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By Root 769 0

born in 1930 on the old Iron Range of Minnesota, a child of relative privilege in that humble community and depressed economy, so her family’s thorough-going and instinctive modesty was even more wisely self-protective. Her father was something of a town elder in tiny Ely, Minnesota, even serving—extraordinarily for a Jew—on the town council. As the town’s most successful grocer, Felix Arden was able to survive, if not exactly prosper, through the 1930s. The family didn’t suffer as much in the Depression as others, and Felix was known to provide free and discounted food for those in need, for which he was later honored by the town. As a result of his Christian generosity, the entire family shared in his reputation. Mary worked as his delivery girl to the housebound, and so gained a rather saintly aura. Her very un-Minnesota taste for fine clothes and displays of wealth were therefore largely forgiven, where anyone else would have been mocked or shunned in small-town Lutheran style. She was a regular at the Quality Shop over in Virginia, where the finest clothes on the Range could be had without the trek down to Minneapolis. She was a figure of powerful glamour there, looked up to by the shopgirls and even by the owner’s own beautiful and brilliant daughter. Silvius told me that the Quality Shop’s owner, in his annual trips to New York, would come back with gowns he chose particularly for the Arden girl from Ely. My mother’s clothes, hairstyles, and very unladylike motorcycle with sidecar (which I later used in one of my novels) were only admired and smiled on, since she had been the little girl bringing food through the snow not so many years before, never forgotten by the Swedes, Finns, Italians, and Poles of Ely.

It was one of those Italians, Silvius diLorenzo, who set his heart on the grocer’s daughter with the long black hair and eyes so gray they were almost silver. Religious and class distinctions were very real, though, in 1950s small-town Minnesota, and Sil would have had to be a stiff-spined rebel to buck everything in his way for her, even if he could have won her. She might possibly have been in a position to make an unconventional marriage, if he was inclined to convert, or if she was inclined to marry at all, but she still had wispy ideas of moving away from Ely to become an actress in New York or Hollywood, or to achieve some other undefinable glory. She had never tried acting; it was just that too many old Swedish ladies had petted her hand as she delivered their food and told her she looked like a movie star.

Sil was the son of Italian immigrants (whereas my mom was the granddaughter of immigrants). His people worked, when there was work, in mining or on the docks over in Duluth. Sil tried his hand at boxing before being “knocked out enough to knock some sense into me.” His mother had a make-work servant’s job in the Arden household, though the notion of actually using a servant offended Felix and Annie Arden’s modest sensibilities, and Annie had to stop herself from doing Violeta diLorenzo’s work for her, lest she reveal just how much charity motivated the employment.

And so, for years, Silvius told me, he ached for my mother, the daughter of the house where his own mother folded the laundry. A fair student at Ely and a second-line wing on the school hockey team, he watched as she was squired to dances, as she rode through town with this or that boy in her sidecar, and as she prepared to go down to the University of Minnesota in 1949.

He declared himself to her that summer before she left, in a scene I heard from both of them. In Sil’s version, she barely noticed his presence, seemed puzzled by the whole thing. “She was imagining herself performing for the crowned heads of Europe or marrying one,” he said. Sil slunk away, embarrassed but lighter for having faced down his fear. “She was cold as a common executioner,” he told me, laughing by then, the late-round victor. “Silly, she called me. That was rough. When you’re beneath her contempt, when your mother’s cleaning her toilet. Now I can take it.”