The Conundrum of Knowing Others

Lately I've been thinking about the phrase, "You never really know a person,” and I wonder if perhaps what we mean—or should mean—is that we can never really know all the details about a person. Behavior, attitude, personality may make adjustments throughout life, but generally remain very similar. However, how a person behaves, or expresses, her/his personality is something entirely different.

The gist of what I am thinking about is: People surprise us.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Here’s an example of a good surprise: At one point I was talking to my late grandmother, my mother’s mother. She was older, maybe in her late 80s or 90. She told me that she once played around with the guitar. I was astonished…and thrilled. This was something that she had done or tried that I never would have considered for her. So I went back and reviewed all I knew about her—how she managed to raise five kids, keep a roof over their heads, feed and clothe them, make sure that when they needed medical care they got it, and ensure that they never felt as though their lives were at times near destitute. This she did with a husband who would spend a lot of time at the pool hall, and when he needed it, use the food money for something else. And at one point in her life, this amazing woman tinkered at playing the guitar. My mother has the guitar!

“You never really know a person.”

My other grandmother, my father’s mother, spent a lot of time with cigarette smokers. Her parents smoked, her stepparents smoked, her husband smoked, many of her friends smoked. Two of her three children smoked, including my dad. She never smoked. In 1976, at age 62, she passed away suddenly. The house was her domain. In the months after, as my grandfather and aunt were cleaning cupboards and closets, they discovered hidden in a drawer, a pack of Kool cigarettes and an ashtray with two butts in it. Whoa! Grandma smoked!?! They were so surprised that I don’t think they told anyone for several years. I didn’t learn of it, that I can remember, until I was an adult, and only from my stepgrandmother.

What kind of surprise is this?

Baffling initially, and then understandable. For some time my grandmother had some physical discomfort, even pain, from a bad hip. While she was on medication, the discomfort remained. There were also some challenges going on in the family itself. While tobacco cigarettes are not the same as marijuana cigarettes, they still produce a little high, a quick head rush, especially for a non-smoker. This, at least, was my conclusion. Still, I never would have thought of her as having a cigarette. Yet she did. Same person, more details.

I was in college when I learned that my great-grandmother, Leta Eckman, was much married. Surprise! Basically, I never knew her married. Later I learned that her last husband, Richard Eckman, died the day before I was born. When I was child, she was always just Grandma Eckman, my father’s mother’s mother. She was an old lady. She was 69 when I was born. While I knew that she and her son-in-law, my grandfather, were not the best of buddies, I never thought much about it. In those days, when I was with both of them together, it was usually at some family gathering (holiday or birthday). Grandma Eckman would be with my grandmother, mother and aunt, cooking, cleaning up, gossiping, while my grandfather, Dad, uncle and brother (sometimes) would be together watching sports on television, tinkering on some project, playing pool, gossiping. (I am the second son, middle child.) My younger sister and I would bop around between the groupings or off playing together, joined sometimes by our older brother. We visited her at her duplex until 1971 when she moved into a senior residence. She came to our house on occasion. My parents divorced. I became a teenager and drove my sister and me to visit her. I went to college; I visited her when I was home. She wore glasses; she had false teeth. She went to church. She died in 1985. In her later years she talked about her sewing and crafts, her aches and pains, missing my grandmother and the other folks in the residence.

It wasn’t until after she died that my grandfather told me she had been married “seven or eight times.”

Surprise!

Grandma Eckman never gave me an inkling that she had been married, let alone much married.

In retrospect, I didn’t feel like I never really knew her. While I was certainly astonished, I was not dismayed. I was fascinated. I wanted to not only know more, but more details.

And here we are!

People are who they are—wonderful; changeable; full of hopes, dreams and plans; scary; and frequently surprising. That’s why I love them, and I like to keep learning about them.

Curtis, part thirty-six, concluding this story

Leta arrived back to the house before her husband Curtis’s oldest daughter finished the ironing. Together they hurriedly made the beds. Leta was feeling anxious that she would still be there before Curtis returned to the house for supper. Her next order of business was to send the girl and the two little ones to the garden to carrots, turnips, peas and strawberries for supper. This would leave Leta alone in the house when her daughter Vivian arrived to retrieve her.

The little ones loved to play in the garden, so this task was easily accepted. Once the children were out of sight, she retrieved her three suitcases from the bedroom and set them on the front porch. Then she waited, craving a Scotch to calm her nerves. But she would have a drink soon enough, if and only if Vivian rescued her in time.

Providence sided with her this time, and Vivian arrived shortly thereafter, pulling the car into the dirt driveway.

