Steve Dimick — Law 'n' Stuff

Mildred

You’re a hard man, Magee.

Molly.

“They don’t even keep salt on the table!  I had to get up and get it myself!”

It’s a catch-phrase in our household.  In a roundabout way, it has to do with our wedding.

Marianne and I were married in Paris on Valentine’s Day.  It sounds romantic, but was almost anything but.  Six of us gathered at Notre Dame cathedral: Marianne and I, my ten-year-old soon-to-be-stepdaughter, Kristi, my good friend Chuck McLain, ready to perform his wedding number three-hundred-and-some-odd, and Chuck’s Parisian friends, Georges and Christine.

Christine had allegedly obtained permission over the telephone for the ceremony to be performed in the cathedral, but forgot to ask the name of the priest on duty that day who had granted the permission.

Some member of the angry crowd that gathered around us summoned the cathedral police and we were escorted out into the bone-numbing cold of France’s worst winter in years.  Who would have thought a cathedral would have its own police force?

Chuck finally performed the ceremony in our third-floor walk-up apartment, where the wedding music on the little radio was the habanera from Carmen: “If you don’t love me I love you, and if I love you, watch out.”

[Note: a more complete version of this story is filed under "Personal:  Le Mariage."  Click here:  http://www.dimicklaw.net/thoughts/2009/07/02/le-marriage/ ]

*

Since no family members were invited to Paris for the wedding, some close friends hosted a reception for us back at home two months later.  We invited Mildred and Bob to stay with us for a few days and to attend the reception.  Rick was to fly out later.

The four of us took a day trip to Napa Valley and points west.  Rode the funicular up to the castle-like setting of Sterling Vineyards, with its spectacular view of the valley from north to south.  Had lunch at a four-star bistro and later walked on the beach at Jenner, where the Russian River meets the Pacific Ocean.  It was a genuinely nice outing and Bob loved it.  Mildred said little.

After dinner that evening, Mildred decided she had to call Rick back in Oklahoma.  Having a pretty good idea of what was up, I stood around the corner and listened.

“You can’t imagine what they put me through today,” she said, almost sobbing.  “We had to go to these…wineries.  And you know I don’t like wine.  Then we had to climb all of these stairs at the last place just to look out over a bunch of grape fields.  Then, they served me some undercooked something, I don’t even know what it was, I mean the vegetables were so crunchy I could hardly chew them.  And then, they made me walk on the beach and I was so tired I could hardly walk.

“And then at dinner?  They served me more undercooked food.  And the worst thing was, they don’t even keep salt on the table!  I had to get up and get it myself!”

Yes, when I set the table, I had forgotten to put out the salt and pepper shakers.  I still do, quite frequently, and when one of us has to get up from the table to get the salt, we all chime in.

**

Mildred had two, and only two, real friends, in her entire life: Wilma and Norma, with whom she roomed in Des Moines during the war years when she was waiting tables and going to business school part-time.  Norma married and had children; Wilma didn’t.  But they visited when they could and faithfully wrote for 60 years.  They are the only two friends I never heard Mildred disparage.

Discounting Wilma and Norma, no friendship was ever unconditional enough for Mildred, no praise grand enough, no acceptance pure enough.  In her view, people tended to dislike her, discount her and conspire against her, and she never knew why.

Friends who took her under their wing when she left Dwain and became a single mother struggling to raise two boys on a small salary and even smaller child support later turned against her, for reasons unknown.  New friends made in Midwest City would last a while – sometimes years – but they would all betray her in the end.

“Mil, how’s Mary Hattendorf?” I asked her once on the telephone.  Mary was a widow who had become a friend of Mildred’s, and had actually come with Mildred to California to visit me on two occasions.

“Oh, I don’t know.  I haven’t seen her in a long time,” she replied.

“Well, why don’t you call her?  Maybe she’s sick.  You know, she’s always been your good friend.”

“Maybe she should call me.”

“Mil, that’s not the point,” I argued, and reaching back to my Mickey Mouse Club days, tried to cajole her.  “You know, ‘to have a friend, you have to be a friend.’”

“Oh, I’ve always been her friend.  But if she won’t even call me, what can I do?”

*

Unlike my Auntie Verna on my father’s side, no one is left alive on my mother’s side of the family to give me information about what formed her.  All I have are her writings and my memories – memories which don’t begin until she was around 35 or so.  I have scoured both of these for clues to why she became what she became, with only some success.

There are snapshots of Grandpa Charlie Phearman and Stevie walking in the garden, but I was probably two or younger.  My earliest memories of him are after he went blind, broke his hip and refused to ever try to walk again.

Charlie would sit in his easy chair in the living room, alternately smoking cigars and a pipe, and listening to radio dramas.  Many of the great old shows were still on radio in the ‘50s, including “The Lone Ranger,” “The Shadow” and “Ma Perkins,” but Charlie’s favorite was “One Man’s Family.”  In later years (he died at 90), age and sensory deprivation left him in a foggy world, and the grandkids would make shameless fun of him at dinner for telling the same jokes repeatedly.

