Road to Bluebeard's Castle

By Jean Marie Ivey

As a child, her early impressions came from fairy tales. They became her world apart from the reality of life. This is the story of a journey, duality, yin and yang, good and evil.

She wanted to shed light on the experiences of her life with the goal of enlightening others to the fact that they were not alone. One could escape, as she did,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648957833

Book preview

Acknowledgments

My sincere gratitude extended to Donna Marie Lee for her review skills and help with editing and to my sister Donna Barbisch for walking down memory lane with me and reviewing the text regarding the early years. Thank you, Paul Phillips and the editors and designers at Stratton Press Publishing, without whom, I never would have put this book together, especially Paul who renewed my faith in myself.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue: The Fairy Tale Bluebeard as Remembered by Marie

Introduction

Part 1: Road to Make Believe and Deception

Bluebeard’s Dwelling

1938

From Jean’s Diary

Jean and Jack

Orphaned

The Sandman

Aurora Borealis

Falling

The Waltz

Dave

Dominos

No Smoking Please

Tolerance and Lies

The Prize

Part 2: Red Dog Road

Camp Homesick

Bears in the Night

Twins

Phyllis

Valentine’s Day

The War Years

The Lone Ranger

Dave in Later Years

Cherry Pie

No Fairies

Burned

Feed Sacks

The Sycamore Tree

Rape

Under the Bridge

The Boyfriend

Picnic

Opportunity Lost

The Wedding

End of the Road

New Beginnings

Part 3: Crossroads

Introduction to Crossroads

The Doctor

Roller Skating

Tony

Predators

Welcome Back, Dad

Heidelberg

Double Pain

Death and Resurrection

Toms Run Road

Life on the Hudson

Fascination with the Civil War Ghosts

Part 4: Road to Acadia: Live Long and Prosper

Jordan Pond Gatehouse

Tea and Popovers

Awakening

Wrenched

Morale Dilemma

Building a New House

Part 5: Tony’s Place

Glue

Cat

Bird

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Ducks

Part 6: From Main Street to Jordan Pond Road: A-frame

Maine Paradise

The Garden

Starting from Scratch

Neighborhood Hall

A-frame

Deer Heart

Annie

Braless

Menzietti Rent a Kid

Swiss Chard

Gym Show

The Concert 1978

I’m Going to Shoot You, You Bitch

The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning

Picking up the Story

Sanctuary

Part 7: Road to Redemption

Epilogue

Prologue

The Fairy Tale Bluebeard as Remembered by Marie

As a very small child, her early impressions came from fairy tales read to her by her mother and aunts. They became her world apart from the reality of her young life.

One of the stories that both impressed and frightened her was the classic tale of Bluebeard. The story went something like this:

Once upon a time, in a land far away, lived a handsome young lord. He was called Bluebeard because of his long black whiskers speckled with blue.

Bluebeard was often gone from his castle. Over time he had many wives who mysteriously died one after another and were buried in the castle chapel. Because everyone liked and respected him, they thought nothing strange about the disappearance of his wives.

Now Bluebeard had taken another wife; a beautiful young woman, who with her sister Anne, went to live in his castle. They believed themselves very lucky to live in such a fine home with Bluebeard. Little did they know what was in store.

In time, Bluebeard was preparing for another trip and said to his wife, My dear, here are the keys to the castle. You may use all the keys to open rooms for your pleasure except for one. And he pointed to a small key. This key goes to the room at the end of the corridor on the ground floor. You may not open that door under fear of my wrath. No one may enter that room.

As time went by, her curiosity got the best of her. She thought, What can it hurt to take one little peek into the forbidden chamber?

She turned the key and opened the door. Oh, what a ghastly sight! Inside hanging on the walls were the bodies of all Bluebeard’s past wives. As she ran from the room, she dropped the keys, and the little key was stained with blood. Try as she might, she could not wash away the stain.

Bluebeard returned early from his journey. After greeting his wife, he asked her to return the keys. He said, They are all here, but the little key, the one to the forbidden room.

To which she replied, Oh, dear! I must have dropped it in my room.

When she returned, she placed the key into his outstretched hand. Immediately he flew into a rage. The key is stained with blood. You entered the forbidden room. Well, you will soon return to join the others. You must die!

Just then sister Anne burst into the room, crying out, Whatever is wrong? Please give me a moment with my sister.

Bluebeard relented and said, Ten minutes and not a moment more.

Hoping beyond hope that a handsome prince would rescue them, they both ran to the tower, and the wife called out, Sister Anne! Sister Anne! Do you see anyone coming?

No, replied Anne.

She called out again, Oh please, sister Anne. Is anyone coming?

Bluebeard rushed to the tower with a knife in his hand. He saw a horseman riding toward the castle.

He must also die, growled Bluebeard.

As the horseman burst in, he drew his swords, and Bluebeard was slain.

The young wife and her sister were rescued. She married the handsome prince, and they lived happily ever after.

