MARIN ARTS & CULTURE 25
More than ten years before her death, I urged her to write about her life, to give to her children and 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.
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