snippets of of Bertha:
'Many immigrants had brought on board
balls of yarn, leaving one end of the line
with someone on land. As the ship slowly
cleared the dock, the balls unwound and
the farewell shouts of the women, the
fluttering of the handkerchiefs, and the
infants held high. After the yearn ran
out, the long strips remained airborne,
sustained by the wind, long after those
on land and those at sea had lost sight of
each other.'
Luciano De Crescenzo
WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE:
SHE GREW UP IN A TIME WHEN THE...
WOUNDS CAUSED BY NEGATIVISM AND anti-immigrant bigotry were still raw. Those wounds, and the scar tissue they left behind affected the way millions of Belgium immigrants lived, what they talked about, even how they chose to read the newspapers. In the years of her childhood, my Mother was no exception. Her name was Bertha Winckle and growing up I could hear her stories. She once said to me, 'Things that happened to us was because we were from another country. The warnings, the prejudice. We heard it at home, my father heard it in the barbershop, I heard it on the corner. You heard about it in school. I heard the same kinds of things from my Irish and Jewish friends, how they learned about the ways could get in trouble.'
Part of the trouble was caused by the sheer numbers. From 1880 to the beginning of World War One, more than 24 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to America. The vast majority came to the United States. Her family walked west from the City of New York to the sunny mountains of Colorado, finding jobs as farmers and day laborers along the way. They settled in the unincorporated town of Crook, Colorado in Logan County along the vast southern Colorado plains.
Rural immigrants shared a common grievance against the Old Country: the exhausted or poisoned land had failed them and, in a way, betrayed their faith and prayers; in the New World, they sought the solace of the land and the cement of the cities. Tilling their own soil and city cement was better than hunger; a job and a lock on the door provided the only true safety. Haunted by the brutal realities of recurrent and crippling disenfranchisement of the Home Land, they were drawn to the brighter promise of freedom. In the early 1900's when my grandparents made their separate passages from Stokkum, Belgium carrying with them 11 children. My Mother indicated that even in rural Colorado there was fear. Residents feared the Catholics and Jews, feared strange languages and race, feared people who Were Not Like Them. It could be a matter of life and death. The message from most Americans was clear to the immigrants. An American was supposed to be a white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. In reality, the game was rigged.
This isolation, this shared solitude, created problems that would take generations to solve. Education was often sneered at; what was the use of working hard in school if you couldn't take a diploma and get a job? My Mother grew up in the world of feasts, weddings, funerals, and celebrations, with the insistence on the traditions of courtship, marriage, personal honor. She obtained a teaching certificate and became a school teacher. She had two choices. The old way and the new way. She chose the new way. 'Education gave me the power to believe in myself, she once told me when I was nothing more than a kid. This is why you are going to go to college.'
Mom would meet my Dad, who had hoboed from Iowa after having been kicked-out of his house for impregnating another woman in 1923. His father had been a Lutheran Minister, and Lutheran minister's children do not make girls pregnant. It was, apparently, love at first sight for both of them. They had met at a dance held in Crook's Catholic Church in 1923 and were married in 1927. My Father and his family had migrated from Germany to America in 1904, three years prior my Mother and her family arriving on American soil from Belgium in 1907. The young couple then moved to the City of Denver, where my Father took a job at The Gas and Electric Building in downtown Denver on Champa Street stoking ovens for the building's heat, while my Mother became employed at the J.C. Penny Company selling women's clothing. In Denver, as in many other places, the story was certainly not one of unrelieved misery.
The core of the immigration myth is this: it was about the way people overcame misery, how they found their consolations, and, in the end, how they redeemed America when Americans believed it was not in need of redemption. There was a spirit of patient optimism in my Mother's Denver. For millions of immigrants and their children, technology would provide some consolation and accelerate the process of Americanization. The rapid development of the motion picture would provide one form of nationality, allowing people from every country to share common emotional experiences. The phonograph and the radio were invented. When each became widely available, the lives of immigrants changed in a revolutionary way. Many added a wind-up Victrola, and after 1921, regular radio broadcasting began. Many immigrants could listen to the radio stations, and thus be informed and entertained even though they could neither read nor write.
And they would produce children, a generation that could not remember a time when there was neither a radio or phonograph in the house; and by the time I slid through my Mother's womb and onto the earthly scene in September of 1936, everyone was listening to the music of America. Many immigrants also knew the melodies of Puccini and Verdi, and Caruso singing in their kitchens or living rooms. My father worked at The Gas and Electric Building and my Mother was assigned the task of taking care of me. By then,most immigrant parents had grown used to a new set of myths, peopled by baseball players named Babe Ruth, prizefighters with the name of Jack Dempsey, and movie stars like Clark Gable. All of which would inevitably change their children into Americans.
When I was 2 years-of-age we moved into our own house on South Corona Street, which my Dad bought for $10,000, a considerable sum in that Depression year. The family had, at last, their piece of American earth. No more paying rent. No more hustles with landlords. We now had a one-story home with steam heat, a bathtub, and a finished basement. The new house even had the ultimate luxury: a telephone. My Mother helped Depression casualties as best as she could, laying out spreads of food, trying to find work for those who had lost their jobs. And I remember that she always seemed to be singing. And I was always her audience. I did not have a hard Depression. The Japanese Imperial Navy ended the Depression by bombing Pearl Harbor in 1941.
My Dad tried to enlist and was turned down because of his age which was 49. He became an Air Raid Warden. And I was proud of him. Mom became a member of The American Women's Voluntary Services selling war bonds, providing meals for servicemen, and homes for those in service during the Holiday Season when they had no home to go to. I was proud of her too. She reminded me of Rosie the Riveter, the symbolic woman who had walked into a war plant and found employment that was ordinarily reserved for men.
Bertha had enriched my life since the day I was born. She had confronted bigotry and changed the way many people thought about immigrants and their children. She had made me wiser about love and human loneliness and how I could go about finding out what life was all about; a genuine fine woman who will endure forever in my memory for as long as I live...
MY MOTHER BERTHA:
'My mother had a great deal
of trouble with me, but I think
she enjoyed it.'
Mark Twain
I GREW UP IN A TIME WHEN THE...
WINDS OF WAR UNFURLED OVER the land that my Mother had grown to love; and many of these snippets about my Mother's life are shared with one enduring emotion: nostalgia. Two factors drive that emotion: the rapidity of how my life changed because of her and the immigrant roots which made her who she eventually would become. She always ached for people gone, and the place and music had once she loved. She may have been in America, but she still yearned for old roads, familiar smells, special foods, old games, for parents and aunts and uncles, for homes where they new every inch of the room, even in the dark. Whatever brought them to New York City or Crook, Colorado - bigotry, hunger, oppression, war - the Old Country was still the place where they once ran barefoot in the grass. Every one's present also contained the past. Then. Now.
The Denver neighborhood where I grew up was an unnamed wedge between Colfax Avenue and the suburb of Aurora. Our new home was on Jasmine Street, and most adults in the neighborhood had come through the Depression and eventually the war with Japan and Germany. The most important four-letter word in their vocabulary was work. They never envisioned anything as grandiose as a career; that was for their children. But work meant that they could put money at the grocery store and still have something left in the morning. On holidays, graduations, christenings, they could even buy gifts for their kids. With any luck, they would work until they died. And the world would stay the same. Peace. Steadiness. Even happy endings.
The world didn't stay the same, however. The Korean War meant that we had not seen the end of war. Young men who were 13 when World War Two ended were now being drafted to kill for their country. Everywhere in our country the tradition of following your father into his profession started to end. But there were other huge changes underway. The arrival of television. And much worse, the spread of heroin and petty crime. In a neighborhood where none of us owned anything worth robbing, locks appeared on all the doors ,huge changes underway; but the steadfastness of my Mother remained the same. She taught me that there were few saints, many sinners, some small heroes, a few cold villains. She made me understand that in our world, each neighborhood was a kind of an urban hamlet, complete with its own lore and legends.
CHAPTER ONE
'Men are what their
mothers made them.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
IN THAT CROSSCUTTING OF MEMORY...
THE WIND IS ALWAYS BLOWING IN HER hair, from her blue eyes as she looked my way, the love for me is packed tightly in memory, no matter where we were are or what it was that we were doing. All that mattered is that I was doing it with her. And when I think of my Mother, I always think of Hyman Boch, as well. Hyman moved into our neighborhood in the winter of 1946, when I was 10 years old, and because of who he was and where he had come from, Mom took him under her wing, gave him food, tender care, and motherly love.
Hyman was my age, but his eyes were wide and frightened. When we neighborhood kids asked him to play with us, his face seemed to tremble and he backed up, his eyes confused. Within days, we learned that the new kid was from Poland, a place located somewhere between Russia and Germany, and the language he spoke was called Yiddish.
He was living with an uncle, both his mother and father were dead, and his uncle had also in the Dachau Concentration Camp. Hyman would stand there while we pointed at things, taught him the names of important things like bat, ball, and, of course, soda and candy. My friend Bobby Dixon said one morning, Hyman looks like a dog that got beat too much. I noticed two things about him. He never seemed to smile. And he had a number tattooed on his wrist. He has a number on his wrist? my Mother said, Oh, dear God! Hyman was in a concentration camp!
