richer, and when you sit down and finally open it, you savor it.

I envy families whose history is written down by each generation, decades of thoughts and accomplishments and joys and apprehensions immortalized in letters and journals and books.

I wish my grandmother had written her story. I wish any of my relatives had. Instead they took their truths and their pasts with them.