by S. Rose
It’s true that my aunt never lost the cadence of her native tongue, marking her forever as a foreign transplant, but I loved her musical speech, soft and sweet as a lullaby. Even when she asked me to take out the trash, Aunt Gudrun sounded like she was singing a happy song, with the words bouncing up and down and the vowels round as soap bubbles. And I’d be forced to agree that she wore her skirts overly long and tended toward blouses that buttoned tight at the neck, layered under a cable-knit sweater that effectively hid her bosom. But no matter what she wore, my aunt was a strikingly beautiful woman—though not what you’d call pretty. Pretty isn’t nearly powerful enough to describe her.
Norwegian woman can be tall, but Gudrun was statuesque—measured six feet in her socks. She had a smooth, broad forehead and strong, noble features. Her eyes were a stormy dark blue, and when they bore down on me from her great height, she reminded me of the Statue of Liberty. Through some toss of the genetic dice, her sister, Kristina, was only five foot three, barely an inch taller than the mother she never knew.
My mother came along in 1931, the first Siggurdson to be born in America. Her mother passed away when she was just a baby, and for a long time, I didn’t know exactly how Grandmother Klara died. “Illness,” they said. Mom had taken me aside and told me as a matter of fact, once and only once, along with the admonition never to ask questions or ever mention it in front of Grandfather Sigurdsson. She said he took the loss of his young wife harder than most, so much that he never even considered remarriage. I heard the old women gossip at our Norwegian Lutheran Church—even though Oddfrid came with two children, he was a handsome, hardworking man and considered a good match. More than one cast him an encouraging smile and attempted to engage him in conversation, but he’d disappointed the ladies at every turn. They eventually gave up and accepted his unassailable status as a widower.
When Grandmother Klara died, Gudrun left school and stepped into her mother’s place without complaint to launder and cook and clean and nurture, until her youth slipped away with no more notice than the endless gallons of wash water down the drain. She grew into the habit of selflessly caring for others so early in life that everyone, especially Gudrun, expected it without question, the way you expect death and taxes and the sun to come up in the morning. Long after my mother was grown and even after she married, Gudrun stayed home to keep house for her solitary father, nursing him until the day he died comfortably in his own bed at age sixty-three. In all those years, neither he nor anyone else ever suggested she do otherwise.
Oddfrid Johan Sigurdsson had been a typical Norwegian man, industrious and thrifty, always bracing for a storm and preparing for unseen contingencies. He built the two-family home so as to have the security of a second source of income by renting out the upstairs. I heard that Grandmother Klara wasn’t overly happy with the idea of having strangers living under the same roof. At the time, her husband had a well-paying job at the Nash Motor Company, where his Old World leather craftsmanship was highly valued in the manufacture of custom automobile interiors. Since the Sigurdsson’s financial future appeared assured, Klara timidly suggested that if they only built a bit smaller, they could manage a mortgage for a one-family home without another source of income.
Oddfrid was unrelenting, and as it turned out, his prudence paid off. The Racine auto plant closed in 1929, the first of many shutdowns that would turn unemployed men onto the streets in droves. He was forced to fall back upon cobbling boots and mending all manner of leather goods, from horse collars to upholstery. Occasionally, there was an order from a wealthy patron for a custom-made riding saddle, but money was scarce. The prosperity that was supposed to be just around the corner was a long time in coming—Klara didn’t live to see the day.
Fortunately, Oddfrid was able to lease the upstairs flat to a young doctor and his wife, one of the few available tenants with a steady income. And so, amidst a sea of foreclosures, we Sigurdssons survived the Great Depression with our property intact. It was one of the oft-repeated stories that connected me to our past—which brings me around to another page in the family lore and a notable departure from my grandfather’s lifelong habit of austerity.
The marble hearth and mantelpiece in Aunt Gudrun’s parlor weren’t built with the original house but added on later at considerable cost, crafted by an artisan from Italy, no less. Grandfather Sigurdsson claimed that it was a special gift for his eldest daughter to mark her thirty-fifth birthday—suspiciously coinciding with a long overdue visit from his Norwegian brother-in-law.
