Is That All There Is?

by James Gavin

  Lee couldn’t exist without drama, though. Insanity figured in many of her family stories. In her autobiography, Lee tells a fanciful (and almost completely unsubstantiated) tale of how her Swedish-born paternal grandfather, Jan Magnus Eriksson Ekström, moved to Norway and then, in his attempt to leave, nearly died in a shipwreck. He and five fellow sailors built a raft, Lee explains; they floated on it for a month. Only Jan and one other man survived, rescued by a passing ship bound for New York. The tragedy peaks as Jan goes temporarily mad and winds up in a Manhattan psychiatric ward. Once recovered, he saves enough money to send for his Norwegian wife, Berthe, and Erik, a son he didn’t know he had until he had reached America.

  The truth was much less cinematic. Jan was a ship’s carpenter who impregnated his girlfriend Berthe in his adopted home of Norway. He married her, then lived there with her and their son Erik until they emigrated to the States. After a brief stay in New York, they settled in Wisconsin, where another son, Ole, was born on November 23, 1874. Five more children followed. A few years later the family moved to the Dakotas, whose wealth of fertile farmland was attracting hordes of Scandinavian immigrants.

  Of the Eriksson brood, Ole grew up to be the standout: over six feet tall, lanky, and good-looking, with a brisk stride and a ladykiller’s charm. By seventeen he had relocated to Minnesota, where he won a then-prestigious job as a railroad telegraph operator. That, combined with his rakish charisma, helped him land a beautiful dressmaker, Eva G. Williams. The couple married, and in 1896 became the proud parents of a baby girl, Zelda.

  Thereafter, something went terribly wrong. Eva took Zelda and fled to her family home in Iowa; Ole returned to his parents’ home in South Dakota. No proof exists that they divorced. In a 1900 census form, either Eva or her family listed her as a widow; a year later she remarried. Ole blurred his own past by changing his name to Marvin Olaf Egstrom.

  His checkered marital history resumed in 1903, when at twenty-eight he scored another teenage beauty. Selma Anderson was a petite Norwegian, just eighteen, and born in Volga, South Dakota. She looked like a dainty porcelain doll: a bow adorned her dark, upswept hair, and hanging curls framed an alabaster face. As Peggy Lee recalled her, Selma was almost too good to be true—she played piano beautifully, cooked and sewed to perfection, and showered her family with love.

  In truth, neither Selma nor her family were paragons of goodness. Her parents had divorced, a scandal at the time; her mother, who ran an inn, had borne children by two men, one of them probably illegitimate. According to the Volga Tribune, Marvin and Selma married in October 1903—three months after the birth of their first child, Milford.

  Sexual impropriety was then more common than one would assume. “What else was there to do?” remarked Artis Conitz. But Marvin’s wild days were behind him. Just around the time he married Selma, he won his most prestigious job, as superintendent of transportation at the Sioux Falls headquarters of the South Dakota Central Railway. Children kept coming—Della (1905), Leonard (1908), Marion (1913), Clair (1916).

  The pressure mounted, and soon, people who spoke of Marvin tended to describe him as Conitz did: “He was a sweet, sweet man who loved to drink.” Sloppiness with the railroad’s finances cost Marvin his job. In 1918 he moved to Jamestown to manage the depot there for a junior line, the Midland Continental Railroad. His new job was a comedown. The Midland was originally meant to stretch from Canada to Texas, but World War I had wreaked havoc on the financing, and only sixty-eight miles of track were laid. Locals laughed off the Midland as “puny.” A freight train carried farm goods and supplies; the passenger train came and went just once a day.

  At least Marvin had wound up in a real city. Jamestown was North Dakota’s fourth largest, with six thousand residents. Instead of the state’s habitual flatness, it lay in a valley surrounded by hills; the James River, which connected the Dakotas, ran through it. There were farms on the periphery, but the street names—Milwaukee, Wisconsin, St. Paul, Washington—gave the town a worldly air. Aside from being the county seat of government, it boasted a college, an opera house, and a theater.

