A Broken Tree Page 12

  I have always wondered why Linda felt such a tremendous need to create this alternate reality; apparently she had done this all her life. When I spoke with her sisters, they all agreed that they never trusted anything she said. I’m not a psychiatrist, so I don’t understand all of the coping mechanisms people create to help them deal with life, but I know enough to wonder if anyone really knew who the real Linda was. In fact, I wonder if she even knew. We only knew the person that Linda herself presented to us as her true self.

  Linda couldn’t tolerate anyone challenging her authority or questioning her integrity. This became a very big problem for her. When anyone distorts the truth with the vigor and zeal that Linda did, sooner or later, people will call them on it. I knew people who questioned her claims and sometimes even insinuated that she was lying about something. These encounters brought out the worst in her. She would say terrible things to anyone who confronted her, often physically lashing out at them. The possibility of a physical confrontation wasn’t the worst; it was her ability to eviscerate someone with her words that was the most frightening thing to witness. Sometimes the verbal assault would be an outright attack on the person’s character, using words and a fierce tone that would make even the most seasoned sailor cringe. At other times, she would use calmly spoken statements of fact and insinuations that left you feeling like you had just been verbally gut-punched. It was amazing to see how adept she was at doing this. She had no qualms about using whatever it took to prove herself right, no matter how wrong she might be. Simply put, Linda was never wrong—at least, not in her eyes!

  Linda came from an affluent family. Her parents were upper-middle-class and lived a good, comfortable life. They were considered stalwart citizens of our community and were very well

  respected. Her father owned half of the family business that had been started by his father and his uncle. When my mother was young, and while his father and uncle were still alive, Linda’s father was a salesman for the company and spent much of his time on the road, leaving her mother at home alone to care for several young children.

  Linda’s mother came from an affluent family, as well—even more affluent than her father’s family. She grew up in the South, where tradition and social status ruled the affairs of the wealthy. Linda’s grandfather was a very successful lawyer in Georgia and served in the Georgia state legislature. Linda’s mother had one brother, also a successful lawyer. Her mom’s parents both came from respected and affluent Southern families. Her family had hired help to take care of the children’s needs when they were young. Their servants also took care of all the housework and the work around the large farm. Before the Civil War, they had had slaves. After the Civil War, the slaves were freed, but they still worked for my grandmother’s family. Because of that, Grandma never needed to work and, as such, never learned how to keep house, cook, or master any of the other domestic skills that young women of that era typically learned in preparation for marriage. She was in no way prepared for the challenges of raising a family of six children, mostly by herself, and didn’t know how to deal with their emotional and material needs.

  From my grandmother’s wedding journal, I learned that my grandparents never met before their wedding day; theirs was an arranged marriage. Reading some of Grandma’s writings, I found that she was quite apprehensive about a Southern belle like her marrying this boy from the North. But once she saw him, she liked how handsome he was and felt better about the arrangement. This was how my grandparents started their marriage: two kids from affluent families who’d never met before getting married. On top of that, neither of them had any of the skills necessary to raise a family of their own.

  From what I can piece together from stories shared by my mom and my aunts, I’m pretty sure their father was rarely at home. He was on the road during the week and only spent weekends at home. Because of this schedule, Grandpa didn’t spend a lot of time with his own kids. On the weekends, Mom’s parents were both involved with community affairs, or they would go out and spend time with friends. It’s possible that the absence of her father left a mark on my mom.

  All of this being said, I must say that Linda did have her good side. I honestly have many memories of good times spent with my mom. She often treated me to lunch, frequently urging me to believe in myself. She also spent hours talking with me about family members from Georgia, sharing wonderful stories about their exploits. My brothers and sisters always said that Mom liked me best. This used to irritate me no end, but eventually I came to believe that it was true. I’m not sure why she treated me so well, or perhaps, a bit better than the others. Because of this, I probably have more good memories of Mom than my siblings do. Yes, I saw her mean side more times than I care to admit, but I also saw that Mom could be tender and supportive, something most people rarely got a chance to see.

  All in all, my siblings and I have mixed feelings about our mom. She was a complex person. Starting around the time of the pig incident, and up to the day of her death, my brother Neil would have nothing to do with Mom. This wasn’t just because he’d found out that she had conceived him with another man. Neil always had a rocky relationship with Mom, and was often at the receiving end of her pettiness. I think learning about her relationship with his biological father simply reaffirmed his feelings of contempt for her.

  Judy and Gloria haven’t said much about how they feel about Mom, considering all that we’ve discovered over the past few years. I think what made it especially hard for them was that initially Mom couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell them who their biological fathers were. We weren’t sure at the time if she even knew who they were. After all, when Gloria confronted Mom about it, she was ninety-two years old. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that she could have forgotten after so many years. When we finally discovered that Holly, Judy, and Gloria were full sisters, and all children of Sam, her former fiancé, we concluded that Mom must have known all along that he was their father. Regardless, it must have been terribly difficult for Judy and Gloria during the year between when Mom gave them the false names and the time they finally learned who their real biological father was.

