Girl Called Karen

by Karen McConnell

  My first really clear memories are after my father came home and we moved to the farm. We lived in a large garage that adjoined the foundation of what would become our house. My younger brother, Larry, and I were joined by a new baby, Sandra Lee. This was a good place for kids, but it must have been very difficult for my mother. The facilities were primitive. She bathed us, and presumably herself, in a big kitchen sink behind a curtain.

  My father’s large-animal practice was growing, and he farmed as well. A hayride when I was a kid meant riding in a wagon on a mountain of new-cut hay, not one of those manufactured events with scattered handfuls of hay in the bottom of a wagon filled with city kids. I have good memories of long carefree days, bare feet, and tomatoes picked and eaten in the same sun-drenched outdoors.

  Our next home was in the back rooms of my father’s animal hospital. After a short time there, we moved several blocks to what I’ll always remember as my childhood home. It was a big two-story gray house in a nice neighborhood. Even fifty years later, it is still a nice neighborhood, though the house seems much smaller than I remember from my childhood.

  Isn’t it interesting how the palaces of our youth dwindle into cottages when we visit them as adults?

  In the next few years, our family grew to six children. I was the oldest, then came Larry, Sandra, Patricia, Grace, and David. As an eighth-grade assignment, I was required to write my autobiography. I began it with the words, “There were six of us.” I concluded with the words, “Now there is one.”

  My mama kept coming up with wild schemes to entertain her brood. We loved those circuses, but the neighbors must have lived in fear of the next extravaganza. One of mama’s most memorable creations was a backyard pool constructed of sawhorses, old lumber, and a tarpaulin. Mama filled it with water, and we splashed and played and got unbelievably dirty from the old black tarp.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Heartbreak

  Then the good times were over. By the time I was ten years old, mama’s life had become a nightmare, and she acted more and more strangely. She and my father were having problems that a little girl couldn’t understand. He was never home. So his increased absenteeism didn’t concern me, but it meant a lot of heartache for her. One time my mother picked up the phone extension and heard my father speaking with another woman. She made me listen, I don’t know why. I suppose she wanted a witness.

  Another time she loaded us children into the car, drove to a quiet residential street where we all sat with her for a long time, not knowing what we were waiting for. Then my father emerged from the house. He hugged and kissed a woman there. My mother cried for hours.

  I know what infidelity is now, and I can feel my mother’s terrible pain, but I didn’t understand it then. Mama said the woman my father was seeing was named Lucile, the same as his mother. Mama found this particularly reprehensible, though I’m still not sure why this compounded the crime.

  My mother became ill and then a lot sicker. She would get very flushed, and she couldn’t breathe. When I came in from play, I might find her huddled on the couch, red and sweaty. I’d help her take off her bra, loosen her clothes, and lie back.

  I was terrified over and over again. She told me she was going to die, and I got mad at her. Day after day as long as she was able, she would take us kids to the races and gamble. Day after day, she lost a lot of money. She said she had to get some money so she’d have something to leave us when she died. How could she say such a thing? She shouldn’t say that. What was I supposed to do? I was just a little girl.

  After her sixthborn David’s arrival, she wrote to her mother-in-law, Grandma Lucile, that she had told my father he had to do something to stop the chain of pregnancies.

  She told Grandma she was having terrible headaches. My father didn’t act like she was sick. I was just a little girl. What was I supposed to do?

  I know that there are a lot of books out there that describe terrible abuse and tragic lives. Mine was not like that. My mother thought I was great. She told me that I was great. But then she started forgetting me. I was a scrawny eleven-year-old. Normally I rode the school bus, but this particular day, I was supposed to wait for my mom to pick me up. All the other school kids had been picked up, and no one seemed to notice me sitting outside the school by myself. It got later and later, and I became more apprehensive, so I decided to walk the six miles home. I was mad. I rehearsed my angry attack. My mama was going to know how bad she was.

  When I got home, I found she was really sick. She seemed to have no concept of time and was devastated that she had forgotten me. That was only the first time.

  On another occasion, I got sick and asked to go to the one phone available to students. I called my mother and told her I was sick, but she failed to respond, and I soiled myself. It became a nightmarish pattern.

  As the days melted into weeks and months, I became aware that my clothes weren’t clean enough. I would hand-wash panties and socks and hang them in my room, but I couldn’t figure out how to clean my outerwear. There was no one to ask. The family infrastructure was disintegrating, my mother was dying, and no one seemed to notice.

  My father was more of an enigma to me than my mother. I thought he was incredibly handsome, which makes me a pretty normal little girl. As was the case in the 1950s in this country, he was the disciplinarian. I know that he was consistently stricter with Larry than with his daughters, following the pattern of Grandpa John and the Old Cuss. We were all terrified of the razor strop, but Larry was really the only one to feel the lash. Girls got spanked, but not with the strop.

  We all felt that he favored Sandra, who went everywhere with him (except on his Lucile visits and sundry other adventures). Sandy was attractive, fearless, and precocious. I know that my parents had at least one heated talk about Sandra’s favored position. Still, I was invulnerable. I was the oldest.

