Mystery woman
Suzanne Berne never knew her alluring, gone-before-her-time grandmother, Lucile. But neither did Berne’s father, Lucile’s son. Lucile, who died from cancer in her early 40s, left behind a 6-year-old bereft by her absence, with only a few sore memories of her life. Berne, a fiction instructor at Harvard Extension School, grew up witnessing her father’s ache and fixation over the lost Lucile. He repeatedly told Berne, “I never had a mother.” “That became more and more difficult to hear,” she said. “He blamed everything that went wrong in his life on her.” Lucile was destined to remain a ghost, if not for Berne’s rediscovery of an old childhood tin of knickknacks. Sifting through these artifacts, taken from her grandfather’s attic when he died in 1973, Berne found they were keepsakes that had once belonged to her grandmother, small clues to her life. “Even at 12 I was interested in this woman,” she said. Now in...