Another never seen before bit of memory lane.

Once I had a discussion with my father-in-law about what happens to us after we're dead. Did he believe in purgatory? I wanted to know. He was very thoughtful man, and very religious, my father-in-law, and I know he thought a lot about death. He didn't hesitate and spoke with great conviction. "After we die, we can't get to Heaven until we have forgiven all those people who have wronged us, and until all the people we have wronged have forgiven us."

When we were kids, and had a very strict orthodox Catholic upbringing, we were taught that when we died, we would no doubt need to spend some time in purgatory unless we were so bad as to go to Hell directly, without passing Go. And the only way we could get out of purgatory I seem to remember was by people praying for us.

So we spent a lot of time praying for our friends and relatives who had died, saying special prayers in November which were worth more then, it being the month of the Holy Souls. The special prayers had a value system - some things like ordinary Hail Mary's and Our Father's were of value, but were much more valuable if you said them in some prescribed order like in a Rosary, or on 9 First Fridays, or three at a time on November 2nd, the actual feast of All Souls, as long as you'd gone to confession and communion too. You could go into and out of church all day on November 2nd, and offer all those prayers for the most wretched souls who nobody else prayed for, and that was worth a plenary indulgence. I think that meant it got somebody all the way out of purgatory. There were other less valuable indulgences one could say too, and I think they actually had a number of years remission of purgatory attached to them, or maybe I made that up.

Anyway, my very firm belief in those days was that is was important to pray for the souls of people who died, and I made a habit of saying a prayer for the repose of the soul of every single person I read about or heard about on tv who had died. But I don't think I ever said a prayer for Martin Henlein.

I'm much more sophisticated in my religious thinking these days, and have a very low opinion of indulgences and even purgatory as a place of punishment. But I keep remembering my father-in-law’s ideas and wondering if Martin is spending lots of extra time there, if it exists, because I never told him how sorry I was for how I treated him.

In order to understand this rather weird piece of writing, you have to know who Martin was and what he has to forgive me for, so that involves a lot of prattling on about those long ago days in Bismarck, where I lived with my parents and my sister Judy. The last time I was in that house with Martin as our next door neighbour was after Mom died in November 1968, so I had had 20 years to be nice to Martin, and I never was.

Martin lived with his mother in those early days. I don't think I ever saw her outside the house. She was elderly and bedridden and Martin dedicated his life to taking care of her. He was probably in his mid 30's when we moved in. His mother's bedroom window was right across from our side window in the dining room so we could look into their house, but hardly ever saw anything worth commenting on. I think I can remember seeing his mother in bed, or sitting on a chair, with a nightgown on and a night cap, the sort of ones we made as kids of a circle of material with elastic sewn about 2" in from the outside of the circle.

Somebody told us that Martin and his mother didn't have an inside toilet. I think it was probably Lois who was the older girl who lived down the road who knew just about everything. (In retrospect I expect his mother had to use a commode, and that is what started the rumour.) This bit of information was told with a real sense of disgust - and we picked it up and were happy to add it to the list of things we had against our poor neighbours.

Martin we did see, because Martin was very proud of his yard. In the front he had a patch of lawn that he kept immaculate without a stitch of crab grass in it. He spent hours pulling out the odd bits that floated in from our rather ordinary patch, and although he never actually told us that we caused him all sorts of extra work, which wouldn't have been necessary if we had gotten rid of our own crab grass, we thought that he thought that. And that was another thing on our list of things against him.

The sides of his yard didn't have grass, they had moss. Most people are upset when they have moss in their yards, but Martin was very proud of his. He also went around with his bucket and trowel digging out any weeds, or even bits of ordinary grass that tainted his moss. It was a nice green, and very smooth. I think it stayed green even in the very hot summers when the grass turned brown. I really don't know what Martin's back yard looked like, except that along the side of the house and extending into his back yard there were lilac trees - 3 of them alongside our property, and probably at least another 3 going towards the back. These were cut into perfect round shapes and he spent many minutes studying before he pruned back each branch in the early summer to make sure the shape was retained exactly. The smell of his lilacs was wonderful, and they were very beautiful when they were fully in bloom. We sat and looked at them, and envied them, and thought he was ever so mean not to cut any for us.

Mother asked him for some once because she was having her bridge friends over, and he said “no.” She asked in May, in the prime of their bloom,  “To cut them in May would spoil the shape of the trees,” he said. But she was mad and thought he was mean. Another thing to put on our list.

I do remember lots of bouquets of lilacs in our house over the years, so I'm sure he did give us some. But we mostly remembered the times he said no. (Funnily enough, my husband now is very unhappy if I cut our roses or daffodils. He says that flowers last so much better if left on their plants and are given their full growing season. He buys daffodils when our yard is actually full of hundreds of them rather than let me pick any.) Maybe Martin was not only thinking of himself but of the flowers and the trees. That never occurred to us because we were so determined to not like him or anything about him.

