Roseanne, does Al ever talk about HIS mother, Aunt Irene? Did she ever have a job outside the home and work? Do you know?
Love, Mart
On Aug 17, 2010, at 10:34 AM, Roseanne Sullivan wrote:
Hi Mart,
Do you know I visited Aunt Irene a number of times? Al does talk about her. I don't know if she ever worked outside the home. She didn't seem to have any intellectual interests.
I remember when I got Mummy and Aunt Irene together after many decades when they hadn't seen each other (I drove Mummy out to their farm). The two of them were like the country mouse (Aunt Irene) and the city mouse. Mummy was typically well dressed and fashion conscious. Aunt Irene's home was spotless, but she didn't seem to care about fashion.
In spite of their differences, they were amazed because after all the years they had not had anything to do with each other, they had some odd things in common. For example, they both smoked Raleighs, not the most popular brand.
On Aug 17, 2010, at 10:39 PM, Roseanne Sullivan wrote:
Hi again, Mart,
I forgot about something important, when I wrote you just now that I didn't think Aunt Irene had any intellectual interests. I remembered after I hit Send that Aunt Irene wrote poetry.
After Aunt Irene's youngest daughter, Janice, found out I studied poetry writing and taught creative writing at the U of Minn, Janice sent me some of Aunt Irene's poetry and asked me to tell her if it was any good. Janice said the poetry was from one of her students who wanted to be a poet. I now am convinced that Janice didn't tell me who really wrote the poetry so I would evaluate it impartially. More about Aunt Irene's poetry later.
Janice was a teacher at the time. Did you know that Janice had a M.A. in Math and taught Math in local schools? Janice later lost her teaching job (I think because she was too rough and harsh with the students, probably understandably because of how she was raised), and she concentrated on her dairy farm for the last 20 or so years of her life. She never married, and she was close to her sister Joyce's three boys, her nephews, Jerry, Jeff, and Keith.
After she stopped teaching, Janice worked part time at the post office to support her farming habit, since the farm was a losing proposition.
From time to time after I finally met Aunt Irene's family in the early 80s, I would get interesting letters from Janice full of colorful details.
For example, Janice's Christmas letters usually included an account of at least one collision during the past year involving one of her vehicles (which was being driven by Janice or one of her young nephews), and the collision was due in part to either a blizzard or a thick fog. The collision was always with either a, an Amish farmer neighbor's horse, b, a deer fleeing in panic out onto the highway during hunting season, or c, a wandering cow.
For about a decade at the end of her life, Janice lived with metastasized breast cancer which had spread to her left arm. She had had a big lump in her breast for years before she took the time off to see a doctor. Amazingly she survived a long time after the radical mastectomy, even though the cancer had already spread. Because the government declared her not to be disabled and denied her Social Security disability benefits, she had to keep working even though her arm was essentially useless. She drove to her job at the PO on the often slippery country roads, (and sometimes slid off into a ditch), sorted mail, drove home, and did her farm work with only one good arm.
The last time I saw Janice, I had brought her out to California for a vacation. It was about a year before she died in 2005 or so. She asked me if she could bring her grown nephew, Jeff, and I said sure. I have pictures of him and of her smiling, toothless but game with her arm hanging limp, in front of the house, in the back yard, and in front of various gorgeous coastal view along the Seventeen Mile Drive on the coast near Carmel where I took them sightseeing.
Janice was one of Al and Fran's two half-sisters, Janice's father, Ralph Priebe, had married Aunt Irene after Irene had been widowed and left with two boys, Francis and Alan. It was a first marriage for him.
Ralph had been born in Chicago and always wanted to farm, although he had never learned the skills. How could he have? His father and mother were in retail. I think they worked at Sears.
When they had saved enough money to escape the city and buy a place, Uncle Ralph and Aunt Irene first moved to a farm in Indiana, which is where Mummy had always told me they lived. Years later after Fran and Al had left home, the rest of the family moved to a farm in Wisconsin. Someone told me there was some sort of dramatic series of events behind the move, but I don't remember the details.
As you know, Fran and Al had the last name of Nadosy from their father Oliver. After Irene married Ralph, Ralph adopted Al and Fran. As a result, Al and Fran and Irene's three other children that she had by Ralph (Charlie, Joyce and Janice) were named Priebe.