The days rolled by and Spring came and I began to get a hint as to how special my Mom actually was. Hyman put on weight due to my Mother's cooking. He was at our dinner table almost every night. His uncle could not afford to properly feed him. Mom and Dad bought him clothes and Keds and a baseball mitt. Mom attempted to explain to him why she loved the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, that they represented to her what America was all about. He listened gravely while she explained that they were a team filled with the sons of immigrants, made him recite the litany of Dodger players: Reiser, Reese, Walker and her favorite, Roy Campanella - the son of a Sicilian immigrant with an African American mother and that he was so good at the game that he once said, 'Every day on a ball field is Christmas.'
Shortly after that, Hyman's uncle called my Mother. Hyman had gotten sick and had been taken to Methodist Hospital. There were whispered conversations about what was wrong with him, and then plans were made by my Mother and Father. When he was released from the hospital, my Mother moved into his uncle's house, and I came over every night to help Hyman do his homework, and the neighborhood women decided they would give him a Christmas party. They would combine Hanukkah and Christmas, get a Christmas tree, hang pictures of Santa Claus around the house, but leave out all the mangers and statues of Jesus. Mom insisted that Dad buy train sets and chemistry sets, a big easel so he could paint. A camera. And a radio.
After Hyman had recovered, the Christmas season began in earnest. In downtown Denver, the store windows magically filled with toys and train set and red stockings. Christmas banners stretched across the downtown streets, painted with the slogans of Christmas, about peace on earth and good will toward men. Christmas music played from the loudspeakers, and there were Salvation Army bands outside The May Company and The Denver Dry Goods and men selling chestnuts and old men dressed in Santa Claus costumes, ringing little bells.
My Mother took me and we wandered the streets, and I was full of amazement and wonder. I would ask my Mother questions. Was Santa Claus a saint? Did they have Christmas bells in the Bethlehem stable? How come the Three Wise Men didn't come on reindeer instead of camels, and, by the way, where did they come from? If Jesus was the son of God, why didn't God just show up in Person? She would answer each and every question with tenderness and love.
Hyman and his uncle moved to Colorado Springs shortly after Christmas. That night, I snuck Hyman into our house, and said we our tearful good-byes. Then we all went down to his uncle's car. The trunk was packed with suitcases. Hyman was driven out of the neighborhood, heading away, never to return.
A few weeks later, my Mother received a letter from him, one which she told my Dad and I was meant only for her. When she read it she both smiled and cried and tucked it into a hiding place somewhere in the house. I thought about Hyman every year after that, when the snow fell through the Colorado sky and our neighborhood turned white, or when I heard certain songs from hidden speakers.
Years later, after Hyman had become a medical doctor in the City of New York, she allowed me to read the note: 'Dear Mrs. Daugs: I just just wanted you to know that you made every day Christmas for me.' Love, Dr. Hyman Boch...
...I also thought about him when I saw people with tattoos on their wrists, or saw barbed wire. But I didn't worry about him. I knew he was all right. He had my mother's love. And so did I.
CHAPTER TWO
'Rather fail with honor
than succeed by fraud.'
Sophocles
ALMOST EVERYBODY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD...
LOVED AND ADMIRED HIM, EXCEPT FOR MOM. He had a perfect wife and two perfect children and lived in a perfect house on Colfax Avenue, three blocks from Messiah Lutheran Church. They thought he was perfect at church, too; he was an usher with my Dad at two church services every Sunday, he coached the men's softball team in the spring and was the best bowler on the bowling team in the fall. In the summer, he volunteered to take the poorest children to a mountain retreat for the 4th of July.
He was an executive at a neighborhood bank who didn't smoke, didn't swear, and didn't drink. He was just a perfect guy. And my Mom would say, He can't be trusted. He has the same dead-eyes of Joseph Stalin. Other women, however, would say to his young wife Jill, You're so lucky to be married to a man like that. And Jill would smile in a shy way and keep walking up the street to the grocery store and dress shop. There were, of course, some neighborhood dissenters, mostly men, who agreed with my Mother. Insofar as I'm concerned, the guy's a Putz! said a fellow member of the congregation by the name of Glen Abbot. He walks along, bouncing around on the balls of his feet, his skin all pink and healthy; and all of the women in the church seem to think he's a wonderful guy. Me, I think he's a con artist.
In the summer of 1954, when I was eighteen years-old and preparing to go off to college in the fall, Mister Perfect extended his good works by convincing the church to host meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in a large basement room within the church on Tuesday evening. After several meetings, a few former drunks within the congregation could be seen nursing club sodas, with everybody getting up and describing what alcohol had done to them the wreckage it had caused, the chaos it had fueled. Coffee and tea and doughnuts were served, and the two pastors of the church were always present for those who needed to clean their slates of mortal sin. My Mother aided in the meetings and would come home afterward saying the same words over-and-over again, There is something rotten about that man's soul that is evil and disturbing.
I had gotten to know Mister Perfect's daughter Maria quite well. She was my age. She was pretty. And I liked her very much. I had taken her to see the movie The Caine Mutiny on Sunday night. When the movie ended she said she wasn't feeling well, so I took her home and bid her a good-night. By Wednesday, we knew she had polio. The news raced through the entire neighborhood, and it is difficult to explain now what the word 'polio' could do to people in those days. The fear, the horror. Just the word. Polio.
At the hospital, they didn't let us see her for a while, and her family seemed confused, as if possibly ashamed that this could happen to one of them. Mom sent flowers. She wrote notes. But I didn't get to see her until the following Sunday afternoon. And when my Mom and I walked into the ward, she was alone in a bed against the far wall. She turned when she saw us and started to cry. I tried to console her, feeling stupid and clumsy. My Mom kissed her and held her hand. But then we learned the the reason for her tears. Mister Perfect had not come to visit his own daughter. Not even once.
As we departed her room and made our way to the elevator, my mother said: One day her father's fate will catch up with him. Mark my words, Dick, beneath the sweet-talk and saintly manners, the the man is a modern day Judas! It would be the first and only time I would ever hear her say anything bad about anyone...
...Then on the following Friday evening, his wife Jill appeared at our door. Her hair was blowy, her coat open, her eyes scared. When my Dad opened the door and she said, I'm sorry, but, uh...have you seen my husband? No, Dad said. I can't say as I have. Have you tried up at the church? I mean, that's where he is a lot of the time. She turned and hurried into the night. An hour later, our Pastor came in, also looking for Mister Perfect.
He had learned that Mister Perfect had gone out for lunch that afternoon and had never come back. By midnight the word has spread throughout the neighborhood, and there had been two more telephone calls from his wife Jill. But nobody had seen Mister Perfect. They didn't see him that weekend, and he didn't come to work that Monday.
And then the cops descended upon the bank, and the big wigs came down from the main office in Pueblo, and the examiners were finally called in, and we all knew why Mister Perfect had gone missing. The bank was missing $300,000 along with Mister Perfect. This news made page 1 of The Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post the following day. It's first effect was to cancel the AA meeting that night. Many of the attendees felt that they would rather be honest drunks than the disciples of an embezzler. Many felt that Mister Perfect had absconded with more than money; he had embezzled their emotions, too. My Mother went to see Jill and Maria at the hospital that night to give them comfort.
One snowy Sunday morning the following March, long after Maria had been released from the hospital and was recovering quite nicely, Mom walked into our living room with The Denver Post in her hand. She held it up for me and my Dad to see. Will you look at this? she said, with a rather large smile on her face. The two of us gazed at the picture of Mister Perfect on page 6, his hair longer, his hands cuffed in front of him, and a bosomy handcuffed redhead beside him. The story was out of Omaha, Nebraska, under a headline that read: FORMER DENVER BANK EXECUTIVE, AND STRIPPER GIRLFRIEND NABBED IN BANK THEFT. The two men standing grimly behind the two of them were FBI agents; and my Mother said with the large smile still etched on her face: God does indeed work in mysterious ways.
CHAPTER THREE
'There are no strangers here;
Only friends you haven't yet
met.'
William Butler Yeats
LATER, AFTER IT WAS OVER, ALL OF US IN THE...
NEIGHBORHOOD WOULD NEVER FORGET THAT Sunday morning when Vincent Petros had arrived among us. It was in on a Sunday morning in June of 1959 and I had recently returned to Denver from my first year in college in Nebraska. My Mother remembered that he wore faded jeans and a crisp white shirt, and that it was early in the morning and the sun gleamed on his yellow hair. She was sweeping-off our front porch and he asked her for directions to Mister Goodman's house, which was on the opposite side of Jasmine Street which was directly across the street from where we lived. Mom said hat his accent was thick and strange and that she could not quite pinpoint where he was from, but thought he might be from Greece.
Mister Jackson, our next door neighbor, remembered seeing the young man staring up at street signs as if he he were lost. Others remembered his blue eyes, some his battered tan canvass suitcase tied shut with a rope. They all remembered that he was playing 'Yankee Do0dle Dandy' on his gold harmonica.
