At eighteen, newly emancipated from her foster home, Connie asked her much older boyfriend to help find the father who disappeared fourteen years earlier. Her besotted suitor, a prosperous Chicago bar owner, hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to search. They found no trace of him and surmised that he had disappeared among the masses of people who migrated west during the mid-1920s. Or, perhaps, they said, John Linden was dead.
Almost a century would pass before his granddaughter—me—would learn how wrong the famed gumshoes had been.
After the Pinkertons delivered their findings, my mother abandoned any hope of seeing her father again. She stopped wondering why he left and why he never returned. Her curiosity had brought her no answers, nor any peace. It only confirmed her greatest fear: she wasn’t worth coming back for.
Eschewing curiosity became central to my mother’s parenting philosophy.
“What goes on in our family is nobody else’s business,” she frequently admonished my sister and me. “If someone asks you a personal question, ignore them. Walk away if you must.”
Mom made no distinction between being curious and being nosy. She saw inquisitiveness as a sin of the first magnitude, right up there with sloth and gluttony, and certainly worse than pride, envy, or greed. Inquiry, she taught us, invites misfortune. We are surrounded by dangers. If we don’t look for them, they may not find us.
She chided us for asking questions, even innocuous ones: where is your family going on vacation, when is your grandmother coming to visit?
“Don’t be nosy,” she’d hiss, silencing what felt like ordinary chatter among playmates. As an already timid child, her warnings fed my insecurity.
Our mother assumed her self-protective strategy also shielded her daughters, whom she loved fiercely, if at times erratically. She was blind to the notion that curiosity is a staple of a child’s healthy development.
–
Connie must have once been a bright and inquisitive toddler, but her mother’s death shortly before her fourth birthday changed everything. Soon after his wife died, Swedish-born John Linden, asked his daughter how she felt about leaving Chicago with him. Charlie and Ellen Swenson, elderly Swedish neighbors who had often cared for Connie during her mother’s illness, warned her they’d be stopping at roadhouses full of bad people. Little Connie told her father she was afraid. When she awoke the next morning, he was gone, leaving her in the care of the dour Swensons.
She never saw him again.
Connie didn’t perceive John’s departure as desertion. After all, he’d asked her to accompany him in search of a new life. With a child’s tragically convoluted logic, she believed she had abandoned him, and forevermore cursed herself for her cowardice.
“I should have said yes. I should have gone with him,” she lamented on the rare occasions when she spoke of her father, ice rattling in her third vodka tonic, eyes fixed on something far away. She’d been a frightened child faced with a decision she wasn’t equipped to make, and nothing I could say was of any comfort.
Connie’s early years were stable and largely centered around twice weekly visits to the strict Lutheran Church the Swensons attended, where Connie prayed for her father’s return. A few years later, though, Ellen died and Charlie married his brother’s widow. From the start, Hilma resented Connie. She urged Charlie to take a firmer hand with his now adolescent foster daughter. He began wielding a belt and Connie learned to lie easily, about where she went, what she did, and with whom.
To look at Connie as she entered adulthood, you’d never suspect her bleak childhood or the regrets to which she clung. A tall, striking blonde, she modeled for a short time after high school, acquiring elegant poise and an eye-catching fashion sense.
When Connie met my father, Walter, she knew instantly he was the one. His bespectacled brown eyes flashed with kindness, and his dry wit made her laugh. He was equally smitten with her, which made her feel something new—cherished. At thirty, Walter was eager to have children, so Connie never confessed that she neither liked nor wanted kids. She wanted Walter; if having children was the price, she’d pay.
–
Having had no mother to speak of, Connie was at a loss for how to be one. We, her daughters, bewildered her, and she, in turn, perplexed us. But with her adored and adoring husband at her side, she navigated parenthood smoothly.
Then, in the spring of my sixth-grade year, my father died after a prolonged illness.
Mom’s grief rendered her as fragile as the spindly glass figurines atop my dresser. Though only eleven, I sensed how close she stood to a precipice, and I treaded cautiously, unwilling to risk the loss of my remaining parent. I watched her suspend conversations or terminate phone calls when someone started asking questions. She’d shake her head in disgust, glaring at the transgressor’s departing back or the offending telephone receiver.
Mom ramped up her campaign against curiosity. We mustn’t talk about our father’s death, and never, ever, admit that cancer had been the cause. Cancer, a word spoken only in whispers, carried a stigma in 1964.
But why was cancer something to be ashamed of? There was no one to ask.
–
I didn’t voice my burning questions: What’s the big secret? Why must I withhold so much?
My friends were stunned. They hadn’t known my father was sick. I clumsily deflected their questions as best I could. In seventh grade, a boy named Richard asked about my family and how my father had died, I groped for an answer and finally stammered that I didn’t know. I felt foolish and ashamed. He asked me to the fall dance anyway.
The air in our home reeked of caution. I absorbed Mom’s reticence and learned to be guarded. I didn’t ask the typical questions of my friends: What did you write your English paper about? How was your weekend? Which boys do you like? And soon, they stopped asking me, and we all skated the surface of our friendship.
Though stifling curiosity is not the path to a rounded education, I managed to be an A student through high school without asking many questions. But when I headed off to college, I discovered diligent studying and strong test-taking skills were not enough. Curiosity would be essential to the next phase of my education. Questions weren’t intrusions: they were how I’d learn and connect, how I’d grow.
It felt awkward at first, but soon I learned how questions opened many doors—to friendships, to knowledge, to deep conversations and further inquiry.
If my mother ever pondered why I chose to study philosophy and Russian literature, she never asked. Later, when I established a career working with nonprofit organizations, she didn’t ask about that either. And when I’d occasionally tell her about my work and travels, she’d listen, but never voiced any curiosity.