I remember Ralph with revulsion as the least likeable man I ever met. I cannot even stand his name. Unlike other vicious people I've met, his meanness was in no way compensated for by any attractiveness, charm, intelligence, creativity, or good taste. His natural children were attached to him and they saw things from his point of view. On the other hand, his step-sons Fran and Al recount horror stories about how Ralph would beat them literally bloody when they didn't do mundane things to Ralph's liking.
Fran told me that one night he and Al didn't clean the dishes per Ralph's orders while Ralph and Irene went out for the evening. When they came home, Ralph raged up the stairs to the boys' bedroom. He chased Fran and Al out of bed and down the stairs beating them about their heads with a board until blood was pouring out of Fran's head. Even so, Ralph made them go back into the kitchen, take all the dishes out of the cupboards, scrub the dishes and the cupboards spotless, then dry and put the dishes back before they were allowed to go back to bed. I don't know what Irene was doing while all this was going on.
As soon as they could when they got older, Al and Fran got their names changed back to Nadosy and broke off communication with Ralph. When they had to see him to see their mother, they didn't speak to him and he didn't speak to them.
During the years I lived in Minneapolis and attended the university, I had no idea that Aunt Irene lived only 350 miles away from me in the eastern part of Wisconsin. Maybe I never realized her family had moved to WIsconsin because Mummy didn't think to tell me.
And I had no real idea about the true nature of terrible Uncle Ralph, except I had heard years ago from Mummy that when Irene and Mummy's middle sister, Alice, had come to stay along with her children after trouble with her own abusive husband, Ralph had thrown them all out in a fit of rage in the middle of the night, upset because he had to spend money to feed them all.
I got to know Aunt Irene's family only because one day around 1981 Al phoned me out of the blue when I was finishing my college degree at the U of Minn. Al had read a short story of mine that had won a contest in the Minnesota Daily, and he remembered that his mother had told him that he had a cousin going to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Al introduced himself to me and told me that his wife Dorothy Gross was teaching music at the U of Minn. Since Al is from the Hungarian side of the family, and Dorothy is Hungarian too, I invited them over for Hungarian food. That evening I joked that Al could have a scam going: call up strange women and finagle a free meal with them by claiming they are cousins.
That's the first time I had ever met anyone from Mummy's side of the family, except for that one brief visit you remember from Grandpa Kaposi when we were very small and living with Aunt Peggy and Uncle Ray while Mummy was in the hospital. Grandpa Kaposi was very short, maybe 5' 2" but Aunt Peggy, who often bragged about catching a tall man when she married 6' 1" Uncle Ray, told me Grandpa Kaposi was very handsome.
I remember before he got on the train to go back to California where he lived, Grandpa Kaposi gave $5 to Aunt Peggy for each of us. We never saw a penny of it after that. I was little but I had a lot of nerve, and I even asked her what happened to the money. I don't remember the answer she gave but it was on the level of how the money was used to take care of us, it wasn't for us personally.
Through Al I met the rest of his family in about 1982.
The first time I saw Janice she made an indelible impression. The occasion was the first time I drove out to meet the family in Wisconsin . We were about to have dinner at Aunt Irene and Uncle Ralph's farm house. Janice stomped in from the barn with her father in dirty boots and dungarees splashed with barn waste, in a gruff but not unkindly voice she introduced her large black dog called Demon to me, and then she unceremoniously plopped herself down to eat. She was loud and a little plump and was missing a lot of teeth.
Aunt Irene did all the cooking and housework. Ralph and his kids did the farm work. Everyone apparently looked down on "women's work."
Al's other half-sister Joyce was thin, kind of built like you and around your height, but not at all glamorous or stylish, unlike you. Joyce and all of Joyce's three boys, Jerry, Jeff, and Keith also had missing and visibly decayed teeth.
No wonder: one time I stayed at Joyce and her husband Ernie's house, about a mile from Aunt Irene's farm, and just about all the food Joyce fed her family was sugar-laden prepared foods. Pop tarts for breakfast in the freezer. Another freezer was stocked only with ice cream treats. Large bottles of pop were lined up in a long row. The only thing I remember her actually cooking was Hamburger Helper and a super sweet pineapple upside down cake.
Joyce and Ernie's home was right next to their cow barn, and the whole house reeked of cow urine inside.