He was twenty-two that summer and had taken a room and Mister Goodman's house, which was right next door to Mrs. Derryberry's house. Mrs. Mrs. Derryberry was a young widow who seemed to be living a sentence of solitude since the death of her husband in an automobile accident two years before, mostly worrying about her two year-old son when he played in the yard, mumbling prayers in our church each Sunday morning for her lost beloved husband, and washing clothes. Mom invited her over for dinner every Tuesday night. She was quiet and polite and my Mom liked her. And my Dad liked her, too. She was very pretty and told him that she thought he was quite handsome for an older man. She shouldn't live alone like that, my Mother used to say. It isn't right. And then one afternoon, that first week after the young man's arrival, Mrs. Dewberry was hanging clothes on the line in her back yard and glanced over into Mister Goodman's yard and saw Vincent Petros.
He was sitting on Mr. Goodman's back porch and he was playing the harmonica. She told my Mother that the sounds he made were sorrowful and melancholy, and when he began to sing to himself, his voice ached with loss. She did not understand the words, but she felt that somehow they were aimed directly at her and they made her ache, too. She stepped back from the window, and from the shadow behind the curtain looked down at the beautiful young man. She watched for almost a minute; and then she began furiously to scrub the table, clean the refrigerator, to polish glasses and dust bureaus. When, about fifteen minutes later, her son came in from the front yard, she told my Mom that he found her on the bed, and she was crying.
Later that same day,Marie Miller visited my Mom after her shift at The Bluebird Dry Cleaners on Colfax Avenue had ended for the day. Marie and Mom played bridge with two other women in the neighborhood on Friday evenings and she told my Mom that she had seen Vincent earlier in the day. He brought in six shirts, with medium starch, and a nice brown suit. He was very polite. He didn't flirt. He doesn't know how good-looking he is. He said that he was going to work at 'The Chat 'n Chew Restaurant' right next to where I work, and then he laughed at his bad English. He said he was actually from Greece. To tell you the truth, Bertha, it was hard to keep my eyes off him.
It was shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday, after her son had left for Elitch Gardens with her brother Lawrence, Widow Derryberry was hanging wash while Vincent played his harmonica in the yard below. Suddenly, a piece of wash slipped out of her hands and fell into the yard. He glanced at it, then looked up at the window and saw her frozen in the window frame.
He then walked over and picked up the fallen piece. It was a pair of women's panties. He waved it and explained with a gesture that he would bring it up to her. She shook her head no. She pointed to herself and then at him, indicating that she would come down. But Vincent just smiled and went to her back door, knocked on it, she came to the door, her hair swiftly brushed, her cheeks rapidly powdered, and she looked at him and that was the beginning of that. There were few secrets in the neighborhood, and soon many people knew about Widow Derryberry and the good-looking man with the gold harmonica.
My Mom knew from her face, the freshness of her color, and the way she began to dress again as she had before the death of her husband, in pink and yellow summer dresses. She knew from the drawn shades in the afternoon and evening while her boy was attending a Denver Bears baseball game with his uncle. Our next door neighbor Mister Jackson had seen them sitting under a tree in City Park across from our church, eating sandwiches while the young man played the gold harmonica. Our minister said that he had seen the two of them holding hands and staring up at the glittering stars of the night sky shortly after Widow Derryberry had brought the young man to an evening Sunday service. Of course, the older women in church gossiped about Widow Derryberry and the young man whose name they didn't know; it was to bad, they said, that she had gone 'that way'; she sure was not showing proper respect for her poor dead husband. But most of the younger women approved, and a few were envious.
My Mother, however, was their cheerleader and told the two of them, Just do what you want to do and never worry about what other people might say or think. As for you young lady, center on who you are and what you want, and never ever enter the country of the old like so many of our church ladies have. My husband Godfrey and I have been married almost thirty-three years and I feel as if I haven't aged a bit. Vincent asked my Mom what she would do if she were in Widow Derryberry's place. Mom smiled and said, Elope.
Late that night, when the neighborhood stores had closed and the last shade or curtain were closed in all of the neighborhood homes, and her brother Lawrence had come over to take care of her child, they did just that.
Over that summer, Vincent and Mrs. Dewberry had become my friends, and I had kept in touch with them both down through the years. I recently received a letter from Mrs. Petros, who has now been married to Vincent for almost fifty-six years informing me that her son and his wife had given her a fifth grandchild. A girl. And she had named the child Bertha in honor of my Mother. She then quoted the Chinese philosopher Mencius 'Friends are the siblings God never gave us' and added, 'That is what your Mother Bertha was to me.
I sat back in my chair and put the letter down on the table in front of me. And I gave a small smile of both remembrance and regret, in that I had never appreciated my Bertha enough while she was here...
....Yet knew in my heart that she had already forgiven me.
CHAPTER FOUR
'The lady doth protest
too much, me thinks.'
William Shakespeare
I WAS NOT PRESENT TO WITNESS THE GREAT PROTEST...
OF 1969 LED BY A ONE-ARMED LADY NAMED EMMA BRAG, who had lost her arm when it got caught in her washing machine wringer back in 1962. The protest, my Mom told me, was all about the best fruit and vegetable store in the entire neighborhood which was owned by Orville Janssen. In the summer, his stands and bins outside the store were plump with products of the earth: oranges and grape and apples, and melons and tomatoes and onions. The garlic was always sweet and the basil always fresh. Orville's array of greens and reds and purples seemed lavish and extravagant on that street and in our neighborhood. His customers arrived from the far reaches of Denver and stretched as far as Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Even when the new Safeway opened it giant store, Orville continued to flourish, six days a week, from eight in the morning until eight at night. His prices were a little higher than they were in the new supermarket, but his goods had been chosen by a human hand, not hauled to market by a corporation. All the women of the neighborhood knew this and shopped at Orville's with a certain passion.
All except Emma Brag.
'The tomatoes at Orville's are gorgeous this week, Emma, My Mother would say when Emma and her husband Teddy would come to our house for their monthly poker game. 'I am quite aware of that, Bertha, ' Emma would reply. 'But the new Safeway is more convenient. Initially, nothing was made of this. In our neighborhood of working folks, the few who took time to notice simply dismissed Emma's little boycott as a mysterious failure of good taste. They all kept shopping at Orville's. One reason was that Orville gave his produce the kind of attention that could only be called love.
My Dad, rising at six o'clock in the morning to go to work, could see Orville arriving at the store in his old tan Chevrolet to unload the boxes of produce. He'd already spent two hours at the market. He lived alone in a small home at the back of the store, where he would listen at night to opera or to a baseball game while he designed hand-lettered signs that he would place in the morning over his beloved produce.
Nobody really knew Orville outside the store. He was a small bald man with large black eyebrows and a small well-trimmed moustache. He seldom went to church, had been too old for World War Two so he was not a member of the American Legion or the VFW. He seemed to exist only within the context of his amazing store; he was what he did. And the only one who knew that was not true was my Mom.
I first met Mister Janssen when I was a kid in the late 1940's shortly after we had moved from South Corona Street to Jasmine Street. Mom introduced me to him when I accompanied her to his store. She mentioned that the two of them were from the same city in Belgium, that my grandfather and Orville's dad had been iron workers as well as longshoremen in a town called Stokkum prior to my grandfather gathering-up his family to move to Antwerp. Over the years, I was somewhat surprised at how close and friendly the two of them seemed to be, pleased that Orville Janssen liked me, and always gave me either and apple or an orange whenever I accompanied my Mother to his store.
I had almost forgotten about Orville Janssen when my Mother wrote me and told me of the brouhaha which was about to explode between Orville and a woman by the name of Emma Brag. I had been away from Denver for eleven years by then, having gone off to college, then into the seminary, and was at that time a Lutheran minister in the city of Roswell, New Mexico.
According to Mom, Emma had been protesting in front Orville's store from 2 o'clock until 4 o'clock in the afternoon for about a week, holding a sign in her only hand that read: 'SHOP AT SAFEWAY. IT'S CHEAPER AND IT'S CLOSER,' when her husband, Teddy, fell over at his desk at a brokerage house on Champa Street. He was dead upon arrival at the Presbyterian Hospital on East 19th Avenue, and the news apparently shocked the neighborhood. He was, after all, only 57, and in semi-good shape. Brokers weren't supposed to die at their desk. They are supposed to die in bed.
The funeral service for Teddy Brag at Messiah Lutheran Church was filled with mourners; it filled the entire church, and every0ne said that they were more than a bit surprised to see Orville Janssen sitting in the last pew on the right. When Mom called me to give me an update on how the funeral went, she replied, 'Emma and the three children handled everything with courage and dignity. I am worried about Orville Janssen though.' 'Why's that?' I asked. She replied, Orville was at the funeral and when he walked through the receiving line at the conclusion of the funeral, Emma snubbed him. She and I are going to have a little talk after Emma and the family have time to mourn their loss.' A month after the funeral, Mom had tagged herself as the neighbororhood negotiator. She caught a glimpse of Emma pacing back-and-forth and holding her sign in front of Orville's store. She immediately went into the store to have a little talk with Orville. When Mom came out of the store, she had a little chat with Emma. After that, Mom walked back home.
