Sweet and Sour Pie: A Wisconsin Boyhood Page 5

The viggle years had come and gone. You can’t fool all of the fish all of the time, and we were philosophers enough to understand

  that. But damn, it was tough to rejoin the ranks of ordinary unlucky fishermen.

  The passing years brought their anodyne. As the fifties wore on, the shipyard stayed busy and Dad and I spent more time shooting

  and hunting. The last viggler hung in a place of honor from a joist in our basement workshop. The memories it called up were indelible

  and did not need enlargement.

  38

  The Viggle Years

  And then, one day in 1959, Dad and I stopped at Sporting Goods

  Supply on Quay Street to pick up some shotgun powder, and Lloyd

  Bottoni pushed a couple of little cardboard boxes across the counter for us to look at. Inside were balsa minnow lures, each with a piece of plastic under its chin. Vigglers.

  “These are the latest thing, Dave,” Lloyd said. “Some guy in

  Finland makes them by hand and catches all kinds of fish with them.

  They’re called Rapalas.”

  “But we had those . . . ,” I blurted. Dad caught my eye and shook his head. I shut up. Dad bought two of them and picked up the

  powder.

  Out in the car, we took the Rapalas out of their boxes. They were vigglers all right, painted black on top and gold on the bottom.

  “Well, they aren’t extinct anymore,” Dad said.

  “What’s wrong with telling people we had them in 1953?” I asked.

  “We would just be bragging,” Dad said, “and pride goeth before

  destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. We had a run of good luck—let’s leave it at that.”

  He lit his pipe. “This is one secret that’s worth keeping,” Dad

  said. “Save it for your memoir.”

  And so I did.

  39

  l

  The Christmas

  When a Lot Happened

  O ur Christmas of ’52 began late in the evening on Monday, December twenty-second, lasted until the twenty-ninth, and was

  beyond a doubt the most action-packed week of my life up to that point. Events tumbled after each other so rapidly that when remembering them in later years, Mom, Dad, and I had to divide them into episodes.

  “Do you remember the car ferry and the Saint Bernard?” one

  of us would ask, and we’d roll our eyes. “How about the Zoks and the hot pierogi? And the green brandy?” We’d begin a recital of our holiday stories, adding details and correcting errors as we went along. After a dozen tellings, the stories became polished chapters of family folklore, with titles, quotes, and punch lines.

  40

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  The Crossing

  I don’t remember much about the Christmases of ’50 and ’51, except that they began and ended with two-day, five-hundred-mile drives from Manitowoc to Lorain and back again, through blizzards and

  snowdrifts that our bullet-nose Studebaker battled defiantly, its rear wheels spinning and flathead six whining.

  There were no Midwestern turnpikes or interstate highways in

  the early ’50s. When we drove from Wisconsin to Ohio for Christ-

  mas, we spent about half of each day scudding across windswept

  cornfields on two-lane blacktop roads, and the other half crawling in second gear through every town, city, and village along the way.

  That’s where the highways went; there were no bypasses.

  We’d leave Manitowoc before sunrise and drive through the

  middle of Sheboygan, Port Washington, Milwaukee, Racine, Keno-

  sha, Waukegan, Evanston, and Chicago, arriving at Dyer, Indiana, at dark. There were three reasons for stopping at Dyer: it was about as far as Dad could drive in a day without slipping into a coma, it had a motel that met Mom’s standards, and there was an Italian restaurant called the Olive Branch across the street from the motel, a friendly, garlicky place where we could unwind and fill up on spaghetti.

  The next morning we’d make another early start, eat breakfast at a diner, and then creep across northern Indiana and Ohio, stopping for every traffic light in places like Ligonier, Butler, Bryan, Napo-leon, Fremont, and Sandusky.

  These treks aged Mom and Dad prematurely and took about

  a hundred bucks a year off the trade-in value of the Studie, which wasn’t worth a lot to begin with. In 1952, confronted with another Christmas drive, they said no, no, never again. There had to be a better way.