  My father was committed to his veterinary practice. He preferred healing large animals to working in a small-animal clinic. He was the racetrack veterinarian, and he became the zoo doctor. I believe he had a reputation for being the best large-animal doctor in the county. He was respected for his very good work and high professional standards.

  We were considered community leaders because of his unique position as a professional and because my mother and her gregarious nature had established their social position earlier in their marriage.

  Sometimes my father took the older kids with him on his calls. I shudder to think what we looked like after my mother grew ill. We were ragtag, disheveled little urchins.

  I was with my father the night a local horse breeder wanted him to perform a late-term abortion on a horse. I was too young to understand most of what transpired, but I know that my father was in a rage about something, and we were afraid.

  Later I learned that the breeder wanted a life-threatening operation performed on his mare to get rid of a fetus that he’d lose money on. His intent was to breed her again soon so she could produce a profitable foal for him, and he was willing to risk his horse’s life for that reason. For a veterinarian, the medical injunction about saving lives was nearly as strict as the Hippocratic oath. So my father was outraged.

  I remember the night my father came home from the zoo after working nonstop for three days in a futile effort to save a giraffe. He was devastated by the animal’s death, and he had fallen very sick with malaria. When he was stationed in the Philippines, he got malaria and amoebic dysentery, and he suffered ever afterward when his resistance went down.

  My father was wounded in World War II. I don’t know how he was injured, but among his uniforms and medals in the attic was what I believe to be a Purple Heart. He also brought back straw skirts and big straw hats. When I grew older, I got to take them to school for show and tell.

  Most of my memories of my father are related to his career. I loved the zoo, and I got to spend a lot of time there. Because I was the doctor’s daughter, I had access to behind-the-scenes dramas. When the mother lioness ate all h
er cubs save the one the handlers rescued, a prominent zoo supporter took the baby lion to care for. The little guy got pneumonia, and my father took him back to the zoo for euthanasia. When he told me he was going to put the cub to sleep because it had no chance and was going to die, I got so upset that my father let me take the baby home to nurse. I fed the sick little animal every two hours and mothered it right back to health.

  Then they returned the cub to the influential family. I felt cheated. After all, I was the one who saved its life, but I didn’t donate the large sums of money that the other family did, so I wasn’t allowed to keep it.

  It was one of my first lessons in the power of wealth and privilege. I still had a lot to learn about this world.

  One of my greatest joys was to hold onto my father’s hand as we walked down the street or into the animal hospital at the zoo. He worked hard for long hours, and he was not readily accessible to us kids.

  He was a quiet man, and I treasured his rare words of praise. One of my happiest memories is of the time when he attended my first piano recital, and, although I had played wretchedly, he complimented me on my performance. He said something to the effect that I had the best stage presence of anyone in the entire program. I think his words helped me become a good public speaker in later life.

  I loved my father, I almost worshiped him, and I was always a little in awe of him.

  As I gradually awoke that awful, awful night, I felt someone crowding into me, hot and shoving. It was a man, a strange man … no, it was not a strange man. Incredibly, it was my father, but it was not my father, and he was acting weird, and he was touching me down there over and over again. It was my father, the stranger, who jammed his finger into the hole between my legs and was pushing and pulling it roughly inside me. The painful pleasurable sensations kept on and on, and I had trouble controlling my breathing. I knew it had to stop, and I knew I didn’t dare act like anything had happened. It was bad, really bad. I knew I would be in trouble, or he would think it was okay, or he would want to do it again. Any way you looked at it, I was facing eternal damnation. And so was he.

  I moaned and moved as if I were about to awaken. He rolled to the side of the bed and padded out of the room. I had loved my father dearly, I thought, but his behavior now was just disgusting. How could he do such a wicked thing? How dared he do that to me? How could he perform an evil act that he knew would send me straight to hell? I didn’t sleep again that long, lonely night.

  The next day, my father acted the way he always did, but I knew I would never trust him again.

  Months packed with turmoil and upheaval went by before I told anyone about what happened that night.

  I can’t remember my father being around much when my mother was ill, though he may have been there. She got weaker. Her body retained lots of water, and she became very large. She couldn’t walk anymore. My terror grew.

  We kids tried to help her as much as we could. The day came when she fell to the floor and couldn’t get up. Mama had to go to the hospital. Children were not permitted to visit.

  She had only been in the hospital for a couple of days when my father came home and without preliminaries said, “Your mother is dead.” I screamed at him and called him a liar.

  I could not believe it. I had not believed her when she said she was going to die. I should have believed her. I had not been a good daughter, and now I was abandoned.

  After she was gone, the medics said it was a brain tumor that killed her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Funeral and a Wedding

  The next day saw a flurry of activity. One of the worst scenes took place at the family dining table. My father was eating supper with us, an event so out of the ordinary as to mark the seriousness of the situation. Little four-year-old Grace kept asking for her mother, and her father didn’t answer. I finally shouted at Grace that her mother was dead, that she was gone and wouldn’t be back.

