All the libraries shut down before I could stockpile. I don’t even remember what I was reading “before” COVID-19. After false starts from various bookcases I finally reached up to the stack of books that I keep on the bedpost above my cervical pillow. The books I mean to read but don’t. Perhaps it was inevitable that in the time of a pandemic I would finally reach for “Mrs. Mike.”

When I was twelve years old this novel broke my heart. I’ve spent the last 48 years dancing in its orbit, as though that story was the broken center.

Until this 2020 time of sheltering in place and sorting our basements I’d lost the diary that I kept then. It was the school year of 1972-1973 in a small New England town. My mother finally took the library copy of “Mrs. Mike” away from me, because I wasn’t able to stop crying.

In 6th grade girls and boys were starting to pass one another notes, supposedly to confirm “going out together.” It was 1972; we weren’t going anywhere. I had glasses, wayward hair, and was probably heading into a puberty that would welcome acne, my period, and a first episode of depression that wouldn’t be addressed until 33 years later. But I was a reader. Since chapter books and “Little House in the Big Woods” first launched my alternate life in 2nd grade I had balanced parallel lives, projecting myself into every strong female character.

The children and young adult section of the Topsfield Town Library was still downstairs in the 1970’s. That’s where my journey to 16-year-old Kathleen O’Fallon and the Northwest Territory, and her handsome Canadian Mountie Mike Flannigan, began. But what has haunted me since was the first experiencing of true loss. I was Kathy Flannigan and my children died. Children could die, and so could romantic love.

Does this reckoning with loss come first in a book, for those who are readers?

For years I toyed with the idea of finding “Mrs. Mike” but even the thought was traumatic. Was I afraid of my teenage self, or that the novel would disappoint me, as though I’d fallen for a false narrative of my life?

Then in June 2019 I was in a bookstore in Ketchikan, Alaska, which is still a place of geographic wonder to me, even though I moved to the West Coast in 1983.  At eye level was “Mrs. Mike” by Benedict and Nancy Freedman, featured prominently as a “beloved local classic” in a confusingly glamorous paperback edition. I had a physical reaction: light-headed, pulse racing. Afraid. I bought the book and then kept it gingerly close for eight months…but not close enough to open its pages. Until March 2020.

II

Twelve years ago I merged households in a second marriage and the basement has obligingly served as a bottomless pit for a lifetime of writing. I used to write in my journals daily. Before the smartphone and charger I would reach for a notebook and pen before leaving for an emergency room visit. Napkins worked in a pinch, or margins of books already purchased. Since childhood I’d needed first paper and then combinations (the Selectric typewriter, the obsolete Kaypro and dot matrix printer) to offload the mundane and the terrifying. Both becoming destinations I rarely wanted to revisit. The critiqued and rejected manuscripts, the bedside journals of home and hospital rooms…all warehoused and mildewing in the basement.

As I began simultaneously re-reading “Mrs. Mike” and descending the basement steps I mused there are valid reasons for not taking out the blankets that wrapped us when we were in pain. Not when we could be looking at photos of children dressed as skunks, the first fish on a line, the 50th anniversary photos of parents juxtaposed with those of their wedding in 1958. Why would I want to go through the painful old journals, even though there might be joy in them?

When my boyfriend Jim, whom I would later marry, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease in 1985 his impulse was to seek the movie that stood out as the saddest one he’d ever seen. So we watched “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” I haven’t watched it since. I haven’t watched “Bambi” since childhood either, and tried to keep my daughter from watching it. When I learned she’d seen it at the neighbors’ she assured me, “It’s okay, I already knew the mom dies.” So much for protecting her, already a sign that she’ll always be braver than me. Then again she really did lose her father before she was three.

Go there, I told myself, opening “Mrs. Mike.” Go there, I said, heading down the basement stairs, go where you were first afraid.

In 1972 I followed “sickly” Katherine Mary O’Fallon from Boston to Calgary, Alberta. It was supposed to be my fantasy life away from my bedroom where I was certain I was basically friendless and ugly. It was supposed to be an escape from reality, not an introduction. Like a time capsule the diary of that year came to the surface, missing its cover, lock broken, pages marked by a younger sister.

