Ch 2: Making It Official
Death, divorce, marriage, and adoption--critical events in securing the secret
Except for serving in the Navy during World War II, and a few out of state jobs he took to survive the Great Depression, Norman William Marquis (who I refer to interchangeably in this chapter as “Norm” and “Dad”) lived his whole life in Michigan. His Roman Catholic parents Anne Marie Cheff and William Patrick Marquis emigrated to Detroit’s nearest suburb, River Rouge, Michigan, from Ontario, Canada before their oldest son, Norman, was born in 1907.
He always said the Irish side of him, including his red hair, came from his father with the French last name. I never understood what he meant by that until I heard from my cousins that there were rumors that Dad’s father was adopted. Pipi1 died in 1933, long before we ever could have known him. The only time I remember Dad mentioning him was to tell us that he was born on the Fourth of July. He failed to mention that his father was adopted. Perhaps that’s where Dad first learned to keep family secrets.
Regardless of where it came from, Dad loved his Irish side, from the blandness of a corned beef and cabbage boiled dinner to the excitement of a Fighting Irish football game. Every car we ever owned, except for one Chevy Impala station wagon, was green. A photo from the 1950s shows he had a green car even then.
After high school, Norman spent a short time in seminary to be a Catholic priest. He never said why he left. He spent the years before the war working for the Detroit and Cleveland Navigation Company and the McCarthy Steamship Company, where he was the supervisor of auto shipping. I never heard him mention his work there, like those years were packed up into a can of Spam, a food he thought more vile than death by starvation. I learned about his steamship days when I discovered a yellowed half sheet of paper with a bio of him typed in red ink and all caps, notes you might give someone to introduce you at a speaking event.
In 1939, when Dad was thirty-two, he moved to Plymouth, Michigan, and married a woman named Betty. Norm was her fourth husband. Family lore was that Betty’s daughter from a previous marriage had substance abuse problems, and so Norm and Betty raised her son Lee and to some extent, her older daughter Lorraine. They had no children of their own, at least that I know of.
Three years after he married, Dad joined the Navy’s Construction Battalions known as the SeeBees, and spent four years shuffling between Rhode Island, Panama Canal, and Pearl Harbor, until finally landing on Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific, where he served as a mailman. Like many men who served in World War II, he was proud of his service and spoke of it frequently. He often joked that a bullet had caused the indentation and adjacent incision in his stomach but, in reality, he never saw combat. I believe that killing someone would have troubled him deeply, so I’m glad he never had to.
Post-war revelry
Upon his discharge as a 1st Class Petty Officer, Norm opened a restaurant in Plymouth with Betty. Located right on Main Street, the Marquis Toll House became a community landmark and a gathering place for movers and shakers in this small town that more closely resembled a New England village than a southeastern Michigan city. Many of his customers worked for Daisy Manufacturing Company, home of the Daisy BB gun, which was located just a block away.
In addition to being active in Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church, Dad served as president of the local chapter of the American Cancer Society, the Lions Club, the Plymouth Community Fund, and on the St. Mary’s Catholic Hospital board of directors in Livonia, a city where I would later live with my life-partner. In addition to these community involvements, he founded and served as chair of the Republican Club and was elected Wayne County supervisor.
I don’t know exactly when and how he and Mom met. A newspaper clipping shows Mom’s husband, Bob, serving as treasurer of the Republican Club of Plymouth, when Norm served as chair. Is that how they met or was it through the church? At the restaurant? At some other community event?
Dad mentioned to me once that, “I courted your mother through all her funerals.” He said he sent cupcakes from the restaurant to Shrader’s, the funeral home in Plymouth, each time someone in her family died. I figured he was referring to her daughter’s in 1949, her father’s in 1951, and her husband’s in 1954, so I didn’t question him further. However, I now know that he “courted” Mom long before her husband died.
I never thought about what a married man was doing courting a married woman, especially a Catholic man and a Catholic woman. I never asked what he meant by courting. I never asked him about his relationship with Aunt Betty, or where he met Mom and Bob. By the time in my life when I began to wonder, I was so used to not asking questions that they didn’t even cross my mind. I just smiled when Dad told me about his courting ritual and thought how bittersweet that sounded.
