Family curses can permeate even the educated, practical minds of mothers

The last time I saw my grandmother, I was 6 years old. Before that, about all I remember about her is that she taught me how to play cards when our family lived in the displaced-persons camps of Germany after World War II.

Later, after I had emigrated to the United States with my parents, I wrote letters to her. and she wrote me back. I remember every gift she sent me: a necklace of baby blue beads shaped like tiny flowers, a plastic pin in the shape of a red-cap mushroom nestled at the foot of a dark green fir tree and a beautiful wristwatch with gold numerals.

I loved the watch best of all, and would hold it up to both of my ears to check my hearing, for it seemed to me that I heard better with one ear than the other. It was about this time that I became a compulsive worrier, afraid of anything that might be amiss with my body.

This was also during the time my baby brother had persistently swollen lymph nodes that alarmed my mother greatly. She wrote Grandmother asking for advice because she did not seem to have much faith in American medicine.

Grandmother wrote back. telling her that she should give him cod liver oil. But this seemed to make no difference in my brother's condition; in fact, the swelling moved from his neck to his armpits and even down to his groin. Mother was frantic. She tied a soft. warm kerchief around his neck so he wouldn't get a chill, and fretted out loud, "If he can live to be 4 years old, he'll be all right."

Although Mother seemed to lose faith in that suggested cure, it suddenly seemed that the watch Grandmother had given me was imbued with magical power: it already had dominion over my hearing, and now it somehow controlled my brother's life as well. I could not really make sense of that connection, but Time had almost become a person, much like my childlike idea of God.

Of course I asked Mother why she thought my brother would be all right if he lived to be 4. That is when she told me a story about my grandmother's life that has forever haunted my own: My grandparents' first two children had been boys, one named Alexander, after my grandfather, and the other named Boris - Axel and Bubi for short. When Axel was 4 years old and Bubi 2, Axel died of pneumonia. Then a few days later, Bubi succumbed of the same illness.

The nanny who helped with the children had been negligent, more interested in "amusing herself" (as my mother put it) with her boyfriend than in watching the time. The boys had gotten a chill on that winter day as they stood dutifully beside her on the street corner until she said it was time to go.

Grandmother never forgave herself, nor could she let her little boys go. Before the funeral, Grandmother bathed and dressed them on the dining room table, then turned the large, framed photograph she had of them standing beside their wood rocking horse forever facing the wall. She refused to place what seemed to her a torturously heavy marble stone on their twin graves. Nor would she allow their names to be carved onto the two little white crosses she planted above them.

My mother was one of four daughters born to my grandparents after the boys' deaths. When growing up, they always accompanied Grandmother to the cemetery and helped her to carefully rake the sand and wipe the "little brothers'" crosses. In a moment of despair, she had told the girls that she wondered if the family was destined to bear the curse handed down to them through the beautiful Polish Barbara, their great-grandmother, who had given birth to an illegitimate son of a feudal lord. That kind of curse was believed to follow seven generations of males.

As a youngster hearing this story, all I knew about curses had come from fairy tales. I didn't really believe in curses because in fairy tales, there were almost always ways to break them. Nevertheless, I found myself anxiously calculating the unborn generations that would have to suffer before they could be set free.

Happily, my own parents finally found a doctor who placed my brother in the hospital where after several weeks he miraculously - or so it seemed to me - survived.

Years later, when my own son Severin was born here in Carson City, what I had always considered merely a colorful family story that pointed to an ethnic culture's fascination with myths and magical thinking, became all too real to me: every time Sev was ill I thought "If only he can reach the age of four, he'll be all right." And then I was ashamed of myself for praying to Time.

Although my grandmother and mother were educated, worldly and practical women, they were not impervious to the power of our ancient culture's mythology. Nor was I.

In 1992, however, when my mother returned to Latvia after 48 years, she bought a marble headstone for the brothers she had never seen and had their names engraved on it. With this gesture, it seemed to me, she lifted the burden of Grandmother's sorrow and our family's curse with it.

• Ursula Carlson, Ph.D., teaches writing and literature at Western Nevada Community College.