My grandmother Betsey inked the white linen with the teardrop petals of bulbous red flowers and lettering fettered in a thick chain stitch. The once-red ink from her pen had turned a brick-brown by the time it came into my hands, the third generation of Gombos to add stitches to the altar cloth. I was ten; she was gone.
I don’t know why she never finished the altar cloth. I’ve never asked my father if she started it too early before her death to have the time, or if it was simply the rigors of raising her children while also trying to feed them which stole those hours from her. I only knew that it had passed unfinished to my father, and, unfinished, he had passed it along to me.
Looking
at the cloth, it was impossible to tell where Betsey’s stitches ended
and my father’s began. I wonder if she had taught him the craft herself;
I imagine them together, in the dimly-lit house in Bridgeport I’ve
never seen. She demonstrates practice stitches on a piece of scrap
fabric and a younger version of my father copies the movement; the
needle finding or creating a hole, the way it dips under one side and
raises from the other like opening a vein, the red thread spurting
outwards and upwards, trailing after the needle before she pulls it
taught, and that’s a stitch. I wonder if she spoke to him while she did
it, or if it was just a process of demonstrate and repeat. I wonder what
tone of voice she used- quiet and understanding or stern and harsh or
if she conversed jovially and didn’t discuss his efforts at all. I
wonder if she had a thick Hungarian accent or a barely-perceptible one
or none at all.
I wonder sometimes what her voice sounded like, what her perfume smelled like, what her arms felt like around me. I wonder if I would even recognize a picture of her if I saw one.
When I looked at the cloth I would mostly look at it in sections, only one cell of the grid at a time. But sometimes - only very rarely - I lay the entire thing out before me on my bed like a body on a marble slab and did a visual autopsy of it. My hands brushed the underbelly, ragged with knots, and bent close to try and see the tiny holes where the needle punctured the cloth skin. I examined the words - “Happy Easter!” and their Hungarian counterpart - forcing myself to commit them to memory and feeling so certain that I had succeeded and I would never forget them. Now when I try to recollect them I’m grasping at straws. I remember a capital “H”, a word which ended in “i”, a handful of accent marks over vowels I can no longer place.
Sitting alone in my bedroom, I tried vainly to recreate what I saw before me with no one to guide my needle or show me the stitches. I finished the last two petals of a five-pointed flower which had probably been begun before my birth. Betsey’s and my father’s petals were indistinguishably perfect; mine were small and lumpy with a puckered look to them which I could never really fix. More often than not I would throw the thing back in the metal box in my closet, some dumb container I had bought from the mall which happened to be the perfect size for the cloth and its needles and threads (so perfect it didn’t even rattle noisily when picked up or, really, let you know at all that something was inside it), and I would promptly forget it existed for months or years at a time.
Unfortunately, throwing useless things in the shadowy recesses of my bedroom was a habit of mine which my mother didn’t like. When I moved away to college it wasn’t uncommon for me to come home on a weekend to find my room rearranged and clutterless and a trash bag in my parents’ car bound for a donation center or the dump. Clothing I never wore, broken umbrellas with sentimental value, and preteen impulse buys were the typical offenders. It never really occurred to me to appraise what she had declared valueless and so the bags often went off unchecked or without much more than a quick glance in.
It was probably years of shrinking possessions and cleared-out burdens before I realized the scope of what these actions could mean. I thought I had nothing of real value. Then one day, while thinking about my newly-cleaned closet, fear made my heart pump water through my veins. I hadn’t seen the metal box since high school, maybe earlier. It had contained the only thing my grandmother and I had ever both touched, the one piece of Hungary that I had ever held with my own hands. When I asked them about it, my mother and father looked at me with blank faces and asked, “What box?” Nobody knew what happened to it, and I was so heartbroken and embarrassed at having been so careless that I’ve never told them what was in it. They’ve probably forgotten the whole thing.
Maybe it was for the best. Even if I ever finished it, what would we really do with a hand-embroidered altar cloth? My father would try to put it out on the table under a vase of flowers for Easter dinner. My mother - the American mutt with so many ethnicities that they almost cancelled each other out (Welsh and Scottish and Irish and a little bit of English and maybe even a touch of French, if you went far enough back) - would balk at the idea and demand it be framed and hung somewhere like an artifact in a museum, lovely to look at but too sacred to actually use.
I wonder what Betsey would have done with it - probably donated it to a church like the Byzantine Catholic one we’d gone to when I was young, where everything was golden and deep blood-red and smelled of strong, heady incense. My father would lift me up to kiss the icon of Jesus in the middle of the aisle when my parents went up for communion and I walked along at his side. The eucharist, sweet challah bread soaked in a goblet of red wine, spooned onto their tongues by a priest singing in Hungarian. I can picture the altar cloth under that tablet of Jesus and his disciples, the one which all the children in the parish kissed when we went up for communion. I wonder if Betsey pictured it there, too.
