Year 1911
In 1911 Lena and Belle went to Duluth, Minnesota to attend the wedding of Lena’s cousin Ethel Dick to Max Yeager. She took along her darling boy Mose to show him off.
Lena wore a nice spangle-trimmed dress such as was fashionable in those days. Little Mose sat between the two ladies on the opposite seat from his mother. Once he pointed with his little finger and said pridefully, “You see the lady in diamonds? That is my mama.” And they all had a hearty laugh over it.
But his mother was much embarrassed when on their way home the conductor came to collect fares. Lena said the boy was only five years old and should ride free. Little Mose popped up, saying “Mister, I’ll be soon seven years old,” and his mother had to pay one-half fare for him.
On June 14, 1911 David went to Mount Clemens, Michigan to take a four weeks’ course of mineral baths, and came home quite refreshed.
One day Lena got rattled and angry and grabbed a plate from the table and threw it at David. It was his quick dodge that saved him from getting hurt. The plate struck the kitchen door and broke into splinters. When she sat down in her chair facing David, with her bare arms akimbo in an aggressive posture, she asked, “Well what do you intend to say now?”
David said, “I hardly think you’ll ever learn to behave ladylike.”
That remark – at least so she thought – was like a rap across the knuckles. She tossed her head and wriggled her shoulders and lips, aware of the eyes that were upon her. She let her movements become more and more abandoned. They sat motionless without speaking. There was no need for comment or question at the moment.
David spoke so little yet conveyed so much. A tremendous wave of comfort flashed over him, obliterating all nebulous anxiety and fear, which had tormented him for the past hour. He flung down the newspaper from his hand onto the chair nearby and mused, a man has no right letting himself become pinpricked and let such get the best of him. He left the room. David thought that Lena was up to something. Her thoughts turned resolutely drastic. His temper rose in repeated rebuff. He decided if she wants to sulk, let her sulk; and so before he realized it many days passed.
Two thoughts now seemed to collide in his mind almost spontaneously. Muffled in his thoughts he walked along without seeing the earth or the sky, “Yes, yes. What the fates have spun, even the gods could not unravel. Before the fates Olympus itself was helpless.”
By and by the gulf between them widened until it began to seem improbable that it would ever close up. David rubbed his beard slowly and with his hand over his eyes he pressed his tired eyeballs. A light flashed in sparks and a half-forgotten recollection started out of the dimness.
This scene is almost identical to a scene my mother describes during her childhood, in which Helen grabbed a stack of plates from the nearby hutch and flung them to the floor. Apparently Art, my grandfather, had not taken her side in forcing their children to finish her carefully prepared oyster bisque. Learned behavior?
What are they fighting about? Do we conclude this is not a very happy marriage? What is his critique, that she isn’t skinny and beautiful? Ladylike women do not work in dry goods stores?
My mother’s recollections of David, her grandfather, are of this quiet, gentle, blameless man. Grandma Lena was always criticizing him, according to her. “What do you know?” Lena would say at the dinner table. But in this part of the Diary and others, David portrays himself as someone who is very much in control of the situation, i.e., Lena. Not vice versa.
Well, at least until he decides he is merely buffeted by fate!
David is proud that he can master his anger....
It’s interesting to think about the way a child (my mother) would have perceived a scene like the one above. Absent the “ladylike” comment, David would have seemed quiet and blameless, right? Thus, the version of David we hear growing up.
David began brooding, walking along looking at no one. He gave way to more profitable moods. He perceived himself a failure in his wife’s eyes: a man who cannot put his faith in the beliefs of his own ancestors and who couldn’t on the other hand launch himself upon life headlong.
David mused: married companionship, that most blessed and difficult comradeship, could be easier. But he was one of the many to whom sentiments of life were no more than unseen oil in the machine bearings. He began to take things for granted. He sat and gloomed. He felt sorry that he was suffering from an exaggerated sense of humility. His attitude towards Lena became vaguely defiant. Of course she did not believe him.
The most dismal person in life is the middle-aged misfit who has been compressed into a mold not of his own choosing. He is like a square peg in a round hole from which he cannot extricate himself.
That is “a more profitable mood”?!
