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.

Missing Daddy

George Lore and Heine Olson at the End of the Dock

One summer morning Mary Jane woke up as excited as if it were Christmas. "Daddy is here!" She pulled on her sundress and ran out the lodge door down to the dock. She glimpsed him by the gas pump. He was sitting on his haunches in the clover patch beside his friend, Heine Olson. She climbed onto his knee and threw her arms around his neck. In memory the day shines with a singularity so intense, I've never been able to explain it.

All these years passed, and I didn't put it together until now. I always thought he was there, with the rest of us, at the resort every summer of Mary Jane's young life. But a week or so ago, going through a box of snapshots I came upon an old postcard sent from my mother to her sister, Eva, in April of 1944. The rumors were wrong, she said. She had no intention of going to Omaha in July. She was already at the Lodge and planned to stay for the summer.

Why would she even want to go to Omaha? Why--because it was the WAR and her husband, George, was there working in the aircraft factory building war planes. He wasn't at the resort, except, I guess, for snippets of time here or there, like the time she never forgot and had been fooled by her need into believing was a daily event.

She had lost her mother to illness, barely got her back, and then she lost her father to the war.

Snapshots lie. Look at the men there. They seem eternal. I can smell the ozone from a recent storm, the lake smell on his clothes. I hear his laughter and the cry of gulls. His was the appearance of a god. I thought it happened every day, that all of us left Omaha in the spring and didn't return until October. There are many snapshots of him at the lake. Were they not proof? I see it now. Those pictures came from before. They came from after. They did not come from the day to day. Day to day he simply wasn't there.

Over the years, I now see, I fit the memories together like remembering a dream. I twisted them around and wove them into a chronology with a flaw. Too many of them do not include him at all. Because he was not in the Pacific like my Uncle Pete, nor in Europe like my Uncle John, I remembered him with me, with Mary Jane. But he was not.

Other men were with Mary Jane out at the lake. Grandpa Klimek, always. Johnny Shellum, who lived in a little shack next to the woods, who had a grindstone for sharpening knives, who filleted the walleyes and packed them in ice, who kept the grounds clean of debris, who found a bright red arrowhead made of trader's glass and gave it to her--memories are full of him. Doc Osburn and his big old hunting dog sat in his easy chair in the house at the end of the road. He smoked cigars and paid her scant attention, but he was there. The "Dubuque Gang" and the "Stephen's Gang" came from Iowa or southern Minnesota to fish. They were business men, too old for war. One of them sat on the dock with her and told folk tales. Another took her down on the living room floor while she struggled to get away. "I'm gonna give you a whisker rub," he laughed as though she liked it, and he wouldn't let her go until she cried, and her mother came. Uncle Paul tried to play with her, but he was rough and left the marks of his fingers on her arm. "Paul loves you, but he doesn't know his own strength," explained her mom.

A significant clue to her father's absence is the train. I see Mary Jane and her mother on the train, traveling from Omaha to . . . somewhere. My guess is Minneapolis/St. Paul. Her father is never with them. I see them in their seats, looking out at farmland. I see them in the aisles hurrying towards the dining car. I see them after dinner coming back to their car that has been transformed in their absence into curtained bunks for sleeping. Mary Jane lay in her mother's arms, looking out the window at the stars, falling asleep to the clacking of metal wheels on the tracks. She and her mother were on that very train on April 12, 1945. They were in the dining car and the child was eating spaghetti and meatballs when the porter, an African American man who always bent down to talk to her at her level, came into the car. He was crying. Mary Jane turned to her mother. "Why is he crying?" It felt amazing to her, that he would cry. "I am so sorry," he said. He paused. Then: "President Roosevelt is dead."

Her father stayed in Omaha to build B-29s. The factory was working on a secret project. One day (and I don't remember this--it is something I was told much later) Colonial Paul Tibbets came to the factory and chose one of the planes off Dad's assembly line. He named it after his mother and flew it to Japan. The Enola Gay.

