by Ivan Doig
So the great Kate Smith, dressed in a peach-colored outfit that made her look like a million dollars, monumental in every way as she peered down at me with a perfectly plucked eyebrow arched, represented rescue, relief, reward, a miraculous upward turn in my circumstances. And I needed whatever I could get, ragged and snaggle-toothed as my appearance was. Her expression turned to puckered concern as she tallied my missing buttons, dangling pocket, and the rest of my shirt more or less torn to shreds. “Heavens, child, you look like you’ve been in a dogfight.”
Well, yeah, that pretty close to described scuffling with the pack of campers, and there was a story that went with that, but this did not seem like the time for it. I looked down as if apologizing to my shirt. “It got caught on something, is all.”
“We’ll have to get you changed”—she noted the heavy traffic into the men’s restroom, and frowned—“later.” A new note of worry crept in at my general disarray and the wicker suitcase, which itself was looking the worse for wear, if that was possible. “You did bring something presentable, I hope?”
“Sure thing,” I defended my and Gram’s packing, “I have a clean shirt left. My rodeo one sort of needs washing, though.”
“Road-ee-oh,” came a guttural expression of interest from her silent partner, up to this point. “Not ro-day-oh, hah?”
Paying no attention to that, she seemed to make up her mind to smile at me, the extra chin and the famous chubby dimples involved. She had the bluest eyes, which mine swam in guilelessly. “If you’re ready, honeybunch,” she was saying in that voice so melodious I was surprised she could pass herself off in public as Aunt Kitty at all, “we may as well go.”
I nodded eagerly. Herman—somehow I had trouble applying Uncle to him, without Dutch to go with it—insisted on taking my suitcase.
Out we went, he and I trailing her as she plowed through the depot crowd, drawing second looks every step of the way. At the curb, I was glad to see, an idling bus that was not even a Greyhound was filling with the kids going to camp, the poor saps. If there was any justice, Kurt, Gus, and Mannie were in there watching and eating their weasel hearts out at my royal welcome.
Herman hustled ahead to the car, not the limousine I was looking forward to but a big old roomy four-door DeSoto, I supposed because someone the size of Kate Smith required a lot of room.
I fully expected her, and if I was lucky, me, to establish in the backseat, the way rich people did. But while Herman was putting my suitcase in the trunk, she drew herself up by the front passenger door and stood there as if impatient for it to open itself, until I realized I was supposed to be the one to do it.
When I leaped and did it, she enunciated, “That’s a little gentleman,” but still didn’t budge until I caught on further and scrambled in to the middle of the seat. She followed, the car going down on its springs on that side under her weight, until Herman evened things up somewhat by settling himself behind the steering wheel.
Doing so, he slipped me a sly grin and I heard him say what sounded like “Welcome to Manito Woc,” as if the town were two words.
I was about to ask if that was actually how to pronounce it when the Kate Smith voice hit a note of warning. “Brinker, don’t fool around. Look at the time—we have to go to the station.”
“Yah, Your Highness,” he answered as if used to being ordered around, and the DeSoto came to life after he pulled out the throttle a little and the choke farther than that and stepped hard on the starter and did another thing or two.
Meanwhile it was all I could do not to bounce up and down with delight at her pronouncement. The station! The dog bus, that loping mode of transportation full of starts and stops and disruptions and tense connections, somehow had delivered me right in time for her radio show. Kate Smith Sings, all anyone needed to know about it.
I glanced at her hopefully. Maybe she even could slip into the program some hint that I had arrived, and Gram would hear it in her hospital room and know I had come through my harrowing journey safe and sound, mostly. I didn’t want to ask that yet, shy about bothering someone getting ready to perform for a national audience. I would not have been surprised if she exercised her vocal cords right there in the car, but the only sign she gave of impending performance was humming to herself while she tapped a hand on the round rise of one thigh as steadily as a telegraph operator in a shoot-’em-up western.
