"Marriages are made in Heaven; but some of the parts get assembled in Hell." Swede Johnson.
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Tolstoy once said: "Every happy family is boring in the same way; every unhappy family is funny in a different way." That was Sol Tolstoy, by the way, who ran The Dime Store down on Como Avenue where I regularly stole penny candy and red plastic bottles of bubble blowing soap.
Hardened criminal that I was, I had little time to give heed to my step-brother Leonard's unhappy marital affairs while I was growing up. Leonard was 20 years older than me; he had the same mother as me, but not the same father. And that's all I knew about the matter until after my mom's funeral, when my older brother Billy filled me in on some of the sordid details about mom's first and very brief marriage.
Leonard was the fruit of that initial compressed affair, and he was a giant. He was over six foot by the time he was in tenth grade, according to Billy, and by the time he started eleventh grade at Edison High School he had not only whipped every bully in school, but a goodly portion of the male teaching staff and several truant officers who got cheeky with him. Believing his horizons were rather limited vis-a-vis education, he lied about his age and enlisted in the Marines.
All this happened before I was much of a sentient being, and so my exposure to him occurred when he was home on leave from wherever the Marines had him posted -- usually overseas in Germany, Korea, or Vietnam. I still fondly recall the cheap Black Forest cuckoo clock he brought me from one of his furloughs in Germany. I could never get it to work properly, so dismantled it and carried the cuckoo bellows around with me, using them as accompaniment while I whistled Laurel & Hardy's theme song to all and sundry.
I was a hateful child, that way. My sisters would not acknowledge their relationship to me in high school because of that peculiarity (among many others).
It seemed to me that Leonard had a different wife every time he came to visit us.
The first one I remember was a towering Aryan blonde who guzzled beer in a manner that impressed my dad -- no mean toper himself. She gave me many beery hugs the short time she was among us, and pestered Leonard constantly to buy her a dachshund.
We called her Betty, although I don't believe that was her name.
When it was time for Leonard to go back to Germany, we discovered that he intended to leave Betty behind, in her own apartment around the corner, for mom to take under her wing so she could become 'Americanized'.
I was there at the painful denouement of this miscalculation.
"You'll have to find someone else to babysit her!" mom said emphatically to Leonard. "I've got enough on my hands with these little marmots of my own!"
Dad was even more direct. He minced no words, right in front of Betty -- who assumed a wooden expression and attitude not unlike the little painted hoyden on my Black Forest cuckoo clock.
"You can't leave that Kraut broad here -- she'll be two-timing you before you can say 'pretzel'!" he declared.
And so Betty went back with Leonard to Germany. We never saw her again.
The next time Leonard came to visit the old homestead he had an American bride in tow. She was also tall, almost as tall as Leonard -- who by now was nearly 7 foot. When he went into our dinning room he had to duck in order to miss grazing the chrome and plexiglass chandelier that hovered over the dinner table like a B movie flying saucer.
Her name was Belle Ami, which, she told us, meant 'Good Pals'. She was from Little Rock, Arkansas, and had a drawl that could flavor gumbo.
She and my mother immediately hit it off like white phosphorus and oxygen.
I cannot quote any dialogue from memory, nor indeed make up anything using artistic license, because all I remember are enraged screams from the both of them, and a string of profanities on the part of Belle Ami that made my tender ears vibrate as if they were timpani during a performance of the 1812 Overture.
Leonard was always cowed by mom -- even during her most pacific moments. So Belle Ami was bundled back off to Little Rock while Leonard finished his furlough with us as an imminent bachelor.
It was about two years before Leonard came calling again. This time he never made it past the front porch with his new bride.
She was Vietnamese, and mom would not, could not, let her in the house.
It was December, just before Christmas, and bitterly cold. But none of that mattered to mom, who kept muttering "Jamais dans ma maison!" in her hoarse French-Canadian.
She did not even open the door for them.
I felt so very sad for the two of them, especially the little wisp of a girl bundled up in woolen coats and sweaters leaning on Leonard's side. Luckily the cab they had come in was waiting for them (because, I guess, Leonard already knew what the outcome was likely to be), and so they trudged back down the white-rimed sidewalk and were driven away.
The very last wife Leonard brought around before lapsing into a sullen and permanent bachelorhood was Mormon.
To my mom, a staunch, Roman Catholic, this was almost as bad as the Vietnamese girl.
But since she was white and looked rather demure, she and Leonard were admitted into our cozy little home on 19th Avenue Southeast, and mom did her best not to overtly show her complete disdain of the LDS 'cult'.
Dad, on the other hand, had no use for people who didn't like to take a snort. He didn't bother to come home for the dinner the rest of us sat down to with Sally. She was bright and cheerful and seemed genuinely attached to Leonard, that poor biddable behemoth. She told us about growing up in Utah, how her farmer grandfather would 'tithe' a tenth of his cabbages and eggs and bacon to take to the Bishop's Storehouse. She looked and sounded perfectly normal, and I could see my mother visibly begin to soften towards her.
But she brought with her an evil-eyed little boy, about my age. His name was Snow. He came from a previous marriage ( a 'Temple' marriage, Snow emphasized to me, which meant nothing to me at the time) and had a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount Rushmore.
I hated him immediately, and he returned the compliment with interest. After dinner we went outside and instantly started throwing rocks at each other until one of the stone missiles inevitably went through a living room window. The blame for this dismal accident was firmly attached to me. I was sent to my room as Snow smirked. I would love to say it was his stone that broke the window, but at this late date I cannot recall which one of us actually did it. But I feel certain that morally he was more in the wrong than I was.
After this episode I did not see Leonard again for many years, after he had left the Marines with a solid pension and bought a house in Nordeast Minneapolis. This was just before I left to go to Florida to try my luck as a circus clown.
"Where's that Mormon wife of yours?" I asked him.
"She left me years ago" he said slowly. "She got my gun collection and sold it to some pawnshops.
"Damn those greedy Mormons" I thought to myself. "That's one crazy religion I'll never have anything to do with!"
For at the time I was troubled by angels I couldn't see and couldn't hear -- but wanted to, desperately. So I was looking for some kind of belief system beyond my mom's tepid Roman Catholicism.
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