A couple of women in the congregation said we ought to send a truck south to help with hurricane relief. The Foertschs were willing to donate a truck and Lynn Winkler and Winkler Foods were willing to help get food and water…
Our plans grew as pledges came in. (Just over $35,000 in gifts and pledges. Over $12,000 was from St. Peter and Trinity.) We quickly began looking for another truck and drivers. It turned out to be no more difficult to find these than it was to raise the money. Larry and MaryAnn Wetzel were ready with their truck. Phil Liebering would be their second driver…
Foertsch’s truck had the heavier but shorter trailer, which was loaded with water. Larry’s truck had the pallets of food and baby supplies. We bought $500 worth of towels and washcloths and 100 foam sleeping pads at the last minute, because of the great response of pledges. Both were on Thibodaux’s wish list. They were happy to see us. The unloading went quickly and they asked if they could use Wetzel’s semi-trailer to move the clothes to another warehouse, which meant they could move it with a forklift instead of by hand…
Reading Jahn’s e-mail, I wished, as I would ordinarily never wish, that I belonged to a church in southern Indiana, so that I could have ridden in one of those trucks. It would have been awkward, of course, to sit in a church every Sunday and sing hymns to a God I didn’t believe in. And yet: wasn’t this exactly what my parents had done on every Sunday of their adult lives? I wondered how I’d got from their world into the apartment of a person I didn’t even recognize as myself. Throughout the autumn, whenever my eyes fell on the half-empty leather sheath, the absence of the scissors stabbed me afresh. I simply couldn’t believe they’d disappeared. Months after my return, I was still reransacking drawers and closet shelves I’d searched three times already.
THE OTHER HOUSE of my childhood was a sprawling, glass-fronted, six-bedroom rich person’s retreat on a vast white-sand beach in the Florida Panhandle. In addition to its private Gulf frontage, the house came with free local golf and deep-sea fishing privileges and a refrigerated beer keg that guests were encouraged to make unlimited use of; there was a phone number to call if the keg ever ran dry. We were able to vacation in this house, living like rich people, for six consecutive Augusts, because the railroad my father worked for sometimes bought rail-maintenance equipment from the house’s owner. Without informing the owner, my parents also took the liberty of asking along our good friends Kirby and Ellie, their son David, and, one year, their nephew Paul. That there was something not quite right about these arrangements was evident in my parents’ annual reminders to Kirby and Ellie that it was extremely important that they not arrive at the house early, lest they run into the owner or the owner’s agent.
In 1974, after we’d vacationed in the house for five straight years, my father decided that we had to stop accepting the owner’s hospitality. He was giving more and more of his business to one of the owner’s competitors, an Austrian manufacturer whose equipment my father considered superior to anything being made in the United States. In the late sixties, he’d helped the Austrians break into the American market, and their gratitude to him had been immediate and total. In the fall of 1970, at the company’s invitation, he and my mother had taken their first-ever trip to Europe, visiting Austria and the Alps for a week and Sweden and England for another week. I never found out whether the company paid for absolutely everything, including airfare, or whether it paid only for their meals and their nights in top-drawer hotels like the Imperial in Vienna and the Ritz in Paris, and for the Lincoln Continental and its driver, Johann, who chauffeured my parents around three countries and helped them with their shopping, none of which they could have afforded on their own. Their companions for the trip were the company’s head of American operations and his wife, Ilse, who, beginning every day at noon, taught them how to eat and drink like Europeans. My mother was in heaven. She kept a diary of restaurants and hotels and scenic attractions—
Lunch at Hotel Geiger “Berchtesgarden”—wonderful food & spectacular atmosphere — Schnapps, sausage (like raw bacon) & brown bread atop mountain—
and if she was aware of certain historical facts behind the scenery, such as Hitler’s frequent visits to Berchtesgaden for recreational getaways, she didn’t mention it.
My father had had serious qualms about accepting such lavish hospitality from the Austrians, but my mother had worn him down to the point where he agreed to ask his boss, Mr. German, whether he should decline the invitation. (Mr. German had answered, essentially, “Are you kidding me?”) In 1974, when my father voiced misgivings about returning to Florida, my mother again wore him down. She pointed out that Kirby and Ellie were expecting our invitation, and she kept repeating the phrase “Just this one last year,” until finally, reluctantly, my father signed off on the usual plan.
Kirby and Ellie were good bridge players, and it would have been a dull trip for my parents with only me along. I was a silent, withdrawn presence in the back seat for the two-day drive through Cape Girardeau, Memphis, Hattiesburg, and Gulfport. As we were driving up the road toward the beach house, on an overcast afternoon made darker by an ominous bank of new high-rise condominiums encroaching from the east, I was struck by how unexcited I was to be arriving this year. I had just turned fifteen and was more interested in my books and my records than in anything on the beach.
We were within sight of the house’s driveway when my mother cried, “Oh no! No!” My father cried “Damn!” and swerved off the road, pulling to a stop behind a low dune with sea oats on it. He and my mother — I’d never seen anything like it — crouched down in the front seat and peered over the dashboard.
“Damn!” my father said again, angrily.
And then my mother said it, too: “Damn!”
It was the first time and the last time I ever heard her swear. Farther up the road, in the driveway, I could see Kirby standing beside the open door of his and Ellie’s sedan. He was chatting affably with a man who, I understood without asking, was the owner of the house.
“Damn!” my father said.
“Damn!” my mother said.
“Damn! Damn!”
They’d been caught.
EXACTLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS later, the realtor Mike and my brother Tom agreed on an asking price of $382,000 for the house. Over the Labor Day weekend, when we all gathered in St. Louis to hold a memorial service for my mother, Mike dropped in only briefly. She appeared to have forgotten the ardor of our initial meeting — she barely spoke to me now — and she was subdued and deferential with my brothers. She’d finally held an open house a few days earlier, and of the two prospective buyers who’d shown some interest, neither had made an offer.
In the days after the memorial service, as my brothers and I went from room to room and handled things, I came to feel that the house had been my mother’s novel, the concrete story she told about herself. She’d started with the cheap, homely department-store boilerplate she’d bought in 1944. She’d added and replaced various passages as funds permitted, reupholstering sofas and armchairs, accumulating artwork ever less awful than the prints she’d picked up as a twenty-three-year-old, abandoning her original arbitrary color schemes as she discovered and refined the true interior colors that she carried within her like a destiny. She pondered the arrangement of paintings on a wall like a writer pondering commas. She sat in the rooms year after year and asked herself what might suit her even better. What she wanted was for you to come inside and feel embraced and delighted by what she’d made; she was showing you herself, by way of hospitality; she wanted you to want to stay.