Back to Work, part three

A month after her sister Mabel's husband Arnold died, Leta’s sister Nellie died. Nellie was 66 years old. While Nellie’s husband Frank and three children made most of the arrangements, Leta and her sister Louise spent their days and nights available and in mourning with them. After the funeral, Nellie was buried in what they called their family cemetery in Lake Township, the same place their mother and many other family members were buried.

While Leta was always lively and active, Nellie’s passing stopped her completely. Nellie had been more than a big sister to her. Throughout their lives, Leta had always been able to go to Nellie with fears and concerns. Nellie would listen carefully, ask a couple of discerning questions and then give advice. Nellie had been the one who took care of the family when their father, brothers and sister Mabel left them, when their family dissolved in 1896 when Leta was two. While Leta’s memories were vague, she remembered her teenaged sister holding her while she cried for their father, and their mother was entrapped by her own grief and shame. It was Nellie who recognized how oppressed Leta was by her marriage to Ralph Chetister and gave her tacit permission to leave her first husband to marry the more dynamic and affectionate Albert Mohr. When Albert was killed, Nellie watched Vivian and Dale, while Leta dealt with the police and funeral and despair that she felt. Through all of Leta’s years of loneliness and turbulence, Nellie provided comfort and support without judgment.

Then she was gone.

Leta was brought back to her own situation when her next month’s rent came due. She looked at the calendar. She had only a few months left before she would be absolutely broke again. She opened the paper to the classifieds section and began to read.

For the next week, she made more employment calls. She spoke to several potential employers, but none of the positions or circumstances suited her. Why couldn’t she just take any job that came along? She needed the pay. This was only a job, not her entire life. She persisted, but remained discriminating. She needed a position that she would enjoy and be willing to go to every day.

One hot summer morning in late August, she received a phone call from her daughter Vivian who had recently spoken with her broker at New York Life Insurance. His office had just learned that one of their secretaries was leaving to get married. Another had quit only a month earlier to have her first baby. They needed someone as soon as possible.

Leta went to the office the very next day. She didn’t speak to her daughter’s broker, but to the senior broker of the company. He was a large man whose belly could barely be contained by his bright white shirt and lilted over the waist of his pants, which were held up only by his suspenders. His tie fell slightly to his left. She saw his suit jacket hanging on a hook on the wall. He had a round face with a large nose, and a full lower lip. His dark hair was slicked back with specks of gray throughout. His office was warm and smelled of cigarettes. He was perspiring.

He seemed to be very busy. When she walked in, he made a note or two on a piece of paper, put a cigarette in his mouth, stood, offered his hand to her while still looking at the document on his desk, shook her hand, sat down, and then looked at her. Leta wore a plain blue dress with a broach of mini pearls that matched her pearl necklace and earrings.

“So you want a job?” the man asked right from the beginning.

“Yes, yes, I do,” Leta answered. “I’m a hard worker. I like people. I’ve worked in an office before.”

To be continued.

Back to Work, part two

In 1954, the market for employment was challenging for women. Although there had been positions available during the war in Korea during the previous three years, the recent influx of returning soldiers saturated the workforce. With this a growing attitude that women should spend their days caring for their husbands, families and homes was fiercely prevalent.

Over her 57 years, Leta held a variety of positions. Mostly, she worked to earn income. She did not, as young people were beginning to say, have a career. She held jobs—factory worker, hat maker, seamstress, diner manager. She did not have education or training like her daughter, who was skilled as a secretary, or her son-in-law, an electrician. She was more like her son, who worked in a factory that made automobile parts. These kinds of jobs, however, were reserved for men. They paid well; a man could easily support his family with such a job. For this reason, because a man’s responsibility was to work and support his family, these kinds of jobs were unavailable to her.

Women could hold jobs, but these were restricted to teacher or nurse. Leta did not have the education for either. She could take a position in a shop—a market, apparel or gift store—or certainly in a restaurant. During her walks, she passed many businesses with “Help Wanted” signs in the window. But these positions did not interest her. For two weeks, she took a temporary position as a cashier in a diner. However, the pay was low, the work only part-time and the manager crass. She was happy to leave there. An avid newspaper reader, she started looking through the help wanted advertisements. During a period of four weeks, she found seven positions that mildly interested her and were accessible to where she lived. She made the appropriate calls: three had been filled before she arrived; two were not the same positions as advertised; one reported to a person with poor hygiene; and one was excellent, but the employer was interested in “someone younger.”

The next Sunday afternoon she visited her sister Louise. They had recently learned that their older sister Mabel’s husband Arnold had died. As Mabel and her family lived in Vancouver, 2,000 miles away, they had only met him three times, but they liked him. Only a few months earlier, the three sisters were all in Florida together on vacation. Both wished they could be with Mabel during her loss, but by the time they arrived by train, the funeral and burial would be over.

