Modern American Memoirs (9 page)

I resisted, for I already knew I could not do a somersault, much less a headstand or cartwheel, and I sensed that I would never be anything but a ludicrous spectacle at gymnastics.

“Young man, do you want to grow up and get curvature of the spine?” The doctor opened a drawer and produced a book. There was a photograph of an adult case of advanced curvature of the spine. Was that what I wanted to look like when I grew up?

It was not for me to answer. My mother had seen enough. I began reporting to a gymnasium to be saved from curvature of the spine. I hated that gymnasium. My God-given physical gracelessness immediately made me an object of derision among the other boys, most of whom had the agility of chimpanzees and found it hilarious that my efforts should always end in a clatter of crashing bones.

After months of this torment, parents were invited to a gymnastic exhibition. My mother brought Aunt Pat. When it was over and we were walking home Aunt Pat congratulated me on a wonderful performance. Not my mother. Lying was not in her.

“I think it'd be better if you learned to play baseball, Buddy,” she said. A few days later she went to Woolworth's and bought a bat, a ball, and two gloves for Doris and me to use in the backyard. She never took me to the gymnasium again.

While I was experiencing the routine miseries of childhood, my mother was discovering the Depression. She quickly learned that
her hope of finding a job and renting a place of her own was foolish. There were no jobs to be found.

She hoped to resume teaching. The school administrators told her Virginia credentials were no good in New Jersey and no jobs were likely to be available even if she qualified. The story was the same everywhere. No jobs. No jobs for saleswomen in the department stores. Department stores were firing, not hiring. No jobs in the factories. Factories that weren't laying off workers en masse were shutting down entirely. All that year she walked the streets, combed the classified ads, sat in offices waiting to talk to possible employers, and always heard the same refrain: No jobs.

In December she found temporary holiday work in a Newark five-and-dime store. Twelve hours a day, $18 a week. It was good pay; any pay was good pay by then. It enabled her to contribute to the budget for Wakeman Avenue, and that was good for her self-respect, but there was no longer any deceiving herself about becoming independent.

Of course there was always the chance she could marry again. As 1931 went from bad to worse the possibility of another marriage began to seem her best hope of salvation. Tucking me into bed one night, she lingered an unusually long time, then asked out of the blue, “Do you think Oluf would make a nice father?”

It was a troubling question, and she must have noticed my uneasiness because she immediately said, “Oluf is a good man.”

This was her official seal of approval, for there were few “good men” in her catalogue. “Papa” of course had been a “good man,” and Uncle Allen was a “good man,” but there weren't many others.

I was vaguely aware of Oluf. He came to the house now and then, arms filled with bags of pastries which he jovially pressed on Doris and me. I knew he and my mother occasionally went out together for walks. Beyond that I paid him little attention. To me he was little more than a jolly stranger with a funny way of talking. He was certainly not my idea of a father.

Uncle Allen had met him while selling oleomargarine. Oluf was a skilled baker who had graduated to traveling salesman. With his sample cases full of margarine he traveled through the northeastern states demonstrating and selling his goods in large plants and small neighborhood shops. Uncle Allen brought him home one evening and introduced him to my mother.

He was a Dane, a big, yellow-haired, outgoing man in his late forties, and a widower. He had emigrated to the United States after his wife's death. There was a son who was married and living in western Pennsylvania. Oluf had the venturesome business spirit my mother admired. He had borrowed from the banks to buy three or four houses in Pennsylvania and considered himself a developing American success story. He was a man of high good humor, well-pressed double-breasted suits, manicured nails, and glossily polished shoes. He had risen above the labor of bake ovens, traveled from city to city, talked business deals with bankers. My mother, looking at him, saw a man with a future.

And though I did not know it at the time, she loved him.

I did not. Though I liked Oluf's jovial spirits and ate his pastry with gusto, the possibility of having a new father scared me. My great terror then was of losing my mother. I had constant nightmares, ghastly nightmares in which she was dead and Doris and I were left alone. Her marrying, I thought, would be another way to lose her, though I never told her so.

