Don't Mess with the Redhead!

There's Sandra Su. She was born first and was the dearest, smartest, most talented, most to be admired child ever to walk the earth--except maybe for Shirley Temple whom she resembled. I knew her primarily from photographs in Grandma Klimek's living room in town. After Grandma told me all the wonderful things about my older cousin, I would visit each of her photographs, show them to my little friends, and imagine myself being able to do everything this Shirley-Temple-like-child did. In one large portrait Sandra Su is a ballerina posing en pointe and wearing a tutu. In another she must have been dancing to "The Good Ship Lollypop." I simply can't see re-runs of Shirley Temple without thinking that, really, the little girl on the silver screen is actually my cousin.

She is the eldest daughter of my mother's brother, Pete, and his wife,  Alice Lou. She is Sally Su's older sister. Sal may have not yet been born when Sandy and I posed for this particular photo. Likely it was taken during WWII. when Pete was shlepping Admiral Halsey through gunfire around the South Pacific. I don't recognize this house. Maybe it was where she lived in Iowa. Maybe it was Christmas; she looks pleased with that stuffed animal, and the tree seems to have lost a branch being hauled in or out. Whatever she has, it would have been her right to have it, being as wonderful as she was, but I don't really look all that happy, do I?

Sandy was just that much older than I to separate us during childhood. Even once the war was over and Pete's family spent summers in Baudette, it was Sally with whom I played, and Sandy found friends closer to her own age who lived in summer homes along the river not far away.

Sandy Su, Mary Jane, Sally Su

This was sort of the way it must have been. Probably I wanted to BE my cousin Sandy. I can already see in our faces the women we would become in later years.And look! Someone made us identical dresses. Probably that would have been Aunt Eva. And we even all ended up sixty years later wearing our hair in the same styles. Amazing!

We weren't sisters, after all, even though the grown-ups showed us off from time to time as if they wished we were. Both Sal and I depended upon Sandy as a kind of miniature adult; both of us rebelled against her restrictions and attempts to remind us that we were the little ones, subject to her rule. But that's the way it is in every family, right? Except for that one detail -- we were not sisters, and at the end of the summer they would return to Iowa and I'd become an only child once again.

Are children trained by life for the challenges that will visit them as adults? When I look at the three of us, I think maybe so. And since I'm gazing most intently today on Sandy, let me just say a few words about how Life insisted she be strong. She was the first in our family to work towards an advanced degree. Hers was in business. She became a college educator. She married a fine man who, midway along his road of life, was striken by a rare disease that would make him an invalid and Sandy a caretaker for the over twenty years remaining to him. She educated herself in the politics and practices of doctors, nurses, hospitals, government laws concerning health care -- and often knew a whole lot more about how to keep her husband, Wood, alive than they did. Their hearts might have fallen into their stomachs when they saw her coming. She dedicated herself. She became a Bear, a Harpy, an Archangel, a Goddess of protection. Wood used to laugh: "Don't mess with the Redhead!" He knew he could count on her. We all knew he could count on her.

And at the same time she continued to teach, she supported the family, she masterminded a new house where he'd feel stronger, on a lake where he'd enjoy the ducks and the boat, she survived breast cancer.

Wood lived longer than anyone could imagine. When he did die, Sandy lost herself for a while. We who have known widowhood understand that. Physically as well as emotionally she had taken a beating. She began needing to use her vast education of the American medical system to intervene for herself. And she did...she does. At present she's recovering from surgery to replace her shoulder. And here's something quite wonderful -- she can still count on her friends from childhood. Even if they live halfway across the continent they keep in touch. There's something more than special about our Sandra Su. There's an honor she's held up. There's a faithfulness, a tenacity, a courage with which she continues to face each moment.

Thanks, Sandy. I've always been grateful for your presence in my life.

Red Ball

Imagine her walking towards the woods behind the lodge. She'd been warned. There would be danger there. But imagine it anyway, though she wouldn't really do it because of the fear. One could venture only just so far away from home before the drop off where land disappeared as it did in dreams and in what they called imagination. Land didn't actually drop off like that, but she wasn't sure. So imagine it. Pretend she did step through the ferns into the tall grass and past the first tree, the territory of porcupines, skunks, snakes, weasels and wolves. What if she hadn't stayed in sight of the ice house and the garage, the lodge, the cabins, and Johnny Shellum's little shack papered inside with bathing beauties. What if she had been like Eve and disobeyed the order of the gods? What would she be like today?

I wondered this on a day in the early 1980's when Pat Kelly (my husband then) visited what was left of the old Klimek's Lodge. Not much. The lodge itself had been torn apart, sections of it moved and turned into cabins, much of it just tossed out as trash. (Maybe these thoughts should be saved for the ending of this Lorelands blog, but I'm thinking of it now. What can I do? I'm only the writer.) Pat and I wandered an unfamiliar landscape. "I think this is where the ice-house used to be..." and "there once were beautiful rocks along the shore. One was crystalline and Mary Jane would pretend to be inside it, following the fissures like roads to the interior."

We walked towards the woods where Grandma Klimek's daisies used to grow. The big tree where Mary Jane's swing hung--gone. Where was the spot she buried the baby chick? Where did she dance around the grave of Sparky the dog? The earth had reconfigured itself.

Is this also what becomes of us, the individuals who occupied a place? Are we as ephemeral as the land we once thought to be secure? So stable and so steady that even if everything else changed, the land would remain. And then it doesn't.

There is something more here than the once stunning notion that we can't go home again. Better is the poet's insight that we can go home again but only after long explorations, and then in the keen sight of a life intensely lived,  we can finally know the place, the essence of the soul, for the first time.

We walked the forest's edge. Maybe it was the wrong time of year for wildflowers. Leaf-green and the deep red of sumac curtained the interior. Pat was pointing: Look! A spot of red almost hidden in the long grass. Too round to be a sumac leaf. What? I went towards it.

Whether it had survived or returned there every time a spirit of innocence ran laughing at the forest's edge really didn't matter. Whether it had belonged to Mary Jane, a true archaeological find, or to a succession of individual children over the years, these details rarely matter to the heart. I laughed, feeling I'd found a bit of her, a round of color in a shaft of summer sun.

A child's red ball.

(Images copied from Google Images)

Things Unknown

The more I think about my grandmother, Elizabeth Catherine (Friesinger) Klimek, the less I know her. She left a lot of hints and rumors behind her, but no diary or letter or journal. She left her name on legal and business documents as well as on the cover page of several prayer books. She left some photographs. 

Who was she? About twenty years ago I began to write a novel based on the hints and rumors. What I couldn't know as fact, I would fill in with imagination. I've re-written this novel nine times, and I'm back to writing it yet again! 

