CHAPTERS FIVE, SIX & SEVEN... thanks for asking readers, Deb P.

Chapter Five

(Solving Lonely, copyright 2001, Deborah McWatters Padgett)

“Karen, I don’t know what to do. What’s expected anyway? Don’t you think the people in the church, the community would understand? I mean, how much can one person bear?” Phoebe held her coffee cup in a death grip. She and her best friend Karen Kline had just walked Lake Calhoun. It was the first chance they’d had to really talk since before Marc died. It was September now and an unusually chill wind had sent them into Sherman’s Bakery for coffee. They’d ordered a fresh baguette, sweet cream butter and apricot jam as an added treat to warm the day. On more pleasant days, after their walks, they would sit on a bench or spread a blanket near the water.

Karen was the one friend Phoebe felt she could talk to about anything. She wasn’t a church friend. As a matter of fact Karen was an agnostic wild woman with whom Phoebe felt nearly free to be her own secret (sometimes naughty) self. Karen understood the various layers on which an individual woman could simultaneously experience life. Her own life was as unconventional as Phoebe’s was normal, everyday respectable, expected, conventional.

Karen was a bleach blonde black Jew — black because her father was African American; Jewish because her mother was a Russian Jew. She wore her nappy blond hair cropped close to her head. Her black eyes, big and set deep, dominated her face. Her flawless walnut shell skin stretched over high cheekbones, making her look absolutely regal when she smiled. She’d had her nose done in high school, but by the time she became a full-fledged feminist (which was when Phoebe met her) she was considering having the operation reversed since she felt shame for succumbing to some Waspish patriarchal idea of beauty that pretty much excluded the Jews and Blacks , “So what else is new, eh?” she’d said.

Together they read and discussed the latest writings of Erica Jong. They confided their adoration of the down and dirty, nasty, naughty Mick Jagger. Karen told Phoebe the lurid and luscious details of her sexual escapades. Phoebe had only and always been with Marc and was reluctant at first to talk candidly about the intimate details of the life of a minister and his wife. She didn’t know if Karen brought out the best or the worst in her, but she knew she felt set free in the company of the free-living, free-loving Karen. Karen’s love life spanned the map of the world but with an insistence on what she called “serial monogamy, which Phoebe figured out meant she was committed to only one lover in her bed, car, on the beach, the kitchen table at any given time. “Serial monogamy” meant she didn’t do threesomes or more than one lover during the time she was dallying with a single, particular person. She didn’t limit her loves to men only, but had never been seductive or flirtatious with Phoebe, completely respecting her straight, marital boundaries.

They’d both read J’s “Sensuous Woman” as young women and believed with absolute ferocity in the necessity for masturbation as an integral feature of the conscientious sex life. This aspect of her sexuality was another secret Phoebe kept from Marc.

Phoebe had met Karen in a women’s support group, when she was twenty-one, not long after she and Marc lost their first baby. She developed an interest in women’s rights and the Feminist Movement’s growth in the late 60’s. When she lost the first baby she decided to seek out a group of women who might understand her anguish. Also, she always felt she had to be a certain way with the Bethel College and Seminary wives, and then, of course she felt that way with the women in the congregation once Marc became a pastor. In the support group she met with eight women, once a week for six months.

Other friendships grew out of this group too. Rhonda was a stately, articulate, and stunning black woman basketball coach at the University. Susan, a single mom on welfare who was taking art classes at the University. Phoebe stayed in touch with all of them over the years but Karen Kline became her best friend. With Karen, though from outward appearance it would be hard to tell, she felt a sense of kindred spirit almost as if they were twins separated at birth.

Karen was feisty and brilliant. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota with a double major in Library Science and Fine Arts. For years she worked at the downtown Minneapolis Branch of the Hennepin County Library, saving her pennies for the day she could open an art gallery in the warehouse district.

Though Karen’s parents were quite well off, she had an independent streak that dictated she would win her gallery through the work of her own two hands.

She lived in a loft on Washington Avenue and walked to work everyday. She was one of the few mid-westerners Phoebe knew who didn’t own a car. Still, Karen worked as a librarian but she owned a gallery and paid a rotating staff of artists to keep it open and accessible the hours she couldn’t be there. In recent years she’d bought herself a small but lovely Tudor style house just off Dean Parkway by Lake of the Isles. Influenced, as so many were, by the emergence of Yuppie-dom, she broke down and bought a black package Toyota Corolla in 1980. She drove that car until there was nothing left to drive — all the blackness rusted off.

Karen knew more than anyone the depths of despair Phoebe suffered through her miscarriages; knew more than anyone that Phoebe and Marc’s marriage was good, solid, loving and sexy as hell. She knew there were parts of Phoebe her friend withheld from expressing in front of Marc, but believed that sort of sacrifice was common even in the best of marriages. She, herself, had never found a love partner worth the sacrifices the thought marriage demanded. She knew a good thing when she saw it though — at least knew Phoebe felt blessed. Phoebe and Marc’s marriage was a rare, rare phenomenon and Karen had no reservations about noisily cursing God on Phoebe’s behalf for taking this rare love out of the life of her best friend.

“Jesus Christ, Phoebe, I wish to hell I knew what to tell you. I always felt a little cursed to not find my one true love; that that was somehow a cruel fate visited on me, but this … This. Goddamn it. You’re exactly right! How much can one woman take?” She reached across the table and took Phoebe’s cup from her hand. She took both Phoebe’s hands in hers and looked her square in the face.

“All I know,” she told her friend, “is that you will find a way. You will know what to do.”

“But I’m so frickin’ tired, Kare.”

Karen let go of Phoebe’s hands and brought her own hand to her mouth to cover a smile.

“What?” Phoebe picked up the remains of the baguette in the basket before them and clunked Karen on the head with it. She pulled Karen’s hand from her mouth and asked. “What the heck do you find so gosh darn funny, I’d like to know?”

“Phoebe. Listen to yourself! Holy shit woman. Frickin’? Heck? Gosh darn? What the hell is it gonna take to get you to cuss a little?”

