Aunt Roseanne lived in the back bedroom in my grandmother Katie’s house. Roseanne was Katie’s first cousin. Katie always had a room for anyone in need. Roseanne, by profession, a social worker and by nature, always helping others, had a need. Her husband, Pat Darnell, went out to the dry cleaners one day and never came back.

Roseanne (center, in black slip) at “Come as You Are” party at Katie’s house, 1955.

Pat was a Captain in the Air Force, stationed at Whiteman Air Force Base, just out of town. He was Hollywood handsome and he soon moved into Katie’s house with Roseanne. He bought a great ornery Palomino, King, and kept him at the Lamy farm. When Pat walked out that day, he left King behind, too. Roseanne, in her sorrow, often promised her young friends rides on King but she couldn’t bring herself to face Pat’s horse or her lost love.

“Lord help us and save us, Miss Davis,” was Roseanne’s constant refrain. Aren’t we all still looking for Miss Davis? On Sundays, the Sedalia Drugstore used to deliver Roseanne’s medicine in a brown paper bag which I took up to her in her room. She accepted that (maybe because it was on Katie’s account) but otherwise was always giving everything away, every penny she had, “to those poor people.” She found wonderful homes for many adopted children. Aunt Roseanne looked after everyone but herself.

In the work week, after depressing interviews with abused women and children, Roseanne and her friend Elizabeth who lived one block over, enjoyed a few drinks of an evening to relax. The evening over and outside of Elizabeth’s door, they invariably broke into “Goodnight Eileen” to sweet Eileen on the corner of Third and Harrison.

On Mexican soil in the summer of 1959 with Roseanne in back, Larry driving, Ward in Tyrolean hat, E.G. taking picture while Mary has taken car-sick Cassidy to bathroom.

I got to know Roseanne better in 1959 just after my grandmother died. My uncle E.G. said, “Let’s go to Acapulco,” and Roseanne was already in the car. We all piled into a white chevy convertible (my mother, Uncle E.G., his friend, Larry Murloch whom everyone fell for, Aunt Roseanne and my brother, Ward, and me). I had just turned seven and Ward was nine. The Chevy had red leather bucket seats. I rode much of the long, three-day drive from Missouri to Acapulco, on the passenger seat floor at my mother’s feet. My mother, Mary, prided herself on her small feet. I easily fit in between them.

Back in the 50s, there were no seat belts in cars, no confinements at all other than our sweat glueing the backs of our legs to the sun-scorched, red leather seats. Ward and I would unstick our thighs with a pop and climb up the back seat of the Chevy to sit where the convertible top folded in. We tilted our heads back, flying, with the dry summer air pummeling our faces. Roseanne, below us, kept trying to keep her dyed jetblack hair patterned, her scarlet nails at work unweaving black webs around her face the entire three day ride. She couldn’t wait to get to a beauty parlor.

Waking up at the Riviera Motel on her first Acapulcan morning, Roseanne shrieked at a ceiling of lizards above the sleeping ceiling fan. She did find a hairdresser before we all went off to the beach, Revolcadero, known for its riptides. Just as Roseanne stretched her piano legs into the sultry sand, a huge wave engulfed her, flattening her newly coiffed curls. But she was game as always, and just laughed.

Rosie with baby Matt, Cassidy and Ward in 1958.

Back in Sedalia some years later, she was wooed by her childhood flame whose wife had recently died. His family, being strictly Protestant, had disapproved of the Catholic Roseanne. Now Bob had his freedom with his parents and wife gone. Bob built Roseanne a brand new house on Fourth Street and they were married. They seemed to live in a phantasmagoria of love as every time I knocked on the door, Roseanne was always in her nightie and had a dreamy look. After a few years together, she died suddenly and unexpectedly.

Of course, I wonder if they found happiness. Did the curse of their youthful loves doom their mature union? Were they torn by impossible dreams of each other? Or did they create a new heart altogether, learning to understand all and forgive all? For someone so kind as Roseanne, someone whose short arms reached so far, into so many families, I hope so.