  So Dad decided to take the only available shortcut, the car ferry across Lake Michigan, from Manitowoc to Ludington. He had

  41

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  ridden the ferry a couple of times on business trips. We would

  board about eleven at night, he said, with the Studie safely stowed away below decks, and sleep our way across the lake in a comfortable stateroom. We’d arrive refreshed on the Michigan side early in the morning, pile into the car, and drive southeast across Michigan, saving a half day of driving and getting to Lorain about suppertime.

  It was twenty above the night we left, with a damp, gusty north-

  east wind off the lake. When we got to the ferry dock we could hear waves thumping into the breakwall around Manitowoc’s harbor. We

  boarded the ferry while railroad cars were being shunted aboard, leaving the Studie on the dock, to be loaded last. The staterooms were on the main deck surrounding a central passenger lounge; our room was about nine feet wide and had narrow upper and lower

  berths. The single porthole was iced over on the outside and didn’t offer much of a view.

  Once in the stateroom there was nothing to do but go to bed, so

  Dad boosted me into the upper berth and turned off the flickering, forty-watt overhead light so he and Mom could undress in privacy.

  With a certain amount of giggling and muttering, they squeezed

  themselves into the lower.

  In the meantime I had discovered a curious feature at the head

  of my berth: a wickerwork ventilation panel through the bulkhead between the lounge and the stateroom. It was caned like a chair seat, with holes that let me see and hear the passengers who hadn’t paid for a stateroom and were going to spend the night sleeping on sofas in the lounge. There were only three lounge passengers that night: a scrawny, harassed-looking man, his fat and dumpy wife, and their Saint Bernard dog.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the man and wife; what caught my

  eye was the Saint Bernard. I had never seen one in the flesh, and he exceeded my expectations, particularly in the amount of saliva he 42

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  produced. He was a copious drooler, and when the engine started

  hammering and the ferry pulled out of its slip, the noise and vibration worried him and he drooled even more.

  In a minute or two we cleared the breakwater and began to punch

  into big seas that had been rolling all the way from Michigan. The ferry would rise, hesitate, and then plunge down into the trough.

  There it would wallow for a few seconds and begin another slow rise.

  At the top of the next swell the bow would meet the oncoming crest and ram it with a boom that made the ferry shake.

  None of us liked this, the Saint Bernard least of all. He shook his head back and forth, flinging ropes of saliva from his glistening jowls. A large stringy dollop landed on the fat lady’s black wool over-coat. Her husband pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at it, but he couldn’t keep up with the Saint Bernard, who seemed to be melting.

  “Get that damn dog away from me!” the fat lady shouted. “It

  makes me sick to look at him!”

  “All right, all right, all right,” said the husband. He pulled the dog to the far end of the lounge and tied its leash to the metal frame of a big leather-covered sofa.

  By this time we were a co
uple of miles out into the lake. The

  swells were farther apart now, and the ferry started to roll as well as pitch. The rolling panicked the Saint Bernard, and he headed back to his master, pulling the sofa behind him, his claws scrabbling on the linoleum.

  But the fat lady had more than dog spit to worry about. The

  rolling and pitching were getting to her. Her face was fish-belly white and her eyes were open wide. She gave her husband a bruising poke in the ribs. “Herman! I’m going to throw up. Get something!”

  she yelled.

  Herman jumped to his feet and looked around for a container.

  43

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  He spotted a metal wastebasket at the forward end of the lounge and started for it, tottering on the pitching deck. And then the lights in the lounge went out. They were turned off at midnight to let the lounge passengers sleep.

  “For God’s sake, Herman, hurry up!” squalled the fat lady.

  Herman was a quick thinker; I heard the click of a Zippo and he

  reappeared, sliding back down the deck toward his wife, the wastebasket in one hand and his flaming cigarette lighter in the other. The fat lady grabbed the basket, stuck her head into it, and began to retch cavernously. She had apparently eaten a big supper—it smelled like sauerkraut and liverwurst, washed down with a couple of beers—

  and now it was all coming back.