Phoebe grinned, shrugged her shoulders a little and said, “Not ready for that yet. One step at a time here. Can’t I still live vicariously through you for a little while here? I mean, until I get my heathen or pagan or whatever bearings? I am open to tutoring you know. Just not yet. I’ve got some stuff to figure out here. There’s still Marc’s church to think of, and I told you didn’t I? They want me to fill in as pastor, kind of like when a Congressman dies, his spouse steps in …?”

“No. Phoebe that is too much. Hell, don’t they know you hardly believe in God anymore?”

“Well, of course they don’t know that! Even Marc hardly knew that. He preferred to think I was simply going through some normal periods of doubting. And the truth is I get some kind of spiritual vibes that there exists a source of good, truth, you know … that sort of thing, that is beyond but part of humanity somehow. And Marc was such a believer! My poor, cursed, beautiful boy!” She reached in her pocket and pulled out a wad of much used Kleenex.

“Shoot! Now I’m crying again. Hey, let’s walk some more okay? Then it’ll just look like the wind is making my eyes fill up.”

“’Shoot’, yes, honey.” Karen stood and helped Phoebe into her jacket, giving her shoulders a little squeeze in the act. “Let’s walk!”

* * *

For the first month after the funeral Phoebe managed on the money in the checking account she’d always shared with Marc. She just wasn’t ready to do all the research and what she thought of as begging for the resources she was entitled to after Marc’s death. Conversations about what part of his pension she could expect, just how much was the pay out on the life-insurance, how much did they still owe on the mortgage on their little house, were not conversations she wanted to have. She wanted a short time, at least, to just pretend nothing had changed that much. Maybe pretend during the day that Marc was just off at work. On the lonely weekends, make believe he was doing a guest-pastorate somewhere.

She and Jade hadn’t been able to adjust their relationship to the loss of Marc. Conversations were brief and perfunctory.

When Jade first came in the door after school in the afternoons she still carried some of the ordinary day-ness of the school day with her. Still had a bit of adrenaline from the walk home with Jolee and her other girlfriends. She told Phoebe sometimes things almost felt normal when she was at school. Usually they could keep up some sense things were all right until about 5 o’clock, the time Marc used to walk in the door and complete the family circle. So by dinnertime it hurt Phoebe to see how lost and alone Jade felt. It hurt Jade to feel lost and alone and she always harbored the hope her mom could say something to make it better. When this never happened they just went through the motions of dinner conversation with Phoebe trying to draw Jade out and Jade answering in monosyllables.

“Heard a joke today, baby. Wanna hear it?”

“Sure. I guess. How old is this can of tuna anyway?” Jade searched the label for the freshness date. She’d lately become obsessed with the idea of fresh food and kept catching her mother in the criminal act of keeping something in the cupboard or refrigerator past the stamped freshness date on its container.

Phoebe was annoyed at this eleven-year old Mother Superior or scientific genius bit Jade imposed on her. Why can’t she just cry and fall into my arms like the little girls in books do when their daddies die she thought.

She said, “It’s canned, honey. Canned tuna. Canned stuff lasts forever. It’s what they call non-perishable. They feed armies on this stuff, pack it up and keep it in a storeroom for years just in case war breaks out. Now, you wanna hear this Ole and Lena joke or not?”

“If it’s non-perishable, why does this say 09/85, Mom?” She shoved the can in Phoebe’s face.

“You caught me.” She put her hands up and extended them toward her daughter. “Here. You got those handcuffs handy or you gonna use the rope this time?”

“Uugh, Mom,” Her voice a kind of whispered grunt, “Why are you always joking about important stuff like this? People can die from bad tuna you know!” She opened the cabinet under the sink, tossed the tainted tuna in the garbage and left the room.

“I guess that’s a no to Ole and Lena.” Phoebe said to herself as she dug the perfectly good can of tuna out of the garbage.

That night when she tucked Jade into bed, things went a little better between them.

Phoebe smoothed her daughter’s hair from her face and pulled the comforter up under her chin.

“So, Lena says to Ole, she says…”

“Oh Mom! I love you.” Jade reached her arms around her mother’s waist and rested her head in her lap.

“’Ole,‘ she says, ‘I read there in the paper there’s goin’ t’ be a snow squall. One of them snow emergencies, don’t ya know. Yah. Yah. They say there’s gonna be no parking on those North South streets ya know.”

“’Ya don’t say Lena? I’d best move the car alright then.’

“Next day Lena says to Ole ‘Ole, paper says gotta park the cars East West. Yah, says there’s another snow emergency don’t ya know.’”

“Yah, you bet ya, Lena. I’d best go move the car again then.”

“Next day Lena’s looking at the paper, says to Ole, ‘Hey there now Ole, don’t ya know, this paper here says the snow emergency is all over wit’. No more parking North South/East West.’”

“’Yah, alright then, Lena! Guess I’ll go put that car there back in the garage then.”

Phoebe laughed at her own joke and it set Jade’s head to bouncing. She looked up at her mother and gave her a grin that said she thought she was pretty silly for a mom.

“Songs now, Mom! Start with “Thousand Stars.” She put her head back on Phoebe’s lap and her mom stroked her little girl’s face as she sang.

“A thousand stars in the sky, like the stars in your eyes. You are the one love that I’ll adore … Tell me you love me. Tell me you’re mine once more …” She looked to see her daughter sleeping and was grateful she’d managed to hold back the tears just long enough.

Chapter Six

“Never thought you’d be alone …” Phoebe sang as she dressed to go see Steve Dobbs, her accountant. “… this far down the line. And I know what’s been on your mind. You’re afraid it’s all been wasted time.” Now she sat on the bed to pull on her shoes. She tried to remember the words.

“So you’re back out on the street, and you’re tryin’ to remember ¾ how to start it over, but you don’t know if you can. You don’t care much for a stranger’s touch, but you can’t hold your man.”

“Okay, Phoebe my love,” she said to her image in the mirror, “get it together. You and me’s got places to go, peoples ta see. Oh, and by the way, I’m sick to death of your fuckin’ self-pity. That’s right, I said fuckin’.” She picked up her lipstick, put it in her purse and left the room.