  My father began to weep. That was the most shocking thing that any of us had ever seen. I was so sorry that I had hurt him. All six of us were very still.

  There was a funeral to prepare for. Some neighbors and people from our church came and did things for us. The older kids and the ragtag urchins were given haircuts and new clothes, and everyone could see how beautiful we all were.

  A lady whose son was in my class at school came and took me shopping. She got me two of the most beautiful dresses. They weren’t little-girl dresses, they were for a teenager and store bought. I was thrilled. I have never forgotten them, but I had very mixed feelings about this charity. It didn’t feel right to have her buying things for me. We were not poor people. I believe she sensed my distress for she said that she had sons and had always wanted to shop for a girl. I accepted that explanation.

  Other people brought food and flowers in abundance. I was pleased to realize they cared about us, but I wondered where they had been when my mother needed help.

  Family came from far away. Everything that anyone said felt like criticism of my mother. She had died slow and hard, but no one seemed to understand that. My grief mingled with anger and gratitude. My Aunt Eileen was an anchor in the whole drama. She didn’t make judgmental statements, at least none in front of me. She was available for comforting, and I think we all leaned on her. People from everywhere in northern Ohio came to pay their respects, and the funeral procession was lengthy. Then everyone went home, and somehow we were supposed to go on.

  I should say almost everyone left – Grandma Lucile and Aunt Eileen and Aunt Mary Louise and Uncle Lyle stayed on and had supper with our family. Grandma Lucile and Grandpa John lived in Florida, and Uncle Lyle and Aunt Mary Louise lived in New York City, and Aunt Eileen lived in Chicago. Mostly everyone was pretty quiet, and then Uncle Lyle said to my father, “We know it’s going to be awfully hard for you to manage with all these kids. We’d like to help…. Mary Louise and I want to take the two little ones to our home to live with us.”

  I held my breath. I knew that for me it would be unbearable to lose my little sister and brother, and they would be heartbroken to be separated from all of us and from each other. The six of us could hardly bear waiting for my father to answer.

  “No,” he said. “I want to hold my family together. I don’t want to break us up. We can manage. We’ll find a way to manage.”

  You could feel the sighs of relief all around the table. We were going to stay together and live with our daddy.

  My girlfriends were my greatest source of comfort through the next days. My best friends were Gloria Rutkowski, Kathy Horton, and Carol Hill, and their mothers were quietly present in my life. I can’t honestly remember any dramatic conversations or tearful scenes, but I did know they cared. I was a Girl Scout, and that was a comforting place to be. My Catholic school was my safe haven from all the hurts.

  Mama had died in March, and somehow we muddled along without her. We were a family. We knew we had to stay together, but we argued and scuffled the way most kids do.

  Shortly after mama died, Larry was given a gasoline-powered airplane. He loved it, and it was shattered when I inadvertently stepped on it. He broke into tears, and he chased me all over the house and the yard. He was beet red, sobbing, tears streaming down his face. I had never seen my brother like that, and I really thought he would kill me if he caught me. I think his profound grief for the loss of our mother spilled over that day.

  Father hired a housekeeper to take care of the home and his children. I discovered that the woman was sleeping with my father in my mother’s place, and I hated her. I was the leader, I was mean, and my siblings and I made her life miserable. In retrospect, it was one of the larger mistakes of my life. She genuinely liked us kids and probably would have made a compassionate stepmother, though I doubt that my father would have thought her a suitable wife. My father’s relationship with her had developed too soon after mama died for us to accept her, let alone welcome her.

  One day Larry and I, with some neighbor kids, got into an excitin
g fight with water guns. Our housekeeper tried to move the action out of the house. I defied her, locked myself in the upstairs bathroom, and dumped water out of the bathroom window so it whooshed through the kitchen window below, soaking the poor woman and the kitchen floor. She was one unhappy camper. I still refused to come out of the bathroom.

  When my father came home, I was wrathful because of his betrayal of my mother’s memory, and my rage grew greater as I remembered his sneaky midnight violation of my body. So I was sassy, and I ended my outburst by screaming, “And that woman has no right to be in my mother’s bed.”

  He slapped me across the face.

  First I had lost my mother, and now I had lost my father.

  We six kids escalated the battle to rid ourselves of the housekeeper, and that “menace” soon went away and stayed away. Not long after that, father began seeing Marge, whom he said he met at a church function.

  How can I describe Marge? It’s difficult because my contact with her was so brief that it left me with few memories. I remember a skinny, short-haired blonde with bony feet and without much bosom. My mother was dark-haired with an ample bosom, just right for comforting little people.

  We went to the drive-in movies one evening. Larry and Sandy and Patti and Grace and David and I sat in my father’s car, and he sat in Marge’s car. Other than that adventure in togetherness, we saw very little of Marge and did almost nothing with her. We never shared a meal. The two adults spent more and more time together. Eventually, we six kids were left with a housekeeper while my father and Marge went to Florida. I don’t know where her six-year-old son stayed, but it was not with us.