That evening my Dad and other members of the church had combined forces to throw a benefit in City Park for Emma and her children on the great lawn adjacent to The Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The blankets were spread on the grass and lawn chairs and picnic tables put in place. The great lawn was filled early. Coke and coffee and tea flowed, a small band played old songs, and Emma Brag sat with her neighbors at a table near the softball field. And about an hour after the racket had begun, Orville Janssen appeared at the edge of the festivities. He was wearing a new white shirt and new tan slacks and new blue tennis shoes.
My Dad would tell me later that Orville entered hesitantly, even shyly, until Mom ran up to him and gave him a hug, then took his arm and walked him over to the crowded table where drinks were being served. The men didn't know him very well, but the women started coming over, happy to see him. A few were surprised, because they knew that Emma Brag was protesting in front of his store, but they were pleased that he had come in a show of neighborhood solidarity with the grieving widow and her family.
He said his hellos, murmured his regrets, sipped his tea. And all the while, he looked through the crowd at Emma Brag. A moment or two later, he walked over the grass and blankets toward the softball field, staying close to my Mom, and came over to her. 'Hello, Emma, he said. After a long pause, she replied, 'Hello, Orville. How nice of you to come. She looked around uneasily, her one hand moving awkwardly. Most of the tables were empty as dancers moved to a tune 'It's All In the Game.' He smiled, tentatively, and asked: 'Could we go for a walk and have a little talk?' There was an uneasy moment. Then Emma said: 'I never thought that you would ever want to talk to me again.' 'Me neither,' he replied. 'Are you angry with me? she asked. 'A little,' Orville said. 'But not nearly as much as I was.' He paused. 'I want to talk if it's OK with you.' 'It is,' she replied. Then my Mom walked away, her back straight, looking proud, easing her way through the crowd, who were looking past her in utter amazement when they spotted Emma and Orville actually talking to one another.
That fall I returned home to Denver to visit my Mom and Dad, leaving my wife and two children behind in Roswell. My daughter, Traci was now in school. My wife thought it best to tend to her needs without disrupting her usual routine. Mom was making noise in the kitchen and bacon was frying and the radio was on and everything was exactly like it had been when I was a kid. I happened to look out of the living room window as my Dad sat on the sofa reading The Rocky Mountain News, when I spotted Orville Janssen walking up the street with a one-armed lady. 'Who is the woman with Orville Janssen?' I asked. Dad replied, 'Thats Emma Brag. she works at Orville's store now. 'How did that happen? I said. He laid the newspaper aside, smiled, then said: 'Ask your Mother. I haven't a clue. And when I did, all Mom did was smile...
CHAPTER FIVE
'Every parent is at some time
the father if the unreturned
prodigal, with nothing to do
but to keep his house open
to hope.'
John Giardi
BILLY REZAAB LIVED DOWN THE STREET AS I WAS GROWING UP...
HE IDOLIZED HIS FATHER WHO WAS, AFTER ALL, A HERO OF THE Korean War. His father's name was Rollie. In the neighborhood stores, in the veteran's club and Masonic Lodge, they all knew the story well: how Rollie had gone to Korea in that first brutal winter of the war, when the ground was frozen iron, and how his outfit was cut off in the night and the flanks were overrun, and how Rollie fought off the Communists all by himself, killing several of them, until help arrived in the morning. Billy knew the story as well as anyone, although his dad was a modest man and didn't talk about it all that much, except when he was smoking pot. Which was an unusual thing for a man to be doing back in 1955. Particularly in our neighborhood. My Dad was quite fond of Rollie. My Mom was not. It was not because he smoked pot. She did not like the fact that he did not wipe-off his shoes on the front porch Matt before he entered our house and seemed always to leave spots on the living room rug. 'I think he should be more careful, my Mom would say.
But she seemed to always enjoy looking at his medals and ribbons whenever he brought them over for my Dad to examine. And so did I. The Distinguished Service Medal. The Bronze Star. The Purple Heart. They thrilled Billy and, handling them, he would imagine his father, young and tough, with a machine gun in his hands, marching across the barren hills, and then fighting hard through fear to save his buddies. When when Billy was 18, he volunteered for the army. His mom cried and protested, his 2 younger sisters told him not to do it, but Billy insisted that as the only son it was his duty. In his time, his dad had done his duty; now it was his turn. In basic training he was tormented by fear, afraid that in a crisis he would not be as brave or as tough as his dad was. He might falter. He might cry. He might break down and run. But in the end, none of that happened. Billy went to Germany, not Vietnam, and his father remained the only hero in the family. After his tour of duty had come to an end, Billy vanished. Rollie and his mother hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to hunt him down. They never did.
Over the years, Rollie grew fatter. Chins multiplied; blue veins blossomed on his nose; his belly became huge and he seldom spoke. Rollie missed his son. The year was 1971, and I had not seen Rollie in 12 years. A year before his wife had died. Just like that. A heart attack. His daughters moved away. One to Colorado Springs with her husband and two children. The other to Pueblo with her husband and three children. By then, I was residing in Houston, Texas, had emitted the ministry, due to my rather Liberal leanings, was then earning my living as the manager of a men's clothing outlet, and had returned to Denver, once again, to visit my Mom and Dad. Mom asked if I would mind taking Rollie to Denver Botanic Gardens near Cheesman Park. She said that Rollie enjoyed strolling through the lovely scenery. As we came to the end of our stroll, Rollie turned to me and said: 'Your Mother is a wonderful woman, Dick. She knocks on my door every morning to see how I'm doing. She cooks for me. We talk on my porch. She has become the family that I no longer have...'
In 1973, Rollie was laid to rest in Arlington after a long bout with stomach cancer. There was a flag on the coffin and a bugler playing taps and his two daughters and five grandchildren and my Mother and Father; all there to watch Rollie Reezab join the endless rows of white crosses that marked the presence of men who had fought and died for their country. Some of them might have even been there with him that terrible night in Korea. The only one missing was Billy...
...When I asked my Mom why she and Dad went to the funeral so far away from our Denver home, her simple reply was: 'To make certain he would be safe and warm. I crocheted a blanket for him and the Servicemen were kind enough to grant my wish and wrap it around him before he was laid to rest...'
AN EPILOGUE:
'I got to grow up
with a mother who
believed in others
and taught me how
to believe in me.'
Antonio Villaraigosa
IN THE MORNINGS OF THAT COLD WINTER...
MY MOM WALKED THE SNOWY STREETS, her heart blown through with emptiness. Neighbors watched her progress. She plucked trash that lay in the streets and gently placed them into garbage cans in front of small stores. She was becoming accustomed now to the permanent grieving sadness over the loss of my Dad, who had died in October. The year was 1975, and the houses were sealed with plastic sheets on windows against the invasions of winter. Alone, bundled in down and wool, her rubber boots heavy, Mom would walk about three miles each morning, with the Rocky Mountain wind pounding the streets, and then back. She seldom had breakfast, and no longer read the newspaper or watched television. Across the long mornings, she worked with her hands, preparing small Christmas gifts for the children of the poor. The music of Mozart fled her heart. She only thought about Dad each hour of every day.
She ate a late lunch, always in a restaurant called The Chant 'n Chew on Colfax Avenue. In the afternoon, she would polish whatever piece of wooden furniture in the house that she thought needed tending. Then she would sit in the large, soft chair beside the fireplace. In those first weeks, after my Father's death, she would imagine that he was still with her, that they were laughing together. Her pain was most terrible at night. She would get up and walk around the house and try to read, and lie again on the brass bed, hearing the house settling and the light noise of the falling snow on the roof. And sometimes she was afraid. Thinking: I could die here, and nobody would know.
The fear of solitude slowly left her. It had been years since she had slept alone, and for a long time she would still awaken and reach for my Dad. But then, knowing that he was no longer there, and would never be there, she learned to accept his absence, and made new habits. She began to look forward to the luxury of solitude. I must be healing, she thought. The wound is closing. I have survived.
And then one gray afternoon after lunch, she marched through the snow to the home next door to see Bess Wagner. Bess had been a neighbor since 1941. I had grown up with her two sons Steve and Bruce. Her husband Myron had died the month before my Father passed away, and the two of the sat before the fireplace for a long while, discussing their mutual loss until they came up with an idea and and invited Emma Brag over to join them. Emma had lost her her husband Teddy in 1969; and together, thee three of them established The East Denver Widow's Club. And when spring came, when the three of them went to walk the neighborhood, women waved at them. They waved back. And then went into other where widows were waiting for their solace and advice.
My Mom died in August of 1992, with my two children at my side. She looked up at me from her hospital bed where she had made me lay my head next to hers, her blue eyes bright as ever, and said: 'I love you, Dick.'
I was asked by Pastor Weaver of Messiah Lutheran Church to give a eulogy in honor of my Mom and I quoted the words of Samuel Taylor: 'Her death came with dignity; The opening bud to Heaven conveyed, and it bade it blossom there...' And finished the eulogy by paraphrasing the swords from Romeo and Juliet: 'When she shall die - Take her and cut her out in little stars and she will make fhe Face of heaven so fine - That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun...'