  In the flickering yellow light of the Zippo, I could see Herman’s face. He was grinning. The rolling didn’t bother him, and for once, I guessed, he had the upper hand. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. Suddenly there was a long whistling buzz. The fat lady was farting helplessly inside a girdle stretched tight as a drum-head by her mighty buttocks.

  “Steady, Elsie,” Herman said. “One end at a time.” He was still

  grinning.

  The Zippo went out and it was dark again. The Saint Bernard

  whined and Elsie moaned. Eventually I fell asleep.

  When we left our stateroom the next morning, Elsie, Herman,

  and the dog had gone.

  All that remained of them was the wastebasket, an odor of sauer-

  kraut, and a yellow puddle with cigarette butts in it.

  A few minutes later we climbed into the Studie and headed for

  Lorain. Mom looked over at Dad. “Never again,” she said. “Do you hear me? Never again.”

  “Right,” Dad said, and tamped his pipe, which had begun to go

  out.

  44

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  Waiting for Puppa

  “Puppa” was the nickname I gave my great-grandfather Albert when I was about four years old. Because I was the only great-grandchild on my mother’s side of the family at the time, anything I said was clever, and the name stuck.

  Puppa was a short, sturdy man with a full head of silver hair

  and a flowing salt-and-pepper mustache. He had been a building

  contractor in Detroit for most of his life, and kept on working until the outbreak of World War II, when he was about seventy. Then he cashed in his chips, left Detroit, and bought a tin-roofed house surrounded by orange trees near Lake George in central Florida.

  Puppa and Great-grandma liked Florida but couldn’t bear the

  idea of staying there for Christmas. During the war, when gasoline and tires were rationed, they took the train to Lorain each year to spend the holidays with their daughter Myra and their son-in-law Henry Lester, who were my maternal grandparents. Everyone gathered at Grandpa and Grandma’s, and for many years we had four-

  generation Christmases.

  After Great-grandma died, Puppa quit taking the train and

  started driving to Lorain for Christmas. With gasoline available again and selling for twenty-seven cents a gallon, he figured it was cheaper to take his ’39 DeSoto than to squander money on a Pullman room-ette. Also, he considered the car to be more direct.

  “Damn railroad jumps all over the map, this way and that, gotta

  change trains three times and I can’t get any closer than Cleveland,”

  he said. “In the car I can go direct, pull out of my driveway, and right up yours.” As far as Puppa was concerned, the intervening

  three days and nine hundred miles were a mere bagatelle.

  Dad often wondered how Puppa navigated the southern back-

  woods without ever seeming to get lost. He found out one Christmas 45

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  when he took a look at a highway map Puppa had left on the passenger seat of the DeSoto. Drawn on the map with a thick carpenter’s pencil was a perfectly straight line from Lake George to Lorain.

  Puppa simply drove the roads that were closest to the line, a route that took him due north through Georgia and the moonshine country of South and North Carolina, over the Great Smokies, across the tag-ends of Tennessee, West Virginia, and Kentucky, and finally into Ohio. When Puppa said direct, he meant direct.

  Grandma worried about Puppa’s long drives. Year after year she

  tried to talk him into taking the train; year after year he refused. Her anxiety peaked around the twentieth of December each year, when

  Puppa would call long distance from Florida. He would place the

  call through the “central” operator on his local line, and then hang up and wait for central to call him back. Central would call the nearest long-distance operator, who passed the connection northward

  through a succession of additional operators, a process that could take as much as an hour. Once the line was open from Florida to

  Lorain, Puppa would get right down to business.

  “Hi, Chickee.” Chickee was his nickname for Grandma. “I’m

  leaving in the morning. Should get there on the twenty-third.”

