Secrets, part ten

Leta was having her weekly lunch with her sister-in-law and best friend Florence, and after several meetings and conversations, Florence had begun to question her inconsistent behavior. One moment Leta was as happy as a schoolgirl in spring the next she was as withdrawn and noncommunicative as a young woman in adolescence. Florence had already noted that Leta’s behavior was similar to a young woman’s in love, which seemed to be uncharacteristic considering Leta had been expressing unhappiness in her marriage with Ora.

In only a few seconds, Leta’s countenance went from excitement to gloomy.

 “What is it?” Florence questioned.

“What?”

“You became very sad all of a sudden.”

“Really? I don’t know why.”

Then their server arrived, allowing Leta to change the subject. Florence accepted Leta’s decision but continued to search in Leta’s words and expressions for hidden information. When they finished their meal and parted, Florence made one more attempt to coax Leta into revelation of the basis of the emotional inconsistency, but Leta ignored it and simply sent a loving greeting to her brother and nieces.

From that moment, Leta realized that she must be more guarded with her emotions. While she had not even started talking with her much missed Albert until after she had formally separated with Ralph, she was more than socially involved with Leech and simultaneously very much married to Ora.

Although she had scheduled a lunch date with Leech for the following day, Leta chose to remain at home instead. This was not a definitive decision for her to make. In fact, she felt so vexed by Florence’s observations that she spent the afternoon, evening and much of a restless night anxiously reviewing her situation and alternating between continuing her relationship with Leech and abandoning her attachment altogether. The only time she felt happy in her life occurred when she was with Leech, but when she wasn’t with him, she struggled with a combination of guilt and eagerness to see him again.

Perhaps sensing her distress, Ora awoke early in the morning with her. While she was dressing, he made the coffee and had a steaming cup waiting for her. She cooked breakfast, of course, but he assisted in the kitchen and chatted with a liveliness that she had not experienced in a long time. When the children made their way to the breakfast table, he greeted them with a big smile, complimented her cooking to them and then handed each of them a dollar. Vivian accepted with a quiet thank you, but Dale, who had been eyeing a set of adventure novels was ecstatic and begged his mother if he could stop at Woolworth’s on his way home from school to purchase several.

“You may spend fifty cents,” Leta stated. “The rest I want you to save. Vivian, you, too.”

Dale started to protest, but Ora interjected firmly, “You heard your mother.”

Rather than obtain the desired effect of humble obedience, Ora’s remark caused Dale’s face to redden with fury. Leta cleared her throat quickly. She had recently had long conversations with both of her children, developing with them several calm responses to any of their stepfather’s vicious remarks or demands.

“Yes, Ma,” Dale said grudgingly.

A short time later, Leta was alone. She set herself to washing the breakfast dishes and then her housework directly. She needed to keep busy and follow a strict schedule in order to distract her from the lure to meet Mr. Hoose for lunch as planned. The time passed slowly, and in spite of her best efforts, she looked at the clock every ten or fifteen minutes. After she washed the coffee percolator, she made another pot and drank continually all morning. This only intensified her tremulous movements.

At twelve twenty-five, five minutes before she had planned to meet Leech for lunch, she turned away from the clock completely. She made herself a chicken sandwich for lunch, poured herself the last cup of coffee and tried to read the newspaper. The sounds in the quiet room were thunderous, from the clock’s steady ticking and the rattle of the breeze on the kitchen window to her own chewing. Each sip of coffee reverberated throughout the kitchen.

To be continued.

Secrets, part nine

Almost as thought it was a natural flow of their budding friendship, Leta and Mr. Leech Hoose began to meet for lunch on Wednesdays. They initially met at a speakeasy where Leta had been fleeing her husband Ora, began to visit with each other there regularly, and finally developed a casual friendship. The Wednesday lunch dates were a sign that the friendship was developing into even more intimate territory.

While Leech preferred Tuesdays, Leta had her longstanding weekly lunch date with her sister-in-law Florence and on occasion her sisters Nellie and Louise. If she wanted to alter that date, she would have to give Florence a complete explanation, and in this instance, that was something she could not do. Florence’s strict religiosity would not understand or condone Leta’s betrayal of her marriage vows.

