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.