Michael & Maria

By Emma Stephenson

This memoir opens in England, in the outskirts of London. It is June 1992, and a family gathers to host a surprise celebration in honor of Michael and Maria's upcoming fifty-ninth wedding anniversary. Here, the reader meets both immediate and extended family and, as the day progresses, learns of underlying tensions, one of which was caused by another recent family event. At this time too, the four offspring face the reality that age and infirmity are starting to take their toll on this, until very recently, fully independent couple.

Though the parents' lives are centered in south-east England, their roots are not English: Michael's origins are in the east coast of Ireland, in Counties Wicklow and Wexford, while Maria's reach back to Piçinisco, and the scattered hillside villages seventy-five miles east of Rome, skirting the wild and beautiful Parco Nazionale Abruzzo.

Michael and Maria met and fell in love in Folkestone, Kent, in the early 1930s and, ignoring family concerns and even active dissent, they married. As with most British families, the September 1939 outbreak of World War II had a huge and immediate impact on their lives. But they were in many ways more fortunate than most, and we follow them to North America, and back again at war's end.

After that, the years sped past as the family moved from one home to another, and the author and her siblings grew up and spread their wings. Marriages took place. Babies arrived. It was not until her own children were moving into their teen years that she began to wonder about her parents' roots, and her own, and the talents and challenges she had passed along, as her contribution to her children's gene pool. Though by now living in the United States, she set out to uncover those roots whenever an opportunity arose.

Family origins are explored and Stephenson comes to better understand the very different ways in which her parents were raised, and the challenges impacting their shared goal of raising a God-fearing English family. The details provide a frank and engaging back story, as we are introduced to family on both sides, through their own or their siblings' recollections. The story is enriched by the inclusion of excerpts from Michael's written memories, and Maria's frank and lively sharing of the Rossi family's patchwork upbringing.

Within six months of the June family gathering, the health of both parents seems to slip into a rapid decline. The author, able to be present and actively involved during this crucial period, shares with the reader her very poignant experiences with her precious yet very different parents; each passing is very much in character with the life each had led. But over and above the gift of being there when needed, is her slow-dawning realization that, regardless of her negative opinions of their marriage, and the times of turmoil and disputation, her parents loved each other more deeply than she could ever have imagined.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emma Stephenson
• Release date: Apr 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311010865

Emma Stephenson

Emma Stephenson has written all of her life, including letters, journals, short stories (two of which have been published), and a novel. She has raised four children, worked in quality assurance, and run a local bakery and national mail order business. She has also spent a lifetime volunteering.

Book preview

Roots

Maria Shares Memories

Rossi Roots

Rossi Offspring

Irish Connections

Marianne and Patrick

Michael Joseph Ward

Self-betterment Time

The Beau

True Love

Betrothal and Marriage

Margaret Ward

Marianne Re-visited

PART III

World War II

Daddy Heads West

We Follow Daddy

The Family Is Reunited

First Impressions

Pearl Harbor and More Moves

Daddy’s Private Burden

Life in Ottawa

Another Move

The War Winds Down

An Afterthought

PART IV

A Growing Family

Man Proposes, God Disposes

Travel with Daddy

Michael Versus Maria

PART V

The Beginning of the End

Mother Dear, Where Did You Go?

A Horror Story

A Close Call

Blessings

Losing Daddy

The Gipsy

Maria and Michael

The Day Daddy Died

A Funeral

Maria Returns

Endings

Epilogue

Prologue

I sink into the depths of my capacious and well-loved old armchair, a cup of tea on the table at my side, as the westering sun pours through the many-paned living room windows, casting blocks of brilliant color across the patterned rug at my feet. Though I am alone, I am surrounded by smiling faces. In ones, twos, and larger groups they press in on me. From ornate or simple frames in assorted shapes and sizes, from their assigned places on piano, mantel, every surface large enough to accommodate a frame, faces smile at me. My family. Even though a few have occasionally been the cause of real pain, I see them all as the source of great happiness, these dear people, young and old.

