The Waiting

by Cathy LaGrow

  Minka was grateful for the life she was able to give her children. They were safe from their father, but not shamed by a divorce. Best of all, they weren’t milking cows, hauling water, cutting firewood, or performing other manual labor. Their summer days were filled with pulling back bowstrings and shooting arrows, riding horses, meeting kids from around the country, memorizing Bible verses, and hearing how much God loved them. It was a precious answer to prayer.

  God had become the spouse she didn’t have, an unwavering friend, and her refuge from loneliness and worry. When the ache for her mother, for Roy, for a view into Betty Jane’s life became deep and threatening, Minka discovered an unexplainable peace. The divine comfort always came when it was needed most.

  On many a summer’s night, when Minka gazed at the moon, she wondered if Betty Jane had gone to camp as a child. She imagined her daughter winning all the awards for knowing Bible verses, and roasting marshmallows over a fire. So many years had gone by. Now her little girl was most likely married with children of her own.

  In the cool evenings, Minka once again prayed for her firstborn. God, I pray that Betty Jane found a wonderful man who loves her with all his heart and that they have been blessed with children and happiness. Most of all, Father, I pray that they all know Your love and grace every day, no matter where they are.

  Occasionally, when Minka helped with the food line during camp meals, she wondered if one of the adorable faces on the other side of the strawberry Jell-O or mashed potatoes might be her own grandchild looking back at her.

  * * *

  On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American to travel into space, weeks after a Soviet cosmonaut had become the first human to do so. Like everyone else, Minka watched the event on television in awe. When she was born, the only option for crossing the ocean was via ship—now man flew beyond the bounds of earth. But Minka was too busy to do more than briefly marvel. The news did not take over her life.

  It did, however, captivate a nine-year-old boy from rural Wisconsin, who was watching the launch, spellbound, on a fuzzy black-and-white TV at his one-room schoolhouse. At that moment he made a decision that would propel him through his childhood at the country school, through high school and the Air Force Academy, and eventually onto four space shuttle missions.

  The boy with the dreams had a special connection to Minka, even though she did not yet know he existed. The future astronaut, who would one day float untethered in space, was Minka’s grandson.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1961–1977

  AFTER THE LOSS of their mother, Jane and Minka felt their own separation more keenly. Jane was no longer alone, having married Chris Froehlich in 1959, but she missed her sister. Eventually, Jane and Chris moved to Oakland, too, and juggled housing arrangements, first staying with Minka and the children and then moving out on their own.

  Sometimes when the sisters met for coffee, they talked about how rapidly America was modernizing, in ways that often dismayed them. Men wore their hair scandalously long now. Women wore their dresses shockingly short. British fellows with bangs nearly covering their eyes took over the music scene, performing for hordes of fainting and screaming fans. A new magazine called Playboy had caused an initial uproar, but copies were selling out as fast as its young publisher could print them.

  Then, the Friday before Thanksgiving week in 1963, the halls of Piedmont schools suddenly echoed with voices during class time.

  “Something is up,” one of the women in the cafeteria said as she came into the back room. Minka, focused on a food order, hadn’t noticed anything amiss. Before they could investigate, a woman from the office burst into the kitchen.

  “The president,” she said, dissolving into tears.

  “What? What is wrong?” Minka asked.

  “Shot. Someone shot President Kennedy in Texas.”

  “Is he going to be okay? How bad is it? When did this happen?” The women in the cafeteria bombarded the secretary with questions.

  “I don’t know. We don’t know anything yet.”

  By lunchtime, it was announced: JFK was dead.

  Minka and the other ladies in the cafeteria stood together and cried. School was dismissed; children and staff were sent home. It was beyond comprehension. The Kennedys were the embodiment of a thriving country, with the president’s winning smile and the fashion and sophistication of Jackie Kennedy. Minka had admired the couple.

