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.