by S. Rose
5
IN THE WEEKS that followed, I didn’t hear any more about my father’s drinking or how Tante Gudy missed the boat. I was shocked by the news that we might soon have our own house and prayed it wouldn’t be too far of a walk to visit my aunt after school. But the real kick in the teeth was that Dad never wanted a baby girl. He was so unhappy that Tante thought she should’ve have carried me off to Norway. And Mom had agreed with her.
I wondered how my parents ended up with me instead of the boy they’d hoped for. Who was responsible for this calamitous mistake? At the heart of the matter was a burning question, the answer to which every child longed to know: where did babies come from?
Back then, it was a deep secret shrouded in myth. If you asked outright, grownups squirmed as if they’d been sent to the blackboard in front of the whole class to do an arithmetic problem but hadn’t done the homework. Women hid their condition as much as possible; when curious children asked why some ladies had swollen tummies, they said it was the result of eating too many heels from the bread loaves. I steadfastly refused to eat a single heel.
Most of us were told that the stork delivered babies. Kitty explained that she was found in a cabbage patch, hiding amongst the giant green heads. Her mother had said so, and she believed it with all her heart. I had serious reservations, but I’d never contradict Mrs. Gunderson.
We all wanted answers, but under the circumstances, I was driven by more than curiosity. I desperately needed to know how my parents got stuck with the wrong kid. Once I knew how you got a baby, I could figure out how to get a little brother. Then maybe they wouldn’t feel so bad about me.
I’d already tried asking Mom and Tante on two separate occasions, but they must have been in cahoots. They each gave the same brisk reply. “God decides when to send a baby, and it’s no concern of little girls.”
I made up my mind to ask my father. It was time to confirm or debunk the stories of cabbages and storks, once and for all.
I waited until Sunday afternoon. Dad was in his armchair, watching a ballgame, and still jiggling the omnipresent glass of ice, but looking a lot less sullen as of late. The expression on his face was promising; the creases around his mouth were relaxed, and he wasn’t chomping ice cubes. Maybe, if I casually slipped in the question I’d catch him off guard, and he’d spill it without thinking.
“Dad, does the stork really bring babies, or do you find them in a cabbage patch?”
“Ha!” He snorted, without taking his eyes off the TV. “You’re more likely to find ’em in a whiskey cellar.”
“Is that where you found me, Dad, in a whiskey cellar?”
“No, Puddin’ . . . I think you were hiding in a wine cellar . . . behind the bottles of Chianti. Ha ha ha.”
“George, that’s enough of that.” The indignation in Mom’s voice was palpable all the way from the kitchen.
That night I lay awake trying to put together the clues about storks and whiskey and cabbages. I finally came to a brilliant conclusion: the stork collected some babies from whiskey and wine cellars, and others from the cabbage patch and delivered them to the door of their rightful owners. The parents had to sign for the babies, just like when the postman brought a special package. That explained the part about signing the papers, I thought with smug satisfaction.
Suppose the stork got mixed up and left me on the front porch instead of the boy the Parsons ordered? Maybe he’d flown off to look for babies in a whiskey cellar and gotten himself drunk? Or maybe it was Dad who had too much to drink. I’d seen that before. My father once had such a good time downtown that he couldn’t find his way home and accidently walked into our next door neighbor’s house! Maybe he was half in the bag, and signed for me before he took a good look and realized the slip-up.
But then, why hadn’t the stork come back a year or two later with a baby brother? I wondered how some folks got to have more children and others only got one. At last, I figured that out, too.
“Mom?” I asked as she stood at the kitchen sink, washing the dinnerware. I was by her side, drying.
“Hmm?”
“I was thinking . . . maybe we could get me a baby brother?”
“What?” A plate slipped from her hand and disappeared under the suds.
“A new baby. All you need to do is write a letter to the stork and ask him . . . like when I write to Santa and tell him what I want for Christmas. Last time he brought the blue bicycle, just like I asked.”
