Section Summary: Mother. She was right, in her way, and I was wrong. But being right? It was nothing to gloat about. The surprising thing for me? Mother didn't gloat, but she didn't whine, either. Instead she did what she must. Mother is a Hale.

Rochester, September, 1933 — former Hale household and cheapside:

Besides earning my post-doc degrees, watching Vera, and tracking my killers ... who said eternity had to be boring? Besides Edward, that is. I watched my family. Father died, but one thing he didn't do was to sleep around, as I had led myself to believe. He didn't bed Carol.

Now you could say that his habits would be affected by the shocks: a dead daughter and lost employment, but I like to give him the upper hand here. I would like to have my faith restored in one parent, at least.

And, funny thing: it was restored in two of them. I never thought that would be possible.

Mother was right about everything, in her way. Father was let go, and he had to move very quickly to let the house. He would actually need to give money to sell it, given the times, but he did manage to use his existing set of contacts to locate a family moving up in the world.

They were the O'Malley family. They brought their own servants, so most of ours were also let go. My family couldn't keep one. Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in one generation. Very sad.

The O'Malley family did keep Carol. They needed her. They had a 12 year old girl named Claudia. Irish, of course, so she was a freckled thing. Cute, I supposed, in her own way. You didn't know if she had pale white skin with brown dots or brown skin with pale white dots. Very curly red hair — unruly! — that must have been a chore for Carol to brush in the morning. She was so tiny for her age she looked like an animated china doll. But she had a joyful laughter that never stopped and a happy glow in her eyes. I hoped she would be a good mistress to Carol.

As I was not.

Father had to retrench. Severely. He did amass quite a bit over the years, even with the expenditures of a large household, and he immediately put all that money in trust that was doled out to the family, parsimoniously, in monthly allotments. The trust began immediately, so there was no money to be tied up in court at his death. Father was very, very smart when it came to money.

He showed Mother how to economize, and they all moved into a one bedroom apartment above a grocery. I kept waiting for Mother to break or to whine. She didn't. Her stiff back never altered from its life of ease to this new life of hardship. She did the laundry and paid the bills and cooked the meals ... and took care of the boys. It was if she expected this fate her entire life, and, when it came, accepted it with dignity.

I didn't love her. I didn't think I could love her. But my respect for her, as she shouldered a burden I never thought she would, grew and grew as I watched her every day in that little apartment working all day and into the night just to make ends meet, just to make life for my brothers bearable, just to make sure that the heat bill was paid on time, as so many heat bills in Rochester weren't. My brothers didn't get consumption, and it was Mother who fought tooth and nail to ensure that.

I was watching a woman I never knew. Because I did never know her. I only knew her given name, Gwendolyn, from an earlier, painful, memory I had kept from my human life; I didn't even know her family name. All I had ever known her as is as a Hale. What was her life like before she had me? Had she grown up like this? An immigrant child in a family struggling in this New World? I didn't know. I'll never know now.

But I do know this. Mother is one person who would not bend and who would not break, no matter what you threw at her.

Mother is a Hale.

... and she showed me that's actually something to be proud of.