“It is not the same! Oh, you’re impossible.”
The one constant in the repeated quarrels was Aunt Kate holding her ground in the kitchen, while Herman retreated elsewhere, waiting to scrap over toast scraps another breakfast time. Eventually, when it sounded safe, I would abandon the green leather couch and National Geographic—even the attractions of people pretty close to naked in “Bali and Points East” can hold a person only so long—and creep across the living room to peek into the kitchen. The remains of the daily toast war, which might still be sitting there at lunch or beyond, I could not figure out. Sometimes on what had to be Herman’s plate would be nothing but crusts, other times a pale blob of toast from the middle of a slice. In any case, I would face the inevitable and call out “Good morning” and she’d look around at me as if I’d sprung up out of the floor and ask, “Sleep well, honeykins?” and I’d lie and reply, “Like a charm,” and that was pretty much the level of conversation between us.
I have to hand it to Aunt Kate, she was a marvel in her own way. To say she was set in her habits only scratches the surface. Regular as the ticks and tocks of the kitchen clock, she maintained her late start on the day, parked that way at the breakfast table, dawdling over the newspaper sensations and coffee refills, yawning and humming stray snatches of tunes, until at nine sharp she arose and clicked the radio on and one soap opera after another poured out, the perils of Ma Perkins and Stella Dallas and the others whom she worried along with at every devious plot turn.
Needless to say, monotony was not my best mode. Herman’s, either, fortunately. During the soap opera marathon, he hid out in the greenhouse, where I sooner or later would join him so as not to have radio performers’ woes piled atop my own.
“What do you know for sure, podner?” he would greet me, as no doubt one cowboy in a Karl May western would drawl to another.
Actually not a bad question, because the one thing I was sure of was what a mystifying place Manitowoc was, from toast fights to smoky portrait sitters inhabiting greenhouse windows to Manitou walking around dead to the strange nature of the neighborhood. I mean, I seemed to be the only kid anywhere. As used as I was to being in grown-up company at the Double W, now I apparently was sentenced to it like solitary confinement, with the street deadly quiet, no cries of Annie-I-over or hide-and-seek or boys playing catch or girls jumping rope, nobody much making an appearance except a gray-haired man or woman here and there shuffling out to pick up the morning paper or position a lawn sprinkler. It made a person wonder, did every youngster in Wisconsin get shipped off to some dumb camp to hunt frogs?
In any case, the sleepy neighborhood was getting to me, so I finally had to put the question to Herman as he fiddled with a cabbage plant. “Aren’t there any other kids around here at all?”
“Like you?” I was pretty sure I heard a note of amusement in that, but he soon enough answered me seriously. “Hah uh, kids there are not. The Schroeders on the corner got boys, but they’re older than you and don’t do nothing but chase girls.” Taking the stogie out of his mouth, so as not to spew ashes on the cabbage leaves, he shook his head. “Except them, this is all old folks.”
I still had a hard time believing it. “In this whole part of town? How come?”
“Shipyard housing, all this. From when Manitowoc builds submarines in the war. The last one,” he said drily, I supposed to mark it off from the one going on in Korea. “People did not go away, after. Now we are long in the tooth,” he mused. He gave me a wink with his artificial eye. “Or ghosts.”
That was that, one more time. I pulled out a fruit box and settled in while he went on currying the cabbages.
Under the circumstances, with no other choice except Aunt Kate, hanging around with Herman in the greenhouse suited me well enough. Whenever he wasn’t pumping me about ranch life or telling me some tale out of Karl May’s squarehead version of the West, I was free to sit back and single out some family or man and woman in the photographic plates overhead, catching them on the back of my hand thanks to a sunbeam, and daydream about who they might have been, what their story was, the digest version of their lives. It made the time pass until lunch, when I’d snap out of my trance at Herman’s announcement, “The Kate will eat it all if we don’t get ourselfs in there.”
After lunch, though, inevitably, the nerve-racking sound in the living room changed from soap opera traumas to the slip-slap of the canasta deck being shuffled and the ever so musical trill, “Yoo hoo, bashful,” and all afternoon I’d again be a prisoner of a card game with more rules than a stack of Bibles.