by Cathy LaGrow
Just like Jennie so many years before, Minka was now a single mother. And just as Jennie had done, Minka squared her shoulders and got to work. When she took a bus to the district school office to enroll Dianna and Donnie, she asked the secretary if they had any available jobs.
“There’s a position open in the cafeteria,” the woman said.
“Perfect,” Minka replied. She got the position and was grateful to know she’d be working near her children and during school hours.
School started that autumn without red and orange leaves carpeting the sidewalks. The shift of seasons was subtle in Oakland—autumn came a month or so later, and winters were mild. Minka missed the Midwest’s fluctuating weather: snowdrifts and ice-covered lakes that glistened in winter, leafy trees robed in breathtaking colors in autumn, brilliantly hued tulips that boldly announced spring. She had always lived with defined seasons, and adjusting to the change was like living with an out-of-sync clock.
The atmosphere of the West Coast was different too—there was more liberal thinking than she’d ever encountered before, and communities brimmed with a sea of diverse cultures and nationalities: Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern, African, and other unfamiliar languages and peoples.
Minka sometimes felt overwhelmed by all the changes but was bolstered when she found a nearby church, Grand Avenue Alliance, that soon felt like home to her family. At night, when she sat at the bedsides of her sleeping children, who were now safe from the threat called Daddy, Minka felt reassured about her decision to come here.
Minka spent her days packaging sandwiches, fruit, and milk, and delivering bag lunches to the district elementary schools. She was never late, and nobody worked harder or faster than the former South Dakota farm girl. Still, money was tight.
She took a second job in the evenings, making phone calls for the American Cancer Society. Minka had no money for a babysitter, and John and Dorothy were too busy with their own jobs and schedules to help. Donnie and Dianna had to be left home alone. In between solicitation calls, Minka would phone her house, always saying the same thing when her daughter answered.
“Don’t go to the door. Are you okay?”
Dianna would reassure her mother. And perhaps ten minutes later, Minka would call again.
“Are you okay? Don’t answer the door for anyone.”
She checked in with them over and over, until the children put themselves to bed. When Minka came in late at night, she’d straighten bedspreads, kiss soft cheeks, and listen to her children breathe, while racking her brain for a better plan.
A year after Minka moved to Oakland, Roy followed.
* * *
He’d promised to stay sober, and he’d kept that promise, living the previous year in Jennie’s basement so his mother-in-law could monitor his sobriety. But he felt unmoored without his children, without Minka’s capable steadiness.
During sporadic phone calls, Roy made promises to Minka. Jennie confirmed that he hadn’t been drinking and offered to move to California when he did. Minka believed that God could change anyone. The children longed for their father, and getting sober had been the agreement. In the summer of 1956, Minka said he could come.
Roy quit his job in Minneapolis, bought a brand-new Buick sedan, and drove to California. Jennie, who wasn’t about to leave him unsupervised, rode shotgun, leaving behind forty-three-year-old Jane.
Though charming all her life, Jane had been so deeply attached to Jennie that it had crippled her ability to bond with anyone outside the family. But recently she’d begun dating a fellow Aberdeen native, a former classmate of Roy’s who now worked in management at a railroad company. Chris Froehlich wore expensive suits and smoked cigars, and Jane was smitten. For now, she decided to stay in Minneapolis.
That summer, President Eisenhower was preparing to sign the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and within a few decades the drive from Minneapolis to Oakland would be only a three-day trip. But Roy and Jennie had to stitch together a winding route on back roads and byways. Day after day, they puttered across plains and through towns and over the fearsome Rocky Mountains, the likes of which Jennie had never seen.
“If only I had one of my old planes,” Roy mused to Jennie during one of their rest stops. “We could have been there in less than a day. It would have been something flying over those mountains.” He would never fly again, and he’d never stop missing the sensation of escaping through the clouds.
Roy and Jennie both moved in with Minka. With her mother there, Minka no longer had to worry about her children in the evenings. Dianna and Donnie were ecstatic to have Daddy back. Minka was cautious. Roy’s behavior had called for drastic measures, but families were meant to be together. Her thoughts were a roller coaster; she struggled to believe that Roy had really changed.