Though we live apart, they are ever near, and hover in my thoughts, just behind the thin shield of current activity. At night, when I rearrange my feather-filled pillow, they are here too, infants and ancients, the quick and the dead, coming it seems, of their free will, not mine, sometimes one, sometimes another, to participate in my busy loneliness. And sometimes they comfort me. My photographs, so precious that they surround me in every room of my private yet ever-welcoming home, are constant reminders of life’s ebb and flow; of the dance, whether joyous polka or stately pavane, that introduces new arrivals even as much-loved others leave. Time and again my eyes are drawn to one particular photograph. My parents. Taken in England in 1984, one evening after dinner. A quiet evening. Just the three of us. Mummy starts to clear the table. I jump up and reach for my camera.

C’mon Mummy. Stand by Daddy. I’ll take your picture.

She obliges and there they are, a moment in time, on my piano forever. Mummy was eighty-one, Daddy seventy-eight. And most every person in the universe represented by my photographs was influenced by these two people. And if they were not, their turn may yet come, because, through the ever-widening ripples of thought, word and deed—not to mention the always surprising gene pool—the past impacts present and future.

* * *

When I returned from the hospital on the morning that my father died, I looked about his room. I saw the clothes that he had dropped on the chair when undressing, his wallet and a crumpled handkerchief on the chest of drawers, the book he had been reading while trying to relax into sleep. I looked, and I saw, and my eyes were as dry and my heart as empty as his bed.

Though tears flowed sporadically in the hours, weeks and months that followed, not until a perfect day in May, sixteen months later, did the enormity of my loss, the anguish of that experience, finally break through the barriers I’d erected, and demand recognition. It was on that day that I knew I had no choice but to pull together the scattered notes and journals, letters and diaries—mine as well as those of my parents—and out of that motley collection, and my memories, piece together one man’s life and death.

After the writing began, I discovered that he did not stand alone, had not lived alone. I knew that already in the back of my mind, but the complex reality of it all came to me only through the subconscious thoughts which moved my fingers, and pressed the keys, so that words appeared on a screen before my eyes. And this became the story of two people. Michael and Maria.

As I wrote, I found the need to look back to the roots from which they sprang, because this explained so much more about them, and the challenges they had faced. But my telling is not chronological because neither is life. It only seems so to that part of us which is earthbound.

As a child, I stood on the sidelines, watched what was going on around me and judged accordingly. Now, as I think back on my parents’ marriage, and try to describe it, music offers a helpful analogy. My unsophisticated ear is attracted by harmony, and what seems to be a natural progression of movement through the life of a piece; the minor keys add notes of challenge, mystery, tension, but overall there is harmony. There is other music which I find atonal and cacophonous. I am filled with foreboding, hear frustration, unrequited longings, unmet needs. And though there may be moments of revelation and delight, the experience is more discordant than harmonious. Try as I will, the deeper subtleties most often escape me. It is this second example that describes what I too often felt. Clearly, my inability to grasp the more complex nuances of their relationship reflects on me, not on my parents. But still, I judged them.

* * *

Michael, this father of ours, was a man who achieved much, and gave happiness to many. There is no question but that he cared deeply for his family, both immediate and extended. I always knew that he loved me, but it wasn’t his nature to show that love in a warm and fuzzy way—not to me at least, and not, I think, to my mother and brothers. From where we stood, he tried to be focused, authoritarian, self-controlled and controlling. Even in the last hour of his life he gave orders and expected compliance. And his offhand disregard for a person’s right to feel differently from himself, in big ways and small, was one more often hurtful response to those who loved him.

With my sister he was in many ways another person. It was as if, on the day she was born, they looked into each other’s eyes and a special bond was instantly forged. She seemed the only one able to disarm him, to allay his fear of being judged soft or weak. Though they fought each other, perhaps even more than did the rest of us put together, though he laughed at her and made her cry, there was always that special bond, that recognition of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and the traits they shared—and above all, their deep, unquestioning love for each other.

And yet…Had I not settled down to this task, I might have forgotten the times when, for my sake, he did let his heart overrule his head.

A case in point: after I wrote to my parents from the States, telling them that my husband and I had separated after sixteen years of marriage—four closely written pages detailing the whys and wherefores—my father telephoned.

All he said was, You will not do this thing. Now here is your mother.

A week later he wrote to me. It was a brief letter, but one sentence read, Never forget that we love you.