However, she learned a very important lesson, being that it is not always sensible to act on your curiosity.

Sister Anne! Sister Anne!

Do you see anyone coming?

Introduction

She was born into a world of grown-ups,

Lonely and afraid.

This is my story written by and about me. Due to my discomfort at introspection into my own existence, it is written in the third person.

Disassociation is a way I have coped with the harsh realities of life, always observing from a distance so that I can escape into my fairy-tale world with the belief in, one day, living happily ever after.

Why are you writing this? she whimsically asked herself.

To which she replied, To validate my existence of course. And more importantly, she continued, I want to shed light on my own life with the goal of enlightening others to the fact that they are not alone. That they can escape, as I did, the imprisonment of their own mind.

All those years, she contemplated, because of isolation, fear, and abuse, I became so dependent on first my mother and then my husbands that I could not imagine being able to take care of myself or my children without them. Her mind remained that of a child.

And as she thought about it further, she responded, I want others to know that no matter how difficult their circumstances, they can always simply open the door and walk out.

That, to her, was a revelation that she needed to share to show lessons learned and provide hope to women, especially those who may feel entrapped in their individual situations.

I want to help them open the door.

This tale began near the end of the story as a crisis unfolded that could have become fatal.

Marie’s family was living in Seal Harbor, a small town in Maine. They lived in a beautiful A-frame chalet at the end of town surrounded on three sides by Acadia National Park. From the outside, it looked like a fairy-tale existence.

Marie and the seven children were the foundation of the Seal Harbor UCC church choir.

Tony, with the help of local townspeople and family, had built the house, mostly from remnants of old historic buildings. The house was surrounded by trees and gardens that Marie had created. There was a frog pond to one side that the children filled with tadpoles collected from nearby ponds in the spring.

On Saturday morning, Marie cooked pancakes on a large cookstove in the ground-floor kitchen that had double sliding doors that looked out into the park woods. The stove had been rescued from a summerhouse in the village by Herb Watson, who looked after summer people and was also the middle school gym teacher.

The chalet was the only home that was big enough to accommodate such a grand stove. It had a large grill that could cook twenty or thirty pancakes at a time, depending on the size. Tony would invite anyone from town or passing utility workers who were in the vicinity, and the children always invited friends to join. Over the years, many, perhaps hundreds of folks, joined them for breakfast on Saturday mornings.

She also cooked fabulous meals for any visiting dignitaries that Tony frequently brought home. She was a fabulous gourmet cook. That was part of her creative nature.

Everyone seemed so happy. There were those in the village who called it Happy Valley or Happy Castle.

Some close to the family suspected that all was not as it seemed. But in those days, even if one had suspicions, they kept their counsel and did not interfere.

So it was that Marie believed she was locked in a veiled world of make-believe and deception.

Part 1

Road to Make Believe and Deception

With its hanging gardens and beautiful family, the villagers called it Happy Castle. However, Marie knew it was neither happy nor a castle. It was a house of horrors. It was Bluebeard’s dwelling, and behind the facade of balconies and flowers, she knew what secrets it held.

Bluebeard’s Dwelling

Marie filed for divorce. Tony withheld funds and food, threatening to starve the family. He made threats, stating that he would burn the house down with everyone in it. Jean came from Pittsburgh a few days earlier with money for food and a smoke detector, fearing for the family’s safety.

Midmorning on a cold winter’s day, Tony and his ten-year-old son sat at the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the dining and living room, where Marie and Jean sat sipping coffee.

The day was sunny and beautiful and bore no hint of what was to come. Holding a shotgun across his knees, with a pocketful of shells in his vest, he took a shell from his pocket and pumped it into the chamber directing a statement to Tono, who was sitting at the bar eating his breakfast. He described in detail what it was like to shoot a deer and how that was different than shooting a person.

Marie looked at Jean and stated quietly in a tentative manner, That was a really strange thing to say.

Jean replied, Why is he speaking in that tone and talking about shooting people, especially to Tono?

I don’t know, replied Marie with a worried expression.

Both women felt queasy and uneasy overhearing the intense, irrational soliloquy that was being addressed to a ten-year-old boy. He spoke loud and distinctly, like a threat as though the comments were directed elsewhere.

Tono loved his father. He heaved a huge sigh, appearing to carry a great weight on his thin shoulders. Confused and not understanding, he didn’t know whether he should sit and listen to his dad or go and sit next to his mother and grandmother. His eyes were big and sad, and he appeared to be scared.

Something was different this time. Something was really wrong. Something was going to happen, and it was not going to be good.

1938

She was expected on Halloween but instead entered the world a week early.

Her father Jack named her after her mother, Jean Marie. Thereafter, she was called Marie.

At the time of her birth, her mother kept a diary.

From Jean’s Diary

(Written eighty-two years ago and only recently discovered during the writing of this memoir.)

At 4:55 Thursday morning, October 20, Jean Marie cried. Never had I heard such a welcome sound. She was a thin little thing, red and wrinkled; six pounds eleven and a half ounces, eighteen and a half inches long. When Daddy saw her, he was frightened.

