Goddess of Love Incarnate. Leslie Zemeckis
matter.”
Lili might not be so sure there was much love coming from Idella, but Maud she would never doubt.
Maud looked at Idella sternly. “Idella, you know it was done because we loved you. We love you. And you too, Lili. Me and Daddy Ben love you. Idella loves you.”
Lili was thin, hadn’t yet grown into herself, still somewhat awkward and feeling too tall, unaware of her beauty that was about to burst forth.
“Everything,” Maud emphasized, “was done because we love you. Remember that, honey. We love you.”
“We all did the best we could,” Idella said, nearly hysterical.
Maud told of a charming handsome Dutchman who had come into Idella’s life and had “whispered words of love.”
Idella explained they had met at a dance. Lili couldn’t picture that. The Idella she knew was self-conscious about her pronounced limp. So there was an Idella before the ill-tempered woman sitting before her. Lili glimpsed a different Idella, a girl who might have been carefree, maybe a girl like her who yearned to flirt and go to dances, a beauty with her pick of boys.
The two women told Lili the Dutchman disappeared “in a fog” from Milwaukee, leaving Idella “in the family way.”
Idella was very sick in the hospital and had a beautiful baby, but the baby was sick and born early and unable to leave the hospital. Idella was in agony—possibly because of the polio—and couldn’t begin to take care of the baby girl.
Maud, her face anguished, explained that Daddy Ben had wanted to marry her.
Maud said she would marry Ben if they could bring up Lili, providing a “real home” for one daughter and a second chance for the other. Maud assured Lili she was wanted.
“I was so scared for you when you were little. You needed so much protection,” Maud explained. She thought Lili was going to “die,” tiny and helpless in the incubator. The doctors predicted she would be there for months.
“I knew it was the right thing for you,” Idella whispered.
Lili was shaken. She needed to think. She stood up and walked out of the cottage, the truth whirling inside her head.
She walked up the wide boulevard where a streetcar ran down the middle, past imposing banks, a post office, Jordan’s dry goods store. All the while her thoughts a jumble. Dardy and Barbara and Jack and Betty were half-siblings, not nieces and a nephew. Idella her mother? It seemed so preposterous.
Slowly her mind began to quiet. She decided she didn’t feel deceived, she felt strangely liberated. And whether this happened over time or that night, Lili would realize that though she wasn’t who she thought she was (Marie Klarquist), she would be who she wanted to be.
Somewhere in her walking she decided that none of it mattered. This information didn’t need to alter anything. She wasn’t all of a sudden going to call Idella “mother” and move in with her. She had always loved Maud and Daddy Ben. What did it really change?
It explained so many things, like why Maud, with her stoutly figure, wrinkles, and gray hair, was so much older than most mothers, the age span between the “sisters,” Idella and Lili, so great.
She knew if she scratched beneath the thin layer of feelings and probed she would experience something decidedly not uplifting. But Lili, as she would always do, chose not to go beneath the surface. Fantasy was bearable. Truth was so often not. She would “not let it affect” her.33 She would make her own reality. She set out to orchestrate her life as she wanted to live it, and work and romance and one day drugs would sustain the illusion.
This was a new chapter in her life. She liked new beginnings, always would. She claimed not to mind the constant moving of homes. She welcomed change that meant escape. Nothing would tie her to a place, not friends, family, or a man. Each new city held possibility, a chance for “adventure.” Pasadena bored her. She longed for something. She would reinvent herself as she went along, a new name, a new place. She would remain an itinerant gypsy most of her life.
She would also turn Maud’s and Idella’s guilt into something she could manage to her advantage. Until the end of her days, Lili would become a master manipulator.
When Lili finally crawled into her bed with an old Vogue, Maud came with dinner on a tray. Maud would always be there for her granddaughter.
“We don’t manifest our love,” Lili would one day tell a reporter, “with hugs and kisses.” It was a family that didn’t talk about their feelings. There were few outward signs of affection. “But I knew I was loved.”34
Daddy Ben, equally reserved, was a minor character. He played a benign role and would quickly fade from the narrative. It was women who ruled Lili’s world. It was strong women who made the decisions. She learned from the women in her family to take care of herself and to do as she pleased. She also learned not to trust them.
Momentarily, Lili felt in peril. She was no longer Marie Klarquist. She felt as though something—she didn’t know what—had been taken from her.
She compared the two names and thought Van Schaack was more exotic, different. “I’m going to call myself Marie Van Schaack,” she declared. And indeed that would be the name she would sign for most legal papers for the rest of her years on earth.35
Maud agreed. Lili wrote in her French Canadian biography Ma Vie de Stripteaseuse that Maud then dropped another bombshell. Her real name wasn’t Marie, it was Willis. But even that was not the truth. Either Lili or Maud made up the story. Clearly on Lili’s birth certificate her given name is Marie.36 Perhaps Lili remembered Aunt Katherine in Seattle whose middle name was Willis and she thought that different enough to appropriate as her own. Lili would vacillate between Marie and Willis for the rest of her life.
It wasn’t enough that she was a different person, but those around her had to transform also. She could no longer call Maud “mother.”
Maud must have been devastated. She had lived for this little girl and wanted nothing more than to be her mother. Lili had been named after her. Marie.
But Lili didn’t want to punish or hurt her beloved Maud. She knew all the sacrifices Maud had made for her. She knew Maud’s life revolved around her. Maud would hold the deepest part of Lili’s heart.
Lili’s mother Idella
Lili had decided that to live the life she wanted, to deal with the shock that nothing was as it seemed, she would make them all change. (She would spend a lifetime reinventing and renaming people.) She wanted everyone to be different, not just her. Maud would now be “Alice.” Where the name came from is anyone’s guess. But it was accepted and immediately incorporated by the entire family.37
Lili decided Idella was now “Adelaide.”** It was no time for arguments and Lili got her way.
Alice knew everything would be all right with her imaginative, clever, and always adaptable Lili. It was one of Lili’s most dominant traits; she was versatile to whatever came her way. Lili would always be a survivor.
Alice stroked Lili’s forehead and left her in the dark of her room, names pinging around her head like popcorn on the stove. Marie. Van Schaack. Grandmother. Sister. Mother. She smiled.
Now Lili had something in common with her idol. After all, Garbo had been born Gustafsson.
What should have been, and probably was, seismic news, Lili quickly filed away. Or so she claimed. But what a shift it must have made. The truth of it would do nothing to instill a sense of honesty in relationships. It was okay to say and do what you wanted no matter how it might affect others.