3
My after-school visits usually coincided with her
afternoon time off. I would sit on her bed, she in her rocker,
and inevitably her talk turned into stories—family stories.
Lillie’s life as a Thomson-in-law had not been easy.
She was a product of Southeast Missouri, living in the
surrounds of the Missouri boot heel. She and Mac, my
grandfather, had eloped when she was seventeen. Mac was
thirty-seven.
Only after she arrived in St. Louis did Lillie learn that
Mac’s father had been a much decorated general in the
Union Army. The war had been fought almost a half-century
earlier but was still a social qualifier in the mind of the
general’s widow. While her own father had been a volunteer
in the Union Army, her grandfather and several half-brothers
were staunch Confederates.
Lillie also quickly learned that Mac belonged to a
devoutly Catholic family. Three of Mac’s sisters had entered
Visitation Monasteries. Lillie was a baptized and committed
member of the Methodist congregation. Still an
impressionable teen when she became part of Mac’s family
and feeling very inferior to this socially elite (snobbish?)
family, it was rather easy for Ed, Mac’s sister, to coerce Lillie
into taking instructions at the local rectory and to convert to
Catholicism. Often, when I arrived at her apartment Grandma
was quietly sitting in her rocker reading her Bible. One