The little rascal looked cross-eyed at him. He had never seen a new baby before so how was he to know they all are like that?

Like a persimmon, he said and will never hear the end of it.

Those 10 days in St. Joseph’s Hospital passed quickly. Little Ivey, as the nurses called her, was a good baby even then.

I laughed at her smacking her lips as Miss Colbert carried the little bundle down the hall from the nursery to my room. We never had to coax her to eat, for she was almost disgracefully anxious. When daddy and Aunt Janet came to take us to Grandmother’s, the paper showing the little footprints indicated that little Ivey had gained ten and a half ounces.

An exceptionally healthy baby, Dr. Golden said.

The next day was Halloween. I was in full charge. Bathing the baby proved to be a pleasant if tiring task. For the first time I could see for myself that she was truly perfect. Her long thin fingers, her tiny toes, her straight back, everything was all right. She had red hair like Granddaddy, and she had her Daddy’s dimpled chin. How she did kick in the bath water and she cried when I lifted her out.

When she was dressed again, I wrapped her in the pretty blue blanket that Daddy made for her months before. She was so sweet and round and nice that I thought I never had seen such a wonder.

So many people exclaimed when they see her for the first time, Oh, the little doll!

On Armistice Day, Daddy came to take us to the farm. We had been staying with Grandmother until the doctor finally gave his reluctant consent to our departure. Home again! How nice it was to have just the three of us and Blixie, who by the way, was painfully jealous. He had been such a pal to Jack in our absence.

Everyone was worried that the baby or I would catch cold out there in the country, but we had no trouble. At two o’clock in the morning when I fed her, Daddy fired the stove. Marie’s little hands and nose would be icy cold, but she didn’t lose any sleep over it and never so much as sniffled in consequence. When thrashers were at our house for dinner two days, she didn’t even let them hear her cry. Even when she was wee little, she didn’t cry much. We tried to make her comfortable and then let her cry in her crib if she insisted on crying. Only once she kept us up at night and then only for two hours. She had colic.

We all spent a very pleasant Thanksgiving without company or excitement. Marie lay in her favorite position on the far side of the table and watched us eat. It was the following Sunday that Grandmother Ivey came all the way from Columbus to see our little girl.

When she was six weeks old, she smiled and laughed silently. My heart fairly sang the first time I saw her laugh. A week later when she listened to her Daddy sing lullabies and cowboy songs at the top of his voice, she looked very surprised almost scared but as soon as he stopped, she cried for more. At eight weeks she was doing her best to talk, and she laughed out loud in her sleep. In a few days she laughed aloud for her Daddy when he laid her on the table and played with her.

Jean and Jack

Jean was lovely with beautiful blue eyes and soft wavy brunette hair. Her skin was ivory and flawless like a porcelain doll. She was refined, soft-spoken, and fun-loving.

She and Jack had both been in a theater group and loved performing. Playing the guitar and the ukulele was a favorite pastime, and she loved to entertain. She was a natural, strumming and singing and always popular with family and friends. Writing poetry, however, was her greatest talent.

Jack was handsome and dashing with sandy-colored hair and a well-trimmed mustache. Jean always said, He rode into my life on a white horse. But there was more to this story that came from Jean many years later.

In later years, sometime after her one hundred and first birthday, Jean related, I was working downtown in Pittsburgh, doing specialized work wrapping fancy clothes that were delivered to customer homes. I stayed at night until the alterations department was through for the day. There was a theater group in Dormont, and I had a role in a play. Jack worked for the theater, and the manager, not wanting me to go without supper, sent him downtown to bring me home for dinner so that I would not be late for rehearsal. I knew who he was before we met. I was dating another person at the time. However, it was love at first meeting. He was the love of my life, and that never changed.

They married and moved to an old farm in Butler, north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Having grown up on a farm, farming was familiar to him. Jean came from a middle-class family in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Farming was foreign to her, but she learned quickly how to manage.

The two-story farmhouse was big and drafty. The upstairs was closed off in the winter except for sleeping because of the bitter cold.

Jean worried about the baby sleeping in the frigid bedroom. Marie always wore a bonnet and was bundled up tightly so as not to kick off the covers.

A large stove in the kitchen served as heat for the house as well as cooking. Jean’s beloved Blixie, her white Eskimo dog, slept on the wide hearth of a large fireplace in the kitchen or under the stove to keep warm.

Railroad tracks ran past the farm fields. The mournful whistle blew, reminding Jack and Jean that it was time to take the coal buckets to meet the train with car after car carrying coal to Lake Erie.

The trains rolled by day and night, slowing down as they rounded curves in the hilly terrain. Often they waited for lumps of coal to fall to the ground or sometimes be thrown by riders that saw them gathering the black gold that would help keep them warm at night.

In the summer, before Marie was born, they raised their own food, and Jean baked bread and preserved fruit and vegetables that