One Special Woman

One Special Woman

Yesterday I had a phone conversation with a woman who just celebrated her 90th birthday on Monday.  She distinctly remembered me when I was seven years old.  That was fifty years ago.  Alma, Mrs. Gulley and her husband Charlie, Mr. Gulley were my brother Jack's house parents when he was in Maryland Delaware Hall at Mooseheart. In the orphanage, boys had houseparents, a couple who were married, giving them a male influence in their lives and girls had matrons. I guess we didn't need father figures, but boys needed a mother figure.

    Mr. and Mrs. Gulley hailed from southern Illinois. When hired as houseparents in the late 1960's,they made it clear to the higher ups at Mooseheart that they would take care of any discipline needed for the boys. The boys wouldn't be sent to the farm-another name for the detention hall-for laborious hours of work.  The Gulley's found it atrocious that kids were separated from their siblings and parents, so they invited them to visit their hall.   I had never met any of my brother's houseparents and felt special going off girl's campus onto boy's campus to visit my older brother at his hall. It was a big change from the crowded little room in Loyalty Hall where we usually visited our mother for a few hours on Sunday.

    The first time  I walked in the back door of the MD hall I had a real sense of a home.  Granny, Mrs. Gulley's mother, a small framed woman,  wearing an apron was stirring a batch of peanut butter fudge. Without knowing my name, she handed me a large wood spoon with plenty of fudge still on it and said “Sweetie, would you like to lick the spoon?”  

    Just as I was scraping the last of the fudge off the spoon with my teeth, I felt another presence in the room.  When I turned around, a tall woman with blonde hair styled in a beehive on top of her head was standing in the doorway.  Expecting to get hollered at I stiffened up and hid the spoon behind my back.   “You must be Jack's little sister. I see that Van Zanten look in your eyes.”  Instead of scolding me, she walked over to me and gave me the first hug I had in seven years.  When she hugged me, I wanted to melt into her large bosoms, held up by a sturdy brassiere that I could see through her neatly pressed cotton blouse. “Charlie, look who we got here, Jack's little sister.  Isn't she a cute one?”

    Charlie came around the corner of the living room. The aroma of Mr. Gulley's pipe tobacco swirled around the house as he puffed on his pipe that he held between his strong jaw.  He wore cowboy boots, blue jeans, a large belt buckle with a picture of a horse, a long sleeve, a plaid shirt that had pearly white snaps instead of buttons.  He had jet black hair, slicked neatly to the side. His deep, dark eyes didn't look away when he spoke.

    “Well, hello young lady.  It's a pleasure to meet you.  We've heard a lot about you from your brother.” 

    I hid behind Mrs. Gully and gave him a little wave.

    I was surprised at the difference in Jack's behavior. There wasn't any teasing or monkey business.  It seemed as if he had grown up into a respectable young man instead of an impish boy.  He called me Brat only once while I was there.

     Mrs. Gulley kindly reprimanded him “Don't you call her that.”

    “But that's what everyone calls her.” He retorted.

    “Her name is Jeanette and that's what you will call her from now on.” Mr. Gully chimed in, looking Jack directly in the eye.

    For awhile Jack didn't call me anything, but after awhile he began to use my name.

    While on the phone with Alma, now remarried and is Mrs. Scarlett, we spent an hour catching up on the last fifty years. I could hear the age in her voice that wasn't quite so strong anymore.  She's had four bypasses, hip replacements, knee replacements, a steel plate in her head, but a memory like a steel trap. She was sorry to hear about my mother and my brother Paul passing away.  She remembered all my brother's names and asked how they were doing. She reminisced about  Mooseheart.  She told me about the time my brother Jack was going to the Illinois State Fair to show cows.  A few days before the fair he sprained his ankle and begged the Gulley's not to take him to the hospital.  He wanted so bad to get out of Mooseheart for a few days.  So instead of sending him to the hospital, Mrs. Gully put horse liniment on his ankle, wrapped it in an ace bandage and sent him off to show the cows.

    With tears in my eyes, I said, “You and Mr. Gully were so kind compared to the matrons in the girl's hall. 

