Mary Catherine Lacy Toombs Hudson was my great-grandmother, born, as she often told us, the day the U.S.S. Maine was sunk in Havana harbor, thus "beginning" the Spanish-American War; actually she was born the day after, February 16, 1898. But that was characteristic of her stories: they were always just a little bit off somehow. She was also fond of saying, for example, that a Lacy ancestor of hers had been executed in the 15th Century for being a Protestant. (Given that Mother Toombs was a Southern Baptist, there was something about an ancestor being persecuted for religious reasons that appealed to her sense of melodrama.) We, being oh so clever, snickered and scorned: after all the Protestant reformation didn't begin until the 16th Century!
Much later, well after Mother Toombs (a name I invented for her, as the matriarch of the family) died, I discovered that our Lacy ancestors had been French Huguenots, and that although her century may have been a little off, her facts were pretty much spot-on. Now, of course, I wish that I had recorded the tales she told, because I'm doing genealogical research and her stories are one of the best resources I could find, if only they hadn't died with her. (Her Lacy ancestors--also spelled Lacey or Lassey or de Lassey--may also have been Normans who helped William the Conqueror defeat the English in 1066. Indeed, Hugh de Lacy was one of the guys who conquered Ireland for Henry II.)
She was from Richmond, Virginia, part of a typically large family, although the only sibling I ever knew was her younger sister Edna. Mother Toombs married my great-grandfather, RLT Sr. (I'm number four), a Richmond dentist who made her, as she proudly proclaimed, the first female dental technician in the U.S. But her longevity became something of a curse: she lost her first husband to, as I recall, a heart attack or a stroke; her second husband, Mr. Hudson, died apparently in a train wreck; and then her son, the Marine Corps major, died in his early sixties from lung cancer that was a plain result of years of smoking. I can remember her sitting in her chair after his funeral, saying to no one, to the world, "A mother is not supposed to outlive her son." But she did, by nearly fifteen lonely years. And although her own family was numerous, her descendants were not: one son, two grandchildren, and only five great-grandchildren.
Her last years were difficult: her local Miami doctor proclaimed that she had Alzheimer's, and never bothered to question whether that might be right. Certainly it seemed like Alzheimer's: I was staying with her during one summer home from school, and I would hear a sudden loud clattering from her room. I would find her rattling a cup against the window shutters, scared out of her wits and demanding to be taken away from this strange place and brought back to her real home. Dad tried to find a decent facility where she could stay, but she was miserable at every one of them, and eventually he sent her to Montana, where my aunt lives. There, a small-town doctor thought to ask some simple questions and, on the basis of little more than a family history, determined that Mother Toombs actually had diabetes, which was what was affecting her mental state. He began to treat her properly, and suddenly she regained lucidity for several more years. So much for our big-city Miami doctor.
But here's my favorite Mother Toombs story: in May 1984, my newborn brother Adam was going to be baptised, and it was my job to drive to Mother Toombs's house (which was in the opposite direction), pick her up, and get her to the ceremony. I was driving my step-mother's old Corolla, a nine-year old car colored an unusual shade of green that only had a couple more years in it; Dad had loaned me the car once I came of age, with one proviso: if I ever got a traffic ticket, my driving privileges would disappear. So I get to Mother Toombs's house and she's plenty old and doesn't move that fast, which means we're running late. I tried to make up the time on the freeway, and promptly got pulled over by the state troopers.
I explained to the officer why I was speeding. "Yes sir," I said, "I know, I was driving too fast, but you see my baby brother's baptism is this morning and it's very important to me, and--well, and the traffic is very light and I was being very careful but yes sir, I understand, I'll slow down and I won't speed any more and I'm very sorry sir."
The trooper looked like he was just about to let the whole thing slide when Mother Toombs, who had not said one word the entire trip, suddenly decided to help. She leaned over toward the trooper and declared, in her beautiful Richmond accent, "I told him not to drive so fast."
Oh yeah, you bet I got the ticket. The trooper looked at me as if I was this evil person, for imperiling this sweet little old lady, but how could he possibly have known the truth? (That's a picture of her below, taken only a few hours later, with baby Adam.) All I could was slump into my seat and accept the ticket and then drive, slowly and deliberately, to my brother's ceremony--which I still reached on time, as it happens.
She never said a word to Dad, though, and I didn't either until only a few years ago, when the Corolla and Mother Toombs were both long gone. Then, it was safe to tell the story; and Dad laughed long and hard, because he'd known her too and it sounded just like something she'd have done.
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