Three: Contributing Factors--Perhaps
I believe I am a rational man. Indeed, I may think a thing to death. I've tried for most of my adult life to understand who I am and what has happened to me. I've wanted to place the situations and circumstances of my personal history into a logical framework, one that demonstrates the clear progression of cause-and-effect. The existentialists would tell me I am bent of a fool's mission. But early on in life, I was told by the nuns who were instructing me in the Baltimore catechism that there was an answer for every question ( they didn't add "If it's the right question") and, so, I learned the responses, Q:"Who made the world?" A: "God made the world." Q:"Why did God make the world?" A:"God made the world to show forth His goodness...." and I attempted to regiment my patterns of thought to a model I was taught would be acceptable to God. Roman Catholicism played a very important role in my formative years. I'll try to explain in this posting.
My mother was brought up, as she described it, in a "Continental" Roman Catholic country. As I understand it, neither of her parents were particularly religious and I never thought to ask her how she became so devout. She drew a distinction between Catholic practices in Europe and those she found in the local parishes of Kingsport and Bristol where the priests typically came from Irish stock. As I was growing up listening to her opinions at the kitchen table, her implication was the church in Appalachia was far more conservative and legalistic than she had known in Belgium. Her contact with church law came about when she phoned the priest at Saint Dominic's to arrange for my baptism. When the priest said he had no record of my father and mother being married in the church, my mother explained that they had married in a civil ceremony. The priest then told her I was "born out of wedlock" and was, therefore, a "bastard." So, before I could "become a child of God," my parents had to be married in the church. Added to this complication was the fact that my father was not a Roman Catholic, nor had he been baptized. He'd been brought up in a "backwoods Methodist" home and my grandmother had some notion that one day all of her children and grandchildren would accept Christ and come forward for baptism all at once as a testimony and tribute to her being a "good Christian woman."
As I would learn in parochial school, a "mixed marriage" was dangerous. Although word anathema was not in my seven year-old vocabulary, the nun giving us religious instruction certainly painted the idea as a slippery slope toward damnation. Further, the nun expounded on what happened to unbaptized souls at death to a degree that one might believe she had witnessed the tortures first-hand. I was continuously aware of my father's "predicament" during those years to the point that I would tearfully beg him on numerous occasions--if he loved me--to go to the priest, receive instruction, and convert. Wasn't that what a good Catholic child ought to do in this situation? At the time, either I didn't know or didn't care that when I was baptized the priest had my father sign a document surrendering my education and religious instruction to my mother and godparents. It is here that I have to put myself into my father's shoes. What kind of resentment would I have acquired had I been asked to do the same at the baptism of my own son? Are you keeping a tally of barriers to paternal bonding? First, I'm born physically defective (arguably corrective but most fathers-to-be anticipate a birth problem-free, and my father's upbringing would have led him to believe that illnesses and birth defects were signs from God) and, next, I'm a bastard for whom he has just signed his rights away. Would I have begun to shut down emotionally?
Other than the church, there were other tensions that distorted the relationship between husband and wife. When my mother arrived in this country with three suitcases, a one-way ticket from Belgium, and on a 90-day marriage visa, my father was at LaGuardia to greet her: "Yvonne, I've changed my mind about marrying you but I thought this would be a nice vacation for you." This was a story my mother told me on numerous occasions, more often as her dependency on alcohol deepened. It was an incident she never let my father forget. And I cannot imagine what she must have felt when she heard my father's words. I've read the notes she placed on the backs of photos she'd sent from Belgium while they were dating over long distance: "See, I can be a farmer girl if I need to be." She came to America to marry a man she'd met during the Allied Occupation of Brussels. She never introduced him to her parents. She believed that America and this promise of marriage was a golden opportunity. Charlie drove her from New York to Kingsport. She said they arrived at night and he said, "Here's the town!" Her response was, "Where?" It was an understandable response. Yvonne had spent all her life in major European capital. As she spun the tale to me, she described her first days in America as a kind of shell-shock. She was welcomed briefly into my father's home. My dad's younger brother was living there with his young bride who was expecting. Two other brothers and his sister were married and out of the house. Mom knew she'd have to support herself, so she found a job as a Linotype operator and translator at the Kingsport Press working for "Colonel" Palmer. One hundred-ten days after her arrival in this country, Immigration officers arrived at her apartment door, "Whacha doin' here, honey? Why aren't you married?" She explained that her fiance no longer wanted the marriage and that she didn't want to be a burden on society. They informed her she would be deported. The colonel intervened. Arrangements were made for my mother to re-enter the country. At first, it was to be by way of Cuba, but those plans fell through. She was bussed to Monterrey, Mexico, and later to Ciudad Juarez, where she waited for forty-five days for her Mexican quota number to arrive. She re-entered the country by way of El Paso, a "woman without a country" for she'd surrendered her citizenship papers at the airport in Brussels the day she purchased her one-way ticket to America. It was two years later, in 1950, when my father knocked on her apartment door and said "I made a mistake." He'd loaned his car to a woman he'd been dating and one of his brothers had found her in it with another man at the drive-in movies.
