Linda Murphy Marshall - Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery

Using translation of languages as a metaphor to search for the meaning of family relationships, Linda Murphy Marshall takes the readers on a journey of recollection and compassion to understand her parents. Ultimately, Ivy Lodge is a story of self-discovery through the language of love, written in elegant prose. It is an extraordinary book.

Allison Hong Merrill,

author of Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops: A Memoir

With carefully crafted narrative, Linda Murphy Marshall has written the next great memoir about her painful and still-mysterious childhood. After both parents deaths, she returns to the family home, Ivy Lodgea grand faade that shrouds the emptiness inside. She moves from room to room, examining distressing memories that stem from her emotionally detached parents. A multi-linguist, Murphy-Marshall applies her considerable language skills to translate the dialogue that still echoes, ultimately accepting that some languages may be too intricate to understand. I highly recommend this first-time author and look forward to her next release!

Donna Koros Stramella, author of Coffee Killed My Mother

A comfortably white middle class American family living in the Midwest: what could go wrong? No poverty or alcoholism, no racial discrimination or physical abuse: how could someone raised in such favorable circumstances emerge so wounded? Linda Murphy Marshalls memoir takes us deep into the dys-function of one such family. In intriguing detail, she examines how seemingly ideal conditions can result in a lifelong attempt to translate parents actions into meaning. Many will relate to the lives it describes, prevalent and arguably influential in shaping our countrys social fabric as they are.

Chivvis Moore, Author of First Tie Your Camel, Then Trust in God: An American Feminist in the Arab World

IVYLODGE

A Memoir ofTranslation & Discovery

Linda Murphy Marshall

Copyright 2022, Linda Murphy Marshall

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-367-4

E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-368-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022900233

For information, address:

She Writes Press

1569 Solano Ave #546

Berkeley, CA 94707

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

Book design by Stacey Aaronson

All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

This book is a memoir. It reflects the authors present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.

writing is translation, and the opus to be translated is yourself.

~ E.B. WHITE

A room is the summation of all that has happened in it.

~ AMOR TOWLES, A Gentleman in Moscow

Ivy Lodge

My memories of that day remain sketchy. A foggy lens held at a great distance with unsteady hands. A scrim of years obscures the first time I saw Ivy Lodge the winter of 19591960. Like a movie you watched so long ago that you only remember liking it or not, not details of the plot.

Accompanied that day by my parents, my two older brothers, and my little sister, we had a mission to fulfill. Our father wanted to buy Ivy Lodge, wanted us to see itwanted our mother to see italthough I doubt our opinions of the property impacted his final decision.

In this memory Im nine years old, in fourth grade, short for my ageall six of us were. Janet was four, not yet in school. She looked like a mini-me, a smaller version with the same dark eyes, chin-length dark hair, Dutch-girl bangs. Steve stood several inches taller than me, in seventh grade, with dark features similar to Janets and mine, features our uncle referred to as Black Irish. My friends routinely had crushes on Steve because of his movie star looks, his charismatic personality. Sam, the eldest, in ninth grade, took after our mother with his lighter brown hair, blue eyes, more reserved personality. Steve, Janet, and I resembled our swarthy father.

Our parents met in college, marrying in 1942 at the height of World War II. More than ten years separated their eldest and youngest children, Sam and Janet, but moving into Ivy Lodge would create a chasm that made that age difference pale in comparison. The move would ultimately lay waste to our family of six, almost as though the home had been dropped on top of our little three-dimensional, six-sided cube, our personal Rubiks puzzleour familyshattering it in the process.

We didnt go inside Ivy Lodge that day, so I never took off my coat, but if I had, my outfit wouldnt have featured black. According to my mother, fast women wore black, women who had questionable morals, who tried to seduce men, whatever that meant. My mother forbade me to wear black until years later, high school. Even then I owned a single black jumper with nickel-sized gold buttons and a faux insignia. The buttons ran down the middle of my jumper. I balanced the black of the jumper with a white Peter Pan blouse underneath; the outfit made me look more nun-like than wanton woman. My mother neednt have worried; I knew far less than my friends about boys. I didnt learn about the birds and the bees until well into the eighth grade.

Even though only a few blocks separated Ivy Lodge from our home on Gill Avenue, Id never driven past Ivy Lodge with my parents. It wasnt on the way to or from anywhere in my limited world: not on the way to my grade school or the junior high or high school, not on the way to the shops in downtown Kirkwood, nor to downtown St. Louis. Nor en route to my grandparents home or any of my aunts or uncles homes. Besides, at only nine years old, I hadnt ventured too far from Gill Avenue.

Seeing the words IVY LODGE etched into the corner pillars that first day, I may have wondered about living in a house that had such a fancy name, not to mention two sets of pillars. Id been to Wilderness Lodge and Trout Lodge, both just outside St. Louis, but they were large resorts, open to the public. Why would someones private home be called a lodge? Werent lodges where men hunted, where deer antlers, bear heads, and game fish had been mounted on paneled walls? It made no sense, especially in Kirkwood, Missouri.

From my vantage point that day, I would have looked at the seemingly enormous home, much larger than the one on Gill that we would move out of, just three blocks away, and been puzzled. Maybe I deemed it too big for the six of us, thought it looked more like a hotel than a home, at least from the outside.