Imagining My Grandmother

I received a packet of photos from my father today. He’s 86 and wants to make sure his daughters get the mementos we’ve requested before he leaves this earth.

This photo is of my paternal grandmother, born at the turn of the last century near Sebastopol, California, apparently taken while she was married to her first husband, a French-American named Barbier.

It looks like this spunky young woman, born Mabel Amanda Feige, could be rolling a cigarette after dance or drama class. Her hair is bobbed except for one long spiral curl draped over her shoulder. She and her sister, Josephine, were actually taking turns dressing up in their brother's Navy uniform.

Before long, she’ll lose her husband in the influenza epidemic of 1914, finding herself a widow with a young child, named after his father, Harry.

This is before women have won the right to vote, but I doubt if this ever stopped her from expressing her opinions, political and otherwise. She’s a rebellious Catholic, eventually meeting a small man from San Francisco who will marry her, give her another son (my father) and drive her crazy because he seems to love the city more than his family.

My grandfather, Albert Engelhart, survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake at age 10. He took advantage of numerous legally questionable opportunities to make a lot of money, as the City by the Bay was being rebuilt. When crime in the burgeoning city became a troubling issue, my grandmother wanted to move south, to the suburbs, but he refused. They divorced, remarried and divorced again - scandalous! She bought some land in Redwood City and lived with her boys in an unwired, unplumbed garage for the next 12 years, building her adjacent stucco home herself, with the sporadic and unreliable help of a male cousin. I remember marveling at the hand-carved beams and doors in the ceiling of her modest Mission-style home.

Mabel remarried and divorced my grandfather and eventually married Milton Stuart, a man my father revered as his stepfather, who tragically died of cancer a year after I was born. My grandmother suffered debilitating strokes by the time I was eight years old and was in and out of nursing homes until her death when I was 16. She cried when she realized she would never teach me how to knit.

Now that I have this photo, I prefer to imagine her as a bit of a rebel. Mabel Amanda was a woman who didn’t need the label of “Feminist” to express her individuality. Both of her given names mean “lovable”, but I have a feeling that she was loved on her own terms.