The Purse Inheritance

by Sheila Connolly

She pulled the battered box toward her and untied the faded ribbons.  Lifting the lid, she inhaled deeply of the scent that meant childhood to her—her grandmother's floral sachet, mixed with her mother's cigarette smoke.  Inside the box lay neatly wrapped bundles, each swathed in white tissue paper, tied with colored ribbon, a brief note tucked under the bow, in her grandmother's or her mother's handwriting…written on a "DON'T FORGET" pad.  How could she forget? 

No, I haven't gone over to writing women's fiction; this is a true story. 

Recently my sister moved into a new home, and in the process she was purging her place of unnecessary items.  Her concept of "necessary" and mine aren't quite in synch, but unarguably I have more storage space than she does.  As a result, I am now the designated custodian of the hereditary purse collection. 

We're not talking ancient or valuable here, except for the family associations.  What I have is about two dozen evening purses that belonged to my grandmother and my mother, and which date from roughly the late 1940s to the 1960s (including a tasteful black clutch I carried to my first formal dance in 1967).  And many are beautiful. 

My grandmother, in the
purse years

As I've no doubt mentioned before, my grandmother left her husband, after he'd decided he wanted to be a dairy farmer in Maine and failed, and she moved to New York City, where she found work during WWII.  When I say she found work, there's a story there too:  she was barely scraping by when she attended a funeral in New Jersey for an old family friend, where she met someone who was instrumental in getting her a job at Lipton Tea (and a ride back to the city, saving her the train fare), where she rose to the position of Assistant Director of Human Resources before retiring in 1958.  I'm guessing that the Golden Age of the Purses lies between 1945 and 1958, and I know the purses (along with my grandmother, of course) attended some fabulous events, including a dinner with the Queen of England. 

So the purse collection speaks of another time and place, the glamorous New York when there were still night clubs and big name bands, where you could sing along to golden-age Broadway musicals, and dine at the 21 Club or Le Pavillon or the Waldorf.  And you had to have the right purse for every occasion. 

Most of the beaded purses are French, a few Belgian, and the beadwork is elegant and intricate.  Most came from a small boutique called Henri Bétrix, on Madison Avenue.  I was probably there at some point—shopping was one of our traditional school-holiday pastimes when my sister and I visited my grandmother, and we were familiar with most of the high-end boutiques on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue, not to mention Tiffany's (we used to go in and try on diamonds for fun, when I was a child). 

There are those (like my sister) who would argue that I shouldn't be keeping such useless stuff.  But as long as I have space I'm going to hang on to things like these purses, not only because they belonged to people I loved, but also because they capture a moment in time, from a lifestyle now gone.  And I still visit the purses now and then and remember the women who bought them and carried them, which now include me and my daughter (who in fact carried the paisley purse on a recent trip to New York City). 

When the Ferry Is a Time Machine

Elizabeth Zelvin

I recently took a short ferry ride from the Battery, at the tip of Manhattan, through New York Harbor past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island, a trip that cost $9.50 and traveled 100 years into my family’s past.
The gateway to America for 12 million immigrants from all over the world in search of a better life between 1892 and 1954, Ellis Island has been completely restored and is now managed by the National Park Service as a monument to the melting pot that shaped American culture.

A French friend visiting from Paris suggested we go, but this was no mere museum trip or history lesson for me. Both my parents came to America through Ellis Island: my father from Ekaterinaslav in the Ukraine in 1905 at the age of six, and my mother from Papa in Hungary in 1906 at the age of four. I’ve always regretted that I never visited Ellis Island with them.
They went with a cousin shortly after the restoration in the 1980s, and both said that they remembered the Registry Room with its vaulted ceilings and high arched windows.
My mother’s most vivid memory was of her own mother, my grandmother, crying as she said goodbye to her mother, whom she knew she would never see again. My father remembered being given a banana as he waited to board the ship, and how, puzzled by this strange fruit, he bit into it skin and all.

The night before our excursion, I looked up Ellis Island on the Internet. The site www.ellisisland.com offers information about the Immigration Museum, while www.ellisisland.org allows users to search for passengers on the ships that brought the immigrants past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. At the click of a mouse, I found both my father, on the ship’s manifest of the Caronia out of Liverpool and my mother, listed as a passenger on the Deutschland, departing from Hamburg. I discovered that my Aunt Anna and my Aunt Sophie, younger than my father, were actually named Chane and Schifre. I already knew that my mother, named Judith (and called Judy her whole life, till she died at 96), got an inadvertent name change at Ellis Island, when an immigration official heard the Hungarian pronunciation Yoo-deet and wrote down “Edith”—which is how she was listed on the records I found. (Her official signature was always “Edith Judith” or “Edith J.”—though the only people who called her Edith were telemarketers.)

The cousin who visited the museum with my parents enrolled my mother’s mother, our beloved Gran, on the American Immigrant Wall of Honor outside the Great Hall, overlooking the harbor and the Lower Manhattan skyline.
When I emailed him, he reminded me that at the time, none of the cousins wanted to pay the hundred bucks to list our grandfather, who died long before we were born. Now I think I might go back to www.wallofhonor.com and do it. I was moved to find my grandmother’s name among the 700,000 remembered in this beautiful and historic spot.