Katherine Susie Erickson
Aus: Kathy Hartmann-Campbell, Making Meaning of My Life
My mother’s mother, Grandma Erickson («Grammy»), was a quiet presence in my childhood. She owned the house on East Main Street that we moved into when I was three. She was still working as a housekeeper and cook for wealthy families in the suburbs of Hartford and only came to Middletown for special occasions like birthday parties and holidays.
A few times I was allowed to visit Grammy in Hartford and even stay overnight in her tiny apartment. We would go out shopping to what seemed to me to be extraordinarily fancy and huge stores, which made me feel grown-up and extravagant even if we didn’t buy anything. Grammy was only five feet tall and nearly perfectly round by then (she was in her 60s). She didn’t wear make-up, but when she donned one of her fancy hats, she looked elegant.
She enjoyed good food as much as I do, so when I came to visit, she always indulged herself and me. We bought special items to eat, some packed in cardboard containers with a little wire handle I was enchanted by. We’d then go to a park if the weather was nice or back to her place to devour our treats. She liked steak and mashed potatoes, fried rice and shrimp cocktail, fancy things that I liked too and rarely got to eat. She was a quiet person, and I don’t remember conversing much. We just communed over our mutual pleasure in eating good food.
Staying overnight was even more exciting, mostly because I got to pack a small suitcase, making me feel like a world traveler. By the time I was eight years old I was allowed to take the bus alone from Middletown. We slept together in her single bed as that was the only option. One night I had a vivid nightmare in which my half-brother Doug was sticking the tines of a fork into the roof of my mouth. The pain was so intense that I pulled my arm back and punched as hard as I could with my fist, intending to fight off Doug, but actually hitting my grandmother in the middle of her back. I was horrified, but she didn’t scold me. We just got up and had our traditional, wonderful, decadent breakfast of leftover steak and cold, lumpy mashed potatoes. I don’t think I knew then that Grammy’s career as a live-in cook had culminated in her being one of Katherine Hepburn’s cooks at Fenwick, her estate in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. I doubt that Katherine Hepburn had leftovers for breakfast, but I can’t know for sure.
In 1964, when the World’s Fair took place in Queens, New York, my grandmother announced that I needed to see New York City and that she would invite my parents and me to go there and stay overnight and visit the World’s Fair. It was magical, as if I had stepped into another life. I remember the Greyhound bus trip and arriving at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. I’m sure that we stayed in a very modest hotel, but we went to a restaurant for Sunday brunch that had a fountain created by a tower of overflowing champagne glasses. None of us indulged in a glass, but that nevertheless made a lasting impression. I was enchanted by the World’s Fair. The ride produced by Walt Disney called «It’s a Small World After All» made the deepest impression on me. We floated in boats past animated child-like dolls, representing cultures across the world, colorfully dressed in the traditional garb of their countries, all singing the eponymous song. I was only nine years old but made my first and perhaps most important life decision then and there: get out of Middletown, Connecticut and see the world.
The house on East Main Street had been made into a duplex by converting a side porch— by closing it and adding a floor — into a tiny apartment with a sitting room and kitchen downstairs and a bedroom and bath upstairs. Grammy moved into it when I was nine. She sometimes invited me over for a treat. My first experience of both waffles and chocolate cream pie was in her humble apartment. Her kitchen was small but cozy and featured a terrific secret pantry — a narrow slit in the wall in the corner behind the refrigerator. I thought it would be a great hiding place, but we never played hide and seek. I wondered how Grammy got in there. It was never very well-stocked, so perhaps she couldn’t.
She grew so rotund towards the end of her life that she could no longer squeeze through the very narrow passage that led to her bathtub. I remember washing her in our bathtub and shampooing and styling her hair. She had dementia by then and only spoke a foreign language that I didn’t understand and assumed was some Scandinavian language or Sami dialect, as she had always reminded us proudly that she was from Lapland. I associated the fairy tale, «The Little Match Girl», with her because she said that her husband had sold matches for a living. She was very short, with especially short legs and had pronounced, high cheekbones, a very flat nose, and distinctly almond-shaped eyes. I could easily picture her bracing herself against an Arctic wind, making her way through a snowy landscape. The genes responsible for these features must be quite strong as my mother, my daughter and I all share them. When I saw a documentary film about tribes in Mongolia in my 20s, I felt like I was looking at my relatives. Because Grammy’s name was Erickson, I figured she must have been from Swedish Lapland. Plus she always had a box of enormous round knäckebröd in her apartment. I have no idea where she got that. I never saw it anywhere else in the US.
As I entered adolescence and had begun to despair of my parents ever making peace with each other, I was grateful that Grammy allowed me to use her apartment as a refuge. She highly valued her independence, and her peace and quiet. By then she hardly ever went upstairs, so I could hang out in the bedroom and daydream. She slept on a single bed downstairs. During one visit she showed me the meat tenderizer/cleaver she kept under her pillow in case an intruder should barge through the front door. I had never seen one before and found it quite terrifying. It was heavy and had a black cast iron head with sharp points for tenderizing meat on one side and a blade on the other, atop a wooden handle. She would have been able to both bludgeon and chop up her attacker. As far as I know, she never used it, but it was there under her pillow every night until she died in that bed of a stroke at 75.
I only learned much later that she had completely invented the story of being from Lapland to hide her Lithuanian heritage. In my early 20s, when my mother disclosed to me that I was one-quarter Lithuanian (she had bought fully into Grammy’s story), she acted as if this was something shameful. When I asked why, my mother explained that Lithuanians had been the lowest-status immigrants when she was growing up, spurned and ridiculed. That is why she changed her surname at age 18. Clearly, Grammy had not only reverted to her maiden name and anglicized it, but also lied about her national origin.
In 2018, Marion Barre, a Massachusetts resident, emailed to inform me that we are distant cousins. Her great aunt Frances Tilioniute, who had emigrated from Surviliškis, Lithuania, was my grandmother’s mother. I didn’t want to believe it at first. Marion sent me a scan of my grandmother’s declaration of intent to become an American citizen, filled out and signed by her in 1944. From it I learned that Grandma Erickson had arrived in Boston by ship from Liverpool, England on October 31, 1908, under the name Katrina Areksonas, her birth name, and had last lived in Kaunas, Lithuania. Marion connected me to my cousin Linas Eriksonas, who lives in Vilnius, and in 2019 my husband Werner and I went to meet Linas and other family members. We visited the site where the house Grammy was born in used to stand, in the countryside near Surviliškis, where the parents and sister of my cousin Diana Eriksonaite have a large grain farm. Though I had to let go of the fantasy of being one-quarter Lapp, I am very grateful to have gotten to know my real maternal heritage and meet new family members. Unlike my grandmother and mother, I am happy to know that I am Lithuanian.
