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Monday, April 26, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Thanks to my niece, Joann Albrecht, for encouraging me to share my family experiences. And as always, thanks to my dearest friend, lover, and co-conspirator, Mariona
Family, the immediate extension of self,
is obviously critical to any writer writing her life. . .
- Jill Johnston
I stand in a light September rain outside 426 West Alder in Missoula Montana, gazing at the house my parents must have lived in 80 years ago. I'm looking into the past--my past, in a way. I talk into my tape recorder; will someone living there wonder what I am up to?
I try to picture the railroad bookkeeper living here with his wife, Eugenia (Genie), their year-old son, Franz, and newborn daughter, Mary. I want to hug that house, and the people who lived there. I want to know more about them and their life in this house.
Something quite plain, almost banal, has become a shrine in my eyes, and an inexplicable touch of awe comes over me. I've never felt that way about the house I grew up in. There’s something about seeing this one for the first time; I wonder what it was like when my parents and their two infant children lived in this unimposing two-story yellow clapboard house with what looks like recently added-on aluminum siding.
Its ground-floor bay window looks out on a front porch with three columns, only as wide as the front door. Upstairs a window on one side, two windows in front, probably another in back. I imagine two bedrooms, my parents in one, the children in the other, in a small house on a street of frame houses that all look pretty much alike. Those must have been here, too. The neighborhood is still generally pleasant with lawns and trees.
Now, someone is standing in the doorway looking at me. Should I go to the door and tell them what I am doing? Perhaps they would invite me in. But no, I don’t want to break the spell.
I was in Missoula on one of my research trips to Montana. I'd reserved a room at a Travelodge Motel, not knowing anything about the neighborhood it was in. But when I came across the Robischon name at the West Alder address in county records, I realized it was only two blocks away from the motel.
Across the street from the motel was St. Patrick’s Hospital, where I also thought my sister, Mary, might have been born. But later, when I consulted the hospital records, I am unable to find her. Behind the motel is the church that my parents must have attended: St. Francis Xavier’s.
All this family history in a three-block area! It was almost enough to make one believe in some sort of supernatural karma!
My brother, Franz, had been born just a year after my father and his pregnant wife migrated from Staples, Minnesota to Missoula. I suspect my mother remembered her family’s warning about the dangers and deprivations of living in the still new West, and had gone back to Minnesota to have Franz. Maybe Mary was born at home and not in St. Patrick's--my mother, worried about leaving Franz with someone during the three or four days it was customary to keep new mothers in hospital, deciding to have him at home.
I want to know more about the 28-year-old man and his 23-year-old wife who came to live in the house on Alder. What did they think of this piece of the West? Did they ever think they may have made the wrong decision to come to this small town that Montana writer Caroline Patterson (The Montanan, UMont., Fall 2002) described as growing up around a flour mill, and the “hub of five mountain valleys drunk with rivers.” It was a town only 25-30 years older than they, but its frontier rawness had been altered by settlers like them--respectable working and middle-class people, homeowners, entrepreneurs, churchgoers--and a university. But out on the edges of town the rawness was still evident.
Was that house on West Alder a company house? The railroad for which Frank worked, the Northern Pacific, was just two blocks away. A block away is an old brick Montana Hotel, which looks like it, too, was here when they were. and a business section. This must have been a principal part of the town when they were here.
St. Francis Xavier Church, their church, was I am sure a comforting familiar presence for them. (On my first visit to Minnesota I noticed how much the Catholic churches there resembled those in Montana, with their identifying tall steeple topped by a cross. It was built in 1892.
I wonder what I might find about my parents and their children in the church's records. A woman warmly welcomes me to the office. I tell her what I am looking for without revealing my connection. She genially says something about maybe I might become interested in Catholicism. She strikes me as rather desperate. I feel she's snooping about me--in a nice sort of way.
The church’s handwritten baptism records she brings me reveal Mary's name written in Latin--Mariam Antoinette. My father’s is Francisco, but my mother’s is just plain Eugenia Antoinette. How come? My uncle Mike was also there as one of the child’s sponsors, and so was ma mere--my mother’s mother. Minnesota moral support in the Montana wilds, I am sure.
If the house on Alder is like a shrine for me, so too that church. It is surprisingly large--a good three stories high. Inside, its fluted stone pillars support arches across the ceiling. A pipe organ is in the gallery in the back where choir galleries always are in Catholic churches. There's a room along one wall called the “Reconciliation Room.” It's the replacement for the confessional. I don’t think that name was always there. It sounds a bit too humane. It has a sign to tell you whether it is occupied, and a place to kneel before a screen. But it looks almost public, and I wonder how I would have felt confessing my awful masturbatory sins in such a setting.