  She watched the president’s televised funeral, joining the world in tears as cameras captured little John Jr. on the day of his third birthday saluting his father’s casket on its path to Arlington National Cemetery. The country spun with grief, while fears and rumors ran rampant. Who had done such a thing? Was it the Russians, the Mob, Fidel Castro, or the man they arrested, Lee Harvey Oswald?

  Camelot was no more, and within a few years trouble that had been rumbling in the background exploded. Another civil war seemed to rage in the South as protesters marched from Selma to Montgomery, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of his dream.

  In her school kitchen, Minka discussed with the other women the civil rights demonstrations turning violent in nearby Berkeley, as groups of young people took over parks and business owners boarded up shops. Then came the murder of Reverend King and another Kennedy brother. It seemed the whole world was unraveling.

  In this time of uncertainty, Minka’s brother, John, died at the age of fifty-seven, shortly after being diagnosed with brain cancer. Minka had never grown much closer to John than they’d been as children, when he had impatiently teased her awkwardness. He’d been so different from her, with his quick boldness. But she had loved him and now grieved the slipping away of one more DeYoung.

  Minka combated losses and fear with faith. She read her Bible and found strength in the Psalms, especially the first chapter, which declared that the person who delighted in the Lord would be “like a tree planted by the rivers of water,” unbending and full of good fruits. She volunteered at church, teaching the children’s “Lightbearers” program, making her own felt figures for the flannelgraph stories and even writing little songs to accompany the lessons.

  If her faith was like blood in her veins, Minka’s children were the beat of her heart.

  Dianna, despite the challenges of her epilepsy and medication, excelled at everything. Minka paid for piano lessons, and soon Dianna could play difficult classical pieces beautifully. She was a superior student and shortly after turning seventeen was accepted to Westmont, a private college in Santa Barbara. The accomplishment thrilled her mother.

  Donnie was following a different path. As a little boy, he’d prayed forcefully, like a preacher. When he was nine, Minka had taken him and Dianna to a Billy Graham crusade in San Francisco. When the charismatic evangelist gave the invitation to pray for a personal relationship with Christ, Donnie had run up to the front without hesitation.

  But as Donnie got older, church interested him less, and Minka, who had a good rapport with other children, struggled for the first time to connect with him. She knew her boy needed the male nurturing that Roy was unable to provide. Donnie began challenging his mother at every turn.

  When Donnie started getting into trouble with a friend, Minka talked to the police behind her son’s back, asking them to scare him good. Officers did just that, putting Donnie in a squad car and driving him to areas in town where drug dealers hung out and where addicts lived on the street.

  He brushed off his mother’s concerns as nonsense, but Minka met him head-on.

  “Donnie-boy, you have to make a choice,” she said. “There are two places to go: hell or heaven. You open the door either way. You have to live not only to know the Lord—you have to make Him Lord of your life. There’s a big difference between just knowing Him and putting Him in charge.”

  Donnie’s reply filled her with fear: “Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’ll always find a way.”

  Minka was frustrated with her teenaged son. She felt ill equipped to raise a
young man in such a different environment from the one she’d grown up in. She spoke with a traveling evangelist who had three boys of his own. His advice was succinct. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told my own wife: ‘Get off his neck, but don’t get off your knees.’”

  Minka took the evangelist’s advice and stopped hounding her son. She got down on her knees and prayed instead.

  In 1967, Minka learned she was going to be a grandmother twice over. That spring Dianna, who had left college and married a coach, had a baby boy named Gary. A few months later, Donnie became a father to a little girl named Dawn.

  Though still enrolled in high school, Donnie had married his girlfriend, and the couple lived with Minka for several months. Nearly forty years had passed since Betty Jane’s birth. Minka’s “baby” Donnie was just seventeen. And yet the feel of Dawn in Minka’s arms returned the flood of wonder she’d first felt so many years before.