...I love you too, Bertha Winkle Daugs....
WHAT'S PAST IS PROLOGUE:
SHE GREW UP IN A TIME WHEN THE...
WOUNDS CAUSED BY NEGATIVISM AND anti-immigrant bigotry were still raw. Those wounds, and the scar tissue they left behind affected the way millions of Belgium immigrants lived, what they talked about, even how they chose to read the newspapers. In the years of her childhood, my Mother was no exception. Her name was Bertha Winckle and growing up I could hear her stories. She once said to me, 'Things that happened to us was because we were from another country. The warnings, the prejudice. We heard it at home, my father heard it in the barbershop, I heard it on the corner. You heard about it in school. I heard the same kinds of things from my Irish and Jewish friends, how they learned about the ways could get in trouble.'
Part of the trouble was caused by the sheer numbers. From 1880 to the beginning of World War One, more than 24 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to America. The vast majority came to the United States. Her family walked west from the City of New York to the sunny mountains of Colorado, finding jobs as farmers and day laborers along the way. They settled in the unincorporated town of Crook, Colorado in Logan County along the vast southern Colorado plains.
Rural immigrants shared a common grievance against the Old Country: the exhausted or poisoned land had failed them and, in a way, betrayed their faith and prayers; in the New World, they sought the solace of the land and the cement of the cities. Tilling their own soil and city cement was better than hunger; a job and a lock on the door provided the only true safety. Haunted by the brutal realities of recurrent and crippling disenfranchisement of the Home Land, they were drawn to the brighter promise of freedom. In the early 1900's when my grandparents made their separate passages from Stokkum, Belgium carrying with them 11 children. My Mother indicated that even in rural Colorado there was fear. Residents feared the Catholics and Jews, feared strange languages and race, feared people who Were Not Like Them. It could be a matter of life and death. The message from most Americans was clear to the immigrants. An American was supposed to be a white Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. In reality, the game was rigged.
This isolation, this shared solitude, created problems that would take generations to solve. Education was often sneered at; what was the use of working hard in school if you couldn't take a diploma and get a job? My Mother grew up in the world of feasts, weddings, funerals, and celebrations, with the insistence on the traditions of courtship, marriage, personal honor. She obtained a teaching certificate and became a school teacher. She had two choices. The old way and the new way. She chose the new way. 'Education gave me the power to believe in myself, she once told me when I was nothing more than a kid. This is why you are going to go to college.'
Mom would meet my Dad, who had hoboed from Iowa after having been kicked-out of his house for impregnating another woman in 1923. His father had been a Lutheran Minister, and Lutheran minister's children do not make girls pregnant. It was, apparently, love at first sight for both of them. They had met at a dance held in Crook's Catholic Church in 1923 and were married in 1927. My Father and his family had migrated from Germany to America in 1904, three years prior my Mother and her family arriving on American soil from Belgium in 1907. The young couple then moved to the City of Denver, where my Father took a job at The Gas and Electric Building in downtown Denver on Champa Street stoking ovens for the building's heat, while my Mother became employed at the J.C. Penny Company selling women's clothing. In Denver, as in many other places, the story was certainly not one of unrelieved misery.
The core of the immigration myth is this: it was about the way people overcame misery, how they found their consolations, and, in the end, how they redeemed America when Americans believed it was not in need of redemption. There was a spirit of patient optimism in my Mother's Denver. For millions of immigrants and their children, technology would provide some consolation and accelerate the process of Americanization. The rapid development of the motion picture would provide one form of nationality, allowing people from every country to share common emotional experiences. The phonograph and the radio were invented. When each became widely available, the lives of immigrants changed in a revolutionary way. Many added a wind-up Victrola, and after 1921, regular radio broadcasting began. Many immigrants could listen to the radio stations, and thus be informed and entertained even though they could neither read nor write.
And they would produce children, a generation that could not remember a time when there was neither a radio or phonograph in the house; and by the time I slid through my Mother's womb and onto the earthly scene in September of 1936, everyone was listening to the music of America. Many immigrants also knew the melodies of Puccini and Verdi, and Caruso singing in their kitchens or living rooms. My father worked at The Gas and Electric Building and my Mother was assigned the task of taking care of me. By then,most immigrant parents had grown used to a new set of myths, peopled by baseball players named Babe Ruth, prizefighters with the name of Jack Dempsey, and movie stars like Clark Gable. All of which would inevitably change their children into Americans.
When I was 2 years-of-age we moved into our own house on South Corona Street, which my Dad bought for $10,000, a considerable sum in that Depression year. The family had, at last, their piece of American earth. No more paying rent. No more hustles with landlords. We now had a one-story home with steam heat, a bathtub, and a finished basement. The new house even had the ultimate luxury: a telephone. My Mother helped Depression casualties as best as she could, laying out spreads of food, trying to find work for those who had lost their jobs. And I remember that she always seemed to be singing. And I was always her audience. I did not have a hard Depression. The Japanese Imperial Navy ended the Depression by bombing Pearl Harbor in 1941.
My Dad tried to enlist and was turned down because of his age which was 49. He became an Air Raid Warden. And I was proud of him. Mom became a member of The American Women's Voluntary Services selling war bonds, providing meals for servicemen, and homes for those in service during the Holiday Season when they had no home to go to. I was proud of her too. She reminded me of Rosie the Riveter, the symbolic woman who had walked into a war plant and found employment that was ordinarily reserved for men.
Bertha had enriched my life since the day I was born. She had confronted bigotry and changed the way many people thought about immigrants and their children. She had made me wiser about love and human loneliness and how I could go about finding out what life was all about; a genuine fine woman who will endure forever in my memory for as long as I live...
MY MOTHER BERTHA:
'My mother had a great deal
of trouble with me, but I think
she enjoyed it.'
Mark Twain
I GREW UP IN A TIME WHEN THE...
WINDS OF WAR UNFURLED OVER the land that my Mother had grown to love; and many of these snippets about my Mother's life are shared with one enduring emotion: nostalgia. Two factors drive that emotion: the rapidity of how my life changed because of her and the immigrant roots which made her who she eventually would become. She always ached for people gone, and the place and music had once she loved. She may have been in America, but she still yearned for old roads, familiar smells, special foods, old games, for parents and aunts and uncles, for homes where they new every inch of the room, even in the dark. Whatever brought them to New York City or Crook, Colorado - bigotry, hunger, oppression, war - the Old Country was still the place where they once ran barefoot in the grass. Every one's present also contained the past. Then. Now.
The Denver neighborhood where I grew up was an unnamed wedge between Colfax Avenue and the suburb of Aurora. Our new home was on Jasmine Street, and most adults in the neighborhood had come through the Depression and eventually the war with Japan and Germany. The most important four-letter word in their vocabulary was work. They never envisioned anything as grandiose as a career; that was for their children. But work meant that they could put money at the grocery store and still have something left in the morning. On holidays, graduations, christenings, they could even buy gifts for their kids. With any luck, they would work until they died. And the world would stay the same. Peace. Steadiness. Even happy endings.
The world didn't stay the same, however. The Korean War meant that we had not seen the end of war. Young men who were 13 when World War Two ended were now being drafted to kill for their country. Everywhere in our country the tradition of following your father into his profession started to end. But there were other huge changes underway. The arrival of television. And much worse, the spread of heroin and petty crime. In a neighborhood where none of us owned anything worth robbing, locks appeared on all the doors ,huge changes underway; but the steadfastness of my Mother remained the same. She taught me that there were few saints, many sinners, some small heroes, a few cold villains. She made me understand that in our world, each neighborhood was a kind of an urban hamlet, complete with its own lore and legends.
CHAPTER ONE
'Men are what their
mothers made them.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson
IN THAT CROSSCUTTING OF MEMORY...
THE WIND IS ALWAYS BLOWING IN HER hair, from her blue eyes as she looked my way, the love for me is packed tightly in memory, no matter where we were are or what it was that we were doing. All that mattered is that I was doing it with her. And when I think of my Mother, I always think of Hyman Boch, as well. Hyman moved into our neighborhood in the winter of 1946, when I was 10 years old, and because of who he was and where he had come from, Mom took him under her wing, gave him food, tender care, and motherly love.
Hyman was my age, but his eyes were wide and frightened. When we neighborhood kids asked him to play with us, his face seemed to tremble and he backed up, his eyes confused. Within days, we learned that the new kid was from Poland, a place located somewhere between Russia and Germany, and the language he spoke was called Yiddish.
He was living with an uncle, both his mother and father were dead, and his uncle had also in the Dachau Concentration Camp. Hyman would stand there while we pointed at things, taught him the names of important things like bat, ball, and, of course, soda and candy. My friend Bobby Dixon said one morning, Hyman looks like a dog that got beat too much. I noticed two things about him. He never seemed to smile. And he had a number tattooed on his wrist. He has a number on his wrist? my Mother said, Oh, dear God! Hyman was in a concentration camp!