Leta justified it for herself by noting that Ora was also failing their marriage. He was not a good husband, provider or even stepparent. With Leech, she was happy and relaxed. She began to take better care of herself and her appearance, as well as dress more fashionably. When she thought about him, she her countenance became more outgoing.

“What’s happening, Leta?” Florence asked during one of their weekly lunches.

“What do you mean?” Leta asked in return.

“I can’t figure out what, but you’ve been going through something lately,” Florence explained. “One day you’re as giggly as one of my girls, and then next you’re as irritable as ever I’ve seen you. At first, I thought you might be drinking in the morning—“

“What?” Leta interrupted, dropping her fork.

“—But then,” Florence continued, “I remembered you weren’t like that.”

“Damn right I’m not!”

“Leta!”

“Florence, you just accused me of being a drunk,” Leta charged.

“No,” Florence corrected, “I said I was concerned about your behavior.

“You said you thought I was drinking in the morning,” Leta returned.

“I said I didn’t think that was the reason, but even so, Leta, you are behaving quite oddly.”

“It’s a far cry from being irritable and angry all the time, as I have been for months, isn’t it?”

“Yes, of course,” Florence agreed. “It’s just a bit extreme, these mood swings. If I didn’t know better, I would say you were in love.”

Leta’s body tensed, and she quickly took a drink of water before she revealed to her sister-in-law too much. She was falling in love, but with a man who wasn’t her husband. Until that moment, she had not considered it.

“Really?” she choked out.

“Something very interesting must be going on with you and Ora,” Florence said. “I thought you were unhappy with him.”

“He just started a job,” Leta countered. “There is a man who owns a few duplexes in West Toledo that hired him and a couple of other fellows to paint all of his buildings.”

“That’s wonderful!” Florence exclaimed. “I must confess, Aaron and I have been worried. It’s been a few weeks since he’s had a job.”

“Me, too. But he gets his first paycheck on Friday, and then I can pay off some bills,” Leta agreed.

“How long do you expect him to be working?”

“Right now, it looks like three months,” Leta answered.

“This will help you financially quite a bit,” Florence noted.

“Yes,” Leta answered, but upon realizing that for the next several weeks life at home would be more pleasant, her countenance fell.

To be continued.

Secrets, part eight

Mr. Hoose was the most charming and determined fellow Leta had met during her visits to the speakeasy where she went to get away from her unhappy life with her husband Ora. While they had seen each other previously at the establishment, it wasn’t until a night after a terrible encounter at home with her husband that Mr. Hoose actually approached her.

His manner initially was as aggressive as any other man who had introduced himself to her over the past couple of months. He looked at her as if she was a desperate, loose woman seeking temporary and improper male companionship. She gently rebuffed him by stating quite clearly that she was a married woman with children and that her husband worked a second shift at a local factory and would be meeting her after he finished work for the night. Where it deterred most of her would-be suitors, Mr. Hoose let her comment roll off him, and he asked if he might sit down with her anyway.

She was tired and upset with the situation at home and agreed.

“May I buy you a drink?” he asked.

Leta sighed heavily. She had already had two and four was her maximum when she was with trusted company. Three drinks could disrupt her capability to make good decisions. However, she felt no better from the previous two and agreed.

“You seem a little distressed, Mrs. Freeman,” he said.

“A quarrel,” she said, avoiding explanation, but Mr. Hoose would not let it stay. He liked the sound of her voice, even when it was filled with annoyance and anger.

“With Mr. Freeman?”

“Yes,” she said, sipping her gin and tonic gingerly and weighing what and how much she could tell this stranger with what could be inappropriate attentions.

“My wife and I used to quarrel frequently,” he offered sympathetically.

“Are you divorced?” Leta asked suspiciously.

“She died.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“I am frustrated with my husband,” she continued, Mr. Hoose’s understanding eyes coaxing the story out of her.