But in “Mrs. Mike” I was hooked again by page one: snow covering the windows of the train. By page 19 of the 2002 Berkley trade paperback edition there’s the ultimate dislike/attraction of every romance novel: the first meeting of Kathy with a very tall, “very good looking” Mountie. The bantering was familiar from every love story I’d read, the movies where Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn sparred until they admitted love. Those books and movies usually ended with a kiss as consummation, implying marriage and the rest of their lives resolved (happily) forever.

Reading these passages 48 years later I can still feel their allure, but 60-year-old me, wants to shake Kathy, “This is just a crush. You’re 16 years old. A baby. I wouldn’t even want you to be driving a car.” But Mike is very adult, and perhaps a grown man has a certain appeal for a young girl, especially one without a father? On page 60 Kathy’s Uncle John responds to Mike, “There’s no man I’d rather give her to you than you, Mike Flannigan, and you know it well.”

I would clearly not be reading this novel the way I did in 1972, lacking even then a historical perspective of what was culturally accepted in 1907, or as first published in 1947. I kept reading, recognizing that the novel’s endurance rested in part on its inspiration from a real Katherine Mary Flannigan and good writing.  But I felt dread at what I knew lay ahead and latent shame. White, Eastern European ethnocentricity suffuses the story. I cringed at a reference to “breeds,” not even referred to as Half-Breeds the way Cher famously sang in the 70’s (mounted incongruously in a Bob Mackie Cherokee-inspired two piece outfit on a horse).  Despite the racist terms of the day, the Native-Americans were written as three-dimensional humans. 

Who will be reading this for the first time in 2020 I wondered? Don’t swallow it whole. Don’t be hooked on a beautifully baited line. There’s a reason almost entire villages will die, from the White European’s diseases, along with the trappers, miners, loggers, railroad builders, all those traders and the bankers investing in them back in the cities, plundering the natural resources that had sustained the indigenous. 

Yet I read on, the happy parts lost to my memory but now clouded with pending doom. A fire sends all the women and children into the water. I remember fire and loss. Was this my source of terror? But pregnant Kathy Flannigan is rescued by her Mike, even though their house is lost. In the dialect that now grates, the chief, Mustagan, shakes hands with Mike supposedly as thanks, “after the custom of white men. ‘The Sergeant, him save the people of Mustagan.’”

Understand that I was born in 1960, raised on the mythology of nearby Plimouth Plantation and the Mayflower.  On April 20, 2020, it was Patriot’s Day in my “Home State,” and October 2020 brought another “Columbus Day.” I didn’t question my father’s story of the ocean being drained every night, and distinctly remember going to see it filled in the morning…along with my imaginary friend Peachy. When a character appeared to have been killed in a cliffhanger ending on a Friday episode of “The Edge of Night,” I was terrified but afraid to confess my terror to my mother. I slunk downstairs to the TV in the den to watch alone in case Nicole was really dead. Yet 1972 was also the year “West Side Story” was first broadcast on national television, on two consecutive nights. Part of me still can’t believe that hapless Tony dies, but I didn’t see myself in Maria, perhaps because of what Latinx writer Donna Miscolta identifies in titling her story, “Natalie Wood’s Fake Puerto Rican Accent.”  I wept, but for senseless violence and tragedy in general, not one in my life, real or imagined.

Katherine Flannigan is a mother before she is eighteen. An older European-born woman tries to prepare her for what lies ahead, how there will likely be a first family, perhaps even a second family. “Don’t look like that Katherine Mary. It happened such a long time ago, twenty-five years. I can talk about it now, tell it as if it were a story.”

The insight that proves to be the driver of this novel was utterly wasted on me. “These big things, these terrible things, are not the important ones. If they were, how could one go on living? No, it is the small, little things that make up a day, that bring fullness and happiness to a life. Your Sergeant coming home, a good dinner, your little Mary laughing, the smell of the woods – oh, so many things, you know them yourself.”

Two paragraphs later the Sergeant kicks open the door carrying the woman’s son who has just watched a grizzly bear maul his friend to death. So this wasn’t  “Little House on the Prairie,” but I was smugly safe in my New England bedroom.