With his drafting skills, Roy found a job easily. Minka would dress the children in their Sunday best on the days she picked him up from work, and he enjoyed showing them off to his coworkers. The family resumed their weekend tradition of car rides, visiting Lake Merritt—a tidal lagoon in the heart of Oakland that reminded them, just a little, of their beloved City of Lakes and of their happiest times together.
For special treats, they drove to Playland, an amusement park on the beach in San Francisco, or ate at the Grand Lake Drive In, which everyone called Club 19 because hamburgers cost 19 cents each. Minka told her kids about the long-ago days when she’d shared a single milk shake with her stepfather, mother, and sister.
“I get to have my own milk shake,” Donnie said proudly, and Minka was reminded that despite the hardships, her children were not struggling through childhood as she had. They had a better life.
There was an uneasy truce between the adults in their first months back together, one that Dianna and Donnie sensed and skirted.
And then one day, Roy stepped into a neighborhood bar. The dimly lit space enveloped him like an old friend.
Minka smelled the beer, threatened him, feared what was to come. She was more torn than ever. Her children were older, more attached to their father, yet there was little chance of hiding his drunken behavior. Roy made a few lukewarm promises, but alcohol was a controlling master that he couldn’t seem to resist.
One weekend the whole family went for a drive. Jennie rode in the backseat with the kids. Roy drove while the women chatted over the seat.
Without warning, Roy veered toward the sidewalk.
Then up onto it.
Pedestrians stumbled back, against the front of a drugstore, shouting at Roy. Two of the car’s tires bumped along the curb. Seat belts would not be mandatory for another dozen years, and little Donnie fell against the back of the front seat. Jennie caught Dianna around the waist.
“Roy!” Minka yelped. “What are you doing?”
He twirled the steering wheel. The car settled back onto the street. For a moment, it seemed like just a careless accident.
Then he jerked the wheel again, and the car jumped back onto the sidewalk.
“Roy!” Minka cried. She grabbed the dashboard and whipped her head toward her husband. “Stop it! Get back on the road.”
There was a faint smile on Roy’s face. Both hands gripped the steering wheel. His cigarette, clamped between his lips, dripped ash onto his trousers.
The car bumped along, half on the sidewalk. More pedestrians fled. One man hollered something, but nobody in the car could hear what he said. Finally, Jennie raised her voice.
“Roy. Stop this car now.”
Roy pumped the brakes. The car stopped, flinging everyone forward.
Jennie collected her purse, opened the back door, and stepped onto the sidewalk. She pulled the children from the car, then turned to her daughter. Minka was trembling as she stared at Roy, her back pressed against the side window. “Kom maar hier, Minnie.”
Minka fumbled at the handle, got the door open on the second try. She stepped out and slammed the door shut. All four of them stood staring at the car until Roy pulled forward and drove off. This ti
me, he stayed on the street.
No one said a word. They walked to a bus stop and were soon on their way home. Minka sat with her back straight, her eyes damp, her mind far away. When they got home, Roy’s car was in the driveway.
Dianna ran up the front steps first. Roy was sitting on a chair in the kitchen doorway with a rifle across his lap, a gun his daughter had never seen before. He stood up.
Instinct pushed Dianna back. She ran outside, shoved her brother and mother and grandmother toward the sidewalk. “Daddy’s got a gun! Run!”
The women and children scrambled down the street to a neighbor’s house while gunfire cracked behind them. As the neighbor dialed the police and Jennie stood at the doorway, Minka yanked her children against her, fighting back the emotion that caught painfully in her throat.
Officers came and arrested Roy. When his family returned to their house, they saw ragged holes where Roy had sprayed shells into the plaster ceiling, hunting some unfathomable prey.