It was 1950, and the economy was booming. Oddfrid had bought out a furniture factory that specialized in upholstery, where he’d worked since 1941. He was making plenty of money supplying couches and davenports, settees and overstuffed armchairs for new homes that were springing up like mushrooms all over America. Nonetheless, the family was taken aback by his sudden desire for artistic embellishment and attention to décor.
The design and installation were undertaken by a master stoneworker from Florence, who just happened to be in downtown Racine renovating a grand old office building. The workmen were packing their tools and sweeping up when my grandfather chanced by the plate-glass windows. Highly impressed, he wandered inside to admire the craftsmanship. With abundant gestures and limited English, Mr. Salvatore indicated that there were some fine pieces of marble left over, just the right size for creating a beautiful home mantelpiece. And as luck would have it, he had enough time to complete the project before his return trip to Italy.
Apparently, Mr. Salvatore was a temperamental artist, passionate about his work to the point of madness. Twice he had the hearth half done and twice tore it out to start over, having ostensibly perceived some imperfection in the grain of the marble. Each time the project grew in scale and ornamentation, until what started out as a touch of elegance evolved into a monument, more at home in a Roman Catholic cathedral than in an otherwise plain Norwegian parlor. The hearthstones were of black marble while the columns on either side of the fireplace were chiseled from a rare green, as was the base for the mantel itself. The heavily scrolled white mantelpiece was so massively out of proportion with the room that it looked as if it might pull down the wall. As a child, it was I who first discovered the artist’s signature on the underside of the shelf, etched in flowing script: S. Salvatore.
I SUPPOSE I might have felt different about moving if Grandmother Klara had got her way, but as it was, Aunt Gudrun had been a daily presence in my life from the start. I’d always felt that we were one family and had no notion that we might at any time be torn in two.
I called her Tante Gudy, Tante being Norwegian for Aunt; Gudy was the name I came up with when I was first learning to speak, and the name stuck. I recall when I was very small and impatient to see her, but my legs were too short to walk down the flight of stairs. In order to descend, I learned to sit on my bottom, push off with my hands, and bump down step by step. Before I was able to climb back up, it was Tante who carried me—Mother had had an operation and couldn’t manage the stairs with my added weight. By my third birthday, I’d mastered the climbing, but I still remember riding up and down the staircase on Tante’sbroad hip. She held me effortlessly with one sturdy arm, and my chubby legs wrapped around her middle like a monkey.
Soon I was bounding up the stairs two at a time and though it was officially forbidden, my aunt looked the other way when I occasionally slid down the banister, so long as it wasn’t on a Sunday. As the years marched on, I marched up and down those stairs until I wore a track in the carpet runner, and little by little, found myself more down than up. It wasn’t just that I loved Tante Gudy. It was a matter of practicality.
I’d always enjoyed art projects, anything that required paint or clay, and the messier, the better. Tante Gudy’s kitchen table was the place to go on rainy days when a creative muse came over me or whenever I had a school project that required lots of cutting and paste. As Norwegian descendants, both Mother and Tante were notorious for strict cleanliness, bu
t my aunt would simply cover the table with a sheet of plastic, layer some newspaper on the floor, and ignore the mess until I was finished.
By the time I was six, I’d given up using Mom’s kitchen as an art studio. She tended to hover at my elbow like an irritated bumble bee, with frantic darts to wipe spills or snatch fallen scraps of sticky paper from her nice clean floor. Once she made me so nervous that I bumped over a whole mason jar of green poster paint. “Uff da,” I said in consternation.
It’s a common but untranslatable Norwegian idiom, most often used as a mild oath, although not exactly a swearword. Some liken it to darn it, but that doesn’t quite capture the sentiment. Among Norwegian Americans, uff da is sometimes interjected to punctuate a delicious bit of gossip, as in, “Did you see Ole kissing in the park with Freda? Uff da!” Both Mother and Tante discouraged its use, chiding that it was okay for boys, but not very ladylike.
