we take time for tea and fresh Polish apricot bars.” Aunt Clara set a copper kettle on the porcelain Hotpoint stove. I spotted my favorite wooden chair leaning against the wall, pushed it up to the red and white checked kitchen tablecloth, and sat down with my elbows bent on the table top, fingers cupping my chin. I inhaled deep, full breaths of contentment. In Aunt Clara’s kitchen, I felt safe. Nothing in this house could hurt or disappoint me, especially when Polish apricot bars were waiting.
One cup of milky tea, three sugar cubes and four apricot bars later, Mother was fueled up for the drive back to Hartford. “Tatush waiting I fix good Polish dinner for him,” she said. With a cursory wave, Mother sped away. Without me as her backseat vigilante, the stakes favored the Connecticut State Highway Patrol.
With my cousin Theresa at school and Uncle Eddy at work, I had Aunt Clara all to myself. In Aunt Clara’s pristine Betty Crocker world, my childhood indoctrination to healthy eating began and ended. Aunt Clara religiously followed the 1950s-era Basic Seven Food Wheel taped to the wall of her tidy pantry: nothing deep fried; plenty of fresh vegetables; measured portions; and no between-meal snacking. I was her avid convert.
In my imagination, dinners at Aunt Clara’s house were picture perfect, a typical American family sitting around a table set with matching china, no shouting, Emily Post manners, everyone served heaps of loving from the oven. In reality, we couldn’t have been perfect. Maybe Aunt Clara and Uncle Eddy argued sometimes, and maybe my cousin occasionally didn’t want to do her chores. But at dinnertime, when I sat across from Theresa, listening to quiet, polite conversation, I felt content and well-fed. And I could actually identify what I was eating—baked chicken, green peas and puffy American white rolls. Bliss!
After dinner, Uncle Eddy typically headed to the adjoining living room and relaxed in his favorite chair to read the paper. Aunt Clara pulled the latest Good Housekeeping from a tidy stack of magazines on the coffee table and settled on the sofa without wrinkling her housedress. Theresa—adored by her parents and envied by me because she was older, prettier, and owner of a closet full of pretty clothes and shoes—disappeared upstairs to do homework. This left me alone in the kitchen in front of a heaping dessert plate of Polish apricot bars and a pile of Theresa’s dog-eared Junior Guide magazines. Life didn’t get any better than overnights at Aunt Clara’s.
Low voices stirred from the living room, and either Aunt Clara or Uncle Eddy slowly pushed the kitchen door closed. How strange—they weren’t reading, they were talking. Tiptoeing to the door, I pressed my ear tight against the smooth wood.
Uncle Eddy repeated a familiar question, one I’d overheard from other relatives, but he also added something new. “How Hania and Juzo afford so fancy house on Webster Street—when those girls were little?”
Those girls? Until that moment I believed my parents had raised only one girl besides me—my sister Edith, grown up and gone off to Arizona, long before I was born. What other girls was he talking about?
“Hania found good use for so many bedrooms upstairs on Webster Street,” Aunt Clara added.
“Yes, she fill them with boarders,” Uncle Eddy said. “Too many poor families in Hartford with too many children. Hania made good business—”
“Until she took in the Holdens,” Aunt Clara interrupted. “One day they just showed up, a milkman with his sick wife and four children.”
“Clarcha, is no wonder they are poor, with sick wife and four girls to feed and raise. Hard times for them Irish immigrants.”
I pictured Uncle Eddy, a quiet man with strong opinions, shaking his head, shaggy with thick, gray hair.
“Juzo has good luck with his mechanic job at Pratt & Whitney. When war come, the factory is crazy busy making airplane parts.” He was talking about my dad. My ear pressing so tight against the door began to hurt. I realized that if Aunt Clara were to check on me in the kitchen, there wouldn’t be time to scramble back to the table and look innocent. But I couldn’t stop listening.
Now Aunt Clara was talking about money. “If you think Hania’s money was a mystery, you know nothing!” Her voice, though muffled by the door, turned shrill and grating. “The wife died and the milkman was left alone with four daughters. No mother. No money. Hania and Juzo agreed to keep the Holden girls. Nothing legal—that’s how the Irish were.”
“So terrible,” Uncle Eddy’s voice sounded angry, “the father of those Holden girls—he just disappear!”
My head was pounding, sore ear forgotten. Hearing my sweet Aunt Clara sound so blunt and harsh gave me stomach cramps. How could a father walk out on his children? Why did my parents take in four children of total strangers? Almost overnight, Mother suddenly had five children! Everything I’d learned had happened long before I was born. I tried to imagine how I would have felt in Edith’s place.
“Hania is tyrant,” Uncle Eddy said, describing the same mother I knew—at least that part made sense. “She punish hard and quick.”
Aunt Clara finished the story, “Those Holden girls grew up, and one by one, they left. No one in the family ever heard from them again.”
Mother showed no compassion for the meager finances of her boarders, and she willingly profited from their distressed circumstances. Yet, the secret I’d overheard behind closed doors in Aunt Clara’s house told me that Mother had once saved four young girls from destitution and danger—four girls who apparently felt no need to return and thank her.
In future, I’d again confront the mystery of the Holden girls taken in at Boarding House #1. And I would find evidence—an old photograph of Mother with Edith and four instant sisters—Frances, Mildred, May and the youngest they called “Bunny.” Yet, I could only speculate about why Mother had made such an incredible, impulsive decision. Had she rescued others to save something she had once lost and was trying to recover? What had she seen in these motherless girls that perhaps struck a deep chord and warmed her heart? Mother’s stories, to be repeated again and again during my childhood, would be clues to her past. As she wove her narratives, I clung to them with obsessive fascination. Were Mother’s stories truth, fiction, or a combination of both? And, in the end, would the answer really matter?
Edith (2nd L.) and Mother with the Holden girls, Boarding House #1 in Hartford, 1930s
Fleeing the Old World
Mother’s Lost World
Most days, I didn’t know which Mother would show up—unflinching dictator or consummate actress. Would she punish my rare acts of rebellion with a leather belt? Or would she draw me close to her with stories of long lost times in Old World Poland? Would she dictate how I behaved, how I dressed and what I ate? Or would she transform into the pampered young woman of her youth, living in affluence?
I would take my place on a wooden chair in Mother’s kitchen strewn about with unwashed dishes and leftover food—to watch a drama I named “Mother’s Tragic Destiny.” I’d put on imaginary sepia toned glasses that made the past come to life. Mother the actress, whose voice rose and fell with compelling emotion, pulled me into the web of her stories.
Hania Olsezska was the sole daughter among eight children born into a family of notable Polish landowners. Although she never admitted her exact birthdate, I estimated my mother was born around 1900. The Olsezski family (in correct Polish, a woman’s
