No. 63

Chas. In 1895 (Wrapping)

Stewart King c/o

John C. Davant, Attorney

501 Cleveland St.

Clearwater Florida

December 12, 1939

Dear Stewart,

The younger postal clerks were handsome, but I came to like Charles. I spent more and more time with him on his visits and saw a man full of ideas. A jovial (another word your mother taught me) man who, upon entering the mansion, would be greeted with cheering and a throwing of hands in the air that I didn’t understand. And I came to know him, or want to know him, bit by bit.

The letters.

Charles could not sit still, as if he, too, was avoiding touch but his letters gave me attachment and entertainment. I wanted to read. I was too afraid to ask your father to borrow something from his library, especially since it wasn’t yet sorted, although I handled the collection for a time, but I was only educated through the grammar years, until I was able to learn alongside with you boys, following your lessons, and watching your progress, and how I enjoyed trying something beyond myself and quarters, and of course you understand, I desired to know anything I could about the clerk who saved me from the greasy backside of Clinton, Iowa

Well, after your mother told me about his trials in Cedar Falls, well, she caught me crying over these letters, more than once, yes, I was in debt to him as he was in debt to her. I was in an impossible situation because there would never be any resolution. I would never be good enough. I knew this. I chastised myself, No proper Dutch girl would take time for this imagination! I know this now. Which is why I’m giving them up for Advent and beginning my fast as soon as I drop these to the post office.

Your mother said that I could keep these letters for a “trial” –whatever that meant….

She assured me, “The tears will stop someday, and you’ll find other disappointments to replace this one, especially if Charles is involved.”

But for today one last sentimental flip.

These letters belong to your line. But you won’t understand their importance unless I make things known.

Tonight, I look outside and smile as the snow is heavy, brutal, reminding me of the Blizzard of 1883. The movers, some Knights of Columbus men, had to cut off their generosity in order to get home to their families before the roads were too thick with it. As I wiped up their tracks in the hallway, I think of all the spills, disasters, and crashes of the King boys. I think of your family and the growing children of your brothers. I think of you and your lovely wife wrapping presents for your fine stepdaughters.

My sisters and brothers at St. Boniface tell me, I suppose feeling sorry for me, that I have a family with my nieces and with my employer’s kin, and that is a relief. But how can I tell them, after they say such a thing to me, nodding and patting my shoulder, so glad to be rid of me, that it is my true family are the statues at St. Boniface?

I lived alone in the back of the King mansion, up the spiral stairs above the kitchen, and hoarded my rare leisure time with occasional reading—oh, to read unmolested—but mostly exhaustion and love for you, most of all, for you. All those years of dreaming one day of having a simple house and life so that I could read and let the little monster in me out with a good mystery novel from the dime store, giving life to that imagination always denied me to slip out, like an exhalation.

And now, strange how something caught my eye at the depot tonight, grabbed my heart, and now all I want to do is to confess about those spiral steps, how I cursed, how I wanted out, that irreversible twisting of my young, barren womanhood, and your mother, so lovely she was to me, as it turned out, even though I couldn’t see it until now, but how impatient, too, we both were. And her brother, who noticed me despite my self-inflicted knots.

Charles had a spark that carried me. Next to that bursting life, I became a bag of mail and waited for him to toss me over his shoulder and take me out of there. When he was around, I adopted sloth, apathy, and imagination with batting eyelashes, hoping to be once again lifted out of work, but he was a one-way-ticket and would not act out such theatrics with me until the worst timing possible and when that happened, for fear of disappointing your mother and for fear of her wrath against me, after everything she did for me, and the state she was in, I took away my hand.

Later this week, or as soon as they clear the roads, I will return these letters, in the same hat box, with some framing or wrapping, and a peppermint candy, left over from the Christmas bizarre at St. Boniface.

The move here brought on my complaints in the knees. But also, the complaints from Europe. This today is a good place for us to part ways, to turn our backs on the world and its mobbers, and to set up a scene or table for the Holy Family, as I did yours for 40 years. Today we pull out what is rare, almost sacramental, and give it a treatment of spice or orange, holly berry, oriental tapestry, and stockings by the fire. I do have a nice fire.

Now, I have little hope that you will even read these letters, because of how you were raised to look ahead. The King Brothers were hardly home. In the office, on the field, and mucking about the mines in far off places. A wee bit respite and that was for football or reading the news for the latest innovation, automobile, regulation, or threat.

Your mother taught me that daily here is the task: “Minnie,” she used to say, “just wrap the gift. They can always return it, but our part is over.”