The paintings on a very large ceiling overhead don’t strike me as very good. Standard church decorations--but imposing, a full story high, with the effect of an art museum. On the walls oval paintings of various icons hang above larger programmatic portrayals. I wonder if some would-be Michelangelo ran wild here. How tempting it would have been to gaze upward to study the paintings while sitting through Mass.
There's a turned-around altar in the sanctuary, of the Catholic church’s bows to modernity. How strange when I think that as an altar boy I would have faced the congregation.
The wooden pews look like originals, with kneeling railings that pull out, cushioned and leather-covered--a luxury we wouldn’t have dared think of in St. Matthews parish up in my hometown. But what is that heavy curved strip of iron there dividing the pews into two halves? Separate pews for separate families?
Sitting late in the afternoon I try to imagine which pew my parents sat in. But in the church office I found no records of their church membership, or pew assignments (perhaps my father was unable, as he was at St. Matthews, to contribute enough to be assigned a pew).
Hanging in my bedroom is the formal picture of my father's Sauk Centre high-school graduating class, in what must have been its original oval frame. Five men and 12 women, and I wonder why those women were there; my mother didn't go to high-school because girls weren't expected to go.
I see a good-looking young man shorter than his four male classmates--looking a little like Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." His hair is parted almost in the middle, eyebrows are full, nose prominent but not distracting. It's his mouth that interests me most, and I realize I had not noticed before the sensuous--though not sensual--curve to the upper lip.
Picture this dashing young man, derby at a moderately rakish angle, white collar mounting firmly (almost) to his chin in the fashion of the day. A good catch, my Aunt Louise said of him (thereby suggesting that maybe the Remillards didn’t think my mother married down). He continued to be attractive to the ladies as he grew older, with his Old World charm, tipping his hat to them; always neatly dressed; always orderly and reserved. In a passenger elevator I'm sure he would have taken his hat off.
He attended the University of Minnesota, planning to be an engineer. But after a year he left when, he said, the money ran out. But there's another, possible explanation. My father may have been a mother’s boy (to a point of distraction for him), and the money for his university education came by way of his mother. He was her favorite child, and she might well have observed the changes college was making in him--as parents are wont to do. She might have feared she would lose him. But I admit this is speculation.
I could never determine from him exactly how he felt about not being able to continue at the university. I suspected buried hurt feelings. With his desire to better himself, and his respect for education, he must have been disappointed. And so he took a job in the office of the general counsel of the Northern Pacific Railroad in St. Paul. There, he was offered a job as a traveling secretary with one of the NP’s top executives, which he admitted would have been an excellent career move. But he didn’t want to have to travel, he explained to me, and it is true, he didn’t like to travel. (I always thought he never quite made his peace with the infernal combustion engine. He may also have turned down an offer to go to work for a congressman in Washington.)
But my father didn’t give up entirely on advancing himself. And he knew that was something everyone--well, every young man, certainly--should be mindful of. But the office in St. Paul didn’t offer him the opportunity to become more actively engaged in railroading. And so, he requested and was granted a transfer to Staples sometime around 1914. But why Staples, a considerably smaller town 130 miles or so up the line from the Twin Cities? Could it have been that he would be closer to his mother, who after his father’s death had moved in with my father’s sister, Mary, in Sauk Centre? Or perhaps Staples offered the kind of opportunity he was seeking.
It was in Staples that he met my mother, and they married in April 1915. Their wedding photo shows a nattily dressed man standing beside, but not touching, a woman who looks older than her 22 years and rather down (though it was not the custom then to smile when your picture was taken). He was 27.
His relations with the Agent in the Staples office were all right, but there was limited opportunity for advancement beyond the level of a clerk. But another opportunity arose--as a clerk in the Northern Pacific agency in Missoula, Montana. And the West still was the epitome of the land of opportunity.
My mother’s family was well situated in Staples, and couldn’t understand why my father would want to leave the comforts of such a life for the hard life of the frontier. And when ordinary forms of persuasion failed, my mother’s family warned the couple of the hardships and deprivations--and dangers--of life on what they imagined to be a still savage country.