We never know for certain what we are part of. It takes a lifetime to put it all together, and even then we have no idea if we get it right. The pieces are slippery. Dark and light memories swirl together, penetrate each other. "Your father built the plane that ended the war," my mother used to say. It was so many years before I knew the cost of such winning and the paradox of denial and un-remembering involved in missing him.
 

The End of the Dock

End of the Dock

The lake had a way of drawing her. Her body drifted always towards the dock's edge. Be careful, her mama warned. She tried hard to walk in the middle. Veering off the way she often did troubled her and made her altogether leery about the dock. She shuffled her bare feet and got slivers which needed to be removed with a needle. She set her sights on each post, one after the other, walking only just that far, then sitting down. Over the edge on the surface of the water gas from the outboard motors made rainbows. She refocused her eyes to see deeper. Minnows darting through reeds. Floating moss. Green algae floating in the rust colored water. Sunlight piercing the current but not to the bottom. Maybe there was no bottom.

If she could get to the end she could sit there and fish with the short rod and reel her dad gave her. If she could get there without falling off the edge. It was better if the boats were in and tied up. It was better if someone held her hand, but she almost always was alone.

Older she became and finally did stand at the end of the dock with the rod and reel Daddy rigged and she fished.  Seldom did she fish from a boat.  This was a business, this fishing.  Everyone in her family was too busy seeing to it that the resort guests caught their limit of walleye to be thinking about entertaining a little girl.

Captain George, my dad

 Besides, the few times Daddy did take her out, she begged him not to go near the reed beds. She had seen the muskie, bigger than her own body, brought in by proud fishermen from Chicago or Houston.  They said they caught them at the edge of the reeds.  She imagined the fish gliding whale-like in the depths.  She imagined one of them taking her line.  Then what?  Pulling her out of the boat, for sure.  No, she would stick to fishing for walleyes, thank you, far from the reeds, off the islands where the lake bottom was hard clay under rippled sand.

Chucky L's dad took the two children fishing one afternoon and, much to Mary Jane's dismay, turned the small outboard motor boat towards the reeds on the Canadian side. The L family came to Klimek's Lodge each summer from Iowa, and had become family friends.  Young Chuck and Mary Jane were born the same year and their mothers pretended a liaison between the children before they could walk.  Most of my life I kept a tiny silver and turquoise ring Chucky gave Mary Jane the summer they were two years old.  I don't remember the incident but Mama kept photographs to document the event.  When my niece, Krista, was two years old I passed the ring on to her.

Chucky's dad acted strange all day.  Chucky might have been a pushy kid, six years old, maybe.  "the lake's too rough..." mumbled his dad.  "Can't go yet.  Maybe it'll calm down later this afternoon."  Still Chucky pushed. Mary Jane might have helped in her way, though my guess is that by that time she was hanging back from a probable initial enthusiasm.  Grumbling, Chucky's dad grabbed up his gear and hustled them towards the dock.  Suddenly Mary Jane completely understood that she didn't want to go.  Something was wrong with him.  Now I know that he was drunk.  His words slurred.  He dropped things.  After all that pushing, though, she understood that she no longer had a choice. 

The boat slapped the waves. She held onto the wooden bench seat.  She didn't dare say don't go near the reeds.  When he slowed the motor to trolling speed she did say softly, "Isn't this the Canadian reed bed?" 

"What the hell's the difference," he snapped back.  "There's not a game warden in sight."  He said he'd troll and we should put our lines in the water.  The boat bounced like a cork. Mary Jane dropped her line.  There might be a muskie down there.  Please, I don't want to catch it!  Chucky and his dad dropped their lines.  The motor sputtered and stopped.  "It's reeds," Mary Jane echoed information gleaned from her own dad.  It was her fishing line, tangled in the prop.  Mr. L leaned over the motor, swearing, trying to free the line.  He hadn't reeled in.  The reeds got closer and closer as the current took the boat towards them.  "Get the oar and push us out of these goddam things," he grouched.  The children tried, but they were only six years old.  The reeds rose tall and green all around the boat.  "God DAMN!  Can't you kids do anything right?"