Over the next month, their conversations went from random to habitual. Leta arranged to leave the house on Thursday and Saturday evenings for three hours. This was easy enough. Ora liked to visit their neighborhood blind pig on Thursdays (as well as any other evening he had the chance) and played cards on Saturdays. As for her children, they spent Saturday nights with their father, who recently became employed once again and suddenly wanted them back in his life on a more consistent basis, and on Thursday, she sent them to a weekly church youth program. Having just been confirmed, Vivian went somewhat reluctantly, but her sense of responsibility for Dale helped Leta to get them both out of the house. Besides, Vivian was elected secretary of the Luther League, the youth spiritual and activities group of their church and felt it part of her role as a youth leader in the church. Although they arrived home long before their mother or stepfather, they were perfectly capable of getting to bed on their own.

The other days of the week were hardly bearable. Ora continued his vicious, slovenly and disrespectful habits. Having reconnected with his father, Dale began to rebel against Ora’s authoritarian and wildly inconsistent attitude. Vivian was losing her sense of independence and becoming clingy. There were times when Leta would excuse herself from them and lock herself in the bedroom for a few moments of peace.

Leech provided the sympathetic ear she needed at the time, and she had many instances and reasons for being unhappy. By the middle of their second month of conversations, he began to gently urge her to make a change. He was never specific, but he told her that being unhappy prevented a person from living a fulfilling and productive life. He knew this from experience.

To be continued.

Secrets, part seven

When he first introduced himself, she nearly laughed out loud. What kind of a name is Leech? Like Ora, he wasn’t very tall, and he had crooked teeth and thinning hair with several uncontrollable wisps that floated in the air in spite of a healthy dose of Brylcream. His face and hands were so pale that they had a kind of yellow sheen to them, and she wondered if he wasn’t suffering from jaundice. What appealed to her, however, was what she called his cockeyed smile. When he smiled, his large, oval head seemed to shift more on one side than the other. One eye would open wider, the mouth would turn crooked and he would raise one eyebrow. He even tilted his head a little bit.

The first time he smiled in that way, he also tipped his hat to her, and she thought of her thirteen-year-old son Dale. He, too, had a slightly large oval head, which he cocked to the left when he smiled. And Leta was at a disadvantage. Dale’s needs were weighing heavily on her mind that evening. Her husband Ora was between house painting jobs, the weather was unpleasant which kept him from his usual wanderings, and Dale was having a particular difficult time with a larger classmate at school. That afternoon Ora had been after the boy from the time that he arrived home from school. Dale was in a poor mood and slammed the door, which awoke his stepfather, who had been napping on the couch. Waking Ora in such a way, Leta and both of her children had learned, always resulted in raised voices and some sort of punishment. In this case, Dale initially suffered through having to go back and forth through the door over two dozen times before appeasing Ora’s demand that he do it properly. However, Dale was not satisfied with the repetition or the result and slammed his bedroom door right after. This caused Ora to rise from the couch and charge to the bedroom.

While Leta could not be considered a lenient mother, she did allow her children to have interior locks on their bedroom doors. Having had their lives disrupted several times in their young lives, she wanted them to have some sense of safety. When they moved in with Ora after the marriage, she had locks installed on all three bedroom doors. Ora hated it, mostly because she hid the spare keys to the children’s bedrooms from him.

After the door slamming altercation, Dale had stormed into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. Ora twisted the handle several times and yelled for the boy to open it, but Dale refused to respond. Unsatisfied, Ora stomped into the kitchen where Leta was cooking their supper and demanded that she give him the key.

“I’ll take care of it,” Leta said calmly, as she stirred the simmering stew.

“This is my house, Leta,” Ora declared, “and I won’t have that kind of behavior in it.”

“I’ll take care if it,” Leta repeated.

“You spoil them kids,” her husband charged. “You let them get away with everything.”

“Ora,” she said, “I’m sure there’s an explanation. You know he’s having trouble with some other boy at school.” Then she changed the subject. “The rain’s stopped. Why don’t you take a little walk, about fifteen minutes, and when you come home I’ll have supper on the table?”

Ora grunted. He was too lazy to remain for long at a high energy level, and was beginning to calm down.

“Fine,” he said, and then added, “But he gets no supper tonight. Do you hear me?”

