The Marilyn Monroe of
Great Falls, Montana
24 MARIN ARTS & CULTURE
veryone dies. We all know it, though none of us are ever really prepared for it.
My mother smoked herself to death at 78. She had a genetic right to live to 100. That her life was cut short was in itself a tragedy. But the larger tragedy to me is that she left a vacuum, an abyss of unfinished humanity, long before we were able to say everything we really needed to say to each other, an accumulation of decades worth of unspoken feelings and unanswered questions.
The unspoken things. This is the great loss, the unrecoverable, the discontinuity that is the black hole of mortality.
grandchildren the full dimensions of a story that we knew was complex and studded with telling detail, and for which she alone was the gatekeeper. She begged off, claiming only that “it’s too sad.” That statement itself was a revelation. We had all endured hardship, but the family narrative was dominated by our successes and the things we had overcome. Why “sad” should be the simple reflexive response will always be a mystery to me.
Our family was small and fragmented on both sides, without any real standouts, save for my maternal great grandfather who emigrated from Sweden at 17, became a pillar of the community in Great Falls, Montana, and subsequently bought a ranch in the area. My mother was the only link to the past, our only source of continuity, the last keeper of family history and lore.
She was beautiful. A Marilyn Monroe lookalike, tall and busty, gifted with intellect, passion, and a kind of preternatural empathy that drew people to her. That she ran off with my ne’er-do-well father when she was 17 makes perfect sense if one knew her mother, who drove off four husbands and to the best of my knowledge never had a close friend in her life. Add to that the onset of World War II when people lived with a kind of fatalism that we of subsequent generations will probably never really know.
She came of age in the golden era of tobacco, when it was simply taken for granted that everyone smoked, everywhere and all the time. Hollywood made smoking de rigueur for the glamorous, sophisticated and romantically inclined. She began smoking at 15. Her last words, I am told, were a request for her cigarettes.
After years of poverty and the humiliation of bill collectors, evictions and my father’s chronic aversion to real work in favor of his endless stream of lightweight scams, she found the courage to dump him. Sometimes I try to imagine what she must have felt at the time: a beautiful woman, not yet 30 but with three strapping boys, no high school diploma, no job and no money. All this in the middle of the nowhere that was Montana in the mid-50s. Trapped in that era, when so little opportunity was open to women, she had to find a way for us to get by.
She had converted to Catholicism as a teenager, drawn to the mystery and pageantry of the church over the dour Lutheranism she had been raised in, and there was a payoff. She threw herself on the mercy of the Catholic Church, giving my brothers and me temporary sanctuary in St Thomas orphanage while she got her GED, worked selling real estate, and went on to college on a fast track to get her teaching credentials. Forced to make her own resourceful way to support her family, but in a culture that defined a woman by whom she married, she spent the rest of her life straddling that divide between feminist empowerment and seeking a man to marry and take care of her, the Holy Grail of her generational culture.
We got by. My brothers and I shuttled between St Thomas, my grandmother’s scruffy ranch, and weekends with my mother who always found a way to maximize our time with her. Despite our poverty, she always managed to keep us hopeful and optimistic. There was always the “Christmas miracle,” even in the worst of times, when I expected nothing but we still ended up with a beautiful tree and a dazzling abundance of brightly wrapped presents. To this day, I have no idea how she managed it. I always meant to ask her.
When we had nothing else, at least we had books. She was an avid reader and believed in the power of learning as well as the escapist balm of a good read. She had classic fiction and poetry, as well as the writings of Freud, Voltaire, and Aquinas, among others. Best of all, there was a set of the 1950 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the remnant of my father’s last stab at a conventional sales job.
Her first teaching job was in a one room schoolhouse in the middle of Nowhere, Montana, where she slept in a tiny alcove off the classroom, which also had a nominal kitchen. My brothers and I slept in a fold-up bed in the classroom. Water came from a hand-cranked pump. The toilets were of the classic “two-hole” species, a decent walk from the back door. Winter was a siege of record cold and snowfall, and at one point we were marooned there for weeks. She had her books, her boys, and the Big Sky, but it must have been a horribly bleak year for her. She took up painting that year, and seemed an awesome talent to us. Sometimes, in that miniscule kitchen, she would prepare something so unusual that we were certain we were the only people in Montana who were eating that dish that night. What couldn’t she do?
What she couldn’t seem to do was to land a man. It was a profound mystery to us. After all, what man wouldn’t want a woman who was beautiful, glamorous, innately sophisticated, brilliant, wellread, artistic? The answer, it seems, was that very few men of that era wanted the challenge of engaging a woman with those qualities on an equal footing. She was clearly intimidating to most.