“Mother?” she said questioningly. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you once we get out of here,” Leta said. “But first, help me put these bags in the car and let’s go.”

Vivian recognized Leta’s urgency and desperation, and quickly assisted her mother. Five minutes later they were on the road.

Once free of the burden she had mistakenly taken upon herself, Leta could barely keep from bursting into tears. As Vivian drove, she stared out the window and the greening fields of the countryside, reviewing the several months of foolishness that she had just experienced—from the day she met Curtis, who only partially presented himself, to accepting his marriage proposal, to marrying him and moving to his disaster of a chicken farm, to learning that he had 12 children at home, and finally realizing he was a brute of a husband who desired a servant rather than a wife. He had misled and lied to her. He attacked everything about her—elegance, womanliness, good humor, even her attractiveness—to remake her into someone she was not, an overworked, servile farmer’s wife.

This was not what she wanted and definitely not what he promised. The silent tears rolled down her cheeks, and she dabbed at them with her handkerchief.

But she had already cried enough. She had awakened before their usual early hour after a brief and fitful night, then sat in the filthy living room with its broken furniture and fireplace smell for nearly two hours and cried. Those were tears of frustration and desperation. But then she acted, and now she felt relief.

Forty minutes later, they safely arrived at Vivian’s house, just as her grandson Don arrived home from school. Leta had never been so happy to see anyone in her life and held the boy so tightly that he had to pull himself away. While she watched, Vivian sent him to his bedroom to change his clothes and prepared a light snack.

Leta simply watched her daughter busy herself in the kitchen. It wasn’t a large kitchen, but a very comfortable one, with two outside walls. Two of the walls held the cupboards and a large sink under a window. On the other inside wall, there was room for an electric stove and refrigerator. A small dining table pressed against the other outside wall and gave just enough room to maneuver on three sides of it. A large overhead electric light gave the room a warm glow in the evenings and mornings, but in the middle of the afternoon, sunlight streamed into the sparkling windows. Leta had spent many mornings, afternoons and evenings in this kitchen, and as Vivian worked, she felt safe and secure, for the first time in over a week.

Then evening came, Vivian picked up her husband Ed, they had supper together, and then the two women were left alone with their coffee.

Vivian sat across the table from her mother and asked, “How did this happen?”

And slowly Leta told her how she met and married Mr. Curtis.

Curtis, part thirty-five

Fortunately, Mr. Wilcox was at home on Tuesday afternoon when Leta arrived to use his telephone. She was so determined in her quest that she had not anticipated he would not be there, although anyone with sense, she would note later, would not expect a farmer to be in his house on a spring afternoon. Even though the air was cool and a breeze coaxed her along, she was perspiring from a combination of exertion and anxiety.

“Mrs. Curtis!” Mr. Wilcox exclaimed in surprise when he answered her light tapping at the front door. “To what do I owe this honor?”

“Good morning, Mr. Wilcox,” Leta said pleasantly. “I am calling on you, because I—“

“—My goodness, you must come in for a glass of cold water,” he continued, almost without hearing her. With that he opened the screen door and beckoned her inside.

His small farmhouse had a vestibule with a closet and hat rack on the wall beside it. She could see down a long, narrow hallway to a closed door that she presumed must be the kitchen. Several feet ahead to the left were two steps that led to the upstairs. He gently took her elbow and guided her into a living room directly on the right. Through a large arch, she could see the dining room table, and another doorway beyond, to the kitchen. A large fireplace centered the outside wall, and the dining room held another. The house had a light, open feel, owing to windows being opened, and a cross breeze from front to back. While the furniture was neither old nor new, it was clean and well kept.

“How about a glass of iced tea?” he suggested. “Do you take sugar and lemon?”

“Why, both, please,” she stammered. “Thank you.”

“Please, sit, Mrs. Curtis,” Mr. Wilcox gestured politely, and I will fetch it for you.”

“No, thank you, I’m sorry,” Leta continued, startled by his kindness and holding up her hand. “I don’t have much time. The children will arrive home from school soon, and I must get back to prepare Curtis’s supper.”

“Yes, of course,” Mr. Wilcox agreed. He led her into the dining room, where a small telephone table stood in the front corner of the room. “Here is the telephone. You know how to use it, yes?”

“Yes,” she answered. Initially, she was surprised by the question, but then realized that Mr. Wilcox knew little about her and that it would be likely for those in Curtis’s household to be inexperienced.

“So you can see,” he added kindly, flicking the switch of an electric lamp on the stand. “While you make your call, I will fetch your drink. That will give you some privacy.”

“Thank you,” she said, and watched him walk into the kitchen.