By Chapter Nineteen another mother has had to saw off half of her son’s leg that was caught in an abandoned trap and Mike is trying to vaccinate all of the Indians in the village. In Chapter Twenty Kathy births her second child, a son, which is then almost stolen by a widow who has been repeatedly raped (this word wasn’t used and I have no idea what I thought had happened in my pre-pubescent days). Was I still along for what I thought was the romantic ride: imagining myself as brave, serving tea to the Indians and being called “Kitten” by the brave, handsome, faultless Canadian Mounted Police Officer?

What I should have known was coming, back in 1972, arrived after the innocuous beginning of Chapter Twenty-Three when Kathy has been transfixed in the rare arrival of new reading material, “The History of China.” Mrs. Mike herself becomes closer to me imagining myself her. “For weeks I lived in two worlds…And the next day I might be a Taoist priest or a young beauty from Szechuan waiting to be married to the Crown Prince.” In fact Kathy is imagining herself the owner of an original painting in the book. “There was a curious sound at the door…Wiya-Sha stood there. ‘Sergeant Mike,’ she said, ‘my baby sick. My baby choke.’”

Did I know in 1972 that horror had come knocking with “bare hands?” That in practically the shortest two chapters of what the 2002 edition calls, “This classic saga of love and courage in the Canadian Wilderness,” that almost everything in Kathy’s life would be lost? That first her son and then daughter Mary would die along with most of her village? Her babies die horrible choking deaths. Sent away from being with the bodies of her dead children Kathy tries to help an old man wrest his dead wife from a dog.  “I came at the dog with my stick, but by the time I reached him, the old man was mangled.”

Perhaps this novel was why I have never watched a horror movie. “Mrs. Mike” had every possible horror already included…an epidemic, humans as prey, natural and man-made disasters. But I don’t know if these deaths were what broke me.

When Mike takes Kathy to see the graves, she remembers. “I had been afraid when Constance told me of her children, the one she hadn’t named and the others. What warning could be plainer than her words, ‘The women here speak of their first family, their second and third families.’ Why hadn’t I taken my children then, away from this country that had killed them?”

But it’s what comes next that merges my childhood self with that of my adult. “What had happened to us, to Mike and me? I wanted to reach out to him, but I couldn’t.” Months pass. “After dinner I’d sit and listen to him play. He brooded in his music. I brooded in myself. I was alone. Mike was as lost to me as surely as the children were.”

I’m not sure what I understood of the loneliness in relationships then, but I could relate to feeling alone, no matter how many people were around me. I could also feel the chasm in my parents’ relationship and would fantasize that if I died (in sort of a poof without specificity) they would miraculously love one another again. Now as an adult I know all too well a distance that feels like a force field, even as you sit together eating dinner. I knew that loneliness during Jim’s Hodgkin’s Disease recurrence, when he turned away from me. Whether it was exhaustion or pain, I took it personally. After he died it sometimes seemed less lonely; the separateness had felt like that cold that gets in your bones, not even warmed by sharing the same bed.

Kathy Flannigan and I were both children at the beginning of the novel, overly romantic and so naïve. In my teens I tried to fight depression, knowing that sometimes the sun warming my skin was enough, was joy even. Other times there was just the weight on my chest; I was safer on the side of my wall that had books.

I can read the words and appreciate that early message to Kathy. “No, it is the small, little things that make up a day, that bring fullness and happiness to a life.” I think of the day when our daughter was perhaps six months old. The last chance bone marrow transplant team said that Jim wasn’t a candidate. Having that hope taken away seemed to put all three of us into a sort of Rip Van Winkle sleep, dropping in the light of day. I woke up first, was parched, and drank from whatever had been in my closest glass. Root beer. A root beer float would taste so good, I thought, picturing the warmth of future months. Imagining a future, and realizing that it would be the small things in life, and that my life would more than likely continue without Jim someday.

Perhaps my twelve-year-old self was wiser than I’ve credited. Is it possible that believing “Mrs. Mike” broke or scarred me, it’s actually the opposite? Is it possible I was able to experience a hard thing vicariously, vaccinated for heartbreak in a way they couldn’t yet vaccinate for diphtheria?