As the paint splattered, Mom jumped from her chair with a little screech as if she’d sat on a tack, scurried over to blot it with a rag and the whole time squawking, “Oh, Cassandra! Just look. Look at this mess . . . oh dear.” There was a pea-green puddle amassing on the linoleum. “See? See what you’ve done now?” I felt like a character in a Dick and Jane book. “And don’t say uff da—it’s not ladylike.”
Following the green paint debacle, my mother introduced me to the craft of crocheting, an obvious scheme to curb my lust for untidy self-expression. I did like making little hats for my dolls and managed a lopsided woolen scarf, but it was no substitute for what I really craved.
Sometimes I helped my mother bake a batch of brownies from a mix or put together a hotdish for supper, but it was my aunt who taught me how to actually cook. For Mom, the goal of food preparation was to expend as little time as possible and use a minimum of cookware, so there’d be hardly anything to clean up. In that regard, she was like most modern American housewives. I think the official Wisconsin State dinner was hotdish, a thick, unappetizing mixture of Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, overcooked egg noodles, and either ground beef or tuna, usually topped with cheese and bacon bits. You didn’t even need a mixing bowl; the concoction was all stirred together in a rectangular glass baking dish and popped into the oven.
Tante Gudy prepared everything from scratch, and cooking could take up half a day—when we made Norwegian kringla cookies, the cream and sour cream had to be mixed and put aside the night before. Next morning, I’d get to press out the sticky dough with my hands, which was a lot more fun than stirring eggs into brown powder from a box of Betty Crocker.
We always had a reason to bake something, because my aunt belonged to the Lutheran Ladies’ Benevolent Society. Her pastries were famous among parishioners—they were the first to fly off the table at bake sales. I remember a stout pastor with fat cheeks who closed his eyes when he ate the kringla, the better to relish the experience. But whenever anyone complimented her baking, Aunt Gudrun modestly replied that she was just lucky to have been taught the traditional recipes by her mother. In Norway, she emphasized, they had baked in a cast-iron woodstove with a big black oven; keeping the firebox stoked so that it stayed at precisely the right temperature was half the battle. Thirty years later, she still marveled at how simple it was to bake with a gas oven.
Tante Gudy’s patience and care went beyond cooking and my creative endeavors. Every night before bed, she painstakingly combed through my headful of long, thick, springy curls, looping each section ’round with a clean strip of cloth and tying it all into place. Otherwise, my hair would be snarled like a bird nest when I awoke. In order to get me ready for school the next day, Tante stood behind me at the breakfast table, unwrapping and arranging each coil that she’d put up the night before, while I, usually late, shoveled in my oatmeal. By the time I’d swallowed my last mouthful, I was sweetly coifed with ten-to-twelve long banana curls bedecked with ribbons to match my outfit.
My mother just couldn’t come to terms with my hair. She used to do it in little ringlets with bobby pins and sponge rollers when I was small, but as I grew up, it got thicker and wilder, until it took a lot to tame it. By the end of second grade, Mom wanted to cut it short, but Tante begged with tears in her eyes to let it grow full out. She promised to keep it up, and she kept her promise.
I couldn’t imagine where I got such a challenging mop of deep brunette curls. My father’s hair was thin, straight, and sandy brown, well on the way to salt and pepper. Mother had fine blond tresses which, when left as nature intended, floated in soft waves around her pretty face but was regularly starched into stiff perfection with plenty of hairspray. I was rarely allowed to touch it lest I muss it up, but Tante Gudy let me brush hers out at bedtime. Although her hair was heavier than Mother’s, it was still Norwegian hair, and when unleashed from its tidy bun, spilled down her back like a fragrant river of clover honey with ripples of yellow taffy.
Somewhere in the middle of West Bumfart, I shut my eyes tight and ran my fingers along the top of my head, pretending it was Tante’s gentle touch. Over the noxious whining tires, I captured a memory and held it a moment like a living thing, fragile as a lightning bug in a jar.
3
I’M NOT SURE when my father decided he was no longer happy with our living arrangements, any more than I could say exactly when the Woody got old and worn out. He was never overly chummy with his sister-in-law, but the real trouble began in the dark of winter, just after my grandfather passed away.