I looked up at her face, expecting praise for my wonderful idea. Instead, her fair complexion turned pink to the roots of her pale blond hair. I’d seen that before, and it always made me curious. I had skin the color of a walnut shell and tanned so dark in the summer that Dad sometimes called me his little Indian. Tante Gudy said it was because I favored Uncle Lars who was a dark Norwegian.
“I . . . uh . . . it’s not proper for a little girl to come out with such things,” she said indignantly.
I felt my face burn all the way to my ears, even though it probably didn’t show. “I’m sorry, Mommy . . . I didn’t know.”
“Besides, ah . . . everyone knows that you can’t write a letter to the stork because storks can’t read.”
“They can’t?”
“Of course, birds can’t read. That’s just silly.”
“Then how does he know when to bring a baby?”
“Well, um . . . they grow in the cabbage patch.”
“Dad said they came from a whiskey cellar.”
“He thought he was being funny. They grow in a cabbage patch,” she insisted.
“Then, can we take a drive out to the country and see the babies growing?”
“No, because . . . uh, God plants the seeds in a special cabbage patch. It’s in heaven, of course, and the angels tend them until they grow into a baby. God tells the stork where to deliver the babies. You can’t write a letter to get one, it’s up to Him.” She cast her eyes upward.
“Oh. Then I suppose it’s alright to pray and ask God to send a baby?”
“Ya sure. We can pray and ask God for any good thing, but then we must accept His will. Now, you mustn’t go around talking about any of this outside of the house. It’s very private. You understand?” I nodded. “And,” she lowered her voice, “you mustn’t mention any of it to your father; some things a girl should only speak of with her mother, don’cha know?”
I nodded dumbly, wary of saying the wrong thing and upsetting her further.
“Well then, let’s finish up these dishes.”
TWO WEEKS LATER, school let out for the summer. I hardly got a chance to enjoy it before I learned we were moving to Blackstone.
“Tante is coming too, isn’t she?” They were the first words out of my mouth, although I already knew the answer.
“Of course not. She’s staying here . . . in her home,” Mom said pointedly. She went on to regale me with the explanation for the move. My ears started ringing, and time seemed to stand still as she made what was obviously a prepared speech. “Grandpa Parsons is getting too old to run the lodge alone. Your father needs a change from the stress of being cooped up in an office . . . blah blah . . . his ulcer is acting up . . . blah blah . . . misses the outdoors . . . blah blah . . . great plans to modernize the lodge and make lots of money . . . blah blah . . . Daddy will build us a house of our own . . . ”
Before long, the heart of the matter sank in: we were leaving, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. I also sensed that my mother only pretended to be happy and desperately wanted me to believe everything was under control . . . but I wasn’t fooled. I knew that beneath the crust of composure her blood was roiling, as evidenced by her Norwegian complexion that turned the color of a radish.
“No!” I finally broke in. “No no no no,” I babbled like a stubborn two year old, shaking my head. I couldn’t compose a more complex sentence.
“Now, I’m warning you not to kick up a fuss, young lady, and when your father comes home . . .”
&nbs
p; “But we can’t just leave Tante. This is our home,” I blurted with emotion. My mother’s face gentled a bit as she reached out to put her hand on my shoulder. I jumped back as if it were a dog about to bite, then turned and ran from my bedroom.
“Cassandra!” she called after me.
“Tante Gudy,” I shouted as I ran down the staircase, blinded by tears.
The worst part of all was that my aunt didn’t seem the least bit ruffled. She stood stiff and composed as I threw my arms around her middle and protested; I was sobbing so hard it hurt my chest. I couldn’t imagine why she wasn’t crying too.
Then Tante Gudy reached around her back, firmly grasped my hands and unlocked my embrace. “Your father and mother have decided to go. Your place is with them,” she said evenly. “There’s nothing more to discuss, so please don’t carry on.”
6
WHEN I TOLD Kitty Gunderson I was moving far away the very next week, she bit her bottom lip the better to think and quickly came up with a rational plan: we would play all our favorite games every day to hold us until I came home. I explained that my father was moving us forever, but she insisted I’d be back. I didn’t try to argue the point. Even though we were in the same grade, Kitty was eight months younger, and her views tended to be more childish.