My brother Franz was now on the way, so it's understandable that my dad's desire for advancement with the NP would be even more pressing. My father was a moderately ambitious young man, and I think of him as seeking the opportunity to be more than a stenographer, in a position where he could show how well he could do his work. I also imagine my mother not keen to go west--not all the way to Montana. But she would have acceded to her husband’s wishes. It is what wives were supposed to do, and she would see it as her duty not to question or complain.
I have no knowledge of Dad's relations with his wife’s family, but it is not difficult to imagine him not too comfortable with them. They may have been a notch above his own family in Sauk Centre on the social/economic scale. I am pretty sure the thought of getting away from his father, Mathias, didn’t particularly trouble him. And his mother, Gertrude, not all that much more. He might have realized that getting away from her would have freed him from a possessive and at times troublesome person.
Despite the warnings and dire predictions, my father accepted the position in Missoula.
He was not seeking the success and fortune in the land of milk and honey that attracted so many to the West, suspicious as he was of money and wealth, and what it can do to a person. He wasn’t an immigrant looking for free land to farm, nor an upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial type, nor an ambitious young man on the make. Far from it! He was no boomer or booster, nor an adventurer, or experimenter or risk-taker. He never tried to scale any heights that I know of. He would have regarded aspiring to rise to a class beyond the one he was born into with serious reservations. (Not my mother, however, as we shall see in the sequel.)
He had turned down opportunities that would have meant a better life for him and his family. And choosing the life of a bookkeeper in a railroad office in Montana, in the absence of any redeeming considerations, strikes me as following that same holding himself back, cautious, not going too far. It was enough that he dared to pick up and start over way out in Montana. That was what many people were still doing in those days, and with less assurance about their future. There was at least a job waiting for him.
Mother must have missed the cultural life she had grown up accustomed to, and the class and social status her family enjoyed. Writing about women who developed a love/hate relationship with the Great Plains they had come to settle, Kathleen Norris (in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography) observes that it lives on in their children. “Some mourned the loss of European culture or ethnic roots; others the social status they’d enjoyed in cities back East. Only the toughest survived here.” I must have picked up my persistent and insistent belief that there must be--has to be--something better than my hometown from her.
Norris also notes that the ambivalence--or rage--these women had toward the Plains found expression often in doting on the children who moved away, and shabbily treating those who remained. I suspect that part of my mother's desire to see her sons perform and achieve was a way for her to make up for what she had lost when she moved west.
Family, the immediate extension of self,
is obviously critical to any writer writing her life. . .
- Jill Johnston
I stand in a light September rain outside 426 West Alder in Missoula Montana, gazing at the house my parents must have lived in 80 years ago. I'm looking into the past--my past, in a way. I talk into my tape recorder; will someone living there wonder what I am up to?
I try to picture the railroad bookkeeper living here with his wife, Eugenia (Genie), their year-old son, Franz, and newborn daughter, Mary. I want to hug that house, and the people who lived there. I want to know more about them and their life in this house.
Something quite plain, almost banal, has become a shrine in my eyes, and an inexplicable touch of awe comes over me. I've never felt that way about the house I grew up in. There’s something about seeing this one for the first time; I wonder what it was like when my parents and their two infant children lived in this unimposing two-story yellow clapboard house with what looks like recently added-on aluminum siding.
Its ground-floor bay window looks out on a front porch with three columns, only as wide as the front door. Upstairs a window on one side, two windows in front, probably another in back. I imagine two bedrooms, my parents in one, the children in the other, in a small house on a street of frame houses that all look pretty much alike. Those must have been here, too. The neighborhood is still generally pleasant with lawns and trees.
Now, someone is standing in the doorway looking at me. Should I go to the door and tell them what I am doing? Perhaps they would invite me in. But no, I don’t want to break the spell.
I was in Missoula on one of my research trips to Montana. I'd reserved a room at a Travelodge Motel, not knowing anything about the neighborhood it was in. But when I came across the Robischon name at the West Alder address in county records, I realized it was only two blocks away from the motel.
Across the street from the motel was St. Patrick’s Hospital, where I also thought my sister, Mary, might have been born. But later, when I consulted the hospital records, I am unable to find her. Behind the motel is the church that my parents must have attended: St. Francis Xavier’s.
All this family history in a three-block area! It was almost enough to make one believe in some sort of supernatural karma!
My brother, Franz, had been born just a year after my father and his pregnant wife migrated from Staples, Minnesota to Missoula. I suspect my mother remembered her family’s warning about the dangers and deprivations of living in the still new West, and had gone back to Minnesota to have Franz. Maybe Mary was born at home and not in St. Patrick's--my mother, worried about leaving Franz with someone during the three or four days it was customary to keep new mothers in hospital, deciding to have him at home.