Finally she faced him. “Yes, I hear you.”

While she registered calm and certainty, she wanted to slap her husband across his contorted face. She simply wanted him away from her.

Four hours later, she was sitting at her usual table in the speakeasy and talking to Mr. Leech Hoose.

To be continued.

Secrets, part six

In a very short time, Leta began to develop new friendships. This was unexpected in her life. For slightly over a year, she had been married to Ora Freeman, a house painter, who had been graciously attentive to her and her children Vivian and Dale, after the shocking murder of her husband Albert. Ora’s kindness and attention won Leta’s aching and empty heart and satisfied her need to provide a stable and secure home for her children, and she married him.

However, Ora’s receptiveness, and his financial security, were fleeting. Shortly after she and the children moved into his house, he had reverted to a somewhat bachelor life-style, transforming Leta into a housekeeper and her children into little servants he demanded call him daddy. Money was almost always in short supply, and Ora had no understanding of how much it cost to raise a family, even though he promised her he would take care of them.

For her part, she anticipated that her warming heart would continue to grow in fondness and desire for him as married life proceeded. But his subtle transformations wore on her and left her feeling more lonely than she had after she lost Albert. Ora had not made love to her in weeks, and she was beginning to feel unappealing and forlorn. Her girlfriends and her sisters all started to notice. Her growing unhappiness began to affect her children, as well. Always a polite scholar and conscientious companion, 15-year-old Vivian began to become irritable and unpleasant, particularly to her 13-year-old brother Dale and their cousins. Dale was becoming disobedient, lazy and sloppy, like his step-father. Although only 34 years old, Leta felt like her life had turned into an elongated evening of sitting in an empty living room.

Then something unexpected happened. One evening after Ora had behaved abominably, Leta had left the house in a fury to gather herself at their local establishment. While sipping her drink, she had been approached by an attractive younger man, and suddenly, she realized that she was a woman with feelings and passion. This realization led her to her current behavior. Twice a week, since Ora was working steadily and arriving home late, she would bathe, dress and take the streetcar across the river to a elegant speakeasy.  

A vivacious person, Leta quickly made friends and became comfortable in the establishment. That could have been enough, except she was a woman with needs. The single, and even some married, men began to catch her eye, and vice versa. She couldn’t explain how it happened—perhaps with a smile across the room or an “is this seat taken?”—but during her ventures, she became a different person, a flirtatious, friendly, laughing, affectionate companion. No one at the speakeasy knew she was miserably married, occupied her days cleaning and attending to an unhappy household and spent her limited free time lamenting her life. They knew her as a woman with personality, wisdom and humor with an exquisite taste in hats.

The more comfortable she became the more she attracted men to her, and Leta revelled in the attentions. At least twice per evening, she would gently rebuke the advances of men who were infatuated with her and wanted to take another step. She never told them she was married, she claimed she was a widow, but she did use her children to keep her suitors at bay.

“I have children,” she would share, “and after the death of their father, they’ve been having a hard time. They’re just not ready. It’s been too hard.”

And then she met a man, who wouldn’t take her gentle rejection as a absolute.

To be continued.

Secrets, part five

If her husband Ora noticed, he never said. He never asked her where she had been or what she had been doing until late in the evening. Even though she didn’t smoke, he never inquired why her clothes smelled of cigarettes. That could have been partly because he smoked cigars and he was so accustomed to his own odor that hers never reached his weak olfactory glands. It wasn’t as though he touched her or came that close anyway.

As for her children, Vivian (age 15) and Dale (age 13), she took great care to wash before they would be exposed to her own transgressions. Previously, this was her habit anyway. After all, Ora’s own stench permeated their bed, and she had been washing it away every morning since shortly after their marriage.

However, there was more to her more recent fixation on cleanliness, and she knew it. She wanted to wash away any trace of her transgressive activities. She always felt guilty afterward, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night with her heart racing and her nerves rising like goose bumps. Still, she never vowed to stop, because the two evenings per week that she took the streetcar across the river to a slightly nicer part of the city to spend an hour or two talking to strangers in a speakeasy had become her only means of having any peace with her life.