And the boys were mean. I saw them kick and taunt Ralph's mother who was living with Irene and Ralph when the grandmother tottered out of her room to go to the bathroom. And I saw them torturing baby mice in the hay loft. Aunt Irene acted abusively to her mother-in-law too. But that's another story.
Joyce lived on her dead brother Charlie's place a few miles away from the two family farms that were close together.
Did you ever hear the story of how Al's half-brother Charlie died? Ralph had the habit of cutting the third grounding prong off 3 prong plugs for convenience, ignoring the safety ramifications. Charlie apparently took after his father amd did the same. The day before Charlie's divorce from a woman the family didn't like was final, Ralph found Charlie electrocuted in Charlie's barn in a puddle of water with a plugged-in electric drill beside him.
A conspiracy theory held firmly by all was that the wife's brothers had killed Charlie so the wife would be able to inherit the dairy farm. If Charlie had died one more day later, the divorce would have gone through, and they thought that Charlie had left would have stayed in the Priebe family. Maybe she would have gotten half of everything in the divorce settlement, but not all? To everyone's chagrin, the wife got all the cows and the farm. I seem to recall that the Priebes bought the cows and the farm back from her.
During the evening when I was staying at cousin Joyce's home, my kids were avidly watching TV, which we didn't have at home. I was uncomfortable, sick of the urine smell, and bored. Joyce came in and brusquely told me that her father was helping a cow give birth in the barn. My starry-eyed idealism about going back to the real life of the farm took me over. I had to see the birth, share in the cycle of nature. I hurried out to the barn.
Ralph did not acknowledge my greeting when I came in, and I proceeded to tell him I wanted to see the calf born. He didn't acknowledge that either. Ralph was standing in a big stall with the cow. Joyce's family was running the milking machines in the long room full of cows next door. The milk was flowing from the milking machines into hoses that fed into a big stainless steel holding vat.
I was shocked that Ralph had a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. I briefly recalled a Flannery O'Connor story in which a batch of milk got sent back from the dairy because the hired help had been smoking in the barn, and the smoke had ruined the milk. Could it be that no one was testing the milk for off flavors and odors any more? That thought soon passed, replaced with more unpleasant affronts to my starry eyed idealism.
Next I saw that Ralph wound some chains around the hind legs of the calf, which were by then protruding from the birth canal. The chains were connected to some sort of an electronic winch. I was simply amazed when Ralph turned a switch and started winching the calf out of its mother. So much for natural birth.
In a brief amount of time, the calf was standing wobbly next to its mother, covered with a gooey Vaseline-like substance. What happened next was an even worse violation of my dewy eyed expectations. The mother got in only a few licks of her tongue to clean her newborn calf before Ralph returned from where he had been coiling up the chains. Ralph picked up the calf by its middle. He carried it out of the stall, and into an adjacent area that had much smaller stall, where he left the newborn calf by itself about thirty feet from its mother. They could see each other but never touch each other again.
What's the meaning of this? I wondered.
Are you preparing this calf for veal? Yes. You don't even let it drink its mother's milk? No. I think he extracted all the new milk from the mother with a milking machine to sell. They would feed the veal calf when they get around to it with skim milk. From a bucket. Keeping it closely stalled is part of the veal making process, because the close enclosure keeps the calf from developing much muscle and makes the meat tender.
I went back into Joyce's house. I longed for the calf to have the comfort of its mother and the mother to have the comfort of her calf. Joyce's family was all still out in the barn milking. Unlike the farmers I met out when we lived in the country in Minnesota, these farmers bred of city stock did not have a routine. They got up whenever they wanted, and they milked any old time, when they got around to it.
I gave up. My participation in reality was over for the time being. In the kitchen, I grabbed a Nutty Buddy ice cream cone and joined my kids watching Fantasy Island in the living room until it was time for bed.
We left in the morning and joined Fran and his wife and two kids, Jody and Terry for breakfast at the farm where they lived 20 miles away, away from Ralph and away from his gruff, belittling siblings. Jody was at that time a beautiful red headed early teenager, still playing with a huge collection of Barbies. It was interesting to see her dressed in work clothes and helping her dad feed the pigs. Clodean and Fran were very hospitable and Clodean served a hearty breakfast. Terry sat at the breakfast table with us while we ate pork sausage. He apparently was trying to get a reaction out of us by snapping some metal snips over and over and telling us he would be using them in a few minutes to castrate the piglets out in the barn.