Even when I was in my thirties and she was dying, our conversations never delved too deep beneath the smooth sea we had sailed together. We stayed close to shore, clinging to the safe and familiar to the end.
–
Three decades after my mother’s death, the mysteries of my family called loudly enough for me to answer. I wanted to find those missing puzzle pieces and to understand her elusiveness.
I had few remnants of my mother’s life from which to launch my inquiries. Mom had only one photograph of her father which she’d shown me just once. It’s a studio portrait in a leatherette folder, circa 1925, around the time her mother died and John Linden decamped. Following her death, I found it in a folder of her important papers. It was all she had of him. It was all I had of my grandfather.
“Isn’t he handsome?” she said that one time she’d shown me the photo, brushing a finger across the silky sepia image. John is handsome. He’s about forty years old, sitting in a chair with his legs crossed. He wears a dark, well-tailored suit, with a pocket handkerchief that matches his diagonally-striped tie. His receding hairline only adds to his distinguished appearance. He looks directly at the camera with a wide and confident smile.
In the photo, Connie perches on a stool beside him, one woolen-clad leg tucked under the other. She’s wearing a shiny dress with short sleeves and lace trim. Dark, polished Mary Janes adorn her small feet and her blond bob curls around her ears. She faces the camera shyly, leaning into her father.
I want to believe there were originally two copies of that photograph. That John kept one, treasuring it as his daughter had, perhaps occasionally tracing her face with a tentative finger.
I keep the picture near my desk and periodically study it to see if there’s anything I’ve missed, some clue as to why a father deserts his daughter. Death, I understand; John’s desertion, I cannot fathom.
Warily, I signed up for Ancestry.com, fearing both what I would and would not find. With this and other resources never imagined by the Pinkertons, I uncovered answers easily via census data and public records.
–
John Linden may have left Connie and his job chauffeuring a wealthy Chicago family in the mid-’20s, but by the 1930 census, he was back, living only blocks from the Swensons and his daughter. The 1940 census showed him living at a different address—still within walking distance—but with a new wife and stepdaughter.
Having emigrated as an adult with only an eighth-grade education, and perhaps limited by a heavy accent or his lack of schooling, John nevertheless pursued the American dream. In the 1930 census, he claimed to be a machinist, and in 1940, at age 56, a tavern owner. In 1950, John reported himself a bartender.
According to Mom’s lifelong best friend, she and Connie spent many evenings in local bars and night clubs, despite being underage. Connie passed for twenty-one even before she graduated high school. Did she ever frequent John Linden’s tavern? Did he pour her a drink as she sat on a barstool with her friends?
–
I’ve found some answers, but so many questions remain, questions that will never be answered: Where did he go for those few years and what brought him back? Why didn’t he ever contact Connie? How often did he think about her? Did he think about her? Were the Swensons aware of his proximity? Did he ever walk by their house on Warner Avenue hoping to get a glimpse of his daughter? Would they have recognized each other?
I uncovered snippets of his life: a manifest from a 1931 cruise he took to Cuba with his future second wife, their subsequent marriage, the marriage of his stepdaughter, who unwittingly assumed Connie’s place in his life and ultimately bore two sons who likely called him “Grandpa.”
What would John have been like as a grandfather? Did he play games with his grandsons, tell them stories, read to them? Did he ever imagine if there might be other grandchildren—girls, perhaps? Did he ever wonder about me?
Maybe curiosity was not in his nature, either.
John lived to be almost ninety, married to his second wife for more than 35 years. She died only months before him in 1973. How much, if anything, did his second family know about his first? The only survivors named in his obituary are his stepdaughter, listed as his daughter, and her two sons. Connie isn’t mentioned.
Had I come upon this information when my mother was alive, I hope I would have kept it to myself. Little good would have come of confirming she’d been erased from her father’s life.
–
I am still trying to understand my mother and the safety she sought through her carefully cultivated disinterest. What might she have been like had her curiosity flourished? Perhaps parenthood would have brought more joy and less trepidation. Perhaps we might have enjoyed a deeper mother-daughter bond.
Those few times in my childhood when Smirnoff’s lowered Mom’s reserve enough to talk about her father, he was still the hero of a four-year-old who said no when she should have said yes. I didn’t voice my lack of sympathy for my fugitive grandfather. I didn’t tell her I wanted to throttle him for the life he had sentenced her to. Her illusion was not mine to shatter, nor mine to embrace.
For most of my life, I saw John Linden as a weak man who deserted his child. I judged him for the impact of his abandonment on my mother, and the generational impact on his daughter’s daughters. Quitter. Coward. Deserter. I would once have chiseled these inscriptions onto his tombstone.
Today, though, fifty years after his death, and thirty years after his daughter’s, curiosity fills the space where judgment once dwelled. I think about the young wife he lost, whether he’d had the capacity to raise a child alone. Did he return intending to reunite with her? To watch over her? With each year, was it harder to claim the right to call Connie his daughter, or to consider himself worthy to be her father? Can I offer John Linden a grace I have long denied him? And can I extend that same grace to my mother? And to myself?
For me, curiosity has been a gift. The gift of connecting to an elusive and imperfect grandfather. The gift of a capacity to explore questions with an open heart. And the bittersweet gift of accepting that there are things we can never know.
–
Donna Cameron is author of the Nautilus award-winning book A Year of Living Kindly. She considers herself an activist for kindness, though admits to occasional lapses into bitchiness. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Eclectica, and many other publications. She lives in the Pacific Northwest where she loves outdoor activities that require little or no coordination.
© 2025, Donna Cameron
Halfway Down the Stairs 