Actually, after three weeks of this, she had started to make friends. While the establishment, as many were during the height of Prohibition, was usually crowded with both men and women, the regulars, she learned quickly, mostly occupied a section nearest the escape exit.

Leta told herself that she went for the company. While she had friends and family in close proximity, she sorely lacked the kind of attention her husband was not providing. While sipping her gin amongst the mostly happy and always lively crowd, she felt attractive and jolly.

When she wasn’t there, she missed her late husband Albert—his sparkling blue eyes, his smiles, his laugh, the way he would grab her around the waist and pull her close to him for a kiss, how he would don an apron to wash the dishes and insist she sit at the kitchen table to entertain him with gossip, how his skin always smelled of fresh soap and shaving cream, how his muscles glistened with perspiration when he was firing up the whiskey still they had in the basement, the way he always seemed to have some part of their bodies touching in bed.

The contrast of being with her current husband Ora was palpable and weighed heavily on her. There were entire days when they didn’t share a word. She would rise early and start her child rearing and housework. He would saunter in, swallow a cup of coffee and two pieces of toast with strawberry jam, grab his lunch pail and head toward the door, belch in the middle of the living room, pick up his paint materials and leave. Later in the evening, he would return, drop his lunch pail on the dining room table, shuffle through the house to the small tub in the back porch to wash his paint brushes, then drip his way into the kitchen for whatever supper she had waiting, slurp and chomp it down with beer, belch with satisfaction and then shuffle back through the house and into their bedroom. Depending on his mood, he would shed part to all of his clothes and flop onto bed. An hour or so later, he would awaken, use the toilet and then return.

If he even noticed she was there, he never acknowledged her, making it very easy for her to leave his supper on the stove and pursue her own interests.

To be continued.

Secrets, part four

When Leta stormed out of the house a week previously, having become fully disgusted with her husband Ora, she had not considered that a simple drink to soothe her nerves at their regular haunt would result in a resurrection of feelings she had not experienced since her previous husband Al had died 16 months earlier. While working in the house or yard, she would frequently feel waves of heat flowing through her, followed by a tingling sensation and then a slight burst of excitement. Finally a soft coating of perspiration would escape from her skin.

Florence suggested that she might be going through menopause.

“But I’m only 34 years old!” Leta protested.

“Well, it isn’t the flu,” Florence countered. “What else could it be?”

Leta was beginning to formalize the answer, and if she was correct, she could never tell her prim sister-in-law.

She began to notice that these flashes were frequently triggered when she was reading the newspaper or when she passed a group of men working or even when she was sitting in the café having coffee with one of her friends. A man would catch her eye, and she would feel flush. Or she found herself stopping simply to watch a man at work. Or even turning back the newspaper to look at an advertisement.

The man who had approached her in the blind pig had awakened in her desire, which she had not felt fully since her husband Albert was alive. This powerful, distracting and sometimes even debilitating sensation never happened when she was with Ora, but almost any man on the street could trigger it.

At first, she tried to avoid situations where the wave of desire might occur, but this soon proved to be fruitless. Like an adolescent boy, her sensation could be triggered by nearly anything or anyone. She fought it, but felt it anyway. Ora was no help. He was neither romantic nor erotic. He rarely touched her or was affectionate. Even in bed, he kept to his side, ensuring that their bodies never grazed each other, even unexpectedly. This left her feelings ample opportunity to continue to grow away from him.

On a Saturday night, Leta was sitting with her friends Hazel and Mark Kruper at their local haunt. Ora had worked late, then collapsed, and her children were with their father for the night. She had been agitated and anxious all day, and she and Hazel agreed that  a drink might do her good.

Understandably for a Saturday night, the place was filled with merry people—individuals, couples, groups of younger people seeking romance—and they were forced to stand in the smoke-filled room. As Prohibition was still the law, the space was closed tight, so they couldn’t help but breathe it in. The proprietor had set up a couple of electric fans, but they did little more than to keep the room from becoming unbearable.

Leta was not sure if she noticed the fellow first or the other way around, but every time she would look in his direction, she would see that he was looking at her. Once he even raised a glass, and she smiled.