* * *
Roy was immediately transported nearly four hundred miles south, to the state psychiatric hospital in Camarillo. Minka waited a couple of weeks, then drove the children down the coast to the sprawling hospital campus, where patients stayed in mission-style buildings. Dianna and Donnie moved down pathways lined with palm trees, hearts thumping. Perhaps this place that looked like a tropical resort had fixed their daddy. They tried not to look at the bars bolted over the windows.
After they’d waited for a short time in a doctor’s office, Roy was brought in. Dianna started eagerly toward her father before stopping and staring. Her eyes said it all: That isn’t Daddy.
Roy’s raven hair had turned snow-white. A pair of loose cotton pants and a shirt hung from his limbs. He’d become frail, turned old overnight. He was a sickly stranger.
“Please.” His quiet voice held a desperation the children had not heard before. His dark eyes looked panicked as he pleaded with Minka. “Please take me home. I can’t take this anymore.”
Roy and Minka went for a walk while the children trailed behind. They heard only snippets of phrases. Strapped down . . . wrapped me in wet sheets . . . electroshock . . .
Roy’s unpredictable, volatile behavior had been diagnosed, at long last. A doctor in a white coat explained to Minka how chemicals in the brain worked. He said that her husband’s illness would not go away, and that for safety reasons, he could no longer live at home. And the doctor offered up a fittingly horrid name for Roy’s disease.
Paranoid schizophrenia.
Minka didn’t understand the terms. She only knew that she wanted back the man she’d once known. And she wasn’t going to get him.
Roy returned to Oakland, moved into a small apartment, and lived off his pension. From then on, he would visit his family only for holidays and the occasional birthday—the four of them would never again live under the same roof. Minka didn’t consider divorcing him; she’d said for better or worse, in sickness and in health, and she would not break those vows.
Unable to handle the stress of a full-time job after his breakdown, Roy went on permanent disability. His spirit was fractured for good.
Still, it was a small blessing that he hadn’t been confined closer to home for treatment. Two years earlier Dr. Walter Freeman, inventor and champion of the ghoulish “ice-pick lobotomy,” which he was convinced offered a cure for schizophrenia, had set up shop just forty miles south of where Roy had sat that bleak afternoon, emptying a gun into his ceiling.
* * *
Jennie had her own home in Oakland now. But she’d been feeling tired and feverish lately, so one afternoon she asked Minka if she could stay with her for a couple of days. Jennie’s temperature kept climbing, and she couldn’t shake her fatigue.
Not long after Jennie came, eleven-year-old Dianna walked home for lunch and found Grandma Van in bed, unconscious and foaming at the mouth. Dianna phoned her mother at work, and Minka hurried to the house. Minka was able to rouse her mother, but that night Jennie began calling her daughter’s name over and over.
“Minka! Minnie! Min . . . Minnie . . . Minka! Min . . .”
“It’s okay, Mom. Rest, just rest,” Minka said, trying to calm Jennie while fighting her own panic. This weak and pale woman could not be her unshakable mother.
An ambulance arrived. A specialist at the hospital diagnosed Jennie with Bright’s disease, an inflammation of the blood vessels in the kidneys. “If I’d treated her fifteen years earlier, I could have saved your mother,” he told John and Minka. “But now . . .” He shook his head.
As soon as she got home, Minka called Jane. “You need to come immediately.”
Jane didn’t make it to California in time. The Dutch widow died on January 25, 1958, after almost a half century in her adopted country. She was beloved until the end. Even though she’d lived in Oakland for just a year and a half, twenty-four families honored her with beautiful flowers that filled the funeral home.
Minka performed the necessary tasks—making funeral arrangements, accepting food from church members, and providing for out-of-town guests—but inside, every inch of her felt empty and adrift.
It was the most jarring blow since losing Betty Jane. In quiet moments, a flood of unspoken questions came to Minka’s mind: I wish I’d asked how you were able to cope when Daddy died, if you ever wanted to give up and go back to Holland. Mom, I never asked how it felt when you saw Betty Jane. It was only a brief moment, but I know she captured your heart as much as she did mine. Did you think about her from time to time?