The Korean Conflict didn't help the newly weds. Charlie was in the reserves and summoned to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Mom had no fond memories of being a corporal's wife: the pay was meager, the fear that her new husband would get shipped off ever-present, and the climate was vastly different from that of Belgium. But the marriage survived and dad didn't "re-up" when the time came. In the meantime, they decided that it was time to have a family. She had difficulty conceiving. The first OB/GYN said her uterus was tilted and she would never become pregnant. My father then said, "That's okay. I'll build you a nice house instead." But shortly after they became resigned to a childless marriage, my mother missed her period a couple of times and she went to another doctor. He reported, "Yvonne, you're pregnant." Mom replied, "Impossible I was told..." to which the doc answered "I don't care. The rabbit died." So, in the spring of 1953, baby made three and life was looking fine. Fine until the nurse, a family relation, visited mom just out of the recovery room. "Can I see my baby?" was her question. And Virgie said, "Why sure, Yvonne, but before you do, you need to know there's a little problem..." Today, I look down at my foot and I see all five toes and I wonder what all the fuss was about. But I have to remember the Fifties, the South, and a family of unsophisticated people for that's what my father's people were. Dad had completed his GED in the Army and he also sported false teeth thanks to the military. I'm not casting blame. The Depression was hard on folks. I'll venture to say it was probably harder on folks in Appalachia. In this list of oppositions that formed a shifting foundation for Charlie and Yvonne's relationship, there was a vast difference in their socio-economic backgrounds. While my father earned his high school diploma in the Army, my mother had completed her degree in Germanic philology at the Free Thinker's University of Brussels. My father's parents were distinctly blue-collar: my grandfather first worked in the coal fields of Southwestern Virginia and my grandmother took in washing and served boarders. In Kingsport, my grandfather became a night watchman and my grandmother became a motel maid. My mother's mother was principal of a lycee and my mother's father--a truly towering intellectual figure--was principal flutist and, at one time, conductor of the national opera orchestra at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels. His brother conducted the national radio symphony. As I was growing up and becoming more and more aware of my parent's differences, I kept asking myself, "What could possibly keep these people together? What do they have in common?" Part of that answer was "Me."
My mother was brought up, as she described it, in a "Continental" Roman Catholic country. As I understand it, neither of her parents were particularly religious and I never thought to ask her how she became so devout. She drew a distinction between Catholic practices in Europe and those she found in the local parishes of Kingsport and Bristol where the priests typically came from Irish stock. As I was growing up listening to her opinions at the kitchen table, her implication was the church in Appalachia was far more conservative and legalistic than she had known in Belgium. Her contact with church law came about when she phoned the priest at Saint Dominic's to arrange for my baptism. When the priest said he had no record of my father and mother being married in the church, my mother explained that they had married in a civil ceremony. The priest then told her I was "born out of wedlock" and was, therefore, a "bastard." So, before I could "become a child of God," my parents had to be married in the church. Added to this complication was the fact that my father was not a Roman Catholic, nor had he been baptized. He'd been brought up in a "backwoods Methodist" home and my grandmother had some notion that one day all of her children and grandchildren would accept Christ and come forward for baptism all at once as a testimony and tribute to her being a "good Christian woman."
As I would learn in parochial school, a "mixed marriage" was dangerous. Although word anathema was not in my seven year-old vocabulary, the nun giving us religious instruction certainly painted the idea as a slippery slope toward damnation. Further, the nun expounded on what happened to unbaptized souls at death to a degree that one might believe she had witnessed the tortures first-hand. I was continuously aware of my father's "predicament" during those years to the point that I would tearfully beg him on numerous occasions--if he loved me--to go to the priest, receive instruction, and convert. Wasn't that what a good Catholic child ought to do in this situation? At the time, either I didn't know or didn't care that when I was baptized the priest had my father sign a document surrendering my education and religious instruction to my mother and godparents. It is here that I have to put myself into my father's shoes. What kind of resentment would I have acquired had I been asked to do the same at the baptism of my own son? Are you keeping a tally of barriers to paternal bonding? First, I'm born physically defective (arguably corrective but most fathers-to-be anticipate a birth problem-free, and my father's upbringing would have led him to believe that illnesses and birth defects were signs from God) and, next, I'm a bastard for whom he has just signed his rights away. Would I have begun to shut down emotionally?
