Grandmother Goetchius as a young woman.

Grandmother Goetchius

Although I was at last able to make friends in America, there was one person very close to me that I had great difficulty getting along with—my grandmother. Of one thing I am very sure: When I speak about my grandmother, I am never fair. She was, in the eyes of most people who knew her, a remarkable woman. I didn’t want a remarkable woman, I wanted the warm lap and unconditional love other people got from their beloved grandmothers. My first cousin Mary told me once that she thought she and I had had two different grandmothers. She was quite right. She and her older sister Elizabeth Anne were the first two grandchildren. They never knew a time when Grandmother was not a loving presence in their lives, and I am quite sure that Grandmother provided for them the warm lap and unconditional love that every child longs for.

It was a different story when their brother Charles came along. Grandmother had never had a son, much less a grandson, and Charles was all boy. She had no idea how to deal with such a creature. Young Charles was always hoping for the kind of approval she lavished on his older sisters, but nothing seemed to please her. One day in his adventures he came upon a lovely green snake. The perfect present for Grandmother, he thought. He still remembers her scream.

Mary and Elizabeth Anne loved their brother and tried to help their grandmother understand that, despite his total lack of academic zeal, he was really a great guy. Charles was a high school football star, so the sisters decided to take Grandmother to a game. If she could only see him in his element, she would appreciate him more. Unfortunately, the elements of the chosen day did not cooperate. It was a wet day and the field was a muddy morass.

Grandmother’s horror increased by the minute, watching these man-sized boys grabbing each other, throwing each other down, and rolling about in the mud for no apparent reason. The older sisters were caught up in the game and when Charles made a spectacular saving tackle, they cried out: “Did you see that, Grandmother? That was Charles!”

But all Grandmother could see was the depths of depravity to which mankind had fallen. “Oh, daughters,” she mourned, “to think they were made in the image of their Creator.”

Perhaps the chief source of my difficulties with Grandmother is that I met her for the first time when I was five years old. I readily admit to stubbornness, pride, jealousy, and a terrible temper. Indeed, I plead guilty to any of the seven deadly sins available to a five-year-old. Grandmother saw me, not as a grandchild to dote on, but as a wild thing, desperately in need of straightening out before it was too late. My mother, apparently, was not adequate for the task, so it was up to her. We weren’t in the country long enough for her to complete her mission, so when we came back the second time when I was eight, she took up her assignment in earnest.

One of her favorite admonishments to me was “Be sweet, my child, and let who will be clever.” Well, I didn’t want to be sweet, I wanted to prove myself clever, especially since those American teachers of mine thought me a bit slow.

I may have been shy in most public settings, but at home, as the middle child of five, I did whatever it took to get my share of attention, and sweetness didn’t do the trick. Worse yet, if there was any opportunity at home, at school, even at church to show off, I would—much to Grandmother’s distress. Ladies, even small ones, did not show off.

Grandmother had no home of her own in those days. So her daughters’ homes became her homes. From the time I was nine until I graduated from high school, Grandmother lived with us for four months out of every year. We children dreaded these visitations. Our mother would become more and more tense as our family’s turn drew near, because I wasn’t the only person or thing Grandmother would begin working on as soon as she walked in the door. She’d start by rearranging all the pictures and whatever furniture was light enough to move, and then start trying to rearrange Mother and the five of us children.

The only person spared criticism and improving instruction was Daddy, whom she adored. He could do no wrong. She became almost starry-eyed when she talked to him, and she basked in his attention. Daddy couldn’t resist teasing her. We’d watch with fascination the exchange between them at mealtimes. Surely, Daddy had gone too far with his joking. Grandmother couldn’t possibly appreciate his wry sense of humor. He’d surely hurt her feelings, she’d stop worshipping him, and then we’d really be in trouble. We were wrong, of course. At first she’d look puzzled, and then she’d break into a coy smile. “Oh, Raymond,” she’d say, “you’re teasing me.”

By the time I reached the last years of high school, Ray was in the navy and Liz was in college. So I was suddenly the oldest child. During my junior year, we moved to Charles Town, West Virginia, and were living in an upstairs apartment. Daddy was traveling for the mission board and wasn’t there to help with anything, much less Grandmother’s visits. Until Barbara and I became close friends, I was totally miserable in Charles Town. Often I would come home from school, and, without even taking off my winter coat, throw myself down on the living room floor to read my current book.

The particular day I remember best, I was totally engrossed in A Tale of Two Cities. I guess I was vaguely aware that my mother was sweeping the floor around my prone body, but I was too lost in the book to care until I heard my grandmother’s voice, weary with the burden of having failed to make me over, “Sweep, sweep, sweep,” she said. “You are going to kill your mother.”