It began with a phone call from my cousin Don Lore who at the time was rabid about genealogy--tracking down the Lore side of our family. In the process he checked census records throughout Minnesota and happened upon early records of the Friesingers in Morrison County. Lizzie was still at home in 1900, and was twenty years old. She had a sister, Eva, who was five. WHAT????? Why had I never heard of this Eva who would have been an aunt to my mother? The only Eva I knew about was my own Auntie Eva, my mother's older sister, my grandma Klimek's first daughter. MAYBE her first daughter. The first Eva was listed as Lizzie's sister, as I said, which would have made her the daughter of my great grandmother, too old at the time to have borne her. Then, in the 1905 census this first Eva had disappeared. She didn't live with Lizzie's parents; nor did she live with Lizzie and Anton Klimek and their little son, Paul. She would have been ten years old, and she was nowhere. 

I called my Aunt Eva and  questioned her about the mystery. "There was no other Eva," she insisted. "Maybe it was the Klimek family. I think they had an orphan come up the river on a malaria boat. Lots of orphans came to farms that way those days. She grew up and married a fellow from Minneapolis. They lived on Chicago Ave. But she died early--32, I think she was. Her name was Mary." It didn't sound like the same person at all. I said that. I wanted to know if my grandmother could have given birth to this first Eva and passed her off as a sister. It's happened, I reminded my aunt who exploded in anger. "Don't you be saying such things about my mother!" And she hung up. Hum. What DID happen to the first Eva? I believed the census: she was here and then she wasn't.

Families hide their secrets like heirlooms. At one time everyone knew the value of the treasure. But after generations pass a forgetting sets in. The hint of meaning either points to something valuable, or it points to nothing at all. But the compulsion to find the hidden heirloom of a family story remains powerful. 

If there was a first Eva, what kind of effect might that person have had upon the family's history and all of us who share it. How did her presence as secret, as hint or as reality create my grandmother to be the person Mary Jane knew? And since this Grandma Klimek became such a power in all our lives, how might knowing the first Eva's story have affected that.

We have only a name and date inscribed upon the census record. A hint. And I'm writing. Here's a small scene in which the grandmother character is looking at her treasures and remembering:

A slower pace might serve me better, she thought as she prepared herself for bed. She sat in front of her dresser and opened the bottom drawer where she kept things too beautiful to wear. Now and then, when she felt her blood pressure rising, and when her head began to buzz, she opened these drawers and took each article of clothing out of its tissue paper wrapping to lay it on the bed and admire it. The bedroom lamp cast a rosy glow over the contents of the drawer as she removed the delicate lace and linen handkerchiefs, then the silk undergarments. She ran her hand over the rose colored panties, much too fine to wear, almost too fine to touch, especially if she had been cleaning house and her fingertips had cracked from the lye soap. She opened the silver colored box and, careful not to wrinkle it, folded back light blue tissue. It pleased her every time because the tissue wasn’t white, wasn’t ordinary, just as the cobalt blue satin nightgown in the box had nothing about it anybody could call ordinary. The little card from the store in Roseau remained tucked in the corner of the box exactly where she found it years ago. She lifted the nightgown from the box, stood up, and held the gorgeous thing to her body. In the full-length mirror on the front of her wardrobe, she could see that the gown still enhanced the color of her skin and brought out in her something that was once quite stunning. She folded it again and hid it between the layers of blue tissue, thinking as she did so how this had been her way for so many years that it, too, was now a part of her, perhaps her essence, though she hoped that it was not.

                There was more. Much more. Her dresser drawer contained photographs. The red enameled box filled with letters. Boxes and boxes of jewelry, stylish in its day.  A faux-pearl ring. A bracelet made of rosy gold. By the time she reached the bottom of the drawer, she had covered her bed with finery. She felt high, as she used to in prohibition days when she drank too much bootlegged Canadian Club whiskey. The one box remained at the bottom of the drawer. Usually she would leave it there, unopened. What was the use? She knew what the box held. But she wanted to see, to gaze on the shawl, to close her hand around the cool amber.

                She lifted the box from the drawer and set it on her lap. She took a deep breath before removing the cover. The sight of the blue silk brocade shawl, unchanged over all these years, drove her heart up into her throat. Her breath caught on it. She made a little sound, involuntary, a moan. Her hand, seeming of his own accord, moved to the pendant on its gold chain, the smooth German amber containing the honeybee that lived a million years ago and had been trapped and preserved all that time in the sap of an ancient tree. She stared at it as though she had never seen it before, and holding it in her hand, felt almost worshipful, as though she held a relic and had become lost in contemplation. She sat for what must have been an hour holding the pendant, surrounded by the things too beautiful to wear, until her breathing deepened like the breathing of someone in a dream, and the buzzing in her head disappeared. Then she returned the pendant and the shawl to their box and replaced it in the bottom of the drawer. On top of it she organized all the other finery, closed the drawer, and turned out the light.

Cover Art

A Massive Love

Sally Su and Mary Jane

My cousin Sally Su had curly blond hair; Mary Jane wanted curly hair. Sally Su could hang by her knees upside-down on her swing set; Mary Jane worried she might fall on her head. Sally Su took off all her clothes and ran from the Wigwam Lodge to Klimek's Lodge; Mary Jane couldn't believe her daring. Sally Su pinned diapers on frogs and set them loose in the reeds. Sally Su sang "I'm A Little Puffer-Belly" on a makeshift stage and all the tourists clapped.

See how Sally looks straight into the camera; see how Mary Jane looks sideways, leans away from what is taking place. What is the meaning of this? Watching these two from my chair in the future of over sixty-five years, aware of the lives they stepped into after the day of this picture, I have to say not much has changed in the archaeology of their personalities. They became simply more of what they were. She still faces life head on. Mary Jane...well...

Always I assume there is a meaning. I've studied life through the filter of that belief from the beginning as though presence of meaning is obvious; if I can't find it, it's my duty to keep searching. This is part of what keeps the child in me hidden and requires that I find her, finally, while I still have a chance. Because it was a mistake from the beginning; the truth seems to be that meaning is never obvious. It's as the poet says:

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment.

This I know: few persons will stay with you forever. But Sally stays. I knew that even after I left her to enter the convent, during those years that Mary Jane was veiled from everyone, even her. Secretly the thought ran through my mind that if I had to stop being a nun, if I had to leave this enclosed place, I would go to her. She still would be there. She would look me straight in the eyes, telling me I would survive this, and I would believe her.

She did this for me every single day after my husband, John Weber, died. Every single day she called me with encouragement in stories, in laughter, in tears, in a voice full of faith in my tenacity. She did this for an entire year.

Sally has a gift of passion. She consumes the present moment with a passion few know and more than a few cannot abide. But she will hold tight to you even as her rage erupts over some injustice. Even if she slams some door, she'll be waiting on the other side. She acts life out for you, right in your face, all the magnificent passion of it, and you can either take it or not, but she stays. In her heart she stays. She won't flinch when she loves.  And her love is massive.

