Modern American Memoirs (10 page)

During their long separation their letters were creating an intimacy between them far deeper than they had known when they walked out together in Newark. There their relationship had been entirely correct and according to the canons of courtship. The most passionate moment, to which Oluf alluded now and then, occurred during a walk that took them near the neighborhood hospital, when they seem to have kissed.

“We are having such a neice Day,” he wrote in the autumn of 1932, “just like Spring, I went out for a warlk this morning, do you remember when you and I went for a warlk, I mean to the Hospital….”

Distance and loneliness encouraged hopes of a more passionate relationship when they met again, yet Oluf's most romantic compositions were constantly being interrupted by cries of terror.

In October:

“If I don't come to your Birthday this year, please don't worrie, because when I do come I will kiss and love you that much more, yes I will keep on till you put your Arms rown me and tell me I am good, can I love you to much? You better say no, tell Pat I will answer her letter when I get to feel a little better, what makes me sick is all this jobs I am to have, but never gets any, I was up to see my Dochtor to day, he tells me I am OK, in very good Health I know I am, if I only could get a job.”

The election of Franklin Roosevelt in November did not raise his spirits.

November 11, 1932:

“Precident elesktion came out I think OK, it don't matter if it is Republican or Democrate in times like this…. Butter Prices are down where they were a year ago, and till they go back up rown 30 cents pr lbs, they never will hire me to demonstrate Margarine, now I am down and out again, and I don't like to keep on borrowing Moony from the Banks, because I got to paid it back sometimes sooner or later.”

Desperate to pay his bankers, he went back to the bake ovens that month.

November 19, 1932:

“Dear Elizabeth…. I wont to come to you wery, wery bad, and I will, and when I do come you will be so glad with me, I know you will, but I borrowed doring the Summer over 1,000 Dollars from the Banks and was down and out again, then Metz came along, and told me about this job, and I went and got it, but oh how I dont like it, it is absolutely no good, to much work, I mean to long hours, we got to go to work tomorrow Sunday all day, and again Monday morning, and every morning at one
A.M.
til next day rown two or three Afternoon, but I must stand it for a while….”

Two days later:

“…this hours, it is day and night, work all the time, Yesterday we work all day till ten last evening then we started again at two this morning, now it is three Afternoon I just got home, now Elizabeth
don't worrie, get along the best you can, and always think and say, someday Oluf will come, and I will….”

These lines were the closest to a promise of marriage he had written. She wrote back immediately urging him to look for an easier job more fitting for a man of his age and achievements.

November 25, 1932:

“No, Elizabeth I tried all over to get a job, I vill bet you I spendt over five Dollars on Stemps, sending letters to every one of this Bakers, who offered me jobs with big mony when I was traveling, but only one of them answered, no there was two, one in Newark and one in Boston, but they said they diddent have anything just now, the rest of them wouldent even spend a two cent Stamps on me, and they all were my Friends, well such is Life, no you musent think I would stay here in this dumpe one day ef I could get an other Job…now it is three a clock Afternoon, and we got to go to work at elleven this evening, isint it some Life, vell I hope soon vill change to something better…I will get to you some day, don't worrie, love to you all from Oluf.”

Five days later he had good news.

“Yesterday I received a Box of Cigares from a wery good Baker in Philladelphia, so maby my Freinds begin to come rown again, I wrote him to day and Thankt him, and said ef he needed a man lett me know and I would come down there.”

Ten days later:

“I got a letter from that Baker in Philadelphia to day, but it was the same story, he like very much to have me, but not now, vell there vill be something comming soon, I think so….

“Say isent it funny doing a Persons Life all there comes up, one thing after an other, and then it is nothing, as long as we have our Health….”

In the middle of December she wrote that she had sent him a Christmas present.

“You shouldn't send me any Precent, not in times like this,” he replied. “I am sending a litle so you can by something for the Children for Christmas and I hope you vill all have a neice Christmas, and I wich I could be there with you, but I will someday, good Night with love to you all from Oluf.”