I knew something was up when Dad started parking himself in front of the television promptly after supper and sat until well past midnight, jiggling a tall glass of ice and surrounded by a Chesterfield haze. He liked to crack the ice cubes between his back teeth, a sound that made me shudder. Mom warned me to steer clear of the parlor when he was crunching ice—said he was sulky as a bear and liable to growl. From then on, I spent most evenings downstairs with Tante, while Mom sat alone at the kitchen table reading magazines. I had no idea why and didn’t dare ask.
All in all, there was a vague emotional chill in the house, like a draft on a raw day: you run your hands along the windowsills and around the door frames, but can’t quite locate the source. Sunday dinners became noticeably quieter, not that my morfar—literal translation, mother’s father—ever did much of the talking. He generally spoke no more than two sentences at a time, and they were usually about some practical matter. The awkward silence was due to the fact that my parents and aunt seemed to run out of conversational material after they’d passed the gravy.
At first I thought it was because they were sad to lose Morfar. I missed him terribly, especially when we gathered around the Sunday dinner table without him. I had a good cry at the sight of his favorite overstuffed armchair by the front parlor window looking lost and forlorn without its longtime occupant. And I never realized how much I’d loved the smell of his pipe tobacco. For a time, I could stuff my nose into the upholstery of his chair and still catch a whiff—if I closed my eyes, the feel of the fabric and aromatic scent seemed to resurrect him for a moment, like a friendly ghost. Then one day I came home from school to find that Tante had the furniture steam cleaned and thoroughly aired the room, even though it was the dead of winter; every trace of Morfar’s pipe was gone.
Most of all, I missed our weekly game of dominoes. On long winter afternoons when we came home from church, Morfar and I played dominoes at the coffee table in the parlor, while Mom helped Tante with the big Sunday dinner. (My father sat upstairs with his newspaper until the food was ready.) Before we set out the dominoes, Morfar always let me wind his clock, an oak-pressed gingerbread mantelpiece clock with a brass pendulum behind a glass window.
The ritual began when I was four years old. I was fascinated by the shiny brass pendulum, keeping time with a steady tat-tat-tat like a little tin drum. I knew I shouldn’t touch it but wanted a closer look, so I pushed the hassock up against the fireplace and climbed.
Morfar swooped me up from behind just before I managed to pull the clock down on
my head. I began to cry, expecting a scolding, but he didn’t even raise his voice. He carried me to his favorite chair and sat me on his knee. “Vell, Datterdatter,” he began, using the Norwegian word for maternal granddaughter, “so tell me, vat you gonna do with your old Morfar’s clock?” Between guilty sobs, I explained that I’d only wanted to look inside, to see how it worked. “Vell den, so why didn’t you ask?” I shrugged.
From that Sunday on, Morfar took the clock down from its place of honor on the mantel and set it on the coffee table where I could reach. He let me open the little door in the back to wind the clock with a tiny brass key, all the while watching carefully to see that I didn’t turn it too far. I kept my solemn promise not to touch it in the meantime.
Morfar was usually so quiet as we played at dominoes that the only sound was the tat-tat-tat of the clock, punctuated by his breath as he blew smoke from his pipe. Then one Sunday last winter, he deliberately laid the pipe in its ceramic holder, cleared his throat, and looked at me as if he had something to say. I looked up expectantly from my seat on the hassock and assumed he was about to excuse himself to the necessary. I was in for a surprise.
“Vell, Datterdatter . . . I, uh . . . vat I vant to say is . . . I tink it comes ’round dat ven ve get old, ve learn some kinda tings dat ve didn’t know before.” I was even more surprised when he looked into my eyes, waiting for an acknowledgment to his revelation.
“Ya, Morfar,” I said, nodding respectfully, although I had no idea what he was talking about. He stroked his short white beard and leaned back in his chair with his hands folded across his belly. I waited patiently. He looked thoughtfully past my head and out the window.
“And den,” he said at last, “den der is some kinda tings dat ve tink ve knew goot, but den ve learn . . . too late . . . dat ve didn’t know so goot after all.” His faded blue eyes searched me once more. “Ya know?”he queried hopefully.
