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Vintage Baby I dance the Charleston with my little son. If I knew older dances, I’d do them, but waltzes are complicated. I read him ancient English nursery rhymes and sing early American folk tunes, and when he’s bigger I want to get him interested in listening to Depression-era radio shows and watching black and white movies. If it’s old, I like it. I climb around the nursery and paste Victoriana everywhere, and mine e-Bay for a vintage rocking horse, despite the fact I think that already (at barely 2 years of age) my son would prefer a tiny racecar. Oh, if only life was simple and sweet – like the old days. Maybe it makes sense for the daughter of a history teacher to sentimentalize the past that way, but I should know better. If nothing else, the funny story Grandma told about the baby corpse should have clued me in. My grandmother was born in 1903 and was within a few months of making it to 100 when she died. In the last few years of her life, she kept her clarity and focus, reading the newspaper cover to cover every morning. She also started to remember and cheerfully share family memories that were the dark antithesis of the sunny times I think of when I’m hanging up Jessie Willcox Smith prints from babygoesvintage.com. Her mother, Dora, the granddaughter of early Indiana pioneers, gave birth to 11 children, starting in the early 1880s. The only set of twins was born in 1890. One of them, my father’s Uncle Maurice, survived, but little Martin died the following year of a mysterious illness called “summer complaint.” The family was quite poor at that time but had a small plot of land in a nearby cemetery where they buried the child with their own hands. It seemed the end of a short, sad story, but it wasn’t. Grandma said, “A few years later they had more money and wanted a bigger family plot, so they bought another one nearby. But they needed to go dig up the baby’s grave and move it to the new place, so my mother and father sent my brothers to the cemetery. “But those boys got curious once they dug up that coffin. ‘How’s about we look inside and see what Martin looks like now?’ They pried open the little coffin to take a peak, and got such a fright! The skeleton inside crumbled to dust!” She laughed when she told it. It was a long time ago, she’d never known the baby, and her older brothers were always getting into scrapes. And it was only death, after all. Grandma was a quiet but devout Catholic who felt quite friendly and familiar with dead people. But when Grandma told me in 2002, I giggled at the shock at how strange it all sounded to my modern ears. After all, we don’t dig up coffins ourselves anymore, and even if we did we wouldn’t send youngsters out to do it as part of their chores. The past is weird. Grandma, with her modern appliances and even more modern attitude, was glad to leave it all behind. But in spite of everything I sometimes find myself craving it – everything is so complicated now! If only I lived back then, I would know what was expected of me. Plus there was all that fun music. Good books, too. But hold on a minute. “We had a cat,” my grandmother said another time. “I don’t remember it, but my family told me that when I was little it loved to snuggle up and sleep on my chest. But then someone told them cats steal your breath, so they took it away and drowned it.” That’s sad, and awful. Our cats died, and we honor their ashes with a mini-shrine on a living room shelf. But the fact is my grandmother didn’t think her cat story was that depressing. “It was just a cat,” she’d say. That’s not how I feel. Cats and dogs are like people. Period. I’m not the only one who thinks this way these days, but I suppose it would have been a rare outlook 100 years ago. Different attitudes towards animals are another thing I conveniently forget when I think about the old days. How’s this for acceptable behavior during a sibling tiff: my great-uncle was known to chase his sisters around with a dead rat. This is not a way that my family plans to emulate an earlier time (though we do live in Manhattan, and the raw material is here). I will see to it that my son sticks to verbally abusing his future brother or sister. Rats and cats aside, no matter how many stories I remember from my grandmother, the one my brain goes back to again and again is the dead baby. Especially now. Since I became a mother, I don’t think I would be amused and detached if I heard the tale now for the first time. Now I picture a 1-year-old staring uncomprehending down an Allen County road, trying vaguely to figure out when the twin that he’s known since conception will return. Toddlers have short memories, but I wonder how long it was before he got used to being a singleton. I wonder if Dora was still nursing. How did going from two to one affect her milk supply? Before, the anecdote was merely a curiosity, the little corpse safely laid to rest between the dusty pages of a genealogical chart. Now I can see the small, deep hole in the ground. And I look up the death date – Aug. 22, the day before my son’s birthday. So I’ve stopped envying my ancestors. I still have old fashioned tastes, but these days, as I sing or recite the songs and poems to my son, a realization sometimes hits me: a lot of babies who heard those died. That’s when I break into the Charleston, and Elliot and I high-kick those dark thoughts out of my head. And I think how, in addition to reading him the classics, I’ll tell him stories about his great-grandmother and how she lived to be very, very old. Just like he will.
Suzanne Schuckel Heath is a writer who lives in Manhattan with her husband, David. She is currently looking for a publisher for her middle grade novel set on the streets of 19th century New York, and also finds time to write about the surreal and exciting world of motherhood. Since writing 'Vintage Baby,' Suzanne has welcomed Elliot's baby sister, Caroline.
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