I heard a few stories about Charlie’s early years.  How he took great delight in eating Limburger cheese while the very smell drove the rest of the family away from the table.  How he ate raw eggs as a joke and once conned a girlfriend of Uncle Leo’s into following his lead, whereupon she immediately had to rush outside to throw up – all to Leo’s mortification and Charlie’s great glee.  How Mabel, after he went blind, would serve him strawberry or cherry pie and only afterwards slyly tell him it was rhubarb, which he professed to hate.

But nothing about cruelty, coldness, selfishness or narcissism.  In fact, when eight-year-old Stevie and five-year-old Ricky would wander unsupervised around Prairie City and become lost, we could ask any passerby for directions back to Charlie Phearman’s house.  The whole town knew him and liked him.

*

There are many more pictures and mental film clips of Mabel, Mildred’s mother, who to me was a saint.  She did sigh a lot, so maybe Mildred received the martyr syndrome from her mother.  But Mabel, at 70 and 75, would gladly cook a complete meal for 10 or 15 when Mildred’s (meaning Mildred, Steve and Rick), Ruth Adah’s (meaning Aunt Ruth, Uncle Daryl, Linda, Shirley and Dale), Carl’s (Uncle Carl and Aunt Berniece), Aunt Lena and Aunt Nellie (Mabel’s sisters) came for dinner.  Never a word of complaint and the sighs were less exasperation than exhaustion.

Mabel was born to be a grandmother.  She had 12 grandchildren, loved each of them as her own, and somehow made each of us feel as if we were her favorite.  Mabel’s was a lap on which I could cuddle.

(Mabel’s sister, Aunt Lena, however, was another story.  Aunt Lena was mean as a snake.  And it certainly didn’t help any that she married a Dutchman (Prairie City was largely of Dutch descent and the German families were a minority), who died long before I came along.  So maybe there was a family gene which skipped Mabel, but became dominant in Mildred.)

*

So all I have is what Mildred was and not why.  What she was was suspicious, tight-fisted and convinced that nobody liked her, for no justifiable reason.

In 1940, Mildred was living at the YWCA in Des Moines, waiting tables and going to school at Capital City Commercial College (commonly known as 4Cs – “It Pays to Attend a Good School”)  and playing basketball for the Y.  She wrote her mother on December 7, 1940,

We played the employees of the State Farm.  The girls won and the boys lost.  I got to play almost the whole game again.  He started the other girl but only let her play about 2 minutes.  Gee!  I just love to play – don’t know why he doesn’t start me in the beginning.

I made a 10¢ tip today but was asked for a dime to buy Margaret a present so I handed it over.  Isn’t that bad?  I no sooner get money than I have to give it up.

An old gentleman who is either a lawyer or court reporter went to Chicago and sent cards to the waitresses who had served him.  I got one – with the picture of a Chicago hotel on it. He’s certainly a nice old fellow but rather queer.  He always wears a stiff white collar and a black bow tie.

**

When Mildred’s second husband Bob died, it fell to my wife and me to clean out the house to prepare to move Mildred into an assisted living facility.  Rick was supposed to keep her occupied by playing board games with her, otherwise we’d never have gotten anything done.  She would question everything that went into a garbage bag.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a 15-year-old bank statement, Mil.  You don’t need it.”

“Oh…What’s that?”

“It’s a 20-year old tax return, Mil.  You don’t need it.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Mil.  Rick does your taxes and he said it was OK.”

“Well… I guess it’s OK….What’s that?”

“RICK!!  Help me out here!  Don’t you think it’s time for another game of Rummy-Cube?”

We tossed dumpster after dumpster of old bank statements, old tax returns, old letters and notebooks; made many trips to the Salvation Army and sorted the rest in preparation for an estate sale.  That is when I found what I have come to call the “Dwain box.”  I also found, read and tossed two spiral-bound notebooks and have kicked myself ever since.

*

After retirement, Bob had taken up golf and played nearly every day.  When he wasn’t playing, he hung around the clubhouse, eventually becoming a de facto assistant and adopted grandfather to the owner’s young daughter.  Mildred played bridge, volunteered at her church’s retirement home and took the occasional adult course at the local junior college.  She took at least two “creative writing” courses during these years, in which the assignment was to keep a journal and to write a story or essay about things the students noted in their daily lives.

Interspersed among the overly flowery descriptive essays were several pieces about interpersonal relationships, including one about her bridge friends and two about bus excursions she and Bob had taken to Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri.

I should have these essays to quote from.  At the time, however, I was more interested in documents about family history or family stories than family psychoses.  I dare not even try to reconstruct them, but the outlines were pretty much the same:

I.  A group of people meet in a social setting that has been, or is expected to be, repeated, whether over a period of years or merely days.