Some years later, now divorced, I became inextricably attached to another man and he moved in with me and my children. A year later my parents arranged to come and stay with us for several weeks, so I reminded them of my new situation. In response, my father told me that he wanted to see only myself and the children. But it was important to me that he and my mother meet the man to whom I was now committed, and accept his part in our daily lives. So I ignored his mandate and, in the process, gave their sensibilities scarcely a passing nod.

My father’s anger, when it exploded about me, was born of pain, and shame at my shamelessness.

Has this State no law against moral turpitude? Your children should be taken from you! were his words, even as tears wet his cheeks.

But our fight was private and later he put on a good face and was civil for the sake of my mother and the children.

He couldn’t forget, or bring himself to believe that the things I did were right, but he could forgive, and, after five years or more of my going alone to visit them, he was finally able to tell me that Don and I would both be welcome next time. When we arrived and I stood at the door of the guest room, gazing in astonishment, Mummy whispered that it was Daddy who told her to use her best red satin bedspread, and he who made sure there were flowers from the garden in our room, because he knew how much they would mean to me.

* * *

Maria, our mother, was equally important in our family, and equally capable of exerting influence. She was also equally self-willed and opinionated. But she made few waves, was not a creator of conflict, anger, pain. Her modus operandi was different from Daddy’s; memorable for quiet self-assurance, an innate understanding of the intricacies of any circumstance that might befall any one of us, and absolute faith in God, and the eventual victory of good over evil. I see now that she was the stronger of the two. All Mummy ever wanted was the best for her offspring. She too had her own clear views of right and wrong, but left the argumentation to the rest of us, knowing that there would be plenty of that.

When Daddy handed her the phone, after they received the news of my separation those many years ago, she could only weep as she said, Oh, darling. I’m so sorry! How will you manage?

So the personality of our extended family had at its core the principles of these two people, Maria and Michael, our yin and yang.

* * *

My story of a much-loved, ambitious, family-focused and handsome Irishman and the vivacious, loving, self-assured Italian beauty who became his wife, their very different roots and upbringing, the world in which they made their life together, their impact on their family, and certainly the manner in which each of them left us—these all speak to more than my narrow viewpoint and our small family. Because their story is surely similar in so many respects, to the stories and experiences of a vast multitude of other loving, caring families, immigrant or not.

Part I

One Glorious Day in June

It all started so innocently. How could we ever have guessed that we were witnessing the beginning of the end?

* * *

"Let’s have a fifty-ninth anniversary party for Mummy and Daddy next year, my sister, Leonora, suggested over the phone one frosty Maine morning, as we touched bases across the miles from her home in Bavaria. Let’s not wait for their sixtieth."

There are times when you know instantly that something is right. "Good idea! Let’s."

But let’s not wait ’til December. How about June? she’d added.

And again I agreed. Perfect!

So, from that first sharing, through many more phone calls and letters between Leonora and myself and our brothers Mike and Robert, in England, a special family day came into being.

Which is how it came about that the following June, five of us were staying with our parents, Michael and Maria, in the spacious ground floor flat of the house that had been their home for close to forty years and which my father had converted into apartments once we four offspring were grown and gone. Don and I had arrived from the States a week earlier. Leonora and her husband, Walter, had arrived at mid-week with younger son, Andreas. Their elder son, Micky, and his wife, Christine, had arrived too, were staying nearby and had joined us for tea.

This is splendid! said my father, looking at the smiling group gathered around the tea trays in the garden on that sunny Friday afternoon. We all made appropriate noises and Mummy nodded agreement, her face crinkling with quiet pleasure as she studied each of us in turn. For her, a family gathering was a foretaste of heaven.

I wonder if Mike and Heather could come along on Sunday, Daddy added, but they’re always so busy… He didn’t even mention Robert; he and Theya were usually out of town at weekends.

I’ll phone Mike when we go inside, Leonora offered, and she later told us that he and Heather were free and would come along in time for a late lunch.

Lovely, said Mummy, but we had better think about what to serve.

Don’t worry. Leo and I will take care of everything for a change, I promised. Trust us! And she did—for the moment.

On any other occasion that Leonora or I came to visit, Daddy made all the arrangements for get-togethers and did it well ahead. That was the way it was. But on this visit, we were so engrossed in our plans that we noticed his changed behavior only to the extent of thanking our lucky stars that he seemed, for once, so laid-back.

