Chapter 38

The story of Clarice and Don is not quite a romantic love story. Oh, I think it had its moments, but they were really ill-matched from the start.

This is from Mother’s memoir, about how they met. It starts after high school, when she moved to Minneapolis to work. She was 16.

After Margaret (a friend) and I worked at Munsingwear for a while, we both hated it — I always hated sewing — so we applied at the New Brighton War Plant. We made good money out there. I had to ride the streetcar to downtown Minneapolis, and there we got on the buses that took workers to the war plant. (About 1942.)

I worked there quite a while. That’s where I met Frank (Pigg), Don’s brother.

Frank maintained all the machinery that broke down, walking around with a toolkit to fix things. He used to come to my wagon all the time. He said, “My brother is coming here on leave from the Navy, and would I be his date while he was in town?”  I said, “Well, I’m already engaged,” but I was bored and didn’t have anything to do. Winnie Vokaty was in the Navy, and he was gone. He was always writing to me about girls he’d met. So I said, “Why not?”

So when Don came to Minneapolis on leave, we went out together, but I didn’t think he was anything special. He didn’t dance. We’d go to these big ballrooms and he never danced, so I wasn’t too interested in him. Then after he left, we started writing back and forth. Then he wrote and said he was being shipped out of Corpus Christi and didn’t know where he was going, so would I come down and spend a weekend?  There were 60 of us girls (at the war plant) that would go out every weekend. A lot of them had boyfriends stationed along the way, so we got on the train and they’d drop off as they needed to.  Three of us went all the way to Corpus Christi.  Frank and Daddy met us there.

Before we left, Don comes out with this diamond ring and he gave it to me. He never said a word. I didn’t know what to do. He never said a word about he liked me or loved me or anything like that. He just put the ring on my finger. It just sort of happened.

I don’t know why he did that. He didn’t know me all that well, either.  So then I broke up with Winnie. He was always dating all these other women, anyway, and Mom would get so mad. She liked Winnie, but she didn’t want me to marry him at all. She said, “If he’s like that before you’re married, what will it be like afterward?” As it turns out, she was right. He was divorced twice, and he had a roving eye.

So when I was going home on the train, I had that ring on my finger, and I kept looking at it and thinking, “I don’t really even like this guy that much,” but finally I thought, “Oh well, one’s as good as another one.” But he kept writing letters and assumed we were getting married.

And then he was being sent to San Diego, and he wanted me to come and get married out there when he was on leave, before he shipped out. I thought, “I don’t want to be a Mrs. Pigg.”  But I went. I rode the train from Minneapolis to San Diego. What a horrible thing! It was packed with servicemen, really crowded. I couldn’t afford a sleeper, so I slept sitting up in my seat. It took three days. I couldn’t afford to eat hardly. Food was expensive on the train. I finally got there and was I ever glad!

I didn’t tell anybody I was leaving Minneapolis. After I got to San Diego, I wrote to Mama and Daddy and told them what I had done. Daddy said, “What next is she going to do?”

The day after we were married, Don left on the next carrier and he was gone for a while. I don’t remember how long now. A lady lived behind our house in the guest house. She was a telephone operator on the naval base, and she knew when Don’s ship was coming in. She’d call me and say, “Did you get a letter today?” and I’d say, “No,” and she’d say, “Oh, you’ll probably get one tomorrow.” That was our code for letting me know Don’s ship was coming in.

Daddy did not treat Mother very well sometimes, but she tolerated it because of us kids, she later told me. And besides, as a Catholic, with VERY Catholic parents, divorce was out of the question.  Sometimes, after we kids went to bed at night, we’d hear them fighting downstairs. Seldom in front of us.

One morning, after a particularly loud and long argument, we woke to find Mother in a hyper-cheerful mood. Or so we thought.

“Come on,” she said, “Pack a bag. We’re going on a little vacation!”

Puzzled but excited, we packed a pair of clean underwear, our swimsuits, and a towel at her direction. Toothbrushes and a comb, and we’re off in the old 1956 rust brown and tan Chevy station wagon. When we got in the car, one of us asked, “Where’s Daddy?”

“Oh,” she said. “He has to work. But we’re going to have some fun anyway!”

She drove us north to a small lake cabin owned by her Aunt Mae and Uncle Ed. It was a log cabin-looking place with a red door and one bedroom. Mother and Andrea shared the bed and Cindy and Dale and I slept on the couch and floor in the little living room. When we got there, we ran straight to the lake and spent the day playing there. For supper, we went to a little lakeside diner just down the road. Hamburgers all around! The next morning, after we played in the lake some more, she packed us up and took us home.

Later, Andrea said Mother muttered all the way there, saying things like, “See how he likes it to come home to nobody and no supper.”

Some unforgivable words or actions must have ignited this estrangement, but we never knew exactly what it was.

When we got home, she moved all her stuff into the sewing room with the little twin bed and they never shared a bedroom again. But they stayed married for 56 years, until he died. She always took care of him and he let her, and eventually settled into an armed detente. It still makes me sad.

Epilogue (Cindy): I don’t remember the argument. I don’t remember the “vacation”. But I do know there was a period of several years where their relationship was pretty cold. But our dinners were still warm and friendly, and there were moments when I think the ice melted a bit between them. As parents, however, they never wavered.