Roy came to the service to pay tribute to the woman he’d always respected, the one he’d heeded even more than his own mother. He brought the prettiest bouquet in the room, a huge spray of red roses. The gesture touched Minka, made her wish once again that life didn’t hold such sickness and loss that kept families apart and took loved ones away.
Jennie’s savings, the money she’d worked so hard to accumulate, was dispersed among her children. John and Jane took the lion’s share. Haggling over their mother’s money seemed disrespectful to Minka. She asked for just a thousand dollars and used it to establish a scholarship in her mother’s name at Simpson Bible College, at whose summer camps Minka would cook for many years.
Jennie and Minka had never been expressive in their relationship. They hadn’t hugged or kissed when parting, nor had they poured on compliments or words of love. But now, after church on most Sundays, Minka would stop by a small flower shop near the cemetery to buy an arrangement of fresh flowers. The children sat silently as the scent of the blooms mixed with their mother’s palpable sorrow, filling the car with a quiet reverence. They watched Minka approach Jennie’s plot at the outdoor mausoleum, polish the nameplate, and slip the flowers into the holder.
Only after Jennie’s death, witnessing their mother’s gentle graveside vigils, did Dianna and Donnie realize how deeply their mother and Grandma Van had loved each other.
* * *
Minka had ample experience with pulling herself together and moving forward. But this time Dianna and Donnie were on the journey with her, and having children added a deeper layer of suffering to hard times. Now more than ever, Minka took to her knees in prayer. The practice became more than just a ritual; it was a lifeline amid daily challenges. No longer did Minka attend church simply because it was what good families did. Instead she looked forward to church as a place to serve others, to receive guidance for her own life, and to be encouraged by fellow believers.
In the midst of all the changes at home, Minka had found a career where she excelled. Cooking and organizing a kitchen were second nature to her. The Piedmont School District promoted her to cafeteria manager. Minka created meal plans a week in advance, coming up with recipes for chicken dishes with mashed potatoes, or macaroni-and-cheese casseroles. The teachers could choose a modified menu, with special desserts, colorful salads, and fat, buttery rolls.
During the summers Minka cooked at Camp Fire Girl camps and church camps as far away as Oregon
. When she took a break from kitchen duties, she’d step outside where redwoods reached heavenward and the air was pungent with pine. Mountain peaks rose over the nearby forests, and lakes and streams were cold with glacial runoff. It was a drastic change in landscape and climate from sweltering summers in flat, open South Dakota.
Dianna and Donnie often accompanied their mother on these summer treks; Dianna would room with Minka at the girls’ camp, while Donnie stayed across the street at the boys’ camp. Minka saw him on weekends, when a new group of campers arrived.
“Mom, you have to see how good I can swim now,” he’d say. The three of them would spend the afternoon at the deep mountain lake, where Minka’s growing daughter and son would dive from the dock, shouting for her to watch and trying to coax her to join them. Minka had never learned to swim, but she enjoyed watching her children laugh and play.
“Watch this,” Donnie shouted, attempting a new acrobatic move. She wished for Roy then—the Roy she’d first met so many years before. You’d love it here, Roy, and you’d be showing off for them.
He wasn’t completely absent from the children’s lives. Even when they weren’t sure where their father lived or what he was doing, he rarely missed a school performance. One year when Dianna went off to a camp in Canada without Minka, Roy met her at the bus station to say good-bye. He sent care packages full of swimsuits, sweaters, and shorts to her that summer. Every piece of clothing was the latest style and fit Dianna perfectly.
His family found it impossible to resent Roy for his confusing disease, for the way his personality deteriorated when he drank. They loved him still. And Minka wouldn’t allow regret to swallow her. She’d had enough losses, so she chose to cherish the now.
She loved those summer weeks—children’s voices screaming with delight, their laughter cutting through the mountain hollows, and cozy nights spent around blazing campfires, singing or listening to a missionary’s stories. Minka’s room was decorated with Popsicle-stick crafts, beaded bracelets and necklaces. Week after week, Dianna and Donnie proudly gave her badges they’d earned for learning Scriptures.