Oluf's work kept him on the road much of the time. During his absences he wrote two or three times a week to my mother. The graceful flourish of his handwriting contrasted oddly with the fractured grammar and exotic spelling of his prose. Still, his discomfort with the mysteries of English did not diminish his power to make himself felt when he took up the pen. Through the comical spelling, eerie grammar, and devil-may-care punctuation a distinctive voice emerged, full of sweetness, despair, earnestness, love, and loneliness, all expressed in a graceful Scandinavian lilt.

The first note of fear was sounded in a letter he wrote her from Boston May 9, 1932. He had visited his home office that day. Back at his hotel that night he wrote her about it.

“Dear Elizabeth,” he began. “Today I have been together with our Manager all day, and he told me that it look like I will have to go June first. Business is so bad and getting worse for us, he let four salesmen go here May first so now there is only seven left. Last year there was seventheen. Well it don't help to worrie, like you said, I have to start a bakery somewhere, do you want to help me if I get one?”

The following week he called on customers in Providence and Newport, then came back to Boston and began his letter with bad news.

May 21, 1932:

“Dear Elizabeth: Just was at our office, they showed me letters they had written to Swift trying to keep me, but Swift said no, so I am out.”

He was answering a letter from her in which she said Aunt Pat was going to find her a job.

“How in the world could Pat get a job for you? You know jobs today don't hang on trees.”

And then, the abrupt switch to a more pleasant subject that typified his instinct to look on the bright side:

“New Port is the nicest place I ever seing.”

And in the next sentence, the relapse into fear:

“Do you know Elizabeth down in Baltimore is a baker who wanted me affoul bad last time I was there maby I will take the job for a while, how would you like that, would you come and see me, or I come and see you. Business is affoul bad, now they are going to stop this office and only keep three Salesmen, last Summer they hat 32 men here, how people are getting over next vinter, I can't untherstand. Again thanks for your letter you are a sweet Girl, I will Kiss you when I see you, how is that, love to you and the Children from Oluf.”

By the summer of 1932 President Hoover's mere “depression” had become “the Depression” with a capital D. Campaigning for reelection, the President declared, “Prosperity is just around the corner.” Oluf, however, was adjusting his goals downward.

May 26, 1932:

“Dear Elizabeth, I will try to see that Baker in Baltimore on Monday June 6, today I was offered a job here with a Baker he would pay me 45 dollars per week, I told him I would think it over but oh how working in a Bakeshop in the Summer months is hard work.”

Then, a burst of romantic teasing:

“That Widow in Pittsburgh has heard about I loosing my job, now she offers me all there is in this world if I will come and run her shop, but I don't think it will be so great, do you, no I know, you say no, oh how worm it is here this days, and today we hat a Storm a bad one to, a Cann of Blue Berries exploted today in a shop and I got it all over my Close, how is that—not so good,

“Love to you and the Children from Oluf.”

My mother was writing back to him letter for letter. She kept his stored away for years, not because she realized they constituted a personal history of the Depression, but because she valued them among her most precious treasures. What she said in her letters to him is all lost except for echoes and resonances in his replies. It was not a conventional lovers' correspondence, despite Oluf's frequent attempts to strike the chord of passion. He in growing fear, she in her mid-thirties, impoverished, widowed with small children, both were using the mails to shelter them against loneliness.

Earlier that year Aunt Pat had her first child, a daughter she named Kathleen. By mid-June Oluf had retreated to his properties in western Pennsylvania and wrote a “Dear Friends” letter to the whole family:

“Pat you are an affoul bad Girl, not to write me any before, you know I am out of work, and have been for some time, nearly all Echerson Co is out, and soon Swift and all their large Packing Co will be out, I never know how hard times is till when I got back to this town trying to borrow mony, I am glad Allen is working, be sjure to hang on to it, Pat I told you a Child is word a Berl of Gold….”

He had a job though: “demonstrating and selling Pomosin, a New Product from Germany.” He had also traded his car for an old Buick—“a Buirich Carre”—and was about to set out in it on a selling trip with his son Niels.

