Taming the Wild Gull

A GROUP OF FISHERMEN docked, bringing to shore a seagull chick they had found in the water off Gull Rock. One man put the bird into Mary Jane's hands and asked her to take care of it. Johnny, the yard man, constructed a wire cage behind the laundry building for protection since the bird couldn't yet fly, and she supplied minnows and water several times a day. From time to time she let the bird out to waddle along behind her. Little girl and a seagull. She called him Peter after her uncle who was then flying Admiral Halsey from island to island in the Pacific.She cried when the gull's wings grew large enough and he flew off over the lake. From the end of the dock she called to him, "Peter, Peter!"

He came back. Out of a flock of gulls one separated himself and landed at her feet. He followed her up the dock to the yard, played this game for a while, and then flew off again to rejoin his kind. "That bird was meant to be wild," her grandmother said. It was all right if he were wild, just so he kept coming back to her.

               

One day he didn't come. She stood at the end of the dock and called, "Peter," over and over until her mother came. She explained that Peter wasn't coming back. There were dogs that belonged to one of the guests. They didn't know Peter was special. They thought he was a gull just like any other; not one with a name who had become the friend of a little girl. And they attacked him. He didn't use his wings to escape. He didn't know enough to be afraid. "Maybe it was wrong of me to let you tame that bird," she said.

At the end of the dock she continued to wait. The flock came at sunset to dive for fish scraps that Johnny threw from his boat. The child grew wings and waited. When the flock lifted into the sky something in her lifted with them. Something in her cried out. Something saw the earth from above. Something must stay wild, must never be tamed, must ride the wind, must never know a cage, must not exchange freedom for safety.

The temptation to safety is constant. I call it temptation not because safety is somehow evil. It is a necessity for productive life. Children need safety to develop a sense of inner security. It is mystic consciousness that requires the wild, and children often experience a foretaste of this truth.

There may be a time before reason sets in that we receive an intimation of a larger world existing on the other side of the wild spaces that is more truly safe than anything this limited world can provide. It cries from within like the cry of a gull. It seduces. It feels like something radically Other. But it cries from within and from without simultaneously. This is the moment that the soul grows wings.

She grew wings and soared,

Peering into swamps and bogs,

Spruce islands floating

On unmeasured deeps,

Illusions of stability.
She called

And a gull’s voice

Haunted the sky. 

Days of Fairy Tales

Mary Jane Loves Stories

I couldn't watch the Disney production of The Little Mermaid because I'd heard how different it was from the original tale by Hans Christian Anderson. Mary Jane wouldn't permit it. She can still remember the opening lines from the story that she wanted read every night of her childhood. "Far out in the ocean, where the water is as blue as the prettiest cornflower, and as clear as crystal, it is very, very deep; so deep, indeed, that no cable could fathom it..." When she first heard this story she had never seen the sea. She didn't see it, it fact, until I was in my early thirties and flew to San Francisco, so for all those years she imagined that cornflower blue, while I taught Emily Dickinson to English students:

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

Each night, and I remember this particularly from the years at Lake of the Woods, Mary Jane's mother would stand her up in the center of the bed to check for wood ticks before the pajamas went on and the pillows were plumped and the child climbed between the sheets with Klimek's Lodge embroidered on the seam in red thread. How many nights her mother actually read The Little Mermaid, I can't say for sure. It seemed like Mary Jane wanted it every night.

A large part of my life was spent working with children at a Catholic Charities children's home. During that time I read Bruno Bettelheim's work on the importance of fairy tales in the development of children.(Uses of Enchantment) His research turned out to correspond with my own experience, using a storytelling technique to access a child's emotional experience. The child would ask for the same fairy tale over and over until the dilemma it addressed was resolved. A lot of the children I worked with wanted to hear "Hansel and Gretel" which made sense to me because they had wandered away from what was often an abusive home and found themselves in a treatment center, (the witch's Gingerbread House?) where life seemed safe but where they soon found themselves virtually locked in and feeling anxious over what new dangers might befall them there. The fairy tale became their bible for finding a way to a transformed family and home.

Mary Jane's fairy tale was The Little Mermaid. She reacted to the story just as Bettelheim would later speculate then prove that children do. The tale enchanted her. In that enchantment she became the mermaid, learned the mermaid's every desire, every choice, every movement. It was her bible.

The mermaid would do anything for love. She would sacrifice her family, her identity, even finally her life and her hope for an immortal soul: all for love.

Maybe this kind of sacrifice would keep the mother safe from the danger of the fire.

Did Mary Jane think that way? No. She was a very small child. She didn't do much by way of thinking. But she loved the tale. From the tale she learned how to live, how to be who she became. Riding the waves of this story she eventually came to believe that the best way to love was to leave her family, sacrifice her relationship to her high school sweetheart, enter a convent, give up her name, her home, her culture, her place in the flow of time. Honestly, when people asked her why, she really didn't know. She only knew she had to go.