Her gift arrived December 20.

“Dear Elizabeth, Thanks wery much for your letter and the Packets I received today. I wont open up for it til Christmas I never du with any Precent, My Wife used to open up for everything before the day and I always scoled her, say you are a sweet Girl now Elizabeth, the way you write me, and I like it, you vill see when I come down to you, we know each other, and we vont be afraid, now I never was of you, but you was a little of me, and you should be them days becouse you diddent know me, but now you do, and I can almost feel how sweet it vill be when I put my arms rown you….”

He also had good news.

“To day a man came in our shop from Gumbert Co in New York, he said to me, vhat in the World are you doing here Oluf, I told hem, then he said, write to our Company and I think they vill heire you, so that is vhat I vill do, and I hope I vill get a job, but it vont be til in January, vell again I wishes you a Mery Christmas and Thanks for all your kindnes to me….”

January 4,1933:

“I got a letter from this People in New York to day, but the same Story, they vould like very much to have me, but the Depression is on, oh how I do wich it soon vill be better so I can get a job, but rown here it is getting worce insted of better….”

Four days later his spirits were high and he was counting his blessings.

“This job here has been a great experience for me, you know vhat I mean, I use to be a Baker but it is eight years ago since I was working at it and a Fellow forgot all about working in that time, but now I am fearly good ad it again, I am loosing in waith now, I can feel it when I get dressed up on Sundays, but that is OK, because I was to fatt, don't you think? Elizabeth isent it funny all a Person goes tru during a Life time you have going tru lots, but I think I a litle more, because I am older, but again as long as we have our Health everything is OK, and we shouldent complain….”

In mid-January another job prospect failed.

“That Baker never answered, and I spoce never will, it is funny how it goes.”

The end of January:

“I did write Jelke Co, and hat an answeer, I did write Echerson Co, but it is the same Story, they sjure would like to have me, but the
Depression is on, it is affoul, I wont to come down to you, and you wont me to come and here I am more than 400 Miles away, and it is all from that Depression.”

February 1,1933:

“Business is getting worce insteadt of better….”

February 9:

“That Baker in Baltimore never answered yet, it is funy, he is the one who offered me 125 Dollars per week ef I only whute come to hem, and it is not much over a Year ago, now he wont even spend a three cent Stamp on me, I mean telling me he cant use me, or something, the same day I wrote to hem, I wrote to one in Boston, he offered me 50 Dollars per week a Year ago, but I dont think he will spend a Stamp on me, well such is Life, I think I wrote over fifty Letters to differens Bakers about a job, but only two answered me telling how sorry they where they couldent use me….”

The following week the gloom lifted at last. After so much despair, everything was turning out OK, after all. Life really was “funy” with its “cracy ups and downs.” He was exuberant.

February 15, 1933:

“Dear Elizabeth, Can you imagien I received a letter to Day from Mr. Echerson in Jersey City telling me that Rice's Bakery at Baltimore wont to gett me at least for two weeks, and for ever if I am not to expensive, so I wrote them right now, I don't know who they are, but who ever they are, they must be OK, I mean becouse they wont me, so maby our dreams at last will come true, say it is funy, here I give up all this Bakers, and they send for me…now I hope it soon will be over with and then I will come to you, are you glad? Love to you all from Oluf.”

Was she glad? She was delighted. She immediately wrote urging him not to sell himself too cheaply to Rice's Bakery. His reply to her was an epitaph for their entire generation.

“Dear Elizabeth, Thanks very much for your letter I received Yesterday, and Thanks very much for your Advice, but Elizabeth the War is over with, the good times is over with, them days we did seat a Price on ourself, but to day we just take what we can get and must be satisfact,—am I not right? So I diddent put any Price on, only told them what I am getting here, but what ever the wages are for a man like me down there I vould take….”

Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated March 4, 1933, but his sonorous cadences designed to revive the national spirit failed to stir Oluf. The great Baltimore opportunity seemed to be vanishing.

“Dear Elizabeth, Do you know Elizabeth I am feeling wery blue, I never heard from Rices Baking Co yet, and I begin to think it will go the same way as the others, now I have been seathing here all Day listening to Rosevelt being installed as our new Precident, well I do hope some of all this neice tings they told us over the Radio will come true, Elizabeth I am very Radicall, my idea would be to day ef I was to be the Precident, to jump on a Freight Train going to Washington, and say here I am ready to go to work, what they done there today will cost over 10 Million Dollars and we all know it would have helped many poor People out spending that mony giving us work, but perhaps I am funny the way I look at such tings….”

Four days later:

“Yes, I got a letter from Rices Baking Co, saying
no
.”

He had been trying to rent his houses, but without success. It was becoming harder to meet the payments on their mortgages. He was also having trouble paying the taxes. His letters were increasingly melancholy.

March 26, 1933:

“No, I dont do any thing, just seat rown or warlk up Town, and listening to People telling me how Lucky I am has lots of Mony, I always say, yes it is great, tomorrow I got to put in a new Hot Water Tank in a House, well there is always something….”

On April 14 he confided that he was $1,000 in debt.

“I talk to the Caschier in our Bank to day, asking him to lett me have 1500 Dollars, he said, not now, but come in here middle of next month, I think then you can have it, ef I do I will come to you, ef I could have got it to day, I would have been down with you tomorrow night….”

April 19, 1933:

“Dear Elizabeth, Thanks very much for your wery sweet letter I received to day, Thanks for telling me all the neice things, I do know now we can be free to each other, not afraid, when we see each other again, not like it was when I was down there, I know I was always looking at you when I was at your House, but you never seemed to
be interested in me, I know you beginn to be the day we went to the Hospital, am I right?…”

His next letter, written on April 24, was a hammer blow.

“Dear Elizabeth, Thanks for your letter I received to day, I am sorry, but Please dont write me any more.

“Yours truly

“Oluf”

She wrote back immediately. Had she said something that offended him?

April 30, 1933:

“Dear Elizabeth, Thanks for your letter I received the other day, no you have not done anything to me, but the Deprescion has, the City took everything I hat for Taxes, so I am down and out, that is why I don't want you to write me any more, I came to like you tru your letters, and I thought maybe some day we would come to know each other Personly, but not now, I wont be able to borrow any mony, any more, I am trying to gett anof so I can go to Danmark, and Perhaps stay there, so Please forget all about me, I am lost and going, ef I ever got back again, and you are not married, then ef I can help you I will, but please try to feind a man good anof for you, and forget all about you ever seing Oluf.”

She wrote again and had no reply. Then again, and no reply. She sent a registered letter and the Post Office sent her his signed receipt for it, dated May 18.

On May 19 he wrote “Dear Elizabeth” for the last time:

“Thanks for your letters, yes I received them all, but as I told you vhat is the use to keep on writting, I was in hope someday to come to know you, by getting a job down there, but now I never can come down, I am like I told you before, lost. I tried to raice anof mony so I could go over Home, but so far I diddent, this Town is going down and out, so I am asking you to stop writting to me, becouse I am not interested in anything any more, love to you all from Oluf.”

The war was over with, the good times were over with.

“Well it will all come out OK, I hope so” had become “I am lost and going and not interested in anything any more.”

Oluf disappeared into the Depression. My mother's hopes for finding love and security vanished with him.

Novelist Maureen Howard is also a playwright, scriptwriter, essayist, and critic. The most recent and most ambitious of her six novels is
Natural History
(1992); it takes place in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she grew up. She went to Smith College
.

Her vivid memoir
, Facts of Life
(1980), won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction, and was nominated for an American Book Award. How does a memoirist choose among the facts? Howard said, “Make them into something worth giving. As I'd shape fiction or cut you my prized delphiniums and lilies
.”