His rod and reel jumped up and down beside his foot. She stared at it.  Nobody else was paying attention. She looked out to where the reeds thinned.  A huge fish broke the surface of the lake in a magnificent leap and just at that moment his rod and reel arched out of the boat and disappeared into the water. Mary Jane yelled, "A fish!"

"Damn! that was my best equipment.  God damn you kids, why in hell did I bring you out here anyhow?"

She sat shivering.  The waves tossed the little boat.  The wind felt cold and was getting stronger.  Chucky's dad couldn't fix the motor.  It was her fault.  She couldn't see anything but reeds and the boat had probably drifted into Canada.

My memory leaves me there, in the reed bed, and doesn't kick in again until the moment we arrive at the dock.  The water must have been low that year.  It was a long way from the boat up to the dock.  Chucky's dad lifted Mary Jane up to be taken by a dock hand and set safely on the wooden planks.  Then Chucky.  Lastly, the gear.  He let go before the dock hand had a good hold on the remaining rods.  Splash!  And gone.  Rainbow colors from the gasoline swirled in the water where they fell.

Coming in from the lake

  

A House for the Soul

Lodge Living Room open to the Porch

The places Mary Jane lived are now doorways to her soul. These past several days since I've written, I've been catching glimpses of those places and the bits and pieces of soul I left there. This picture is precious to me. It takes only a slight turn of mind to see Mary Jane playing in this room. You can't see the Stark Player Piano on the far left side, but she's still learning to play it as I look at the scene. Stuffed ducks decorate its top along with a pelican whose wing-span reaches from one end of the piano to the other.  Evenings, after dinner, guests would stand around the piano and sing old songs like "Pack Up Your Troubles," and "My Old Kentucky Home."

Then a mere shift of memory and Grandpa Klimek is sitting in that intricately upholstered chair telling stories to a room full of people. It's the story about duck hunting with Mutt Onstad, the time Grandpa fell into the lake. I can hear his thick Polish/German accent as he says, laughing, "Down I went! Down and up!" He was old already then, just a few years this side of death. Pete and Grandma, on the other side of that open door, in the porch, were secretly recording his every word. It was a new contraption Pete bought in Minneapolis. Wire picked up people's voices through a large silver colored microphone, and then Pete could cut a record at 78 rpm. Suddenly Pete must have turned up the volume, and the microphone gave a loud honk.

 "That was a duck!" Grandma called out from the porch.

Grandpa looked startled, then laughed. "Oh, the duck don't want me to tell the story, eh?"

He was the soul of the place that collected slivers of me. My grandmother ran it, but he became its heart. This is how he looked back then. Can you see the softness, the humor?--even though he doesn't look like a man who wants his picture taken.

In the following years, between that time and the year I was seven, he would suffer eight strokes.

Why is it that memories of the place turn so quickly to memories of Grandpa Klimek? 

After the strokes started, he would look like this. That's Mary Jane with him, glad to be with him. See his left hand hanging. It was paralyzed. 

In his German accent he read to her, comic books from Curtis Drug Store.  He skipped pages, pretending he didn't understand that he was to read the left-hand page.  "Grandpa," she corrected him, exasperated with his stupidity, "you forgot this page again." 

"Tsk, tsk, your old grampa, you know, he don't know nothing."  He shook his head.  "Poor Schnickelfritz, to have such a grampa."  She sat on his knee.  He smelled of stale tobacco and hair oil, like clothes packed away for years.  He let her sit on the wing of the wing-back chair and play with his scant, soft, faded brown hair while he read the paper.  She imagined roads where the parts were.  She imagined that his dandruff was sand.

His first stroke paralyzed his left arm and hand.  His thumb and forefinger locked stiffly together and the other three fingers curled into his palm.  He worked it and worked it.  The effort drove Grandma mad.  They yelled at each other.  "Leave it alone, Anton," Grandma yelled, "it's useless."  And Grandpa exploded, "Hold your tongue, woman.  Without the hand I am no man.  I am needing the hand.  I am making this hand to work."  And he continued.  He used his right hand to pull the stiff thumb away from the forefinger.  They snapped right back together.  Over and over.  One day he could move them far enough apart simply by willing it that he picked up one of the dining room chairs.  "Aha!" he laughed, "AHA!!!  Lizzie, look!  Al, Look!"  The chair dangled from his stiff, misshapen fingers.

