Mother's nature

Beatrice Klinkenberg, my mom, would swear, smoke and laugh so hard her dentures flew. I'll never know everything that made her the person she was. All I ever saw was the side she would show to a son.

	[Photos courtesy of the Klinkenberg family]
	Beatrice Mary Grace O’Donnell Klinkenberg at age 22. Her husband, a soldier, was overseas.
	Bea in November 2003 at her assisted living facility in St. Petersburg. She was 84.
	Bea had a lifelong love of hats. And cigarettes. Here she is during World War II in Chicago.
	[Times photo: Scott Keeler]
	On March 7, 1998, Bea dances with her son, Jeff, on his wedding day.
	[Times photo: Jeff Klinkenberg]
	Bea and Ernie are buried at the Bay Pines National Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

I grabbed my cell phone and called my kids, told them their grandmother didn't have long. Better get over here fast. They stood with me in the emergency room and looked helpless. The priest arrived and gave my mother the last rites. She looked up and blinked. I wasn't sure she understood that her love of strong drink had brought her here.

They had trouble finding a vein. I didn't think they would find one, but they did. Next they inserted a catheter. She kept asking to go to the bathroom. "Mom," I shouted into her ear. "You really don't have to go to the bathroom. They put a tube in you. It just feels like you have to go."

She said, "I have to go to the bathroom."

She was 84 and nearing the end at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg. I thought back on everything I knew about her life as a little girl, her life with my dad, my relationship with her, how she took me countless times to Pinocchio how she read Golden Books to me at bedtime, how she took joy in my writings as a little boy.

I thought of the good times and the bad, the laughter, the alcohol - especially the alcohol - and how she nurtured her grandchildren. I thought about her cigarettes and hidden bottles of wine, her wonderful childlike curiosity about everything, the funny faces she always made, the impossibly heavy purse she toted no matter what, the National Enquirer always folded neatly on her reading table. She was a small woman, barely 5 feet tall, but she looked even tinier on the big emergency room bed.

Bink! Bink! Bink!

The heart monitor was the soundtrack for her last day on Earth.

An enigmatic character

My mother wasn't a mother from a Hallmark Mother's Day card. A tough Irish broad, Beatrice Mary Grace O'Donnell could swear, drink, smoke and tell tall tales with the best of them. I was always grateful she never lived within walking distance of the dog track.

She was very funny, but also very sad. A high school dropout, she could do the New York Times crossword puzzle. As a kid I learned to duck when she got mad, though usually not quickly enough. She hit me with her hands, shoes, kitchen spoons and, at least once, a seed pod from a poinciana tree.

She loved to talk, but even more liked to listen. You could spend hours with her and realize that for all the conversation, and all the joking, you didn't learn much about her. You were drawn to her warmth, but at some point, if you got too close, she might cut you off. She was one of the most colorful people I have known, and also among the most secretive. Fifty-four years I knew her without understanding her.

I can't tell you what she thought. I can only tell you what I know.

The rose of St. Rose of Lima

When I was a kid, my mother was the only one I knew who routinely invited members of Jehovah's Witnesses into the house to argue religion. My mother was a staunch, rosary-saying Roman Catholic who believed that the Catholic Church was the one true church. I guess she thought it was her obligation to convert Jehovah's Witnesses before they converted her.

Mostly I think she was bored and lonely. She loved excitement. As a young woman, she was a knockout - Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara - and was used to being the center of attention. But Saturday mornings could be slow. If she had to buy a Watchtower to get a little conversation, so be it.

I would listen in embarrassment as my mother and another religious zealot went nose to nose for an hour or two, both of them laying rhetorical traps, neither giving an inch, both secure in the knowledge that only one of them was bound for heaven.

I thought only Catholics got into heaven, and not many of those, because it was too easy to sin. I was taught that forgetting to say your prayers at night was a venial sin. Killing somebody was a mortal sin. If I believed the Dominican nuns who were my teachers, masturbating certainly was a mortal sin, and that worried me deeply. Lying was somewhere in between. Same with taking the Lord's name in vain. My mother swore like a sailor.

If I dillydallied in the bathroom, or took my time getting dressed for school, or procrastinated about a decision, I could always count on my mother to set me straight.

"S-- or get off the pot!"

On Sunday, we'd sit together in a pew at St. Rose of Lima, a church always staffed by Irish priests. My mother, though born in America, was Irish all the way. After Mass, she would address the Irish priest as if she had just stepped off the boat from the Emerald Isle herself. I think she thought her fake Irish brogue would endear her to the good fathers. On the walk home, my mother and I sometimes took a short cut through the woods on 107th Street in Miami Shores.

"You coming?" my mother would call, firing up a Pall Mall.

"Coming!" I'd shout back as I looked for garter snakes.

When I was pokey my mother roared, "S-- or get off the pot!"