The days rolled by and Spring came and I began to get a hint as to how special my Mom actually was. Hyman put on weight due to my Mother's cooking. He was at our dinner table almost every night. His uncle could not afford to properly feed him. Mom and Dad bought him clothes and Keds and a baseball mitt. Mom attempted to explain to him why she loved the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, that they represented to her what America was all about. He listened gravely while she explained that they were a team filled with the sons of immigrants, made him recite the litany of Dodger players: Reiser, Reese, Walker and her favorite, Roy Campanella - the son of a Sicilian immigrant with an African American mother and that he was so good at the game that he once said, 'Every day on a ball field is Christmas.'
Shortly after that, Hyman's uncle called my Mother. Hyman had gotten sick and had been taken to Methodist Hospital. There were whispered conversations about what was wrong with him, and then plans were made by my Mother and Father. When he was released from the hospital, my Mother moved into his uncle's house, and I came over every night to help Hyman do his homework, and the neighborhood women decided they would give him a Christmas party. They would combine Hanukkah and Christmas, get a Christmas tree, hang pictures of Santa Claus around the house, but leave out all the mangers and statues of Jesus. Mom insisted that Dad buy train sets and chemistry sets, a big easel so he could paint. A camera. And a radio.
After Hyman had recovered, the Christmas season began in earnest. In downtown Denver, the store windows magically filled with toys and train set and red stockings. Christmas banners stretched across the downtown streets, painted with the slogans of Christmas, about peace on earth and good will toward men. Christmas music played from the loudspeakers, and there were Salvation Army bands outside The May Company and The Denver Dry Goods and men selling chestnuts and old men dressed in Santa Claus costumes, ringing little bells.
My Mother took me and we wandered the streets, and I was full of amazement and wonder. I would ask my Mother questions. Was Santa Claus a saint? Did they have Christmas bells in the Bethlehem stable? How come the Three Wise Men didn't come on reindeer instead of camels, and, by the way, where did they come from? If Jesus was the son of God, why didn't God just show up in Person? She would answer each and every question with tenderness and love.
Hyman and his uncle moved to Colorado Springs shortly after Christmas. That night, I snuck Hyman into our house, and said we our tearful good-byes. Then we all went down to his uncle's car. The trunk was packed with suitcases. Hyman was driven out of the neighborhood, heading away, never to return.
A few weeks later, my Mother received a letter from him, one which she told my Dad and I was meant only for her. When she read it she both smiled and cried and tucked it into a hiding place somewhere in the house. I thought about Hyman every year after that, when the snow fell through the Colorado sky and our neighborhood turned white, or when I heard certain songs from hidden speakers.
Years later, after Hyman had become a medical doctor in the City of New York, she allowed me to read the note: 'Dear Mrs. Daugs: I just just wanted you to know that you made every day Christmas for me.' Love, Dr. Hyman Boch...
...I also thought about him when I saw people with tattoos on their wrists, or saw barbed wire. But I didn't worry about him. I knew he was all right. He had my mother's love. And so did I.
CHAPTER TWO
'Rather fail with honor
than succeed by fraud.'
Sophocles
ALMOST EVERYBODY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD...
LOVED AND ADMIRED HIM, EXCEPT FOR MOM. He had a perfect wife and two perfect children and lived in a perfect house on Colfax Avenue, three blocks from Messiah Lutheran Church. They thought he was perfect at church, too; he was an usher with my Dad at two church services every Sunday, he coached the men's softball team in the spring and was the best bowler on the bowling team in the fall. In the summer, he volunteered to take the poorest children to a mountain retreat for the 4th of July.
He was an executive at a neighborhood bank who didn't smoke, didn't swear, and didn't drink. He was just a perfect guy. And my Mom would say, He can't be trusted. He has the same dead-eyes of Joseph Stalin. Other women, however, would say to his young wife Jill, You're so lucky to be married to a man like that. And Jill would smile in a shy way and keep walking up the street to the grocery store and dress shop. There were, of course, some neighborhood dissenters, mostly men, who agreed with my Mother. Insofar as I'm concerned, the guy's a Putz! said a fellow member of the congregation by the name of Glen Abbot. He walks along, bouncing around on the balls of his feet, his skin all pink and healthy; and all of the women in the church seem to think he's a wonderful guy. Me, I think he's a con artist.
In the summer of 1954, when I was eighteen years-old and preparing to go off to college in the fall, Mister Perfect extended his good works by convincing the church to host meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous in a large basement room within the church on Tuesday evening. After several meetings, a few former drunks within the congregation could be seen nursing club sodas, with everybody getting up and describing what alcohol had done to them the wreckage it had caused, the chaos it had fueled. Coffee and tea and doughnuts were served, and the two pastors of the church were always present for those who needed to clean their slates of mortal sin. My Mother aided in the meetings and would come home afterward saying the same words over-and-over again, There is something rotten about that man's soul that is evil and disturbing.
I had gotten to know Mister Perfect's daughter Maria quite well. She was my age. She was pretty. And I liked her very much. I had taken her to see the movie The Caine Mutiny on Sunday night. When the movie ended she said she wasn't feeling well, so I took her home and bid her a good-night. By Wednesday, we knew she had polio. The news raced through the entire neighborhood, and it is difficult to explain now what the word 'polio' could do to people in those days. The fear, the horror. Just the word. Polio.
At the hospital, they didn't let us see her for a while, and her family seemed confused, as if possibly ashamed that this could happen to one of them. Mom sent flowers. She wrote notes. But I didn't get to see her until the following Sunday afternoon. And when my Mom and I walked into the ward, she was alone in a bed against the far wall. She turned when she saw us and started to cry. I tried to console her, feeling stupid and clumsy. My Mom kissed her and held her hand. But then we learned the the reason for her tears. Mister Perfect had not come to visit his own daughter. Not even once.
As we departed her room and made our way to the elevator, my mother said: One day her father's fate will catch up with him. Mark my words, Dick, beneath the sweet-talk and saintly manners, the the man is a modern day Judas! It would be the first and only time I would ever hear her say anything bad about anyone...
...Then on the following Friday evening, his wife Jill appeared at our door. Her hair was blowy, her coat open, her eyes scared. When my Dad opened the door and she said, I'm sorry, but, uh...have you seen my husband? No, Dad said. I can't say as I have. Have you tried up at the church? I mean, that's where he is a lot of the time. She turned and hurried into the night. An hour later, our Pastor came in, also looking for Mister Perfect.
He had learned that Mister Perfect had gone out for lunch that afternoon and had never come back. By midnight the word has spread throughout the neighborhood, and there had been two more telephone calls from his wife Jill. But nobody had seen Mister Perfect. They didn't see him that weekend, and he didn't come to work that Monday.
And then the cops descended upon the bank, and the big wigs came down from the main office in Pueblo, and the examiners were finally called in, and we all knew why Mister Perfect had gone missing. The bank was missing $300,000 along with Mister Perfect. This news made page 1 of The Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post the following day. It's first effect was to cancel the AA meeting that night. Many of the attendees felt that they would rather be honest drunks than the disciples of an embezzler. Many felt that Mister Perfect had absconded with more than money; he had embezzled their emotions, too. My Mother went to see Jill and Maria at the hospital that night to give them comfort.
One snowy Sunday morning the following March, long after Maria had been released from the hospital and was recovering quite nicely, Mom walked into our living room with The Denver Post in her hand. She held it up for me and my Dad to see. Will you look at this? she said, with a rather large smile on her face. The two of us gazed at the picture of Mister Perfect on page 6, his hair longer, his hands cuffed in front of him, and a bosomy handcuffed redhead beside him. The story was out of Omaha, Nebraska, under a headline that read: FORMER DENVER BANK EXECUTIVE, AND STRIPPER GIRLFRIEND NABBED IN BANK THEFT. The two men standing grimly behind the two of them were FBI agents; and my Mother said with the large smile still etched on her face: God does indeed work in mysterious ways.
CHAPTER THREE
'There are no strangers here;
Only friends you haven't yet
met.'
William Butler Yeats
LATER, AFTER IT WAS OVER, ALL OF US IN THE...
NEIGHBORHOOD WOULD NEVER FORGET THAT Sunday morning when Vincent Petros had arrived among us. It was in on a Sunday morning in June of 1959 and I had recently returned to Denver from my first year in college in Nebraska. My Mother remembered that he wore faded jeans and a crisp white shirt, and that it was early in the morning and the sun gleamed on his yellow hair. She was sweeping-off our front porch and he asked her for directions to Mister Goodman's house, which was on the opposite side of Jasmine Street which was directly across the street from where we lived. Mom said hat his accent was thick and strange and that she could not quite pinpoint where he was from, but thought he might be from Greece.
Mister Jackson, our next door neighbor, remembered seeing the young man staring up at street signs as if he he were lost. Others remembered his blue eyes, some his battered tan canvass suitcase tied shut with a rope. They all remembered that he was playing 'Yankee Do0dle Dandy' on his gold harmonica.