Becoming our godfather
When Jarrett was born in 1953, Uncle Norm and Aunt Betty stood beside Mom and Bob at his baptism. Being Jarrett’s godfather, and later mine, was the first formal role Uncle Norm played in our lives.
By the time I was baptized twenty-one months later, Bob had died, but Norm and Betty were still in our lives.
Finding herself alone
Mom was four months pregnant with me when Bob died. I don’t know a lot about that time. What I know is from brief snippets that escaped Mom’s closely guarded vault of secrets. What’s truth and what’s fiction will never be known for certain. What I heard from Mom is that Bob suffered a heart attack standing in line at the Sunday buffet at the Marquis Toll House. He died a few days later in Ann Arbor at the age of 47.
Mom was left alone with a two-year boy and another child on the way. I know very little about how she coped. What I do know from 8mm family movies and photographs, our godparents were frequent visitors to our home; we went to community celebrations, like 4th of July parades, together, and, of course, spent time at the restaurant. I don’t know if they helped Mom financially, at least in any direct way, but I know they offered support and care to this grieving widow.
This kind of community visibility that Norm enjoyed must have made it difficult for him and my mom as their relationship grew. Although she was now a widow, he was still a married man. I imagine that’s why he closed the restaurant he loved and took a job with Daisy—a sales job based in Denver—one that would allow him to quietly divorce his wife and move out of the community he had given so much to and had given so much to him and welcome a new family into his life.
Jarrett and I loved our new dad. He adored us and especially loved to make us laugh. He was like a Saturday matinee I’d sneak in to watch repeatedly without ever paying admission. Storytelling came naturally to him, and it didn’t take much prompting to get him to launch into one. One of his favorites went something like this.
You think it’s hot here?” Dad would quip when one of us complained about the heat on a summer’s day. "When I was on Enewetak, it was so hot that when I’d deliver mail, the glue would melt on the envelopes and the letters would fall out in my bag. I’d have to read each one to figure out who to deliver them to.” A mischievous grin would creep over his face, which he’d cover up by taking a long drag on his pipe.
“In fact, it was so hot,” he’d continue, “we would take our shirts off and pin our medals to our bare chests.”
“Oooooh, Dad, that’s gross!” I’d exclaim.
“Yeah, we’d pinch a little of our skin like this,” he’d say as he demonstrated with the skin on his ample chest. Dad was an All-State lineman on his high school football team thirty years before, and like many ex-football players, his muscle had dissolved into fat. Dad’s rotund torso made it hard to imagine him in a sailor’s uniform.
“You have to be careful not to pinch too much,” he’d explain, “or it’ll hurt. But if you stick the pin through the outer skin, you barely feel it. See like this.” He’d then pretend he was sticking a pin through his skin. “Some guys would have a whole chest full of them. It sure beats wearing a shirt.”
“Dad, stop it!” I’d say. “I’m going to get sick!”
He’d just laugh. His belly would shake, and he’d reach out to hug me. He’d wrap his arms around me, and I could smell the fresh Edgeworth tobacco in the pipes he kept loaded at his waist like handguns he might pull out if anyone came to harm us.
From godfather to stepfather
I didn’t learn until much later that Uncle Norm, now Dad, had divorced Aunt Betty to marry Mom. At the time we arrived in Denver, I was too young to understand such things, so I didn’t know that or its implications. According to their marriage license, which I found after they had both died, Mom and Dad were married in a civil ceremony in Colorado Springs, on a Monday afternoon in December 1961, a year and a half after we moved in with him. I suspect now that they had to wait to get married until his divorce from Betty was final. Until I saw the marriage license, though, I never imagined that my parents lived together (in sin) only pretending they were married.
Jarrett and I would have been in school on their wedding day. I was in first grade, and he was in third. We knew nothing about the wedding.
I can imagine Mom walking us to school and then hurrying home to change into a nice pastel or beige dress, something she would wear to church on Sunday. She probably put on long white gloves and covered her hair with a lace chapel veil she used to wear to church sometimes when she and I still had to cover our hair for Mass. Dad would have worn a suit and tie, probably green.