  “Dad,” Grandma would beg, “why don’t you take the train this

  year? There’s snow in the mountains and we really don’t mind going into Cleveland to meet you.”

  “Nope, nope, too late now—I’ll never get a ticket, and besides,

  the train jumps all over the map,” Puppa would say. “Gotta hang up now, we’ve been talking a minute already.” Puppa made long-distance calls with his pocket watch in hand. “See you on Tuesday.

  Good-bye.” Click.

  Besides Puppa’s obsession with going direct, Grandma had an-

  other reason for worry: as a driver, Puppa was largely self-taught. He had bought his first car in 1922, when he was fifty years old. The 46

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  salesman gave him a half-hour driving lesson, and from then on he was on his own.

  Puppa had worked with machines all his life, so he had no trouble learning to operate a car. And he agreed with most of the traffic laws.

  He obeyed the speed limits, and at a four-way stop or a traffic light he would wait patiently, knowing that in a minute or two it would be his turn to go. He also understood that at certain intersections he would have to yield the right-of-way, and he tolerated that too, within reason.

  When a side road he was on intersected a busier road, he would

  stop and look both ways like any careful driver. A car from the right would go by, then one from the left, and then another from the

  right, and Puppa would wait. But after about ten closely spaced cars had passed without letting him go, Puppa would lose his patience, muttering and tapping his clutch foot on the floorboards. He was willing to yield, but not forever.

  “It’s not fair!” Puppa would yell. “Those fellas just drive past like they don’t even see me here. They won’t give me a turn. Oh, the hell with it!” And he would pull out on the highway. So far, no one had hit him.

  Dad had been right about one thing—the car ferry avoided the

  Chicago bottleneck and cut about twelve hours off our total elapsed time from Manitowoc to Lorain. The roads in Michigan and northern Ohio were clear, and
the Studie cruised along at a steady fifty-five between towns, its snow tires humming. We arrived at Grandpa’s in the early evening of the twenty-third. After we unpacked the car, Grandma served up bowls of chicken soup with dumplings the size

  of tennis balls. She took occasional sips of her soup, but spent most of her time pacing back and forth, watching the street through the dining room windows. She was waiting for Puppa, who was a couple of hours overdue.

  47

  The Christmas When a Lot Happened

  “I have begged and I have pleaded, do not drive all the way from Florida at your age,” she said, “but will he listen? No, he will not. A fine Christmas we’ll have if he’s dead in a ditch someplace. And now look!” she shouted. “It’s starting to snow!”

  Big flakes the size of silver dollars were falling, thick and wet, fluttering down in the glow of the streetlights. But I had faith in Puppa, so I dug into a plate of frosted cutout cookies Grandma had put on the table. I preferred the Santas and snowmen, because they were the largest, and I was on my fourth snowman when a pair of

  yellowish headlights pulled up the driveway.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, is it him?” Grandma cried. “Henry,

  go and look. It’s probably the police come to tell us he’s dead!”

  “It’s him,” Grandpa said. “Cops never drive DeSotos—they

  overheat.”

  Puppa came in through the kitchen door, stamping his feet and

  brushing his sleeves to shed the snow. His mustache and felt hat were frosted with it. “Hello, hello, hello,” he said. “Merry Christmas. Do I smell chicken soup?” He lifted the lid of the kettle on the stove. “Hey, dumplings!” he said. “I’ll have some in a minute, but I’ve got to run down to the drugstore before they close. I need some pipe tobacco. I ran out down around Coshocton.” He gave me a

  meaningful look. “You coming, Davy?”

  I put on my jacket, slipped out the door, and hopped into the

  DeSoto before Mom or Grandma could object. Puppa backed down

  to the sidewalk and started looking back and forth at the traffic on East Erie Avenue. In those days East Erie was also U.S. Highway 2, the principal route from New York to Chicago. Traffic was always heavy on U.S. 2.

  “You look right and I’ll look left,” Puppa said. “Anybody coming?”