I’m sure I should have felt guilty. I was simply annoyed. Grandmother should have been proud to have a grandchild so absorbed in a classic that she ignored the world around her. My mother loved to see me read, and I was quite sure my reading was not going to kill my mother, whatever Grandmother might say. And if you’re guessing that I had the grace to get off the floor and give my mother a hand, you’d be wrong. It was at about this time that Grandmother seemed to accept the fact that improving me was a lost cause, announcing sadly to Mother: “I’m afraid Katherine is a lover of luxury.”

But I started this by saying that I have never been fair to my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, and I have stories to prove it.

After the difficult birth of her third daughter, Grandmother “enjoyed ill health.” Mother recalled countless afternoons when she came home from school that she was hushed by the African American housekeeper with the warning that her mother was resting. But Grandmother didn’t spend all of her time abed. She was, apparently, noted in Rome, Georgia, for her good deeds. There was a tiny apartment connected to the house, and Mother recalled that it was nearly always filled with some pitiful person or another who would otherwise have been homeless. Every month she sent money to Dr. Harry Myers, a friend who was a missionary in Japan. Dr. Myers wrote that her gift was being used to support a penniless student named Toyohiko Kagawa.

Kagawa went on to become known worldwide for his work with the poorest of the poor in the slums of Kobe and Tokyo. He was imprisoned on a number of occasions because of his activism on behalf of labor and because he opposed the Japanese military, going so far as to apologize publically in 1940 for Japan’s crimes against China. He was a prolific writer, often using his time in prison to write, and was nominated both for the Nobel Prize in literature and the Nobel Peace Prize. After his death, the Japanese government, which had so often opposed him, awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, its second-highest honor. Dr. Kagawa died soon after I arrived in Japan, so I never met him. But I was in Tokushima Province when his widow brought part of his ashes to bury them in his hometown. I was able to tell her about my grandmother’s pride in having played a part in her great husband’s life.

After her daughters had all grown up and left home, Grandmother wanted to be useful. She ceased her role as a Victorian semi-invalid and moved to Baltimore, where, I was told as a child, she became a “missionary to the Jews.” The word “missionary” was not a derogatory term in my family, but “missionary” is a misleading description of what she actually did. It seems that the Presbyterian Church was very concerned for the immigrants in Baltimore, many of whom were Jews, who in the 1920s and ’30s had fled Europe and settled in the city. Grandmother’s job was to teach English to a group of Jewish women immigrants. I think it was a volunteer position, rather than a paid one. One remarkable thing about my grandmother was her ability to manage on very little money.

She grew quite close to the women she worked with. One of the rare lovely memories I have of my grandmother is listening to her describe her Jewish friends preparing for Passover. She was awed by the way they approached this sacred rite—the beauty, the purity of it. She’d never seen anything like it in her own church. She was sure, she said, that the Holy Spirit was present with these wonderful women.

Often she would take my mother’s letters from China and share them with her friends. She remembered that awful time when she had been in too big a hurry to read the letter first, had simply opened it, only to find herself reading aloud my mother’s account of little Charles’s death. If my grandmother was broken-hearted, so were her friends. “How can God let a little baby die so far away from his beloved grandmother?” one of them cried as they wept with her for her husband’s namesake that she would never know.

I think Grandmother left Baltimore about the time we moved to Winston-Salem. Perhaps if she’d stayed and been nourished by her friends and the work she did there, she and I would have had a different history. I’ll never know.

Grandmother lived to be ninety-six, but in 1955, when she was eighty-seven years old, she was living with my aunt Anne in Alexandria, Virginia, and running about visiting sick and elderly friends in Washington, DC. Anne often said, “Mother, you have to watch for cars in the city. You aren’t careful.” To which Grandmother would invariably reply: “Nobody is going to hit an old lady.” But, one day she stepped off the curb and somebody did. Her hip was shattered. A skillful surgeon put it back together and she was able to walk again, but something happened to the grandmother I knew in the process.

After the operation, the iron lady that had frightened and judged me for most of my life simply disappeared, leaving the sweet granny I’d always longed for. I went to see her before I took off for Japan. She seemed particularly fuzzy that day, so I said, “Grandmother, do you know me?” She peered at me closely. “No,” she said, settling back in her chair, “but I know you’re somebody nice.”

My older sister Liz thought she saw Grandmother in Louise’s grandmother in Jacob Have I Loved, but I really didn’t. Louise’s grandmother is closer to the mother-in-law of one of my friends, who in her dementia was cuttingly cruel. Until her accident that softened her personality, my grandmother was not demented. She was stern and used Scripture to bolster her arguments, but she was not intentionally cruel. To hint that she was would have been totally unfair to that remarkable woman.