He was twenty-two that summer and had taken a room and Mister Goodman's house, which was right next door to Mrs. Derryberry's house. Mrs. Mrs. Derryberry was a young widow who seemed to be living a sentence of solitude since the death of her husband in an automobile accident two years before, mostly worrying about her two year-old son when he played in the yard, mumbling prayers in our church each Sunday morning for her lost beloved husband, and washing clothes. Mom invited her over for dinner every Tuesday night. She was quiet and polite and my Mom liked her. And my Dad liked her, too. She was very pretty and told him that she thought he was quite handsome for an older man. She shouldn't live alone like that, my Mother used to say. It isn't right. And then one afternoon, that first week after the young man's arrival, Mrs. Dewberry was hanging clothes on the line in her back yard and glanced over into Mister Goodman's yard and saw Vincent Petros.
He was sitting on Mr. Goodman's back porch and he was playing the harmonica. She told my Mother that the sounds he made were sorrowful and melancholy, and when he began to sing to himself, his voice ached with loss. She did not understand the words, but she felt that somehow they were aimed directly at her and they made her ache, too. She stepped back from the window, and from the shadow behind the curtain looked down at the beautiful young man. She watched for almost a minute; and then she began furiously to scrub the table, clean the refrigerator, to polish glasses and dust bureaus. When, about fifteen minutes later, her son came in from the front yard, she told my Mom that he found her on the bed, and she was crying.
Later that same day,Marie Miller visited my Mom after her shift at The Bluebird Dry Cleaners on Colfax Avenue had ended for the day. Marie and Mom played bridge with two other women in the neighborhood on Friday evenings and she told my Mom that she had seen Vincent earlier in the day. He brought in six shirts, with medium starch, and a nice brown suit. He was very polite. He didn't flirt. He doesn't know how good-looking he is. He said that he was going to work at 'The Chat 'n Chew Restaurant' right next to where I work, and then he laughed at his bad English. He said he was actually from Greece. To tell you the truth, Bertha, it was hard to keep my eyes off him.
It was shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday, after her son had left for Elitch Gardens with her brother Lawrence, Widow Derryberry was hanging wash while Vincent played his harmonica in the yard below. Suddenly, a piece of wash slipped out of her hands and fell into the yard. He glanced at it, then looked up at the window and saw her frozen in the window frame.
He then walked over and picked up the fallen piece. It was a pair of women's panties. He waved it and explained with a gesture that he would bring it up to her. She shook her head no. She pointed to herself and then at him, indicating that she would come down. But Vincent just smiled and went to her back door, knocked on it, she came to the door, her hair swiftly brushed, her cheeks rapidly powdered, and she looked at him and that was the beginning of that. There were few secrets in the neighborhood, and soon many people knew about Widow Derryberry and the good-looking man with the gold harmonica.
My Mom knew from her face, the freshness of her color, and the way she began to dress again as she had before the death of her husband, in pink and yellow summer dresses. She knew from the drawn shades in the afternoon and evening while her boy was attending a Denver Bears baseball game with his uncle. Our next door neighbor Mister Jackson had seen them sitting under a tree in City Park across from our church, eating sandwiches while the young man played the gold harmonica. Our minister said that he had seen the two of them holding hands and staring up at the glittering stars of the night sky shortly after Widow Derryberry had brought the young man to an evening Sunday service. Of course, the older women in church gossiped about Widow Derryberry and the young man whose name they didn't know; it was to bad, they said, that she had gone 'that way'; she sure was not showing proper respect for her poor dead husband. But most of the younger women approved, and a few were envious.
My Mother, however, was their cheerleader and told the two of them, Just do what you want to do and never worry about what other people might say or think. As for you young lady, center on who you are and what you want, and never ever enter the country of the old like so many of our church ladies have. My husband Godfrey and I have been married almost thirty-three years and I feel as if I haven't aged a bit. Vincent asked my Mom what she would do if she were in Widow Derryberry's place. Mom smiled and said, Elope.
Late that night, when the neighborhood stores had closed and the last shade or curtain were closed in all of the neighborhood homes, and her brother Lawrence had come over to take care of her child, they did just that.
Over that summer, Vincent and Mrs. Dewberry had become my friends, and I had kept in touch with them both down through the years. I recently received a letter from Mrs. Petros, who has now been married to Vincent for almost fifty-six years informing me that her son and his wife had given her a fifth grandchild. A girl. And she had named the child Bertha in honor of my Mother. She then quoted the Chinese philosopher Mencius 'Friends are the siblings God never gave us' and added, 'That is what your Mother Bertha was to me.
I sat back in my chair and put the letter down on the table in front of me. And I gave a small smile of both remembrance and regret, in that I had never appreciated my Bertha enough while she was here...
....Yet knew in my heart that she had already forgiven me.
CHAPTER FOUR
'The lady doth protest
too much, me thinks.'
William Shakespeare
I WAS NOT PRESENT TO WITNESS THE GREAT PROTEST...
OF 1969 LED BY A ONE-ARMED LADY NAMED EMMA BRAG, who had lost her arm when it got caught in her washing machine wringer back in 1962. The protest, my Mom told me, was all about the best fruit and vegetable store in the entire neighborhood which was owned by Orville Janssen. In the summer, his stands and bins outside the store were plump with products of the earth: oranges and grape and apples, and melons and tomatoes and onions. The garlic was always sweet and the basil always fresh. Orville's array of greens and reds and purples seemed lavish and extravagant on that street and in our neighborhood. His customers arrived from the far reaches of Denver and stretched as far as Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Even when the new Safeway opened it giant store, Orville continued to flourish, six days a week, from eight in the morning until eight at night. His prices were a little higher than they were in the new supermarket, but his goods had been chosen by a human hand, not hauled to market by a corporation. All the women of the neighborhood knew this and shopped at Orville's with a certain passion.
All except Emma Brag.
'The tomatoes at Orville's are gorgeous this week, Emma, My Mother would say when Emma and her husband Teddy would come to our house for their monthly poker game. 'I am quite aware of that, Bertha, ' Emma would reply. 'But the new Safeway is more convenient. Initially, nothing was made of this. In our neighborhood of working folks, the few who took time to notice simply dismissed Emma's little boycott as a mysterious failure of good taste. They all kept shopping at Orville's. One reason was that Orville gave his produce the kind of attention that could only be called love.
My Dad, rising at six o'clock in the morning to go to work, could see Orville arriving at the store in his old tan Chevrolet to unload the boxes of produce. He'd already spent two hours at the market. He lived alone in a small home at the back of the store, where he would listen at night to opera or to a baseball game while he designed hand-lettered signs that he would place in the morning over his beloved produce.
Nobody really knew Orville outside the store. He was a small bald man with large black eyebrows and a small well-trimmed moustache. He seldom went to church, had been too old for World War Two so he was not a member of the American Legion or the VFW. He seemed to exist only within the context of his amazing store; he was what he did. And the only one who knew that was not true was my Mom.
I first met Mister Janssen when I was a kid in the late 1940's shortly after we had moved from South Corona Street to Jasmine Street. Mom introduced me to him when I accompanied her to his store. She mentioned that the two of them were from the same city in Belgium, that my grandfather and Orville's dad had been iron workers as well as longshoremen in a town called Stokkum prior to my grandfather gathering-up his family to move to Antwerp. Over the years, I was somewhat surprised at how close and friendly the two of them seemed to be, pleased that Orville Janssen liked me, and always gave me either and apple or an orange whenever I accompanied my Mother to his store.
I had almost forgotten about Orville Janssen when my Mother wrote me and told me of the brouhaha which was about to explode between Orville and a woman by the name of Emma Brag. I had been away from Denver for eleven years by then, having gone off to college, then into the seminary, and was at that time a Lutheran minister in the city of Roswell, New Mexico.
According to Mom, Emma had been protesting in front Orville's store from 2 o'clock until 4 o'clock in the afternoon for about a week, holding a sign in her only hand that read: 'SHOP AT SAFEWAY. IT'S CHEAPER AND IT'S CLOSER,' when her husband, Teddy, fell over at his desk at a brokerage house on Champa Street. He was dead upon arrival at the Presbyterian Hospital on East 19th Avenue, and the news apparently shocked the neighborhood. He was, after all, only 57, and in semi-good shape. Brokers weren't supposed to die at their desk. They are supposed to die in bed.
The funeral service for Teddy Brag at Messiah Lutheran Church was filled with mourners; it filled the entire church, and every0ne said that they were more than a bit surprised to see Orville Janssen sitting in the last pew on the right. When Mom called me to give me an update on how the funeral went, she replied, 'Emma and the three children handled everything with courage and dignity. I am worried about Orville Janssen though.' 'Why's that?' I asked. She replied, Orville was at the funeral and when he walked through the receiving line at the conclusion of the funeral, Emma snubbed him. She and I are going to have a little talk after Emma and the family have time to mourn their loss.' A month after the funeral, Mom had tagged herself as the neighbororhood negotiator. She caught a glimpse of Emma pacing back-and-forth and holding her sign in front of Orville's store. She immediately went into the store to have a little talk with Orville. When Mom came out of the store, she had a little chat with Emma. After that, Mom walked back home.
