Girl Called Karen (2 page)

S
ometimes when you bury things, the memory stays but details get lost. I’m not sure of the date or time of what I’m about to tell you, but I remember for sure every detail I’ve written here. And more besides. I’m certain no adult trauma or sophisticated inquiry or appalling case study will ever scrub the shock of that awful night from my mind.

I know that before it happened, I had been scared, and I wanted my mother. I was eleven at the very most. My mother was not there, and I went looking for her scent and the comfort of her place. It was late, and my father was not home when I curled up in my parents’ bed. Sleep came quickly, deep and hard. Waking came gradually and in stages.

A hand was between my legs, touching, stroking, kneading. I froze. I didn’t breathe or move or make the
slightest sound. I felt funny in a pleasurable, scary kind of way. The hand kept touching me down there in the place my parents said I must never touch except for when I should wash myself in a hurry. The nuns at school said so, too, and they threatened us girls with eternal damnation if we let anyone put their hands Down There.

I knew I wanted that hand to stop, but I didn’t want it to stop. Maybe, I thought, if I just take tiny breaths or don’t breathe at all, this will turn out to be the weirdest, most shocking nightmare I ever had and I can forget all about it when I wake up. But even as I forced my breath into the littlest sighs, the hand went on roaming over my Secret Place, first lightly, then faster and more insistently, fondling and fingering, rubbing and circling until suddenly an invasive, brutal finger rammed into my flesh and plunged all the way inside me.

It was a real nightmare, it wasn’t a dream.

I never knew you could shove something right into the flesh down there. I never knew there was an opening to a cave that could almost devour a rude exploring finger. I never even knew I had a hole down there.

I think now that things would have been bad enough if that had been the end of it. But my nightmare continued. There was so much I didn’t know – much that I had to learn. As I thought about it all night long, I got more confused, more terrified. Maybe that was
the way people got babies, I thought. Was I going to have a baby and be the shame of the whole neighborhood? I prayed I wouldn’t get a baby. I prayed I wouldn’t shame the neighborhood.

I loved my neighborhood. It was the best place, and my house was the best place, and I was the most important child in our home because I was the oldest and the best at taking care of my five young brothers and sisters. Everybody knew that.

Until that Awful Night, I thought my family was about like all the others on our street. True, our house was more rambunctious, bigger, shabbier, livelier, noisier; more alive with tears and laughter and songs and chatter and rivalries and squabbles. It was seldom empty – mostly full of people, very young people. When my mother’s roses were in bloom, our yard was a riot of sensuous color, and they were the pride of our community. Otherwise our yard was the biggest mess in the neighborhood.

True, we had special perks. Even though Toledo was a long way from darkest Africa, because our father was the veterinarian for the zoo, our fun and games included free rides just about whenever we wanted them on a scruffy dusty camel or a gentle gray elephant called Toots. Those unusual privileges made us the envy of the neighborhood kids.

Our family was the largest on Algonquin Parkway. That’s because my mother became pregnant eight times and gave birth to six babies in eleven years.
Keeping track of that heroic record, our priest gave joyful praise after every birth, and my Grandpa John (my father’s father) snorted “no self-control” every time his son sent word that another one had arrived.

Whether my father was astonished or perturbed at such fecundity was never clear. He loved us kids very much, there was no question of that, and he worked endlessly with only a few interruptions to support the lively brood that he and Sally made.

I
was proud of my family, I was proud of my neighborhood, and I was proud of my ancestors, too. My mother’s family came to this country at the turn of the twentieth century. Her family was from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and they continued to speak to each other in the language of the old country.

Grandpa was from Poland. He died before I was born so I never knew him, and my information about him is very sketchy. I can tell you that he worked in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. There in the coal country, he met and married my grandmother. They moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and my grandfather acquired a lumber mill. Apparently he became fluent in English, worked extremely hard, did very well in business, and grew quite wealthy. In addition, he was
active and influential in local politics. He fathered five children, one of whom was my mother, Sally.

He has been described as driven and intense. When the Great Depression drove him into bankruptcy and destroyed him financially, he committed suicide. I know only that he went into the woods and hanged himself from the branch of a sturdy tree. He had built his fortune from the forests, and that’s where he ended his time on earth.

My mother told me very little of this tragedy, even though his disastrous end totally changed her life.

My grandmother never acknowledged it to me.

I loved my Little Grandma very much, but the language barrier made it difficult for us to communicate. When I was a young married woman, I brought Grandma to my home in Toledo for a visit. I invited a friend from my workplace who spoke Polish to talk to my grandmother and act as our translator. That’s when I learned that, although my Polish grandfather spoke his native tongue fluently, my grandmother could not speak it at all. My friend said that Mary could mix some Polish in with English, but neither was her birth language. I tried to find out where she came from. I learned nothing conclusive, but I believe her family came from Hungary, and her native language was Hungarian. Obviously, my grandparents met and married without sharing a common language.

