The Temptation of Evelyn Gagne

My mother: Evelyn Marie Gagne

In 1933 my Aunt Ruby ran away with a sailor, according to her sister, my mother. Ruby met this nameless pirate while he was on leave from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station just outside of Chicago. Ruby was a willowy and winsome 19 -- just barely of legal age. But my grandmother Daisy was determined to nip these nautical nuptials in the bud, so she used her meager savings to board a bus to Chicago to track down the miscreants and have the marriage annulled. She succeeded in doing so, and brought Ruby back home, safe and relatively sound. But while she was gone my mother was left to her own devices -- and the devil came calling.

The devil, in this case, being her estranged father Joseph Philippe Gagne. Soon after my mother was born Joseph took off for parts unknown and never came back. He had some wealth and apparently increased it in the intervening years, for when he appeared at my mother’s drab doorstep in ‘Nordeast’ Minneapolis he was nattily attired, with a diamond pinky ring and pearl buttoned spats. He drove a brand new LaSalle. And according to my mother he never supported his bride and young children whatsoever after he deserted them -- leaving the three of them to sink lower and lower into mortifying poverty as the Great Depression continued to throttle the country.

My mother says he was suave and persuasive, which is why she did not shut the door in his face once he identified himself. He invited himself in, dusted off a rickety wooden chair with his silk handkerchief, and sat down to immediately begin enticing my mother to come back with him to his comfortable apartment located along the Gold Coast of Chicago.  

He offered no apologies for his heartless behavior and neglect. All he wanted, he said, was to take his daughter Evelyn away from her poverty-blasted situation and introduce her to something better, much better, in Chicago. Would she come for a summer visit and then consider staying on with him indefinitely?

Mom looked around the cramped and shabby room that she and her sister and her mother called home, with its warped linoleum floor, single gas ring for cooking, peeling wallpaper, and meter that took dimes in exchange for the cooking and heating gas. She agreed to go back with him, but only if he would leave her mother some money. He gave her fifty dollars from his calfskin wallet, which mom put in an envelope along with a brief explanation of where she had gone and left it on the gateleg kitchen table. Then she packed her modest belongings in a cardboard suitcase and left with her father for Chicago.

I never got this story in one whole chunk from my mother. Rather, she let it out in dribs and drabs during my childhood years -- usually after dad had blown a sizable wad at Canterbury Downs or in a pinochle game. At such moments she would sit down on the salt and pepper  corduroy couch in the living room to fan herself with a copy of Good Housekeeping, while recalling briefly and bitterly that one magical summer of luxury with her father in Chicago.

He took her to Marshall Field’s State Street store, where she gaped at the Tiffany Favrile glass ceiling. He bought her dresses made of such smooth and soft material that they fell about her young shoulders and clung to her body like a shower of warm water. He let her pick out a delicate bracelet of turquoise -- her birthstone. There were endless bags of Frango Mints.

Along with his elegant wife, a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl (whose name my mother could never bring herself to pronounce), they dined regularly at the Stock Yark Inn on Halstead -- feasting on thick cut steaks and pork chops so exuberantly juicy that each diner was supplied with a starched white bib the size of a small tablecloth.

They went dancing at the Trianon Ballroom near the University of Chicago campus, where bands like the Hotsy Totsy Gang were experimenting with Swing.

And Evelyn’s father made her a promise: If she decided to stay on in Chicago he would finance her education at the University of Chicago in any field she chose. (Mom was an outstanding student at Edison High School back in Minneapolis; she had even written the school song that was used until 1940.) She could have her own apartment, her own car, plus a generous allowance. All she had to do was stay in Chicago. In other words, my mother explained to me years later, she was to promise to abandon her mother and her sister back in Minneapolis.

Her mother, of course, had responded immediately to mom’s note the minute she got home with Ruby. She simply wrote that it was good of Joe to take her in for the summer, and that the fifty dollars was a godsend to help stave off neighborhood creditors. She hoped Evelyn was well and looked forward to her return in the fall.

What mom read between the lines, apparently, was that her mother was terrified of losing her daughter like she had lost her husband years before. As tempting as her father’s offer was, mom opted to take the bus back to Minneapolis at the end of August -- and never saw or heard from her father again.

Once back in that cramped and musty room with her mother and sister, mom took a six month secretarial class at the Minneapolis Business College, working in a bakery to pay for it. But there were no secretary jobs to be had after she graduated, and so she remained at the bakery for the next several years until she met dad and they were married. She already had a son, my half brother Leonard, from a previous and very brief misalliance, who dad grudgingly agreed to support, but not adopt. Mom then left the bakery and stayed a homemaker for the rest of her life. She eventually persuaded dad to invest in a mortgage on a three bedroom house in Southeast Minneapolis, where I grew up, and where she lived for over forty years.

I think mom eventually came to have some regrets about her decision during that summer in Chicago. But she never changed her opinion of her father -- he was a reprobate. I’ve come to wonder, though, having lost my family in a bitter divorce and then been estranged from my own children for nearly 20 years, what really happened between Joseph Philippe Gagne and Daisy Ellen Bedelle all those long years ago. Was it an open and shut case of desertion and neglect -- or were there other factors that I never heard about? As I recall and record these bits and pieces of family narrative, I’m hoping to get a better understanding of these, to me, mythic figures from my past. To maybe grant them some of the sympathy they appear to have been denied during their brief stumble across the arena of life . . .