More than three months had passed since Phoebe and Jade scattered Marc’s ashes to the wind. She’d had moments when she just wanted to quit; wanted to give up and die herself, but when all was said and done, she knew it wasn’t her time to go. Not only Jade needed her to weather this loss, but the church too.

She finally pulled herself together enough to meet with the Board of Deacons shortly after Marc’s death. At the meeting it was determined she had worked so closely with Marc as pastor and had, frankly, been the church’s behind the scenes administrator all the years he was pastor there. They felt they needed her help at least until they could complete a search for the new pastor.

Phoebe agreed to continue her work with the community outreach programs and the planning, personnel and organizational work, but said she had to draw the line at giving sermons. She said she would contact Bethel Seminary and try to retain some pastoral interns to lead the Sunday services and suggested that members of the congregation take turns leading the Wednesday night prayer meeting and various Bible Study groups. She’d still never confessed her faded faith to anyone associated with the church but her conscience certainly wouldn’t allow her to play a role from the pulpit.

She wasn’t completely negative about church and the positive role it played in so many people’s lives. She loved the music program at their church and did take the opportunity to perform on occasion those songs that are part blues, part gospel, part hymn and part rock and roll. The church had what it referred to as it’s own little orchestra but really it was more equipped as an R&B band. A guitar, keyboards, trumpet and a drum were used increasingly even in the more formal Sunday morning services. The church had become a rockin’ place and attracted large numbers of young people in a time when a sense of community and family was lacking in so many children’s lives. Phoebe thought this was an aspect of the church and Christianity, even, that she could feel pretty good playing a part in.

In that same meeting with the Board she’d been given the paper work on her husband’s pension. In the nine years he’d served as pastor the fund had accumulated $42,864.72. This was offered to Phoebe in a bulk sum but she was urged to ask her accountant how best to invest it. The life insurance policy on Marc was for $250,000. Phoebe found out when she went to their safe deposit box. She hadn’t remembered it being that much and wondered if Marc had increased the policy without telling her. Sometimes he seemed to have a touch of a sixth-sense.

She took the mortgage information, the insurance policy and the pension check when she went to see Steve.

Steve Dobbs had graduated from Bethel the same year as Marc but with a degree in accounting. He had a dream of a private practice outside of town where he could set up a small riding stable and raise a few horses in his spare time. He married right out of college, had a couple little girls and, just after he bought the ranch, his wife, Lani, decided she wasn’t really cut out for married life and left him. That was several years back now and Steve had dated occasionally but he and Lani couldn’t entirely let go, had never formally divorced, and he and the girls still held out hope they’d all get back together as a family again someday.

Steve was leading a saddled chestnut mare by the reins into the stable yard when Phoebe pulled up in her Escort. He brought the horse with him and came close to give Phoebe a hug.

“Hey sweetheart. How you doing?”

“I’m okay, Steve. Doing pretty well I guess. There’s lots to be done I’m finding out.” She reached to stroke the horse’s muzzle.

“This is a pretty one. Is she gentle?”

“Like a lamb, this one. I let the girls ride her all the time. You and Jade should come out and ride some time. Jade like to ride?”

“She went to Y riding camp the summer she was seven and had a great time. We’re such city slickers we only occasionally get a chance to ride. But, we both love the thought of horses. They are such beautiful animals, aren’t they?”

“Well, come on with me while I put this one away and then we’ll get down to business. But ask Jade, okay? I really mean it. It would be fun to have the two of you out to ride.”

“Thanks, Steve. I’ll ask.” Phoebe followed him into the barn.

His office was in a building next to the horse barn. He hired seasonal accounting help around tax time every year, but took care of all his other business on his own. He had all the right equipment to make the money-earning part of his life convenient and free up maximum time for his horse hobby. He was, though, an excellent accountant and had kept both Phoebe and Marc responsible in regard to money management. He wasn’t an investment advisor by trade but was able to steer Phoebe in the right direction to safeguard her money.

She told him she wanted to pay off the house. It only cost $76,000 when she and Marc bought it in 1974. They still owed $45,000 and if she paid it off she’d have $600 extra dollars a month she wouldn’t have to send for house payments. Groceries cost about $250 or so a month for her and Jade, and though their Escort was paid off, it was old and she figured she’d soon have to buy another car.

Steve suggested some medium to low risk investments and gave her the name of a contact who could manage them for her. If she invested her $250,000 she could expect somewhere between $10 and $15,000 per year in return without having to touch the principal. The church would pay her $800 per month and she could set her own work schedule. When Steve added it up it looked like she would have about $20,000 per year to live on at minimum and no house payment. If she could delay buying a new car for awhile she might be able to put some money in savings as well.

She left Steve feeling reassured that she and Jade would get by just fine, financially anyway. She promised to call in a few days to set up a time to come out and ride. She rolled down her window and waved to him as she and drove away on the dirt road that led to the main highway.

Chapter Seven

Karen Kline had more personality, looks and brains than she realized and, even if she had realized, she was so consummately endowed she’d have been hard pressed to know what to do with her gifts. Gifts seldom come without a dark side, though. Unaware of the enormity of her talents, for the most part Karen perceived herself as cursed rather than gifted. She was an only child, born to educated, upper middle class parents who spoiled her rotten. She discounted her parents assessment of her talents believing they were, for one thing, strongly biased and lacking in perspective. For another thing, she believed they told her, not necessarily the truth in all things, but only what they thought it would be good for her to hear. She’d long felt her parents were oblivious, had to be, to the harsh realities of twentieth century life in the metropolis in which they lived.

Karen was so outspoken, funny and articulate that Phoebe loved her from the first night she listened to her tell her story to the support group they both attended.