  Still, the place epitomized small-town America. Few people locked their front doors. Clip-clopping horses pulled carriages down Fifth Avenue South—a dirt road that contained a general store, a barbershop with a peppermint-stick pole outside, and other essential businesses. Men strode down the street in dour three-piece suits; women wore neutral-colored dresses and overcoats and church-lady hats. There was no room for stylishness, just prim practicality. Mary Young, who lived in Jamestown, recalled big nights out: “You’d park your car downtown and watch the people window-shop. Folks would buy popcorn and hot peanuts from Mr. Wheeler’s cart. That would be a big deal for me, to have a bag of popcorn. Everybody was poor. We’d go to the ball games, and if I got a bottle of pop, oh, that was incredible.”

  Each Sunday residents gathered in Jamestown’s many churches—Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal. The tall, pointy steeples aimed at the heavenly paradise they hoped someday to reach; church bells resounded through the town on Sunday, suggesting that something larger was looking out for them. But darkness radiated from the city’s largest business, known as “the Nuthouse.” The North Dakota State Hospital for the Insane stood on a hill that overlooked Jamestown. A hamlet unto itself, the Nuthouse had its own farm, power plant, and general store. Marvin Egstrom knew the place well, for the Midland carried its supplies.

  The hospital was proof of the staggering degree of mental illness that plagued the region—another byproduct of the grim pressures of the Dakotas. By 1950, the Nuthouse’s population had ballooned to almost 2,500—nearly a quarter of Jamestown’s population. A 1915 report told of rooms overcrowded with lice-infested cots, of patients doped into oblivion. Outbreaks of smallpox and tuberculosis there were deemed “almost impossible to prevent.” Even in the fifties, a doctor brought in to overhaul the institution talked of finding “cages, strait jackets, leg irons, stern guards, malnutrition.” Inmates were so neglected they could wander out freely.

  Before she left Jamestown at the age of eight, Norma Egstrom had seen some of the patients, with their vacant stares and strange behavior, and had heard many stories. These memories came in handy in 1955, when the movie Pete Kelly’s Blues costarred Peggy Lee as a woman who ends up institutionalized, her mind nearly blank.

  But only sweetness was apparent in the face that greeted Selma and Marvin Egstrom at Trinity Hospital on May 26, 1920, the day their sixth child, Norma Deloris Egstrom, was born. Norma had extremely fair skin, light brown hair, and hazel eyes; soon she became Marvin’s little angel.

  In her early years, the Egstroms thrived. They had settled into a spacious house on Pennsylvania Avenue between Second and Pacific Streets; Marvin, meanwhile, was promoted to vice president of the Midland Continental. The family lived simply; they sang together, played cards with neighbors, went to church socials and barn dances, and ice-skated on the frozen creek in winter. As the temperature climbed—sometimes to 115 degrees—they picnicked along the James River. Farm kids walked around barefoot, partly to save on shoes; boys fished or hunted gophers. “We were satisfied with very little as far as entertainment,” said writer Connie Emerson, who grew up in Valley City, North Dakota, in the thirties.

  Selma and Marvin continued to indulge in the pastime that kept wives perennially pregnant. For Selma, it was proving dangerous. Buried in Jamestown records is the fact that Selma had developed diabetes while carrying Norma. No longer was she a petite, doll-like beauty; a family portrait from that time showed a woman worn down by motherhood—bloated, with a weary face and a short, messy hairdo of convenience. Just sixteen months after Norma’s birth, Selma was pregnant again. The baby, who arrived on June 21, 1922, and was named Gloria, emerged stillborn.

  Just over a year later, Selma was expecting again. According to Peggy Lee, her mother feared for her life, and spent the last months of the pregnancy making clothes for the children—“so we’d be dressed for a
long time.”

  Selma returned to Trinity Hospital, where on April 23, 1924, she bore Jean—a fair-skinned child with the whitest of blond hair. Jean looked like an angel fallen from heaven; and indeed, congenital ill health made her not long for this world. Neither was Selma. “Following her return,” the Jamestown Daily Alert would report, she was “confined to her bed and her life despaired of many times.” A bed was set up in the living room and a nurse engaged. Jean was entrusted to Selma’s sister; the other Egstrom children took turns sitting vigil with their mother.

  After three months, Selma lapsed into a coma. She died of diabetes-related causes on August 7, 1924, at four in the morning. She was thirty-nine. By the next afternoon, a coffin had replaced the hospital bed. Friends and neighbors filed past, while a reverend from the Scandinavian Lutheran Church intoned a grave funeral service. Even though she was only four at the time, Peggy Lee would claim vivid memories of that day. “There they were, standing all around with the sweet-smelling flowers, the eyes of everyone focused on the casket. They had on hats and sad faces . . . Why was everyone so serious?” She recalled asking: “Can I see my Mama?” Someone picked her up and sat her in a chair alongside the casket. There lay Selma “looking so tiny and beautiful . . . I thought she’d just gone to sleep.”