Parenthetically, I believe my grandmother’s lack of
language and sophistication disturbed my mother when she was a young woman. As a child, I had observed the relationship between my mother and her mother. It was for my mother a mixture of love and frustration. For Little Grandma, it was a source of unstinting pride.

When my mother died, my grandmother’s grief was inconsolable. This was the one child who’d stayed connected to her, and now she was gone. But that loss came years after grandpa’s suicide abandoned Mary to the life of a poverty-stricken widow.

After grandfather’s death, Grandma Mary continued to live in Iron Mountain, Michigan. It was a remote little place, and her children gradually left town. Finally, she was left with Alex, her youngest. There was speculation in my father’s family that this child, who came much later than her first four children, might actually have been an illegitimate offspring of my mother Sally. I asked my grandmother about this, and she exploded. She never had learned much English, but there was no doubt that she was screaming that Alex was
her
baby and people had lied about her baby.

Alex was severely mentally retarded. When he was in his teens, he was taken from her custody by the authorities and placed in an institution a long way from home. According to eyewitnesses, she wailed and cried and struggled so hard to keep her baby, who was then about sixteen years old, that the police came
close to locking her up. Finally she was forced to accept her loss, but she didn’t forget Alex, and for years, she never failed to take the bus each month to visit him in the institution where he was confined.

Whether that heartbreaking experience served society well, I really don’t know, but it took a cruel toll on my Grandma Mary. From then on, folks in Iron Mountain considered her a bit strange.

The whole town of Iron Mountain knew her as “Little Mary.” She lived above a bar and restaurant. She had one room of her own and supported herself by cleaning rooms for all the elderly men who lived there. She never really learned to count, but she was very careful with her money. She scrimped and saved enough to pay for her funeral and burial arrangements when she died.

I visited Little Grandma when I was a teenager, and I became acutely aware of her unusual status in the town. For example, the cloistered convent allowed Mary access – a most extraordinary circumstance.

Several years before Mary’s death, I was in the midst of major life changes and had moved to another address when it became evident to the townspeople that Mary would have to go to a home for old folks.

I didn’t hear about it. No one in Iron Mountain knew how to reach me. Had I known, I would have done my best to rescue her, but, limited as my time and resources were in those days, I might have been
unable to do as well as she and her friends did when they placed her in the home.

It was nothing fancy, that home, but fancy wasn’t what she needed. It was an old house, and it boasted a staff of compassionate people. They let her clean the stairs and certain rooms. It was satisfying labor for her. She knew there was hard and useful work to be done, and it was her job to keep on contributing. She had to work because that is what people need to do.

Eventually I learned what had happened to her, and I went to see her in Iron Mountain. When I visited, she was proud to show me her room, but she was even prouder that her chores were important. She was a productive, contributing citizen even at her advanced age. (I never knew how old she was, nor did she. Based on my mother’s age, I estimate she died in her
mid-eighties.
) I believe that she lived the balance of her life in comparative peace. Very likely, it was the best place for her to live out her days.

When she died, my Aunt Catherine and I received her few worldly possessions. I was amazed to see that gifts I had given her had been carefully preserved and had never been worn. What was even more disconcerting was finding gifts to my grandma from my mother, who by that time had been dead for more than twenty years.

As years went by, I learned that many elderly people save things for a future they don’t have, for golden
years they won’t live to see. I hope grandma got pleasure keeping the trinkets we gave her.

Little Mary’s life offers vivid lessons. An illiterate girl whose family had grown up somewhere in Europe, married a Polish immigrant (whose language she didn’t know). He crossed half a continent and a mighty ocean to a country he had never seen where first he dug coal out of the ground and then owned a lumber mill and got rich and powerful until the Great Depression broke him and he killed himself. His widow had borne him five children, and (except for Alex) she raised them to adulthood.

Consider this: First, she had been poor, then rich, again poverty stricken, and finally ended her days as a cleaning woman who eked out enough from meager earnings to pay for her funeral and burial arrangements.

I learned a lot about resiliency from my Grandma Mary.

As contrasted with my mother’s parents, who were fairly new arrivals in this country, my father’s family had been here a long time. The ancestors of my paternal grandfather (Grandpa John) immigrated to this continent from Scotland and England in the mid-1600s, and the family of my maternal grandmother (Grandma Lucile) came here the following century from England and Germany. Many Midwestern farm families had similar backgrounds, and no one took any special pride in it. Mostly they laughed at the
Daughters of the American Revolution and the “blue bloods” who paraded their ancestry.

Grandpa John was not much for bragging about his forebears, and he grumped about a genealogical search financed by his sister (Great-Aunt) May: “She wasted her good money for that nonsense! It doesn’t matter a hill of beans who your ancestors are. Just because you can trace them back a few hundred years doesn’t mean they amounted to anything. What you are now and what you do now, that’s what counts.”

Sometimes Grandpa sounded like he’d rather not be linked to his ancestors – especially not to his father. Once a year, he would take his youngsters to spend an hour with the “Old Cuss” at his farm. Totally estranged from his tightwad father, he would sit in his Model-A Ford staring through the windshield until the visit ended and his children came back to the car bearing or wearing bizarre gifts.