Grandpa and Grandma went to Mass every Sunday but Grandpa seldom went up to the Communion railing to receive the sacrament.  Grandma and Mama received every Sunday.  Mary Jane wanted to know why.  "He's too humble," explained her Mama.  "Grandpa really believes that God comes to him in Communion.  It is such an honor for him, he never feels worthy.  Only rarely does he permit himself to receive, despite how unworthy he feels.  Mostly he prays his rosary and the prayer the priest says:  'Oh Lord, I am not worthy that You should come into my house; only say the word and my soul shall be healed.' " Mama’s voice became soft, "I love my Daddy so much.  I am more grateful for the little bit of him in me than for all I received from my mother."

After the stroke when the priest and doctor came, and Mary Jane hid her head under the sofa pillows, Grandpa Klimek never again left his bed.  The family nursed him--Grandma, Mama, maybe Aunt Alice Lou helped, I'm not sure.  I don't know if my mother's older sister, Aunt Eva, came from Minneapolis to help.  Mary Jane visited him.  A large wooden chair that was a portable toilet was placed by the bed.  She avoided it.  She sat on the bed.  Grandpa played "Eeny, meeny, miney, moe" with her.  Later all he said was "Jesu, Maria, Joseph," over and over.

He died on December 5, 1948, and no one told her.  She was at school.  Miss Boeckers, her third grade teacher, said her mother had called and that she could go home with Bonnie Brink.  She lived in a big house on a corner where she had a room all to herself and so many dolls they couldn't be counted.  Her mother owned a gold satin comforter and didn't mind that the girls played with it.  Bonnie was Doctor Brink's daughter and Billy Brink's sister but Mary Jane forgave her for that.

Marge Brink, Bonnie's mother, came upstairs to Bonnie's room and told Mary Jane that Doctor Brink wanted to talk to her.  She went down the stairs into the living room and stood stiffly, eyes on her toes.  "Your Grandpa Klimek died today," he said.  "Your mother and your grandmother are very busy and that is why they want you to sleep overnight with Bonnie."

He was lying!  She knew it.  Her mother would have told her.  He was a monster, this Doctor Brink. "He did not!" She almost yelled.  "He did not die!"

She couldn't eat supper.  She and Bonnie went to bed.  She felt thirsty.  They called to Bonnie's mother for water.  She couldn't go to sleep.  She asked Bonnie what happened to people who were dead.  "Worms eat them," Bonnie informed.  "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms crawl up and down their snout," she sing-songed.  They giggled.  They sang together "The worms crawl in. . ."  They giggled some more and sang more loudly.  Doctor Brink called out "You girls, be quiet in there and go to sleep."  Mary Jane felt sick.  She wanted to cry.  She was lonesome for her mother.  Finally she went to sleep.

After school the next day she stopped, as usual, at Grandma's to visit Grandpa Klimek.  He wasn't there.  A woman she didn't know was cleaning.  The wooden toilet was gone.  The mattress was gone off the bed and only the empty, coiled springs remained on the bed frame. 

The next day the undertaker brought a gray velvety coffin into the living room and opened it.  Grandpa lay very still inside on satin pillows.  Grandma cried in her bedroom while she watched herself in the mirror above her dresser.  Mama cried while she knelt on the kneeler the undertaker had positioned in front of Grandpa.  "I wish we could have gotten a better coffin," she explained to all the people as they began to arrive at Grandma's apartment.  "It's the war.  They're so scarce, the better ones."

Relatives Mary Jane didn't know existed came and ate at Grandma's round dining room table.  Uncle Felix with the bushy mustache that dripped with coffee each time he took a drink was Grandpa's brother.  While they ate, her Uncle Paul stood looking down at Grandpa.  The curtain between the dining room and living room was open so she could see him.  He held his grey wool cap in his hands.  He shook a little bit.  He talked softly; she had never heard him talk softly before.  "Dad..." he said.  "Dad."