I figured she was entitled to a few jitters. What had that first seatmate of mine, the stout woman on the Chevy bus, said? I’d be such a bundle of nerves. And that was merely about my supposed journey to Pleasantville, nothing like facing a radio microphone and a live audience and singing for the thousandth time “God Bless America” the way everyone coast-to-coast was waiting to hear again. If I was a trouper like Joe Schneider had said, the famous entertainer sitting right here at my elbow was the biggest example imaginable. It must run in the family.
“How is Montana?”
Herman’s question out of nowhere jostled me out of that line of thought, and somewhat nervously—maybe it was catching—I responded, “In pretty good shape for the shape it’s in, I guess.”
“Yah, I betcha. Like Old Shatterhand would say, up on its hind legs and still going, hah?”
His laugh came from the bottom of his throat, like his words. His lingo threw me a little at first, but I knew I’d get used to it, accustomed as I was to hired hands in the bunkhouse or the barracks at a construction camp who were called Swede or Ole or Finnigan if from Finland, and spoke “that broken stuff,” as it was called. Squarehead was the catch-all term for such types. Herman’s accent and name I guessed must have come straight from Holland with its tale of Hans Brinker and the silver skates and all that, and it only added to the surprise of my sensational arrival. His choppy voice now reached a wistful register as he declared, “Out in cowboy land, you are in luck.”
“Pretty please”—from the other direction came a prompt response with not the usual sweet intonation on that phrase—“don’t be filling the boy’s mind with nonsense.”
“No, it’s fine,” I spoke up, trying to sit tall enough to be a factor between them. “I’m around those all the time, see. On the ranch. Cowboys, I mean. I’d be there in the bunkhouse with them right now if Sparrowhead—Wendell Williamson, I mean—had let me be stacker driver on the haying crew like I asked to.”
It took them each a few moments to put that together, and I’m not sure he ever did get there. She, though, said as if thinking the matter over, “But instead you’re very much here, dumpling.”
“Yeah!” Only minutes before, I would have had to fake this kind of answer, but landing in the spacious lap of Kate Smith, in a manner of speaking, I had no trouble whatsoever being enthusiastic. “This is so much better than there, it knocks my socks off.”
Just then the DeSoto pulled off the street, Herman steering with his hands wide apart like the captain at a ship’s wheel, and I craned for the first sight of the radio station. But he had only stopped for gas, and went inside to use what he called the man’s room while the attendant filled the tank and checked the oil and wiped the windshield, whistling all the while as if he had caught the musical spirit from the great Kate beside me. Staring off into the night, she continued to hum to that fitful pitty-pat rhythm on her mound of thigh.
With only the two of us in the car, I couldn’t help feeling this was my chance. It was all I could do not to yank the autograph book out of my coat pocket and ask her to write in it, right then and there, in the greenish-yellow glow of the gas station’s pump lights. And of course I would want her to sign it Kate Smith, not something like Your devoted Aunt Kitty, to elevate the autograph collection toward true Believe It or Not! territory. I bet she knew all kinds of other celebrities who would write their famous names in it for me, too. Talk about a jackpot! Herman had said a mouthful, about my being in luck. The sacred black arrowhead could not have been doing its job better.
I cleared my throat to make my request. “Can I ask you for a real big favor?”
She jumped a little at the sound of my voice, nerves again, understandably. Glancing down at me, she composed herself and said, not entirely clearly to me, “That depends on how big is real big, doesn’t it.”
The autograph book was burning a hole in my pocket, but something about her answer stayed my hand. Quick like a bunny, I switched to:
“Can I call you Aunt Kate? Instead of Kitty, I mean.”
“Why, of course you can, adorable.” She nodded into her second chin in relief. “It’s my given name, after all. That sister of mine started the ‘Kitty’ thing when we were girls, and heaven knows why, it stuck.”
I squirmed at anything said against Gram, but maybe that was the way sisters were.
Herman returned and went through the dashboard maneuvers and what else it took to start the DeSoto. “Home to the range,” he sang out, earning a sharp look from Aunt Kate.