Those who were bold enough to approach her were either ultimately put off by the boisterous instant family they would be taking on, or were simply the wrong kind of men—married men too often, men who were ultimately inaccessible for one reason or another. Though she seemed artsy and Bohemian to most, she clung to a kind of Victorian-romantic sensibility. She wanted to be thought of as virtuous and worthy of a classic wooing.
Early on there were short-lived romances. The jet fighter pilot from North Carolina who was stationed at the big Air Force base outside of Great Falls, but who went home to North Carolina, which might as well have been on Pluto. The handsome Norwegian war hero who ended up far away. The high school boyfriend who turned up in Portland after we moved there for her fourth year of teaching, who fancied himself a novelist but was mostly a linoleum salesman. What happened to all these men? What impact did they have on her life? What was she hoping for from each? I can only guess.
In the background, all this time, was the man she really loved. Father Bill, as we came to know him, was a Catholic priest who was attached to the hospital where my mother briefly worked in the early years of her marriage. Something ignited between them, but I’m not sure when or under what circumstances. I remember hearing bits and pieces about him. He had become a chaplain in the Air Force, an officer posted to exotic places all over the world—Spain, Germany, Morocco, Japan, and, ultimately, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. There was the occasional letter with the exotic postmark and stamps, the infrequent gift from some strange place; a camel saddle from Tangier, silver and a bullfight poster from Seville, silk from Japan.
He was just an abstraction to me until we picked him up one night at the Portland airport where he had arrived for a brief visit. Seeing my mother rush out onto the tarmac, throw her arms around him and kiss him in a way that did justice to a scene from any movie of the day, was a revelation for which, at fifteen, I was woefully ill-prepared. She gave him her bedroom that night and made up a place for herself in the living room of our tiny cracker box house, but I was still awake when she went quickly tip-toeing back into the bedroom after lights-out.
Despite my adolescent revulsion at having to acknowledge my mother’s sexuality and romantic needs, and my (presumably Oedipal) turmoil at his presence in our lives, I came to regard him as the finest man I ever knew. He was a compassionate intellectual, a cosmopolitan man whose worldliness and breadth of knowledge were beacons to me. A complex man of powerful but fundamentally conflicting ideals, he had the wisdom to keep his conflicts off the table when he was with us. A few years later, when I was mired in an obsessive romance in college, we became collaborators and kindred spirits. This was a period when priests were not yet leaving the clergy, though this would begin in a significant way in just a few years. My mother begged him to change his life and come to her. He couldn’t find the wherewithal to make that move. Toward the end, he told me about the paralyzing fear of breaking with clerical life, with a kind of fatalistic sadness that shriveled me. “What would I ever do? This is the only thing I know how to do.”
They tormented each other with a love that promised everything, but mostly delivered frustration and anguish. Eventually, they gave up. A few years later the news leaked back to my mother: he had been posted to an air base in San Antonio and they found him in his car, far out in the Texas high desert, dead. He had drunk himself to death. She never spoke of him again. I never brought him up, though I was bursting with questions, as well as the sympathetic, compassionate things I wanted to say to her but for which I never found the voice.
Over the years there were a few others: the retired Coast Guard commander who ran a charter fishing boat, whose wife “wouldn’t give him” a divorce; the creepy little guy with the unlikely name of Johnny Fontana, who hit her once. I went looking for him. Luckily for both of us, I never found him. Then there was the cheery sales guy who was never without a cigarette, just like her. Presumably they had other things in common, but I never saw those. Did I mention that he was married and had some convoluted story about why he couldn’t get a divorce? He came back from a business trip one night and straight to my mother’s place instead of home, and died of a heart attack in her bed a few hours later. She wasn’t even allowed to attend his funeral.
In her last decade, it became clear that she would never have that man who would “make her complete” in her idealized, if painfully outdated notion of mating. By then, her talent for denial—that had always been central to her coping mechanism but was easily overlooked when her charms were in full bloom— was running high. Apple’s Steve Jobs was notoriously credited with having his own “reality distortion field” that enabled him to operate by his own set of rules. But my mother could have taught him a thing or two about reality distortion. It made those few opportunities for a real heart to heart discussion nearly impossible, though I made various eleventh-hour attempts. But by then her empathic powers had narrowed to a kind of self-awareness that marginalized her. What had seemed sophisticated and worldly to me as a child now seemed quaint and superficial; what had seemed brilliant and erudite a few decades before now appeared shallow and pedestrian.
The opportunity for closure, for the kind of connection that does justice to the bonds that nature provides between parent and child, from one generation to the next, was gone and irretrievable. And now I have to wonder—could my son be having similar thoughts about me? And if he is, how will I know? Do we ever learn? I think we’ll be alright, partly because we are both compulsive writers and we leave written trails for each other, even when our lives seem so widely divergent. I can only hope.
by Randall Stickrod
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