As a girl in Irish-Catholic Bridgeport, Howard took elocution lessons that were originally intended for her brother, George. This is from
Facts of Life.

 

from F
ACTS OF
L
IFE

G
eorge began to stutter: “B-b-bread, p-please,” and “P-pass, the b-b-butter.” My brother was such a bright articulate boy any dodo would have known that the sudden blubbering plosives were a cry for attention. He must have been nine or ten years old. Though I was eighteen months younger I knew the game he played. He would keep it up—the b-bread, the b-butter and the p-p-potatoes—until my mother's anxious solicitations drove my father to curse George out: “Christ Almighty, can't you talk? What the hell is this?” He would ask the question but my father never cared for an answer other than his own: George was ruining dinner, making a fool of himself. How many times had we heard that one of the supreme skills in life was being able to speak out clearly, even eloquently, to address the world grandly, as my father addressed the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, as the lawyers (those much-admired rich and clever men) argued their cases down at the courthouse? And here was his son blithering out of the b-blue. Today any half-wit child psychologist could tell us that a little boy with all A's and “Annoys others. A
great distraction!” written in the nun's precise hand on the back of his report card was b-bored out of his mind.

It was a crisis and though I hated every meal I was in awe of George's persistence. At the table he could keep the stutter going like a twitch, then wash it right out of his mouth when he played with Mark Gilday and Dick Ferucci.

“Speak slowly,” my mother said, always in there trying. “Think of each word, George.” But soon Jesus would be invoked again and the plates would dance at our places as my father struck a blow at weakness and irregularity. Since they didn't want to know all about us (Freud had not filtered down to our self-reliant American family), the burden was on my mother, as usual, to make things right. She found a Mrs. Holton: George was to go for speech lessons, though my mother let us know at once that this lady's abilities were not geared to anything so mundane as curing a boy's bumbling conversation.

In one morning she had discovered the finest woman in Bridgeport, too fine for us she implied somewhat crossly. Oh, her children were already ruined, she knew, by the coarseness of our neighborhood. A rough, dirty blanket covered the whole North End. There was no one with any more idea in his head than running up to the Rialto for a double feature. How she hoped that if Mrs. Holton could take George in hand…He lasted two lessons, the only boy, made a sissy, waiting for one little girl to come out of her parlor and another one there to giggle at him when he was through. It was easier to abandon the stutter, so I was slipped into his place as an afterthought. Like his melton coat and school shoes passed down to me, I came by my brother's elocution lessons secondhand. My mother must have been pleased that at least one child of hers would be exposed to the art and manner of Mrs. Holton.

Today I can't read a poem out loud that my family doesn't ridicule me. They groan and titter. They intone a line after me with false resonance. No one ever, ever reads like that, they say, deep from the chest like a Barrymore. They claim it's not
me
. La-dee-dah they make my reading sound and I'll be damned if it is—for it's perfectly natural. It
is
me—the tone held up at the end of a line, the elisions and glides, the glottal softening, the hitch of caesura in my voice. Funny, of course, if you've heard nothing but the flat crackle of tele
vision voices, thin as cheap beer, clinging to the microphone for dear life. Hurt and proud, I draw into my memories. A posture I hate at all other times seems justified: how can my daughter know, poor impoverished child with her crush on the golden movie idol of the moment—he of the starched mouth and droning masculinity? How can my common-sensical husband understand, a midwestern kid, the twang of his Saint Louis relatives in his ears? How can either of them hear the fine points of my elocution voice, trained weekly by Mrs. Holton?

