SEPTEMBER 17, 2023 – It was one of the few times in modernity that our immediate family—Mother, Dad, Nina, Elsa, Jenny, and I—were together. The place was Jenny and Garrison’ elegant home in St. Paul, a million miles from 42 Baghdad Street. The occasion was Mother and Dad’s 60th anniversary. We’d celebrated their 50th in splashier fashion—two years after Gaga had died and two years before the Great Fire. UB didn’t attend either event, though he had no reason not to. He was free to come and go as he pleased, and after all, he’d been Dad’s best man at the big fancy wedding in Rutherford in 1946—so big and fancy, Dad’s parents chose not to attend despite the fact that Dad was their only child.[1]
Given the joyous reason for our modest gathering—16 people in all—everyone was in a good mood. Almost everyone. Mother’s bipolar boat was heeling toward depression. For much of the affair she was withdrawn, despite being in the company of one of her oldest and dearest friends, Mary Ibele, and Mary’s amiable husband Warren[2]. Mother managed to pull herself together to render a touching, emblematic anecdote about her and Dad’s courtship, but otherwise, she muddled around in darker waters. At one point, while conversing laconically with Mary and me, Mother said, “Two heads are better than one—except when they’re on the same neck.” When I laughed, she said, “Oh, that sounded awful didn’t it. I apologize.” Mary, once of the kindest people ever to walk the face of the earth, opened her mouth as if to say something but nothing emerged except a silent, “O-h-h.”
Later Jenny informed me that within Mother’s keen earshot, Jenny had been on the phone with Dean, Nina’s husband, who was back in Boston. When Dean asked if Garrison was home for the party and Jenny said he was “on the road with A Prairie Home Companion—Dallas, New Orleans, Chicago,” Mother tapped her finger hard against her lips while giving Jenny a stern look. It was part of a years-running distortion in Mother’s thinking about Garrison: she chastised any family member who divulged entirely public information about his tour schedule, especially over the phone. Telling Mother that her concern was ill-founded if not blatantly “crazy” had no effect whatsoever: she was certain “Garrison’s enemies” were listening to our phone calls and plotting to do him harm.
The more formal celebration at the grand house on Summit Avenue in St. Paul was followed the next day by informal lunch gathering of just the six of us—my parents, sisters, and I—at Mother and Dad’s comfortable home in Anoka, still a million (plus 25) miles from 42 Baghdad Street. At the time Mother’s boat was on a more even keel, and we all found humor and delight in sharing reminiscences.
* * *
Lower blood pressure can be achieved by focusing on the positive—even the positive of the negative. That belief informed my embrace of the positive in UB’s crashing the party: he did so after the party had ended. He didn’t crash the party physically but by way of a phone call to Mother a few hours after I’d returned to my office.
Alarmed, Nina alerted me immediately after UB’s call. He had dropped a bombshell over the phone line—first on Mother and again on Nina, after Mother had handed off the phone. Alex was soon flying to New York, and he and UB would be staying at the cove house in Hamburg.
I needed no reminder of my recent letter to Alex, a copy of which had found its way immediately to UB. If UB had sought to declare war on the family, he couldn’t have done so in any clearer terms. This was no pistol shot. It was Pearl Harbor, and the casus belli was my indelicate letter to Alex directing him in no uncertain terms to end his relationship with UB.
According to Nina, Dad had “blown up” over UB’s call and was otherwise “thoroughly furious” over UB’s behavior. I asked her if she thought I should return to Anoka to confer and she said yes, so 40 minutes I pulled into the driveway in Anoka.
The initial firestorm unleashed by UB’s call had subsided, allowing for earnest discussion about how we should respond. Mother was less engaged than were Dad, Nina, and I, and Elsa, who conferred with Nina by phone while I consulted with Cliff, whom I called several times in the course of our family’s emergency meeting.
My earlier stance regarding the inadvisability of pursuing a guardianship or conservatorship had been overtaken by events—or more accurately, by my having sent (inadvisability), my provocative letter to Alex. The consensus was now that we had no choice but to pursue legal remedies.
When I informed Cliff that we were unanimous in wanting him as UB’s guardian, he laughed and said, “I’m already his guardian, so what really changes?”
If a guardianship could cut off communication between UB and Alex, it would be a conservatorship that would turn off the money spigot to London and prevent UB from giving away (or selling) real estate in Connecticut and New Jersey.
Mother wasn’t quite with the program—the one now backed by everyone else in the family. But then again, given her unstable mental condition in recent days, she wasn’t with any alternative program either—except prayer.
“Can someone offer a spontaneous prayer?” she asked out of nowhere.
Initially her appeal was greeted by silence. I broke it by saying, “I’m not feeling particularly spontaneous.” Quiet returned, as no one else volunteered to answer Mother.[3]
My three-page journal entry for that day ended with the following summation:
I felt sorry that Nina’s [rare visit to Minnesota] on such a happy occasion as Mother and Dad’s 60th anniversary had been marred by such ugly business, but maybe it’s best that all of this [about UB] is out in the open now.
It was a case of finding the positive in the negative. But we had no idea how far we had yet to go.
Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
[1] Why my Nilsson grandparents did not attend is one of the great mysteries of our family history. Though my two sets of Grandparents were never close, by the same token there was never any animus between them. I suspect that “Ga” and Grandpa Nilsson were intimidated somehow by the Holman’s wealth—Grandpa Nilsson once said to me almost apologetically, “I’m not wealthy like your grandpa Holman”—but this didn’t fully explain the decision not to attend, since “Ga” had worked for one of the wealthiest and most aristocratic families of Minneapolis. Likewise, she had a benefactress who was the daughter of very wealthy parents. Having spent considerable time among the upper class, “Ga” had adopted their refinements quite elegantly and convincingly. Though I’m not sure he had even a high school diploma, Grandpa Nilsson was a professional violinist, knew much about fine art, was a dapper dresser, and had no reason to feel inferior in the presence of Grandpa Holman, who didn’t know how to pronounce “Mozart” . . . despite an Ivy League education.
[2] The Ibeles were much loved by us Nilssons. Mary and Mother had met in graduate school at the University of Minnesota before Mother and Dad were married. Every year during our childhood, our families would get together at Christmas (at the Ibeles) and in mid-summer (our backyard). Warren was a professor and Dean of the Institute of Technology at the University and always so kind and amiable toward us kids. On this particular occasion—the 60th anniversary party—he told a fascinating story about his interaction with the CIA around the time of his academic-exchange visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1963 (that Christmas he’d tantalized us with a slide show that I’ll never forget). CIA agents had contacted Warren and wanted to meet with him before his travels. Warren astutely said he’d meet with them after but not before the trip. The agents agreed. When he returned, they asked such simple questions as, “What was available for sale at the markets?” It was during this encounter with Warren that I learned he’d been a submariner during World War II. That fact certainly squared with his engineering background but hardly with his personality. As a footnote to this footnote, Erik, the oldest of the four Ibele kids—brainiacs, all of them—had been assigned to Afghanistan while in the Peace Corps, long before the ascent of the Taliban. He became so proficient at Pashtun, his wife (also in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan) had told Mary that locals mistook Erik for a native speaker, despite his Norwegian appearance. After 9-11, when the supply of American Pashtun speakers fell abysmally short of the high demand among government intelligence services, none of those agencies bothered to contact Erik.
[3] A regular feature of her mental condition was that when she became destabilized, she became overtly prayerful—but with a catch. She herself never said the prayer. She always leaned on someone else to say the prayer. When her church friends were present, they’d willingly fall for it, given their ignorance that Mother’s prayer mode was a sign her mental rigging was out of order.