As we pulled out of the gas station, I felt dumb as they come. Obviously I had the wrong night about the radio show. Now that I thought about it, back at the Greyhound terminal Aunt Kate most certainly would have said something like “We have a surprise for you tonight, dear,” if I was going to be part of the audience for Kate Smith Sings, wouldn’t she. Sheepish, I fell back to the early bus habit of “Uh-huh” and “Huh-uh” as Herman tried to make conversation on the drive to their house.
• • •
IT WAS DARK by the time the DeSoto rocked into a bumpy driveway. The house, painted that navy gravy-gray shade like in pictures of battleships and with a peaked roof and lit sort of ghostly by the nearest streetlight, appeared big as a ranchin’ mansion to me after the cook shack, although looking back, I realize that only meant it had an upstairs as well as a downstairs.
As we went in, Aunt Kate instructed Herman to leave my suitcase at the foot of the stairs, to be dealt with after dinner. Since it was pitch-black out, I deduced that must mean supper, another Wisconsin mystery like schnitzel and schnapps and going to camp with a bunch of boy hoodlums.
“You can change your shirt in our bedroom,” she told me, definitely more than a hint. “Just drop that and your other one in the laundry chute, I’ll do them with our washing in the morning.” Herman showed me the chute in the hallway. These people knew how to live—when their clothes got dirty, they mailed them to the basement.
I stepped into the indicated bedroom, and too timid to put the light on, swapped shirts as fast as I could. Straining to take in the exact place where Kate Smith slept, even in the dimness I was convinced I could see a telltale sag in the near side of the double bed.
Hurrying so as not to miss anything in this remarkable household, I dispatched my needy shirts into the laundry chute and followed promising sounds into the kitchen. Fussing with cooking pots, Aunt Kate was humming again when I presented myself, fully buttoned and untorn. “Now then. We’re having a Manitowoc specialty.” She beamed at me to emphasize the treat as she put on an apron twice the size of any of Gram’s. “Sauerkraut and franks. I know you like those. Boys do, don’t they.”
Not this boy, because Gram viewed frankfurters—wienies by another name, right?—with dire suspicion whenever she was forced to boil up a batch to feed the crew toward the end of a month’s kitchen budget, convinced that the things were made from leavings lying around the butcher shop. “Tube steak,” she’d mutter as she plopped wienies by the handful into the pot. “You might as well be eating sweepings from the slaughterhouse.” Not the best thing to build an appetite for frankfurters. But my stomach and my hunger had no time to debate that, as I was shooed out of the kitchen and told I was free to look around the house while dinner was being fixed.
I edged into the living room and onto a pea-green rug so deep I left footprints wherever I stepped. It was like walking on a mattress. Intimidated, I crept across the room, studying the unfamiliar surroundings. A big, long leathery davenport, also green but closer to that fakey shade of lime Kool-Aid, sat prominently in front of a bay window, where the sill was crammed with potted plants of kinds I couldn’t recognize. On an end table next to the arm of the davenport rested a phone, pink as bubblegum, of another type I had no experience of, with a cradled receiver and a circular dial full of numbers and letters. Whatever else this strange territory of the summer proved to be like, it definitely did not seem to be party-line country.
Across the room from all this, on either side of a fancy cabinet radio but some distance apart, bulked his and hers recliner chairs, the kind with a lever on the side that tips a person back as if to get a shave from a barber. Over what was more than likely Herman’s hung the picture of dogs sitting around a table playing poker that you see so many places, while over hers was a framed sampler with a skyline of a town—largely steeples—and a ship on the lake with a spiral of thread for smoke, and underneath those, a verse in red and blue yarn, MANITOWOC—WHERE MAN HAS BUT TO WALK, TO HEAR HIS BLEST SOUL TALK.
Yeah, well, okay, I supposed that went with the reputation of ghosts walking around town, but now what had me more interested was a cubbyhole room off the far end of the living room.