After the months of separate mourning Kathy hatches a plan to “get out.” She’ll accompany an injured man to Boston. She and Mike both dance away from discussing what this might mean for them. She tells herself that he doesn’t mind that much. The night before she sees him watching her brush her hair. “But tonight it would be like the old days; he’d kiss me and hold me and all the silences would be broken through.”

“He didn’t kiss me or hold me. He said, ‘Good night, Kathy’ very gravely.”

“I lay beside him for hours wondering whether or not he was asleep.”

I know those hours well.

After accompanying her on the first part of her journey, Kathy leaves Mike as the train pulls off. “My last picture of him was standing alone, against the whole Northwest.”

I think of the last time that I was able to meet Jim for lunch when he was still working, and watching him walk away. I somehow knew that it was the last time. Was it from Laura Ingalls watching the papoose, from Kathy seeing Mike, for once clumsy and uncertain, before he walked along beside her moving train? I remember often lying next to Jim, afraid of reaching for him, wondering whether or not he was asleep.

November 1, 1972

Last Thursday night I read Mrs. Mike and when I came to the sad ending after the normal tears something hit me. Daddy being mean to mother and I sobbed on and on in a large wet way. I couldn’t stop.

Looking at the battered, coverless diary of 1972-1973 I see I was worried about losing my best friend, jealous of her sleepover with a neighbor, feeling distant. Depressed by re-reading the book in March, I wrote in cursive, once again it affected me in that ‘tearing’ way. It is as though one of my family has died, and my heart lurches whenever I think of it. I fear I am heading for another full-scale depression. Every book I pick up, I am afraid of, will it hurt me, crush me?  Then a few lines below, in my own version of italics are the words, “until the next mood.” There are no entries after that. Just torn out pages.

After leaving the Northwest Territory Kathy spends time in Boston, goes to shows, has a man flirt with her, and loses patience with her mother’s boarders. “With a third of the village dead there hadn’t been this much commotion…Even my mother and sister were irrevocably separated from me. They could never know any part of my life up there. They could never know my children or my husband.” A paragraph later, having realized that she needs to explain to Mike why she needed to get away after the children died, there is the only break in the book that’s separated by asterisks, rather than just white space, jumping straight to in-person:

“’But the only thing I can’t stand is not being with you, not being yours again. Mike, you must let me come back into my own place. I’ll never leave you again. I couldn’t, you’re my life, this is my life…’ And I spread my arms taking in the miles of endless snow.”

The fairytale ending has seemingly returned, but with still more reality in the account by the end of Chapter Twenty-Six. The book isn’t over. There is more death to come, after the notifications to the families during World War I comes the flu in the fall of 1918. “And we died, again without doctors, serum, or help.”

Having seen all her children dead, the woman Constance, who originally warned Kathy of the losses she would survive, dies herself: “She had had sorrow: her family, all her children – gone. But death does not stand at the end of life, it is all through it.”

She asks Mike and Kathy to take her only surviving offspring, twin grandchildren. Then in another reconnecting thread they are asked to raise their beloved Indian caregiver’s child after her death. The morning after her arrival Mike brings out the sled he’d made for their dead children and hidden away. Kathy finds herself feeling content, all of them sledding, and the novel ends with the single word: happiness.

Forty-eight years is a long time to avoid a book. My parents stayed married, although I cannot say that it was happily. Jim and I married and started a family, aware that he might not live to see our daughter grown; he still declared his last years the best. I have known loss and great happiness, and how to find my balance within depression.

After “Mrs. Mike” I was prepared for the kittens that ventured too close to the road, the High School English teacher’s fatal heart attack. There would be boyfriends breaking up with me, and misunderstandings with friends. I watched the “deadliest school shooting” headline eclipsed over and over by the next one. I remember the dead in Oklahoma City and the silence of the skies after September 11th.  Do the family members during COVID-19 taking a loved one to the hospital with shortness of breath wonder if they will ever be able to hold their hand again? Could anyone imagine this pandemic would continue in its first wave carry away hundreds of thousands, once again preying most on the indigenous and people of color? And we died, again without doctors, serum, or help.

“Mrs. Mike” wasn’t my broken center after all. It was a novel that kept me on a path toward happiness, and realizing I was never broken at all.