What with the castration snips at breakfast and the calf winching and the granny abuse and the mouse torture over the past few days, I felt a bit like I had fallen into a Wisconsin version of the Deliverance movie, and I was relieved to get the kids back in the car and to get on the road back to Minneapolis.
Now let's return to the story of Aunt Irene's poetry, which Janice had sent me soon after my first visit was over. After I had read the poetry (which wasn't notable), I had told Janice that if her student really wanted to be a poet, she should study the history of poetry and the various styles. She should work not on expressing herself, but she should prepare herself to write professionally by mastery of the craft of poetry. Janice never spoke of it again. I think they wanted me to tell her only that the poetry was great. Anything less denied their dewy eyed expectations.
Years later after I moved out here to California, I heard that Jan read one of Aunt Irene's poems at Aunt Irene's funeral. I had tried to go back for that funeral, but my car broke down on my way to the San Francisco airport for the flight out.
That breakdown was probably providential. Things get very intense at family reunions that happen around funerals and marriages and the like. All the old disappointments and resentments come up, not to mention paranoias. This happens even in families that aren't as messed up as ours.
Poor Al has always been in the out group. Aunt Irene was skilled at making sure she was in the inner circle, and Fran is like her in that way.
Practically speaking, the only way to make an inner circle is to exclude somebody. And I suspect it is always more satisfying to exclude someone who is aching to be accepted, like Al. So Al gets pushed to the outside most of the time. I can relate. Mummy was not as deft at such things as Aunt Irene. Neither am I.
Here is another little story that I think illustrates some of the differences between how Mummy and Aunt Irene approached life. After Mummy's and Aunt Irene's mother, our Grandma Yolanda Kaposi died, Grandpa Kaposi had put his three little daughters, Irene, Alice, and Mummy (Martha) into an orphanage because he couldn't take care of them. After he remarried, Grandpa's new wife Magda at first didn't want Grandpa to bring his daughters home from the orphanage. Aunt Irene made it clear she would do anything Magda wanted because Irene wanted to be able to go home. Mummy instead pinned her hopes on being adopted. (She told me that.) I feel that I absorbed maybe by osmosis Mummy's dream, and looking back on my life I find that I subconsciouly thought I find my "true people" who would appreciate me some day. Aunt Irene just decided to work with the family she had in a practical manner. Good for her.
Here is one example of Al getting hurt by being excluded. It happened after Fran's daughter Jody grew up, went to the Minneapolis Art Institute, and met John Peerenboom in around 1993 or so, Al, Dorothy, and separately Sunshine, and I went to northern Wisconsin to attend Jody and John's wedding. We all attended the wedding and the reception, but we were left out of the other events associated with the wedding when the reception was over. I thought that since I had flown all the way from California and since Al was Jody's uncle, we shouldn't have been left alone in a motel in a small town with nothing to do while another part of the family was invited to the groom's parents' house to view the opening of the presents. Our not being included seemed to be especially inappropriate because they did invite a well-dressed Chicago woman named Cathy who was there with a boyfriend, even though she was not even a real relative, and the boyfriend wasn't related at all.
Did you ever hear about how this smart looking Cathy got to be a double-Nadosy? While I was at the wedding, I heard this story about her and her relationship with Al and Fran's Uncle Ed Nadosy.
It seems that Al and Fran had a fair amount of contact with their late father Oliver's brother, Ed. Their Uncle Ed used to go on cruises a lot. And at least once Fran and his wife Clodean went on a cruise paid for by Ed. I never met him myself.
Aunt Irene and Al both told me at different times that Irene had married Ralph partly because she had to move in with her husband's brother Ed after Ollie had died, and Ed had made it hard on her in some unspecified way. Irene didn't have anywhere else to go with her two little boys, so marrying Ralph was a way out of Ed's.
Uncle Ed later obtained a lot of money from suing someone for an injury. He then married a divorced woman who had a daughter. When Ed's wife later died, he continued to take cruises all over the world with his late wife's daughter, Cathy, who was his step-daughter.
Ed used to boss Al around, and he would tell Al that Al had to do whatever he (Ed) wanted or Ed would not leave him anything. Al would fume but comply because he was really dying to get an inheritance from Ed.
Finally as it turned out, when Ed died---to Al's shock Ed didn't leave Al or Fran anything. An even bigger shock was that it came out that Ed had married his step-daughter Cathy and had left her everything he had.
All of a sudden, everybody found out that Ed and Cathy had been following the family for years. Fran assumed a noble indifference to being shut out from the inheritance, and Fran and his wife also extended a gracious tolerance to Cathy, ignoring or forgiving that she had been part of what seems to me to have been a cruel deception.
So then about a year after Ed died, when Jody got married, Cathy the step-daughter/widow was treated like the guest of honor at the wedding along with her current boyfriend, a younger Greek restaurant owner from Chicago. From Jody, I got the sense that Fran and Clodean's family thought Al was stupid for being upset. But I think it's true that Ed played with Al, and that it was natural for Al to hope that his uncle would leave him some money, especially since Ed used to dangle the prospect like a carrot in front of a rabbit.
This reads like a plot from As the World Turns to me.
A partial happy ending: Two of Joyce's sons, Jerry and Keith, joined the armed forces, and the government dentists fixed their teeth. Jerry married a loving intelligent young woman, Gretchen, who is one of my Facebook friends, and I communicate with her frequently. He has done well for himself, he is a Major in the National Guard and teaches at a college in Minnesota. They have three kids.
Here is another story from Jody's wedding, this one's on Al. I felt badly when I heard that Joyce and Ernie, Janice, Jerry, Jeff, and Keith, were going to drive 10 or 12 hours from their farms in south east Wisconsin to where the wedding was being held and then drive back when the reception was over.
I told Al to tell anyone from the family that wanted to that they could stay in our motel room. Stupid me. I assumed that since we were all relatives, we could sleep in the same room innocently enough. I don't know if Al was drunk or crazy (I tend towards the crazy explanation) but listen to this. Towards the end of the reception, Al told me that Joyce, Ernie, and Janice had to drive back to milk the cows. Then Al revealed he was vexed because he had spent so much energy that whole evening negotiating which of Joyce's boys were going to sleep with me and Sunshine. He apparently thought I was offering s*x. I was flabbergasted!
Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men?
One beautiful part of the experience surrounding Jody's wedding happened on the drive to the wedding from Minneapolis, where I'd picked up a rental car and Sunshine after I got off the plane from San Jose. After about an hour on the road, Sunshine and I had gasped at the sight of a gorgeous display of Northern Lights that began to shower down. I pulled the car into the nearest farmer's long driveway. We got out and we stood on the gravel drive and clung to each other ecstatically and screamed with excitement and joy while the red aurora borealis lights poured down around us from every side, surrounding us like a dome. That trip was the first time I had been reunited with Sunshine after she had run away, so it felt especially precious to share that experience with her.
Another good part happened after Sunshine and I returned to Minneapolis after the wedding. We met up with Liberty and his girlfriend Elizabeth and went to the Walker Art Center. Even though it was only early November, a big storm had hit on Halloween, and the city was still blanketed with 16 inches of new wet soft snow.
It was dark out. During this mini reunion between me and my two children plus one, we all got into a friendly snowball fight, climbing around one of the big sculptures outside the museum, scooping up and flinging big wet hunks of the snow at each other. As is often the case when Liberty and Sunshine are together, things took a semi-hysterical turn, and Elizabeth instantly tuned in at their exact wavelength.
We were all having great fun in this cool descent into childish delights, silently self-congratulatory about our artistically creative non-conformity, ignoring any and all shadowy undertones, not the least of which was the separation that was about to begin again tomorrow, when I needed to get on the plane to return to my job in Silicon Valley and my empty home.
On that November night, everything was brightened with light from the combination of the street lights, the moon, and the snow. The deep shadows sharpened the edges of everything. All around us was that pleasing expanse of public space that s bounded by the Walker and the adjoining Guthrie Theatre, by the open spaces and hard edged shapes in the Sculpture Garden, by the whimsical bridge that arches across the street, by the Gothic Episcopal Cathedral which led its witnessing dignity to the scene from the other side of that street, and by the tall black silhouettes of the pines and the Basilica of St. Mary that fringe the facing park. In this borrowed expanse of public space that served as our temporary playground, everything around my nuclear family was for that time in sharp contrast, familiar, clean, well-ordered, beautifully proportioned, and comforting.
Back to the present years and our family, I think we all behaved ourselves well for Uncle Ray's and Aunt Peggy's funerals. Thank God for that.
Love,
Roseanne
Below: Jeff, Janice, and Liberty in the back yard.
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