Anton John Klimek,
1876-1948

Do we slip into chinks between the bricks or boards of places we have lived? Do the trees absorb our spirits? Do lakes, rivers, and the ocean laugh our joy, and does rain weep as we have wept? If we let ourselves, if we take the time, could we touch our past with its people and places, unite it to the present, and carry it into future? And does it then transcend our individuality? And here's another question that intrigues me--Is it possible to bring the world to consciousness through our own souls? Does everything and everyone we have truly loved, consciously loved, become immortal through Love's immortality? 

 

I'd Like to Talk To Her

Elizabeth Klimek, late 1920's

Grandma Klimek favored those glasses. She still had them in the 1940's and Mary Jane begged her not to wear them. Does she look a little mean to you? Maybe she just looks sad. But the child thought all the scariness in her grandmother came directly from the geometrics of those golden frames. Odd how children think.

An enigma, my grandmother. Some people, many in the family, experienced her as selfish, cold, domineering, and downright mean. She tried to control the lives not only of her children but of her "help." That was the story I heard over and over as I asked people who had known her. But they also admitted to her amazing business acumen, her delicious cooking and baking, her impeccable service at the resort, her organizational skills, the best dining room in the county. These days she'd be the CEO of a major corporation. Those days she was an immigrant, born in Trier, Germany, brought to this country by her parents, Nicolas Friesinger and Maria Josephs Friesinger who settled in Little Falls, MN.

Lizzie Friesinger, 1920

 Take a look at her determination. True, she doesn't look all that happy back then either. Or, more likely, picture taking was a serious business. Still, I can't help but wonder, all the way through, just what secret she hid behind her eyes. Mary Jane learned a few things from those nights she spent at Grandma's house, drinking hot chocolate, listening to stories, and looking at pictures. Her mother, Maria, used to hide bread. What was that about? Did she fear starvation back in Germany? And why? And my grandmother didn't attend her funeral. Another why without answer. I thought they must have been angry with each other. That's how children make sense of things like that.

She married Anton John Klimek. He was the fifth man to propose. Anyway, that's how the story went. She had five suitors in all. She accepted each proposal, one after the other. Each time she was given an opal ring. Each time the suitor died before the wedding. She told me that she accepted my grandfather's proposal because he was brave enough to take her on after she'd brought such bad luck to the first four. Truly, she said, it was the opals, not herself. And Anton gave her a diamond. That's how she knew. If that sounds like a tall tale to you, you aren't the first. But when I was eight years old I believed it with wide eyes and with all my heart.

Anton and Elizabeth Klimek, 1902

I wish I knew her now. I wish we were both about, say, forty years old. Let's see...she would be running the Hotel Alyce in Osakis, having just sold the farm outside of Warroad while Anton was being a traveling optometrist and chiropractor. She never wanted to live on a farm in the first place. It had been his idea. She quit her job as sheriff, packed up their things, and bought the hotel. 

I'd like to talk to her. I'll bet she was really something else!

Her Swagger

Alyce at Sixteen

There she is in Pete's pants again. This was such a tiny snapshot that I couldn't make it much bigger without having it turn garish. But there she is with her bobbed hair and her swagger. She's standing on the steps of the first building that later would become Klimek's Lodge. Look at the mess.

She still was in high school and probably had less thoughts of marriage than of journalism. She wanted to be a writer, and to this end she worked part time during the school year at the office of The Baudette Region with editor and publisher, Bill Noonan. He told her she was good--really good. She did the column about the school, and a fine job she did of it, too. She learned to type set. She loved the crunch, bling, bang of the linotype. The smell of ink. If the Depression hadn't fallen hard on everyone, she might have stayed. Who knows?

But once the resort was up and running, she had her summer work cut out for her. Winters she had two years of school left to go. The family still managed the Rex Hotel in town. And she loved a good time. George played drums with Charlie Williams's band. She told Mary Jane these stories any chance she got--after everything else had happened: the TB, the marriage, the birth, in what already were to the girl "the olden days." The whole Williams family was musical. Evelyn Williams became her best friend--not as flamboyant as her other friend, Ethel "Pat" Paddock who had a crush on George. "She might have won him, too, if her family hadn't moved. She had it all over me!"