A Mystery of Iniquity

1946

In this picture Grandma Klimek looks worried. Or possibly she isn't worried so much as simply concerned that things go well with the picture-taking, and was caught making a suggestion that would create more order, make things right. She had a knack for that, I think now, looking back. The beauty and order of her dining room at the Lodge. The perfection of her kitchen back in town.

Hers was a large kitchen with white metal cabinets on the two walls above the sink, the counters, the stove and refrigerator, and a large freezer chest that she had purchased as soon as such appliances were available for homes. On the back wall two windows looked out on the alley behind the bank and post office. A door led outside past a wild rosebush onto a path leading to her garage. On the opposite side of the kitchen were a table always covered with a fresh embroidered cloth and surrounded by four chairs. By the opening to her bedroom her black telephone sat on a round dark wood stand. The room is a map in memory, perfectly laid out, real as if I'd just had my eyes open to look at it, then closed them and saw each image reflected on the inside of my lids. By now, I suspect, it exists nowhere else in this world. I see the room as it looked when I entered it through the living and dining room from the street. I look from left to right, seeing each object, placed exactly as she wanted it. There's no photograph of that room; why would there be? It wasn't like the rooms at the Lodge. It wasn't staged. And photographs had a rarity back then. People took pictures of the extraordinary and of what was loved. A room like this? Well, who knew something so commonplace would end up etched with such love on memory?