As part of their conversation, Louise asked Leta how her pursuit of employment was going.

“Not so good, I’m afraid,” Leta responded. “I just can’t seem to find anything. Most jobs are for men these days, except for low paying ones. And I’m too old for a lot of manual labor ones, like a factory job, not that I could get one.”

“Are you sure you need a job?” Louise asked.

“Yes. I just don’t have enough steady income.”

“Not even with social security?”

“That’s very small,” Leta explained, “widow’s benefits.”

“And all your savings? What about the house?” Louise added, as she handed her sister a cold bottle of beer.

“Claud Bassett spent all my money, Louise,” Leta said bitterly. “I didn’t even know how much until after I kicked him out, and then when he died, his creditors came after me.”

“I’m sorry this happened to you, Leta.”

“I’ll just keep looking,” Leta said.

To be continued.

Back to Work, part one

Once again Leta reviewed her finances. While she was not a spendthrift by any means, the money she had saved over the years was dwindling more quickly than she believed would keep her for the rest of her life. She partially blamed this on her former husband Claud Bassett, a man who always seemed to be working but in fact rarely was, and at the same time, liked to spend money. In the four years that they were married, he stormed through the money left to her by her prior husband Bob Fields. By the time she divorced Claud her savings were nearly gone. All she had was the house she bought, which she sold within a year.

Now, not quite a year after she sold the house, she was living in a three-room apartment in East Toledo. It was a pleasant enough place, fine for just one person. It was a corner apartment with windows on two sides, facing west and south. She had natural light nearly all day. The bedroom was small, but she only used it for sleeping. The living room gave her enough space for a sofa, two easy chairs, two end tables, a coffee table, and a hutch. The kitchen had a nook large enough for a table and four chairs. She had two closets.

Certainly, times were different than when she was living in boarding houses, in small bed-sits with common meals provided by her landlady and a small electric burner that was officially to be used only for a coffee percolator, but which she used for most of her own cooking. In those days, she had no closet, but kept her dresses on hooks along the wall, and her other clothing in the same cabinet she kept her dishes. She had some fear that if she did not make a change soon, she might find herself in the same sort of accommodation, living with generally much younger women or, worse, with women who were down on their luck.

Sometimes she thought that these were supposed to be her finer years. Her sisters had each married only once and to husbands who were employed. Every morning they fed their husbands breakfast, the men left the house for work, and the women spent the day taking care of their respective houses. Their income was regular, they spent time with their children and grandchildren. They were secure.

While Leta was not jealous—she had children, six grandchildren, friends, and her own household chores—she did feel a kind of wistfulness about how her life might be if Bob had not died so suddenly seven years earlier, delivering her into the awful marriage with Claud, and ultimately her current situation. She would, she presumed, be living more like her sisters—relaxed, content and secure. More often than that, she wondered how her life would be if her beloved Albert Mohr was not so viciously taken from her all those years ago by a cold-blooded killer. Would she have more children and grandchildren, for, indeed, they both wanted children together—her own band of laughing, jolly people around all the time? Would she fall asleep every night beside a man about whom she was always dizzy with excitement? Would he still come home from work and take her in his arms as if she were the only reason he had for being? Would she still sit in his lap? What an amazingly happy, beautiful life she would have had with him!

However, he was gone; he had been gone for many years. She had traveled many roads since then. She had stumbled and tripped and fallen and scratched her knees. She had sweated and feared and cried. But she had survived, and she would continue to do so.

So at age fifty-seven, Leta began to look for a job.

To be continued.

Divorce

While I would be surprised if there were a large number of individuals who were married eight times like my great-grandmother, in my work on the novel, I have learned that there were more divorces in the United States than I imagined. Leta and her first husband (my great-grandfather Ralph) divorced in 1922. According to “100 Years of Marriage and Divorce Statistics 1867-1967,” a report from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, 10-15% of married couples divorced in the period between 1916 and 1925. This was also the era when it became more possible for couples to obtain a divorce without proving significant cause of abuse, adultery, or abandonment.

Leta’s other documented divorces occurred in 1929, 1932 and 1952. In those years, the divorce rates were, respectively, 16%, 16% and 25%. There was a spike in the divorce rate in 1946 after the conclusion of World War II, when many who married before and during the war realized that perhaps they had selected a poor partner. Also, the number of divorces was higher in the 1940s than in the 1950s, partly I suspect, due to the rise of the “American ideal” of marriage and family that occurred during the 1950s and the resubjugation of women.

The report notes that during the Depression (1929-1939), the divorce rate ceased to trend upward. Due to the high rate of unemployment, many couples stayed together for financial reasons. Once employment rates began to rise in the late 1930s, however, so did the number of divorces.