Mary Jane reveled in the stories, wished to have a life just like her mother had, a whirl of parties, flights over the lake with Pete, dancing with George and his equally handsome brother, Harvey, singing with Charlie's banjo, pulling toffee on a Saturday night down in the basement of the Rex Hotel--going outside to wrap it around lamp posts while it cooled.

I know that I don't know and can't know how it really was.

The Original Lodge Before Additions
Alyce is sitting on the front bumper in the middle
"Ma" (Elizabeth) Klimek is in front of the Lodge

 

Father-Lore

George Lore, 1932

The Lorelands of Mary Jane's childhood were summed up in her father. He was the only member of his family who remained in Baudette and made his home there with and then alongside the Klimeks. He'd grown up in the town where his father, Fred, was a logger. But the same year that Alyce graduated high school and the Stock Market crashed, someone stole the logs Fred had prepared for sale, and with the logs the Lore earnings for that entire year. Penniless, Fred, Annie, and most of their children moved to Minnesota's Iron Range where there was work. George, already sweet on Alyce, stayed to work for Ma Klimek, learn the complexities of the lake in order better to guide fishermen, and probably most of all to fly Pete Klimek's airplanes and develop skills as a pilot and aircraft mechanic.

Mary Jane's Aunt Barbara, George's youngest sister, would tell her years later that the family harbored anger over the theft of their brother by the Klimeks. It's true that we rarely saw the other Lore's unless one or another of the families drove north from Nashwauk, Swan Lake, Coolie, or Kelly Lake. Mary Jane felt shy around her cousins, most of whom felt to her like strangers.

She never met her grandmother Anna Olson Lore. "Annie." But a story about her impressed the child so profoundly she never could get the images connected with it out of her mind. Anna Lore was killed by fire in a household accident just before Christmas 1935. The two youngest of her children witnessed the accident (John who was about 15, and Barbara who was 6). Annie was dry cleaning clothes with kerosene which she had on the wood stove, a common practice back then, and it caught fire. The flames enveloped her and she ran past John out into the snow. He ran after her with a blanket and put out the flames, but not before her lungs had been too badly burnt for her to survive. She did live long enough for George and Alyce to drive from Baudette to her bedside. Fred and the rest of the family must have been there as well. At her funeral George accepted baptism at her church because it was what she had always wanted for him.

Both George and his sister Edith were said to resemble her, and now I look deeply into her image to find the similarities. Like many daughters, Mary Jane thought him the handsomest of men. Tall for his time—he was maybe 6’2’’—he had stunning gray-green eyes, slicked back black hair, and a mustache like Clarke Gable’s. And best of all, he didn't have a normal job. Aviation continued to be rare in small towns during the 1940’s and ‘50’s when she was growing up.  He projected an aura of romantic ruggedness when he stood on the windswept field beside his Piper Cub or down at the ramp on the Rainy River by his Cessna 180. As a child of nine or ten Mary Jane would hear the roar of her father’s engine and run with her girl friends into the center of the yard where they could be seen, and then they all would lift their arms in sweeping waves as though they themselves had wings. Then her Daddy’s plane would swoop down over them, dipping its wings to return the greeting.

                

She knew him by intuition. He seldom spoke, keeping his counsel. I’m aware now of the way she spun her stories and created him, silence by silence. She whirled around him like a planet round the sun. He could still her with a word, probably because there were so few of them. She came to count on him for the stillness he brought.

                

An airplane in the sky seems not to move over the earth.  She looked down from his Cessna 180, and the ground appeared almost still as they inched along, the plane's shadow like a meandering cloud. She had forever, it seemed, to view the tiny houses below, the roads that slithered over the countryside like wet spaghetti noodles. It wasn’t until they came in for a landing that she realized how fast they had been moving all along. 

You barely can imagine such speed in the midst of a profound stillness until you land safely or fall from the sky. This was the paradox at the core of Mary Jane's father. 