Grandma made hot chocolate here. She burned the tips of her fingers when the gas fire flared. She laughed and made her coffee cake. She sat by the telephone, lifted the receiver. She knew the switchboard operator by name. She started telling stories here in the kitchen on those nights Mary Jane stayed with her after her Grandpa died. And this was the kitchen through which Mary Jane ran on the day she tried to escape what I now would call the mystery of iniquity.

~~~~~~

Sister of St. Joseph from a book published in 1948
to celebrate 300 years since the founding of  the Congregation

The arrival of the Sisters every June was better than a circus coming to town. They stayed in our town for two weeks every summer and taught "Catechism" to prepare the children for their First Confession, First Communion and Confirmation. They arrived in a billowing of veils, the deceptively cool look of starched linen, and a clicking of beads. Sister Bernard twirled for the first graders, her skirts spreading like an umbrella, and when she collapsed in laughter on the ground they ran to her, threw their arms around her neck, then arranged themselves on the carpet of her skirt while she told stories.

Sister Bernard

The Sisters laughed often, sang loud camping songs, played ball and tag and Pum-Pum-Pull-Away. Sister Rita's eyes narrowed to sharp points and her words fell like fireworks when she perceived any injustice, such as the time the boy named Billy placed a tack strategically on Mary Jane's chair and she yelped when she sat on it. 

She had started going to Catechism a year early with an older girl named Joan. After only one day she wanted to continue regardless of her fear of the other older children. The whole experience kept her in a constant state of breathless awe. That first June nothing was required of her. Treated like a guest, she watched and listened. She stared at Sister's face, at the white linen, at the black veil. Sister put her hands under it at her neck and shook it like a long fan. "Hot" she said. Mary Jane watched her walk up and down in front of the church pews where all the children sat trying to memorize Latin phrases to say at Mass even though the majority were never expected to be required to use them, not being the proper canonical gender. The nonsense syllables rolled out of their mouths importantly: "Ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meum," they recited, raising their voices on the "ti" and on the "ju" and the "tu" as though it was a nursery rhyme and they were jumping rope.

 
Each summer it was the same routine. The children walked in long lines, hands pressed together, thumbs touching their breastbones, fingers pointing heavenward. They genuflected, back straight, head bent. They sang "O Salutaris" and "Tantum Ergo" while the altar boys swung the ornate brass incense burner and enveloped Father Merth in a cloud of smoke.  They pounded their hearts with their fists when Father lifted the monstrance holding the large white Host of the Blessed Sacrament behind a little round window at the center of a gold sunburst.

 
At noon they prayed the rosary just before Sister dismissed them all for lunch. The rosary was long and repetitious. It made Mary Jane's knees hurt and her head float. She let it float and tried not to listen, wanting to be surprised by the last "Glory Be to the Father," so she could run to the ledge by the basement stairs where everyone had deposited their bag lunches. She liked her thermos bottle--the reflective glass interior that looked like a crystal well.

After lunch the little girls always walked the two blocks downtown for ice cream cones or candy to be bought with the nickle their mothers had tucked into buttoned pockets of dresses. The year of her First Communion, when Mary Jane was six, she stopped by the Gambles store each day to press her nose against the window and stare at a blue and white Schwinn bicycle. She knew it was too big for her, but she'd been growing all her life and didn't plan to stop. If she could own that bike... 

That year of her First Communion Sister Bernard told a story about a child who refused to tell a lie in self defense and consequently went to heaven where she became a saint. Mary Jane, who sometimes bent the truth a bit to keep from being scolded, vowed never to lie again. That noon, before joining the other children on their daily trip to Main Street, to Gambles, and to the candy counter at the drug store, she sneaked into the quiet church while the others were outside eating their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was dim inside. Stained glass filtered and colored the light. She knelt in front of the blue and white statue of the Virgin Mary and looked up into her calm face. "Please," the child  prayed, "always let me tell the truth. Make me a saint. Take me to heaven someday." 

Afterwards, in town, she bought a chocolate marshmallow cupcake. Back at the church an older girl, nicknamed Peachy, invited a group in to sing by the wheezy pump organ. They sang everything she could play before Sister Rita Marie rang the bell that announced the afternoon class. At the end of the day, just before Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, all the children gathered in the pews by the organ to practice hymns. Sister Rita played the organ.  In the middle of "Salve Regina" the organ stopped. Sister Rita stood up from the stool and twisted her long skirts around to look at something. There, stuck to the back of her skirt, was Mary Jane's chocolate marshmallow cupcake.

 
"Who left this here?" Her face was red. Her voice just avoided being a shriek. "Who is the naughty child who was eating in church?"

Dilemma. Tell the truth? But all the children were present, not just the little ones, but the older ones as well--Billy and Gary and all the other mean boys. They might laugh. How badly did Mary Jane want to be a saint? 

"I did it." Her voice came out in a tiny squeak.

"Who said that? Speak up!" Sister Rita yelled.

"I did it."

"Stand up!" The nun demanded.

Mary Jane stood up. Tears made a round wet ball in her throat. Every child's eyes stared at her. Wasn't it wrong to make a spectacle of her when she had told her the truth just like the child in the story? Sister Rita suddenly resembled the witch from Hansel and Gretel. "I'm sick," Mary Jane whispered and left scrambled out of the pew to leave the church.

She ran, crying, up the street, turned onto Main, passed Gambles without even looking at the blue bike, slammed in through her Grandma's front door, ran to the kitchen and threw her arms around the sturdy woman's waist.

"I'm sick" The child sobbed when Grandma Klimek tried to find out what happened. It had to be the truth; little snakes crawled around in her stomach; her head burned; her eyes ached; her legs felt like seaweed.

 
"You just go lie down on my bed, Sweetheart. You take a little nap. You'll feel better later."

After waking, she told Grandma the story about the chocolate marshmallow cupcake and Grandma sent her back to apologize and offer to clean up the mess. Somehow the  Grandma's matter-of-fact calm made it seem possible to fix this disaster.

 
All the children were gone when Mary Jane arrived at the church. She climbed the white stairs and checked the organ stool. It looked fine--no marshmallow. The sanctuary was quiet.  She opened the door to the basement. Sure enough, the Sisters were down there. But . . . they were laughing! Even Sister Rita Marie was laughing. How could she laugh? What about the cupcake? What about the tragedy of her long black dress with sticky white smeared all over the back? Mary Jane tiptoed down the stairs. Sister Bernard held a big industrial broom in her hands and her veil was pinned back. She had hitched her long skirt up almost to her knees and had a checkered apron over it. Sister Rita looked pretty much the same as she always had and was washing a blackboard. They didn't notice her. She stood waiting. Finally Sister Bernard turned and saw her. "OH! Mary Jane. Are you feeling better, dear?" 

"I'm sorry about the cupcake!" 

"I hope you'll think twice before you eat candy in church again," said Sister Rita as she cocked her veiled head and lifted one eyebrow. "Now, how about helping us clean up this mess? You want to wash off the table tops?" and she handed her a wet cloth.

On First Communion Day she had so much to remember. Don't drink water. Don't eat anything. Don't commit a sin. Don't wrinkle that pretty white dress. Don't scuff those new shoes. Don't go in the road, it's dusty. Don't sit in the grass; it stains. Don't forget the white prayer book with the mother of pearl cover. Don't forget the white rosary. Don't forget the white veil.  (How could she forget the white veil? It was the best part.)  She went to the side of the lodge and picked lilies of the valley. Her mother pinned them to her veil. I still can smell  the lilies and visualize the damp white bells hiding under the ferns

.
Sister Bernard had told the children over and over that First Communion day was the most important of any person's life. Jesus who was God really and truly came into our hearts in the round white host that might stick to the tops of our mouths, but don't put your finger in and pry it loose because you're not supposed to touch God. If you stuck a pin in the host, blood would come out and this was true, because a little boy who didn't believe what his priest said took the host out of his mouth and waited until after Mass. Then he stuck a pin in it and sure enough. None of us would want to do such a thing, of course, because it was a terrible sin and the boy certainly could go to hell for such a sacrilege, which was the worst of all sins that even God had trouble forgiving.

