Chapter 2

I went over to see my mother early the next afternoon. I followed my father's sage advice and didn't even try to pull the wool over her eyes. It was good that I approached her that way because she was already suspicious that Annie was pregnant and was relieved to find out that there was a man who accepted responsibility and wanted to marry her.

After I told her that my father already knew about it and had asked me to break the news to her, she questioned me about how he had taken the news when I had told him. She laughed when I told her about my attempted deceit.

"Jackie, you've got to get up pretty early in the morning to put anything over on that man. I suppose Annie and her fella want to have a nice, quiet wedding, or else run off somewhere to get married?"

I told her about Annie and Janos wanting a civil ceremony at the courthouse, but when her face started clouding over, I had enough sense to stop talking and let her tell me exactly what was going to happen.When I left, an hour later, I had enough work to do to take me three months to do it, and only three weeks to get it all done.

My mother was pulling out all the stops on this wedding. I think the main reason was that she felt that Annie had endured enough disappointments in her past relationships with men, and my mother thought a big church wedding would somehow, miraculously, make all those earlier memories fade to nothingness.

Three weeks to the day later, Annie and Janos were married. They were married up in Lyme, with a bishop of the Church officiating. Every relative in the family that my mother was able to contact was there for the wedding.

Even my grandfather rode in from New Haven to watch his granddaughter get married. It was surreal, watching him enter the church and be ushered over to sit next to my grandmother, his estranged wife. I was seated one row up and listened with trepidation, half expecting a big ugly scene to unfold.

"Good morning Mary Catherine."

"John Francis."

That was it. They had last spoken at the funerals for two of their grandsons seven or eight years previous to the wedding. When the wedding was over, my grandfather stood aside as my Uncle Donald led my grandmother away from the church. Other than my mother, Annie, myself and one or two cousins of mine, no one spoke a single word to him at the reception either.

I guess leaving a woman alone to care for ten of your children, all still living at home, to traipse off in search of peace and quiet, and some degree of happiness for yourself, was considered a no no by the great majority of the family. Having had to listen to my grandmother when she was in one of her full tirades, I felt like I might understand why he felt like he had to get away.

I couldn't excuse it, but I did understand it. My mother thought the sun rose and set on her father's ass, and she always loved him, no matter what he did or failed to do. When he was up in New Haven years later, with cancer eating away at a host of his organs, she went up there and nursed him night and day for the final three weeks before he died, and then took care of all his funeral arrangements.

He left everything he had to my grandmother, including his railroad pension. After his death, she was financially comfortable for the first time in her life. Of course, by then she was eighty one years old and wasn't able to enjoy the money, due to her own declining health.

A few of us had pooled our money and put together a nice honeymoon for the newlyweds in Niagara Falls. Annie looked so happy, walking down the aisle. She was in a beautiful light blue wedding gown, having refused to wear anything white, walking arm in arm with my father, who was wearing his dress blue Navy chief's uniform, with four rows of ribbons and decorations.

The reception went pretty well until one of my uncles, drunk and feeling morose, braced my father about some ancient slight he'd felt he'd suffered at my father's hands. When my Uncle Donald, his brother, tried to pull him away, telling him it wasn't the time or the place for that sort of thing, Uncle Jimmy took a swing at him and caught Donald behind the ear, making him stumble into one of my aunts.

It all ended when there was a brief set to, with two of my other uncles and both of their wives subduing Uncle Jimmy, then dragging him away from my father. My father, during all this, was grinning, and enjoying the whole fracas immensely.

I loaned Annie and Janos my Impala for their honeymoon trip and off they went for two weeks of honeymooning. While they were gone, we were busy renting them a one bedroom furnished apartment and moving their personal things into it.

Janos passed his classes and was issued a license to teach in Connecticut. After their baby was born on September twenty first, and while Annie was still in the hospital, Janos moved over to Niantic to be closer to his school.

Annie quit her job at Electric Boat and became a full time housewife and mother. In all, they had five children, all boys, Zoltan, Laurant, Josef, Imre and Georgy. I assume those are all Hungarian names, because they sure didn't come from our side of the family.

Janos worked until 1997 and then took retirement and he and Annie moved down to Key West, Florida. The last I heard, they have eleven grandkids, all girls, and were standing by with their fingers crossed, since two of their daughters in law were pregnant again with their hoped for grandsons.

I talk to Annie on the phone most weeks now, since I have one of those phone plans where you can make unlimited long distance calls for almost nothing. She is still happy in her marriage, and with the way her life turned out.

I actually saw her last at my father's funeral in 2000. She looked matronly then, having put on a lot of weight, and having let her hair go completely grey. When I talk with her now, her only major worry in life seems to be getting Janos to quit his smoking.

We had a chance to reminisce after the funeral for our father, and she told me several interesting stories about things that had happened in our family before I was born.

"Did you ever know Jackie, that dad wasn't my real father?" I almost fell over in shock when she said it. My parents had been married in 1937, but I had never given much thought to Annie's birthday being in May and their wedding being in November of that same year. Nothing either of my parents had ever said gave me any indication that he wasn't her father. "It was Uncle Bill. He got mom and Aunt Margaret both pregnant at almost the same time. Mom didn't even know about him and Margaret until Margaret turned up pregnant. Dale is my half brother, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't know that."

"Jesus Annie, are you sure about this? Hell, you don't look anything like Uncle Bill. You look more like dad than I do."

"He's on my birth certificate listed as my father. Daddy adopted me and changed my last name to his, when I was one years old. Mom and Aunt Margaret didn't even speak to each other for three or four years after mom found out about Bill and Margaret. It was when Margaret was pregnant with Billy, and Uncle Bill and Dad were in the service and away from home a lot. The two of them started talking again and Aunt Margaret was able to finally tell mom about how jealous of her she had been, and how she had wanted to get back at her in some way, after mom had graduated and Margaret had failed out of the nursing school they both went to. She didn't plan on getting pregnant, just stealing Bill away from mom was all she was after. Mom told her that she was glad it happened, in most ways, because she never would have met and married dad, if she and Uncle Bill had stayed together or gotten married."