Is he talking about religion here? That David thinks that Lena thinks that he is not religious enough? What’s the critique about launching himself? Once he settled in South St. Paul he seems to have been quite economically successful. Here he seems to be criticizing himself for not attending to emotional matters. Does that mean not attending to Lena’s feelings? I’m totally confused now about what the problem is between them. What didn’t she believe — that he was truly sorry about something? Are we reading into the passage our modern sentiments if we think that David is thinking that he and Lena are headed for divorce?
Surely David uses the word “misfit” incorrectly here. He could not have considered himself a misfit or failure — his success as a small businessman is clear. Rather, he must have meant that he found himself in a marriage that “compressed” him into a mold from which there was no escape. I think David felt that he couldn’t divorce Lena.
What was the mold that he wanted to choose?
The most tragic person in our civilization is the middle-aged woman whose duties in the home are finished, whose children are gone, and who, though in her mental and physical prime, yet feels there is no more use for her.
David studied Lena’s closed eyes and firmly molded lips. A good face. But a good woman has often created most of hell on earth, he thought. But at the end of an hour’s arguments, the cross-currents, confusion and indignation had pulled him into a thick and muddy stream. Somewhere in the depths a gust of passionate anger blew scalding hot against her eyes. She moved her stiff bitter lips and said to the reflection in the mirror, “To hell with it all.”
There are middle-aged women, David thought, at whom foreigners may laugh, but they have the strength of character and obstinate principles and an individuality which makes them a great power in their social circles.
There is an old saying, “God could not be everywhere, therefore he made Mother.” What Providence is to the Universe, Mother is to the home, for does not Mother exercise love and care, prudence, foresight and anticipation for further emergencies?
Interesting contrast in his comparison of male versus female midlife crises. While men may suffer dismal bouts of depression and the realization of dashed hopes, women must contend with feelings of irrelevance (after the completion of the bulk of their life’s work—homemaking).
Now he is sounding like the sympathetic feminist.
Who are the “foreigners?” Does he mean Christians?
Albert had graduated from high school in 1910. In September 1911 he entered the University of Minnesota. He took a liking to military training and was promoted to corporal in the cadets. But he was sadly lax in his scholastic studies. He was inarticulate. He was selfish, hard-headed, with a military nature. He had no faculty to make and keep friends with boys. He was shy and bashful in girls’ company. Anything that displeased him he would destroy ruthlessly.
It looked as if nature had never intended for Albert to shine in a ballroom. The most assiduous attention of his friends did not succeed in helping him much in his elementary steps. Even his mother had the extraordinary sense to see that the reasons for his unpopularity – to use a mild word – lay within him. He was intolerant and bossy; he was tight lipped as close as a bark to the tree, and cold as a brass doorknob. It seemed that his selfishness went beyond the limit of human endurance, although there was nothing basically wrong with him, David thought.
What’s with the military, is that ROTC? Why would a Jewish kid make that choice?
ROTC in the U.S. began in 1916 with the passage of the National Defense Act, intended to increase "preparedness" for the American entry into WWI.
Now we begin to see the intensity of David’s criticism of his eldest son Albert, my grandfather. Al is judged for his bad character — inarticulate, selfish, hard-headed and “with a military nature.” Rather than seeing anything that he or his wife may have done to create this negative person, David sees the problem as something created by nature. The problem lay “within him,” as he was intolerant and bossy. I reflect back on my impressions of Al when I was a young child, some forty years after these words were written, and I’m convinced that David was right — Al was indeed a gloomy, negative and hard-headed person. We always attributed his dark personality to having been stuck running the family store and having such a drab life; now it seems like maybe he had underlying personality problems that resulted in his ending up running the store. But why did he end up this way? Was it genetics or the early childhood treatment by his parents, and why would his brother Joseph emerge as such a different, more glowingly positive person?
Even when David tries to paint a picture of character, he is contradictory. If Al had no friends, then how can his friends not help him?
This is both ironic and rather painfully humorous. Its irony lies in the list of negative characteristics that Albert apparently possesses. They are precisely the characteristics that both his parents have been shown to have in this document. David wraps up this black description of his eldest son, however, by saying that at bottom, there’s nothing basically wrong with him (aside from being an intolerable human being)!
So they are really moving up the class hierarchy now.