I don’t know why they didn’t get married in Denver. Instead, they drove ninety minutes away to Colorado Springs. Perhaps it was all part of the subterfuge.
Mom would have been nervous about getting there and back by the time we got out of school. Because it was a civil ceremony, it would have been fast, a few words, a quick kiss, sign the papers, and they were out of there. Dad would have insisted they go out to a nice lunch, but Mom would have been too anxious about getting home to eat much. I don’t know what they would have talked about on the drive—I never knew them to have in-depth conversations about much of anything, but I’d like to imagine that this once they might have found something important to say to each other.
From godfather to stepfather to adoptive father
Although Mom and Dad kept their wedding a secret, they didn’t hide our adoptions. Sometime after we stepped off the train, probably soon after the wedding, Dad filed papers to legally adopt Jarrett and me. Mom and Dad told us they were doing it so we would legally be Dad’s kids. The final decree of adoption is dated July 17, 1962, about the time we moved from Denver to Daisy’s home office in Rogers, Arkansas, for Dad’s new job as Daisy’s retail sales manager. The papers said, “the court doth find that the petitioner, Norman W. Marquis, has good moral character, ability to support and educate said child, and a suitable home.”
It goes on to say, “The said, Robert Leo Smith, the natural father of said child, is deceased; that the said Helen M. Marquis, the natural mother of said child, has given her written, notarized, consent to said adoption without however, relinquishing any of her rights to the said child.”
On the adoption decree, my middle name, Suzanne, is misspelled as Suzan. The full name of the child, Annette Suzan Smith, has the appearance of a mysterious stranger, someone I used to know but about whom I can only recall foggy details. Mom and Dad were both part French and, when the adoption was final, I became all French, at least in name—Annette Suzanne Marquis—a French name, perfectly balanced with seven letters in each. My new identity felt strong and stable. Finally, we were a real family, and I was a part of it. I knew who I was and where I belonged.
A fortuitous renaming
It wasn’t until I was in college that I thanked Mom for marrying Dad to save me from the initials she bestowed on me at my birth—A.S.S. (Annette Suzanne Smith).
“Oh, my achin’ back!”, she said, mortified by the realization, “I would never have done that on purpose!” She confessed that she wasn’t thinking all that clearly back then, which I could understand given that her husband had just died, and she had a toddler and new baby to care for.
As an irreverent teenager, I thought my original initials were hysterical and wished I still had them. I kidded her about it endlessly. But it made me wonder if subconsciously she knew my name wouldn’t last long enough for it to become a target of ridicule.
In the weeks and months that followed our arrival in Denver, Dad told us repeatedly how much he loved being our father. “I love you kids so much. I hope you know that,” he’d say and then look at us like he was waiting for us to say something back.
“Sure, Dad,” Jarrett would say. He was older so I let him do the talking, but I would crawl up onto Dad’s lap and put my arms around his neck. The sweet but burnt scent of pipe tobacco distinguished his from any other lap. He would take the pipe out of his mouth, and with the bowl in his palm and the stem protruding from the fingers of his hand, he would reach for Jarrett. Jarrett would crawl up on his other knee and directly into one of Dad’s humongous hugs. I felt so safe there with his arms around us like that, even when the pipes on his belt would poke into my side. I was glad he was now our Dad.
So, that’s why whenever adults asked me, “Where’d you get your red hair?” I answered automatically, without a second thought, “From our dad, he has red hair.”
For more about our red hair, see https://www.annettemarquis.com/p/a-letter-to-mom-part-2.
Continue to Chapter 3
Table of Contents
Pipi was our name for grandfather, a deviation from Pépé, a nickname for the French Grandpepé. We called our grandmother Mimi, from Mémé and Grandmemé.
Love this fond reminiscence of your dad, Annette, even if there were some machinations to get from a "lie" to the truth in your family. What else will we discover? ;) "Oh my achin' back!" Ha! That's a new one...
I am really enjoying this memoir! Great writing. I've just finished one myself and I can see where publishing it as installments would work! I look forward to reading the rest. Oh, and the inclusion of photos is perfect. I love the one of you and your brother where you are shirtless! Thanks.