First she had locked us all out of the kitchen so that no draft could disturb the rising dough. Then she let us back in only when the fritters were swimming in hot fat and the table was festively set. In the kitchen it was steaming hot. Frost pictures on the kitchen windows shut out the frozen landscape which lay ominously around the house. Half of the fritters were lying on paper towels, tender and light brown, each with a yellow stripe around the middle like an equator. They were ready to be moved to the warmed plates, while the rest of the fritters still spluttered in the fat.
We sat down at the table, complimented Michi, praised her fritters, and settled into that state of undemanding comfort that can occur either suddenly or arises slowly from warmth, delicious food, and a feeling of belonging in the family or among friends.
The children asked Zuck if he would build a big fire in the living room fireplace and brew up some “hot buttered rum,” a pleasant kind of punch for polar regions that is made of rum and sweet cider. It is always served in cups, and you put a small piece of butter in each cup, which melts on the surface of the hot drink and enhances, rather than decreases, the rum taste.
First Zuck had to go to the barn to get gigantic logs to fill the stove in the living room. Then he brought in a couple of birch logs to lay on the fire in the open fireplace.
When he went through the kitchen with the second load of wood, Michi said suddenly, as a dark shadow fell over her face, “Will there ever be a time in our lives again when we don’t have to jump up right after a meal to stack mountains of dishes and wash and dry them, when you don’t have to carry wood, shake down coals, and build fires, when the kitchen is not papered with all these frightful lists telling what to do and when, without any prospect of ever catching up with all the work, without any hope of finishing?”
Zuck paused a moment in the kitchen. He couldn’t shrug his shoulders because the wood he was carrying in his arms was too heavy, but there was shoulder shrugging in his tone as he said, “I don’t know whether things will ever change, but perhaps it is all right the way it is . . .”
“It is not all right this way,” I said, “especially for a man who has something more important in his head, who has other work to do than heating, milking, and cleaning pigpens.”
“Bitterness will get you nowhere,” cried Winnetou, who had learned this bitter motto in school. “I’ll feed the cats now while you wash the dishes. Then I’ll help dry while you make the rum. When we are done we’ll have room for a couple more fritters.”
Half an hour later we sat in the living room. The children lay in front of the fireplace and stretched their feet toward the open fire.
A mountain of Mardi Gras fritters stood on the table. It smelled of wood smoke and rum punch, of New Year’s Eve and Mardi Gras, and we all felt a combination of being at home and shut away from the outside world, a feeling you can never have when neighbors are near and easy to reach. We spoke dreamily, a little tired, accepting our fate and ready to find again in our situation the humor that we had lost for a moment.
Again and again we came back to the theme of “hired help” and looked at it from all angles.
The children reminisced about the good old days when we had four servants and their nanny would encourage them, in spite of our disapproval, to ring for the chamber maid, even if all they wanted was a glass of water.
We spoke of the lives of our servants, in which we had been much interested and often deeply involved. We got out the letters that they had written us, at great danger to themselves, after Hitler seized power. They were examples of “noble simplicity and quiet greatness.”
We spoke of the concept of service and the related idea of master, of the calling of the servant or waitress, of the situation of being waited on, and of work itself.
We found many examples from our past European and our present American life, but we found no satisfactory solution for the future and saw only the impossible amount of work ahead of us, too much to ever catch up with.
In the course of the evening, I said to Michi, “It makes me think of a funny story. It is silly, but really true. In New York, two immigrants from Austria met each other on the street. ‘Isn’t it wonderful,’ said one, ‘all the things there are here in America! We couldn’t have dreamed of it. Everywhere electric refrigerators, washing machines, singing teakettles, automatic can openers!’ ‘Yes, that is all very nice,’ interrupted the other with a deep sigh, ‘but I really liked having Marie better.’ ”
Back here in Europe, where I am writing, I often have to think back to that Mardi Gras fritter evening and our talk.
I am amazed and deeply impressed by the number of Maries, Annas, Rosas, Mizzis, Kathis, Friedas, and Ellas that are still available. They clean rooms, make beds, set tables, cook, serve the food, wash the dishes, and are always there to do burdensome, dirty, constant, endless work for others.
Naturally, wealthy Americans do have servants, but just the fact that a very small percentage of New York apartments have rooms for servants shows how small the number of live-in servants must be.
The normal situation for a city dweller is to have a woman, black or white, who comes in for a couple of hours two or three times a week.
The hourly wages are high, but there is seldom a personal relationship. In wartime, the connection was so loose that you never knew whether the help that had cleaned so cheerfully on Monday would not stay away on Thursday without notice or goodbye. On the other hand, you had no responsibility to them and could dismiss them at any time without giving a reason.
At the beginning I found it frightening when a girl suddenly packed up her things and departed forever with no real reason and after five years of service. Or when a family moved to another state and suddenly told their maid who had served them faithfully for years that she would no longer be needed. Slowly I began to realize that in America it was not a matter of obligations, as they existed in the better and worse sense in Europe, but of work, a “job” like any other that was done in the most practical and unemotional way possible.