“Get this,” Karen said, in 1970, during her fifteen minute turn to share in the support group where she and Phoebe first met, “My dad’s a Black, Republican, CEO of a multi-million dollar defense instrument manufacturing company in Golden Valley, Minnesota. My mom is a New York-born Jew. So Dad meets Mom when he’s just finishing up his advanced degree in Aerospace Engineering and she’s writing her American Studies dissertation on “Women of the Prairie in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Religious Thought.” I mean, did these two hatch un-aided from eggs or what? Neither of them has the slightest sense of personal heritage! None! So, they meet up in and around Columbia U., decide to settle all possible issues of incompatibility by turning Lutheran and moving to Minnesota. Now they live in St. Louis Park where every single one of their neighbors is Jewish. Their house is huge! It’s on a fucking cul de sac, no less, in what can appropriately be referred to as the hotel district, all the houses are so big and ostentatious.

“Me, I get born to these two, who, if they had any decency should, at the very least be Democrats given their heritage, but who anyone in their right mind would expect to recognize they’d achieved a level of privilege extremely unusual to a bi-racial couple. I mean, these two act like they think they’re second cousins to the Nelson Rockefeller’s. My mom waited until way too late, by which I mean until my nose and breasts started to outsize those of my fourth and fifth grade classmates, to tell me she and I are Jews and that she’d had a nose job and a breast reduction when she was eighteen.”

“Of course, I had eyes, so I could see my dad was Black, but he didn’t think race should be discussed in polite company and, as far as he was concerned, there was no politer company than family. We simply didn’t discuss it!”

“So, I turn out super tall, nappy-headed, long-nosed and big breasted and there’s nobody I can talk to about where I came from and what it’s all supposed to mean to me. I mean, this polite shit in a family can wreck havoc on a girl.

“How’s my time, anyway? I’m done, right?” she looked at the other support group members for permission to either go on or shut up.

“You got five more minutes.” Phoebe checked her watch. “Tell us the part about how you turned out so drop-dead gorgeous — oh, and blonde too.”

“Well, okay. That’s easy. By the time I was twelve it was clear to me I wasn’t going to get anything out of the folks except praise for my utter perfection, and, frankly, the praise just didn’t ring true to me. I decided then and there I would have to create myself. I would make myself over, to the extent possible, to fit an image I liked. I decided I wanted to be blond with a dainty little nose, but, ‘thank you, yes, I’ll keep the breasts if you don’t mind!’”

Karen had invented herself all right. She went to her parent’s alma mater and joined every Black and Jewish activist organization on campus. She was all Jew, all Black, all Lutheran, all Minnesota Nice and all Woman all the time. She double majored in Library Science and Art History and got her minor in twentieth century American sexual revolt.

In college she dated both men and women but didn’t fall in love with either. She protested the war, demonstrated for Civil Rights and, suffered from such severe homesickness she called her mother and father every single day from wherever she happened to be.

Karen gave exactly five years to her education and political and sexual activist pursuits away from home. She stayed on at Columbia the one extra year necessary after completing her undergraduate work and finished her Master’s in Library Science.

When she came home she took the first job she could get at the Downtown Library in Minneapolis, only a few blocks from the Gallery District. Every Sunday afternoon after services from the day Karen returned to Minnesota and got her library job and her loft apartment on Washington Avenue her dad picked her up in his Lincoln Town Car and brought her home to the St. Louis Park family mansion on the cul de sac so she could have Sunday dinner with her father and mother.

Except for those occasions when Karen was traveling or engaged in a particularly passionate love affair, this ritual continued right up until the day her father died of a sudden heart attack in 1986. After her father’s death Karen’s mother went back to New York City, where her own mother was still living. Karen inherited substantial wealth from her dad. She traveled to New York often but could never quite get over the change in her mother. It was as if, she too, had merely invented herself to suit her circumstances, and when that circumstance — the circumstance of her whole adult life — altered, she just went home and went back to being who she was fifty years earlier.

Karen missed her dad terribly but developed an amazing and new level of intimacy and sense of connection to her mother even though they lived further apart than ever before. Karen’s mom went home to her own mother and never once set foot in Minnesota again.

When Karen finished telling her story to group, she ended with the words, “Is that bizarre or what?” Her brow was creased, her mouth open as in “would somebody please explain my life to me?” and she held her hands open, palms up like she thought an answer might fall from on high and she could catch it.

CHAPTERS THREE & FOUR

Chapter Three

Phoebe married Marc Thorpe the week she graduated from high school in 1967 and moved with him from her family home in Elmira, New York to St. Paul, Minnesota. Phoebe was seventeen and Marc was nineteen and had already finished a year of college at SUNY Cortland but would complete his undergraduate education at Bethel College in St. Paul.

The pair met when Phoebe was in junior high school and they dated steadily in the intervening years before their marriage. Phoebe was number five daughter in a family line up that left her sixteen years younger than her nearest sibling. Her mom was forty-five and her dad fifty-five when she was born. They aged poorly and rapidly and died together in a road accident just outside of Harford Mills, New York in a head on collision with a pick up truck trying to avoid a Guernsey in the middle of the road a year after Phoebe and Marc married.

Phoebe’s parents had seemed more like grand parents to her all along and she was sure she experienced a great deal more independence in growing up than any of her sisters. She was close to Janet who was twenty years her senior and felt she was more like a girlfriend-type mother to her than a sister. Janet was the wild one in the family and Phoebe loved watching her get herself into trouble. Phoebe didn’t want that kind of trouble for herself but by the time she was old enough to even think of emulating Janet her parents were weary beyond caring.

Phoebe was a talented kid with a lot of interests and a good personality. She made friends easily. She took up the alto saxophone in the fifth grade and proved to be a natural. She made good grades in school without even trying and never gave much thought to any kind of career aspirations other than becoming a wife and mother, an occupation she looked forward to with relish. She loved babies and children and suffered the fate of all youngest children, that of having no younger sibling to take under her wing and care for. Perhaps this longing explained her rush to fall in love and get married.

She was an avid reader of novels and poetry and listened to the radio for hours on end living in the romance of the imaginary lives in the novels, the tragedy and passion of the poetry and the lament, as well as frenetic sexual energy of rock and roll, folk, blues and the Motown sound.

