A Life of My Own. Donna Wilhelm

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 surname ends with an “a” and a man’s or the plural version with an “i” or “y”) lived just outside Warsaw in a white stone villa surrounded by acres of manicured gardens and a dense, fragrant forest that buffered and disguised its isolation. Unlike boys of Mother’s aristocratic class, girls rarely attended public school or university. They were educated at home by tutors. “In Poland,” Mother explained with a sad smile, “girls like me learn Catholic religion, painting and embroidery—I was best for watercolor flowers.”

      Mother never imagined she would have to rear children without a nanny or lift a finger to clean house. And she couldn’t have predicted that her elite world of luxury was doomed.

      In 1918, the Bolsheviks murdered the Russian Tsar Alexander Nicholas II and his entire family—the last of a long line of autocrats that had ruled Russia since the 1500s. Violent purges followed. Like an avalanche of death, the Bolsheviks eradicated Tsarist sympathizers and rampaged into bordering countries including Poland. All wealthy landowners were suspected of having links with the Tsar. Unless those links could be manipulated, aristocratic families faced terrible consequences.

      To save their seven sons from the Bolsheviks, the Olsezski parents were willing to sacrifice their only daughter, Hania—my mother. They concocted a preposterous plan: to convince Polish society and the Bolshevik spies that all but one member of the Olsezski family opposed the Tsar for his “sins against the people.” Her parents fabricated a friendship between the innocent Hania and the Grand Duchess Maria, one of the Tsar’s daughters. Hania would be publicly shamed and condemned for betraying her family, the honorable Olsezskis, staunch and loyal supporters of peasants and the common folk of Poland.

      “Ach, Danusia, I am rebellious girl always.” Mother raised her flaccid arm to the sky. “Eighteen years old, I’m daughter in disgrace.”

      Hania’s parents bribed an artisan papermaker in Warsaw to produce a few sheets of rich vellum paper encrusted with a counterfeit copy of the Royal Seal. Then they convinced Hania’s governess to forge a flowery letter in the style of eighteen-year-old Grand Duchess Maria, supposedly written to her secret friend, Hania Olsezska. The final bribe to Warsaw journalists stimulated reported stories affirming the Olsezskis’ vehement opposition to Tsarist principles. The fabricated letter that exposed Hania’s friendship with Grand Duchess Maria was passed around Warsaw’s opulent salons. And gossip flared.

      Mother’s talent for storytelling was seductive. She lured me into the fictitious friendship between herself and the Grand Duchess Maria. She enticed my imagination with vivid scenes of intrigue and danger facing two reckless young women in a village near Tsarkoye Selo, the Tsar’s summer palace. Mother’s eyes sparkled with excitement as she described how the Grand Duchess “disguised as servant girl” in the palace kitchens persuaded a peasant farmer delivering fresh vegetables to transport her from the palace to the village. There, her adoring friend Hania waited in an aunt’s nearby cottage. A secluded, vine-covered dwelling—“My auntie Mariska, old and deaf, not know what we were talking”—became the friends’ perfect hideout.

      Mother strutted about, head held high. “I’m remember every word of Grand Duchess Maria in letter,” she boasted. “‘How I loved pretending we were free,’” she recited. “‘Everyone else in the Olsezski family detest Romanovs for royal power over the people. You alone, dear Hania, are my secret