Finally -- Dale Gets Married, part one

Leta looked out the front window anxiously, not because of the rather stormy weather, but because of the guests she was expecting for dinner. She and her husband Bob had been home from church for an hour. The service was at 10:30 a.m. Following it, their usual practice was to have dinner with Leta’s daughter Vivian, her husband Ed and toddler Donald. However, this stormy summer day in 1941 was different. She was going to meet her son Dale’s young lady.

Dale was 26 years old, and in Leta’s thinking a good marrying age. He was employed in a secure job at Spicer Manufacturing, making automobile parts. In fact, he worked in the same factory as her husband. He was thrifty, living with his father and grandparents, the same place he had lived since he was an adolescent. While he liked to spend his Friday and Saturday nights drinking beer with his friends, he was never excessive about it. He was still a little excitable, carrying some nervous energy that he had difficulty controlling at times. Leta attributed this to his still being single. Marriage would help him settle.

The girls’ name was Kathryn Peer. She was the sixth child of Slovakian immigrants John and Juliana. Her father was a farmer, but he had only purchased the farm in 1935. Prior to that he worked in a glass factory. Juliana was a homemaker. How could she be anything else, having given birth to nine children? Dale told Leta that they were a close family. Kathryn—or Kate as she preferred to be called—was the oldest girl and helped her mother until her parents moved from Rossford where they had been living to the farm. She didn’t want to move, even though she was still unmarried, so she moved in with one of her older brothers and worked as a maid for two families who lived nearby.

“Are they Catholic?” Leta asked, almost accusingly.

“Yes,” Dale answered. “And I’m taking instruction to convert.”

“What?” Leta demanded.

“I have to, Ma,” he said. “We can’t get married until I’m Catholic, too.”

“You want to marry this girl?” Leta asked.

“Yes,” he answered definitively. “Wait ‘til you meet here. You’re going to love her.”

Leta had been raised to be suspicious of Roman Catholics. They had strange rituals, incorporated dead people called saints into their belief system, and had to be one hundred percent obedient to their Pope, a foreign religious and political leader whom they believed was specially chosen by God. Leta was not 100% obedient to anyone. They also, she was told, thought that the Pope and his religious collection of bishops, monks, priests, and saints were directly connected to God. A regular person was not worthy to pray to God on her own. They even had altars dedicated to various saints, like the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. They were instructed to pray to her. On the other hand, Leta prayed to God. Sometimes she prayed to God a lot. She was also startled by their belief that during communion, the wine and bread were actually turned into the blood and body of Christ. Once when she was a girl, she was tempted to go into a Catholic church and pretend that she was Catholic so she could taste the bread and wine for herself. While she didn’t know what flesh tasted like, she did know what blood tasted like from cut lips and losing her baby teeth. Besides, if the bread actually turned into flesh, it wouldn’t taste like bread, and she knew how bread tasted. As she grew older, her interest in performing such a test waned, but the wariness about Roman Catholicism continued. So she had some trepidation about Dale’s choice of female companions.

To Be Continued.

Knowing Another Person's Mind

I admit that more than once I have been frustrated during the work on the fictional biography of my paternal great-grandmother Leta. The more I write about her, her childhood, her parents, her siblings, her marriages, her relationship with my grandmother and great-uncle, and her many sexual relationships, the more I want to ask her and others in our family questions.

Some of these questions are: Did your sister Mabel have both the same parents as you? If she did, when was she actually born? Why did your father leave, return and leave again? And what happened to him after he left the second time? Where did your brother Fred go when he left? When did your father, Fred and Mabel leave? How old were your sister and brother when they did this? How often did you stay in touch with Fred? How did your older brother Samuel, the first-born, die at age one or so? How did you meet each of your husbands? Why did you marry each one? Did you ever feel anxious or guilty about sleeping with so many different men? Who knew about your sexual activities and sexual relationships? (By “relationships,” I mean those that lasted more than a couple of nights.) Did you ever break up a marriage? Who was Curtis? Were you married to him? Did he actually die in a car accident or was that someone else? Did you pretend to be married to some men just to save face? Did you just meet men in bars or did you meet men in other places? Aside from my grandmother and Uncle Dale, did you ever get pregnant again? Did you always go to church? How religious were you? Did you miscarry or have an abortion? When and why did you leave my grandmother and her brother with Ralph? Did Ralph really beat you? Did any of your husbands beat you? Do you have any regrets? If so, what are they?