Her older sisters were out in the world practically before she was born so she often had the house to herself during her growing up. These times she’d imagined herself the heroine of a novel or a singer in a band. She dabbled in poetry herself, often turning her poems into songs she would sing aloud in front of the mirror to the tune of a current hit by the Shirelles, the Everly Brothers or Sonny and Cher. Sometimes the school band would be given the freedom to cut loose from the traditional football pep rally repertoire and she’d have a chance to blow her brains out on her saxophone like in a sexy Wilson Picket ballad.

She loved the school dances and fell in love over and over again with Marc as they danced to oldies like “Sincerely,” or “Earth Angel,” and later to “The House of the Rising Sun.”

Marc wasn’t able to boast any super great childhood and had been taken under the wing of the youth pastor at Trinity Baptist in Elmira when he was in junior high. His early religious upbringing was in the care of an atheistic, alcoholic father and a lapsed catholic mother who did a lot of hiding out due to the embarrassment she felt at her husband’s alcoholism.

Marc was a good kid. Unusually strong and physically mature and with a talent for football. He played varsity in eighth grade. The youth pastor singled Marc out the first year he played, recognizing a kid whose home circumstances could spell a disastrous future, but whose basic goodness and athletic ability might mean a pretty good life could be his. Ultimately, the youth pastor was so influential in Marc’s life he decided to follow in his footsteps and go into the ministry himself.

Neither Phoebe nor Marc believed there was any reason to wait for marriage once she finished high school. Marc got accepted at Bethel and they didn’t want to suffer the pain of a long distance relationship. She took a six week course in operating a key punch machine, state of the art technology in the late 60’s, landed a job at Plastics Incorporated down by the river in St. Paul and Marc worked part-time so he could finish college and attend seminary.

Of course, such a young marriage looked doomed to failure to both their families, but Phoebe and Marc had long since relied on their wits and each other and discounted their parents fears. As it turned out youth and immaturity played no role whatever in the ultimate end to their marriage.

The two of them had a lot of fun together and threw themselves headlong into the adventure of becoming a successful married couple and the best of their kind among Baptist pastors and their wives. Neither one of them ever took the time to look back and consider what life could have been like if they had waited to become what their parents would consider fully responsible adults.

Once Marc finished seminary and found the pastorate at the church in Hopkins they settled beautifully into the community and all the responsibilities of the church. Phoebe felt fully a part of Marc’s important work. She loved managing their small home and concentrated a good deal of energy on making sure her husband felt loved and fulfilled in their marriage.

Of course, during the years of their marriage her love of rock and roll took a back seat. Her saxophone received only very rare attention when Marc had to be away at some conference or other. She would climb the attic steps and lift the gleaming brass from it’s burgundy velvet lined case, pull the shades in the living room, set the needle on the phonograph record and rehearse distant memories.

When Phoebe became pregnant the first time at age twenty-one she focused every fiber of every cell and nerve on the health and well being of the tiny embryo. At four months she felt the quickening, that flutter that makes a woman so aware she is not alone in her own body — and her whole life changed.

The living room floor, the back of the toilet seat in the bathroom, the bedside tables in their room were stacked high with books on pregnancy, baby and child care. This was the educational opportunity of a lifetime for the career Phoebe saw as her true calling. Two weeks after that first quickening, while reading the final chapter of Ashley Montague’s Touching, in her afternoon bath, her abdomen gave her a jolting cramp, the tub water turned deep pink and the tiny embryo, far too tiny to be recognizable as human, floated to the surface of the water.

Marc came home from the church immediately when he heard Phoebe’s sobs over the phone. The loss was as great for him as for her and they were nearly inconsolable. This wasn’t the way life was supposed to treat two such good, responsible and persevering young people.

It would be more than four years before Phoebe and Marc experienced an entirely successful pregnancy and birth and produced Jade, named for the treasure she was.

Those years of heartbreak deeply tried Phoebe’s faith and she spent an increasing amount of time alone nursing a painful fear she would never have a child. She took long, lonely walks her head plugged into the earphones of a Walkman and listened to songs of love gone wrong, dreams gone bad. Once in awhile, when Marc had to be away for some reason, she would drive to Brainerd, River Falls or Zumbrota, often taking her turn at the Karaoke microphone or participating in the open stage portion of a small live band in this or that small town bar. She kept this part of her life a secret from Marc, but refused to think of it as a betrayal of her husband. She didn’t want to add to his distress and felt this wild side of her was best kept hidden. She’d come home feeling cleansed and ready to try again to have a successful pregnancy.

* * *

Once pregnant with Jade, Phoebe thanked God everyday that baby stayed alive inside her. Jade was born six weeks ahead of schedule on March 8, 1974.

Phoebe and Marc couldn’t take their eyes off their little girl. She was an easy, healthy and happy baby. She was precocious, learning to talk early. She loved music and Marc and Phoebe were often wakened mornings by the sweet sound of her humming from her crib. They’d enter her room and the beautiful little fifteen-month old baldy, her feet straight up in the air, would continue to hum and turn to smile at them, distracted momentarily from playing with the toes of her Oscar the Grouch pajamas.

So, yes, Phoebe guessed it was just slightly possible that she, and Marc too, were overly enthralled with their daughter, and, maybe, just maybe, a tad bit over protective.

Phoebe’s love of singing got plenty of exercise once Jade came along. Each night of her life right up until Marc died, Phoebe would sing a repertoire of at least six songs to Jade after reading her a bed time story. Favorites were “Johnny Angel,” “A Thousand Stars,” “Poetry in Motion,” Travelin’ Man,” “I Told Every Little Star,” and a special rockin’ version of Rock A-Bye Baby called “Cradle of Love.”

Jade grew to love singing and she and her mom would belt out songs in unison to the tunes played on the car radio or tape player. Sometimes Jade sang the lead, sometimes back up to Phoebe’s lead. When Marc was with them the sing-a-long selections were more likely to be hymns, Sunday School songs or child rhymes like “Old MacDonald.”

After her daddy died, though, Jade only acted annoyed when her mom popped a tape in the cassette player and urged her to join her in song.

Chapter Four

“Oh Marc, you look awful! What is it, Honey?” Phoebe set the bag of groceries on the kitchen table and went to her husband who was leaning on one arm over the sink, dousing his flushed face with cold water from the tap.

