History is written by the winners, George Orwell said, and this goes for family history, too. After finishing Miss Abby Fitch-Martin, you sigh in relief that the adage is true in this case. If Kataryn Loughlin and her little sister Esther survived to adulthood, it was despite the best efforts of their Aunt Abby.
“Aunt Abby” sounds far too familiar for this forbidding woman. She was, Loughlin writes, the “final synthesis of eight generations of Puritan ancestors, the last member of an intermarrying tribe who had persistently adhered to a family code of Pedigree, Prudence, Pride, and Purse.” Intermarrying is putting it lightly: not only did the Fitches and Martins and Fitch-Martins have a tradition of marriage between first and second cousins, but they also recycled first names, particularly Abby and Pliny, making Loughlin’s first chapter, “Family History,” a bewildering read.
But you can skip that, for soon the cast is pared down to the essential few. Kataryn and Esther are the survivors of the four daughters of Katherine Fitch-Martin, Abby’s half-sister, and the Marine of French-Canadian origin she married. When Katherine dies in a fire, the girls are left to their closest relatives: their grandfather, his daughter Abby, and his son James (from his second marriage and therefore, despised by Abby). When the girls arrive at the family home in Whitesboro, New York, Abby makes their situation clear: “You are the unwanted, unfortunate products of my half-sister’s ill-advised marriage and are only here temporarily, to humor my father.”
She then shuttles the girls to an empty, unheated bedroom and locks the door behind her. Kataryn is five. Esther is four. This is just the first of many nights they will spend cold and hunger in a household with more than ample means to provide for them generously. But Miss Abby Fitch-Martin is a pathologically mean and cold woman who proceeds to spend nearly twenty years denying them any form of material or emotional comfort.
Hers was a Puritanism distilled to its extreme. Meat was eaten once a week, and then it was a one-pound piece of steak divided into five portions with Abby always reserving the largest for herself. Kataryn and Esther were given one set of clothes, one pair of boots, one cotton coat for the bitter upstate New York winters. If their clothes were torn or became threadbare, Miss Abby gave needle and thread and instructed the girls to mend the garment themselves. If a classmate invited them in for a snack after school, Miss Abby forbade the girls from entering anyone else’s house and sent them to bed without supper. If a sympathetic parent gave them some trinket — a marble, a playing card — she confiscated and destroyed it, calling the girls thieves.
One summer when Kataryn was just eight years old, she so angered Miss Abby with some trivial infraction that her aunt threw her first belongings in a bag, took her to the train station, and put her aboard a train to Montreal, where the girl’s long-missing father was known to have some family. Miss Abby gave Kataryn a nickel and instructed her to “Find a relative in the phonebook and call them.” Miraculously, Kataryn made it to Montreal, given food along the way by fellow passengers, and with help from a kindly station agent, was able to locate a great-uncle with whom she was able to stay for a few months. But even that meager reprieve ended and the girl was returned to the “care” of Miss Abby.
Even a small school prize — a five-dollar gold piece — would be confiscated and disappear into what James called, “Aunt Abby’s insatiable maw.” She kept accounts meticulously and made a point to charge everything possible against Kataryn and Esther’s eventual inheritance: “A good quarter of her long life was spent at her desk, estimating and recording the minutiae of daily life.” In 1914, for example, she noted the fares for six hundred tram rides to Utica and back, all of them debits against the girls, as were the wages for the cook, half the food expenses, and all of the coal, water, and electricity used in the house.
If there was any relief from Miss Abby’s relentless neglect, it was thanks to their uncle James. A brilliant if eccentric man (he worked on a number of Esperanto dictionaries) and alcoholic, he convinced Abby on several occasions to allow Kataryn to “chaperone” him on a trip to a sanitarium in Colorado for “the cure.” On one of these trips, Kataryn grew so bored that she talked a couple from Arizona into taking her along when they returned home and she spent two months in the warm, relaxed atmosphere Flagstaff. Among other things, this book is testament to Kataryn’s incredible ability to avoid disaster.
Even when Kataryn managed an escape, earning a scholarship to college and covering her living expenses through a variety of jobs, Miss Abby’s thirst for retribution could not be satisfied. Just before the girl’s first year of study ended, Miss Abby traveled to campus and presented herself to the school’s dean, informing him that the only way Kataryn could have made her money was by “thieving and whoring.”
Kataryn and Esther married and freed themselves of Miss Abby’s control, but she then directed her still-generous supply of venom at poor Uncle James. After falling and breaking a hip at age 81, she insisted on being treated as an invalid, with James her only full-time carer, despite reports from neighbors that she could occasionally be glimpsed moving around the house on her own feet. When he finally collapsed and died of a combination of exhaustion and hunger, Miss Abby left alone — and triumphant:
She had regained her pinnacle. That her whole life had slipped by in the waiting was utterly unimportant. At long last, it was all hers again: the money, the property, and most of all, the sacred name. She, who had valued it the most, was the last ever to possess it.
One might ask, “Why would anyone read a book about such a nasty, petty person?” Well, for me, the answer is two-fold. For one, Miss Abby’s meanness is of such a magnitude and intensity that it fascinates in the depth of its blackness. She could easily take a place besides the worst of Dickens’s villains and leave them quaking. And for the other, Kataryn Loughlin is a fine writer who keeps her resentment simmering without ever letting it boil over. A good Christian woman, she married a sexton and the two of them cared for the Methodist church and cemetery in Vernon, New York, for over thirty years. Though she wrote hundreds of articles on local history during that time, Miss Abby Fitch-Martin was the only book she published. Kataryn Loughlin died in 1965 at the age of 57.