Her given name was Katherine, but she was always called Kitty, and the name fit like a soft, warm mitten. The two of us were a study in contrast; she was tiny and fair-skinned with wispy, strawberry-blonde hair and light blue eyes. I was tall for my age, and Kitty was short enough for me to eat a peanut off her head—I did it once to prove it. Her elven face was so pretty and her skin so white that she reminded me of one of those porcelain dolls, too fragile to play with and only displayed in the window of a fine toyshop. But that isn’t why I loved her. I loved her because of the way she smiled when she saw me each day—the way her eyes lit up as if I were a Christmas gift, still wrapped beneath the tree.
Kitty’s father was a second generation Norwegian American. Mr. Gunderson only had one arm; he’d lost his right arm in Germany, fighting for America. The sight of the missing limb frightened me at first, but each time I’d seen him he wore a kindly smile, and in all the years I’d known the family, he never once raised his voice. When I saw the way he wrapped his left arm around Kitty and pulled her close to kiss her strawberry head, I decided I liked Mr. Gunderson very much.
Kitty’s mother, Inga Lena, was a German-born war bride. She was one of those immigrants who always struggled with the new language, even though she was smart and had lived in the States for ten years. While Aunt Gudrun’s sing-song English was otherwise impeccable, Inga Lena’s speech could be halting and slow as she grappled for just the right words, then still got snagged on the pronunciation. As a result, Kitty grew up fluent in German and often conversed at home in her mother’s native tongue. I loved to hear Kitty’s high voice trill and roll her r’s, but she was warned never to speak German outside of the house. In 1962, war wounds were still raw and jagged at the edges, especially the kind you couldn’t see. Many people bore a deep resentment toward the German nationals; others out and out hated anyone of German decent, naturalized American or not.
Even though Mr. Gunderson lost his right arm for our country, certain neighbors wouldn’t associate with the family on account of Inga Lena. Norway had also suffered under the Nazi occupation, and though Tante didn’t dwell on it, I knew that her nephew Karluf was shot dead by a German soldier. Nonetheless, she didn’t hold with prejudice, nor did my mother. They both adored Kitty and were always kind and welcoming to Inga Lena.
My father had a different opinion. He’d served in the army and for a long time I knew very little about it—except that he’d also been in Germany. Back then, it was common to hear men of that generation talk about their service; even children routinely asked one another, “What did your father do in the war?” But whenever I asked, Dad skated around the edge as if he got too close to the middle he might fall through. “We shot at Germans. They shot at us.” It was all I could get out of him for years.
By the time I was in fourth grade, the social pressure was mounting. “Please? Can’t you tell me something?” I begged.“I’m the only kid in school without a story to brag about.”
“Believe me, there’s nothing to brag about. I got there when the fighting was just about over. Mostly, I helped care for some civilians.”
“Which side were the civilians on?”
“They didn’t get to pick sides . . . they were caught in the middle.” I looked at him skeptically. “Civilians are noncombatants,” he explained. “They weren’t soldiers. These people were captured by the enemy and kept as prisoners in a big camp.”
“Like a summer camp?”
“No, Puddin’, it wasn’t anything like a summer camp. It was a concentration camp.”
“Tell me about it, please, Dad?”
“Seems you’ll leave me no peace ’til I do.”
“NONE OF US even knew it was there,”he began with a shrug. “One minute I was in a tank, rolling along a country road, watching some old German farmer plow his field with a horse. It was a beautiful spring day in April. It was quiet and peaceful. We all thought the worst was over. Next thing I knew, the tanks were crashing through some barbed wire fence. We had our guns at the ready, but there was no shooting. The German soldiers had already run away, so it wasn’t dangerous anymore. But the people . . . those poor people left behind were, uh, very hungry and very sick. I never saw anything so terrible in my life . . . None of us had. All we could do was try and feed them . . . try and save some of them. And just when I thought it couldn’t be any worse, we learned there were children held at that prison camp.”
“Children? But who would send children to a prison?”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” he answered, which was no answer at all.
“Did the kids do something bad to get sent there?”
