intimacy and ice; How best to understand mysterious women.

Byline: Liza Ward

A woman displays her diamonds through the silhouette of a figure from an earlier time. Erwin Blumenfeld shows us a glimmer of the woman inside the woman, the jewel at her center. The snow on this woman's shoulders suggests something below the surface we can't quite make out. Her diamonds are lasting, tokens of love passed down through generations.

I can't help thinking of my grandmothers, neither of whom I ever really knew, and the way I came to understand something about them by the jewelry they left behind.

I was sitting on the bed in our summer home where my grandmother Elizabeth Ripley Cameron spent the last few years of her life, when my mother first showed me her jewelry. I was eight years old. There was a shaft of afternoon sunlight falling across the four-poster. It must have been midsummer, and death was still something vague to me, a dark and mysterious occurrence that made the grown-ups sad. I knew my father's parents had died suddenly when he was young, and I imagined the two of them, Clara and Lauer, faceless strangers, resting beneath a cornfield in a deep blue sleep.

My maternal grandmother's jewelry box offered me my first tangible experience with things that had belonged to someone who was no longer alive. I recall feeling slightly afraid when my mother opened the gold box in the shape of a dove and pulled out a tangle of amber and silver. The curved lid reminded me of my grandmother's humped back, the amber of something prehistoric and strange. I remembered the odd expressions she used to make, the failed attempts to relate to me. It was all somewhere inside that box. Those strands of amber, however, told me something about her no photograph could have captured. Each bead had, at its core, a unique formation of bubbles; a tiny string insect suspended forever in hardened sap.

A woman's jewelry: what is passed down tells us a story about her, lets us imagine the person she might have been. What did she wear proudly? What did she hide away? My grandmother chose to wear these simple cords of fossil resin instead of the family cameos with locks of hair tucked behind their faces, or the diamond mourning ring prominently displayed on the finger of her grandmother, Mrs. John Crosby Brown, in a portrait that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She sought to shed her Victorian ties, to redefine herself as a modern woman of the mid-twentieth century. At 20, she ran off with a man who lost all her money on the stock market; and when her only daughter was born to my grandfather, a Scottish immigrant and a professor of Greek philosophy, she refused to have the baby baptized. All these details have been relayed to me like a legend. There is a story about an emerald necklace once belonging to an empress left in a seat pocket on one of the first TWA flights and never recovered. But it is the solid amber that says the most to me about the woman my grandmother chose to be.

I knew even less about my father's mother, Clara Ward, who had been murdered along with my grandfather at their home in Lincoln, Nebraska, when my father ...