Relics

Alyce came home to Lake of the Woods the summer of 1933. She needed to rest. George was waiting. He and his sister, Edith, both worked at Klimek's Lodge, and in later years Edith talked about her role back then of making sure Alyce actually did rest. My mother didn't tell stories of rest. She told stories of the gaggle of young adults who worked for her mother, "Ma Klimek." Mary Jane's uncles, aunts and cousins -- Lores, Klimeks, Delaneys, Youngs, Highs, Russ's, all at one time or another came under the iron hand of Elizabeth Friesinger Klimek.

All of it happened before Mary Jane came to be, and she would remember it in much the same was that she remembered the tales of Anderson and the Brothers Grimm. Her mother's romantic streak gave glitter to even the suffering times. It was the Great Depression. You'd never have known it from the description of life on the Lake. Prohibition would end that summer, but the stories predated that time while also merging with it. In the child's mind her mother had, once upon a time,  occupied parallel worlds. There was a world of illness and the sanatorium, and a world of parties, bootlegged whiskey and beer, dances at the old Wigwam Hall just walking distance from the Lodge where big bands came up from Fargo and Grand Forks on tour. She and George waltzed. Her Charleston wowed the fellows. She laughed to the Foxtrot. She wrote, "It was swell!"

"Their" songs were "The Waltz You Saved for Me," and "Goodnight Sweetheart." Of course they were! For most of the time those songs were popular the young lovers were separated. Ever in dreams, while I'm away, dear, I'll hear that melody. Of course. Goodnight Sweetheart...though I'm not beside you...sleep will banish sorrow. Mary Jane as a child thought these songs were lullabies. She fell asleep each night to strains of loss. Whisper goodbye...whisper goodbye...whisper, Goodbye.

Alyce and George.
Honeymoon Cabin at the Northwest Angle

Alyce returned, maybe she rested--maybe she didn't, and they married on September 3, 1934.

Mary Jane found her mother's brown wedding dress in the attic. She must have been about eight. Brown? Yes, brown. And the story of the wedding in the priest's rectory came out. "I could smell the potatoes burning in the kitchen," she laughed. The priest was poor and liked his solitude. A bit of a hermit, maybe. He wouldn't have a housekeeper. His name was Worm. George, never baptized but raised Lutheran by his pious mother, Annie, could not be married in the Catholic Church, and Father Worm took that law literally. "I didn't care about the brown dress. I didn't care about the dingy rectory. I had your father, Mary Jane, and that was all I cared about that day and ever afterwards."

The girl created a fairy tale of them and their honeymoon cabin on Lake of the Woods, their canoe trips to the islands, the granite rock they carried back with them. It was built into the great stone fireplace in the historical center in Bemidji. She touched it once, as one would touch a relic--the stones in Jerusalem where Jesus walked, or one of the bluestones that form and ancient holy place of Stonehenge.

It's the black granite in the center

A Love Too Much

Alyce Klimek, 18 years old

Before the mother is a mother she is the one her child will never know. Here she is before Mary Jane existed, in 1929, before the tuberculosis, before marriage, before even falling in love. How completely happy she looks, leaning against that paper birch on the river's edge in front of her parents' resort, Klimek's Lodge. Where did she get those pants she's wearing? I'll bet they belonged to her brother, Peter. How daring of her in that "flapper" era. Shouldn't she be wearing long beads and dancing the Charleston? This could be today if the pants weren't cut all wrong. This was early summer of the year she graduated high school in Baudette, Minnesota. She told Mary Jane the story of two girl friends and herself, all of them in those daring pants, celebrating what still was quite extraordinary for girls in little towns back then. Her sister, Eva, only four years older, didn't have that chance. School ended for her after sixth grade when she began to work alongside her mother running hotels, first in Osakis and then in Baudette, and finally the resort on Four Mile Bay where the Rainy River flows into Lake of the Woods.