Other than the church, there were other tensions that distorted the relationship between husband and wife. When my mother arrived in this country with three suitcases, a one-way ticket from Belgium, and on a 90-day marriage visa, my father was at LaGuardia to greet her: "Yvonne, I've changed my mind about marrying you but I thought this would be a nice vacation for you." This was a story my mother told me on numerous occasions, more often as her dependency on alcohol deepened. It was an incident she never let my father forget. And I cannot imagine what she must have felt when she heard my father's words. I've read the notes she placed on the backs of photos she'd sent from Belgium while they were dating over long distance: "See, I can be a farmer girl if I need to be." She came to America to marry a man she'd met during the Allied Occupation of Brussels. She never introduced him to her parents. She believed that America and this promise of marriage was a golden opportunity. Charlie drove her from New York to Kingsport. She said they arrived at night and he said, "Here's the town!" Her response was, "Where?" It was an understandable response. Yvonne had spent all her life in major European capital. As she spun the tale to me, she described her first days in America as a kind of shell-shock. She was welcomed briefly into my father's home. My dad's younger brother was living there with his young bride who was expecting. Two other brothers and his sister were married and out of the house. Mom knew she'd have to support herself, so she found a job as a Linotype operator and translator at the Kingsport Press working for "Colonel" Palmer. One hundred-ten days after her arrival in this country, Immigration officers arrived at her apartment door, "Whacha doin' here, honey? Why aren't you married?" She explained that her fiance no longer wanted the marriage and that she didn't want to be a burden on society. They informed her she would be deported. The colonel intervened. Arrangements were made for my mother to re-enter the country. At first, it was to be by way of Cuba, but those plans fell through. She was bussed to Monterrey, Mexico, and later to Ciudad Juarez, where she waited for forty-five days for her Mexican quota number to arrive. She re-entered the country by way of El Paso, a "woman without a country" for she'd surrendered her citizenship papers at the airport in Brussels the day she purchased her one-way ticket to America. It was two years later, in 1950, when my father knocked on her apartment door and said "I made a mistake." He'd loaned his car to a woman he'd been dating and one of his brothers had found her in it with another man at the drive-in movies.
The Korean Conflict didn't help the newly weds. Charlie was in the reserves and summoned to Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Mom had no fond memories of being a corporal's wife: the pay was meager, the fear that her new husband would get shipped off ever-present, and the climate was vastly different from that of Belgium. But the marriage survived and dad didn't "re-up" when the time came. In the meantime, they decided that it was time to have a family. She had difficulty conceiving. The first OB/GYN said her uterus was tilted and she would never become pregnant. My father then said, "That's okay. I'll build you a nice house instead." But shortly after they became resigned to a childless marriage, my mother missed her period a couple of times and she went to another doctor. He reported, "Yvonne, you're pregnant." Mom replied, "Impossible I was told..." to which the doc answered "I don't care. The rabbit died." So, in the spring of 1953, baby made three and life was looking fine. Fine until the nurse, a family relation, visited mom just out of the recovery room. "Can I see my baby?" was her question. And Virgie said, "Why sure, Yvonne, but before you do, you need to know there's a little problem..." Today, I look down at my foot and I see all five toes and I wonder what all the fuss was about. But I have to remember the Fifties, the South, and a family of unsophisticated people for that's what my father's people were. Dad had completed his GED in the Army and he also sported false teeth thanks to the military. I'm not casting blame. The Depression was hard on folks. I'll venture to say it was probably harder on folks in Appalachia. In this list of oppositions that formed a shifting foundation for Charlie and Yvonne's relationship, there was a vast difference in their socio-economic backgrounds. While my father earned his high school diploma in the Army, my mother had completed her degree in Germanic philology at the Free Thinker's University of Brussels. My father's parents were distinctly blue-collar: my grandfather first worked in the coal fields of Southwestern Virginia and my grandmother took in washing and served boarders. In Kingsport, my grandfather became a night watchman and my grandmother became a motel maid. My mother's mother was principal of a lycee and my mother's father--a truly towering intellectual figure--was principal flutist and, at one time, conductor of the national opera orchestra at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels. His brother conducted the national radio symphony. As I was growing up and becoming more and more aware of my parent's differences, I kept asking myself, "What could possibly keep these people together? What do they have in common?" Part of that answer was "Me."
posted by GMarc | 10:33 AM
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