The Man Who's Not in My Family Tree

Pretty sure all my friends have heard me go on about my grandfather Edward Cheslik, who my father believes was a homosexual and who was certainly an alcoholic and an unreliable husband and father, as far as that goes. My father told me these things when I came out to my parents at 20 (if you accept my telling) or 18 (if you believe my mother). And when I say “told me” that’s short for “told my mother and she told me.”

This story, or these stories, or I should say the gaps in this story, are, I’m realizing, the driving force of my life’s work. In my twenties, I wrote a song called My Family Tree, the subject of which was not knowing anything about the man my grandfather loved. (My father has since changed the way he tells it — he used to say that his father disappeared several times, his mother tracked him down, and she always found him living with a particular man, but recently Dad told me that it was not the same man but always a different man. Though there’s no way to be sure, I’m inclined to go with the first version because my father often alters facts in stories in later tellings. But to be sure it is possible the revision is correct.)

The geography of my father’s childhood tracks his abandonment by his father. Lenore found Ed in Albert Lea, she packed up and moved the family to Albert Lea. Lenore found Ed in Waukegan, she packed up the family and moved to Waukegan — where my father met my mother and where I was born. Even a series of earlier moves within Winona, where they lived when my dad was little and where the Chesliks go back several generations, seem to have been prompted by a series of frustratingly undescribed “scandals.”

For a long time, that was enough to know. Or I should say it was enough to not know. Just the knowledge that my grandfather was probably queer, the sense of a forebear, was potent and moving to me. More recently I’m less satisfied. As I’ve studied more and more lives of gay people and seen how almost every biography is full of holes — holes created specifically, explicitly, by the imperative to preserve secrecy in order to avoid public shame, ostracization, injury, death: correspondence burned, personal papers burned, everything containing any hint of intimate or domestic life, any sign of love, destroyed, lost to history — I’ve become more angry, more unsettled, more heartbroken. Because it’s not just a family history lost but the history of a people.

I mean to tell Edward’s story in this book I’m writing, and I want more to tell.

My grandfather and my grandmother Lenore were divorced I think in the very late 1950s or early 1960s. My mother said that Ed held me as a baby, and then, after many shorter disappearances, disappeared for good. In 1965, he was found dead under a tractor trailer in Tucson where he had crawled for warmth and shelter. He was what they used to call a “transient” — homeless. He must have been carrying identification because the small article in the Arizona Daily Star about his death named him, and the coroner phoned his “next of kin,” his sister Sylvia in Minnesota. Silvia flew, alone, to Arizona to identify and claim the body of her brother. She and the minister were the only people at the funeral service. Edward Paul Cheslik was buried in Holy Hope Cemetery in Tucson.

Now I yearn for the seemingly impossible. Who was the man he left his family to be with? Or was it men? Where did they meet, and how? What could it possibly have been like to be a homosexual in small town Minnesota in the 1920s? 1930s? Where was Ed during the period after his final disappearance until his death a few years later? There are 1800 highway miles between Waukegan, Illinois and Tucson, Arizona. Why Tucson? Where did he stop along the way? For how long? How did he get by?

I found a woman on Ancestry.com, in that list they give you of “2nd/3rd cousin, shared DNA,” who had written a short remembrance of her grandmother Silvia Cheslik Luxem, Ed’s sister. I sent her a note asking if she had heard any family stories of Ed. She wrote back right away, having contacted an aunt who was Silvia’s daughter. The aunt remembered Ed and Lenore and that Ed had disappeared and the family never spoke of it, and she remembered meeting my father when he was a teenager and he showed her his model airplanes. Just reading these fragments of a stranger’s memory of my father and his family this morning I found myself suddenly crying, though it amounts to nothing much.

Most people research their genealogies, construct their family trees, based on marriage records, but of course there’s none of that. I know about Ed’s marriage, but that’s such a small part of his story.  Maybe one of the big questions I need to answer as I write this book is — what is the nature of a story that has been mostly erased, the only people who might have had direct memories of it all dead, about a man whose family for the most part wanted to forget and nobody living much cares about?

I just want to give Edward Cheslik’s life the dignity of being remembered, and I don’t know how to do that.