One time Aunt Eileen had draped over her
seven-year-
old body a golden fox fur half as big as she was. The Old Cuss had trapped the fox and skinned it, tanned and lined the fur, and saved it as a gift for her annual visit. Aside from allowing a snapshot of the child wearing this amazing luxury item, her mother said there was no appropriate occasion for its display, but for years, it was one of the little girl’s treasured possessions.

My father never mentioned the Old Cuss, and he didn’t talk to us about his family tree. Only in recent
years has our genealogy been perfunctorily circulated among the younger family members, most of whom seem to agree with Grandpa John that lineage doesn’t matter a hoot.

In retrospect, though, I think the unsung family history helped shape my father’s life.

Back in this country’s early days, my father’s ancestors were Quakers, believers in peace and simplicity, opponents of rituals – alien to a religion featuring Low Mass and High Mass, rosaries and confessions, incense and sacramental wine, priests and nuns, and the Pope in Rome.

In more recent years, the family felt the strong influence of the Shakers. That was because Grandpa John’s mother, Grace, was an orphan who was raised by Shakers – a small sect that guaranteed its own demise by segregating the sexes and forbidding sexual intercourse. EVER. There were a few Shaker villages in the United States, but the unappealing Shaker program didn’t really get off the ground, and its failure saved the human race from extinction by abstinence.

The one taboo the Catholics and Shakers shared was birth control, though for very different reasons.

The Shakers got new members by raising orphans and persuading them to stay as adults in the Shaker community. They also got a few adult recruits – usually abused wives running from sadistic husbands. Their rigid, repressed society was not congenial to my
orphaned great-grandmother, and she left the Shaker Village as soon as she could.

Even though the Shakers preached that all sex was sin, she opted for marriage and children. Unfortunately, she chose a mean, hard-working, stingy farmer, and the rocky marriage of the miser and the waif produced three excellent, though inhibited, children – John, May, and Ona. The parents divorced as soon as their kids were grown.

Grandpa John’s philosophy drew upon the sternest strictures of the Shakers and the Puritans of New England and forbade, with equal ferocity, sex, smoking, and drinking. With such a dark moral code, sacramental wine and tobacco and extramarital sex had to be the ultimate evils, and Grandpa’s taboos were so unrealistic that his children sought a different set of values. Sometimes they made awful mistakes.

I believe his only son (my father) was a troubled man with respect to his sexuality, beginning in his teens, most certainly continuing through marriage and fatherhood, and probably all his life.

Grandpa John was not alone in his struggle for appropriate sexual mores. The twentieth century moved from Calvin and Luther and the Popes to Freud and eugenics and planned parenthood and the pill and the sexual revolution. Maybe some day we’ll get it right, but I doubt it.

Along with its ban on sex, booze, and cigarettes, the family repressed emotionalism. Self-control was the
rule. “Don’t complain. Never cry” was the unspoken good-behavior code. Aunt Eileen said that one time Grandpa John was jauntily whistling “Yankee Doodle” as he came into the house from the barnyard. Something was wrong she knew, and, sure enough, his thumb had been torn halfway off in a farm accident. She said any time his voice was that carefully controlled, you could be pretty sure he had suffered a physical injury or was in some sort of danger.

Grandpa John’s Quaker/Shaker heritage with its sexual taboos gathered fuel from his work. In addition to running a farm, he was a teacher and superintendent of country schools. It was almost as politically vulnerable an occupation as a rural minister’s. His children learned the hard way, “Control yourself. Don’t complain. Never cry.”

Even down to my generation, I was taught to stay silent and hide my feelings when disaster struck. I remember that when a marriage was going sour and I didn’t know why and I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t fight. I could only cling. And hurt.

Grandpa John and Grandma Lucile were strong, hard workers. As farmers and teachers, for many years, they worked at both occupations at the same time. Their work ethic was rock solid, and that’s how they raised their children. Grandpa was very strict and seemed scary to me. He expected hard work, and his rule was law. That’s what he had learned from the stingy old farmer and the industrious Shaker.

I remember my family’s visits to my grand-parents in Florida when I was a child. My father always spent a good part of our vacation working on the ranch, mending fences and burning fields. Grandpa was the boss, and my daddy, the successful professional, obeyed him.

I adored Grandma Lucile. I always felt that I was a very special person when I was with her. She would take me to Catholic Church even though she was a Protestant and didn’t like Catholicism very much. She enjoyed reading and respected my passion for books.

The last time I got to spend with her was during my fifteenth summer. We cooked and ate and played. She took me to the movies, and we saw
The Roots of Heaven
. The movie terrified me, and I couldn’t sleep. She heard me tossing and came to my room and made everything all right. Grandma Lucile’s loving, comforting words that night are among my fondest memories. Going back to a home where I didn’t really belong was so bleak a prospect and my loneliness and the need for her were so intense that I cried all through Florida and Georgia on my way home to Toledo.