When I was growing up on Goodrich Avenue in St. Paul, my
mother befriended a woman a block north on Lincoln Avenue. Unlike my mother who
had five kids, her friend had only one son and an older reclusive husband. The
supermarket was close by, but without a car, the woman could buy only what she
could carry home. She and my mother managed to coordinate grocery shopping for
big trips, so they could use our car. Soon they were playing bridge with other
neighbor ladies. Bridge may have been what brought them together initially. It
was a long time ago and unimportant
Also unimportant, but maybe not—how does one really know—my
mother was attractive and educated. She joined the Navy in 1942, interrupting
her University of Minnesota education when my grandfather joined the FBI and
was sent to Miami. She served at Balboa Hospital and at Pearl Harbor. She
finished up college after the war. As to her attractiveness, a girlfriend from
school got jealous when she saw my mother and me together on the street, not
knowing it was my mother instead of a love interest.
My mother’s friend was not attractive or educated, but she
was a nice person and had difficulty with her curmudgeonly and miserly husband who
spent a great deal of time alone in an attic he kept locked. Her son, a few
years younger than I, got a lot of my hand-me-down clothes. Their household was
unhappy.
A few years went by, and not much changed until the woman’s
husband died. The story came out that during the Depression the man had run a
bar on the East Side near The Mining, as we called 3M those days. When McKnight
ran out of money, he paid his workers in stock certificates. The opportunistic
husband accepted the stock certificates as legal tender. He had squirreled away
a whole trunk of the certificates in his attic, more than a million dollars’
worth.
The woman sold their rundown house and moved to 740
Mississippi River Boulevard, a newly constructed, spiffy high-rise in Highland
Park. The rich tend not to hang around with the middle class, not that “class”
has anything to do with it. Contact was lost for many years. Then one day, my
mother informed that she had run into the woman. Shortly after, they were
playing bridge again. It was one of those groups hosted by a different participant
each week. When it was the woman’s turn, she held it at Lost Spur, a country
club across the river in Mendota, just south of the city. The woman treated her
guests to lunch, but not booze—perhaps something to do with her late husband.
Each player got a party favor in the form of a tightly wrapped hundred-dollar
bill next to her plate. My mother never missed a bridge game.
The son went off to school at Colorado College, I was
probably in Vietnam by then. He and I had never been friends. Too many years
separated us. In elementary school, three years may as well have been a decade.
Also, we attended different high schools. Then there was the money. His mother
did complain to my mother that her son seemed to major in skiing.
While the woman certainly acquired a better life after the
death of her husband, she wasn’t a particularly happy person. She buried her
next two husbands. I expect she was lonely most of her life, and the men she
attracted were perhaps attracted more by her money—something I have no
knowledge of. Her son remained a problem, appearing to have found a new degree
program that required seven years of study to graduate. His mother was able to
get his attention when she informed him he was disinherited until he graduated.
He did graduate, but he was too busy skiing to attend his
mother’s funeral. My mother was livid. That was the end of the story until
recently. I was telling a few people the tale, when one of the women present
spoke up, shocked that I knew the man who had been involved with one of her
friends in what I gathered was not a happy union. The woman informed me the
boy-man had died. I guess the story reached its conclusion, unless I run
into offspring or the lawyer who handled the wayward son’s estate.
