Ch 16: Historical Markers

Sometimes connections come when you least expect them and for reasons you can't comprehend.

More than ten years after I left Anne, and three years after Mom died, I received a phone call that broke open the closely guarded book of secrets in my family. My secrets were already a thing of the past. My closet didn’t even have a door anymore. I’d flung it open so wide, it broke right off its hinges. When I interviewed for a new job in Northern Michigan in early 2001, I came out to my potential employer during the interview. I didn’t want any questions, any suspicions, any doubt. They would hire me knowing I was a lesbian, or I wouldn’t get the job. They hired me. So, I packed up my things and moved to Traverse City in Michigan’s Northern Lower Peninsula. There I began working as the Executive Director of Third Level Crisis Center, a job not unlike the position I’d held so many years before in Albion, when I confirmed to Mom that, as much as she hoped I’d grow out of it, I was a lesbian, although I used the word “homosexual” then (Ch 11: The Second Coming Out).

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to my parents’ secrets over these intervening years. With Mom gone, and only one living relative of their generation left (an aunt who married my uncle after all this had happened, so didn’t know anything), I’d pretty much given up any hope of finding out the truth. Instead of letting it worry me, I just let it go and focused on my own life.

Or so I thought.

When the phone rang, I almost didn’t pick it up.  It was the dead of winter. The temperature hovered around 6 degrees all day, and I was cuddled up next to the wood stove reading some novel that I don’t remember. I didn’t want to be disturbed. “Let it go to the answering machine,” I said aloud to no one.

Despite that, for reasons I still don’t understand, I threw the fleece blanket off, stood up, and went to the phone. Out of habit I guess, or maybe I had some sort of premonition that this call would be important.

“Hello,” I said, wishing I still had a blanket around me. Whenever my dad answered the phone, he always said what sounded like, “Yellow.” I thought of him, as I always did and still do when I pick up a phone call. I didn’t have much time to think though. The woman on the other end of the line barely gave me a chance to finish with, “Hello” before she dove into her questions, “Are you Helen Marquis’s daughter?”

“Yeees.” I answered warily. Was this a sales call? It caught my attention that she knew my mother’s name. The next question made it clear to me this was no salesperson.

“Did you have a sister named Marlee who died of polio?”

OK, now this was getting weird. I replied but with suspicion still in my voice, “Yes, Marlee was my sister.” I thought I could hear an intake of breath at the other end of the line.

“I’m Marcia,” the woman declared. “I was your sister’s best friend.”

I glanced outside at the frozen Northern Michigan landscape, snow piled high upon the deck, the only tracks those of birds trying to gather sustenance from the many feeders in our yard. I must have been cooped up in this house too long. Was I hearing things? If it was the same Marcia I’d heard about from Mom, it would have been at least forty-five years since our families had been in touch.

Marcia didn’t give me much time to make sense of what she’d just said. Before I even responded, she started in with the reason for her call.

She talked fast and tangentially, and I struggled to keep up—to get the gist of what she was saying. She said she had been trying to find me for the past three years. She said something about going to visit Marlee’s grave and finding out that she didn’t have a headstone. And she said she wanted to buy her one, but the cemetery wouldn’t let her. She said they told her it had to be a blood relative. So, she said, she started looking for me.

And finally, before pausing for a breath, she said, “I have something to give you, and something to ask of you.”

I sat down. I felt like a character in an Indiana Jones movie, and I’d just been invited to go on a quest—if I was brave enough to accept the mission. Something to give me and something to ask of me. Whatever was she talking about?

Before I could begin to process everything that she’d already told me, she recounted all she’d done to try to find me: writing the state for documents, tracking down and calling my cousins, going to the library to look me up in city directories (do they still even make those?). As she went on, my own thoughts drowned out her voice. Marlee didn’t have a headstone? What would Marcia have to give me? What would she want of me? Why did she go to such lengths to find me?

As Marcia kept talking, I found myself calculating how old she must be. If she were the same age as Marlee, who was born in 1937, I figured she must be close to seventy. I knew Mom had mentioned Marcia—in those rare times when she talked about her past—and she’d also mentioned Marcia’s parents. I didn’t know what ever happened that caused them to lose touch. I assumed it was part of Dad’s insistence that Mom leave her past behind.

Then I heard Marcia say, “My husband and I live in Flint.”

My mind snapped back to the present. She and her husband live in Flint? I’d moved to Flint after Anne and I broke up and lived there until I moved up north for this job. We’d lived only a few miles from each other for almost ten years and neither of us had any idea of the other. We could have been sitting right next to each other devouring coney dogs at Flint’s landmark coney island, Angelo’s, and we’d never have known.

When Marcia asked if I’d like to come to dinner. I said, “Absolutely.” The first words out of my mouth since I said, “Yes, Marlee was my sister,” and that seemed like a long time ago. This was big. I could finally learn about Marlee from someone who knew her besides Mom. Her best friend. And who knows what else she might know about my family before I was born? Maybe I could finally make sense of it all.