“What was that?” Hazel asked.

“What was what?” Leta replied innocently.

“You just made the kind of expression my daughter does when she sees a boy she knows.”

“Really, Hazel,” Leta remarked, “I’m a married woman. Why would I be smiling at other men?”

“I don’t know, Leta. You tell me.”

Leta rolled her eyes and turned her gaze.

“Oh, look,” she noted. “Mark found a table.”

“Thank goodness!” Hazel exclaimed. “My feet are killing me.”

While she lost that particular fellow in the crowd, Leta’s senses had been awakened, and sometimes when Ora was out with his friends and the children were safely tucked in bed, Leta would take the bus to a speakeasy she knew about outside of her neighborhood. She told herself that she needed a break from the challenges and discomforts of her life, and the only way she could feel like she was getting one was to travel a distance to where no one knew her. But she could not fool herself, not fully. She desired the romantic and lascivious attentions of men. She needed a relatively safe location in which to experience this.

To be continued.

Secrets, part three

Having left her house in a fit of anger and disgust at husband Ora’s behavior, Leta had taken refuge in their local blind pig to collect herself with a couple of drinks. She had ordered her first drink and then sat at a small table in the corner to be alone with her thoughts. As she was finishing, she was approached by a handsome and friendly man with slicked down hair and soft hands. Before she could truly grasp the situation, he had ordered her a refill and sat down opposite her.

He smiled, and they simply stared at each other for a few moments. Leta felt the impulse to touch his hands grow quickly inside her. Forgotten was her anger and frustration with her husband, her sadness that she had chosen such a companion and her dread of being in the same house with him. Instead, she had glided into the comforting and friendly gaze of this handsome  and obviously younger gentleman who had seen her sitting alone in the bar and wanted to speak with her. She felt a wave of ease rolling through her.

The reverie was broken by the the bartender, who brought their drinks. As he set them onto the table, he turned his face toward Leta and shared an expression  of complete bafflement.

“Here you go, Mrs. Freeman,” he said pointedly, and Leta paled with embarrassment.

“Thank you,” her companion said, and Leta felt even more torn. Her husband rarely thanked anyone.

But she had a husband, and the bartender knew him. The two of them visited the place together most of the time, and the server’s reminder jolted Leta back to herself. After the bartender returned to his post, her companion turned to her and said, “Nice fellow.”

Then he noted the expression on her face.

“Is there something wrong, miss?” he asked.

Her face barely masking the contortions that her thoughts and feelings were taken her mind through, Leta said quickly, “Sir, I am a married woman. I can’t talk to you like this. I’m sorry.”

Leaving her drink untouched, Leta rose and strode determinedly out the door.

She had only walked two blocks when emotion overtook her and she started to sob. What a wretched life she had chosen for herself. Out of what she could not determine. Need? Before she married Ora, even before she married her beloved late husband Al, she had been capable of eking out a living for herself and her children. The need for companionship? She had friends, relatives, company around her all the time. The need for intimacy? While it was true that Al’s lovemaking was passionate, varied and frequent, she was more than that, wasn’t she? And Ora had seemed so devoted after Al died. He took care of things. Why had he stopped? Why had she married him so impulsively? And how could she possibly get out of her current living situation?

While she and the children had a roof over their heads and food most of the time, there was still so much hardship in their lives. Ora’s infrequent work, his continual drinking, his refusal to permit Leta or the children from mentioning Al, his insistence that the children call him father, his adamant rejection of Leta’s offer to help support them.

Leta was miserable, and she didn’t know what to do.

Over the next three days, as her life continued on the same trajectory, Leta frequently found herself day-dreaming about the kind gentleman she had met so briefly at the blind pig.

To be continued.

Secrets, part two

Leta and her husband Ora had been spending a quiet evening at home. Her children Vivian and Dale were in bed, and the couple was sitting in the living room. She was sewing a shirt out of other materials for Dale, who had recently grown two inches very quickly. Ora was in his chair, dozing, passing gas and drinking a friend’s beer. He was in a poor mood, there being little money in the house, even though he had just started a job. He failed to understand how it cost more to feed, clothe and care for four than it did just for himself.

