Morlet family memoir section

It’s irrational but true:  I love the people who I should hate. I strive to achieve their acceptance, even after their death. They will never accept me. I will never be able to hate them, what they did to me. And I cannot.

I go back in time.  My family spent holidays at the confluence of  Brittany and Normandy near Mont Saint Michel.  I’ve never been, but I can see the spot on the webcam.

But for my family, it was always depression.  It was called La maladie Morlet since most of my family and their noble ancestors suffered from melancholy. My maternal great grandmother was crushed between two millstones, a gruesome suicide. It is my inheritance; the wealth has gone but the restricted gene pool remains.

My uncle Paul was the closest thing I had to a father when I was in my twenties. I relished his visits as moments of clarity, though they always included arguments between my mother and him. He told me in his haughty tone how my great grandfather received his diploma at the Sorbonne from Emperor Napolean III. We were always superior, even when we were not.

Nobility was inculcated in the family tree my uncle drew for me, much like many Americans claim there is a Cherokee princess among their ancestors. I was raised with a false sense of superiority; a quality I clung to well into my twenties until the time came when I drank it out of me.

My uncle talked about the relatives’ noble descent. My mother talked about la maladie and the great grandmother who practiced witchcraft.  Titles and  curses reside inside me, a dichotomy I still cannot escape.

The lineage was artistic and noble, opera singers, writers, engineers. That was the Morlet side. No mention of my grandmother’s lineage, though she lived to 99 years old, read for all of her life, and lived through two world wars and the Spanish Influenza straightness. The twentieth century was recorded in the tight bun she wore her hair in, the of her spine when she sat, the quietude when she knit or read. My grandfather, the last nobleman, was a pariah. He was introduced to me as a caretaker when I met him at age 10. The haughty noble family was ashamed of the last link in its lineage and gave no mention to the proletarian side that lived through most everything without expectations of glory.

He had been trained as a research librarian before he was disinherited. Both he and my grandmother passed on the love of books, one of the positive values I inherited.

Now with a quarter of the 21^st century done, it is easier to look back at their lives.  My mother and uncle passed a decade ago, my grandmother died two weeks before the birth of this century.  Their lives played out on a roll of film left out in the light, turned dark, left negative by history and war. No one wants to be exposed.

^^^

All this at a time when nearly everything is finished. There is a painting of my mother’s namesake, Madeleine Morlet, done by a famous portrait painter in the late 19th century.   She poses in such finery in a Parisian salon during La Belle Epoque.  I can see my mother’s face in hers, and parts of mine. I search to find what is my unknown father’s, that part of me which has never been portrayed.

My mother lied to me about most things. When she said I look like my father, I thought she meant Harry. He had a long face and wavy blonde hair. My bones were slim, my hair red. But no. It was the engineer I never met. And she was correct.

I’ve seen his picture once, a black-and-white publicity photo for the automobile he hoped design which would revolutionize American sportscars.  I recognized the face behind the smile—serious, distant.

 The photo was taken in 1952, a time when he was involved with my mother. 

I have his smile, his eyes, his nose.  I don’t know about his genetics.  That aspect of my life will always be outside my reach.

The portrait of my great grandmother and the photo od the man who most likely was my father.  It’s all there. The beauty, the ugliness. The tragedy. The tragedy.

It’s ironic that the last portrait Gaspar painted was of another relative, Jean Morlet, who was recorded in the first Opera set to disk in Europe.  I’ve bought the remastered CD.  Jean’s voice reminds me of my mother’s, those summer days in Michigan when we both lay on a blanket and she sang to her infant son.  She sang to me in French, my mother tongue.  I rarely have had a chance to use it.

When I became a teacher, my mother gave me the book she used to teach grammar in France in 1947. The volume rests on the second shelf of my main bookcase in the living room. She could do things like this for me. She could not accept me or share affection with me.

The lack of acceptance left me on edge.  I look at the horizon on the edge of the ocean, desiring to touch it. Like all I desire, it is always out of touch.  It is the desire to reach the edge beyond my limits. I have never been satisfied living within them. Always wanting. Never good enough.

Driven never to stop.  In my mind, stopping was never allowed. I literally worked myself to death. Twice. And never acceptance for who I am.

The world has been bleakly beautiful, not the long court case of Bleak house, the long bleak life interspersed with beauty.

My legacy is in my writing and my son. I write so that others may gain a frame, or to live without one. I raised my son so that he has a secure frame. Even though I fear he will be alone, I know I have provided the scaffolding so that he will always be able to stand. And my wife knows the secure love I can provide, but never truly accept. Never.

Oh America, show me your passenger pigeons

A student taps a pencil on his desk

looking past the standardized test on the Chromebook. 

The boy next to him quietly catches 

the attention of a girl two desks down. 

Both smile. 

Test scores accumulate: 

fallen snow on an administrator’s desk. 

The secondhand sweeps the circular clock 

on the rear wall. Artifacts scatter 

across education—golden spikes, 

a red line demarcating the continental divide, 

the closing of the frontier, the building of America. 

No one taught the Lakota believe water is life,

or showed black-and-white photos buffalo skulls stacked at rail junctions; 

or quote Sheridan’s instructions: 

kill the buffalo, starve the Indians. 

Maggot patriotism professing control of nature. 

From my desk chair, I rise and snowshoe 

to the quiet shore of Lake Isa, 

surface water icy in February, 

fallen logs protruding from the small pond. 

Off the road a sign proclaims Continental Divide, 

a placard hammered to a tree

 reads water flows to the Gulf of Mexico and to the Pacific. 

Snow settled on silent surface, 

not even a lapping to break the moment into parts. 

Water rests for snow melt, no sense of direction only being water. 

And I am only by the shore, 

taking off a glove to touch a fallen tree when the bell rings. 

The test session concluded. 

Another class enters the rows of desks. 

I take attendance