
I had always assumed that Grace and Mary were about the same ages, within a year or two, falling before the birth of the only son but after Lola and Pearl. Then one day, when I was old enough to understand, I witnessed Aunt Lola attacking her younger sisters for their failure to support Mary's son during a terrible crisis in his life. "You treat Carlyle the same way you treated Mary. You pretend he doesn't exist. All the time I was growing up, I was the only one who defended and took care of Mary. The rest of you ignored her." I was taken aback when I remembered a 1900 Census that showed that Mary was the second child, some six years older than Lola. So why was a child "caring for and defending" a sister who was much older than she was?
Again, family pictures bring a possible explanation. Mary appears only in formal, staged portraits, and she is always next to her mother, in at least one being held forcefully in place.
The other girls usually have characteristic expressions on their faces--Lola looking worried, Florence being smug, Minnie with a smile, my mother with her head cocked flirtatiously, Ella serious behind her glasses, and of course Pearl off to the side in her ill-matched dress. But Mary? Her expression is curiously blank. There's no personality there. Even in the four-generation portrait of her mother, her son, and her granddaughter, her face is vacant. The child is perched on her lap but her lands lay useless on either side of the child, not holding her as a grandmother might be expected to do.
Other census records offer a few more clues. At the age of two, Mary's son, Carlyle, appears in Lola's household, listed as her "adopted son." Ten years later he is living with his father. In both census records, Mary lives with her mother. Apparently she was not capable or interested in raising her own child.
I am tempted to guess that Mary fell somewhere on what is now the autism spectrum. There were also vague suggestions that she had an unusual birth -- perhaps "born with a caul," the rumor went -- a membrane over her face, or perhaps the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Perhaps she had experienced some sort of brain damage. Whatever the cause, it's obvious that Mary suffered from some disorder or disability -- something that was seen in the 1880s as shameful, something to be hidden away. How sad her story becomes in that light!
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