We made plans for the following weekend. I’d come to her house for dinner, and she’d explain everything then. As I hung up the phone, I felt adrenaline drain from my body. I hadn’t realized I’d been so tense. I returned to my comfy chair, wrapped the blanket back around me, and stared into the fire trying to figure out what this all meant.

This unsettled feeling stayed with me as the week dragged on. The unanswered questions, the mystery, the secrets spun around inside my brain. Even though they’d lived inside of me, I’d buried them for so long, I wasn’t sure what it would mean to unearth them. What would it mean to have answers to the questions that I’d given up ever knowing, questions that had shaped my life?

The neighborhood of small, brick ranch style homes was typical of the industrial boom and bust town of Flint, Michigan. A smattering of unkempt lawns, damaged mailboxes, and run-down cars deprived the neighborhood of a homey feel. Marcia’s house, however, appeared well-tended, despite the cracks in the driveway and an open garage full of boxes.

I rang the bell and waited. The door opened. A large, gregarious, billowy woman enveloped me in her arms. Marcia greeted me like long-lost family, the smell of talcum powder and sweet perfume overpowering my other senses.

 “It’s so good to see you. So good to see you,” her voice cracked as she let go of me and worked to pull herself together, straightening her skirt with her hands.

I told her it was great to meet her. “My mother told me so much about you,” I said as I stepped inside the house. I knew that was an exaggeration – Mom hadn’t told me much about anyone from that time, including Marlee – but the fact that I’d heard Marcia’s name from Mom enough to remember it demonstrated how important she must have been. In fact, sometime after Dad died, when Mom visited me in Michigan, we tried to find her parents only to discover they’d moved to Florida. Mom told me that they’d been her and Bob’s best friends. That’s all she said. And all I knew.

“I loved your sister so much. I sure missed her when she died.” Marcia shut the door behind me and motioned for me to head through the small, cluttered dining area into the living room. “Come in here,” she directed as she pointed to a worn red couch. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back. I want to show you what I have for you.” She hurried off into what appeared to be the bedroom.

While she was gone, I looked around. The house was dark, the furniture tattered, the air close. “Well-lived in,” a friend of mine would say.

Before I had a chance to take any more in, Marcia returned clutching a beat-up, brown manila envelope. “This is all the research I did to find you,” she said, plopping her large frame on the couch next to me. “It’s got birth certificates, death certificates, marriage licenses, phone numbers, addresses. You name it. A lot of your relatives are in here,” she said as she shook the envelope. “I took what little information I knew and tried to find out enough to figure out where you were.” She opened the envelope and started pulling out the papers inside.

She did all this to find me? Two minutes on Google would have done it. But she was clearly not a Googler.

“I finally found you through your cousin, Kathy. You know, Bill’s daughter.”

Uncle Bill was my mother’s younger brother—someone Mom didn’t like very much. Something had come between them, but like all the secrets in my family, I never knew what it was. I hadn’t had contact with his kids for years, so I had no idea how Kathy had information about me.

I flipped through the papers, and there I saw it. Buried in between some pieces of notebook paper, like the paper Mom used when she wrote Marlee’s story so many years before, was a photograph—the same one Mom had kept hidden, even when Dad had her throw away all the others. The one Aunt Babe gave me when I first saw my photos of Bob, the man Mom told me was my father. The photograph of Marlee on a horse. I pulled it out and stared at it. It instantly transported me back to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I could see Mom searching for the photo under her sweaters in her dresser. I remember how I felt when I first saw it, the questions that formed in my head, the anger I felt when I learned that Dad had made her get rid of the others (Ch 4: Whisperings). Was I any closer to unraveling the mystery my parents had worked so hard to conceal? The answer was clearly, “no.”

Marcia interrupted my reverie when she saw what I was looking at. “Oh, yeah, there are a few pictures in there,” she said. “I didn’t know if you had those. You can have them if you want. I’ve got others,” She sounded as if she were offering me some store coupons she didn’t need. She had no idea how precious these photos were.

“Thank you,” I mouthed, still amazed by what I held in my hands. Yes, there was the photo of Marlee on a horse, but also others of her and Marcia and of her as a toddler. Photos I’d never seen before. I hugged them to my chest. “I’ll treasure these,” I said.

Marlee and Marcia

Before I could say anything more, Marcia launched into the reason she had searched for me. “You see, Frank and I—he’ll be back in a few minutes—are selling the house and going RVing. You know what RVing is, right?” she asked.

 “Of course, yes,” I replied, and before I had to chance to say more, she was off again.

“I’m sorting through everything in the house, and I found this bracelet.” Out of a smaller envelope buried deep inside the one with the papers and the photographs, she handed me what appeared to be a silver charm bracelet.

But it wasn’t a charm bracelet. Instead of charms, ten Catholic patron saint medals adorned the tiny, tarnished chain, and five more lay loose in the envelope. I recognized a few of the images: the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Mary’s assumption into heaven, St. Christopher carrying Jesus on his shoulder. Others were either too worn or unfamiliar to identify, but I knew each one represented a special prayer, a patron saint, a plea for intersession. I loved medals like these when I was a kid and often wore three or four of them on a long, silver chain under my clothes. I always felt closer to God when I wore that necklace.