How shall I describe him? Martin was probably as tall as my dad, about 5'11",  but he was thin and stooped over so he looked shorter. His hair was balding and I don't remember it ever looking in any other way. He wore glasses, ones without plastic rims, which made him look even more eccentric to our juvenile minds. He had a soft, educated voice. He always looked neat and tidy, and had his hair cut a reasonable length. He wore grey workingman's shirts and grey trousers, but they were always clean and ironed.

Why did we take such a dislike to poor Martin? Why did we feel it necessary to keep adding to our list things that we held against him? The only thing I can think of was that he was different, and even as I write it, it is hard to justify us thinking he was different. He didn't have wife and children. He didn't go out to work. He must have been the one to do all the cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing and shopping for himself and his mother. Men didn't normally do those sorts of things in those days, but then most men didn't have to take care of invalid mothers either. Martin was a bore. That was probably the top thing on his list of faults. When he talked to us, he talked for too long and about things we weren't interested in. But in truth, it was very seldom that he spoke to us at all. Mostly he just kept himself to himself, and went about weeding his garden and living his lonely life.

His mother died when we were in our early teens, I think. And I suppose we thought his life would change after that. But for awhile, his life appeared to be just as before. But now there was a new threat and a new thing to add to the list. He was a man living alone, and we were young teenage girls who were sure he had evil desires concerning us. To put it in words makes it even more ludicrous than it was. We were bespeckled, flat -chested and by no means overwhelming attractive to the opposite sex so why we should have thought that poor Martin fancied us and was waiting his opportunity to ravish us, I can't for the life of me imagine. I can remember playing with the hose, dressed in our swimsuits, one summer, and somebody squirted me and the top of my suit fell down. Martin just happened to be standing in his yard when this happened, and I thought I'd die of embarrassment.

Martin's other interest in life besides his yard, was classical music. One summer he brought a large number of albums (twenty maybe) and some singles over to our house and knowing that I played the piano, and Judy played the trumpet, and assuming we had an interest in classical music, asked if we would like them. He said they were slightly scratched, which was why he was giving them away, but we never detected any scratches in them. This was a real gesture of friendship on his side, and we were polite and said thank you, but were not prepared to consider friendship with this weird man.

Probably when his mother was alive she was getting a pension, and Martin and she lived on that. After she died, Martin became gradually poorer, and the time came when he really had to go out to work. He talked to dad more than to the rest of us, and told him how little success he had with all his attempts. This wasn't surprising as he had been unemployed for so long, and was so quiet and shy that we didn't blame people for not taking a chance on him. One time he had the possibility of a job demonstrating vacuum cleaners. He asked if he could clean our rug in front of his potential boss so that it could be determined whether he was any good at it. "No way am I letting that man in my house to clean our rug" said Mother. So hopefully he had some better friends who did let him use their houses, but I don't think he got the job anyway.

One Christmas, he was really at a low. He talked to dad over the fence just as we were going out so we all overheard part of the conversation. He had nothing in the house to eat and no money. We didn't have much money in those days, but we always had enough to eat. But we never once invited Martin over for a meal. And Dad gave him a bill - probably $5 or $10 maybe only $1, and Mom sent over a large jar of pickled peaches for him. But we didn't invite him in to share our Christmas meal.

Why were we so mean to him? Why were we so scared of him? Only because he was a single man who somehow seemed a threat to us, and because we thought if we started doing things for him, he would expect more and more. I felt guilty when we did so little for him that year, but I never told my parents that. It wasn't that I wasn't willing to disagree with them or say what I thought. I went out of my way to tell them in front of some company once, that their attitude to black people was way out of line of Catholic teaching. But because I shared Mom's dislike and fear of Martin, I kept my guilt to myself. I don't think Dad disliked him, but he wouldn't go against anything Mother said.

A few summers after that we had a frightening series of incidents that we were sure had something to do with Martin. On frequent occasions, our neighbours on the other side, the Boespflugs found that their little stool had been moved from outside their house and left underneath Judy's and my bedroom window, or sometimes the bathroom window. Obviously there was a window-peeker around, and obviously we suspected Martin.

Eventually the boy who was doing it was apprehended at another neighbour's house, and it turned out to be an old boyfriend of Judy's from the next block. But rather than feeling sorry that we had falsely suspected Martin, we were outraged because when the story got around, he admitted that he had seen a boy looking in our windows and had thought he was a friend of ours, so hadn't said anything. Would we have believed him if had said it was a boy whom he had seen visiting our house many times, and who obviously was a friend of someone in the family? I doubt it.

Eventually Martin got a job in the drafting office at the State Highway Department. He walked a mile and a half up the road to work each day and back each night. We no longer had to worry about whether he had food or money or friends, because it wasn't our problem. I never saw anyone with him in the house visiting him, so probably his life was nearly as lonely as before, but at least he had a job.

I only saw Martin once after I married and that was coming out of church one Sunday. He looked so pleased to see me, and I think I probably managed to say hello before I rushed away. And the next time I asked, many years ago now, I was told that he had died.

When we drive by our old house, and his, there is crab grass in his lawn, and grass where his moss used to grow. The lilacs aren't there anymore either.

So I'm writing this to say I'm sorry Martin, for misjudging you, and ignoring you, for refusing to be your friend, and I hope you can forgive me so we can both get to heaven.