Immediately enthralled, I let loose with “Holy wow, doesn’t that hurt at all?”
Grinning and even winking with that false eye, he shook his head.
“Herman, that’s out the far end!” The squint of his good eye questioned me. “That’s soldier talk, it means something is really something! Can you do it again?”
He obliged, this time with the recognizable rhythm of Hap-py birthday to you. I couldn’t get over the stunt; the carnival sideshow that set up camp in Gros Ventre at rodeo time didn’t have tricks nearly as good as playing shave and a haircut, four bits and the birthday song and who knows what else on an eyesocket. Still overcome with enthusiasm, I pointed to its eyeball or whatever its substitute ought to be called. “What’s it made of?”
“Glass,” he said with a half wink this time, donning the eyeglasses again. “Like a greenhouse of the head, hah? Only it grows this, from the ship company.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together, which with a penniless pang I recognized meant money. “Dutch is name buried at sea,” he dropped his voice as if at a funeral. “Herman stays on land, no more Witches of November.”
? ? ?
THAT WAS HERMAN in the ways most meaningful that first adventurous day, or so I thought. I can’t really say a glass eye sold me on spending a stifling summer in Wisconsin, but he did make things more interesting than expected.
Aunt Kate was another matter, a sizable one in every way. After the morning’s catastrophe with my money and our general lack of meeting of minds—if she even credited me with one—I didn’t know what I was going to be up against when she returned from canasta, but suspected it probably would not be good.
So when Herman went off for a nap—“Shut-eye is good for the digestion”—I figured I had better show some progress on the jigsaw puzzle. Spilling out the pieces that half covered the card table and sorting the ones of different colors with my finger, I had quite a stretch of the sky-blue top edge fitted into place, strategy recalled from having done the damn thing before, working my way down onto George Washington’s acre of forehead, when I heard the DeSoto groaning up the driveway and then Aunt Kate’s clickety high heels on the kitchen floor, instantly stilled when she reached the plush living room rug.
“Yoo hoo,” she called as she swung through on her way to hang up her purse in the sewing room, as if I wasn’t just across the room from her.
“Yeah, hi.” Figuring it couldn’t hurt, could help, I tried a slight initiative that might be construed as politeness. “How was the, uh, card party?”
“A disaster,” she moaned, flinging a hand to the vicinity of her heart. “It ruins the whole summer. Of all the bad luck, why, why, why did this have to happen on top of everything else?”
Continuing the drama, she dropped heavily into the recliner beneath the Manitowoc sampler, whipped around to face me where I was stationed at the card table, and cranked the chair back until she was nearly sprawling flat. In the same stricken voice, she addressed the ceiling as much as she did me: “It’s enough to make a person wonder what gets into people.”
Apprehensively listening, a piece of George Washington in my hand, I contributed, “What happened? Didn’t you win?”
Now she lifted her head enough to sight on me through the big V of her bosom. “It’s ever so much worse than that,” she went on in the same tragic voice. “Years and years now, the four of us have had our get-together to play canasta and treat ourselves to a little snack. Religiously,” she spiked on for emphasis, “every Monday. It starts the week off on a high note.”
To think, Kate Smith might have uttered those exact last couple of words. But this decidedly was not America’s favorite songstress, with me as the only audience trying to take in what kind of catastrophe a dumb card game could be.
“And now, can you believe it, Minnie Zettel is going off on a long visit,” Aunt Kate mourned. “Why anyone would go gadding off to Saint Louis in the summertime, I do not know. She will melt down until there is nothing left of her but toenails and shoe polish, and it will serve her right.”
Her chins quivered in sorrow or anger, I couldn’t tell which, but maybe both—they were double chins, after all—as she fumed, “The other girls and I are beside ourselves with her for leaving us in the lurch.”
Having been beside herself with me not that many hours ago, she was having quite a day of it, all right. Getting left in the lurch seemed pretty bad, whatever it meant. I made the sound you make in your throat to let someone know they have a sympathetic audience, but maybe I didn’t do it sufficiently. Still flat in the recliner, Aunt Kate blew exasperation to the ceiling, wobbled her head as if coming to, and then her sorrowful eyes found me again, regarding me narrowly through that divide of her chest.