Margotlog: Memories Like Smoke

Margotlog: Memories Like Smoke


I haven't had many men "friends" in my life probably in part because during my growing up, it was so clear that the boys belonged to one tribe and the girls another. Times have changed. Now among a gaggle of women I trust and adore, there are several gay couples who are as close to my heart as the best of brothers. I especially appreciate this because I had no brothers.

My mother and her twin brother, Maxine and Max, did not remain close in part because of family abuse. This subject is very vivid in my mind right now because I'm writing a memoir that now touches on it. My parents came from quite different ethnic backgrounds: my mother's side of the family was German (her father) and Swedish (her mother); whereas both sides of my father's family were what we'd now call, without hesitation, "Italian." In the days of their immigration, however, they would have been labeled, at least in Italy, Sicilian and Neapolitan. In the generations before widespread railroad travel, crossing mountains or bodies of water, even relatively small ones, set people apart.

In the North Dakota small town of my mother's youth, being either Scandinavian or German was relatively common. It was the distance in age that, in part, prompted what became an ugly episode in my grandparents' lives. My German grandfather's first wife died in childbirth, and the family of the wife, from Milwaukee, took the child to live with them. Then my grandfather's eye fell on a tall, willowy young school teacher at a rural Dakota school. Her parents had died shortly after immigrating, and she had been raised by two older sisters. The photograph/portrait I have seen of her was taken later in life, but despite her gray hair, she was a lovely woman, her face turned slightly aside, her eyes gleaming, her mouth holding a hint of a smile.

When our mother would bring us on the train from Charleston, South Carolina, where my father spent most of his working life teaching at The Citadel, she intended for us to appreciate not only her successful businessman father, but also her "Mama" who loved beautiful things, who took naps (as did my very energetic mother), and who made delicious Swedish pastries. I never knew this grandmother, but my oldest cousin whose family remained in the small North Dakota town, has told me about going with her father to visit "Mama Max." Her father, Buddy, was my mother's twin brother, the one who stayed in the town; whereas my mother, after graduating from the University of Minnesota, went east as fast as she could to a library job in Pittsburgh. There she met smiling, curly-haired Leonard, second son of the Italians. My Italian grandfather had been converted to Protestantism and preached powerfully to a Pittsburgh Italian congregation. Not easy, that business of being Protestant among a community of mostly Catholics. My father used to recount being pelted with rotten eggs when he and his family walked up the hills to their father's church.

 At some point when I was still very young, my North Dakota grandmother developed stomach cancer. I have a hazy memory of tiptoeing across the large parquet floor of the hall to a small door which usually remained half-open. There in a narrow bed, lay a figure who was my grandmother. She did not speak nor raise a hand. I don't remember ever seeing her stand. Slowly over the years, it came out (largely from my cousins who grew up in the town), that "Mama Max" had been abused. When the last of her four children left home for college--the youngest would have been "the twins," my mother and her brother--Mama Max slowly fell into a depression and wept a lot. After his first semester in college, my mother's brother, Buddy, came home to protect her.

My mother spent one summer helping her father repaint the kitchen a sunny yellow, but without fail, she returned to graduate from the University of Minnesota and head east. It has taken me years to piece together this story, and to honor my uncle's dedication to protect his mother. It was only years later, when I was pregnant with my first and only child, that my mother and I took the train from St. Paul/Minneapolis back to North Dakota. There we stayed two nights in a local motel. We called from the motel to see if her brother Buddy was at home. No doubt he was astonished to hear that she was nearby. Years later, wondering why she did not call long distance ahead of time. I think there can be only one answer: she intended to make the trip without the fear, embarrassment, or awkwardness of having already contacted her brother. But he was welcoming and invited us to his family's large lake house just outside of town. My first glimpse of Buddy, sitting in a large family room, immediately told me he was my grandfather's son. They looked very much alike.

Our visit was brief and friendly enough. The big house in town, which my grandfather had expanded when  "the twins" were born, was being fashioned into a bed and breakfast. Though I have seen some of my cousins since, I probably never will visit Hankinson again. This essentially means that my sister is my only relative outside my daughter, and my husband's wide circle of family and friends. Keeping family secrets so long a time can turn confidences into whispers, so soft that they eventually disappear like smoke.