A Classy Lady

     The photo paper, a stiff weighty stock with matte finish, gives substance to Mutti. Sepia tones gentle her classic German face, “Marlene,” people would say. “You look like Lily Marlene.” They referred to her contemporary, Dietricht.  Signed on the back, the 1930’s photo portraits the twenty-seven year old with pathos and a womanly fullness too common in today’s Hollywood club scene, thanks to implants. Mother was genuine.

     Turn of the century hardships might have shaped her youth, but no hard lines taint this visage. Mutti wears only a dreamy look of unknowing that the future would bring romance, two children, and “so much pain.” The photo belies the tough outer shell Mutti wore in later years created by too many disappointments, mistakes, and lies. I never saw her cry, though she surely must have, perhaps in the privacy of her room or church. Indeed, church shaped her bitter-sweet life, because to her last breath, she would worry, “Do you think I’ll get to heaven?” I’d answer, “Gee Mom, you say your daily Rosary, you taught us our prayers, and you gave us a firm foundation in Catholicism. However unworthy you feel, doesn’t matter. You have fulfilled God’s will.

     I recall a photo of her at age twelve, sitting in tight pig-tailed seriousness. Erste Heilige Kommunion (First Holy Communion) on the back, it remains the only picture of a sacred event from those early years. Mutti, no doubt, threw away later memories of her Catholic wedding to her first husband, Mr. Lang. His cover up of an illegitimate child would have annulled the church marriage, but Mutti didn’t know that. So she suffered the remainder of her life after divorce under the notion that she was a reprobate.

     Mother loved the Church, refusing to discard it the way she discarded some of the regulations she couldn’t come to terms with. Aside from a short defection during her Florida years, she went regularly, and sometimes daily, to mass. I sort through connected memories in her boxes of photos. There’s a postcard of Munich’s Buergersaal where her favorite Saint, Pater Rupert Mayer, sleeps. Close and personal, the local Jesuit’s sermons circulated Munich’s Marienplatz.  Mutti once spoke of how she listened enthralled, adoring this lone voice against Hitler. Half a century later her admiration extended to Edith Stein, the outspoken young Jewish philosopher turned Catholic nun. Both saints were canonized recently in the same year.

     In a snapshot of a high school play Mutti claims her position as the Angel of Comfort during Christ’s agony. Other photographs of familiar churches and events are too many to count (Mother was a shutter bug). Most include main altar views of many places I remember: The Gasteig Kirche in Haidhausen, OLM (Our Lady of Mount Carmel) ), Bronx, St. Mary Magdalen’s in Winter Park, Sacred Heart Church, Covina. They time line her restless soul.

     Each Church, each city, shaped my brother and me, as did Mother’s European heritage . . .