  Dawn’s crib was in her grandmother’s bedroom, and it was Minka who soothed her cries, gave her bottles. Even though Minka still worked full-time, she was the one who sat up with Dawn in a recliner all night when the baby was sick. The teenaged parents were not yet ready to take care of a child. It was exhausting work for a grandmother, but once again, for the third time in her life, Minka fell deeply in love with a baby girl. After Donnie and his wife got their own place, Minka still cared for Dawn each day after her work shift ended.

  She understood that a new child was a gift, and ever would be.

  * * *

  Minka and Roy had spent years apart, with only sporadic contact. He’d lived with another woman in the time he’d been away. But in the end, when he faced death, Roy wanted Minka. Only her.

  He’d developed prostate cancer, which metastasized to his bones. He rang in the new year of 1972 during a two-month stay at the veterans hospital. His brain was hemorrhaging. Fluid clogged his lungs. He called Minka.

  “Can you come? Come and spend the night?” he asked.

  Minka barely recognized Roy when she entered the hospital room. He was only sixty-two years old but looked ages older, smaller and more worn than ever. But those piercing eyes that widened at her arrival told her that this was the Roy she’d known since 1935.

  There was a Bible on his nightstand. He’d never had much use for church, for “religion,” but he was reading the Bible now and accepting visits from the hospital chaplain. Knowing that brought Minka a measure of comfort.

  He asked a nurse if they could bring a bed for Minka. But only a chair and a blanket were available.

  “Oh, no,” Roy said. “She works too hard for that.” He turned to Minka. “You go on home, honey. You can come back in the morning.”

  Those were the last words he’d ever speak to his wife. When Minka returned the next day, Roy had slipped into a coma. Minka sat by his bed, listening to the breath rattling in his throat. She held his narrow hand in her larger one, squeezed and patted.

  The good memories played in Minka’s head now, only the good: Roy spinning her around the dance floor, patiently teaching her the steps. The red rose he’d bought when Dianna was born, still pressed into her baby book. The way he’d plotted with her to make Christmas morning a grand surprise for Donnie and Dianna.

  She thought of Roy exclaiming over his favorite turkey with oyster dressing until the children laughed, and taking her off on long walks alone during family vacations. She remembered the way he’d grin when one of the children saw a new present lying on their bed.

  And she would never forget the fact that this slight man, even when alcohol made him cruel, had never once made fun of her big feet or her large, twisted fingers that engulfed his own.

  Tears ran down her cheeks. Regret squeezed her heart so much that she winced in pain. He’d had such talent, so many gifts, all smothered by illness and trauma. Maybe he hadn’t fought hard enough against his demons. Maybe he had.

  Roy was the only man Minka would ever marry, the only one she had ever wanted to. In the end, on February 6, 1972, death was a blessed release from the pain that had haunted him for so long.

  * * *

  After Dianna and Donnie moved out, Minka sold the house on Linwood and downsized to an apartment. For years, motherhood had been her main focus, and it took time to let go of that all-consuming role. Other than a short period when Roy was away during the war, Minka had never lived alone. The rooms were awfully quiet at first, although she talked to her children regularly and visited her grandchildren. As time passed, she filled her days with new pursuits and grew to enjoy the silence, during which she could think and pray.

  She began taking painting classes and discovered she had an artistic eye and skill with a brush. She created colorful landscapes and still lifes and gave them away to family or friends. She knitted and crocheted afghans and gave those away too. Friends taught her even more complicated stitches and patiently answered her questions.

  Since her teenaged days in the Aberdeen sewing circle, she’d never lost her curiosity about the wider world. Current affairs amazed and bemused her in equal measure. A South African doctor named Barnard was transferring organs from one human to another. Nearly twelve thousand years after it first appeared, smallpox was about to be eradicated from humankind. A movie star had become California’s governor, and a peanut farmer had been elected president.

  People seemed consumed with monumental accomplishments, like constructing a twin set of ludicrously tall buildings in New York City, each 110 floors high, or preparing to launch a spacecraft on a decades-long journey to the edge of Earth’s solar system. Minka could only wonder at it all.