  The casket lid was closed, and a fleet of pallbearers carried Selma out. “I was so puzzled,” recalled Lee at seventy-two. “So I asked Daddy, ‘Where did they take Mama?’ He said, ‘To heaven, with God.’ And that answer set me on a search that has never ended.”

  As she heard her siblings recalling their mother, Selma became Norma’s fantasy ideal. Selma seemed like an angel, wrenched from her for reasons she couldn’t comprehend. Gone were the unconditional love and safety her mother symbolized. In their place came the gnawing sense that her gestation and birth might have pushed Selma to her demise.

  Alone, Norma went walking by a nearby stream. Spotting stones and flowers, she paused to pick them up; maybe her mother lay in the ground beneath them. At other times, Norma stood in the backyard and stared at the sky. “I always thought she was going to appear someday and look over a cloud and wave at me,” recalled Peggy Lee. “Sometimes I really thought I saw her.”

  During childhood, she kept the longing locked inside; Artis Conitz couldn’t recall her ever mentioning Selma. Many years later, though, Lynn Ringuette, one of Marion Egstrom’s sons, knew that his aunt Peggy “grieved terribly; all her life she kept a photograph of her mom on her dresser.”

  As for Marvin, his wife’s death “really tore his guts out,” said Glen Egstrom. Marvin’s drinking increased, and his fatherly attention shrank. With no mother to look after them, some of the children were scattered around. Grown-up Della married and moved to another part of Jamestown; neighboring families took in Clair, Marion, and Norma. The younger Egstroms still needed their father, and he wanted them back.

  Marvin hired a local widow to housekeep and tend to the children. She had midwifing and nursing skills; according to one report she had even helped care for the dying Selma. Minnie Schaumberg Wiese was a full-blooded German, age thirty-one, whose parents had settled in Jamestown. “Min,” as she was known, moved into the Egstrom house with her eight-year-old son, Edwin. To the Egstrom brood, Min was unnervingly different from their beloved mother. Tall, hulking, and stern, with waist-long hair braided and tied in a bun, she epitomized cold efficiency. Lee described Min in monstrous terms: “Bulging thyroid eyes. Extremely obese, but light on her feet, fast and violent. Spent time with True Romance [a magazine] and boxes of chocolates. Came from rather nice background, but her taste was imitation oriental rugs and mohair sofas. Nostrils flared a lot. Wore percale. Full lips, gold tooth in front.”

  Her granddaughter, Janice Wiese Duffy, recalled a “warm and loving” side to Min, who could laugh at a joke until tears ran down her face. But Min wasn’t there to charm anyone; she had work to do, and Marvin was relieved to let her take over. All the children resented her presence, but Norma had the most violent reaction toward Min—“because of all the evil she seemed to represent.”

  Some of that darkness surely stemmed from a tragedy too painful to discuss. In 1916, Min and her first husband, farmer Emil Wiese, were living with Edwin, then a toddler. A week before Christmas, the family had gone to visit Min’s parents. The Wieses returned home later that day. While Min busied herself in the house, Emil did farming tasks outside. He needed gas, and about a gallon remained in a sealed barrel. The bitter cold had frozen the nozzle. Using a piece of wire and a rag soaked in oil, Emil designed a makeshift blowtorch. He lit a match and held the rag to the nozzle to thaw it.

  Min heard an explosion so strong that it shook the house. She ran outside to find her husband’s body some distance away, crumpled on the ground in flames. The near-empty gasoline barrel had exploded like a bomb; according to a detailed report in the Jamestown Daily Alert, it had blown off the top of Emil’s skull and shot it clear over the house. In shock, Min grabbed the baby and ran to the nearest farm, which was about a mile away. No one was home. Bolting farther, she found a schoolhouse with a church service in progress. She screamed for help. A doctor was called, and he rushed to the house with Min; but her husband, of course, had died instantly. He was thirty-three.

  Emil had known all about the dangers of farm equipment. The violence of his exit suggested a Dakota prototype: an unhappy man in an environment he longed to escape. But no one, except perhaps Min, would ever know his motives.