I want to know more about the 28-year-old man and his 23-year-old wife who came to live in the house on Alder. What did they think of this piece of the West? Did they ever think they may have made the wrong decision to come to this small town that Montana writer Caroline Patterson (The Montanan, UMont., Fall 2002) described as growing up around a flour mill, and the “hub of five mountain valleys drunk with rivers.” It was a town only 25-30 years older than they, but its frontier rawness had been altered by settlers like them--respectable working and middle-class people, homeowners, entrepreneurs, churchgoers--and a university. But out on the edges of town the rawness was still evident.
Was that house on West Alder a company house? The railroad for which Frank worked, the Northern Pacific, was just two blocks away. A block away is an old brick Montana Hotel, which looks like it, too, was here when they were. and a business section. This must have been a principal part of the town when they were here.
St. Francis Xavier Church, their church, was I am sure a comforting familiar presence for them. (On my first visit to Minnesota I noticed how much the Catholic churches there resembled those in Montana, with their identifying tall steeple topped by a cross. It was built in 1892.
I wonder what I might find about my parents and their children in the church's records. A woman warmly welcomes me to the office. I tell her what I am looking for without revealing my connection. She genially says something about maybe I might become interested in Catholicism. She strikes me as rather desperate. I feel she's snooping about me--in a nice sort of way.
The church’s handwritten baptism records she brings me reveal Mary's name written in Latin--Mariam Antoinette. My father’s is Francisco, but my mother’s is just plain Eugenia Antoinette. How come? My uncle Mike was also there as one of the child’s sponsors, and so was ma mere--my mother’s mother. Minnesota moral support in the Montana wilds, I am sure.
If the house on Alder is like a shrine for me, so too that church. It is surprisingly large--a good three stories high. Inside, its fluted stone pillars support arches across the ceiling. A pipe organ is in the gallery in the back where choir galleries always are in Catholic churches. There's a room along one wall called the “Reconciliation Room.” It's the replacement for the confessional. I don’t think that name was always there. It sounds a bit too humane. It has a sign to tell you whether it is occupied, and a place to kneel before a screen. But it looks almost public, and I wonder how I would have felt confessing my awful masturbatory sins in such a setting.
The paintings on a very large ceiling overhead don’t strike me as very good. Standard church decorations--but imposing, a full story high, with the effect of an art museum. On the walls oval paintings of various icons hang above larger programmatic portrayals. I wonder if some would-be Michelangelo ran wild here. How tempting it would have been to gaze upward to study the paintings while sitting through Mass.
There's a turned-around altar in the sanctuary, of the Catholic church’s bows to modernity. How strange when I think that as an altar boy I would have faced the congregation.
The wooden pews look like originals, with kneeling railings that pull out, cushioned and leather-covered--a luxury we wouldn’t have dared think of in St. Matthews parish up in my hometown. But what is that heavy curved strip of iron there dividing the pews into two halves? Separate pews for separate families?
Sitting late in the afternoon I try to imagine which pew my parents sat in. But in the church office I found no records of their church membership, or pew assignments (perhaps my father was unable, as he was at St. Matthews, to contribute enough to be assigned a pew).
Hanging in my bedroom is the formal picture of my father's Sauk Centre high-school graduating class, in what must have been its original oval frame. Five men and 12 women, and I wonder why those women were there; my mother didn't go to high-school because girls weren't expected to go.
I see a good-looking young man shorter than his four male classmates--looking a little like Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." His hair is parted almost in the middle, eyebrows are full, nose prominent but not distracting. It's his mouth that interests me most, and I realize I had not noticed before the sensuous--though not sensual--curve to the upper lip.
Picture this dashing young man, derby at a moderately rakish angle, white collar mounting firmly (almost) to his chin in the fashion of the day. A good catch, my Aunt Louise said of him (thereby suggesting that maybe the Remillards didn’t think my mother married down). He continued to be attractive to the ladies as he grew older, with his Old World charm, tipping his hat to them; always neatly dressed; always orderly and reserved. In a passenger elevator I'm sure he would have taken his hat off.
He attended the University of Minnesota, planning to be an engineer. But after a year he left when, he said, the money ran out. But there's another, possible explanation. My father may have been a mother’s boy (to a point of distraction for him), and the money for his university education came by way of his mother. He was her favorite child, and she might well have observed the changes college was making in him--as parents are wont to do. She might have feared she would lose him. But I admit this is speculation.