All through this time, however, the spouse filing for divorce still had to show that her/his partner was either cruel or adulterous. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a person could cite irreconcilable differences as a reason for divorce, which suddenly made divorce much easier to obtain. Divorce rates skyrocketed.

According to http://www.divorcestatistics.info, various studies on U.S. rate of divorce show significant differences when a comparison is made in first, second and third marriage terminations. Based on more recent examples, the divorce rate for first marriage is 41% to 50%, the rate after second marriage is from 60% to 67% and the rate for third marriage divorces is from 73% to 74%. Reports also show that couples with children have a slightly lower rate of divorce as compared to couples without children.

I do want to point out that these are national averages. Some of the reports I’ve seen that break down information by state seem to show that Ohio (where my great-grandmother lived her entire life) is firmly in the middle, neither on the high end or the low end when it comes to divorces.

Grief

I recently finished reading Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast. This is a memoir of his relationship with his partner Wally, primarily focusing on Wally’s decline and death from AIDS. Doty, who is an award-winning poet, writes with love and devotion toward Wally, and how connected their lives are before, during, and after the illness. It’s a story from grief.

I have presumed that my great-grandmother Leta’s behavior was triggered by her own grief, that the death of her beloved second husband Albert Mohr launched her into a lifestyle that was built around searching for an ideal mate, partially settling with one or another for a variety of reasons, and then breaking that off when the marriage or the husband failed to meet her unmeetable expectations. I also think that was pulled in a variety of ways by social convention—being a woman, having children, and that one should stay married to the same person for life. But grief has been a key.

Albert Mohr was murdered on their front porch on a summer evening in 1927. He was abruptly taken from her when she was happy and settled—home, children, a good life. She had divorced her first husband to marry him. Her mother had recently died. And then the tragedy struck.

While Doty gets time to journey with Wally from diagnosis, through the deterioration of Wally’s body and mind from the disease (and the connected illnesses), Leta had a life that was demolished by one terrible incident. Doty gets to prepare, gets to journey, gets support and frustration (not everyone is helpful) throughout—and, in the book, he is reminiscing, for by his own admission he didn’t start writing it until after Wally’s death. My great-grandmother is wrenched from one trajectory to another. She doesn’t get to get immersed in her beloved’s own journey. She has him and then she doesn’t.

Even with all the time of Wally’s decline, he is wracked with grief after Wally’s death. It manifests itself in back strain, in a broken leg, in months of taking long walks with his dogs and only writing here and there. (He seems to have financial resources to keep himself in his house and lifestyle.) Whereas, Leta’s situation is very different. I don’t think that she gets much time to grieve. She has two children to feed. She has no source of income, and she has the swirl of innuendo surrounding her husband’s death. She is also a woman. There are other expectations of her.

What Doty has written is incredibly moving. He truly takes his reader with him on his journey, and how much his connection with his beloved affects his life during the illness and after, how so much reminds him of Wally, and how much death has betrayed the couple—stolen from them more time to love and be with each other.

For my great-grandmother, she also experiences the grief of having her beloved taken from her, but in her situation, he is torn from her, unexpectedly and brutally removed. And in the aftermath—after the funeral, the arrest and investigation of the murderer—Leta has to survive. She doesn’t necessarily get to heal. She gets to present herself as the mother taking care of her children and her family. She also has societal rules to be married, and whatever Albert fulfilled in her life, she still needs, even more desperately.

Whether her marriage to Albert would have lasted for the rest of their lives is something that no one will know. They were only married for 4½ years. She was married to Ralph Chetister, her first husband and the father of her two children, for eight years. Would she and Albert have eventually divorced? It’s hard to say. She probably would not have been able to answer that question if I put it to her. However, her behavior following his murder indicates very strongly to me that her grief (and shock) was palpable, that her emotions did influence her behavior. She married and divorced two men in a three-year period immediately after. (I have considered that she may have been seeing her third husband, Ora Freeman, during her marriage to Albert; they did marry very quickly after Albert’s death. There is no evidence of this, and other information indicates that she was dedicated to Albert, including the fact that she is buried with him.) During the second post-Albert marriage, she ran out on her husband, she gave up her children to their father, she became a “scandalous” woman, running with a variety of different men for 10 years before she married Robert Fields, who was also taken from her abruptly—by a heart attack.

This brings me back to grief, and how such tremendous loss can affect a person’s behavior, can draw out emotions and actions that have been skirting around the edges of our personality. Leta was seeking a certain kind of life. She didn’t always pursue it. Sometimes burning needs wrenched control for a time. However, it seems to me that she always pursued a relationship in which she could be the person she was.

But then there is grief.