So, I ask you this: Is it possible to bring her back this late in the game?

The mermaid, after refusing to kill the prince to save herself, casts herself into the sea, knowing that she will become foam that disappears, knowing that she will never have an immortal soul. But the daughters of the air take pity on her. They lift her onto the currents of air. She floats above the earth in the winds and clouds where for three hundred years she will whisper encouragement to wounded human souls. After all that time which is shortened if she witnesses goodness in children, and is lengthened if children are bad, she will be released from this ghostly state. And then, only then, because of her compassion for the peoples of earth, she will discover in herself the immortal soul for which she longed.

The tale is written in Mary Jane's every cell. Will she be required to act it out right to the end and beyond? And if she is, is that such an awful thing?

Spark of Self

The world of Mary Jane's childhood was (as it is for most children) a mythic place. The real and the child's interpretation of the real combine into a story the adult spends the remainder of life deciphering. Mary Jane's world surrounded her in her family and the impact of those individuals upon one another. Laughter, tears, the inevitable sufferings of love's promises and betrayals, of nature's wounds, of the press of history (genetic and otherwise)--all swath the child. The child makes nothing of it, and makes it into everything. Creates of it everything she knows.

The world was made of leaves, ferns, Grandma's daisies, breezes and the lake. It was bordered by the spruce bog. Wildflowers grew there. "Do not go into the woods!" One wild flower led to the next. An old lady got lost, picking. Fishermen found her in water up to her waist. Three days wandering. Beyond safety--endless wilderness. 

"Don't play in the reeds!" Blood suckers and leeches swam there. They would stick to your skin. They could cover your body. The boy who swam in the reeds to save Mary Jane's beach ball lay on the grass bank screaming. All his skin squirmed with black. The grown-ups poured salt on him and the suckers fell. His skin pocked with red wounds. 

"Don't climb into the ice house!" But the ice gleamed amber in the saw-dust and the air was cool. A child could fall between the ice blocks and never be seen again. She didn't fall, but her father laid her across his knees and spanked her. You could have died. You could have died. You could have died. 

Did every beauty shimmer with danger? She held to her Grandpa Klimek's leg. Her grandma's apron is a flag in wind. Over the Gap at the end of Four Mile Bay a tornado wagged, chasing the launch to shore. Water the color of gun metal. "Please, God. Please." The funnel broke and water poured from the sky.

Since earliest years, since the beginning of memory, the world was for Mary Jane a terrifying, beautiful place in which she could not quite find her footing. Her earliest memory is a dream which she remembered from its first appearance in her mind through numerous re-plays for years until she became old enough to pray and manufacture her own additions to “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

               

"Please God,” she prayed aloud with her mother kneeling beside her at the side of the bed, “don’t let the house burn down for one hundred and sixty-six years. Amen.”

The dream prompting the prayer came when she still was young enough to be sleeping in a crib. The blanket covering her was pinned down with a gigantic safety pin, presumably so that she wouldn’t kick it off. I know this because the pin and the rungs of the crib were the first thing she saw upon awakening.

Mary Jane is standing by the side of the road in front of the lodge, looking towards the water. An orange road grader is coming down the road from my right, and it is spurting fire from its stack. She is terrified because road graders are so frightening anyway, but also because this one is headed towards the house where her mother is playing cards with her friends. It intends to burn the house down, and she is too small and too scared to stop it. She will lose her mother. Her mother will die in the fire.

NO!!

MARY JANE WOULD TAKE CARE OF HER!

It couldn't be allowed to happen.
An unspoken contract was set in place:

• That this mother must live to come when Mary Jane called, even in the middle of the night, even from the top of the ice house, even from across the room, even from the end of the dock where deep water swirled.
• That they would adventure together: to the sand ridges to pick chokecherries, to the islands where blueberries grew, down the dark road to the outhouse, to the city with its streetcars and the elevator at the Foshay Tower, to the sky with her father dipping and whirling and stalling and plummeting, the engine restarting, and climbing towards the sun, to the church where God hid in bread locked behind a golden door.
• That the mother would read to Mary Jane every single night, and sing a lullaby, and close the closet door, and kiss her face, and count her toes, and they would hold each others hearts until they woke in the morning.
• That she would teach Mary Jane to dance, to pray, to act in plays, to love the sound of words, to bake bread, to give the bread away, to be a friend, to be a daughter, to be loyal, and when the time came, to walk forward into a life of her own and she would say, "Go with my love; all I ever wanted was for you to be happy."
• That together they could dance and could be still, could laugh and then could scream,  could stand their ground or run away, could say terrifying things and follow them with words so loving as to melt their hearts, could lay their heads against the rough bark of the cottonwood tree.
• That when the mother cried out, that when she wept, that when the headaches came, that when she went to bed in the middle of the day, that when she wept, that when she wept, that when she wept…Mary Jane would hear and take the pain inside herself and carry it like her own child.
• That Mary Jane would keep the fire away.

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."

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.