  Too little of her husband remained to display in a casket. Min’s parents took in her and Edwin. For eight years she struggled to survive, working whatever domestic jobs she could find. But on the afternoon of December 27, 1924, Min was ensconced at the Egstrom home, serving as midwife for Della and her husband Paul Rudrud’s first baby. By midnight most, if not all, of the Egstrom family was asleep. The temperature outside dipped to thirty below zero.

  Marvin had lingered at the depot. He returned home around one in the morning to find smoke seeping out of seams in the walls. A fire had erupted in the chimney. Marvin quickly notified the fire department—how wasn’t clear, for the house had no phone. Milford ran from room to room to rouse his siblings. Two firemen carried Della and her newborn son into the bitter cold and dropped them off with neighbors. Others doused the house or hauled out furniture. By the next morning, the Egstrom house was a charred and sodden mess. Min’s parents and her former in-laws divided up the children and sheltered them while Marvin and Min looked for a new house. Peggy Lee talked about that fire for the rest of her life; for her it was one more symbol of displacement, of warmth and safety removed.

  * * *

  THE EGSTROM SIBLINGS WERE aghast when, just a year after their saintly mother’s death, their father told them of his plans to marry Min. No one in town could fathom why this still-handsome and charming man would want to replace Selma with a battle-ax like Min. Nevertheless, the wedding took place on August 15, 1925, at Min’s parents’ home.

  It was a practical choice for Marvin and for Min, too, who had struggled as a single mother for years. Their failure to produce any children suggested a sexless marriage. “I never saw him touch her or her touch him in a loving fashion,” said Artis Conitz. But Min grew to care about Marvin very much, and was unfailingly devoted to him. All the while she faced the constant challenge of being compared to Selma, whom her husband had adored, and whose shoes she would never manage to fill.

  Min couldn’t possibly feel secure, so she retained her tough shell. After the marriage, the Egstroms moved into a house at 215 Milwaukee Street East, three blocks from the Midland Continental depot. Min, said Janice Wiese Duffy, “absolutely took care of business. Early to bed and up at the crack of dawn.” In the autumn of 1926, Norma entered Roosevelt School, a block away from home. But her day didn’t begin there. Min expected the children to rise by at least six and perform household chores. “It was just normal that you worked from the time you were little,” said Jeannette Loy, Norma’s future high-
school classmate. In years to come, Peggy Lee recalled baking bread, milking cows, churning butter, and—to her revulsion—butchering animals, a technique taught by Min. All these tasks, she said, were enacted behind the house on the family farm, where Lee remembered spending untold hours in indentured servitude.

  Those memories clashed with the ones that Marion Egstrom passed on to her son Lee Ringuette, Lynn’s brother. “There was really no family farm as such,” said Lee. “Given that era, it could be that you had your own animals and a garden, but I don’t know this.” Artis Conitz doubted that the Egstroms had ever had a farm. “Norma had quite an imagination,” she said with a laugh.

  No one would inflame it like Min, the villain who had torn her storybook home life asunder. “Where were the tender smiles and happy laughter . . . the feeling of fresh linen and the smell of flowers?” lamented Peggy Lee in the 1980s. She envisioned her mother “baking delicious cakes and cookies, singing and laughing, playing games with us, playing her prize possession, a Circassian walnut piano. And then she was gone, and there was this ominous heaviness and anxiety everywhere.”

  It’s unlikely that Lee could have recalled so many details of a mother she lost at four; the portrait was probably a collage of her siblings’ recollections and her illusory Paradise Lost. For now she kept her hatred of Min hidden, but in the years to come it would flare up with mounting intensity if the wrong buttons were pushed. Dona Harsh, Lee’s secretary and traveling companion in the late 1940s and fifties, recalled entering the singer’s bedroom once on a late morning to wake her up. “I said, just kidding, ‘Are you gonna sleep all day?’ She practically clawed me. She said, ‘That’s what Min used to say to me, and don’t you dare ever say that again!’ ” Lee’s secretary of the 1970s, Betty Jungheim, told of a Christmas season when someone sent Lee a beautiful arrangement of yellow poinsettias, a flower Min had loved. “Peggy nearly went bonkers. ‘They remind me of Min! Just get them out of my house!’ ”