 

It must have been the heyday of the Emerson School of Speech and Dramatic Art when Louise Holton was a student in the nineties. The photographs on her dining room sideboard were discreet: a stately brunet in the full-length portrait carried her head high with billowing pompadour, pearl choker on a long arched throat, pretty arms, a rose in hand. White muslin draped gracefully to the floor from the lacy exaggerated bosom of the day. Simplicity itself. The toe of one satin slipper indicated a positive stance. Nothing so transient as a smile on her face, the young lady gazed steadily ahead with an ethereal softness, capturing in her look some old idea of beauty. There was spirituality and competence at once in the gentle angle of the head. The world that this studio photo of young Mrs. Holton suggested was so far removed from mine that I never believed in it. It was dream stuff, like the drawings of beautiful ladies I found on the old sheet music in the seat of my grandmother's piano bench—“The Last Rose of Summer,” “Come Down, Come Down My Evenin' Star.” Another photograph featured a group of girls all costumed for a theatrical romp—Shakespeare I presumed even then—and my Mrs. Holton with arms akimbo, bold as you please in tights, had placed one foot jauntily up on a tree stump. They looked a deadly bunch, faking the hearty fun of it all, their performance captured in mud tones forever. Behind the bric-a-brac of silver plate there was one more half-hidden photo, not quite admitted to the everyday world, of a girl about my age with golden pipe curls and a wreath of roses on her head for some artistic event. This was the Holtons' dead daughter, Ruth, I'm sure of that, but God knows in the gentility of that dining room how I ever learned it outright. I was fascinated by the glint of her perfect teeth, the crisp ringlets of hair at
her temples…a child my age, dead. This sweet and satisfactory girl was infinitely more deserving of life than me—that's how I thought of her—and I stared at her photo hard and long the few times Mrs. Holton left the room.

That lifeless house where I presented myself each week after school—the whole somber feel and smell of it is with me still, the details more readily available than the arrangements of houses I have recently lived in…the hall with the hideous umbrella vase, art pottery of 1910, the brown scrub-brush mat to wipe my feet on, the toppledy coatrack that held its arms out invitingly and then slipped my coats and sweaters to the floor. A high table at the dining room window held waxy houseplants that seemed never to grow or bloom over the years. The scent of brown laundry soap rose from the freshly ironed cloth on the dining room table where we began my lesson. Everything in place and clean, no excess of matchbooks or rubble of dusty pennies from coat pockets, no tattered magazines, not even last night's
Post
folded out of the way. Nothing had happened here or ever would. Mrs. Holton's pupils came and went in a hush.
Mr
. Holton, on the early factory shift, came home from work, stole in the door and creaked up the back stairway. I encountered him once in the upper hall when I needed to go to the toilet so urgently that I finally asked permission to tiptoe up to the immaculate bathroom. There he stood, a lean Yankee the color of tallow soap. He wore his factory identification tag on the pocket of his blue workshirt and black lace-up boots. He did not speak.

Herbert Holton was a foreman at Jenkins Valve, an engineer in better days who had come down from Massachusetts to get work. Of course Louise Holton was not from
Bridgeport
, that, my mother pointed out, was easy to tell. Though she was loyal to our “Park City” my mother had some fix on Boston that we got a dose of now and then—the finesse, the delicacy of Bostonians made us all look like boors. Even the Boston Irish (she was so ignorant of the world) were better than the breed at home. So off I went to Mrs. Holton, who
was
Boston and culture, that I might acquire the clear rich speech and poise of a lady. Herbert came home. The stairs creaked. My teacher's voice rang through her modest house with the assurance of a grande dame, “Good afternoon, Herbert!” The brightness
of her greeting was always met with silence, and brighter still she turned back to our lesson.

A, E, I, O, U. We slid the vowels up, then down. We trilled them and shot them like spitballs at the walls, in unison, then on my own. I advanced to the more difficult roller-coaster effects, A, E, I, O, U—taking each vowel in death-defying swoops. Next, we addressed ourselves to those troublesome consonants, the D's and T's, spraying them lightly across the table, moving on to the plosives, those B's and P's George had picked to taunt us. All warmed up we let the vocal cords rest, closed our exercise books and went through the open arch to the living room. There we faced each other across the carpet—Mrs. Holton, a corseted full figure in her dark afternoon dress, her fluffy white hair pinned up in a modified pompadour, powdery white arms and neck, high color in her cheeks that even a child would not mistake for rouge. I was short for my age with plump legs encased in the brown lisle stockings prescribed for all pure Catholic girls. My usual school dress was a muted plaid to minimize my round tummy and each morning my mother finished me off with glossy fat braids. We swung our arms up and around. We bent from the middle (neither teacher nor student had a discernible waist) and lolled our heads round and round to loosen up before we began The Attitudes.