Naturally, question after question arises as I work on the book. I have some dates of things to serve as the basis for parts of the story, but I need to embellish. I know, for instance, that she watched Billy Graham revivals on television in her later years and that she was a churchgoer in various periods of her life, but until she became Roman Catholic during her years living at the senior home, I did not know what denomination. (I think she converted from being Lutheran, primarily so she could participate fully in the services there; the senior home was Roman Catholic-based.)

I wish I could have a long talk with my grandmother about her mother and their relationship. How much did she remember of her parents’ marriage, divorce and her mother’s subsequent marriages? What happened that landed her and her brother at their father’s house? Why did her father move back in with his parents, and even after he married Eunice, stay with them? What do you remember about Eunice? I know practically nothing about her, except when and where she was born, that she was married prior to marrying my great-grandfather, that they married in 1929, and that she died in 1934. How did you meet my grandfather? How long did you date before you were married? What happened to you so that you were told you could have no other children after my father? How much did it hurt you to give birth to Uncle Larry and Aunt Linda, respectively, 12 and 14 years after the birth of my father?

With the death of June Scott, daughter of Leta’s brother Aaron, I no longer have any primary storytellers, those who have lived during my great-grandmother’s younger days. While my father and his cousin Connie were both children and even adults during several of her marriages, neither can recall very much, just a few experiences here and there.

Yes, my great-grandmother is fascinating. Anyone who is married at least seven times (I have pulled that many marriage certificates via genealogy searches and from two county courthouses) and divorced at least four times is fascinating. That she is a beloved grandmother, who when I was a child, shared her hard candy, let me play with her little parakeets, gave me the Snoopy and the Red Baron game that I loved so much, and chatted with me, my sister and my friends for hours and hours in her last years.

What made her tick? That’s what I’m figuring out through the facts, through the history, through the memory. That’s what I have to work with, and I am.

On Writing

My writing practice for the fictional biography about my great-grandmother Leta Scott Chetister Mohr Freeman Hoose Fields Curtis Bassett Eckman has been to work simultaneously on the writing of the novel, the timeline of her life, and these blog entries. This has enabled me to rarely get stuck, either in a creative way or on waiting for information. There is so much history and so many experiences within it that in my research and writing I have been able to skip around.

When I learn a new bit of history, for example, either from a family member or the research, I can write it up as a blog entry that I then copy and paste into the working notes of the pertinent chapter, or return to a drafted full chapter for an update. The book has basically 11 chapters—one for each of the eight marriages, one of her childhood, one of her senior years (when I knew her), and one of the long period of being single (between the marriages, respectively, to Leech Hoose and Robert Fields).

This process enables me to work at the same time on the book as a whole and on a specific chapter. Currently, I am working on a full draft of the chapter of Leta’s marriage to Robert Fields. This marriage occurred from September 17, 1937 to his death on June 19, 1946. Historically, it includes the birth of my father (my grandparents were married a year before), the marriage of my great uncle and aunt, World War II, my grandfather’s participation in the war, the births of my dad’s cousins Connie and Duane, the family reunion with Leta’s sister Mabel, and the death of Bob.

Naturally, certain details come to light in each of these historic points, and there is also the artistic embellishment. This is, after all, storytelling.

As I write the chapters, I paste in what I’ve already written (in blog posts and other notes), create segues, evaluate details, add new material, cut repetitive notes, restructure within the overall themes of the book and pay attention to the fixed history of events. While there are some jumps back and forth in time, the structure is mostly chronological.

