Still Life with Flowers, Leon de Smet

ALAN writes:

One day recently I reread your remembrance of a woman you admired in your childhood.

There was a Betty in my life, too.  She was there before I was born, as a friend of the woman who would marry my uncle.  The two young women met before World War II when they worked at an industrial plant in St. Louis.  Betty married a Navy man sometime in the 1940s.  But he died unexpectedly of natural causes.  They had no children, and Betty had no siblings.

I first became aware of Betty in 1952 or ’53.  Her name was Elizabeth, but no one ever called her that.  She was always “Betty” to us, plain and simple.  She was of average height and had black hair.  There was nothing pretentious about Betty.  She was as honest and down to earth as they come.  A snapshot from the mid-1950s shows Betty and me sitting on the floor by our Christmas tree.

She drove a mid-1950s maroon Ford.  When I knew she was coming to visit us, I would sit by a window and watch eagerly for her car to come into view.  She chain-smoked cigarettes and helped sustain the Coca-Cola company by drinking countless Coca-Colas in the popular 6½ green-glass bottles.

She lived upstairs in a brick house across the alley from a St. Louis Fire Department engine house.  At age 4 or 5, I was thrilled when she and my mother walked me over there one day and permitted me to talk to the firemen and be hoisted aboard one of their fire engines for a few minutes.

Betty continued working in the office of the industrial plant where my uncle worked, just down the street from a soap factory and a train station at a busy intersection.  The plant is still there, but the soap factory, train station, and passenger trains are long gone.

One Friday afternoon in1954, I was running around outside as little boys like to do when I tripped and the edge of a stone step intercepted my forehead.  I was a bloody mess.  Betty arrived on the scene of the calamity a few moments later and drove us to a medical office where a doctor patched me up.  Then we got back into Betty’s car and she drove us a hundred-plus miles along Route 66 to a weekend visit with my aunt and uncle in an area of small towns, farms, forests, and sawmills.  In one snapshot, she is wearing blouse and blue jeans and watching the little boy as he feeds a horse.

It seemed that Betty was always there in the 1950s:  At summer outings, helping my mother supervise a birthday party, visiting my aunt and railroad uncle, helping to dismantle great-aunt Lydia’s Christmas tree, driving us around to see the Christmas lights on houses or trees blown over by a St. Louis windstorm in 1957, and at my grandmother’s 73^rd birthday in 1956.

In May 1958 we visited a botanical garden where my mother took a color slide that shows Betty standing there in the sunshine with me against a backdrop of red roses.

Betty invested a lot of emotion in trying to find another man with whom to go through life.  I don’t believe she ever remarried, but she pursued the possibility.  She must have been lonely and short on hope at times, because I remember being there in her apartment on nights in the 1950s when she cried and my mother tried to console her.

On a cold day before Christmas in 1958, Betty drove us to the St. Louis Board of Education Greenhouse to see the poinsettia display in the Palm House.  A color slide shows Betty and me standing there in our heavy winter coats amid the greenery and red flowers.

Forty-seven years later, I walked to that same site and gazed through a chain-link fence at the neglected greenhouse property, trying to remember how it felt to be there on that day in 1958 and to see some trace of those two women and that little boy beyond the faded glass in the doors of that Palm House.  It and the entire Greenhouse property were demolished in 2006.  There is nothing there today to suggest that it was a showpiece of the neighborhood for half a century.

Another picture from 1958 shows Betty holding the cloth calendar for 1959 that my mother gave her as a Christmas gift, the kind of calendar that women could purchase from mail-order catalogs and then hang on a kitchen wall.  It is one of only a few pictures in which Betty is smiling—not a showy smile but a restrained smile in gratitude for a simple, practical gift.

Fifty-eight years ago this month, Betty drove us around town to see some of the devastation left in its path by the killer tornado of 1959.

Little boys grow up fast and develop other interests and sometimes forget about former friends.  I did that to Betty without ever realizing I was doing it; by default, not intent; out of stupidity, not malice.  But it was terribly unfair to her.  I don’t recall ever seeing her again.  She died at age 50 in 1966.

Thirty years later, I found myself standing one day at the corner entrance to a large park in St. Louis.  A glance at the flowers by the entrance prompted me instantly to think about Betty.  My grandmother loved to grow flowers, and my mother loved visiting floral gardens.  Betty was a part of that little world.  She and I appear amid flowers in some of those pictures.

When we knew her, she lived only a block away from that park.  It was almost as though that park had been at the center of her life:  She lived a block east of the park, and then in later years a block south, and worked at a building a few blocks north of the park.

On another day I stood at her gravesite in a Catholic cemetery, lingering there and thinking of how decent this woman had been to a little boy, of how little he had known about her and her life, and of how much he owed her.  It was of course appalling and inexcusable that I remembered all those things only when it was too late to tell her.

— Comments —

Johanna writes:

I loved reading both “Betty” reminiscences. It’s typical of human nature, I think, to find appreciation long after the opportunity for expressing it is gone. Thank you for the beautifully painted
portraits.

An anonymous woman writes:

Alan’s story had me weeping as soon as I imagined Betty crying over her loneliness. As I’m engaged to be married, it is incredibly sad to imagine losing one’s husband. I hope she found consolation in the Lord at least at the end of her life.

I’m really moved by this sort of contemplative and simple reminiscence, with its touch of melancholy. Thank you, Alan, and thank you, Laura, for your blog.

I hope Alan knows that the most profound act of gratitude that he could ever perform for this woman is to pray for the repose of her soul. I will pray for it too.

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