“I’m probably alright now, Phoeb. I had a killer sick headache and came home early. I was so sick I didn’t know which end to put in the toilet for about an hour there.” He came toward her but felt so weak he had to grab the back of a chair for support. Phoebe put her arms out and helped him sit down. He rested his head on his arms.

“Marc, I am calling the doctor immediately. This is the third time in the last couple of weeks. It’s clearly not some passing bug or the twenty four hour flu.” She reached around him to pick the phone off the wall and the address book from the shelf above his head.

“Phoeb. Phoeb, don’t.”

“Marc, I won’t let you stop me …”

“I already called honey. I’m supposed to go in first thing in the morning for tests.”

Phoebe put the phone on the hook and fell across her frightened and sick husband’s back. It seemed they were frozen in place, shivering and sweating with fear at the same time.

“Mom, that you?” Both Marc and Phoebe sprung to attention, Phoebe landing herself in a chair across from her husband. They feigned a casual nonchalance at the sound of their approaching daughter.

“Sure sweetheart. I’m home. We’re out here.”

“Hi Mom. Dad? You’re home early aren’t you? What’s up?” Jade had come in the front door from school. She still had on her backpack and carried a can of Coke Classic in one hand.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t feel so well Pumpkin, so I came home after lunch. Your mom just got home. We were … uh … just catching up with each other.”

“Oh. Cool and groovy.” She bent to kiss his forehead, then looked with alarm at her mom.

“God Daddy! You feel so clammy. Am I gonna catch it? Mom! What is this? What’s he got? Dad, are you going to be alright?” Now she dropped her pack, set her Coke down and sat in the other chair at the table.

“Well, we were just discussing that when you walked in, as a matter of fact.” Phoebe told her daughter. “You know your dad’s been feeling a little off the last few weeks. He had a ghastly headache today and then vomiting and diarrhea. We called the doctor and he’s going in for some tests tomorrow morning.”

“Jade, I don’t want you to worry.” Marc told her. “It’s probably something stress related. I’ve been pretty busy at the church lately you know. That new community outreach program, the funding and stuff, you know that’s stretched me a bit.”

Jade stood and hugged her dad’s shoulders. “Dad, I’m sorry you don’t feel well. I didn’t mean that selfish thing about ‘am I going to catch it.’”

“Oh honey, I don’t blame you at all. I’d wonder that if I kissed your clammy forehead too! Now don’t you have better things to do than sit in the kitchen with the old folks? Get out of here. Don’t they give homework at that high class school of yours?”

“If you must know, Father-mine, your brainy daughter already finished her homework. When is supper, Mom? I told Jolee I’d call when I got home. Do I have time to talk?”

“Dinner won’t be for another hour or so. Go ahead and give Jolee a call. I’ll call you when I need help with the table.”

“Ta ta then, Elders.” She waved her little finger in farewell and went to use the phone in her bedroom.

Phoebe helped Marc to the bathroom and ran a tub for him. He swooned gratefully as he lowered his body in all the way to his chin. Phoebe urged him up and forward and filling a washcloth squeezed it gently across his shoulders and back. The hot stream of water visibly soothed her husband. He leaned back against the tub again and she repeated her squeezing on his chest and stomach then lathered the cloth and washed him gently from top to toe. She left him there soaking, only his face above the water line, his hair submerged and went to their bedroom to get him his white terry cloth robe. Jade was still safely hidden behind closed doors.

Marc went straight to bed after his bath and Phoebe and Jade shared a silent dinner at the kitchen table, neither knowing what to say that wouldn’t expose their fears for the man they loved.

* * *

The next six weeks were impossibly fleeting and, at the same time eternal. The doctor had no way of knowing how quickly death would take Marc. The cancer that only recently showed signs of its presence had progressed to advanced stages before the first test was done. Predictions of six months to a year, but no hope for full recovery, caused the young family to make plans for the time remaining. Maybe they would travel. Marc had always wanted a trip to the Grand Tetons. Jade could leave school for awhile. They would fulfill, once Marc completed a cycle of radiation and chemotherapy, every wish he’d ever had, except of course, that most precious wish of a long and healthy life.

Nothing went as planned. Phoebe’s husband, Jade’s father, never left the hospital. He went in for tests the day after his wife and daughter’s silent dinner and never came home to share that table, the bathtub or his wife’s bed again.

During the weeks of Marc’s illness Phoebe rarely left his side. Her sister, Janet came for a few days when they first learned Marc was sick but soon had to return home to Wisconsin and her obligations there. After that, Phoebe’s best friend, Karen Kline, essentially moved into Phoebe and Marc’s home to be with Jade before and after school.

The first few weeks Marc was still coherent and his pain was under control for the most part. He and the doctors worked a kind of sensitive collusion on Jade’s behalf to be sure his pain was minimal during his daughter’s visits. Of course, in the early days, they were all still hoping he’d be home again and life would return to normal.

Jade established a ritual. Karen picked her up from school and drove her straight to the hospital then promised to pick her up again later that night when Jade would call and say her dad was going to sleep now. Every day after school Jade sat vigil in the hospital waiting room or on or beside her father’s bed making valiant efforts to keep her dad from dying. On weekends Phoebe insisted Jade make plans with friends and try to keep some semblance of normality in her life, but still Jade made sure to see her father every day.

She entered the hospital as if on a mission. She knew the nurses and doctors by name and greeted them on her way to her father’s room. Phoebe watched her daughter and marveled at her conviction and perseverance.

Every day Jade entered the room and without first taking off her coat or setting aside her backpack, approached her dad, placed her small hand on his forehead and leaned to give him a quick kiss on the lips.

“Hi Dad! You’re much better today, right?” Without waiting for an answer or looking at his eyes where a silent answer might appear, she slid her pack from her shoulder and set it by Marc’s feet at the end of the bed. Next she removed her jacket and hung it on a hook on the back of the door. Still without acknowledging Phoebe’s presence in the room or looking again at her dad, she went to the TV and adjusted the set to CBS where “The Guiding Light” was usually just ending and one of the afternoon talk shows was about to begin.