On First Communion Day, Sister Bernard said, God would answer any prayer, grant any promise. This is the way it worked: After the priest put the host on your tongue (the children practiced sticking their tongues out properly) you were to bow your head and walk slowly back to your place where you should kneel down and talk to Jesus who now was in your heart. Ask him. Probably you shouldn't ask for a new bike. It would be better to ask for something he understood better, something holy. Mary Jane had heard enough saints’ stories to be able to grasp this distinction. She decided to ask Jesus, just as she had asked his Blessed Mother on the day of the chocolate marshmallow cupcake, to make her a saint.

Who could know how God saw things, or in His eyes what truth might be? All those times He must have been watching her with her nose pressed against the Gamble store window, and balanced that desire up against the moment of her First Communion prayer. What did she want more? And upon what fulcrum did they balance? Might it be that chocolate marshmallow cupcake stuck like sin across the back of Sister Rita’s black wool dress?

Or was it not like that at all? Maybe with one sweep of a divine wind even memories of such things are lost for all eternity. Maybe the only reality that continues is the reality held in our little minds, while in the grandness of Being it is as if it never happened at all.

The communicants sang "Jesus, Jesus, come to me..." and received the sticky host on their tongues, managing  to swallow it without putting fingers in their mouths. "All my longing is for Thee," Mary Jane sang with them while she yearned with all her six year old heart to become a saint and live with God forever. It seemed she had forgotten, at least in that moment, all about the bike.

  

After each First Communicant had a picture taken with the Sisters and with Father Merth, Mary Jane went with her family to Grandma Klimek's apartment. Parked in her kitchen was a brand new royal blue and white Schwinn bicycle. The child stared at it. It was the very bike that was supposed to be in the Gambles Store window down the street. What was it doing at Grandma's?

Grandma laughed. "It's for you, Sweetheart, for your First Communion. It's from me, from Grandma."

She didn't dare touch it. “What’s wrong?’ Grandma hugged her close. “I thought you really wanted this bicycle.”

She couldn't move. It was like a dream and she was waking up. Then her sobs came and tears fell.

And she couldn't have told you why.

Taming the Wild Gull

A GROUP OF FISHERMEN docked, bringing to shore a seagull chick they had found in the water off Gull Rock. One man put the bird into Mary Jane's hands and asked her to take care of it. Johnny, the yard man, constructed a wire cage behind the laundry building for protection since the bird couldn't yet fly, and she supplied minnows and water several times a day. From time to time she let the bird out to waddle along behind her. Little girl and a seagull. She called him Peter after her uncle who was then flying Admiral Halsey from island to island in the Pacific.She cried when the gull's wings grew large enough and he flew off over the lake. From the end of the dock she called to him, "Peter, Peter!"

He came back. Out of a flock of gulls one separated himself and landed at her feet. He followed her up the dock to the yard, played this game for a while, and then flew off again to rejoin his kind. "That bird was meant to be wild," her grandmother said. It was all right if he were wild, just so he kept coming back to her.

               

One day he didn't come. She stood at the end of the dock and called, "Peter," over and over until her mother came. She explained that Peter wasn't coming back. There were dogs that belonged to one of the guests. They didn't know Peter was special. They thought he was a gull just like any other; not one with a name who had become the friend of a little girl. And they attacked him. He didn't use his wings to escape. He didn't know enough to be afraid. "Maybe it was wrong of me to let you tame that bird," she said.

At the end of the dock she continued to wait. The flock came at sunset to dive for fish scraps that Johnny threw from his boat. The child grew wings and waited. When the flock lifted into the sky something in her lifted with them. Something in her cried out. Something saw the earth from above. Something must stay wild, must never be tamed, must ride the wind, must never know a cage, must not exchange freedom for safety.

The temptation to safety is constant. I call it temptation not because safety is somehow evil. It is a necessity for productive life. Children need safety to develop a sense of inner security. It is mystic consciousness that requires the wild, and children often experience a foretaste of this truth.

There may be a time before reason sets in that we receive an intimation of a larger world existing on the other side of the wild spaces that is more truly safe than anything this limited world can provide. It cries from within like the cry of a gull. It seduces. It feels like something radically Other. But it cries from within and from without simultaneously. This is the moment that the soul grows wings.

She grew wings and soared,

Peering into swamps and bogs,

Spruce islands floating

On unmeasured deeps,

Illusions of stability.
She called

And a gull’s voice

Haunted the sky. 

Days of Fairy Tales

Mary Jane Loves Stories

I couldn't watch the Disney production of The Little Mermaid because I'd heard how different it was from the original tale by Hans Christian Anderson. Mary Jane wouldn't permit it. She can still remember the opening lines from the story that she wanted read every night of her childhood. "Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it..." When she first heard this story she had never seen the sea. She didn't see it, it fact, until I was in my early thirties and flew to San Francisco, so for all those years she imagined that cornflower blue, while I taught Emily Dickinson to English students:

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

Each night, and I remember this particularly from the years at Lake of the Woods, Mary Jane's mother would stand her up in the center of the bed to check for wood ticks before the pajamas went on and the pillows were plumped and the child climbed between the sheets with Klimek's Lodge embroidered on the seam in red thread. How many nights her mother actually read The Little Mermaid, I can't say for sure. It seemed like Mary Jane wanted it every night.

A large part of my life was spent working with children at a Catholic Charities children's home. During that time I read Bruno Bettelheim's work on the importance of fairy tales in the development of children.(Uses of Enchantment) His research turned out to correspond with my own experience, using a storytelling technique to access a child's emotional experience. The child would ask for the same fairy tale over and over until the dilemma it addressed was resolved. A lot of the children I worked with wanted to hear "Hansel and Gretel" which made sense to me because they had wandered away from what was often an abusive home and found themselves in a treatment center, (the witch's Gingerbread House?) where life seemed safe but where they soon found themselves virtually locked in and feeling anxious over what new dangers might befall them there. The fairy tale became their bible for finding a way to a transformed family and home.

Mary Jane's fairy tale was The Little Mermaid. She reacted to the story just as Bettelheim would later speculate then prove that children do. The tale enchanted her. In that enchantment she became the mermaid, learned the mermaid's every desire, every choice, every movement. It was her bible.

The mermaid would do anything for love. She would sacrifice her family, her identity, even finally her life and her hope for an immortal soul: all for love.

Maybe this kind of sacrifice would keep the mother safe from the danger of the fire.

Did Mary Jane think that way? No. She was a very small child. She didn't do much by way of thinking. But she loved the tale. From the tale she learned how to live, how to be who she became. Riding the waves of this story she eventually came to believe that the best way to love was to leave her family, sacrifice her relationship to her high school sweetheart, enter a convent, give up her name, her home, her culture, her place in the flow of time. Honestly, when people asked her why, she really didn't know. She only knew she had to go.

So, I ask you this: Is it possible to bring her back this late in the game?

The mermaid, after refusing to kill the prince to save herself, casts herself into the sea, knowing that she will become foam that disappears, knowing that she will never have an immortal soul. But the daughters of the air take pity on her. They lift her onto the currents of air. She floats above the earth in the winds and clouds where for three hundred years she will whisper encouragement to wounded human souls. After all that time which is shortened if she witnesses goodness in children, and is lengthened if children are bad, she will be released from this ghostly state. And then, only then, because of her compassion for the peoples of earth, she will discover in herself the immortal soul for which she longed.