I could never determine from him exactly how he felt about not being able to continue at the university. I suspected buried hurt feelings. With his desire to better himself, and his respect for education, he must have been disappointed. And so he took a job in the office of the general counsel of the Northern Pacific Railroad in St. Paul. There, he was offered a job as a traveling secretary with one of the NP’s top executives, which he admitted would have been an excellent career move. But he didn’t want to have to travel, he explained to me, and it is true, he didn’t like to travel. (I always thought he never quite made his peace with the infernal combustion engine. He may also have turned down an offer to go to work for a congressman in Washington.)
But my father didn’t give up entirely on advancing himself. And he knew that was something everyone--well, every young man, certainly--should be mindful of. But the office in St. Paul didn’t offer him the opportunity to become more actively engaged in railroading. And so, he requested and was granted a transfer to Staples sometime around 1914. But why Staples, a considerably smaller town 130 miles or so up the line from the Twin Cities? Could it have been that he would be closer to his mother, who after his father’s death had moved in with my father’s sister, Mary, in Sauk Centre? Or perhaps Staples offered the kind of opportunity he was seeking.
It was in Staples that he met my mother, and they married in April 1915. Their wedding photo shows a nattily dressed man standing beside, but not touching, a woman who looks older than her 22 years and rather down (though it was not the custom then to smile when your picture was taken). He was 27.
His relations with the Agent in the Staples office were all right, but there was limited opportunity for advancement beyond the level of a clerk. But another opportunity arose--as a clerk in the Northern Pacific agency in Missoula, Montana. And the West still was the epitome of the land of opportunity.
My mother’s family was well situated in Staples, and couldn’t understand why my father would want to leave the comforts of such a life for the hard life of the frontier. And when ordinary forms of persuasion failed, my mother’s family warned the couple of the hardships and deprivations--and dangers--of life on what they imagined to be a still savage country.
My brother Franz was now on the way, so it's understandable that my dad's desire for advancement with the NP would be even more pressing. My father was a moderately ambitious young man, and I think of him as seeking the opportunity to be more than a stenographer, in a position where he could show how well he could do his work. I also imagine my mother not keen to go west--not all the way to Montana. But she would have acceded to her husband’s wishes. It is what wives were supposed to do, and she would see it as her duty not to question or complain.
I have no knowledge of Dad's relations with his wife’s family, but it is not difficult to imagine him not too comfortable with them. They may have been a notch above his own family in Sauk Centre on the social/economic scale. I am pretty sure the thought of getting away from his father, Mathias, didn’t particularly trouble him. And his mother, Gertrude, not all that much more. He might have realized that getting away from her would have freed him from a possessive and at times troublesome person.
Despite the warnings and dire predictions, my father accepted the position in Missoula.
He was not seeking the success and fortune in the land of milk and honey that attracted so many to the West, suspicious as he was of money and wealth, and what it can do to a person. He wasn’t an immigrant looking for free land to farm, nor an upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial type, nor an ambitious young man on the make. Far from it! He was no boomer or booster, nor an adventurer, or experimenter or risk-taker. He never tried to scale any heights that I know of. He would have regarded aspiring to rise to a class beyond the one he was born into with serious reservations. (Not my mother, however, as we shall see in the sequel.)
He had turned down opportunities that would have meant a better life for him and his family. And choosing the life of a bookkeeper in a railroad office in Montana, in the absence of any redeeming considerations, strikes me as following that same holding himself back, cautious, not going too far. It was enough that he dared to pick up and start over way out in Montana. That was what many people were still doing in those days, and with less assurance about their future. There was at least a job waiting for him.
Mother must have missed the cultural life she had grown up accustomed to, and the class and social status her family enjoyed. Writing about women who developed a love/hate relationship with the Great Plains they had come to settle, Kathleen Norris (in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography) observes that it lives on in their children. “Some mourned the loss of European culture or ethnic roots; others the social status they’d enjoyed in cities back East. Only the toughest survived here.” I must have picked up my persistent and insistent belief that there must be--has to be--something better than my hometown from her.
Norris also notes that the ambivalence--or rage--these women had toward the Plains found expression often in doting on the children who moved away, and shabbily treating those who remained. I suspect that part of my mother's desire to see her sons perform and achieve was a way for her to make up for what she had lost when she moved west.
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