Don't Call Me Mother (43 page)

Through reading the Wapello Republican, the newspaper owned by my grandfather’s family, I tried to find out about my mother’s early life. In the old newspapers, the social lives of local people are listed with colorful detail—births, guests, travels, illnesses. I read every weekly newspaper from 1914, when my mother’s brother, Harrison, was born and died, through 1921, when the trail grew cold.

For at least three years, Gram and Mother and Blaine were together as a family, living in Wapello, where he worked for the newspaper. At some point, Blaine took a job, perhaps when the marriage began to fail, in Rock Island, Illinois, fifty miles away.

Blaine remarried when Mother was seven, and it is then that she was sent to live with Josephine, her great-grandmother. The discovery that my mother had lived with Gram for seven years gave me insight into her emotional troubles. My mother at age seven was no doubt deeply bonded with Gram. How and why Gram left her when Blaine remarried, no one knows.

Gram’s elopement with Blaine in 1911 when she was sixteen had been harshly judged by Blanche and the Iowa relatives, and was still passionately argued about sixty years later. Gram’s flight to Chicago, where she took up an entirely new life and identity, did not make her popular among the plain folks who composed her family.

For years, I tried to understand why Gram was such a snob. I had confirmed that she never graduated from high school, but she must have been ashamed of her roots. Our Iowa relatives could sense that—thus the jokes they made at her expense about education and running off to Europe and wearing fancy clothes. Gram’s family was working class and owned no land, having only rented the land they’d farmed all those years. They had little money or material possessions. She married into a middle-class professional family—Blaine’s father was a newspaper owner, his grandfather an attorney who had served in the Iowa state legislature. They were educated people. She must have felt quite out of place when she lived with them, ignorant of the ways of their refined world.

So Gram reinvented herself as a worldly, sophisticated woman. She was self-educated by virtue of having read hundreds of books, and her travels to Europe helped her develop that English accent and her love of the fine life. Her second husband, a man with money, left her enough at his death so that she did not have to work again; that’s when she moved us to Enid to be near Aunt Helen, who had moved there with Uncle Maj after the war.

Gram lived her own fantasy life through me, finding herself in a position to raise me when Mother left, and deciding clearly to take me on full time when I was six, interestingly close to the age that Mother was when Gram left her. I can imagine that she was determined to do it right this time. She wanted me to have the things she’d always yearned for. In her day, a fine, educated lady played the piano, learned foreign languages, and dressed perfectly; she had good manners and knew how to speak to anyone. This was the life Gram had never lived as a child or young woman. Mother didn’t go along with Gram’s program, except for playing the piano, and even that was against her will. “I always hated the piano,” she confessed to me once.

So I became a pawn in the game between my grandmother and the rest of the world. I was the chosen one who was supposed to finally make Gram happy and proud.

The mystery surrounding my father has taken many years to sort out. I’m certain that the root of the conflict between Gram and him was due partly to their perhaps unconscious sexual attraction. She was only twelve years older than he, and still very beautiful. I don’t understand why they came to hate each other, but perhaps it had something to do with money. Just before I was sent to Vera’s, Gram hired a lawyer to sue my father for child support, which then was paid to Vera.

Relatives of my father told me that he originally thought I might not be his child, probably because he thought my mother was “nutty,” as he put it, and loose with her affections. Her flirtatiousness was indeed outrageous enough to arouse his suspicions. Thus, perhaps, his comment on his deathbed: “So, you’re a Myers after all.”

Daddy’s emotional ambivalence about me disappeared when he was dying, but I was not mentioned in his will. I had often wondered if the distance I felt from my parents was just my imagination, but indeed, in their own ways, they both rejected me.

Mr. Brauninger and Eva were missing from my life for twenty-nine years. During that time, I often dreamed that I was searching for them, as I also searched for Jodie and Keith. Perhaps my rather obsessive searching, before the Internet made locating people much easier, was related to the years I had spent waiting for my parents, yearning to know more about them.

I found Jim and Eva again through Keith’s mother, who had their address. One morning in 1991, on my way to Uncle Willard’s funeral, I waited for my old mentors in an airport corridor. There they were, as if appearing out of the mists of time: tall, willowy Mr. Brauninger and petite, delicate Eva. We hugged and gazed rapturously at each other. Mr. B.’s red hair was white now, but he exuded love from his blue eyes just as I’d always remembered.

I asked them if they had sensed my grandmother’s violent temper and controlling nature. Mr. Brauninger said that he tried to help me just be a little girl and have fun by playing marbles with me. He added, “I used to look into the faces of my students and see the face of God.”

For ten years we saw each other about once a year. Once we had a reunion with Keith and his wife. Mr. Brauninger put Bach on his stereo system and closed his eyes. We all sat with him as if in prayer while the music washed over us. Many shared childhood memories were revisited that weekend—all those Saturday mornings at Youth Orchestra, discovering Beethoven and Mozart together. When Keith and I reminisced, we saw and heard the same things—the flow and discovery of amazing music, Mr. Brauninger’s bright blue eyes, the open plains, and a time that never will be again.

Mr. Brauninger was eventually diagnosed with stomach cancer. Sensing that he would die soon, I felt a compelling desire to say good-bye and took the train to see him during January, the height of the Iowa winter. For two days after I arrived, he seemed healthy and he and Eva and I had a wonderful visit, but he became ill and had to go back to the hospital. I sat with him there, remembering my hospital vigil for my father. As I was thinking of this, Mr. Brauninger took my hand. Looking into my eyes, he said, “I guess I’ve been like a father to you, haven’t I?”

Tears instantly flooded my eyes. Though he was weak, his grip on my hand was firm. I told him again, as I had many times before, how his love had made my childhood bearable. I kissed him on the forehead, and we sat together, quietly holding hands, until he fell asleep. He died a few months later.

I feel so lucky to have known him. Jim Brauninger touched hundreds of young people in his life, giving them full respect as human beings, imparting his love and musical skill. He was able to read the chapters I wrote about him in this book, so I know he understood the very special place he inhabits in my heart.

Jodie and I have lost and found each other several times over the years. She has been a professional cellist in Italy for thirty years, married a Russian violinist, and has a daughter and grandson. Thanks to the Internet, recently we renewed our special friendship. I am grateful to know her again after our long absences. We often reminisce about our good times together long ago in Enid, which seem to both of us like a dream. We talk about looking in the mirror these days, marveling how the faces of our mothers appear in our own, wondering where the years have gone since we met. When we were nine years old, we were protected and nurtured under Mr. Brauninger’s wings, and now our lives reflect his gifts to us.

It took determined research to find out what happened to Aunt Helen. When I last spoke with her in the early 1980s, she hardly remembered me, which broke my heart. After that, all contact faded. I learned a few years ago that she died in 1989 in a nursing home in Tyler, Texas, and is buried in the heart of the Texas plains, which she so loved. There are many nights when I want to talk to her, to find out more from her perspective. I often reread her letters. In one she tells me, “Your mother is nutty and your grandmother depressed, but don’t you go living your life that way. You have a lot to offer, so go do it. You have a lot of common sense and you have your father’s get up and go.” Thank you, Aunt Helen, for saving me many times over with your glop, your belly hugs, and “God love ya, darlin’.”