Chapter I 

I BEGIN

My mother was Corinne Elizabeth Cole Frith, third child of Everson and Helen Henderson Cole. I was named for my Great Aunt Ella Kirk, who was Great-Grandmother Lucretia Henderson’s sister.

My mother hoped that Aunt Ella, who was wealthy, and who shortened her name from Kirkpatrick when she tired of writing her whole name, would leave me some money in her will. She did not. However, she did leave me a Currier and Ives framed print of Little Ella sitting in a railroad car, her feet resting on a hatbox. The Ella of the print was a saucy little miss with long, thick golden ringlets and a pert, fine-featured face. She didn’t look like me with my dark, sullen expression.

Meanwhile, because of my mother’s little avarice, I was saddled with a name I hated. My family could have called me El or Ellie – I might have liked that -- but they didn’t. They called me Ella Jean. My father’s name was John; Jean means John in French, and my mother was a French teacher. It’s surprising the number of things Ella Jean can rhyme with on the playground.

All my life I have been the spitting image of Grandma Cole at the same ages and stages, and I have her dark brown hair and dark eyes. I am grateful for that as I would not have wanted to look like my Grandfather Cole with his aquiline nose and corpulent physique. Grandma was small and lithe, even when she was old and I knew her. I don’t know what I inherited from my father’s side of the family – perhaps a little more gentleness and patience to my nature than the Coles had, a little less of the killer instinct, although when pushed to the limit, my patience thins.

Introducing My Mother

My mother, Corinne, was a child of Neville Island. The direction of her life was determined by the family and events that shaped her earlier years. She broke away from much of the life she had known on either farm, harboring some resentment toward her father for making it necessary to find her own way. But she had goals, and she set out to achieve them with a strong and determined will to make her dreams a reality. She made her life very different from that of her mother.

Like her father, who spent the rest of his life trying to obtain satisfaction from the government for what it took from him, my mother spent hers trying to regain what she saw as her rightful place in society. She was not fixated on the money, being content with our own modest house in an upscale town. Instead, the way she viewed others, and the way she perceived their view of her, carried back to her childhood as the daughter of one of the first families of Neville Island. Our lives were ruled by what the neighbors might think and her unsuccessful struggle to be accepted into the inner circle of the social elite.

As the younger daughter on a busy farm, Mom had grown up to be independent. She often attributed her upbringing to her older sister, Gladys, but as she grew older, Gladys was seldom at home. Mom loved her mother, perhaps out of a sense of duty, but my grandmother was taken up with the chores of the farm and didn’t develop a close relationship with her younger daughter. When Mom was a child, her mother told her she was ugly. So who was her role model for motherhood? She designed her future based on what she gained from books and her dreams. That future surely included children, but she never got past the idea of children in order to grasp the reality once we were there. In her mind, her dream children followed her design. They were one-dimensional.

A romantic, she dreamed of faraway places and a faraway life. She had spent her girlhood seeing Gladys, her Grandmother Cole’s favorite, getting all the advantages: the good school, the clothes, the piano lessons. Struggling through her sister’s books, Mom taught herself to play the piano. She adored Gladys but felt the unfairness of the situation. With her father’s aquiline nose, Mom was not a beauty, but she had a forceful personality, and a certain attractiveness, like Mary Ann Cole in many ways. She had determination. Her father squandered her inheritance, and she harbored some resentment, as did her sister, but my mother would make her own way. 

Mom – Houghton and Cornell

Gladys went off to Houghton College with tuition paid for by her grandmother. Since her father had lost her education money, Mom had given up her plans to follow Gladys to Houghton, and was preparing to settle for a career in nursing at Mercer County Hospital. She had arrived there to prepare for her first term. She was no sooner settled than she had a visit from an admissions representative from Houghton, who offered her the opportunity to attend college with a scholarship and a job taking care of the dean’s children. She immediately left Mercer and headed north to the Genesee Valley.

Now my mother pursued her interest in foreign languages and dove into the study of French and Latin. She attempted a course in German, but hated the guttural sounds and masculine orientation. The sounds were not romantic. By comparison, French was everything she dreamed of; the musical cadences of the language, the romance and color of the culture, and the literature that enthralled her. Latin was a practical "also ran." She became proficient in both and vowed to become an expert on French language and culture. She took a second major in religion, influenced by her early life. She graduated as salutatorian of her class and had been valedictorian of her high school class of six in Sandy Lake.

She didn’t stop there. She went on to a graduate program at Cornell University and obtained a scholarship that financed a summer studying in France. Gladys’s husband, Arthur, had become the principal of the Tompkins Cove High School in Rockland County, New York, and had an opening for a French and Latin teacher. Being more than qualified, Mom was summoned from Cornell to fill the slot. She was also required to teach a course in math, her weak area, but her joy at the opportunity overshadowed that detail. She would worry about the math when the time came. Gladys and Arthur had room for her in their house, along with their small children, so the matter was settled and she transferred to Columbia University in New York City, to complete her master’s degree.

It’s odd that Mom, who had a major in religion that she kept in close touch with all her life, and a master’s degree in Latin, who was traveled and cultured, believed in ghosts. She passed this down to her daughters. When we were young, we would go by Spook Rock on our way to visit our Grandmother Frith in Haverstraw – at least monthly – and we would wait until we came to it, then stare avidly as we passed, hoping so see some wraith flitting around. We never did, not even on the way home in the dark.

Mom said that ghosts can’t hurt you, being spirits that are just restless over some unresolved facet of their lives. She cautioned that you could hurt yourself with fear of them, however, and that some ghosts, less cordial than others, might try to cause you to do that. None of us ever saw any ghosts, but we don’t know. We just don’t know....