The house was simple, but everything was clean, polished, in good repair, neat and modern. He had a telephone and electricity, and most likely indoor plumbing, although she didn’t ask. Leta wanted to relax into the simple luxuriousness of it, but realized that time was of the essence. Curtis might return home at any moment, and there was no telling how he would react to her being packed to leave, or more disturbingly, at the Wilcox farm.

Her daughter Vivian, as she hoped, was at home, and had possession of the car for the day. Usually, Vivian’s husband Ed drove to work, but Leta recalled that this was Vivian’s month to host her ladies’ auxiliary and needed to prepare for the Wednesday event.

“Hello?”

Leta almost started to cry at hearing her daughter’s rich, musical voice on the other end of the telephone line. A door opened in her life.

“Vivian,” Leta choked, “it’s mother. Come, get me.”

To be continued.

Curtis, part thirty-four

For twenty minutes, Leta stood near the open doorway, waiting. The timing was crucial, and she was anxious that her daughter would not arrive in time. Her husband Curtis had taken the truck to town right after lunch. She set his oldest girl to ironing the sheets that they had finished washing that morning, sheets from her stepchildren’s beds that had not been washed in weeks. They wreaked of old perspiration and ammonia, and she spent hours scrubbing the multitudinous stains as best as she could on the washboard and boiling them until they were fresh. There were five beds total for 12 children and two parents, so the girl would be occupied for several hours. The two youngest children were tucked away for naps, and Leta had kept them as active as she could throughout the morning to guarantee they would sleep long and hard. The other children would not arrive home until later in the afternoon. This gave her only a small window of opportunity, but one that she would have to utilize to the best of her ability.

Five minutes after Curtis left, she removed her apron and put on her coat and hat. With her pocketbook in hand, she quietly walked out the front door and down the street. Initially, she walked briskly, but once she felt more secure in her mission, she relaxed her pace, still keeping it steady. At any moment, her husband or one of his older sons passing by her could foil her plan.

Her destination was the adjacent farm, owned by Mr. Warren Wilcox, an older unmarried gentleman she had met during the week when he retrieved his automobile from Curtis. During their courtship, Curtis drove the Buick, and she appropriately presumed it was his own. This was just one of many presumptions that she held until after she married him and learned often abruptly otherwise. She also was surprised to learn that Curtis was viciously jealous. He interrupted that first meeting with Mr. Wilcox, more concerned that she was being tempted to stray from her marriage than to apologize for misleading her about the car.

At church on Sunday, she saw Mr. Wilcox again. They nodded to each other respectfully, which caught her husband’s eye, and again resulted in a fury she would not have believed Curtis capable of had he not unleashed it at her. As they left the church to return to their truck, he grabbed her wrist hard and railed against the sinful weaknesses of women and her, in particular, throughout the drive back to their farm. The only positive of that experience was that none of the children heard him. They were all bundled in the back of the truck.

As she saw the dilapidated farmhouse, the equally rickety barn and chicken coop and the new lopsided chicken barn as they approached, her heart sank. Curtis continued to speak, but all she could hear was the rush of regret at her decision to marry the temperamental and brutish chicken farmer. From that moment on, she lived in a different perspective. While she would continue to perform her chores around the house and take care of the children, she would at the next opportunity leave this ill-chosen life.

But first she needed to find a telephone to call her daughter Vivian to rescue her. After Monday morning’s milking, she shared with her increasingly disagreeable husband that she had managed to reserve a canister of milk from the two cows that he could sell to the milk collector. She had done so by slightly watering down what she drew on Sunday evening and that morning. Her husband’s always-hungry brood failed to notice.

“Remarkable!” he exclaimed. “That’ll fetch a few pennies.”

“But you must telephone the milk collector this morning, or it will spoil,” she insisted.

“Telephone?” he repeated.

“How else will you let him know?” she asked. “He doesn’t stop by regularly, and you don’t want the milk to spoil.”

“No, no, of course not,” he agreed. “It’s just the nearest telephone is at Wilcox’s, and I can’t spare one of the boys to run down there.”

“Oh dear,” Leta said with concern. “Well, I suppose I could just let it sour and turn it into smearcase, although I am not sure I know how to do that. Still, that would be a treat for the children.”

“That would be a waste,” Curtis said, his mind on the few pennies he would make from selling the milk. “Have you heard the driver pass by yet?”

“I don’t think so,” Leta answered.

“Then let’s have Roscoe stand out front and wave him down.”

“You don’t need the boy to help you this morning?”

“I can manage,” Curtis said.

By this time, Leta felt no concern at all about the milk. She had learned what she needed, that the nearest phone was three-quarters of a mile down the road at the Wilcox farm.

To be continued.