II.  Marvelous time had by all;  Mildred thinks of them as (old or new) friends.

III.  Group meets again; Mildred excluded; others continue having grand time without her,

OR

III.  Mildred overhears remark or someone makes public remark;  Mildred realizes she will never be true part of group.

IV.  Mildred hurt, cries, resigns self to inevitable.

I watched this pattern for 50 years, until she got too old to even try.  Just as she described in her Iowa poem written before I was born, people were always conspiring against her, snubbing her, rejecting her or at least not paying her proper attention.  And it never occurred to her that people avoided her because she was honestly, genuinely unlikeable.

*

Having none left of her own, she pinned all her hopes on me.  When I failed to work out to her satisfaction, she centered on my brother, Rick.  There must have been a period of rootlessness before Rick’s wife had their first child and Mildred could dote on him, write poetry to him and believe he was the most perfect grandchild in the world.

There was some small room left in her heart for Rick’s second child and she would vehemently deny any favoritism between them (just as she would vehemently deny any favoritism between her sons), but nobody was fooled – not my brother and not my nephews.

There was no room left for anyone else.

*

The day after Bob died, Marianne and I arrived at the Oklahoma City airport around midnight.  Rick was exhausted from the hospital visits of the last several days.  When our plane was delayed in Denver, I told him to go to bed; we’d find our own way there.  We caught the last shuttle from the airport before it closed for the night and were taken to Midwest City.

The next day, to everyone’s surprise, Mildred’s older sister, Ruth Adah, and her daughter Linda, appeared at the door, down from Iowa.  “Don’t you remember, we called you last night and told you we were coming?”

Marianne remembered the phone ringing in the middle of the night.  Mildred, much further gone into dementia than I had realized, didn’t even remember the phone call.  Out of earshot of her sister, but not of Marianne, Mildred hissed, “I hate her.”

*

Funeral over, the family gathered at a local café for a last meal together before the Iowa contingent headed home.  Mildred had already made several comments about her “real” grandchildren (as opposed to my stepdaughter, Kristi, whom I raised from a pup and adore, and whose doting biological father even admits that it is proper that she refer to Mom and Steve as “my parents”), but was particularly offensive at this lunch.

“I always wished I had a real granddaughter,” she lamented, and was immediately attacked from all sides.  Cousin Linda was the leader.

“Aunt Mildred, I have children and stepchildren and grandchildren and adopted grandchildren, and Cal has children and adopted children and grandchildren, and to us, they’re all just…grandchildren.  We don’t make any distinction.  The kids are all family.”

But Mildred wouldn’t let go.  Advancing dementia had stripped most of her pretenses away, and  little more than an hour later, back at her house, she was at it again about her “real” grandchildren.

I could no longer hold myself back.

“Don’t you ever say that again,” I snapped, pointing a rigid index finger not a foot from her face.

“Why?”

Why?  WHY?  What the hell kind of answer was that?  I had expected something more along the lines of “Don’t say what again?”

“Because I’m goddamned sick and tired of you treating my family like shit,” I said, my voice rising and starting to sound frighteningly like Dwain.  “Marianne came out here and worked her butt off to clean out your house and help find you a place to live.  I’ve always asked Kristi to talk to you on the phone and to call you ‘grandma.’  But all you can do is snub my wife and complain because my daughter isn’t your real granddaughter.”

Neither Rick, who worshipped her, nor his wife, Susan, who didn’t, said a word.  This was between Mil and me, and I credit them greatly for realizing it.

“Steve, I don’t treat your family like shit,” she whimpered, all innocence and tears.

“The hell you don’t!  You embarrassed the hell out of a whole table full of friends and relatives at lunch.  I thought maybe Linda got through to you, but obviously not.  You haven’t let up on Marianne and Kristi since I got here.  I have one thing to tell you now, and you’d better get it straight: I changed my plane ticket to stay another three days to help get you settled, but if I hear you ever – ever – say that again, I’m out of here.  Do you understand that?”  The finger was still pointing.

“…Yes,” she said weakly.  “I’m sorry.”

This was no time for graciousness.  “You’d goddamned well better be,” I said, before slamming out of the house, walking around the block three or four times and spending the next half hour sitting on the curb waiting for my shaking to subside.

My nephews who, luckily, had missed this entire exchange, having been playing football in the back yard, found me on the curb later and asked if I would play with them.  After a three-man game, in which I switched sides depending on which nephew was on offense, we returned to the house and a world in which the scene had never happened.

*

“So the whole thing was just a waste of breath and I ended up looking bad in front of my brother and sister-in-law,” I told my counselor a couple of weeks later.  “She doesn’t remember anything that happened more than a few minutes ago.  And I certainly should know better.”

“Did she ever say it again?”

“No.”

“How long had you been there?”

“About five days.”

“And how many times had she made these comments during those five days?”

“Oh…two or three times a day, at least.”

“How long did you stay after this…incident?”

“Three more days.”

“Did she ever say it again?”

“Um…no, actually, I guess she didn’t.”

“She heard you,” said Mark.  “She heard you loud and clear.  She understands a lot more than you realize.  Don’t beat yourself up.  It’s OK.”

Next up, Chapter 14:  Tales of Oklahoma outlaws