Family Ghosts: On What We Do and Do Not Learn About Our Parents

My mother married my father because she was fainting in the streets with hunger. She told me this one morning as she was getting dressed when I asked her, again. I wanted a story about a moonlit proposal, maybe Guv down on one knee (hard as that was to picture) but got, instead, desperation. Trish leaned into the mirror as she spoke, applying lipstick, expertly smudging her darkened eyebrows. I had followed her into the bedroom, hoping to have her to myself. On her dresser was a small maroon leather jewelry box that I was not allowed to touch, which contained a string of real pearls and a pair of screw-on ruby earrings that had been her grandmother’s. Sweet-smelling pink face powder was scattered across the dresser top, dusting a few coins, leaving a narrow silhouette when she picked up her wristwatch. There were no wedding pictures.

“We didn’t take pictures,” she said.

Why not?

I didn’t understand, then, how young eighteen was. I didn’t understand, then, how after a death everything can fall apart.

She wouldn’t tell me much about her wedding day, other than to say that no, she hadn’t worn a long white dress; she had worn a yellow suit. The war had just ended, she said. Nobody had any money for that kind of nonsense. And then she changed the subject.

I kept asking, though, hoping the story would somehow change. “Did you have a bouquet? Did you wear a veil? Did you have bridesmaids? Did you go on a honeymoon?”

No. No. No. No.

My mother came from a long line of strong-minded women. Her Croatia-born grandmother, Mary Anna Stublar, had been one of the first women in Montana to vote, riding her horse from the family’s mountaintop ranch during a blizzard to get to the polls. Mary Anna had three children: a son, George, and two daughters, Mary and Anna. George was a bachelor, living with his mother on the ranch after she was widowed. Mary was the dutiful daughter, staying close to home all her life. But Anna…Anna, Trish’s mother, was the youngest, headstrong and beautiful.

Anna fell in love with a railroad man named Bud Craig, a man her mother did not approve of (Bud was not Catholic), so Anna and Bud eloped to Missouri. I never met Anna, who died in a car crash before I was born, but if I could get Trish in the right mood, she would tell me a little about her.

My mother, Trish said, was tiny, dark-eyed, and vivacious, always flying out the door on her way to somewhere—her literary club, gardening, volunteering. She worked every fall as an election judge, sitting all day at a long wooden table, handing out paper ballots and keeping an eye on the voters, who stuffed their votes into a metal box. After the polls closed in the evening, Anna tallied up the votes by candlelight, jotting hash marks on paper with a pencil to keep track of the numbers. Sometimes she carried the ballot box home and stored it overnight in the dining room.

Trish said her mother did not talk to her much—Anna was very private, telling Trish what to do, but seldom why. And that habit seemed to have been passed on: Trish, in her turn, did not talk much to me.

Like her mother, Trish had two siblings: a baby who died in infancy, and a brother named James. James was six years older than Trish, adventurous and handsome, their parents’ favorite. He married a southern beauty named Ida Louise and then went off to war. World War II. I had seen his picture in the photo album: His eyes were calm and steady under straight brows, his knotted tie tucked inside his shirt, his army cap at a jaunty angle over his dark hair. Even as a child, I thought he looked too kind to be a soldier; in the picture, he wore the gentle hint of a smile. He was a paratrooper, and he was brave: he won a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and the Silver Star for valor, which he earned by dragging a wounded colleague to safety under heavy fire. He was twenty-three when he died, shot during the Battle of the Bulge just minutes after finding out that Ida Louise had made him a father. He peered around the side of a building and a sniper shot him in the head. Trish had never been close to her older brother, but after his death he became her hero. She once told me, “I weep for him every day,” though the times I saw her crying it never seemed to be about him.

After James’s death, Anna and Bud sold the house, sold everything inside the house, and left St. Joe. They could not bear to live there anymore, now that their son was gone. Trish was in Florida, at college, where she had gone to be near Ida Louise. Not quite eighteen, she no longer had a home. She went back to St. Joe and rented a room in a neighbor’s house, found a job at a department store. Fainted—not in the streets, as it happened, but in the department store elevator—for lack of food. Married my father.

Information was power. Guv dominated through legend; Trish’s power lay in silence.

This story didn’t mean much to me as a child. Didn’t all young people go off to seek their fortune, like in the fairy tales? I didn’t understand, then, how young eighteen was. I didn’t understand, then, how after a death everything can fall apart.

*

In September 1946, Trish and Guv were students at Quincy College in Quincy, Illinois. Trish was one month past her nineteenth birthday and Guv was twenty-one, back from the war and starting college on the G.I. Bill. Guv had chosen Quincy College because the parish priest had told his mother that it was a good Franciscan institution. Trish had chosen it because of Guv. Their wedding ceremony was to be a very private stand-up event with a justice of the peace, and then off to the first day of class. It was, Trish said, no big deal.

But it was a big deal to Gramma. Her oldest child, Leo—Guv—was not supposed to marry; Gramma had planned practically from the day he was born that he would grow up to become a Christian Brother, devoting his life to God, the poor, and her, not necessarily in that order. When she caught wind of the secret wedding, she clamped a hat over her iron-gray curls, put on her glasses, and drove hell-bent-for-election from St. Joe in western Missouri all the way to Illinois to stop the marriage.

Did she get there before or after the ceremony? I don’t know. All I knew was that there was an enormous fight. My mother would never talk about this, and it was Iny, Guv’s little sister, who told me this story—just one of dozens of Hertzel stories I grew up with. The stories were always dramatic. Many were violent, and some involved ghosts. Though they differed somewhat in the details depending on who was telling them, morphing and changing over time, the stories were always recounted as God’s honest truth. They were told without irony. They were our history, our identity, and our legacy. Surely nobody else had such a passionate, sensitive, interesting family. Surely no other family was bound as tightly as ours. Surely these stories set us apart.

The stories were, as I said, Hertzel stories. We grew up thinking that Guv’s crazy, hollering, ghost-fearing family of Irish and German immigrants was our only family. What about Trish’s side? Where were her stories? Trish rarely told them. Information was power. Guv dominated through legend; Trish’s power lay in silence.

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From Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth by Laurie Hertzel. Copyright © 2026. Available from University of Minnesota Press.