How anyone takes it or not is of no concern to us, she used to say. How many gifts from her was I in charge of wrapping, and I, without bitterness, perhaps finally now without bitterness, I can accept this to be my last gift as we part—the end of the line is near for me.

Most of your mother’s retelling of these scenes from the letters took place while she was laid up from that Mardi Gras accident. By the time they made it home, she had been on medication for days. This time with her was remarkable because the letters brought back memories for her that created a stirring, well, she didn’t quite know what to do with either her strong emotion or mine, and sometimes, directed at me, being just hired, here I was so overwhelmed with my predicament and sleep deprivation, well, it was too much for me and too much for her, and you see how the Lord works. It cemented our bond, getting through this time. Charles had something to do with this bond. But it also provided a pull switch.

If you can honor one more request, remember the children of your uncle, Charles. Not to feel pity for them, for he set them up well to flourish, but to let his children, if they can be found, especially his son, know I was a witness to the movement of the horses.

Your mother’s support of Charles was a steady pulse. She had to know everything that he was doing, and he reported in often because he knew how she loved him! You see, this agreement started long before he left their hometown of Bath, New York.

Your mother said that his early troubles started when Charles was nearly five years old, when he was blamed by a crazy neighbor, but not by his parents, for the death of his toddler sister. Something to do with an open window in the cool weather and the tossing of toys out the window as your boy uncle wanted to watch them fall. After constant questioning about the child’s illness, Charles refused to talk about it and it was only your mother, older by five years, who could work on him, periodically, when he fell into a bad mood, for he was particularly low when he grieved. But as they grew it was only your mother (she said she was the only one) who could really know his problems with tenderness and humor.

Your mother said it was natural that the two corresponded during the Civil War. She said that his shipmates from home wanted to marry her, as was the joke at the time, but your mother said he was the youngest Marine, was tolerated in part because it provided the older boys access to her, and she didn’t mind.

She wrote to him during the war that it was his job not to die or get sick but to not fail to find her an officer. It was her job to provide news of home. She was the one to keep the rope dry, tight, and ready to be reeled in. He was the baby of the family, and she insisted that he not be lost.

During the war your mother continued her education to become a teacher. Her instructor was Miss Carrie Dawson, who grew up in Kanona, about 20 miles northwest of Bath, New York, where your mother’s family lived. Your ancestors also had businesses in Kanona and property in Wheeler.

Your mother said Miss Dawson demanded excellence, which attracted the attention of military officers. Some said at the GAR Lodge after the war suggested they were in fact afraid of her, still others said they were tired of the militaristic approach to life. The spirit of Steuben County was always the spirit of drilling for action, named after VON STEUBEN, I later learned, who instilled a sense of practice and standards to be prepared for the enemy, but even that area of the country was tired of the promise of law and wanted pleasure, beauty, and that meant, as it always does, female.

I remember how your mother described Miss Dawson. “Radiant in all departments,” she said. “Posture, teeth, spelling, millinery selection and placement, grooming, musical genius, close application to detail, especially her boots and correspondence, awake and alert before anyone else, never complaining, full of grace and warmth, especially for those with the dimmest wit. The thinnest, tallest waist.

Your mother paused at one moment and said, exhaling a bit too much, I thought, saying they called Miss Dawson, “Well-shaped.”

I asked, “Her intellect?”

No, your mother said. Not for that.

I wondered but didn’t say anything to your mother, still knowing a long-winded question like this would trip up my tongue, but Good Lord, who were these people that called or were calling a teacher by her posture undressed?

How I longed for right reason and command of words. If God might send me a beaver soaked with Mississippi gnats to instruct me, I would make him live with me.

Your mother said Miss Dawson had more beauty than you could imagine: Ice-blue eyes and eyebrows with a perfect arch that, if followed down, would land on her dimples, for by the time you spent that much attention to her face, your face would soften and hers, alike, would assure you that you were not as a lump-of-kicked-about-sack that you thought you were when you left your brown situation, late again, and rushing and winded into her classroom without your reader. Her golden-blonde hair turned everyone’s head, even those who had blonde hair themselves, for the ladies removed their hats, re-pinned and padded their buns when she walked by and they, too, and wondered how she was able to give her locks so much shine and strength. No fly aways.

In hostility to her beauty, for most cannot tolerate it, your mother said that they all tried to find Miss Dawson’s weakness. And would you believe it, of all people, it was your mother who was led to that particularly harsh discovery of her lack of restraint.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

On the day of your mother’s engagement, in 1868, she hesitated to break the heart of Miss Dawson with the news that, effective immediately, she was withdrawing from such praise-worthy curriculum to pack for the move to the still-yet unimproved Clinton, Iowa.