In Vermont matters were even more difficult, and in wartime almost impossible.
By nature Vermonters make poor servants. They can decide of course to help someone, but you must not take this help for granted or as something to be bought. The wages they demand for their work are relatively low because that increases their sense of independence.
Once a friend of ours was looking desperately for a boy to mow the grass.
After a long search one finally came and was asked how much he wanted per hour.
“Fifty cents per hour,” he answered, “but sixty, if you try to tell me how to do it.”
In the first year we were lucky.
That year a Vermont woman from the village came to us three times a week for four hours. She had been a teacher. Now she was widowed, had two children, and could only do domestic work.
She was pretty, quiet, and pleasant. We were glad to have her at our table, and we gave her no dirty or unpleasant tasks to do. Also she was a news reporter for the weekly newspaper, and while she was with us you could read much about our family in the news, for example when the children were home on vacation, whom we visited, and who came to visit us.
After a year she moved to the city, and then we had to get along for two years without any household help. That was hard since the house had ten rooms, with the living room a large hall and the kitchen the size of a dance floor.
Only in the fall of 1944 were we able to get the help of a farmer’s daughter. She came twice a week, but left in the spring of 1946 to get married.
The other farmers had just as much trouble as we did. They had an unbelievable amount of work to do without the corresponding help. There was a farm with fifteen hundred chickens, eight cows, twelve young stock, four pigs, thirty acres of cultivated land, and five hundred sugar maples from which the sap had to be collected and boiled down. The farmer had to take care of all this work with the help of one old man, and perhaps in summer one or
two hired boys to help with the field work. Another farmer had to milk his sixty cows twice a day for months with the help of a young boy. Another took care of his sixteen cows himself and worked besides as a wood-cutter.
Even these few examples show how agricultural machinery for the field, electric milking machines in the barn, and a hundred and one small appliances in the house are essential to help the overworked farmer and his wife cope to some extent with the enormous load of work.
Under these circumstances it was also impossible to ask friendly farmers for help, since they had almost more than they could do with their own work.
We could write a book about the hired boys, boys between twelve and seventeen years old, who went through our house in a colorful procession, each with his own individual and amazing traits, and never there when we wanted them. They had to leave the house at seven o’clock in the morning and came home in the evening at will, and asked every day as if for the first time what we wanted them to do, though their work was laid out in great detail.
Feeding them was no problem. If they were country boys, they usually ate only potatoes, beans, frankfurters, and sausage. That was all, and they made up for the missing vitamins with cigarette smoking.
Two of them who looked, in spite of the fresh country air, as if they were suffering from tuberculosis, scurvy, and starvation were taken into the army even with their miserable appearance. There they were forced to eat steaks, vegetables, and fruit, and under this treatment grew into healthy young giants in spite of themselves. When one of them came back from Japan six months after the war and greeted me on the street, I didn’t recognize him.
Since we had gotten used to the peculiarities of our animals, we adjusted to the ways of our hired boys, although I dreaded Saturdays when they were out of school and we had to put up with them all day long. Now that the new methods of educating the young have spread to the country, and the poor children are allowed to do and leave undone what they want to without being warned away from things that are wrong and led towards what is right by helpful adults, they are helpless in the face of a pseudo-freedom in which they don’t know where to turn.
Children sail on wild, unfamiliar seas in boats without rudder or compass, or run aground on sandbanks. As a natural consequence they direct their anger and frustration against the adults who have given them the great and tempting gift of the boat but forgotten to provide it with rudder and compass.
It was impressed on the children, however, that they are children and therefore, like fools, can be excused everything.
Once I came home to find that our thirteen-year-old hired boy had amused himself in our absence by building a fire on the top of the woodstove, feeding it with such generous amounts of wood that the whole kitchen was filled with smoke and glowing pieces of wood had scattered onto the floor. When I quickly extinguished the fire on the stove with water and tamped out the glowing coals on the floor, he watched my hurried actions with folded arms.
I got angry and told him that he could have been responsible for setting the whole house on fire with his play, at which he looked at me visibly surprised and replied as if insulted, “What do you expect of me—I’m just a kid.”
This statement didn’t lack a certain humor, but from then on it was uncanny to me all that he could blame on his childhood and childishness, and I only wanted to get him out of our house as soon as possible.
Our hired boys never stayed long. Some came to us only for Christmas and summer vacations. But in spite of their many problems it was always hard for us when they left, and we had to do all the work again ourselves.
The length of stay often depended on an order from Sears and Roebuck. According to whether they had ordered a pair of jeans or a gun, I could figure out from the catalog how much they would have to pay for it. Then I divided the pay that they got from us by the sum of the things ordered from Sears and Roebuck and could see clearly how many weeks they would still be with us. If I look back and count, there were really only ten hired boys in all who stayed with us for shorter or longer periods, but to me it seemed like a whole company because they were so different from each other and it cost so much effort and adjustment to get along with them.