 “Your mother made it and gave it to me after Marlee died. You see, it’s made up of all the medals that children gave to your mother to pin on Marlee’s iron lung.”

I felt the air escape my chest as the gravity of Marcia’s words hit me. I imagined a ten-year old Marcia standing next to that terrifying, yet life-giving contraption. I could hear air pumping through the monstrous machine that encased her friend’s tiny body. I saw my sister’s black, curly hair and her weak smile as Mom pinned another medal to a cloth draping her mechanical chest – a medal delivered by some child whose parents wouldn’t allow them to come in. I imagined my grief-stricken mother collecting the medals from the iron lung, picking them off the cloth one-by-one, after Marlee’s body refused to take in another breath.

As each medal passed through my fingers, I felt like I was praying a rosary. These medals, each one especially chosen for Marlee, represented the hopes, fears, and convictions of the many people who were pulling for her to recover. My fingers loosened around the bracelet, cradling the pain that seemed to burn from the time-worn metal, yet unable to release that pain any more than I could relieve my mother’s grief—or my own.

I rested it on the table in front of me, and as I did, imagined words long erased from the book of my family’s past reappearing on the page.

“When I found the bracelet,” Marcia said, forcing me to refocus on what she was saying, “I wanted to take it out to Holy Sepulchre, you know the cemetery, and bury it at your sister’s grave. But when I got there, I found out she didn’t have a headstone. When I asked them about how I could get one for her, they told me it had to come from a blood relative. Isn’t that ridiculous?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “That’s when I started searching for you.” Marcia’s flurry of words swirled around my head as I tried to grasp what she was saying.

“They probably couldn’t afford a headstone for her, with all the medical bills and everything,” I offered.

I knew from the few stories I heard that Mom and Bob didn’t have a lot of money after Marlee died. Michigan Bell, where Bob worked, was on strike, and he was so desperate for money he defied the picket lines and worked anyway. Already ostracized from the community for having a daughter with polio, becoming a scab isolated them even further.

But this oversight—not buying your daughter a headstone--if that’s what it was, felt so unlike Mom. She would have wanted a headstone for her daughter. Wouldn’t she? I couldn’t imagine what would have prevented her from finding a way. Was it too painful to see Marlee’s name carved into a block of stone? Was that their way of holding on to her? Or was it their way of letting go? Or, perhaps, was this another way to erase the past.

I assured Marcia I’d arrange for Marlee to get a headstone. “That’s what you’re asking, right? You want me to get a headstone for Marlee.”

She nodded yes in an almost frantic way. “Her father, you know, Bob, doesn’t have one either,” she said. “I asked about that too.”

“Really?” I noticed she said, “her father,” and not “your father.” Maybe that was just because Marcia only knew him as Marlee’s father or maybe…maybe she knew something I didn’t. Learning that both of them rested in unmarked graves unnerved me, like the missing photographs. Their story, their lives, had been expunged, as if they never existed.  

Having a task to focus on helped bring me back from imagining what Mom and Bob went through after Marlee died. “I’m happy to make arrangements for them both. They deserve to have their lives marked.”

We worked out a deal where I’d tell her how much Marlee’s headstone cost and she’d send me $50 a month until she had paid off half of it. I told her she didn’t have to do that, but she insisted.

“I want to do it,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. “She was my best friend.” And with that, she hugged me again.

We sat there together in silence as if honoring a sacred trust. I thought about how Marcia had held onto Marlee all these years. I looked again at the girl on a horse in the photograph. She must have been a special child to create this deep loyalty from a childhood friend. I again wished I’d known her. She would have helped me answer my questions, to understand what really happened before Uncle Norm became Dad. My parents had done such an effective job splitting our lives into before-Norm and after-Norm, I never imagined what my life would have been like if Marlee had lived. Would I have even had a life?

As I left Marcia’s that evening, I clutched the envelope with the bracelet inside, just as she had done when she first brought it out to me. I hugged her for the third time. “Thanks for searching for me for so long,” I said as I released her and turned toward my car. “I’m glad we finally found each other after all these years.” And I meant it, despite, or maybe because of, the story she’d shared with me. I promised her I’d be back in touch, “just as soon as I find out about the headstones.”

My parents, for reasons I didn’t know, had tried to erase the past. Now I had an opportunity to reclaim a piece of it – to proclaim that Robert L. Smith and his daughter Marlee Lucille had lived and died. I still didn’t know much about them. I didn’t know if Bob was my father and Marlee my full sister as my parents had insisted, or if some other truth lay buried in Marcia’s stack of papers. All I knew was that they were both a part of my story. If I was ever to understand who I was and where I came from, I first had to claim them as my own.

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Read Chapter 17, “Do You Want to Know?”

Ch 17: Do You Want to Know?

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