Later that evening, Mummy again brought up the question of the menu. After a lifetime of shopping, cooking and baking for guests, she was very aware of the absence of preparations in the kitchen. We reassured her, suggesting that we should serve a cold meal since the weekend was going to be quite warm. We would shop for all the meats, salads and desserts on Saturday.

Perhaps you could pick up a big box of sausage rolls at Sainsbury’s, and some of Mr. Kipling’s cakes too—just in case, she suggested, relieved that we were for once willing to take the easy way out.

We agreed that that was a splendid idea and she relaxed.

Of course arrangements were well in hand, and the anticipation of giving Michael and Maria their first-ever surprise party had added an extra dimension to our efforts. We expected that twenty-five to thirty of us would gather on Sunday, for lunch, tea and perhaps even supper, and had agreed to the menu weeks earlier. Leo and Walter had brought along special German foods. Don and I had carried family favorites in our luggage too, including a homemade, traditional two-tier anniversary fruitcake, covered in marzipan and finished with a poured fondant icing of palest pink. Robert would bring smoked salmon, wine and other beverages, while Mike and Heather were responsible for all the refrigerated extras. There would be ample for any eventuality.

Then and Now

I awoke on Sunday morning and lay unmoving between linen bedsheets worn silky soft from decades of laundering. My eyes opened slowly on velvet darkness. Only Don’s steady breathing disturbed the silence. Even the birds slept on. I slipped from between the bed covers, padded across to a window and opened the heavy curtains just enough so that I could look out on the garden. Shafts of pale gold sunlight shot through a sky of softest azure, so that lawn, flowers, shrubs and trees shimmered under a cloak of heavy dew. The tranquil scene soothed my heart, poked fun at the little nudges of apprehension that something—who knew what—would arise to mar our plans. No! This day, selected from all others for a celebration of our parent’s fifty-ninth wedding anniversary, promised to be as perfect as we could wish from June in England. And our parents still had not an inkling of what was in store.

On the chest of drawers in the bedroom Don and I shared on that visit, was a hand-colored photograph of Michael and Maria taken in 1932, the year after they met. Prompted by a sudden urge, I picked it up and carried it to the window. The photo revealed a couple, eye-catching by any standard, about to set off on a sedate stroll along the promenade of the English seaside town where Maria lived with her parents and many siblings; Folkestone, a Kentish town that would always be important to them.

Both were suitably attired, she in a stylish, calf-length frock and matching coat enhanced by hand embroidered panels, silken hose, and elegant shoes whose slender straps buttoned across each instep, he wearing a light tweed sports jacket over shirt and pullover, tie neatly knotted, houndstooth check plus-fours tucked into argyle socks, feet in sturdy brogues. At twenty-eight, Maria was the epitome of Mediterranean beauty. Luminous dark hazel eyes gazed confidently into mine, and I noted the strong, aquiline nose, the full lips, curved and slightly open in a demure smile, the large dimple evident as always in the firm, rounded chin, the deep brown hair fashionably shingled. Yet, even though she held her shapely frame tall, still the top of her head scarcely brushed Michael’s shoulder.

The twenty-five year old Irishman, a Quarter Master Sergeant Instructor in the British army, was the picture of stalwart Celtic manliness. He stood to attention, fair hair close-trimmed, blue eyes piercingly direct as they looked out from under a broad, smooth brow. He was slim and good looking, his nose short and straight, his mouth firm, unsmiling yet not unfriendly.

Studying that photograph in the soft glow of early morning, I realized for the first time that they were always a couple. It was their destiny. They overcame obstacles, married, and stayed married, not because it was the easy thing to do but because it was the right thing to do. And they were both committed to doing the right thing. As I looked, it was as if blinders fell from my eyes. For the first time, I was able to see them, not as my parents, an upright, God-fearing, middle-class British couple caught in a time warp of my making, but as two young people, infinitely dissimilar in heritage and upbringing, drawn together—against the better judgment of themselves and their families—by that indefinable energizer we call love.

Determined to build a fine English family, but with no blueprint from which to work, they role-played to the hilt, and succeeded. And, as their first born, I introduced those parents to one trial after another, in my struggle to grow up and assert my independence; and they too struggled, not only with me, but to adapt to an alien culture and a changing world. When I was young, it occurred to me from time to time that, even though they acted with assurance in deciding the rights and wrongs of every situation, they were in reality both feeling their way through each event. But my fleeting thoughts on the subject were only that, and argue as I might, my father most always had the last word.