Some of them came from Vermont, some from the city, and three were immigrants.
I had a particularly difficult time with one of them. He was a lively, bright boy from Austria who had picked up all the garbage from the social trash bins of America with incredible speed, had gobbled it down, and digested it badly.
I found him one morning in our living room, his hat on his head, his feet on the table, Zuck’s whiskey bottle next to him on the floor, with playing cards in his hands. He had the radio turned on to its highest volume and was playing poker with himself, stopping now and then to spit into the fireplace.
I went and stood in front of him, regarding him with disgust. “Are you quite sure,” I asked him cheerfully, “that people will believe that you are a born American because you put your feet on the table, spit, swear, drink, and talk common American slang? I warn you, Americans can smell out fakes. Perhaps you should take a different American type as a pattern, one that would suit you better and be more convincing.”
Among all these hired boys there was one who sometimes disappeared but kept returning. We had gotten to know him in our summer visits to the area when he was thirteen. When he was fifteen he came to us on the farm, and so we called him our first boy.
He came from a family with many children. His father was a woodcutter and day laborer, and when he came to us he was as much a beginner in farming as we.
He was very handsome, had nice manners, didn’t curse, drink, or smoke. Nor did he pin up pictures of half naked movie actresses on the walls of the chicken houses, or lie stretched out on our sofa in the pose of Madame Récamier. He didn’t kiss our pigs on the snout, tease little animals, or try to use empty jam jars as toilets. He avoided starting fires and ate almost everything we set before him. He was not a model boy, but his faults were balanced out by his good will and childlike simplicity.
Most of all he wanted not to be a child. Rather he was driven by a serious desire to be grown up, and therefore ordered suits from Sears and Roebuck whose cut and color would have been just as suitable for grown men.
The fine, clean shirts that he wore Sundays made such a contrast in color to his neck and ears that I urged him, whenever possible, to take a bath on Saturday night, a job that he felt was the lowest and dirtiest possible. On one Saturday he was going around with a sullen and gloomy face, and when Zuck asked him what was wrong, he said sadly and resentfully, “She wants me to take a bath again.”
For his sixteenth birthday I gave him bath salts and thus made bathing so attractive that he spent hours in the water and I had to knock on the door with the reminder, “Don’t forget to wash.”
A striving to get ahead filled everything he did. The most trying thing for us was his fierce urge for education, together with the high opinion he had formed of us and forced us to live up to.
Zuck would avoid his questions by disappearing into his room in the evenings where he sometimes made attempts to write.
But I had to stay in the kitchen and answer his questions without batting an eyelash, always trying to maintain his illusions about my knowledge.
Usually they were just information questions, but sometimes they had to do with problems that took deeper digging.
One night he came home in a wild snowstorm, threw his backpack, cap, and coat on the kitchen floor and called out to me, busy in the midst of cooking something, “Who was right, Elizabeth or Mary Stuart?”
Experienced as I was by now, I looked first for the source of this question and learned that he had just finished reading “Stiffn Swig.”
After I learned slowly and by having it spelled out that Stiffn Swig was Stefan Zweig, and that the question came from reading his book about Mary Stuart, I had the basis for our discussion. When Zuck came into the kitchen a while later, the goats had not
been milked, the pigs and fowl not fed, but there had been a certain understanding reached about the significance of Queen Elizabeth.
After that he busied himself for some time with English and French history. One fine fall day, as we sat outside sorting the potatoes we had dug for winter storage, he suddenly said thoughtfully, “After the war I think I’ll rent a room in the Versailles palace.”
“I don’t think they rent rooms,” I said, “but perhaps you could be a tour guide there. For that you must take an extra course in French and learn all you can about the French kings. And don’t forget Napoleon.”
After that I lived with Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Beauharnais, and Fouché, but that was all right since it was just at the time when we were hanging ears of corn up to dry in the house and barns, and discussions could be easily conducted from the ladder.
It was more difficult to answer questions about the present. These took in a wide spate of themes. The simplest were perhaps, “How would you act if the Japanese came? Why isn’t Hitler removed by the people and someone else elected? Are you related to the Hapsburgs, and why not? Is it true that the farmers in Europe live in the same room with their animals?”
One of the most difficult questions came up while we were boiling down maple syrup.
Suddenly he asked as if lost in thought, “Would you stand up if Mrs. Roosevelt came into the kitchen?”
“Yes,” I said, with my attention on the bubbling syrup, “of course I would stand up.”
“Would you stand up because she is the wife of the president?” “Yes,” I said absentmindedly, and I stuck the thermometer into the syrup.
“You shouldn’t do that,” he said, shaking his head. “You are just as good as Mrs. Roosevelt . . .”
Just at this moment three pans of maple syrup were done and had to be removed from the stove immediately. This gave me time to think about how I could extricate myself from the accusation that I was a servile European.
The Farm in the Green Mountains Page 14
