Last Bus to Wisdom (13 page)

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.

•   •   •

T
HROUGH 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 in 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.

Herman spoke up. “The boy made a notcheral mistake. It could happen to Einstein.”

“Another country heard from,” she snapped at him. Worry written large on her—there was plenty of space for it—she studied me again but not for long, her mind made up. Whirling to the stove, she set the pot off the burner and turned back to me, with a deep, deep breath that expanded her even more into Kate Smith dimension, in my opinion. “Sweetiekins, come.” She marched into the living room, killed the radio, planted herself on the davenport on an entire cushion, and patted the one beside her. I went and sat.

She looking down and me looking up, we gazed at each other in something like mutual incomprehension. I squirmed a little, and not just from the clammy touch of the davenport through the seat of my pants. Dismayed as I was, she too appeared to be thrown by the situation, until with a nod of resolve she sucked in her cheeks, as much as they would go, and compressed her lips to address the matter of me.

“Now then, lambie pie, there's nothing to be ashamed of,” her tone became quite hushed, “but has your grandmother or anyone, a teacher maybe, ever said to you there might be a little bit something”—she searched for the word—“different about you?” Another breath from her very depths. “Just for example, do you get along all right in school?”

“Sure,” I replied defensively, thinking she had figured out the shirt-shredding battle royal with the campers. “I'm friends with kids in more schools than you can shake a stick at, back home.”

“No, no.” Her bosom heaved as she gathered for another try at me. “What I mean is, have you ever been set back in school? Failed a grade, or maybe even just had teensy-weensy trouble”—she pincered her thumb and first finger close together to make sure I understood how little it would be my fault—“catching on to things in class?”

I understood, all right, shocked speechless. She figured I had a wire down. Aghast at being classified as some kind of what Letty termed a mo-ron, I sucked air like a fish out of water, until my voice came back.

“Me? No! I get straight A's! In deportment, even!” I babbled further, “I heard Miss Ciardi, that's my teacher, say to Gram I'm bright enough to read by at night.”

My frantic blurts eliciting the throaty response “I see,” although she didn't seem to, Aunt Kate tapped her hand on her thigh the jittery way she'd done in the car when I assumed singing to all of America was upmost on her mind.

Before she could say anything more, Herman stuck up for me from the kitchen doorway.

“Notcheral, like I telled you.” His guttural assertion made us both jump a little. “Donny is not first to find the resemblance, yah? If it bothers you so great to look like the other Kate, why do you dress up so much like you could be her?”

“When I want your opinion, I'll ask for it,” she flared, giving him a dirty look. “A person should be able to dress the way she likes. And if Kate Smith happens to resemble me, that is her good luck, isn't it?” A sentiment that made her draw herself up as if double-daring him to contradict it. I breathed slightly easier. If they were going to have a fight, at least that might put me on the sideline temporarily.

Not for long. Aunt Kate shifted a haunch as she turned toward me, a movement that tipped me into uncomfortably close range. “Honey bear,” she tried to be nice, the effort showing, “if you're that intelligent, then you have quite the imagination.”

“Maybe a little bit more than most,” I owned up to.

My modest admission, she rolled over like a bulldozer. “You mustn't let it run away with you,” her voice not Kate Smith–nice now. “You know why you're here, because of Dorie's—your grandmother's—operation. We can't have you going around with your head in the clouds while you're with us, we all just need to get through this summer the best we can.” Another glare in the direction of the kitchen doorway. “Isn't that so, Brinker?”

Looking almost as caught as I was, Herman protectively hugged the book he was holding. “Donny and I will be straight shooters, bet your boots.”

From the look in her eye, she was making ready to reply to that reply when I pulled the album out from behind my back. “All I wanted was your autograph when I thought you were you-know-who.” I knew to put as much oomph into the next as I could, even though the same enthusiasm wasn't there. “I still want it, for sure. And Herman's.”

“I see,” she said, a little less dubiously this time. She certainly helped herself to an eyeful of the memory book as she took it from me, her lips moving surprisingly like Gram's in silently reading that cover inscription,
YE WHO LEND YOUR NAME TO THESE PAGES SHALL LIVE ON UNDIMMED THROUGH THE AGES
. “So that's what this is about,” she said faintly to herself in flipping to one of the entries. I hoped not the Fort Peck sheriff's about keeping your pecker dry.

On pins and needles, I waited for her reaction as she dipped into the pages until she had evidently seen enough. “I need an aspirin.” She spoke with her eyes clamped shut, pinching the bridge of her nose. “And then we are going to eat dinner with no more interruptions.” That last, I sensed, was spoken as much for Herman's benefit as mine.

“Sweetie”—once more she made the effort to be nice to me, handing back the autograph book before heaving herself off the davenport and marching to the kitchen—“we'll be sure to write in it for you, but it can wait. Now then, come to the table, we'll eat as long as we're able.” She summoned the other two of us with an obvious lift of mood, improving with every step toward the dinner pot.

No sooner was the tube steak meal ingested if not digested than Aunt Kate declared in a sweetened mood, “Chickie, you look tuckered out from your trip,” which I didn't think I did, but she topped that off with the message impossible to miss, “Your room is ready for you.”

The night was still a pup compared to the Greyhound's long gallop through the dark, but if she wanted to settle me in the cozy sewing room with that nice cot, I was ready for that anytime. “It's best for you to have a room all to yourself,” she said, leading the way into the hall—
Wow
, I thought,
she's really putting herself out, giving up her sewing room for my sake
—“so we have fixed a place for you, haven't we, Brinker.”

He oddly answered, “Yah, you come to Manito Woc and rough it like a cowboy, Donny. Make you feel at home, hah?”

And whiz, just like that, I was bypassing the cubbyhole sewing room and instead trooping upstairs behind Herman, with him insisting on lugging my suitcase—“You are the guest, you get the best”—while in back of us, Aunt Kate strenuously mounted one tread at a time. And as the stairs kept going, quite a climb by any standard, the suspicion began to seep in on me as to where we were headed, even before Herman shouldered open the squeaky door.

•   •   •

T
O THIS DAY,
that “room,” up where the hayloft in a barn would be, is engraved in me. Aunt Kate could call it what she wanted, but I had bounced around enough with my parents in makeshift quarters to recognize this as nothing more than the attic. Bare roofbeams and a sharply sloping underside of the roof and probably mice and spiders, the whole works.

The first thing to strike me in my shock was the frilly bedspread flowered with purple and orange blossoms the size of cabbages, instead of the cozy quilts Gram and I slept under every night of our lives, and pillows, pillows, pillows, the useless small square ones with tassels and gold fringe and sentiments stitched on such as
IT TAKES TWO LOVEBIRDS TO COO
. To give Aunt Kate the benefit of good intentions, which I was not about to do, I suppose all that was an attempt to camouflage the suspect bed, which I could tell from its ancient iron legs would skreek every time a person turned over. The rest of the furniture amounted to a cheap fiberboard dresser, a rickety straight-backed chair, and a bedstand holding a lamp with a stained shade. The remainder of the space was taken up by a sagging bookcase shelved with the unmistakable yellow spines of many years' worth of
National Geographic
s, and stacks of storage boxes labeled
Xmas tree lights
& curtain material
and such.