“No, the kids didn’t do anything bad . . . None of the people did anything wrong. Most of the children were too weak to move, but one little fellow came staggering up to me. He was nothing but skin and bones. His face was so creased and pinched; at first I thought he was a very short old man—until he began to speak with the voice of a child. My natural instinct was to grab for my rations and hand out what I had. A lot of the guys did that. So, I gave the kid a Hershey bar.”
“He must’ve been glad to get chocolate!”
“A whole damned Hershey bar. The poor kid couldn’t open it . . . His hands were trembling. I tried to help with the wrapper, but he thought I was gonna take back the candy bar.”
My father had turned his head from me and gazed through the window with far away eyes, as if he looked hard enough he could see all the way to Germany, all the way back through time. He wore the saddest smile I’ve ever seen on any man.
“I tried to explain, but he didn’t understand.”
“Because he didn’t speak English?”
“Right. I managed to tear back the wrapper, and he started wolfing it down . . . I thought he was going to eat it paper and all. His mouth was so dry that his lips were swollen and crusty white . . .”
“Yuck. I mean, that’s sad.”
“But he managed to cram it in anyhow . . . the whole damned candy bar. And even though he was starving, it turned out to be worse than eating nothin’ at all. But we didn’t know that. None of us knew . . .”
“Didn’t know what, Dad?”
“Uh . . . that you should never eat candy before dinner, even when you’re very hungry,” he concluded, collecting himself. “It’ll give you a bad belly ache.” He smiled and tussled my hair.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
With no further information to go on, I reasoned that the concentration camps were someplace people were sent to concentrate; that the mean Germans didn’t give them enough to eat, and the poor kids never got any candy.
The only other detail I knew was that my father developed blee
ding ulcers shortly thereafter. My mother told me about the time I started fourth grade but said I mustn’t ever bring it up and never repeat it in the neighborhood. She often warned me not to fuss and make Daddy upset because the ulcers could still act up. When that happened, he took to his bed, often for a week at a time. I had to tiptoe up and down the stairs—heaven help me if I woke him.
I was left to surmise that bleeding ulcers must be a lot worse than losing an arm, but it was a difficult thing to understand. My father came home with all four limbs and not a shard of shrapnel but suffered the rest of his life from invisible wounds, on a mission where no shots were fired at all.
7
MY LAST WEEK at home started out overcast, raining on and off, so that things never completely dried out before it started up again. I didn’t mind the rain. Inclement weather meant Kitty and I could play up in the attic, where over the years we’d had many great adventures.
Monday morning she arrived on the front porch dripping wet, wearing a pink Mackintosh and carrying a matching ruffled umbrella. She brought along three large dolls in their perambulator, all covered up with plastic sheeting from the dry cleaners. Mom hollered for me to leave the wet plastic on the porch. I hung up her coat and wheeled the carriage over the threshold.
We had to make three trips to haul the dolls and a toy tea set up the attic stairs. Kitty had brought a pair of life-sized baby dolls named Molly and Polly, the kind with soft cloth bodies, but the limbs and head made of plastic. She also brought the Kissy doll that Santa left last Christmas, so named because when you pressed her arms together, her lips puckered and popped a kiss. Kissy was a toddler-sized doll with short blond hair and big blue eyes that closed. She came out of the box dressed for summertime, in a one-piece red-and-white checkered sunsuit with tiny red buttons and red Mary Jane shoes. Kitty was worried that the doll might catch cold, so Mrs. Gunderson knitted a little red sweater.
I brought my Betsy Walker walking doll that I’d had for as long as I could remember. I don’t recall her original doll outfit, but she was big enough to wear some old clothes from my preschool days. Betsy was constructed of heavy molded plastic with metal ball-and-socket hip joints. She had stiff black curls and was none too pretty in the face, but she really did walk—sort of. I tugged her along by one arm, and her rigid straight legs kicked out at the hips, but she usually didn’t go more than a few steps before I had to reset the legs. I also carted up my Chatty Cathy that I got for my ninth birthday. She still looked nice but was kind of broken—used to say about a dozen things, but I guess I’d pulled the string too many times. Now all she could say was, “Let’s have a party!”