The other day while working on the chapter of Leta’s life with Bob Fields, I did a timeline check. I had already incorporated many of the previously written blogs and historic points. I realized that I had missed one historic occurrence and had been heading in a direction in which another could not reasonably take place.

This is the first time this has happened, and I was a bit flummoxed. (Flummoxed, for me at least, is a combination of being vexed and frozen.) I was faced with a decision on what I should do. I could leave that chapter for now and move on to the next. I could reorganize it to where it needed to be. I could put the entire project aside to work on something else. The last option isn’t actually an option. I have come too far to pause right now. Additionally, this is a big project, in which time is not a good collaborator. The first option would put me off my trajectory and plan and potentially lead to some unfavorable meandering. I decided to pursue the second option—restructure, rewrite and move forward.

I believe that good writing—the crafting—is in the rewriting. It is noble and creative for a person to put some words on a page that flow from the heart. However, it is artistic to then sift that heart work through the mind, through a number of possibilities, through the ears (because reading is a kind of listening), and make that heart love into a solid piece of writing.

Here I go.

Leta Quits Smoking

At times it was easier than she anticipated, and at other times, she was sure she could not accomplish what she needed to do. Her doctor told her she should stop. The cough she had developed came on sometimes so viciously that she feared she would actually cough her lungs out. He further noted that the back of her mouth and throat were gray after so many years of inhaling cigarette smoke.

During the first few days after the death of her husband Richard, she smoked very little. This was partly because she spent so much time with her granddaughter-in-law and newest great-grandson in the hospital. This got her out of the house she shared with her late husband and kept her out of the arguments and complications of participating in the convoluted funeral and burial preparations of her husband who died the day before the baby was born. She left the arrangements to his adult children. She loved Richard, but they had only been married three years. Her history with him was so short that her claim on any of the details was weak. She could have participated more. She had preferences, but the children, gripped by grief, were fiercely determined each to have his or her own way. They were good people, she believed; they would reach an agreement. She could, as she needed to, be merely a participant. And they were kind to her. Consequently, she bided her time in the hospital, keeping Patricia company and holding the new baby whenever she had the opportunity. She had always liked holding babies.

There were areas in the hospital where she cold smoke, both inside and outside, but since it was late December, going outside was too cold. Using the smoking areas would mean leaving the young mother, and she could not bear that. Even when she had the encouragement to leave for lunch, she stayed. Even when Patricia was napping, she stayed.

When she was home—in the house she shared with Richard---she did smoke a cigarette or two, more out of habit than need. She arrived home from the hospital—usually driven by her daughter Vivian or son-in-law—turned up the heat, made herself some toast or heated whatever dish Vivian made for her, opened a bottle of beer, and when she finished eating would have a second bottle of beer and a cigarette or two. She would light the cigarette, inhale a few times, and then forget she had it. The smoke trickling up from where she left the cigarette in the ashtray seemed to satisfy her. In fact, one morning she cleaned four ashtrays with burned out stubs of cigarettes that she had never finished.

This was how she cut back. After the scheduled five days in the hospital, Patricia and the baby went home. The funeral occurred within the same time frame, right after the New Year celebration. Leta found herself yet again, alone in a big empty house that she once shared with a husband, and this time, nearly everything irritated her, including the stale smell of previously smoked cigarettes that permeated the house.

As she ferociously cleaned, washing the drapes and upholstery, scrubbing the walls, floors and the interior of the windows, she hoped to scour away all cigarette residue. It was the dead of winter, and yet she performed a thorough spring-cleaning from the kitchen through the dining and living rooms, up the stairs and through each of the three bedrooms. She washed all of the rugs and turned up the heat to dry them.

When she smoked, because she often craved a cigarette, she would go down to the basement, where she had designated a smoking area. It was quite cold, and she brought down a fan to dissipate the smoke more quickly. Some days she could not be bothered. Over the course of four months, she went down less and less frequently.

By the time she moved out of the house and into an apartment in early May, she had stopped smoking.