We
left Tulsa at 6:15 AM, in the dark, three generations in a white Toyota
Corolla. I was driving, Mom had the front passenger seat, and my daughter Lilly
took the back. We were mostly quiet as the sun rose over the flat Oklahoma
landscape. Gradually the deep red illuminated the stippled underside of the
clouds and revealed the fields, lined with trees and dotted with black cows.
In
Missouri, my daughter and I were delighted to see the native grasses growing
unchecked We openly admired the waving swathes of green, the seed heads pale or
touched with burgundy, the occasional patches of yellow rudbeckia, blue
ironweed, white Queen Anne’s lace, and purple yarrow, but Mom said they should
mow. Mom likes order and tradition.
She
also complained the entire two miles away from the highway we had to drive to
reach the diner in Mt Vernon, but the biscuits and white gravy tasted homemade,
and while Mom pointed out that the hash browns could’ve been crispier, the
bacon was real, the eggs fresh. I ate enough to keep us on the highway until
dinnertime.
My
teeth were set on edge by her complaints, so when Lilly slipped behind the
wheel and Mom took the backseat, I let her. The better to appreciate the changing
landscape, the grasses ceding to the rising altitude, the outcroppings of
limestone, blasted through for the interstate, and the scrubby oaks that presaged
the Ozarks. The signs featured cartoon hillbillies, Stucky’s, the “largest gift
shop in the world,” and battle sites; Peterbilt and other semi dealerships, trading
posts with names like Wolfman’s and Mule’s, a fake frontier town, and an American
flag the size of a blanket furling and unfurling over a car lot.
I was
on this road trip to gather stories and uncover the family secrets. I’d left
the life I’d built for myself back in New York City to follow up on what I’d
started in February by asking about my Other Brother[s], the illegitimate sons
of my long-dead father, and yet I was hesitant to ask the questions, waiting
for the answers to rise to the surface. I was also as cranky and impatient as a
teenager, refusing to play the word games Mom started to pass the time.
Mom
must have picked up on my impatience, and whether she was playing the sympathy
card or merely thinking about her childhood – we were taking her back to
Mendota, Illinois for her 65th high school reunion, after all - she
told us her mother didn’t want her.
How
many times had I heard that my mother, a caboose child and the youngest of
four, was born when her brother Sidney was 13, Kermit 11, and her sister Ferne
9?
But
then she added a twist I didn’t remember hearing before: “When Uncle Mert came
to see my mother and me in the hospital,” Mom said, “he said ‘Cute baby,’ and
my mother said, ‘You can have her.’”
Lilly
said she’d heard this. She’d spent two months the summer before living with her
granny, and now she encouraged Granny to keep talking.
Uncle
Mert, Merton Larson, was married to Aunt Edna; he’s the one who turned Edvarda
Julia Hagerup Larson into Edvarda Julia Hagerup Larson Larson.
“Aunt
Edna had the longest name,” Mom said. The other two: My grandmother Lilly Marie
and her brother Lloyd Fritzkov. Mom doesn’t know if Waldis, who died when she
was six, had a middle name.
I must
have heard the name Hagerup before, but it only registered now that I’d been to
Norway and walked through Troldhaugen that my great-grandmother named her third
daughter after her famous cousin, Edvard Hagerup Grieg. Did she give Edna this
name because she’d given up on having a son?
No one
talks about whether Edna was depressed or unhappy, but Mom frequently mentions
that Edna drank Lysol. Somewhere near Springfield, she mentioned her suicide
attempt again. She also brought up Steven Truman, her baby whose heart pumped
blood the wrong way and lived only one day.
My grandmother
told Mom that it was “just a baby,” “My mother saw a lot of dead babies, dead
babies with pennies over their eyes,” she said. “The big ones died in the birth
canal.”
Mom,
though, did not feel that her third child and second son was “just a baby.” She
begged the nurses to let her see him – she had to beg the nurses, who finally
put her in a wheelchair and let her see her son through the glass. “He turned
blue,” Mom said. “I never got to hold him or feed him.” It’s hard to imagine
such a thing happening today.