The door was partway open and I glimpsed what appeared to be a daybed under a plain gray cover. Lured by hope, when I poked my head in and saw piles of cloth of different colors atop a table and spilling onto a chair, I knew at once this must be the sewing room, even before I spotted the shiny electric Singer machine by the window. Who would have thought Kate Smith sewed her own clothes? But everyone needs a hobby, I reminded myself, or maybe in her dress-size situation, doing it herself was a necessity. Any fat girl at school got teased about her clothes being made by Omar the Tentmaker, and while I felt guilty about that uncharitable thought, there was the big-as-life fact that Aunt Kate was a much larger woman than clothing stores usually encountered.
Of greater significance to me was that daybed, just my size, really—I’d slept on any number of cots like that, jouncing through life with my parents—and I’d have bet anything this nice snug room was where I was going to be put up for the summer, special guest in a special place of the house.
• • •
THROUGH TAKING in these new surroundings, something else needed taking care of, and I had to retreat to the kitchen to ask.
“Aunt Kate? I need to use the convenience.”
Parked at the stove where the pot of supper—dinner, rather—was on, she gave me a funny look.
“Uhm, restroom, I mean. Toilet. Bathroom.” I finally hit on the word appropriate in a setting that wasn’t a Greyhound depot.
“It’s through there.” She pointed to the end of the hall. “Remember to wash your hands, won’t you.”
I most certainly did remember, and more than that, I took the opportunity to examine my chipped tooth in the mirror over the sink. Baring my teeth in a kind of maniac smile, I saw that the damaged one stood out menacingly from the others. A snag, in fact, the chip having left it as pointed as a fang.
Studying my reflection, I decided I sort of liked the snaggletooth sticking up that way. It made me look tough, like I’d been through some hard going in life.
My admiration of this new feature was interrupted when all of a sudden I heard singing.
I went still as stone to make sure. Yes! Distinct as anything, from the direction of the kitchen. A solo, to keep the famous Kate Smith voicebox tuned up, I bet. And not just a song, but the song! Oh man, this was almost like going to the radio show!
God bless America,
Land that I love.
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above.
I tell you, that singing went right under my skin and raised goose bumps. The one-of-a-kind beautiful voice, the words every schoolchild—every parent, even—knew by heart. And here I was, the lucky audience to this performance by the most famous singer i
n America, maybe in the world. This settled it. I absolutely had to ask for the treasured autograph as soon as the song was over. It was bound to please the performer in the kitchen as well as me. Out of the bathroom in a flash, I sped to where my jacket was piled atop my suitcase, grabbed out the album, and darted back to the kitchen.
Herman had reappeared, sitting at the table, paging through a book and not even particularly listening, he evidently was so used to the glorious sound. Rocking ever so slightly side to side to the rhythm, Aunt Kate stood at the stove with her back turned to us, as if it were nothing to be pouring out the best-known song since “Happy Birthday” while cooking kraut and weinies. I stood entranced there at the other end of the kitchen, listening to her sing just for me. Then as the most soaring part rolled around again, the beautiful voice reaching its height—
To the prairies,
To the oceans white with foam,
God bless America,
My home sweet home.
—she turned around, her mouth full of the half-cooked wienie she was munching.
For a moment I was only confused. But then when I saw her take another bite, eyes half-closed in pleasure, the inside of me felt like it fell to the floor. Meanwhile the song played on a bit more, until there came a burst of applause in the living room and a man’s silky voice doing a commercial for La Palina cigars.
When I recovered the ability to speak, I stammered, “You’re—you’re not Kate Smith? On the radio?”
She swallowed the last of the wienie, fast. “Good grief, that,” she groaned, frowning all the way down to her double chins.
“I telled you, too many sweets,” said Herman, licking his finger to keep on turning pages.
Ignoring him, she scrutinized me. “Where in the world did you get that notion?” she asked suspiciously, although I didn’t yet know about what. “Didn’t Dorie tell you anything about us?” I shook my head. “Heaven help us,” she let out this time, shutting her eyes as if that would make this—and maybe me—go away.