I just can't help it: I love that girl. There's something in her here I can't remember being there forever afterwards. In two years she will have coughed up blood and written in her small brown leather diary, Please God, don't let it be TB. But it was TB. By then she loved George Lore. She could have lost him. He wrote to her every single day for the nine months she fought the disease. The day she said goodbye, though, she had to let him go because, clearly, she could die.

George and Alyce 1931

Mary Jane grew up with the stories of that hospital stay: the younger woman in the next bed who died one night while Alyce listened to her gasps for breath, the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux who battled the same disease, not with the "rest cure" but with her faith in God, the weekly pneumothorax treatment which utilized a gigantic needle for the collapsing of her lung, the time George and her brother Peter buzzed the hospital in Pete's Travel Air plane, and she broke all the rules about lying flat in bed to stand in the big window--a red-pajama-wearing girl waving and wanting to be seen.

Alyce at the Sanatorium 1932

Daring turned
into courage early in her life.

If not for this courage, Mary Jane might never have been born at all. She wasn't strong, this mother of hers. She went through life with one lobe of her lungs permanently collapsed. And Dr. Mary at the "San" strictly forbade the bearing of children.

Years later she would write, in what could only be called a prayer, about that daughter who was born anyway, Mary Jane, the forbidden one. It was the eve of the day I believed I would cease being Mary Jane forever and became Sister Mary Christopher of the Catholic religious congregation of St. Joseph:

Tomorrow, August, 1966, the eighth day, is to be her greatest -- the gift of herself--not to a mere man--but to God--the Supreme Ruler of all, of everything, everywhere. ... My Lord has done great things to me! (Now is the time I can tell her -- with tears of remembrance in my eyes -- she was conceived in a great love on Valentine's Day -- and little did I know then that it was really God's love and for this purpose I was made to live...On that day which glorifies LOVE, God created his child of love to be His Very Own and on this day, August 8th, 1966, I (we) give her back to him with all our heart and love.)

Cherish her, Dear Lord, and show her the way -- without doubts at any time -- but with a constantly growing love for You....but please share her on occasion with her Mother and Father.

The question never was of love, unless it was of a love too much--love that risked death and loss and hands still reaching out to touch even when the possibility of touch exists no more.

The Solemn-Eyed

Nobody remains in this world who remembers her like this. Solemn child. Her baby book records her birth and nothing after that. Her mother was gone. She hadn't died--nothing that serious. But she wasn't there. No. She had bad lungs. TB. And just after the infant's birth she tested positive again and left the infant with its father and grandmother for six weeks while she returned to the sanatorium to heal.

She left her with a name. Mary Jane.

Look at her. What is going through that baby's mind? Or is it the heart that causes infant eyes to gaze like someone old? So then, what is going through her heart? What is the feeling of being torn away from your source, your ground--to have the earth of you unwound? The towel must feel good--cocoon of a different sort, or maybe not, being such an inadequate substitute for the mother's arms, her breasts.

How soon after the mother left did the infant begin to forget? Because forgetting would be a necessity. When the mother is ripped away what makes it possible for such a fragile creature to survive? Something. I don't know what it is.

I can't stop looking at this infant's eyes. I see something there. I recognize something there. Do I remember her after all? Is it possible to remember? What did Mary Jane take as her mother once her birth mother went away? And when she finally returned,was she a stranger? Was there any remnant in the baby of the original mother's face? Had she lost the smell of her, the feeling of her skin? There was no more milk; how could there be?

She screamed with hunger after her mother left--so I was told. The old fashioned formula curdled and the baby screamed. Her grandma and her daddy, adept at other things, failed at this chemistry. If you've ever made cream of tomato soup from scratch, you can appreciate their frustration. Mary Jane screamed and the formula curdled once again. When they finally got it right, it needed to be cooled. Her grandma rocked her while her daddy tested the obstinate liquid on the inside of his wrist.

The story came down in  family lore as funny. Silly daddy. Silly grandma. The baby came through it fine, though. Just look at her. Healthy. Not plump, really, but sufficient.

Curious, about those solemn eyes.

I'm haunted right now by those two words--they seem part of a poem or song. I consult Wikipedia. Yeats. Of course:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us she's going,

The solemn-eyed: