or What John Wanamaker Knew

 My parents’ house is a 1911 bungalow with a steep roof and closets filling the space under the eaves along both sides of the second floor.  Sometime in high school, for some reason I don’t remember, I was digging around in the unnamed closet upstairs. It was not the cedar closet, not the closet by the beds in the boys’ room, or the closet by the chest in that same room, nor the laundry chute closet, nor the ones in either of the girls’ rooms.  It was the closet full of junk, where you never knew what you would find, the one with the brick chimney, broken plaster, bare subfloor and the light you were never sure you could get to turn on.

In a very old brown fiberboard box that had come from my sophisticated grandmother and had JOHN WANAMAKER PHILADELPHIA stencilled on one end, amongst a jumble of papers, I happened upon my parents’ marriage certificate, dated September 17, 1947.

No. Wait.  Their anniversary is July 7.  Wait. . . . . . . . . .

For cultural context, if it had been 2011 instead of the mid-nineteen sixties I would have said, literally, “L  M  F  A  O”  Instead, laughing, a little excited, I counted back from my sister’s April 21, 1948 birthday.  July 7 is nine months and two weeks before that.  I re-counted to be sure before I dared to think the obvious.   “Mom was pregnant when they got married!”

     
  ^{At the Palladium, Los Angeles, about 1945}

My mother, you see, was perfect.   She was tall, thin and beautiful. She didn’t burp or fart or swear and I have brothers who will insist to this day that her nine children are no real evidence she ever stooped to having sex.  Or if she did it was only did it to be a good wife and she certainly didn’t like it. Getting pregnant before you were married was decidedly not perfect.  I couldn’t wait to tell the other kids.

- - - - -

I didn’t mention this illicit knowledge to either of my parents for several years.  (Snickering at any mention of their anniversary did not, somehow, clue them in.)  When I was 19 they found out that many of the nights I told them I was staying with Carol or MaryJo or Gloria I had actually spent with a boyfriend.  There was a scene, a scene that involved the phone being removed from my room, me being locked inside, my father bolting in and out from time to time to scream dire warnings at me.  I could swear he was wearing boxers and a t-shirt and my father never went around like that.  His big concerns seemed to be my sluttishness and pregnancy.  I don’t remember if I told them I had been on the pill for some time or that I had provided the adult-seeming handwriting my sister had used for her  “note from your parents” to procure the pill from Planned Parenthood. I do remember screaming back at them and one of the things I screamed was that I knew about their altered anniversary date.

I don’t recall my father’s reaction to that.  He probably left the room and stayed away.  It may have been the point at which my mother hugged me.  That was notable and surprising because it was the first time I could remember her touching me other than to fix my hair or to hit me.

The scene ended, my door was unlocked, the phone returned, I married the boyfriend, and the big secret wasn’t mentioned again for some twenty years.

- - - - -

The summer of 1987.  My mother and her sister had come from Minnesota to visit me in Maryland and it was time for them to leave.  We were taking the Metro to National Airport and were already late leaving for the station when my mother told me she wanted to talk to me; she had something she needed to tell me.  She asked me to join her in the bathroom.  It wasn’t that she or I had anything in particular to do in the bathroom; she always has important talks in the bathroom.  

It was difficult for her to begin talking.  Her face crumpled with tension and I thought she was going to cry.  She may have.  I probed and prodded gently.  I reminded her she had a plane to catch.  She said she didn’t know how to say it, didn’t know how she could tell me, she was telling all the kids, it was time it came out.  Eventually, I don’t remember her exact words, leaning against the wall in my dimly lit bathroom, she told me that her anniversary wasn’t on whatever date they were now claiming (it moved around in the later years before they came clean) and that she was pregnant when she and my father married.

“Oh fer chrissakes, you put me through this for that?  I thought you had cancer or something.  Who the fuck cares, everyone’s known that forever!  Do you think I haven’t noticed your anniversary jumping all over the place for the last ten or twenty years?”  That’s what I thought.  What I said was nicer, kinder: we know, everyone knows, you know we know, you know no one waits for marriage to have sex.  You know this one and that one were also pregnant.  This is just not a big deal, no one thinks less of you for it, I’m glad you felt like you could finally unburden yourself.  But she was determined to draw out her moment for as long as she possibly could.

It didn’t matter what I said or who was pregnant before marriage or that it had been going on as long as people had been getting married, when she did it it was a whole special degree of bad and my father was an extreme seducer that she, poor dumb farm girl, had no power to resist. Her sisters (two of whom she lived with at the time she got pregnant) absolutely had never done it, never would have and had no idea she had, had never figured out what ever deceptive scheme she and my father had presented to them.

I felt sympathy for her extreme shame but still got them to the plane on time.

- - - - -

Their 40th anniversary was the first one they celebrated on September 17, the actual day they were married.  The whole family (not including me, I couldn’t make it from the East Coast) went to mass together at St. Albert’s, the church of our childhood and afterwards to a restaurant for brunch.  After brunch the kids presented them with a surprise cake, champagne and gifts at the house.

My brother, Kevin, 32 at the time, also missed the celebration.  He had a stroke in the shower that morning.  Six weeks later he died of a heart attack.  That’s how serious my mother’s offense was.

 God killed Kevin to punish her.