The voice on the telephone belonged to my Aunt Dorothy. I knew it before she finished her question, and so did every member of my family, because we had heard it every Christmas Eve of our lives. My grandmother kept a scratched record of the choir of Our Savior Lutheran, made in 1965, and on it a young alto sang the second verse of a carol alone. Dot Larsen. The younger sister of my father. The aunt who, according to the story told at our table, had passed of pneumonia in the winter of 1970, in a hospital in Chicago, and whose name was never spoken after the memorial service.
I stood on the porch with the phone against my ear and the pipe in my other hand, and I could not breathe. “Aunt Dot?” I managed. “Is that you?” There was a long silence. Then a laugh, soft and cracked, like a record skipping. “Joanne,” she said. “You have the way of talking of your father. Yes, child. It is me. I am ninety one years old, and I live in Evanston, and I have been waiting by this telephone since your father passed in September.”
She told me the rest in an hour, and I wrote it on the back of an envelope. On the Fourth of July in 1967, Dorothy Larsen had married Marcus Bell, a postal clerk she met in Minneapolis. My grandfather, Olaf, had forbidden it. He said that if she went through with the wedding, she would no longer be his daughter, and he told the family she had passed in 1970 to end all questions. Only my father defied him. Every July, Harold drove to Chicago alone, and the briar pipe, she said, was a gift from Marcus, with her number rolled inside the shank. “So that Harold could never forget,” she said, and her voice shook.
A briar pipe unstopped on a porch rail gave one daughter the weekend to bring a lost aunt home to Mankato.
My mother Ellen is eighty four and lives in a bungalow on Hickory Street, with a cat on her lap and a radio tuned to Minnesota Public Radio. I sat down on her sofa and told her the whole story, the pipe, the paper, the phone call. She listened without a word. When I finished, she smiled a small and tired smile. “I wondered when you would find it,” she said. “I tried to throw that pipe away in 2002 because I was afraid he would go and not come back.” She took my hand. “Joanne, I drove with him to Chicago once, in 1981. I held the baby while he talked to her on the porch.”
My brother Kurt did not take it as well. He is sixty three, and he inherited the farmhouse of our grandfather, and with it some of the stern ways of the old man. He came to the house of our mother that same afternoon, and stood in the doorway with his cap in his hand. “Let the past alone,” he said. “Dad kept his promise to Grandpa for fifty years. Whatever he did, he did.” Then he reached over the arm of the sofa and snatched the pipe from my lap, and ran out the front door toward the Minnesota River, a block away, with his arm raised. I ran after him, but my husband Gary was faster, and caught his sleeve at the top of the bank.
Kurt stood there at the edge of the water, with the pipe in his fist and his chest heaving. He looked at it, and then at Gary, and then at me. “She was my aunt,” he said, in a strange, small voice. “I remember her at the picnic. I was six. She taught me how to whistle with a blade of grass.” His arm fell to his side. “They told me she passed, and I believed them. I believed them for fifty years.” He opened his hand and let me take the pipe. Then he sat down on the damp grass with his head between his knees, and Gary sat beside him, and neither of them said anything.
We drove to Evanston the next morning, my brother and I, in my car, with the pipe in a pouch on the dashboard. Aunt Dot lived in a tidy brick house with a green door, and she was waiting on the porch in a lavender cardigan and a pair of pearl earrings. Beside her stood two women in their sixties and a tall man in his forties, her daughters and her grandson. Kurt stopped on the sidewalk. Dot looked at him, and she raised one hand to her mouth. “Kurtis,” she said. “Little Kurtis. With the grass blade.” He climbed the steps. He did not say a word. He only bent down and put his arms around her.
The money consequences were simple. My father had never sold the quarter section he inherited from Olaf, and in his files I found something remarkable. Every year since 1967, on the day of the harvest, he had set aside a third of the rent of the land in a savings account in the name of Dorothy Bell. It had grown, with interest, to two hundred and twelve thousand dollars. Dot would not take a cent of it. She gave it back to the family, with a request that it be used for a scholarship, and she named it for the father of Marcus, a Pullman porter, who had never gone to college.
In the name of my father, Harold, who passed in September and who drove to Chicago every July for fifty years, I started the Pipe Stem Fund. It pays for travel, mediation and counseling for families in Blue Earth, Nicollet and Le Sueur counties who are reconciling after long estrangements. In the first year, we helped thirty three families. A man of seventy seven, in a flannel shirt, set a folded letter on the desk and said, “My sister and I have not spoken since 1974.” I put my hand on the telephone and asked him if he would like to call her.
On the Fourth of July, Aunt Dot came home to Mankato for the first time in fifty seven years. Our whole family met her at the church, three generations of Larsens, with the choir waiting in the front pews. She walked down the aisle on the arm of Kurt, small and straight, in a navy dress. At the front, the organist struck a note. And then Dot, ninety one years old, lifted her chin and began to sing, the second verse of the old carol, in her cracked and silver alto. Nobody moved. At the last line, my mother stood up and began to clap, and the whole church rose.
