Grandmother Mary Elizabeth

5811 N. Bayshore Drive, Miami, FL 33137

Mary Elizabeth Felix Kniskern was born in Louisville into a family with Scottish roots. Her own mother (my paternal great-grandmother) was a dour-looking woman with a scowling face and crisp linen collar that accentuated the severe black dress, probably her outfit every day, as evidenced by the photograph Grandmother Mary Elizabeth kept hanging In her hallway. As a child, when passing by it, I remember feeling relieved that my great-grandmother was dead—she looked mean and scary.

As family lore has it, Grandmother Mary Elizabeth’s mother saved her sock money to buy coal mines in Kentucky, making a fortune for the family. She wanted her second child, Mary Elizabeth, to have a fine education and master the piano. Grandmother eventually left Louisville to study music and the piano at Julliard, aspiring to become a concert pianist. But who knew that romance would upend her dreams?

She met my grandfather, Charles Beckham Kniskern, Jr., a dapper businessman from Boston who played quarterback for the University of Chicago. They moved to Louisville to marry and set down roots.

Although my grandmother had a small family of three children, she still aspired to become a concert pianist. My father told me he’d hated hearing constant practicing of scales ‘for hours’ every day. But all of this changed when at forty-three, Grandmother became ill with what was then called inflammatory arthritis, now called Rheumatoid Arthritis. She went for treatments in Arkansas, at Warms Springs, and beyond, desperately searching for a cure. Doctors recommended she move from Louisville to a temperate climate. Her older brother, Douglas, a probate attorney, was prospering in his South Florida law practice and had built a lovely, two-story, terraced mansion in 1939 that stands today overlooking Biscayne Bay.

So she bundled up her three children and left her husband to manage her other side of the family’s stock portfolio in a new residence with her brother.

I suspect that my grandparents’ marriage had not been a happy one. Their only communication was over meals when he would tip spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his iced tea, and she would chide him with a tone of utter disgust: “Just stir one in. That’s quite enough!” It was their standing, daily argument that, as a child, I found quite amusing, as if my grandfather was intentionally baiting my grandmother’s ire.

Grandmother would read stories to me as a child, then take opportunities to give me little life admonitions that always left me feeling slightly guilty. “Pretty is as pretty does,” was one. And she’d tell me the parable of Jesus and the talents, with the clear message that I’d better develop my talents.

Ultimately, she died from the effects of the gold shots that helped alleviate the symptoms of arthritis. She was 76 years old.

Both remarkable women became the grist for my first novel, Under the Lemon Tree, as yet unpublished but not forgotten. I’ll return to that novel after I secure a literary agent and a publishing deal for my second novel set in WWII Italy. More about this book in my blog, but without spoilers!