The tale is written in Mary Jane's every cell. Will she be required to act it out right to the end and beyond? And if she is, is that such an awful thing?

Spark of Self

The world of Mary Jane's childhood was (as it is for most children) a mythic place. The real and the child's interpretation of the real combine into a story the adult spends the remainder of life deciphering. Mary Jane's world surrounded her in her family and the impact of those individuals upon one another. Laughter, tears, the inevitable sufferings of love's promises and betrayals, of nature's wounds, of the press of history (genetic and otherwise)--all swath the child. The child makes nothing of it, and makes it into everything. Creates of it everything she knows.

The world was made of leaves, ferns, Grandma's daisies, breezes and the lake. It was bordered by the spruce bog. Wildflowers grew there. "Do not go into the woods!" One wild flower led to the next. An old lady got lost, picking. Fishermen found her in water up to her waist. Three days wandering. Beyond safety--endless wilderness. 

"Don't play in the reeds!" Blood suckers and leeches swam there. They would stick to your skin. They could cover your body. The boy who swam in the reeds to save Mary Jane's beach ball lay on the grass bank screaming. All his skin squirmed with black. The grown-ups poured salt on him and the suckers fell. His skin pocked with red wounds. 

"Don't climb into the ice house!" But the ice gleamed amber in the saw-dust and the air was cool. A child could fall between the ice blocks and never be seen again. She didn't fall, but her father laid her across his knees and spanked her. You could have died. You could have died. You could have died. 

Did every beauty shimmer with danger? She held to her Grandpa Klimek's leg. Her grandma's apron is a flag in wind. Over the Gap at the end of Four Mile Bay a tornado wagged, chasing the launch to shore. Water the color of gun metal. "Please, God. Please." The funnel broke and water poured from the sky.

Since earliest years, since the beginning of memory, the world was for Mary Jane a terrifying, beautiful place in which she could not quite find her footing. Her earliest memory is a dream which she remembered from its first appearance in her mind through numerous re-plays for years until she became old enough to pray and manufacture her own additions to “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

               

"Please God,” she prayed aloud with her mother kneeling beside her at the side of the bed, “don’t let the house burn down for one hundred and sixty-six years. Amen.”

The dream prompting the prayer came when she still was young enough to be sleeping in a crib. The blanket covering her was pinned down with a gigantic safety pin, presumably so that she wouldn’t kick it off. I know this because the pin and the rungs of the crib were the first thing she saw upon awakening.

Mary Jane is standing by the side of the road in front of the lodge, looking towards the water. An orange road grader is coming down the road from my right, and it is spurting fire from its stack. She is terrified because road graders are so frightening anyway, but also because this one is headed towards the house where her mother is playing cards with her friends. It intends to burn the house down, and she is too small and too scared to stop it. She will lose her mother. Her mother will die in the fire.

NO!!

MARY JANE WOULD TAKE CARE OF HER!

It couldn't be allowed to happen.
An unspoken contract was set in place:

• That this mother must live to come when Mary Jane called, even in the middle of the night, even from the top of the ice house, even from across the room, even from the end of the dock where deep water swirled.
• That they would adventure together: to the sand ridges to pick chokecherries, to the islands where blueberries grew, down the dark road to the outhouse, to the city with its streetcars and the elevator at the Foshay Tower, to the sky with her father dipping and whirling and stalling and plummeting, the engine restarting, and climbing towards the sun, to the church where God hid in bread locked behind a golden door.
• That the mother would read to Mary Jane every single night, and sing a lullaby, and close the closet door, and kiss her face, and count her toes, and they would hold each others hearts until they woke in the morning.
• That she would teach Mary Jane to dance, to pray, to act in plays, to love the sound of words, to bake bread, to give the bread away, to be a friend, to be a daughter, to be loyal, and when the time came, to walk forward into a life of her own and she would say, "Go with my love; all I ever wanted was for you to be happy."
• That together they could dance and could be still, could laugh and then could scream,  could stand their ground or run away, could say terrifying things and follow them with words so loving as to melt their hearts, could lay their heads against the rough bark of the cottonwood tree.
• That when the mother cried out, that when she wept, that when the headaches came, that when she went to bed in the middle of the day, that when she wept, that when she wept, that when she wept…Mary Jane would hear and take the pain inside herself and carry it like her own child.
• That Mary Jane would keep the fire away.

Never Again Not Weep

Eva Florence Klimek 1905

Eva makes my heart ache.

Wasn't she a pretty one, though? She must have liked her second name, Florence, because she is careful to include it in her identification of each picture of herself in the large envelope she passed on to me before she died. Mary Jane's Auntie Eva. Alyce's older sister.

My heart aches when I think of her. The best I can come up with as an explanation is that she loved Mary Jane so unconditionally and with such an impossible yearning
that I rarely conquered the guilty urge to escape from her into a space where it might be possible to breathe. And when I did escape, she never blamed me; she let me go. It was as if she understood that her need to give herself exceeded a normal person's capacity to receive.

She never had a child of her own body. She was Mary Jane's Godmother. She took joy in that. She reveled in the responsibilities her commitment placed upon the both of us.

Just look at her--she's not yet three years old and already taking care of her baby brother, Peter. She's becoming the Little Mama.

Peter and Eva 1907

Mary Jane's Aunt Edith, Dad's sister, observed that Grandma Klimek didn't like Eva much. And why was that? I spent years searching out clues and writing an unpublished novel in an attempt to figure it out. In real life, though, (and if there's any truth to Edith's observation) a turning point might have come for Eva with the influenza epidemic of 1919. When Mary Jane first heard the story, it was to explain why everyone needed to speak loudly and clearly to Auntie Eva whose hearing was pretty bad. I picture her a child, but really she would have been thirteen or fourteen when the flu showed up in Little Falls. Lester Black, Alyce's classmate, died of it. Anton locked his doors and no one could go to school after that. The town doctor died. The children watched the death wagons go up and down the street. Then Eva came down sick. She had the flu and diphtheria combined.  Lizzie put her to bed in an upstairs room and stayed with her, while Anton put up a fumigation seal between the first and second floor. He passed food up through a lift in the wall. Then one evening, Eva died. Lizzie screamed. "Anton! Eva's dead!!" He broke the seal, ran up the stairs, grabbed his daughter, lifted her, turned her upside-down, and shook.  Something in her lungs broke loose. She gasped for breath and lived.

Everything in the bedroom needed to be tossed into the fire. All the books, all the dolls. All burned. This detail horrified Mary Jane.

Anton took the family north to live on the farm near Warroad. Maybe it would be safe there.

Alyce and Eva at the Farm near Warroad, 1920

 Of the eight children in the one-room school, four of them were Klimeks. One of them was young Bill Mapes. They used to meet by the stream beyond the school, and teen-aged Eva fell in love. Bill was a hero who was missing one of his arms and two fingers off his only hand. When he was nine years old he and a friend were playing on the railroad tracks when a car broke loose and crushed them. The other boy lost both his legs, and Bill, bleeding from the wounds left by his severed arm and mangled hand, carried his friend on his back to the doctor's house.

Eva and Bill had enough time together by the stream in the woods to imprint upon each other a lasting memory of love. Then Lizzie sold the farm and bought the hotel in Osakis. 

After that Eva never returned to school. She couldn't hear the teacher. She became the family's Cinderella. She took care of things. She learned to sew. Years later it came out that she was raped several times by customers at the hotels and at the resort. She married an alcoholic named Lloyd, a handsome sonuvagun, and moved to Minneapolis where she got a job repairing torn clothes at a laundry and he worked as a bartender on Lake Street. 

Lloyd and Eva on the bow of the Nellie-A at Klimek's Lodge

She stopped off there after work each day and drank with him. Mary Jane remembers the dark wood of the booths, the red and white checks on the table clothes, Uncle Lloyd's easy laughter. He was a happy drunk. There was an abundance of laughter in their drinking. When they visited the resort Lloyd dressed up like Charlie Chaplin and parodied a tipsy fellow (three sheets to the wind, schnockered, blotto) to the laughter of all the guests. And Eva? What did she feel?