The morning when your mother and father left Bath, New York, it was very cold. No one wanted to be outside the depot, but Miss Dawson chased down the bridal car, which she had earlier decorated, and climbed inside and sat beside your mother and asked if she could ride with her, if only as far as Kanona, where she was to get off and visit her parents.

Despite minor foot shifting by your father, your mother insisted that her beloved teacher sit along with her for their final twenty minutes. Even with your father reminding them to damper and to promptly recall that for they were coming back in the spring to get more of your mother’s many dresses and belongings… well, the two ladies, only five years difference in age, held hands inside your mother’s mink muff and kissed each other, sealing promises to write to each other not just with periodic news but with regularity, an impossible drain but emotions were high.

Your mother said, “You just cannot appreciate how beautiful Miss Dawson was. If she was not so attached to her teaching, she would have been hard competition for me and my friends. We wanted her to keep teaching!”

Your mother swore it was sincere respect she had from the community to instill virtue and discipline in the arts and letters required for advanced placement. And she stated that she was certain the pact was easy to make for the intense moment. In this promise, your mother could send dispatches about the schools there and find accommodation for Miss Dawson’s brightest pupils or her siblings. In exchange, Miss Dawson could provide updates about your mother’s little ones and provide discounts on books for the primitive schools in Clinton. She would continue her endorsement of Miss Dawson’s campaign for school superintendent if that was even necessary. Your brother’s shaky and probationary enrollment into the seminary in Rochester was made possible only with Miss Dawson’s intervention, who convinced her brother, an attorney, to appeal to the school ahead of his application and suggested a grace period.

Your mother and Miss Dawson sustained an understanding up until the last days. Even as I attended your mother’s final moments, it traveled across my mind to inform Miss Dawson—but we had long-ago started referring to her as Carrie—and to alert Carrie that the end was close and to light a candle in prayer.

As your mother’s secretary, I felt her love for Carrie as I took down her words and drilled through my checklist to make sure the grammar was correct. Yet it wasn’t until I reached for these batch of letters from your Uncle Charles, at this very moment, that I am now called to, how shall I put it, begin to remove a treatment that I had applied before.

Nudge now by a voice, perhaps from the depths of the sea or from my natural mother, wherever she may be, that now instructs me now push back on a superfluous layer that was placed in error.

Stewart, and just hear me out, about details now coming into focus, pursuing me, about that trip we took to Kanona in 1896—you, me, your mother, Uncle Charles, and his boy, Henry—that day we went to go look at those exquisite horses (the Morgans).

Do you remember?

These horses had fallen into the untrained hands of Carrie Dawson, which she had won by mistake, well, they all said it was a mistake, and which Charles thought his mission to rescue and claim.

At the time I did not understand what was going on but I think a mystery is going to be addressed this Advent. O come! O come!

Tonight, with the snow falling with the smell of paint still fresh, I have started up my victrola, which was a present from your uncle Charles. He had purchased it for your mother’s birthday, but she died just before that. He gave it to me after her funeral. It has been a great comfort to me all these years. You just cannot imagine.

In 1870, just two years after your mother and father moved away from Bath, things fell apart for Miss Dawson. Some unnamed trouble. When I asked your mother a few days later about said trouble, for I could not fight the temptation, she walked me to her armoire and, digging through a box, found a newspaper clipping.

She described what situation Carrie was in, as far as she could learn from Carrie’s letters up to this point. There was Carrie’s version and the others, too, who whispered.

In 1870, Carrie had secured employment as a teacher with a family in another town as they provided boarding for her. This allowed her to break from Kanona and establish her career as someone truly transformative (unique in her application) of the little savages.

Carrie wrote to your mother in care of Mrs. John Curtis. The head of the household was popular for his entertainment but not their interest in academics or standing on Sunday, shall we say, with the children too close in age, so the mother was allowed no rest. But the father was friendly with so many in the town. Their circle was very casual, and Carrie felt she could be more creative away from the rigidity of Kanona as her family was there, always reminding her of her limits and need for restraint in her intensity, her conscientiousness.

Carrie was determined to bring her own clever, creative, and lighter touch of style of discipline and literacy into the home and use the father’s popularity or gift of conversation, and through his connections would spread the word about her miraculous touch, with the dream of opening her school. He promised her lumber at cost, if they could find land close to the good roads but away from the distractions of commerce. They were only waiting for a new rail line, I think, or some other road to be laid first.

But the newspaper clipping that your mother shared with me, another one of her gifts to me, provided a better understanding of the situation.

She said, “Oh, it is too much for me to go back to that time. You can have it. Burn it when done reading it.”

Why your mother saved something like this all these years I do not understand.

--Miss Minnie

2025 Copyright Christine Friesel