  My oldest sister, Holly, managed Mom’s affairs for more than twenty years before Holly died. Holly played an important role in taking care of Mom and her affairs from a very young age. I believe this is how Holly learned so many secrets over the years, before any of the rest of us knew. Either she didn’t feel they should be passed on to us, or maybe Mom swore her to secrecy until after her own passing. Whatever the case, Holly didn’t reveal anything before she died.

  Paul and Diane had a tough time with Mom during their teen years and much of their adult lives. They struggled with their own issues, as we all did, and never felt like they could go to Mom for comfort or any kind of parental support.

  While he never had a close relationship with Mom, Paul was amazingly devoted to Mark during the last few years of our dad’s life, dropping in to visit him every evening for the last three years of Mark’s life, to check on him and share time together. (After twenty-five years of marriage, my parents had finally gotten a divorce and lived separately.) During this time, Paul and Mark became very close—they had a lot in common, including a shared military history—while the gap between Mom and Paul grew wider. Mark’s death was hard on Paul.

  When Mom told me that Paul was fathered by another man, I discussed it with Gloria. We decided that no good would come from telling Paul that Mark was not his biological father. We didn’t want to do anything to ruin their last years together—although I knew Paul well enough to know that if he’d ever found out that Mark was not his biological father, he still would have considered Mark his one and only dad.

  I think Mom was angry that Paul didn’t stop in and spend time with her, like he did with Mark, even though they lived only a few miles apart. Before Paul passed away from cancer, he told me that he’d met with Mom to tell her he’d forgiven her for all the bad things she had done to him. I was glad to hear he was finally able
to let go of his negative feelings toward her and live the last few weeks of his life without the anger and hatred.

  When Diane discovered that she was not Mark’s daughter, she went through many of the same emotions I went through. However, she was already carrying a lot of anger toward Mom to begin with. Mom did some terrible things to Diane throughout her life. I talked with Diane about the possibility that perhaps Mom had suffered some abuse during her childhood, or struggled with mental illness. Diane didn’t want to consider these possibilities; she was convinced that Mom was simply an evil person, plain and simple.

  Tim doesn’t have a lot of respect for Mom. The two of them disagreed on a lot of issues over the years. When my parents got divorced, Mark refused to talk trash about Mom. Instead, he was mindful of supporting us through the divorce. Mom could see that the three youngest kids still loved Mark, and she seemed threatened by that love—as if we were capable of loving only one parent, not both. To help tip our allegiance toward her, she often spoke badly about Mark, saying he was trying to thwart her efforts to provide for us. It was painfully obvious to all of us what she was doing, and we knew what she was telling us wasn’t true, but Mom wouldn’t let up.

  This was the wrong thing to do, especially in Tim’s eyes. Tim had Mark on a pedestal. While he knew Mark wasn’t perfect—not by a long shot—he also knew that our dad really cared and wanted only the best for us. So, the more Mom spoke badly about Mark, the more she drove Tim away. In the end, Tim could see what Mom was about, and learning of her infidelities only reaffirmed what he already knew. I think to him these are just more “Mom stories,” that end with him rolling his eyes and saying, “Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me.”

  By the time Mom died, she had done enough unkind things to Carlee to break any close ties they may have had. Toward the end of her life, I don’t think Mom really felt a need to try and be pleasant or to make amends with anyone. She simply gave up trying. She knew that she had hurt a lot of people during her lifetime, and once said to me that it was too late to make things right. Carlee and Mom had a fairly good relationship throughout much of Carlee’s life, but in her last years, Mom was in enough physical and emotional discomfort that she just quit caring and started talking mean to Carlee, which only drove her away, too. When I asked Carlee how she felt about Mom after all we’ve discovered in recent years, she didn’t seem to have a strong opinion one way or another. “That’s Mom,” she said. “What can you expect?”

  As you can see, these revelations about our mother’s activities have affected each of us in different ways. Some simply don’t care; others don’t seem overly surprised. And still others feel a great sense of betrayal. How we have responded has a lot to do with each of our individual relationships with Mom.

  In the end, Mom knew she had hurt a lot of people throughout her life. During one of our talks a few months before she died, Mom said, “Steve, I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life. You don’t even know the half of it. Things aren’t going to be good for me when I die. Do you still love me?”

  Enough time had passed since I’d first learned the truth about my biological father that I was able to tell her that I still loved her. She was glad to hear it, saying that at least there might be one person left to speak in her defense after she was gone. I was sad for her, to realize that in her mind, her legacy was so dark.

  How have these revelations affected your feelings about Mark Anderson?

  The more I learn about Mark, the more I am amazed by him. Let me say right up front that he wasn’t perfect. I doubt that he would ever be a serious contender for Father of the Year. He drank heavily; for more than thirty years, he was a full-fledged alcoholic. Why he and my mother ever got married is beyond me. They weren’t good for each other.

  I once asked Mom why she’d married Mark. She told me that she’d married him because he was dashingly handsome. Apparently, many of the other women in the area thought the same thing. She was not alone in vying for Mark’s attention, taking every chance she could to be out and about, holding hands, walking side by side with Mark. She thought it quite the accomplishment to have other women seeing her with such a good-looking guy. He was what some today would consider a “trophy husband.”