“Not working, do you know I am lost, and now all the Insurance People down here comes to see me, they all thinks I am full of mony or something, I say full of Balony, but now I will try this job first, I may land on the poor House but then I wont be the first, nor the last.”

Two weeks later:

“Dear Elizabeth, Monday morning Niels, my Son and I started out selling Flavors and Speices, we made during the week 37 dollars, but we spent 34 dollars you know what I mean, Hotels and Meals, so I wouldent say it was so good…. The worst truble is this Bakers think I am going cracy, coming down selling Speices, this morning in Pittsburgh a Baker we called on there, said when he seing me, say what is this World coming to, now Oluf comes and wont to sell Speices, I felt so bad about it, so I said to Niels come on lett us go Home….”

July 9, 1932:

“Dear Elizabeth, I got Home last Night late, and I sendt in my Resignation. That job was no good, by selling that Stuf I would have spoiled my Name amongst the Bakers….”

They had not seen each other for three months.

“Yes I would have liked to see you now but I will later on, and then you and I will make up for all lost time, then I will be kissing you till you tell me, oh Oluf you are good will you do that? you better say yes, because I am almost sjure of it…tell me in your letters all the news, I like to hear it from you, oh all the Taxces and Bills I got to paid and have no Mony, but then I don't worrie, love to you and the Children from Oluf.”

He was having trouble now meeting the mortgage payments on the houses he had bought, and he hoped to solve the problem by selling one. It was August, nearly five months since they had last seen each other. The long stretch of joblessness had started him reflecting philosophically about friendship.

August 11, 1932:

“Dear Elizabeth, Thanks very much for your letter I received today, yes I wich I was down near you, and we would go out for a ride, I am sjure it would make you cool, here it is wery neice Weather, and cool at Night, oh how I sleep when I am here at my Home, you know it is so quiet, compared with when I use to be in the Citys all noise, and so worm, I don't hear from anybody but you, how funy People are, only when they thinks they can get something out of a Person then they are, or I mean they let on to they are Freinds, but they soon change, you remember some days I received up to twenty letters, and now, not any, only you stick to me, you are a good Girl….

“I begin to think I was going to sell a House this morning, but the Party diddent have any mony, now I have three Houses empty, nothing coming in, and Taxes to be paid, well it will come out OK, I hope so, I always tell People not to worrie, so I won't eather, now good Night with love to you and the Children from Oluf.”

Well it will all come out OK, I hope so.

With the country reaching the modern equivalent of the Dark Ages, “Well it will all come out OK, I hope so” was a declaration of boundless optimism. It was a season of bread lines, soup kitchens,
hobo jungles, bandits riding the highways. Suicide was epidemic among men who felt their manhood lost because they could no longer support their families. Unemployment stood at 25 percent of the work force. There were 85,000 businesses bankrupt, 5,000 bank failures, 275,000 families evicted from their homes.

President Hoover's campaign slogan—“Prosperity is just around the corner”—had become a sardonic national joke. Even among people like Oluf who wanted to believe it, enthusiasm was muted down to, “Well it will all come out OK, I hope so.”

October 6, 1932. It was now seven months since they had seen each other:

“Dear Elizabeth, Thanks very much for your letter I received yesterday, I see you were feeling a little blue that evening, yes I wich I could have been with you, I am sjure you would have feelt alright. Yes I will be down there for your Birthday unless something happening, there was a man here today he wonted to hire me, to call on Bakers in Pittsburgh, but it was all on Commission and no salary, so I said no….

“I got a wery neice letter from the People today where Niels rents his House from, they asked me to paid Nielses rent from August so on til next Spring, but I am not even going to answer that letter, they said in the letter that you Mr. Oluf is the cause of Niels being in this World, and it was up to me to take care of him and his Familie, say I wonder who is to blame for I being here in this World, who ever it is, never helpt me, and who is to blame for you Elizabeth being here,—say that is what I call Balony, but that it what the Vorld is fuld of.”