My grandfather died suddenly in January 1960 of appendicitis. He was 44 years old. It would be another two decades until I was born, but I grew up with the living memory of Robert Swan. My mother worked through her grief of losing her dad at age 12 by sharing stories about him: Laying on his lap and listening to the sound of his pocket watch. Being read to from the pages of The New Yorker. A fight between him and my grandmother that ended with her surreptitiously throwing one of his books into the coal furnace, a pointed revenge for the bookish Robert. Even though he had long been dead when I was a boy, I felt that I knew and identified with him. He was the present yet absent grandfather in my life.
I recently finished reading the Moffats series to my children. Written by Newberry-winning author Eleanor Estes and published beginning in 1941, the series chronicles the family life of a single mother and her four children during and after World War I. They are living in a town called Cranbury, a fictitious name for Estes’ real hometown of West Haven, Connecticut. To me the series is notable for its faithful representation of the emotional world of children. It effectively records the wonder and whimsy of childhood. Because the series also depicts a family that has lost its father, it also demonstrates the resilience of children, a capacity that I often find is overlooked or under-appreciated with children. In the final installment of the series, Estes lifts the curtain on the melancholy that has attended the family throughout the series. It gives us an insight into the way trauma works in the life of children and by extension the way trauma abides into the life of adults. It’s a true axiom of the psychologists that the small child is lurking in each of us.
The Moffat series consists of four novels: The Moffatts, published in 1941; The Middle Moffat, published in 1942; Rufus M, published in 1943; and The Moffat Museum, which was not published until 1983, 40 years later. Despite the gap in publishing, the four novels work very well together. They tell of a widowed mother who’s raising her four children—Sylvie, Joey, Jane, and Rufus. Estes is particularly adept at capturing the anxieties of children.
In the first book, there is a story about Jane hiding in a bread box outside of a bakery, and getting caught in it when a man sits on it. It reminded me of my brother and I hiding in the hamper in the guest bathroom of our house and startling our grandfather (unintentionally) when he went to use the bathroom. We also hear of Jane’s fear of the chief of police. It evokes the anxiety the children feel about people in authority who are remote or intimidating.
Jane’s connection with the oldest living inhabitant of Cranbury suggests the kind of relationships children sometimes have with adults who are sympathetic and understanding. It is a portrait of the best kind of grandmotherly or grandfatherly relationship, whether united by kinship, choice, or chance. In another book we hear of the youngest, Rufus, and his curiosity about a player piano owned by a neighbor. What Rufus doesn’t realize is that the piano is mechanical and not, as he thinks, operated by an invisible person inside the piano. How many such false conclusions crop up in childhood, only to be a source of chagrin or embarrassment for the adolescent. The episode in the final book, when the eldest marries and leaves home, perfectly captures the melancholy of life changes.
To me the most striking element of the series, and one of the least talked about, is the absence of the father. The mother manages to make a modest living as a seamstress. Still, you can tell that the family is going through hard times. They are forced out of a rented house and must move to a smaller residence. Because of rationing, they must make one stick of butter last an entire week for five people. The oldest boy, Joey, ends up taking on the traditional fatherly roles, like purchasing coal and hauling it back home, and—toward the end of the series—quitting school and taking on a job to support the family.
In the final pages of the final book, Jane writes a letter to her older sister, Sylvie, who has married and moved away from home. It is the model epistolary sendoff. So much has changed in their family. Not only is Sylvie gone, but Joey has started his job. The fast and sudden changes put Jane on a pinnacle where she can survey the past and look into an unknown future, one that appears to have far fewer joys. The family will never be the same. Still, she promises that every day she will go to the corner to wait for Joey to come home from work. It is the perfect illustration of nostalgia, which etymologically means pain experienced at a homecoming.
Jane’s mother reads the letter and praises it as exactly the kind of letter Sylvia will be delighted to receive.
Then mama put the small kerosene lamp in the window in the hall. What a busy day! What a day! Everyone was tired out. Mama kissed them all good night. The boys went upstairs to bed. Jane stood at the foot of the stairs for a moment. She saw mama go back into the parlor and put the iron rod in the very last notch of the green velvet Morris chair. Then half reclining, she looked out the window, the way perhaps she often did, looking at the room outside, an exact reflection of the room inside. Maybe sometimes she imagined someone coming into that room outside, Maybe, half asleep, she might imagine … Maybe … Papa?
“Good night, Mama,” Jane whispered and tiptoed up the stairs to bed. (p. 232, my emphasis)
Here we get the idea that Jane’s grief and nostalgia for Joey and Sylvie is parallel to her mother’s grief nostalgia for her husband. I would also submit that Jane’s nostalgia is latent grief for an absent father.
Estes never dwells on the loss of the father. He died when they were all quite young, so the youngest has few memories of him. Like so much trauma, though it is invisible, it is always there. It is part of the mental furniture of the subconscious, the reflected image on the window pane. It is that “room outside,” as Estes puts it. It’s not a place that can be touched with the hands or where hugs can be shared. And yet it is never far from any one of us. That is because the reflection is cast every time the sun goes down and the lights inside come on. Tired mother looks for the missing people in her life. The children wonder if he might be there in that outside room.
My mother lost her father when she was 12 years old. It was a burst appendix that probably even 10 or 15 years later would not have resulted in death. She remembers the way a gossipy neighbor found her before either her mother or her priest could tell her that her dad died. It was a loss for which she never ceased grieving—naming, among other things, her firstborn son after him. Strangely enough, my grandmother remarried. Twice, actually. The first was a desperate grab for money by a widow with two girls, a marriage sought in fear. The second was a marriage of love, and that is the grandfather in the flash that I knew as a youngster. But I also heard of my true grandfather, who had died two decades before I was born. This is the Grandpa Swan, whom I never met but who was in that “outside room.” My mother looked for him there and urged us to look for him there too by sharing his memory.
Most people have loved ones they’re looking for in the outside room. It is part of the nature of grief and loss. The loss endures because people are irreplaceable. On the other hand, what God takes away, he gives back in the next generation. New love and new friends. These don’t replace the one who has been lost, but they add new color to a life that has been bleached by the deaths of our dearest and best. Estes, I think wisely, doesn’t harp on the death of the father. Trauma doesn’t typically manifest as constant introspection but rather like a shroud of melancholy, like an “outside room” invisible to all but those who look with distant longing.
Clergy inevitably encounter trauma and loss in the personal lives of those whom we serve, but the outside room can also function on an institutional level. Maybe there was a beloved priest, or a failed and pernicious priest, who is still looked for in that reflection. Perhaps there was a revered matriarch or patriarch of the parish who is remembered with nostalgia. I came to my current parish not realizing some of the trauma it had endured. My ignorance made ministry difficult for several years. Inexperienced clergy like me are apt to think of these challenges as unique, and to commend ourselves for trying to understand and work through them. The reality is probably far more universal. We all have outside rooms. Last September was the 11-year anniversary of my rectorship. Just a few months before, one of the senior matrons of the congregation confided in me just how angry she was and hurt by a former trauma. It had been lurking there in that outside room all along.
The Rev. John Mason Lock is the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Red Bank, New Jersey.
A lifelong Episcopalian nurtured in the Diocese of the Rio Grande, he attended the University of Delaware, where he majored in English and minored in Jewish studies. He received his M.Div. from Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania, in 2008. He served as curate for five years at All Souls Episcopal Church in Oklahoma City. He is the proud husband of Bonnie and father of four.