Phoebe and Marc exchanged glances and smiles but knew not to interrupt the stages of this necessary routine Jade had established.

“How’s the sound Dad? Too loud? Not loud enough?” Now she looked toward her dad for his everyday signal. He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger and held it high and smiled whether or not he felt like it.

“Okay, then.” Jade repeated the hand on his forehead, the quick kiss then usually said hello to her mom.

“Hi honey,” Phoebe would say and make her way to the door. “Why don’t I go get you a Coke? You thirsty?”

“Sounds good Mom. Thanks. Dad, you want Mom to get you anything?” Now she was propping his pillows or pulling his blanket up under his arms. She always asked this, went through all the same motions even when he ceased to recognize her, ceased his ability to talk and was unable to take any substance by mouth. But, in the early days, he always asked for tea.

“Tea for Dad, Mom.” After she got her dad all straightened and settled on the bed she rolled the tray table over and positioned it above her father’s lap. She took from her backpack a spiral assignment notebook, a textbook for math, science, English or social studies, a fresh sharpened pencil and eraser and a loose leaf notebook and stacked them one on top of the other on the bed table. Next she would bend to remove her shoes then, if her hair was not already in a pony tail, remove the fabric scrunchy from her wrist and pull her hair from her face to secure it at the back of her head. Now she climbed onto the bed next to her father and set about doing her homework.

Marc, if well enough, would lift his arm, carefully arranging the IV tubes, and place it behind his daughter to pull her close to him.

“I’m feeling much better,” he would invariably say, “now that you’re here.”

Phoebe always dawdled getting the Coke and tea to allow Marc and Jade the time they needed to settle into each other.

The day Marc died was preceded by more than a week of incoherency and minimal consciousness. The doctors and nurses tried to time medication and other procedures to allow Marc to be as awake and aware as possible during his daughter’s visits. Five days before Marc died Jade arrived as usual at the hospital but was greeted by Dr. Jackson at the nurse’s station outside her dad’s room.

“Jade,” he came to her and placed his hand on her shoulder. “I need to talk with you just a minute before you go in.”

Jade’s face went white, her eyes opened wide and tears pooled there ready to spill down her face. She looked away from the doctor as if by continuing on as always she could avoid whatever horrible truth he was about to speak. She didn’t say anything.

“Jade, please, let’s sit down over here for a minute.” He steered her toward the gray upholstered chairs lined up against the mauve wall of the waiting room.

“But … no. I don’t want… My dad… he’s expecting …”

“It’s okay. I told your mom and dad I wanted to talk with you. Do you want your mom to join us? I can tell her you’re here now…”

“No. No. That’s all right. I don’t want Daddy to be alone. She’d have to leave him alone, wouldn’t she? I mean, to come out here with me.”

She sat down, her pack still on her back, causing her to balance on the front edge of the chair. She held her right fist in her left hand and looked down at her lap.

Dr. Jackson lifted a chair and brought it around so he could sit facing Jade. He put his hands on hers and spoke, inclining his head close to her face. She couldn’t lift her head.

“Jade, there’s no other way to put this I’m afraid. Your daddy is getting worse.”

Jade didn’t move. Didn’t say anything.

“I’m telling you this because I don’t think he will be able to recognize you or talk to you very much longer…”

Jade lifted her head. Her brow was creased with worry no child should bear. The doctor placed his hand on her hair and continued to speak.

“Jade, sweetie, what I’m saying is — your daddy wants to tell you now, while he still can … He hoped maybe I could help you understand…”

Jade pushed the doctor’s hand from her face, squeezed past his knees that blocked her escape, and ran for her father’s room.

Just outside the door she pulled herself together, prepared to let nothing interfere with her ritual but her mom came to the door and played her part all wrong.

“Daddy needs to talk to you right away, honey.” Phoebe knelt in front of Jade, placing a hand on each of her arms and looking up into eyes filled with confusion and horror. Jade walked around her kneeling mother and into the room where her father waited for her. She proceeded to behave the way she had everyday since her dad became ill. Phoebe followed her into the room and when Jade lifted her head from the daily kiss she gave her dad she turned to her mother and nearly shouted, “Get the Coke and tea, Mom! You’re supposed to get the Coke and tea!”

“Hey, hey, Pumpkin … Come here.” Marc garnered his strength and though he could not lift his body he reached a hand toward Jade. Phoebe left the room as Jade went to Marc and hiding her face in his chest, she cried.

He stroked her hair, murmuring, “I know. I know. Oh, baby. My lovely, lovely Jade. I am so sorry.”

It took all his strength to tell his little girl how very much he loved her and that he hoped one day she would understand whatever purpose there might be to this premature goodbye.

When Phoebe came back with the Coke and tea, the pop was warm and the tea was cold. Marc looked at her through grief stricken eyes, his hand still stroking Jade’s hair. She hadn’t said a word. Only held on tight and cried herself to sleep to the sound of her father’s still beating heart.

In the days that followed Jade refused to notice any change. She carried on her complete ritual without variation as her father continued his decline. He ultimately showed no signs of recognition as his little girl sat next to him doing her homework and upholding both his and her end of every conversation.

Phoebe found it heartbreaking to watch. She spent most evenings wandering between the cafeteria and the family lounge. Sometimes she even visited the chapel and tried to pray to whom and for what she couldn’t say. The final night at the hospital, after Jade left to go home with Karen, Phoebe crawled into bed next to her inert husband.

She wrapped herself around him pushing aside as silly a notion her fear that she might hurt him. She took his face in her hands and moved her nose and lips over his eyelids, cheeks and neck taking in his taste and scent, she realized, for the last time.

Marc must have felt her there beside him. He turned to her, his eyes showing the first look of lucidity Phoebe had seen in three days. Phoebe felt recognized. Felt held in that last look. He didn’t say anything but Phoebe read in his eyes the words, “I love you, Phoebe. Goodbye.”

She stayed close for just a moment after he died, not wanting him to go cold in her arms, then made her way home alone.

It was early, only a little after nine, but Jade was already sleeping. Karen hugged Phoebe and asked if there was anything she could do.