Daddy dearest

She was born on Aug. 10, 1919, in Chicago, in the home of Josephine and Matthew O'Donnell. They were second-generation Americans from Baltimore. I know little about my grandmother, but I've heard stories of Grandpa Mac. A troubled kid, he was raised at St. Mary's Industrial School, the same institution that housed George Ruth, later known as the Babe.

Grandpa Mac drove a truck after he got out, married my grandmother and then, according to family stories, murdered a man in a drunken rage. He fled to Chicago to avoid justice.

He was a wife beater and a drunk. When my mother was a little girl, he took her from tavern to tavern because she was pretty and precocious. She'd dance on the bar, inspiring Mac's cronies to buy him another round. One time I asked if her dad had ever hurt her. "He was the devil," she said.

He was a bootlegger for a while, but got caught and lost his car. When he had a job, he would blow his paycheck on whiskey and the horses and take off. My mother and her three siblings would end up in an orphanage while their mother worked as a maid. Then, bad news: Daddy would come home.

My mother told me once about her favorite Christmas, when a kind-hearted neighbor dressed as St. Nick dropped by with bags of candies for the kids. They were their only gifts the Christmas of 1926.

I think my mother's difficult childhood was why she never cozied up to people who had money; as far as I know, she never voted for a Republican in her life. In the last presidential election, she cast her ballot for Ralph Nader. "He has spirit," she said as I groaned. She valued spirit.

In eighth grade, a nun sent her to the blackboard as punishment for talking in class. As the nun addressed the other students, my mother made faces behind her. Eventually, my mother pulled a banana from her pocket, unpeeled it dramatically, and put the peel on the nun's headpiece. As the nun talked to the class, the peel waved in derision.

My mother got slapped silly, but I would like to believe she thought a little slap was worth it.

A voice through the door

My mother met my father, Ernie Klinkenberg, in 1939. She sold candy and popcorn at a neighborhood movie theater. My dad was 22, a piano player who dreamed of becoming the next Carmen Cavallaro. He wrote a song for her, Candy Girl. I can remember hearing him play it when I was a boy, but I have forgotten the melody and the lyrics.

They married on Nov. 19, 1941. He spent the war in London, Paris and in the Philippines. They moved from Chicago to Miami in 1951 when I was 2. He thought it was going to be easy finding music gigs, but he was wrong. He spent 25 years as the chief steward at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. The Cuban dishwashers and kitchen help called him "Mister Ernie" and encouraged him to play the piano whenever one was rolled into a nightclub or ballroom. One time he got to play Liberace's ivory piano in the Poodle Room.

My dad was a calming influence on my mother probably because they were opposites. She liked arguing; he refused to fight and went fishing. She hated the heat and humidity of a Florida summer; it didn't seem to matter to him that we were the last family on the block without air conditioning.

My mother told me we were poor. I remember the time she sent me to Schwartz's Grocery to pick up a few things, and I lost the change on the way home. After she whacked me with a kitchen spoon, we knelt and prayed to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost items. She grabbed my hand and dragged me down the street. We found the lost cash in the grass in front of the Philbrick Funeral Home.

Sometimes she fell into terrible funks. I remember annoying her on a Sunday drive when I was about 6. She reached back, snatched my favorite cap from my head, and flung it out the window. As I wailed, my dad pulled off the road and retrieved the cap. My mother sobbed.

Mostly my parents laughed together, over slapstick stuff and bathroom humor. A roach that flew across the room and landed on my father's chest was the funniest thing she had ever seen. Another time, on one of those Sunday drives, a wasp glided through the window and stung my dad through his pants. Years later, my mother laughed so hard at the memory her upper plate flew across the kitchen. I remember being shocked; I never knew she had lost her teeth because of childhood malnutrition.

My mother was vain. She was sure neighborhood men were secretly in love with her. During the day, she dressed casually, and I have this memory of her hair always held in place by bobby pins. But when she and my dad went out, she dressed up.

She loved hats. In old pictures, she is often wearing something with polka dots and feathers. Even in tropical Miami, she'd wear hats to church when other ladies got by with simple handkerchiefs on their heads. In the sun, she'd wear bonnets or ridiculously huge straw hats like Mexican dancers might wear. On the top shelf of her closet, stacked like UFOs, were her colorful hat boxes. Even now, I have a hat fetish. If you see somebody ambling down Central Avenue wearing a beret you can thank my mother. Also, if you know who has my baseball cards, let me know. When I was in college, my mother sold my collection for movie money.

My mother loved the Pink Panther movies. She liked anything slapstick. She liked a good steak, a baked potato and spinach. She disliked fish, yellow squash and carrots. She was a fan of Concentration and What's My Line? and the Mike Douglas Show. She hardly drank back then, maybe a glass of Mogen David on a special occasion. She smoked like a fiend, but always dismissed questions about it with an impatient "mind your own business."

