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