When I wrote the novel, Family Heirloom, I tried to imagine how she might have felt. I called her "Julia." I called Lloyd "Sheldon." She seemed to whisper inside me, and I wrote:

            Julia walked along Lake Street toward her apartment wondering what else she might find missing when she went through the door. Mornings, now, she welcomed the opportunity to leave for work where she got treated like a human being. Not like Sheldon treated her. Taking everything. Taking her love and her devotion and her body and giving nothing back at all.

            All these years she tried to keep out something from her weekly check. It wasn’t that much as it was. She always told Sheldon it was five dollars less. If it was fifty dollars, she’d say forty-five and forty-five would be gone next time she looked into the kitchen counter drawer they made into their bank. She kept the secret money in a black cardboard folder on the top shelf of the closet.

            First he took the money from the drawer, then he sold the couch and after that, the chair. Almost every time she came home she’d find another thing gone. During the day she’d sit there at the laundry, sewing men’s trousers, making them shorter. She’d sew sleeves back into jackets where they’d ripped because of being yanked too hard by people without the sense to dress for the kind of work they did. She’d sit there sewing, thinking of Sheldon, and wondering what she’d lost that day.

            All these years she’d stayed with him, and nothing changed. Sheldon drank everything in sight. First he drank Ma’s good cut glass pitcher and the twelve glasses that caught the sun and threw rainbows on the wall. Sheldon drank the dining room table and the chairs. He drank the rent. He drank everything he got from tending bar at JIMMY’S. What did he expect they would eat after that? She supposed he thought she’d join him every night at JIMMY’S. Eat chips. Eat peanuts. She could have eaten peanuts while Sheldon drank her wedding ring.

Lloyd was barely forty years old when he died of alcohol poisoning. He died in the work-house in Minneapolis. One day not long before that a sewing order came into the laundry--a half dozen men's new shirts. The right sleeve was to be cut off and hemmed in a nice tailored way. And she remembered Bill Mapes. She tailored the shirts, and in an uncharacteristic move, took them out to be delivered into the hands of their owner herself. It was he. It was Bill.

They married when Mary Jane was ten years old. Eva was forty-five.

Dave Lewis, Bill Mapes, Eva Mapes, Alyce Lore

I wish I could report that they lived happily ever after. They look happy. I believe they often were happy. Who in the world can be completely happy? Mary Jane was still very much a child when she stayed with them in Minneapolis, and they took her into the city to see A Star Is Born, and afterwards to join them in a bar on Hennepin Ave. The child took one look at the pictures of scantily clad dancers out front, and questioned her new Uncle Bill. "I don't think my mom would want me to go in there." He laughed and said it would be OK because he knew the owners and she'd be just fine in there with him.

Bill didn't drink all that much. Eva should have been safe with him. But so often she couldn't get her footing and it must have felt to her that during her years with Lloyd the ground had become slick beneath her. Vividly stamped on my memory is the Thanksgiving while Mary Jane was in high school when Eva and Bill were visiting Baudette. All of us were at Pete and Alice Lou's house for the celebration. Eva approached her mother to wish her a happy holiday.

"Who are you?" Grandma Klimek looked down her nose.

"I'm your daughter, Eva."

And Lizzie Klimek laughed. "Eva?" She sniffed. "I don't have a daughter Eva."

Alyce put her arm around Eva and led her into another room. "She's been forgetting so much these last months," she cooed.

 She began to cling to whatever seemed even a little bit solid. If Bill couldn't hold her up, if he happened to be out of town or simply unavailable, then she turned to her sister, Alyce, or one of her nieces. She began to hallucinate. She called the police. She called the fire department to report the things she saw. She ended up in the workhouse because there were no treatment centers for the illness that she had--not then, not for all the years she suffered.

My heart aches over her.

I could write a book. I tried to write the book. But it was just too, too sad.

Through all this her problem with hearing continued to worsen. Finally in the 1980s her doctor recommended surgery on her mastoid bone. In a freak slip of the scalpel the surgeon cut the main nerve on the left side of her face, leaving her disfigured. One side of her face would never smile again. One eye would never again not weep.

She grieved over the decline of her sister, Alyce, whom we all had lost to Alzheimer's disease. I still can see her bending over my mother's coffin, moaning in a low voice, "My only little sister."

There's no sense in pretending it didn't, all of it, happen, along with so much more of which I know nothing. I might not have known her very well at all. And what was it through the writing years that poured itself out in words of her -- six successive drafts of the same book?

Again I find myself aware of how our souls are shaped not only by our own choices, but also by the way we are kneaded by the emotions of those whose hearts have opened to us. We are not as self-made as we pretend. Eva still works on Mary Jane with deep aching. She works with questions about the sufferings in life that never cease.

I sang Schubert's Ave Maria, as she had requested, at her funeral Mass. My voice broke on the highest note. "It was beautiful, Mary Jane," she would have said. "It was just perfect."

Mistakes Were Made

Eva, Alyce, Paul, Peter

Mary Jane's Uncle Peter became something of a glory guy because he flew Admiral Halsey around the Pacific during the Second World War. Take another look at this snapshot. He's the one with sun in his face. He's the one gazing at the sky. His little sister, Mary Jane's mother, adored him. She called him her protector. They are the show-offs in the picture. A long time later she would write of him:

“Three years older than I—my idol—redhaired, freckle-faced, pug-nosed tough little Peter—my brother, my champion—afraid of no one, and I lost my fear whenever he was near, ready to defend me with his little clenched fists and challenging voice. Oh, how I loved him, and throughout our growing up years he added much to my happiness and self-assurance....I remember pugnacious little Peter always wanting to engage in fist fights or wrestling [with Paul] and the boarders cheered them on. I guess Paul was less agile as he generally got the worst of the match, even though Peter was smaller.” 

Peter, Paul and Eva  1910

Peter had a bicycle and was often willing to haul his little sister around on the handlebars. Even as an old woman, Alyce thrilled to the memory of the speed of those rides, the wind whipping her hair, the danger of the coasting down that hill close to the house in St. Cloud, and her daring brother, her best loved, her champion.

Peter Joseph. Named after Lizzie's favorite brother Pete Friesinger, and Anton's favorite brother, Joe Klimek. Mary Jane saw that Grandma doted on him, made her famous coffee cake for him, became flustered when he came to visit. She flitted around the kitchen in her apartment downtown. "Pete's coming; Pete's coming..." needing to make everything just right. And he'd breeze in and sit at the table. "I came home just for your coffee cake, Ma!" He'd praise her. "Nobody makes coffee cake like you."

All my life I've heard daring-do stories of Pete. He was the first to fly airmail into the wild outposts of Lake of the Woods. He was a stunt pilot (with my dad whom he taught to fly) at county fairs up and down the country from Minnesota all the way to Texas. He could set a DC-3 down on a Pacific Island where there was as yet no landing strip. He could set a plane down in a cornfield back home, he could tip it on its nose taking off and walk away laughing. He could fix anything. He could cut down a forest to make a road of his own, and stack the logs into a wall between his and his parents' resort. He could tell fish stories that topped his dad's.

So why, when Mary Jane remembers him is it always from a distance? Why can she not remember even one instance when he noticed her, called her name, showed up at any event where she might shine?

It could have been because she was a shy child that he didn't notice her. He sent her two dolls from the South Pacific, so he did know she existed. She wanted him to love her because it just seemed right. He was her mother's favorite. But in his presence Mary Jane felt invisible. This comes as a surprise to me as I write. Of her two Klimek uncles, it now seems that Paul had showed his love more.

Such memories (or their lack) disorient. I went to see him once when he was old--maybe the age I am now. He sat in his workshop, fixing something--an air conditioner, I think. He wouldn't speak to me. He wouldn't look away from the machine. Someone explained later to me that he couldn't forgive me for leaving the convent and marrying an ex-priest. Had it mattered to him that I'd been a nun? He'd left the Catholic church himself after his marriage. Maybe he was still protecting Alyce whose heart ached because of my choice. Maybe all of it had been about only that. 