That evening my Dad and other members of the church had combined forces to throw a benefit in City Park for Emma and her children on the great lawn adjacent to The Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The blankets were spread on the grass and lawn chairs and picnic tables put in place. The great lawn was filled early. Coke and coffee and tea flowed, a small band played old songs, and Emma Brag sat with her neighbors at a table near the softball field. And about an hour after the racket had begun, Orville Janssen appeared at the edge of the festivities. He was wearing a new white shirt and new tan slacks and new blue tennis shoes.
My Dad would tell me later that Orville entered hesitantly, even shyly, until Mom ran up to him and gave him a hug, then took his arm and walked him over to the crowded table where drinks were being served. The men didn't know him very well, but the women started coming over, happy to see him. A few were surprised, because they knew that Emma Brag was protesting in front of his store, but they were pleased that he had come in a show of neighborhood solidarity with the grieving widow and her family.
He said his hellos, murmured his regrets, sipped his tea. And all the while, he looked through the crowd at Emma Brag. A moment or two later, he walked over the grass and blankets toward the softball field, staying close to my Mom, and came over to her. 'Hello, Emma, he said. After a long pause, she replied, 'Hello, Orville. How nice of you to come. She looked around uneasily, her one hand moving awkwardly. Most of the tables were empty as dancers moved to a tune 'It's All In the Game.' He smiled, tentatively, and asked: 'Could we go for a walk and have a little talk?' There was an uneasy moment. Then Emma said: 'I never thought that you would ever want to talk to me again.' 'Me neither,' he replied. 'Are you angry with me? she asked. 'A little,' Orville said. 'But not nearly as much as I was.' He paused. 'I want to talk if it's OK with you.' 'It is,' she replied. Then my Mom walked away, her back straight, looking proud, easing her way through the crowd, who were looking past her in utter amazement when they spotted Emma and Orville actually talking to one another.
That fall I returned home to Denver to visit my Mom and Dad, leaving my wife and two children behind in Roswell. My daughter, Traci was now in school. My wife thought it best to tend to her needs without disrupting her usual routine. Mom was making noise in the kitchen and bacon was frying and the radio was on and everything was exactly like it had been when I was a kid. I happened to look out of the living room window as my Dad sat on the sofa reading The Rocky Mountain News, when I spotted Orville Janssen walking up the street with a one-armed lady. 'Who is the woman with Orville Janssen?' I asked. Dad replied, 'Thats Emma Brag. she works at Orville's store now. 'How did that happen? I said. He laid the newspaper aside, smiled, then said: 'Ask your Mother. I haven't a clue. And when I did, all Mom did was smile...
CHAPTER FIVE
'Every parent is at some time
the father if the unreturned
prodigal, with nothing to do
but to keep his house open
to hope.'
John Giardi
BILLY REZAAB LIVED DOWN THE STREET AS I WAS GROWING UP...
HE IDOLIZED HIS FATHER WHO WAS, AFTER ALL, A HERO OF THE Korean War. His father's name was Rollie. In the neighborhood stores, in the veteran's club and Masonic Lodge, they all knew the story well: how Rollie had gone to Korea in that first brutal winter of the war, when the ground was frozen iron, and how his outfit was cut off in the night and the flanks were overrun, and how Rollie fought off the Communists all by himself, killing several of them, until help arrived in the morning. Billy knew the story as well as anyone, although his dad was a modest man and didn't talk about it all that much, except when he was smoking pot. Which was an unusual thing for a man to be doing back in 1955. Particularly in our neighborhood. My Dad was quite fond of Rollie. My Mom was not. It was not because he smoked pot. She did not like the fact that he did not wipe-off his shoes on the front porch Matt before he entered our house and seemed always to leave spots on the living room rug. 'I think he should be more careful, my Mom would say.
But she seemed to always enjoy looking at his medals and ribbons whenever he brought them over for my Dad to examine. And so did I. The Distinguished Service Medal. The Bronze Star. The Purple Heart. They thrilled Billy and, handling them, he would imagine his father, young and tough, with a machine gun in his hands, marching across the barren hills, and then fighting hard through fear to save his buddies. When when Billy was 18, he volunteered for the army. His mom cried and protested, his 2 younger sisters told him not to do it, but Billy insisted that as the only son it was his duty. In his time, his dad had done his duty; now it was his turn. In basic training he was tormented by fear, afraid that in a crisis he would not be as brave or as tough as his dad was. He might falter. He might cry. He might break down and run. But in the end, none of that happened. Billy went to Germany, not Vietnam, and his father remained the only hero in the family. After his tour of duty had come to an end, Billy vanished. Rollie and his mother hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to hunt him down. They never did.
Over the years, Rollie grew fatter. Chins multiplied; blue veins blossomed on his nose; his belly became huge and he seldom spoke. Rollie missed his son. The year was 1971, and I had not seen Rollie in 12 years. A year before his wife had died. Just like that. A heart attack. His daughters moved away. One to Colorado Springs with her husband and two children. The other to Pueblo with her husband and three children. By then, I was residing in Houston, Texas, had emitted the ministry, due to my rather Liberal leanings, was then earning my living as the manager of a men's clothing outlet, and had returned to Denver, once again, to visit my Mom and Dad. Mom asked if I would mind taking Rollie to Denver Botanic Gardens near Cheesman Park. She said that Rollie enjoyed strolling through the lovely scenery. As we came to the end of our stroll, Rollie turned to me and said: 'Your Mother is a wonderful woman, Dick. She knocks on my door every morning to see how I'm doing. She cooks for me. We talk on my porch. She has become the family that I no longer have...'
In 1973, Rollie was laid to rest in Arlington after a long bout with stomach cancer. There was a flag on the coffin and a bugler playing taps and his two daughters and five grandchildren and my Mother and Father; all there to watch Rollie Reezab join the endless rows of white crosses that marked the presence of men who had fought and died for their country. Some of them might have even been there with him that terrible night in Korea. The only one missing was Billy...
...When I asked my Mom why she and Dad went to the funeral so far away from our Denver home, her simple reply was: 'To make certain he would be safe and warm. I crocheted a blanket for him and the Servicemen were kind enough to grant my wish and wrap it around him before he was laid to rest...'
AN EPILOGUE:
'I got to grow up
with a mother who
believed in others
and taught me how
to believe in me.'
Antonio Villaraigosa
IN THE MORNINGS OF THAT COLD WINTER...
MY MOM WALKED THE SNOWY STREETS, her heart blown through with emptiness. Neighbors watched her progress. She plucked trash that lay in the streets and gently placed them into garbage cans in front of small stores. She was becoming accustomed now to the permanent grieving sadness over the loss of my Dad, who had died in October. The year was 1975, and the houses were sealed with plastic sheets on windows against the invasions of winter. Alone, bundled in down and wool, her rubber boots heavy, Mom would walk about three miles each morning, with the Rocky Mountain wind pounding the streets, and then back. She seldom had breakfast, and no longer read the newspaper or watched television. Across the long mornings, she worked with her hands, preparing small Christmas gifts for the children of the poor. The music of Mozart fled her heart. She only thought about Dad each hour of every day.
She ate a late lunch, always in a restaurant called The Chant 'n Chew on Colfax Avenue. In the afternoon, she would polish whatever piece of wooden furniture in the house that she thought needed tending. Then she would sit in the large, soft chair beside the fireplace. In those first weeks, after my Father's death, she would imagine that he was still with her, that they were laughing together. Her pain was most terrible at night. She would get up and walk around the house and try to read, and lie again on the brass bed, hearing the house settling and the light noise of the falling snow on the roof. And sometimes she was afraid. Thinking: I could die here, and nobody would know.
The fear of solitude slowly left her. It had been years since she had slept alone, and for a long time she would still awaken and reach for my Dad. But then, knowing that he was no longer there, and would never be there, she learned to accept his absence, and made new habits. She began to look forward to the luxury of solitude. I must be healing, she thought. The wound is closing. I have survived.
And then one gray afternoon after lunch, she marched through the snow to the home next door to see Bess Wagner. Bess had been a neighbor since 1941. I had grown up with her two sons Steve and Bruce. Her husband Myron had died the month before my Father passed away, and the two of the sat before the fireplace for a long while, discussing their mutual loss until they came up with an idea and and invited Emma Brag over to join them. Emma had lost her her husband Teddy in 1969; and together, thee three of them established The East Denver Widow's Club. And when spring came, when the three of them went to walk the neighborhood, women waved at them. They waved back. And then went into other where widows were waiting for their solace and advice.
My Mom died in August of 1992, with my two children at my side. She looked up at me from her hospital bed where she had made me lay my head next to hers, her blue eyes bright as ever, and said: 'I love you, Dick.'
I was asked by Pastor Weaver of Messiah Lutheran Church to give a eulogy in honor of my Mom and I quoted the words of Samuel Taylor: 'Her death came with dignity; The opening bud to Heaven conveyed, and it bade it blossom there...' And finished the eulogy by paraphrasing the swords from Romeo and Juliet: 'When she shall die - Take her and cut her out in little stars and she will make fhe Face of heaven so fine - That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun...'
...I love you too, Bertha Winkle Daugs....
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