What I didn’t forget were the stories my mother had woven. According to her, the drama began in Atlantic City sometime around 1923. My paternal grandmother—Olive Appleton—was just nineteen, the “beauty queen of Philadelphia” as Mom always described her, and she was competing in a pageant at the shore. At the same time, my soon-to-be grandfather was boxing in the same city, fighting under the name Pedro Campo and claiming a career in the United States Navy. Mom never explained how their worlds collided, only that they did, briefly and intensely.
What she did make clear—repeatedly—was that the subject of Telesford was forbidden. I was never, under any circumstances, to mention him to my grandmother. And I wasn’t allowed to call her “Grandmom” either; she insisted on Aunt Olive, a distinction Mom told me was necessary because the past made her hysterical.
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