“Oh… no. No. I guess not… Not tonight. I don’t think so.” Phoebe took off her shoes and picked up a blanket from the back of the couch. Karen helped Phoebe wrap it around her shoulders. Phoebe turned and walked away from Karen and down the hall to Jade’s room.

Later Karen went to check and found Phoebe and Jade wrapped together under the white eyelet comforter in Jade’s single bed. Karen closed the door, packed the few items she’d been keeping at Phoebe’s and went home.

* * *

Phoebe was numb. Blind-sided. Her only career had always been wife to Marc, and for the last eleven years, mother to Jade. She was thirty-five years old. The only man she ever loved, a love she built her life around, was gone. The only saving thought in all this was the rightness of their having married so young that she had been blessed to have known and loved this wonderful man for nearly eighteen years. What if she’d waited until she’d grown up to marry him? Think then, what she would have lost. If she’d done the responsible thing and waited to marry until she was in her mid twenties — Marc finished with school — the loss would have been, if anyone can imagine, even greater.

Losing Marc made her feel her orphaned state more keenly too. She needed a mother and a father to tell her how to say goodbye. How funerals work. How estates are settled. This was not supposed to happen for another forty or fifty years. She was supposed to have all that time between then and now to learn about these things.

And, how to comfort Jade?

Phoebe hadn’t a clue where to begin. She didn’t begin to know how to include Marc’s parents in the practicalities or rituals of saying goodbye. His dad was essentially a homebound invalid now and incoherent, whether from the years of alcohol abuse or senile dementia, no one knew for sure. His mother lived in seclusion caring for her husband and was too full of shame, Phoebe guessed, to be much of a mother to her son or a grandmother to Jade.

Through all the years with Marc, though, she’d never felt the need for a parent the way she did now. Her only thought was to reach out to Janet, her sister who’d served as the closest thing Phoebe had to a mom after their parents’ death.

Janet lived just across the Wisconsin border in Upper Michigan on a rare and lovely hobby farm with land that butted up against the shore of Lake Michigan. When Janet and her common-law husband, Tom, bought the property years ago, Phoebe imagined spending lots of time there. It was only a six-hour or so drive from the Twin Cities. Life seemed to have filled to capacity in the intervening years and though Phoebe and Janet did stay in touch, they hadn’t been the easy neighbors they’d hoped to be.

Phoebe’s sister Janet came right away, arriving just after three the day after Marc died. Phoebe answered the door in her bathrobe, her eyes red and swollen and her hair wild around her face. Music Janet recognized as one of Jackson Browne’s early albums greeted her and the words “… let creation reveal its secrets by and by” reached her ears even before she could think what to say to her bereaved sister.

“I’ll get my stuff from the car later, Baby.” She had to raise her voice to be heard and, in spite of feeling very much the intruder, pulled Phoebe against her for a moment and spoke close to her ear.

“I am so, so sorry, Baby.” As she held Phoebe she saw Jade beyond her shoulder, still in her bathrobe too and wearing the same swollen face and red eyes as her mother. Jade sat, bottom on the floor, legs bent backward and out to the sides — a posture Karen recognized as the way Phoebe always sat as a child. Their mom always used to say, “Okay, you want to walk like a cripple when you grow up, you just keep right on sitting on the cold floor like that young lady.”

Janet released Phoebe and walked over to Jade to give her a kiss on the top of her head. Twenty or more photo albums were stacked and scattered around Jade and Karen could tell exactly where Phoebe had been seated among them before rising to answer the door. She noticed a scattering of unbound photos, mostly close-ups of Marc, on the cushions of the couch and on the coffee table.

“Aunt Janet, want to help us?” Jade asked.

Janet looked to Phoebe, having now returned to her seat on the floor next to Jade, then bent to remove her shoes and join her family in the bittersweet task of holding Marc dear while letting him go.

Janet did what was needed. She mothered Phoebe and grand-mothered Jade. She knew all the right questions to ask and helped Phoebe with all the necessary arrangements.

Marc was clear he wanted his organs donated, thinking of life-saving transplants, but in the end they would be used for cancer research and any lifesaving they did would be of the less direct kind. The hospital kept what it needed then returned the rest and Marc’s wish to be cremated was honored.

The sanctuary at Redeemer Baptist had never looked lovelier than on the day of Marc’s memorial service. Parishioners and friends, aware of Marc’s preferences, filled the church nearly to the rafters with the glorious yellow daffodils. Phoebe prayed a quiet prayer that Marc was somehow watching, was truly present in some way, to see, hear, taste and smell the beauty and love that were here in this place, to honor his life.

The church was crowded with people of all ages. Jade’s friends from school came with their parents. Her teachers came too. Phoebe’s friends from the support group where she and Karen first met some fifteen years before; the people she worked with in the community and, of course, Marc’s adoring congregation, were all there.

Karen, a gallery owner and art history librarian, had helped them find a place to make slides from snapshots of Marc and the images of the little boy, the youth and the man he was, were projected continuously on a large screen behind the sanctuary altar. A vibrant cobalt blue jar, holding Marc’s ashes, and surrounded by daffodils, was positioned on the altar.

Marc’s mentor and father figure talked about the years of Marc’s blossoming in his faith and read a few of Marc’s favorite passages from the Bible.

Phoebe and Jade sang Jackson Browne’s “For a Dancer.” They were accompanied by violin and piano from the small church orchestra Marc had been so proud of. It was a flawless and touching performance and Phoebe and Jade agreed they’d managed to get through it all because Marc really was there with them.

When the service ended, Phoebe and Jade carried their beloved husband, beloved father’s ashes in the covered blue jar Marc had loved for its color and sheen. They packed their Escort station wagon and took the two weeks journey out and back to the Grand Teton Mountains. Once there, standing on the wooded mountain path, Jade held the jar while Phoebe lifted the cover and, together, they let Marc’s ashes fly free in the wind.

It was a sad and silent journey. They didn’t play the radio and they didn’t sing. They tried to talk. They tried to play some car games like they had on earlier trips with Marc, but everything reminded them of him and choked them with sorrow.