Romance Finds My Mother

Soon after her move, Mom discovered a French restaurant in Haverstraw, a larger town on the Hudson River near Tompkins Cove, and she became acquainted with the chef. She often went there to practice her French conversation in the evening after her friend’s workload had slackened. There was a young man who had the same habit, but on a different evening. He had studied French in college and wanted to polish his conversational skills. The romantic chef arranged for them to come on the same evening and my mother met John Frith, an engineer with AT&T in New York City.

After a whirlwind romance, my parents were married in the living room of Gladys and Arthur’s house. Mom had vowed never to have my grandmother prepare a wedding meal for her after remarks made following Aunt Gladys’s wedding to Arthur. In her memoir, my mother described her wedding to my father:

"An intense courtship preceded our wedding on December 28 (1937). The Christmas holiday seemed a good time to take a honeymoon at the Cole farm where John could meet my family.

"John’s relatives and friends gathered in the living room where the ceremony was to be performed. Unknown to John and me, my brother-in-law had invited a few of my students to watch the ceremony. The students had gathered quietly on the front porch.

"Reverend Oliver stood up as a signal for the bride and groom and their attendants to take their places. As they did so, the best man took the place next to the bride. John, suffering, no doubt, from the usual attack of nerves for the groom, did not immediately take a hand in the situation. The bride was left to deal with the terrifying fear of being married to the wrong man. The pastor stepped forward and laid a hand on an arm of the offender, while John took the other arm. They calmly moved the best man into place, leaving space for John to slip over next to his bride.

"The ceremony proceeded without further incident. The time came for the bride to toss her bouquet. As she took her position on the stairs, Arthur opened the door for the students to come into the hall. My two nieces and the students stood eagerly awaiting the toss. Inevitably, the bouquet was caught by one of the students.

"There was time for visiting and congratulations while food was put on the table for a sit-down dinner. Gladys very competently carried out that part of the reception. I was glad that Mother did not have that responsibility as I remembered her reaction after my sister’s wedding.

"By nine o’clock on that dark, cold winter’s night, John and I had said our goodbyes to the wedding party. We got into his Buick and off we went on our trip to the Cole farm to introduce their new son-in-law to my parents and two brothers – the wedding was a deed, ‘deja fact.’"

Nancy and I Arrive

My parents moved briefly to an apartment in New York City near my father’s office on Canal Street, but they soon bought a new house across the Hudson River in Ridgewood, New Jersey. We lived at 33 East Glen Avenue, and our phone number was Ridgewood 6-0489. There were no area codes or zip codes then. My sister and I were both born while our parents lived there, although I was born at St. Luke’s Women’s Hospital in New York City, and Nancy was born in Hackensack, New Jersey.

My Father and Nancy

My father was a very sweet-natured man, quiet and unassuming. He had a spinal curvature from a teen-age biking accident when he was thrown over the handlebars while delivering groceries after school. Dad put up with my mother and her social climbing ambitions, and her imperious ways, and with me and my creative imagination that sometimes led me down dangerous paths. When I was older, Nancy told me he worried that once I was off on my own, I would become a drug addict or worse. I don’t know why he thought this as I had no leanings in that direction while I was still at home. He did tend to be an excessive worrier, and some of his worrying might have had a basis in reality, but a potential for drug addiction wasn’t one of them.

I had really liked being an only child, but that came to a crashing halt once my sister arrived on the scene. Not only did I have to put up with this creature and share my parents’ attention with her, but I was forced to give up my cat, Angel. My mother held the old-fashioned belief that cats sucked the breath of babies and she wasn’t taking any chances with Nancy. Angel was wrenched from my life, taken to my father’s sister’s farm, and released – never to be seen again.

As a child, Nancy, three years younger than I, had a round face and long blond hair, that my mother would brush into corkscrew curls. Everyone was always saying how cute she was. I wondered what that made me. I had wanted a brother – I could have tolerated that better. Nancy considered herself a tomboy as a child, but as she grew older she became more like my father’s side of the family – practical and something of a doubter.

One thing stands out in Nancy’s mind. "Grandma really knew how to spit. I remember her walking me to the dentist’s when I was in first grade. She could spit through her teeth farther than any of the boys I played with." Nancy has remained aloof from Cole intrigues. She denies taking any particular pride in being descended from the Cole line, but, by whatever means, pride of family that Mary Ann Cole personified, nonetheless permeated her being. Nancy caught the feeling that she needed to present a certain level of decorum to the world. I suppose I had that, too, as I got older.

Reflection

It occurs to me that if things had turned out differently, if Grandpa Cole hadn’t lost the farm and the family had remained on Neville Island, Aunt Gladys would not have heard about Houghton College and would have continued to attend Margaret Morrison, the women’s division at Carnegie Tech, as Mary Ann Cole planned for her. She would not have met Arthur Bernhoft, married him and moved to Tompkins Cove, New York. As a result, my mother would not have gone to Houghton, would not have gone to live with Gladys and Arthur, and would not have visited the French chef in Haverstraw who introduced her to my father. I would not exist. For that reason, I look with mixed feelings on the life-changing event that befell my family -- the loss of the Neville Island farm and the move to Sandy Lake.

 This was my family when I was young. We were always a little closer to the edge of normalcy than other families, but never went too far over. My mother was ahead of her time in some ways, but living in the past in others. I certainly never fit into the mainstream socially. We had our idiosyncrasies that made us odd, but not bizarre.

During these years, our bedtime stories often consisted of tales of Mom’s family origins. Nancy and I clamored for stories of when she was a little girl on Neville Island. She always obliged. Many of our cousins heard the same stories – or the versions as experienced by my aunt and two uncles.

When I was older, some of my cousins and cousins’ children began to research the facts. They searched archives and interviewed the last generation who still remembered the island and what happened there. What follows begins the Cole saga.