I returned the photograph to the chest of drawers, collected my still-languorous body about me and headed for the bathroom. Lying back comfortably in the oversized, footed tub while the rest of the household slept on, my mind went again to my parents, not circa 1931, but as they were now, sixty-one years later, Maria aged eighty-eight, Michael eighty-five.

My father’s hypertension had been diagnosed in his late forties but medication kept it in check. In his seventies, a circulatory problem caused his feet and calves to cramp whenever he walked, but he insisted that this was not sufficient reason to stop so healthy an exercise, and daily forced his legs and feet to walk, as briskly as every painful step would allow. We had noticed of late that he became quite breathless when gardening, or working on the constant stream of house renovations he took upon himself, but, It’s nothing, he assured us. And I for one chided myself for expecting him to remain forever tireless and youthful.

My mother had lived with Parkinson’s disease since she was seventy-five, but was one of the lucky ones whom medication helped. The visible symptoms were typical, and worst when she was tired; a little unsteadiness, a tendency to slip sideways in her chair and then be unaware that she was lopsided, occasional difficulty swallowing, a droop to the right corner of her mouth.

She had never driven a car and, wherever we’d lived, enjoyed walking to the shops, with the option of catching a bus home if she were heavily laden. Though Daddy was always willing to drive her there and back, she preferred not to be part of his schedule, preferred not to hear "I’ll pick you up on this corner in twenty-five minutes, Maria. Don’t be late."

Getting out of the house, taking her own sweet time, being in the midst of hustle and bustle, seeing other faces, stopping for a chat, these had always been tonics for her. And though she had developed quite a stoop in recent years, she had continued to make the half mile trek along the wide, shady sidewalks, three or four times a week, pushing her wheeled wicker shopping basket slowly before her, using it as a stabilizer.

These outings were not incident-free. Once she had tripped, fallen heavily, gashed her knee and bruised her nose. Another time a young thug accosted her, knocked her to the ground with one vicious blow, and made off with her handbag and the weekly pension she had just collected from the post office. But her dread of not being able to come and go at will was greater than her fear of old age and its attendant challenges, and she continued the shopping expeditions.

Just a few weeks prior to this lovely June day however, her back developed a pronounced hunch which she could not straighten. The doctor came and had a look and tests confirmed that a vertebra in her spine had collapsed. Nothing could be done. The lone outings were over. The silent but relentless advance of osteoporosis had claimed another victim. From that day on, our alert and determined mother moved at a snail’s pace and even then only with discomfort, or pain.

Over the years, we four siblings had often remarked on how blessed we were, with two relatively healthy parents who enjoyed their independence. Now, a collapsed vertebra was to compromise that life style and, by one of those strange quirks of fate, our family was gathering and would observe, commiserate, and consider for the first time the possibility that our parents might soon need some support.

I lay in the cooling bath water and thought on how this painful fact had been brought home to me since my arrival. I’m a homebody, one of the Marthas of this world who instinctively gravitate to the kitchen, anybody’s kitchen, to help out, or just reconnoiter, as the occasion allows. But my parents’ kitchen had always been off limits to me. I had always been required to negotiate my way there, usually to the remonstrations of my father.

"Dar-ling! What are you doing in here?"

He always said the same thing, and always said it as if for the first time, and as if that kitchen were some totally unseemly place upon which I had stumbled. A Bluebeard’s den, rather than just a modest and minimally equipped old kitchen.

During this stay though, a strange thing had happened. After the fond exchange of greetings with my parents, whom I hadn’t seen for nine months, I suggested coffee for everyone and disappeared into the kitchen. Not a word was said. When time for lunch preparation arrived, the same thing happened. And again, at teatime and suppertime.

The following day after breakfast, having heard no comments other than complimentary noises at each meal, I said to my father, I’m having such a good time this visit, I think I’ll come back in January and do it all over again!

He looked at me a moment, over the top of his eyeglasses, as if he thought I was being sarcastic, then said, "I don’t mind getting breakfast. Or lunch. But I hate having to cook supper."

Nothing more. Just a bald statement of fact.

His words stunned me. Why are you doing all that? What happened?

What had happened was that they were sitting in the sun porch