Memories are dangerous. Memories of Uncle Pete might be the most dangerous of all because of the way they run contrary to common family history. Mary Jane feared him, he who was to all accounts a most attractive, most capable, most exciting man. Wasn't he supposed to love her, his only niece?

She feared him. He had a challenging voice--so her mother said. He had a challenging voice, and Mary Jane heard that voice in the room next to her bedroom. The adults, all of them, were there, arguing. Was it about the wall he'd built? She and her cousins called it "The Warring Wall." Was it about the sign Grandma Klimek had put in the front yard of Pete's lodge--the one that said the tourists weren't yet at Klimek's Lodge and they should keep on going up the road? Grandma had kept the bit of land the sign occupied when she sold the rest to Pete. She had deeded it over to Mary Jane who then was five years old. I'd use my challenging voice, too, if I'd been Pete. But Mary Jane sat terrified on the other side of the door as the volume increased, and with it her fear. She heard her mother crying. Adults do argue, after all, but an image passed through the child's mind: that Pete would kill her mother. The one who had always protected her would kill her now because of the land and the sign and the wall that rose behind it.

Then her father's voice broke the argument. "That's enough!" And the shouting stopped.

No answers exist either to vindicate memory or call it wrong. It is not so much about what happened as the way we form our souls as a container for perception. If the perceiver is a child, what then? Might we then be caught up all our lives in a partial or distorted reality? And might who we think we are also be distorted and partial as a result?

I did go to be with my uncle as he was dying. At that time I wasn't remembering all these things. I remembered only that my mother loved him and that he and I were connected through that love. I went to bring her love to him. They tell us that the dying still can hear. I spoke to him with love. It wasn't hard to love him. But now it haunts me that he might have heard my voice and been dismayed by the sound. That it might have conjured up in him something broken or mistaken or simply beyond his control that he'd turned from in his life. I truly hope that is not the case. Truly, I hope that all Mary Jane saw and heard and felt were hers alone -- things of which he had no awareness and would be surprised that anyone, especially his little niece, could have concocted from them such a sad mistake.

What Happened to Uncle Paul?

Paul and Alyce Klimek
Living in St. Cloud, MN 1917-1919

Eva, Alyce, Paul, and Peter Klimek
Superior, Wisconsin, approx 1915

Something awful must have happened to Mary Jane's Uncle Paul. By the time Grandma Klimek told Mary Jane the stories and showed her the pictures, everyone knew it. Everyone had known it for a long time by the time he stood by the war-time coffin and cried, "Dad...Dad." His sister Eva knew it already while the family ran the Hotel Alyce in Osakis, the one that caught fire. She called to him for help, and he threw glasses from the dining room into a bucket, breaking them all, and then he sat down to finish what was left of a fresh lemon pie. What was going on? It had been understandable when he shot partridge out the school room window with his slingshot; that was just stuff that a boy might do. But not grasping the concept of fire--the danger--It was incomprehensible.

Grandma Klimek told Mary Jane that Paul was her most beautiful baby. "Then he had that fever...and was never right afterwards. But he looks "right" in the picture with Alyce when they lived in St. Cloud, and before that with Eva and Pete when they lived in Superior.

He looks "right" in his first communion picture, too.

Paul's First Communion

Pete, Paul's younger brother, thought he might have been responsible. Paul fell from the back of a truck Pete was driving. Grandma never told this story. Pete told it to his daughters, I guess, because that's how it came to me. In more recent years the question arose that Paul could have had Down Syndrome, a mild form that didn't really show up until later. All speculation.

Paul at 19

By nineteen he looked like this. And after that pictures either don't exist, or I have none in my possession.

Why are we so ready to find fault in what we don't understand? Was anything wrong with Paul at all?

He did grab Mary Jane's arm.  He did fling her around.  He did talk loud and call her names.  "Gimme Girl!" he taunted.  "Gimme a nickel.  Gimme Girl!  Gimme Girl!"  He chased her, laughing, but for her--not fun. 

           

 "Uncle Paul can't help it," Mama explained.  "Uncle Paul doesn't understand little girls."

He drove a big black panel truck and delivered the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune to all the resorts.  He ran a taxi service from Baudette to the Lake.  He made trips to get minnows, often all the way to Waskish on Upper Red Lake.  He stole tourists at the bus stop and brought them to Klimek's Lodge.

           

 "Paul is a good boy," Grandma told anybody who would listen.  "He doesn't smoke, drink or chase women."  But she wished he would go to church.  He wouldn't.  He didn't believe in God, he said.

            

Paul was fleshy with big lips, fat hands, and crinkles around his eyes that were dotted with blackheads.  He wore ankle-high lace-up shoes, brown or gray canvas pants, and a grayish-white tee shirt in the summer. 

            

If Uncle Paul tried to be tender his voice shook.  Even trying for gentleness he held onto Mary Jane's arm too tightly; his fingers dug into her flesh.  He wanted her to stand still and look him in the eyes.  He tried to be serious with her.  "You stay out of the street.  You want a car to run over you?"  But it always came out threatening.  She tried to pull away.  His fingers tightened.  His face reddened.  "You listen!" 

            

"Uncle Paul would never hurt you, honey."  Mama comforted.  "He's just a little rough sometimes.  He can't help it."

            

"You better eat onions, girl."  She hated onions.  Why should she eat onions?  "You want to have hair on your chest, you gotta eat onions!"  Hair on her chest?  Girls didn't want hair on their chests.  He turned her world upside down. 

            

A long time afterwards when I was twenty years old and a novice in the convent Uncle Paul stopped to see me.  It was Holy Thursday.  All the nuns were keeping the deep silence of the Triduum, the three holiest days of the year.  I knelt in the chapel.  The doorbell rang.  I heard Paul's loud voice.  "My niece, Mary Jane.  I gotta see her."

The sister portress rustled up to my side.  I pretended I hadn't heard him.  "Sister Mary Christopher, your uncle," she whispered and her veil brushed against my hands.

He stood in the entrance turning his cap round and round in his hands.  His hands trembled.  So did his head.  He tried speaking quietly, his voice shook.  "You okay, Mary Jane?"  His eyes looked at me like dog's eyes, soft, questioning.  He reached out his hand and patted my arm. 

"I'm just fine, Uncle Paul."  Then, because we had rules there, because we didn't speak in hallways and vestibules and especially not on Holy Thursday, I invited him to come into the guest parlor with me.

"No.  Can't.  My car's running.  I was in Grand Forks and came by here and here I am.  I gotta go."

"You can't stay a while?"

"Can't.  Just wanted to find out if you're okay.  You okay, Mary Jane?"

"I'm okay."

The smell of him mixed with incense from the chapel.  I'd forgotten he smelled so rank, like he never took a bath.  Probably he didn't.  It used to bother me, that smell.  When I was in high school Uncle Paul embarrassed me.  What did it mean about me, about who I was, to have an uncle like that?  Loud.  Smelly.  Retarded, maybe.  But now I didn't want him to leave the vestibule of the convent.  I wanted him to sit down with me and tell me what he had been doing in Grand Forks.  I wanted to know if he'd won at BINGO lately.  I wanted to hear about the people in Baudette and who he'd driven to Minneapolis lately.

"I gotta go," he repeated.  He put his cap back on his head.  "If you need anything, Mary Jane, I'll bring it to you.  You just tell your mother and I'll make the trip.  I don't mind.  You just let me know, that's all.  Just let me know."

Then he left.

He fell dead a few years later while he was playing BINGO at the Moose Lodge in Baudette.  At his funeral I knelt beside his body and tried to pray the beautiful "In Paradiso."  I sobbed instead. I thought of the shining robes replacing the dingy tee shirt, the tattered wool jacket, the shapeless pants.  I imagined the new light in Uncle Paul's eyes.  Mama finished the reading for me, her voice soft.           

                        May the angels guide you into Paradise

                        May the saints accompany you as you go;

                        And with Lazarus who once was poor

                        May you have eternal life.

Several hundred people came to pay their respects to this uncle of mine.  They told stories.  How he took one woman home late at night when she was sick and wouldn't accept any payment for it.  How he saved another woman's life, dragging her out of a fire.  He always said he had a lot of friends in town.  I didn't believe him.  I was wrong.

The editor of THE BAUDETTE REGION town newspaper wrote:  he contributed more than most of us who come to this life with, perhaps, a greater reservoir of gifts.