Mom, page 2
This is another photo of what she looked like to me. Before she was married, a band recruited her, apparently in part because of this. Not that she didn't have a voice. One time when we were little my father's mother overheard her as she was singing to
us as she was putting us to bed and said, "Why Marjory. That was professional quality singing." My father's mother taught piano at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music and paid my mother only two compliments in her life that I know
of, so that was saying quite a bit. According to my mother, it was seven or eight years before her mother-in-law complimented her again.
But when a band in Detroit recruited her to sing with them, one of the musicians let it slip that they wanted her partly for what she looked like in a backless dress. So she quit.
Appearance also would never have been the thing on which her mother-in-law complimented her next. I'm told that normally the way her mother-in-law treated her was in line with the comment made when my Dad originally told his parents they'd gotten engaged. My mother and her family already were known because Dad's younger brother was married to Mom's oldest sister.
The families were quite different. The Selmeiers, Dad's family, were austere, frugal, and of German/Alsatian descent. They were generous, supportive and devoted to their children, but Mom did not think they were warm. Since, like most children, I got most of this kind of information through my mother, it is largely her view of the world.
Mom's family was of English/Scottish descent
and made no money, but were so warm that their house was where relatives, neighbors, friends, friends
of neighbors, and even friends of friends congregated and spent weekends. Before the war, before any of them were married, my father and his brother drove north from Cincinnati to spend weekends with my Mom's family at their summer cottage in Canada on Lake Erie.
Early home movies show the crowds that gathered there.
During the war (World War II, of course), Mom had written to Dad as she had written to dozens of other soldiers. People, especially young women, were supposed to write to soldiers to help keep them in touch with what they were fighting for and with the fact that people knew who they were and cared about what they were doing. Before the war, Dad had dated one of Mom's older sisters (Mom was the youngest of four) and as a result uttered a line now legendary in our family. Mom was ten years younger than Dad and so was just a kid sister of 14 when Dad, to get her to leave the room, tossed her a nickel and told her to call him when she grew up.
My father also kept this 8 X 10 glossy on his dresser.
Ten years later, after returning from the war, when Dad joined his brother and the rest of the throng for a weekend at the cottage in Canada, he went on his first date with Mom. Mom said that when they returned at the end of the evening, they did what Mom and her sisters often did at the end of dates. With their dates, they stood in the doorway of the bedroom of her parents, who already were in bed, and talked about everything they had done that evening.
Both families were of the same religion, Christian Science, but my Dad's parents had a different interpretation of a few things. For instance, their interpretation of their religion was that romance existed exclusively for the production of offspring, and that after that it was wrong. After my father's brother had been born, they had moved into separate bedrooms.
Here my father was, standing in the doorway of my Mom's parent's bedroom, as they laid next to each other in bed chatting and laughing and enjoying their daughters' stories about their dates. According to Mom, Dad wanted to have a family like that. Within six weeks of their first date he'd asked her to marry him. When Dad went to his parents and told them, his mother's response was to say, "I have to go lie down." Mom said Dad's parents were not in tune with the warmth he sought. There were other benchmarks they cared about. Mom wasn't in store for a lot of compliments from them.
Years later, when we were with Dad's parents in Florida on spring vacation, and they were staying in closer proximity to him than they had for some years, they saw how sick he really was, and how much care he needed. For decades he had ulcers that were extremely painful and often incapacitated him. When his parents saw first hand how Mom took care of him and three children under the age of 13 at the same time, his mother gave her the second compliment of which I am aware saying, "Marjory, you are a pillar of strength for Lewis."
She deserved to hear that once.
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