  Mark grew up in a good farming family that took hard work and religion seriously. Although he honestly tried to enjoy farm life, he never learned to love it like his brothers did. It just wasn’t in his blood to be a farmer. After he graduated from high school, he moved to a nearby city to go to college. It was his mother’s big dream to have one of her sons earn a college degree, so arrangements were made for him to live with an aunt in the city so he could attend classes. That didn’t work out. Mark said the aunt was old and mean, strict as a Puritan preacher; she told Mark she wouldn’t put up with any shenanigans just because he was going to be a college boy. After just one day, he dropped out of college and walked more than twenty-two miles back to the farm to break the news to his mother.

  After his college fiasco, he decided the military was the next best option for him. World War II was heating up, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he would be drafted. He thought he’d have a better chance of choosing what he wanted to do if he signed up with the army. He spent the next four years serving in Texas and, later, in Europe, outfitting new enlisted men.

  After he came back from the war, he decided to go into sales. In fact, he was quite a talented salesman and loved the work. I remember one of his friends telling me that Mark Anderson could sell anything to anyone. He tried many times to convince me that I should try and find a job in sales, saying that if I got good enough at it, the commissions could make me a rich man. But I never had his gift; he loved people, and it showed.

  Mark was a very nice person, the kind of guy everyone liked. I can’t think of a single person who didn’t like Mark. From what I’ve learned from some of his buddies, he knew how to fight and wasn’t afraid to do so, but he rarely had to resort to violence. He was smart enough to talk his way out of a fight, and in the end, they’d be buying each other drinks.

  Looking back on my parents’ twenty-five-year marriage, I can’t figure out for the life of me how they were able to stay married for so long. Maybe it was because Dad was on the road so much, away from Mom five days a week; spending just two days a week together wasn’t too bad. Divorce still had a stigma attached to it back then. In a town like ours, being divorced was like wearing a big scarlet letter, bringing shame to you and your family. This would have been a heavy burden for both families to bear, especially for Mom’s father, who owned one of the biggest businesses in town. I’m sure they put off the divorce as long as they could.

  I am amazed that Mark never said anything about what he might have known about these matters. If he were still alive today, I doubt he’d allow me to ask him any questions. For some reason, he was quite protective of Mom. Once when I was a teenager and angry at Mom for some reason, I said something to Mark about how impossible and unreasonable she was being. He made it clear to me that I was never to talk about my mother that way. When I think about all the things she said about Mark and the way she treated him, his reprimand doesn’t make any sense to me. For some reason, he thought it was important that I treat her well and respect her as my mother.

  We were never sure how much Mark knew about Mom’s affairs, but it seems reasonable to think he knew something. Regardless of how much he knew, he loved us and he showed it, especially to the last three kids. I’m sure this was not an easy thing to do at times.

  How do you feel about genetic testing?

  This experience with my family’s DNA story has helped me to see DNA testing as a remarkable tool for family history research. It has come a long way from when it was used primarily to resolve paternity suits in previous decades. As it becomes more refined and costs come down even more, and as companies continue to build up their databases of test subjects, we’re going to see the science of DNA dramatically change the dynamics of the family, past, present,
and future.

  In my own case, genetic testing has proven that Mark Anderson was not the biological father of any of the children he raised, which was something none of us ever considered even remotely possible until just recently. It also helped us discover who our real biological fathers were. (Two siblings have yet to connect to descendants of their biological fathers.) This is huge for us. Our mother was either unable to remember or chose to hide the identities of our biological fathers. Were it not for DNA testing kits, we may never have discovered this information. Most people want to know whose genes run through their blood; it provides a sense of identity we all need and want. Matching one’s DNA with someone else’s helps to connect people who might never have been able to connect before.

  The easy and inexpensive access to DNA testing has the very real possibility of creating discoveries that are simultaneously wonderful and very uncomfortable. Let me give you a couple of examples of what I mean.

  Mark once told me that when he was in Europe during World War II, many men in his company thought they would never return home alive. It wasn’t uncommon for soldiers who thought they were going to die to throw caution to the wind and indulge in all of their natural human desires. Dad said that when men from his unit (and thousands of other units like his, I’m sure) were given leave to go into town for a weekend, they got good and drunk and had sex with as many women as they could. Most of them figured it wouldn’t make any difference, since they were probably going to die. Birth control was not easily available for many of these men, so there was an exceptionally high risk they’d be getting these women pregnant. It didn’t matter to them. If they died, there would be no consequences. If they lived, no one back home would ever know what they’d done. They would leave whatever country they were in and return home, leaving no contact information for anyone to get ahold of them after the war. Mark also mentioned that some of the unmarried men felt badly that they might die without fathering a child. For these men, it was their intention to get a woman pregnant—in some cases, as many women as possible—in an effort to achieve some sense of immortality by leaving behind a “genetic legacy” to ensure that their genes would be passed on to future generations.