She never smoked in front of her grandchildren when they were little. She'd smoke in the bathroom and think nobody knew. Everybody knew. The smoke would disperse through the air-conditioning vents. One time she picked up a can of air freshener and gave it a blast to hide the smoke. The air freshener was actually a can of Raid. Years later, suffering from emphysema, she always denied smoking when I took her to the doctor for her hacking smoker's cough.

She had taken up smoking when she was barely a teenager. When I was a kid, the house always smelled of stale cigarettes. I was a particularly sullen youth; my mother experienced a difficult menopause. To drive her mad I shared nothing of my life with her. I caught her going through my wallet and dresser drawer. If I was talking to a girl on the telephone, my mother would find an excuse to be in the room. We had no lock in the bathroom, which made being a teenage boy somewhat harrowing.

"What are you doing in there for so long?" she'd yell through the door. "Are you having a BM?"

"No, Ma."

"So what's going on? You committing a mortal sin?"

My mother hated the idea of her sons growing up. She loathed long hair and the Beatles and boys who didn't tell their mothers where they were going and what they had been doing. The night before I left home for the University of Florida, she wept.

"Are you sure you want to go?" she asked.

I was sure.

"You're not smart enough," she finally said. "You'll fail."

It was the only time in my life I ever heard my father admonish her.

"Shut up, Bea."

The family scourge

He died from the complications of leukemia in 1982. For the longest time, my mother refused to leave South Florida and to move up to St. Petersburg. I couldn't imagine her living independently, but she thrived. She made new friends, learned how to balance a checkbook and how to drive a car well enough to go to Mass and Winn-Dixie.

She was not a good driver, hitting the gas sometimes when she meant to hit the brakes. She drove through two garage doors, that I know of, and after she moved to St. Petersburg she became the terror of her new apartment complex parking lot. Every time she turned the key the hedges, bricks and Detroit steel began sweating profusely.

She was drinking a lot by then. She was 80, tired, confused and sad. Many of her old friends had died. She missed my brother, who had moved to Canada. I had divorced and remarried, and that was hard for her. She didn't always keep a happy face, but she never blamed anybody or complained as far as I know. Nor did she admit she had a drinking problem. Even after the bad falls and emergency room trips, she denied drinking more than a glass of wine with dinner. Sometimes she forgot to eat dinner.

"Bea, you're killing yourself," one doctor told her. On the way home, minutes after the doctor warned her about drinking, she asked me to stop for a bottle of wine. I refused and left her in the truck while I ran into the pharmacy to fill her prescription. I was gone five minutes, but that was time enough for her to buy two jugs at the supermarket next door. Fortunately, I had a bag of sparkling grape juice in the truck. When I dropped her off at home, I substituted the grape juice for the wine. I left the wine next to a Dumpster frequented by homeless people. The wine probably didn't do them any good either.

My brother stopped drinking alcohol in 1988. Afraid of the family curse, I stopped in 2002. My mother continued. I moved her into an assisted living facility and for a while, it was just what the doctor ordered. She made lots of friends and was the queen of Boggle and other word games. She was also sure the handsome young recreation director wanted to marry her.

"He's my eye candy," she declared.

Final hours

From the emergency room they moved my mother to a regular room. During the night her kidneys failed and they wheeled her into intensive care. For the last time her family gathered around her.

My brother called from Canada. She heard him say his goodbyes over a speaker phone. She seemed to be in no pain, though she kicked her size 4 feet under the sheet. A nurse explained that my mother might require kidney dialysis for the rest of her life. Doctors huddled; they worried about brain damage. I told them to make her comfortable.

We were ready for the end. I held her hand. One by one my kids and my wife kissed her cheeks and said their weeping goodbyes. She was tough, my mother; her heartbeat stayed strong for hours. I told her it was okay to go, that her job was done. I told her it was time to join my father in heaven.

At 5 p.m. on Jan. 30 she drew breath for the last time. I reached over and closed her eyelids and kissed her brow and laid my head across her breasts. Beatrice Mary Grace O'Donnell Klinkenberg, flesh-and-blood gal extraordinaire, was finished with this life once and for all.

A fitting burial

My brother flew in from Canada. We threw an old-fashioned Irish wake at my house. We played Irish music, laughed at old photos and told Bea stories. My brother remembered the time he took her to a Bruce Springsteen concert in the Orange Bowl. She was 64 then, probably the oldest person in the joint, but she stood on her chair and screamed like a bobby-soxer at a Sinatra concert in Hoboken. Afterward, she told my brother: "That was the most fun I've ever seen people have who weren't screwing." My brother failed to ask the logical followup question.

My dad's ashes were buried at Bay Pines National Cemetery in Pinellas County. We had my mother cremated, too. The funeral director asked if we wanted to buy an urn. My brother and I had a better idea.

We drove to Beall's, her favorite discount department store, and bought a garish hat box at a 20 percent discount.

We buried her ashes, next to my dad, in that hat box.

- Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at 727 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com

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