tower over her.
A PORTLY WOMAN WHO WORE GLASSES AND DRESSED IN CONSERVATIVE flowered dresses, gray hair tied back in a bun, Maud was the matriarch of the disjointed family. Not a physically affectionate woman, she nonetheless professed a deep love for Lili. Maud was also overly protective, relaxing only when Lili was safely under her roof. Just shy of the age where she would get in serious trouble with boys and not yet chaffing at the reins, Lili was content to stay close to home.
From Lili’s scrapbook, 1931, Lili at age 14
Maud was a remarkable caretaker to Ben, now a semi-invalid whose eyesight had vanished within two years of his accident.
Maud would remain one of the only constants in Lili’s life. A strong-minded woman, generous, upbeat, and a hard worker. She was Lili’s world.
Though for a moment it all seemed to fall apart.
FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD LILI HAD COME HOME FROM THE LOCAL LIBRARY with an armload of books. Not a serious student by any means, they weren’t studious tomes, but fashion books with sketches of dresses that Lili wanted Maud to show her how to make. Maud was a seamstress of remarkable talent and expertise. She made all Lili’s clothes and was patient enough to teach Lili how to sew with equal skill, as what remains of Lili’s costumes today is confirmed by the sturdy and precise stitching.
Lili might not have been thinking solely about dresses this day. She had received her first kiss from Jimmy Nichols, a cute older boy and a friend of Jack’s who spent hours at Bedlam Manner underneath abandoned old cars, barely mumbling to her, covered in grease next to Jack.
It was her first romance and it sent her emotions soaring. She would become giddy by love, transported. Not knowing what to do, she pretended she was Garbo to Jimmy’s John Gilbert. She was swept up in a surge of ecstasy and experienced a previously unknown feeling of confidence and power. Jimmy looked at her completely smitten and obliging when their lips parted, like at the end of a movie when the camera closed in on the satiated faces of the two movie stars as the fade-out began to happily ever after. Lili wanted to live in that feeling forever.
As Lili stepped into her house on Oak Street, her heart was pounding and her head was in the clouds. She was quickly brought down to earth. The atmosphere in the house was heavy and electric. Briefly Lili paused at the door, troubled, trying to discern what the dark essence was. She would recall the atmosphere as “grueling.”32 Dusk had fallen and it took a minute for her eyes to adjust. On the sofa her sister, Idella, faint traces of the beauty she had once been, sat clasping her hands in her lap. Maud sat stiff-backed, her brow creased anxiously. Lili stared at the two, suddenly wishing she was elsewhere.
Lili could tell Maud was tense by the muscles in her jaw.
For a moment the three generations said nothing.
Daddy Ben wasn’t home. Unusual, as he was always in his room or on the porch.
Maud began. She admitted there was “something we should have told you years ago.” But at the time it had seemed “unnecessary.”
Idella spoke. “The time had come.” She and Maud would tell Lili the truth. Why that day is anyone’s guess.
“It was done because we love you,” Maud interjected. “What was done as it was meant to be, because we love you. We did the best we could for you. Don’t make any of this matter.”
Lili might not be so sure there was much love coming from Idella, but Maud she would never doubt.
Maud looked at Idella sternly. “Idella, you know it was done because we loved you. We love you. And you too, Lili. Me and Daddy Ben love you. Idella loves you.”
Lili was thin, hadn’t yet grown into herself, still somewhat awkward and feeling too tall, unaware of her beauty that was about to burst forth.
“Everything,” Maud emphasized, “was done because we love you. Remember that, honey. We love you.”
“We all did the best we could,” Idella said, nearly hysterical.
Maud told of a charming handsome Dutchman who had come into Idella’s life and had “whispered words of love.”
Idella explained they had met at a dance. Lili couldn’t picture that. The Idella she knew was self-conscious about her pronounced limp. So there was an Idella before the ill-tempered woman sitting before her. Lili glimpsed a different Idella, a girl who might have been carefree, maybe a girl like her who yearned to flirt and go to dances, a beauty with her pick of boys.
The two women told Lili the Dutchman disappeared “in a fog” from Milwaukee, leaving Idella “in the family way.”
Idella was very sick in the hospital and had a beautiful baby, but the baby was sick and born early and unable to leave the hospital. Idella was in agony—possibly because of the polio—and couldn’t begin to take care of the baby girl.
Maud, her face anguished, explained that Daddy Ben had wanted to marry her.
Maud said she would marry Ben if they could bring up Lili, providing a “real home” for one daughter and a second chance for the other. Maud assured Lili she was wanted.
“I was so scared for you when you were little. You needed so much protection,” Maud explained. She thought Lili was going to “die,” tiny and helpless in the incubator. The doctors predicted she would be there for months.
“I knew it was the right thing for you,” Idella whispered.
Lili was shaken. She needed to think. She stood up and walked out of the cottage, the truth whirling inside her head.
She walked up the wide boulevard where a streetcar ran down the middle, past imposing banks, a post office, Jordan’s dry goods store. All the while her thoughts a jumble. Dardy and Barbara and Jack and Betty were half-siblings, not nieces and a nephew. Idella her mother? It seemed so preposterous.
Slowly her mind began to quiet. She decided she didn’t feel deceived, she felt strangely liberated. And whether this happened over time or that night, Lili would realize that though she wasn’t who she thought she was (Marie Klarquist), she would be who she wanted to be.
Somewhere in her walking she decided that none of it mattered. This information didn’t need to alter anything. She wasn’t all of a sudden going to call Idella “mother” and move in with her. She had always loved Maud and Daddy Ben. What did it really change?
It explained so many things, like why Maud, with her stoutly figure, wrinkles, and gray hair, was so much older than most mothers, the age span between the “sisters,” Idella and Lili, so great.
She knew if she scratched beneath the thin layer of feelings and probed she would experience something decidedly not uplifting. But Lili, as she would always do, chose not to go beneath the surface. Fantasy was bearable. Truth was so often not. She would “not let it affect” her.33 She would make her own reality. She set out to orchestrate her life as she wanted to live it, and work and romance and one day drugs would sustain the illusion.
This was a new chapter in her life. She liked new beginnings,
