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 I spent years searching out clues and writing an unpublished novel in an attempt to figure it out.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."