The Name on the White Reunion Shirt

Leo Becker

Nobody in that shelter house under the age of seventy knew who Leo Becker was. I could see it on every face. I could see it on Sandra’s.

But Arlen knew. He was sitting at the end of the table with his cane, and he put his fork down and closed his eyes.

And Uncle Carl knew. Carl Lindgren, Aunt Ruth’s husband of sixty-two years, eighty-six years old, sitting in his own lawn chair by the hot dishes with his cap in his lap. He did not look surprised at all. He just looked at his wife the way he has always looked at her.

Aunt Ruth sat down on the picnic bench next to me. She was out of breath. She folded her hands on top of her purse.

“Leo Becker,” she said, “was a Catholic boy from the Becker dairy over by Waseca. In 1961 I was seventeen years old, and he was nineteen, and he asked my father for me.”

Nobody moved.

“He came to the farm on a Sunday afternoon in his good shirt. He brought my mother a pie. He sat in the front room, and he asked my father, very politely, if he could marry me after I graduated.”

“What did Grandpa Halvorson say?” Sandra asked. Her voice did not sound like her voice.

“Your Grandpa Halvorson said no.” Aunt Ruth looked down at her hands. “He said no daughter of his would sign a paper promising to raise her babies Catholic. That was the rule back then, you know. You had to promise. He said it would break this family in half, and he would not have it.”

“Mom,” Sandra said.

“I went up to my room and cried for a week. And then I cried every August for longer than I like to say, because the Beckers’ place was right on the road to the reunion, and every year we drove past it.”

The pantry

Sandra sat down across the table from her mother. She did it slowly, like her knees had given out.

“I used to hear you,” she said. “In the pantry. Every August, the week before the reunion. I’d hear you in there with the door shut.”

“I know you did.”

“I asked Grandma once. When I was ten. I asked her why you were crying.” Sandra’s chin was shaking. “She said marrying out was what nearly broke this family. That’s all she ever said. She said it like it was a rule. I thought it was about somebody else. Some great-aunt. I thought it was a rule.”

Aunt Ruth reached across the table and put her hand over her daughter’s hand, clipboard and all.

“It was me, Sandy,” she said. “It was always me. Nobody ever told you because nobody ever told anybody. That’s how we did things then. We just didn’t say.”

“Then why are you saying it now?”

Aunt Ruth looked at the white shirt on my back. Then she looked at Sandra.

“Because I walked in this morning and saw what you’d done,” she said. “And I thought, I taught her that. Not with words. With the crying. I taught my own girl that marrying out breaks families, and it was a lie. It was my father’s fear, and I passed it on in a pantry.”