When I was first out of college, learning to hold my liquor and trying to enchant the world, I used to
do
The Attitudes at parties. Most anyone could sing old songs, but my skill in pantomime was acknowledged as special and antic, though my pick-up audiences, like my family, never believed in me. I like to think I am the only living person who can perform this lost art form. All the gestures of life boiled down, jelled to a routine and practiced first to the right side of Mrs. Holton's living room, then to the left: Calling (hand cupped to the mouth), Looking (hand over the eyes), Hearing, Greeting, Farewell, then into the deeper emotional material: Rejection, Fear, Love (both open and guarded variety), Laughter (head tossed, eyes dancing) and my favorite, Sorrow. Sorrow was posed with the head sagged, eyes covered with one drooping arm while the other was thrust back in limp Despair.

Week after week I mirrored the example of Louise Holton's perfect Attitudes. I could imagine her Calling Herbert to come down-
stairs after her pupils had departed, giving him a Farewell at the front door each morning as he went off to work with his black lunch pail, and naturally the most touching of all scenes, I envisioned her balanced in Sorrow over the photo of her dead daughter just my age. For what else could be intended but an elegant mime of life: I was to get my emotions fixed, to harness my awkward moments into ideal gestures and thus would my feelings be elevated to the ideal realm.

At home, to irritate us all, my father sat down to dinner in his undershirt, actually the top of his BVD's. My mother might say, “Put a shirt on, Bill,” but could not pursue the matter. He was perverse and crude, a man who must have his way. I was humiliated by the scene between them: his childishness—demanding ketchup and ice water, finding fault with the butter fresh from the dairy that day, thrusting his freckled hairy chest out defiantly. Her painful submission to him brought a short uneasy peace. Then he was angrier than ever and provoked a fight with me or George for not helping our mother. Couldn't we see how dragged out she was, all afternoon cooking the pot roast, baking apple pie? How many families did we think were waited on hand and foot by a blessed martyr? How many of our friends, poor kids that they were in two-family houses down the street, were eating her homemade chocolate cake? You bet your life they're eating crap off Louie's shelf your mother wouldn't feed to the dog. And weren't we chauffeured to our lessons—clarinet, elocution and dance? For what? For us to sit at the table and be distressed—oh, it was too bad—by his undershirt? Once lathered up he could go on with great disdain about “educated” people.

George and I were miserable, choking down the chocolate cake or custard, whatever gift had been given us that day by our sainted mother—there was no easy Attitude to take. I had only the beginning of a notion when I was in grammar school of my father's delight in his own rhetoric. The next night he'd strike quite another pose—fully clothed, indeed, sporting a well-tailored suit from Fenn-Feinstein in New Haven—we'd all be taken through some intricate legal proposition that had come up at lunch in the Stratfield Hotel, or, the Latin and Greek roots of our common English words would be expounded and he would have a “sliver, darling—ah, that's not a sliver now” of our dessert. Charming and
urbane, he was the most interesting father in the world and we were his radiant family. We sat late at the table and played with our crumbs. My mother's demure laugh pleased me, though of course it was not Laughter or Joy in the nobler sense as I well knew. Our passions at home were too muddled to ever be cast in the classical mode.

The tension between my father and mother must often have come to a head at suppertime: the mortgage, the kids, the inner knowledge that they were both meant for better things. And the other nights—the alternate mood of our family meals was as sparkling as a good scene out of a Depression comedy.