  In 1977, after a twenty-two year career, Minka retired from the Piedmont School District. By now most of her family had relocated to Southern California. Jane and Chris, as well as Dianna and her husband and three small children, all resided in Orange County, nearly a day’s drive away. Minka wanted to move near them, to be involved in their lives. Out of necessity, much of her life had been consumed with hard work, but nothing was more important to Minka than her family. Now she looked forward to spending her retirement doting on loved ones.

  She decided to move one more time, to the small coastal town where Jane had settled, to live out the years the Lord had left for her. Her decades of hard work had provided her with financial security. In addition to a pension, the school district had made a special agreement to cover all her medical expenses for life.

  Neither she nor they could have imagined just how long that would be.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1981–2000

  MINKA SAT on a darkened airplane, listening to the great engines thrum, her shoulders hunched under a thin airline blanket. Her teenaged grandson Gary dozed beside her. On the other side of her, Jane’s eyes were closed, too, but Minka couldn’t tell if she was asleep. Here and there, dim reading lights dotted the cabin, which felt unnecessarily cold.

  The sisters were both widows now. Jane’s husband, Chris, had died in 1978, three years earlier. They needed something to look forward to, so Minka had proposed an adventure—she’d take each of her grandchildren on a lavish vacation. On this first trip, with Dianna’s oldest child, the trio would spend three weeks exploring Europe. The journey would culminate in the country where Minka was conceived, her family’s homeland, now called the Netherlands.

  Everything had changed since Jennie had returned to Holland in 1930, carrying Minka’s picture of Betty Jane with her. Minka now sat hurtling through the clouds, miles above the slow steamship route that Jennie had taken. And after all these years, the sharp pain of Betty Jane’s absence had softened into a bittersweet hollow space, one that Minka accepted as part of her. Whenever she felt a deeper pang, triggered by memory or unexpected emotions, she simply prayed for her daughter.

  Minka, Jane, and Gary landed in Germany and boarded a tour bus. They spent the next two weeks winding through the Alps. When they walked into the first enormous castle on the itinerary, Minka looked at Jane and asked, “Can you imagine how long i
t would take to clean this place? Once you were finished, you’d have to start all over again.” They spent days on a boat, floating down the Rhine River, surrounded by mountains whose peaks were snowcapped all year round.

  Every restaurant and hotel served delicious, fresh-baked bread. Gary teased Minka and Jane, who, unable to shake the frugality they’d had to practice as children, wrapped leftovers in napkins and stuffed them in their purses. Another legacy of their childhood proved useful on this trip. For the first time in decades they spoke German, the language they’d learned while running around Uncle’s farm. Initially the sisters grasped for words, but they were soon speaking it with confidence.

  They rode a cogwheel train up to a hamlet in Switzerland and woke the next morning to a foot of snow on the ground. Now it was the sisters’ turn to tease Gary. During white winters in South Dakota they’d used a sleigh to get to church, but Gary had never seen such abundant snow. He kept pulling them to the windows to peer out.

  The trip ended in Holland at the homes of Jennie’s half sisters, Tante Jane and Tante Martha, who weren’t much older than Minka. She’d kept in touch with them through letters, but now they were meeting for the first time. The aunts welcomed their nieces warmly in rapid-fire Dutch, and Minka and Jane fell into that language easily too, serving as translators for Gary.

  The sisters were sad that they couldn’t visit their paternal relatives. Years before, they’d discovered that most of Ben’s family had been wiped out by the Spanish flu in 1918.

  Minka and Jane toured the same windmills their parents had seen in the previous century, browsed gift shops whose windows and floors shone with the same thorough Dutch polishing they’d learned from Jennie. Among the goods for sale—towels and bells and watches—wooden shoes were the most popular items. Minka picked up a pair, running her fingers over the bright flowers painted on the yellow clogs.