In her innocent benevolence, she said, “You mean not everyone treated you kindly.  How could they do otherwise?”

    “Unfortunately your kindness and love were the exceptions.” I answered.

    “I didn't agree with how strict Mooseheart was. Your mom told me that she had no idea that they were going to take her children away from her.  She thought you would all live in one building together. After the fact she felt stuck and couldn't do anything about it.”

      I often wondered how my mom felt about being separated from her children. A few years ago I talked to a mother who dressed in black clothes and snuck out of Mooseheart at night through the cornfields. She landed a job bartending nights, so she could get out and have her kids back.  My mother didn't have that constitution though.  And, maybe we were better off.

    I adopted Mrs. Gulley as my new mom.  Each year my mom would make an annual pilgrimage back to Pennsylvania for funerals or vacations. I wouldn't tell my matron that my mom was away, and I would sneak over to see Mrs. Gulley for an hour.  I would play with her little grandson Tommy Jo, who was visiting her.  He was just learning to walk, and I would hold his hands and walk him around the house while Mrs. Gulley and Granny prepared supper for the boys. On long Sunday afternoon visits,  Mrs. Gulley would get out her portable typewriter and help me type a letter to my mom even though we didn't have an address where she was.

    When it came time for graduation from elementary school, Mrs. Gulley bought me a training bra and nylons for the event.  She went shopping with my mom and I. Since my mom wasn't good at shopping she helped us pick a dress. When I couldn't make a decision, she held up two dresses and asked which one I like the best.  I picked the blue and white checkered jumper that had a lacy white blouse underneath.   She attended the ceremony with her grandaughter Shelley, who was a few years younger than me.

    The Gulley's were at Mooseheart for five years, long enough for my brother Warren to get assigned to their hall.  After they left Mooseheart, my mom would get a special permit to visit them on a farm they rented within a few miles of Mooseheart. They had a horse and a pond where Shelley and I would throw rocks.  Whenever I would ask Mrs. Gulley for permission to do something she said “Honey you don't need to tell me everything.  You just go on and have fun while you are here.”  

    Her son, big Tommy Jo was a truck driver and needed his name embroidered on the uniform shirts he wore.  My mom told Mrs. Gulley that I liked to embroidery, so they paid me real money to sew his name on the shirt. Before I had to go back to Mooseheart at night, Mrs. Gulley took me to the store to spend the money on whatever I wanted.  I bought more thread and a pillow case to embroidery.

    It wasn't long after, that I finally got to leave Mooseheart for good.  My first night out of the orphanage we stayed at Mr. and Mrs. Gulleys where I slept in a little cove in their attic with Shelley. I slept in my clothes as I had read stories in my history classes about the Underground Railroad where slaves had to get up in the middle of the night to move from one place to the other.   I didn't sleep much that night as I waited for the guards from Mooseheart to pull up in the driveway anytime to take me back to Mooseheart. Thankfully that didn't happen. 

    The next morning I woke up to the smell of bacon cooking.  When I came down, Granny had her apron on cooking breakfast for over ten people. I helped her butter the toast just as I was trained to do at Mooseheart.  After breakfast everyone had said their goodbyes and we were headed to Pennsylvania.

     I wished I could have stayed right there with Mr. and Mrs. Gulley and Granny.  When she hugged me goodbye I didn't ever want to let go.  “We'll see you again honey.  Write me letters and let me know how you all are doing.”  She gave me a little heart shaped jewelry box, lined with red velvet.  The top had a blue background and a white ship embossed on it.  She told me it reminded her of my Dutch heritage. I don't know if I ever wrote her a letter, but I thought of her each time I looked at the jewelry box that I carried with me for many years.

    After talking on the phone for over an hour, she said, “Honey, hearing from you has just made my day.  Let's keep in touch.  I don't do Facebook, but send me your address and phone number.”

 I assured her I would.

“And if you ever could come out and visit me that would mean more than anything in the world.  I have two extra bedrooms, and you are welcome here anytime.”

    The twelve hour trip to southern Illinois doesn't look foreseeable in my near future, but a 90th birthday card to a very special woman is in the mail.