But then he wet himself. He simply lacked the wherewithal to get out of the chair and go to the toilet.

The realization fully awakened and irritated him. He stood and waddled into their bedroom, leaving Leta and the wet easy chair in the living room. After the initial shock, Leta examined the chair. A small puddle of urine had worked its way through the cushion and formed on the floor.

Her face red with anger, she clutched the unfinished shirt to her chest, stared toward the hallway and called her husband, but he did not reappear. After a few minutes, she threw her sewing onto the chair where she had been sitting and stormed after him. At the entrance to their bedroom, she nearly tripped on her husband’s discarded trousers. Stepping quickly around them, she approached the bed. Ora had barely been able to remove his trousers before passing out onto the bed still wearing his wet underwear.

Leta felt the rage boil inside of her and tensed her arms. But instead of applying physical pressure to her oblivious husband, she simply turned, grabbed her coat and purse, and left the house. Ten minutes later, she was seated at the blind pig, the cool gin soothing her anger and disgust.

“Hello, young lady,” the man said more loudly than he had the first time.

She was startled out of her irritation and acknowledged him.

“May I offer you a refill?” the man asked.

Leta looked at him curiously. Had he not noticed the wedding ring on her finger? It was there, plain as day, on the hand gripping the near-empty glass.

Once he recognized her acknowledgment, he asked her again. “May I?”

He was rather handsome, Leta thought quickly, with deep brown eyes, thick hair slicked down and a stiff new blue suit. His face was clean and newly shaven.

Taking her silence and attention as confirmation, he gestured to the bartender and pulled out the chair opposite her.

“May I join you?” he asked as he sat down and rested his hands on the small table.

That’s when she noticed his hands. They were smooth, pale and thin, with just a hint of veins running through them. He had long fingers and clean cuticles. None of the men she knew had such hands. They were all rough and scarred from years of labor—either farming, factory work or painting. This fellow’s hands, however, fascinated her. She instinctively reached for them and then withdrew quickly.

He grinned sheepishly.

“Yeah, I know. They look like I haven’t worked a day in my life. I’m an attorney. I grew up in a boarding school. I played lacrosse and competed with my horse, which caretakers maintained. And I even play the piano.”

As her hand went to her heart, Leta expelled her hair as a little whistle.

“Are you all right?” he inquired.

“Oh yes, thank you,” she said softly and then batted her eyes.

To be continued.

Secrets, part one

Leta was sitting quietly in the corner of the blind pig. At any moment she expected her husband Ora to come in, but for the moment, she was desperately trying to grab hold of her own frazzled faculties. The gin helped. It was a good gin. This was not always possible at this neighborhood establishment. Sometimes all the proprietor served was rot gut. At other times, his stock was so low that he watered it down to make it last. When the liquor was particularly weak, she would simply leave. However, Ora was not as sensitive. “Hooch is hooch,” he’d tell Leta, “the more you drink, the better it tastes.” While this may have been true for him, she had a more discerning palate.

Ora could drink just about anything, even paint thinner, she surmised. Although she had never seen him try it, right now she believed him capable of nearly anything. He had startled her so severely just thirty minutes earlier that there was no base activity or inappropriate behavior that she didn’t suspect was beyond his bounds.

They had been sitting in their living room. The children were in bed. She was sewing a new shirt for her son Dale who had just undergone another growth spurt. The fabric she used came from some shirts of her late husband Albert that she had saved. While it was tricky to transform a grown man’s shirt into one for a a little boy, Leta was skilled at it. Although Ora didn’t like that she was using Albert’s shirts or even keeping them around, she responded that they could not afford new.

That they had a light supper of pancakes and strawberries started him off, but there was no money for meat. Leta tried to liven up the meal by making her own syrup out of brown sugar and molasses, but while the children were pleased and proud of her, Ora was disgruntled. He had recently started a painting job, but the money would not come in for another week, she reminded him. Until then, they had to make do.

Ora was sitting in his chair and dozing between chugs of home-made beer he was tasting for a colleague. Every five minutes or so, he passed gas, and Leta winced and grunted lightly when the stench reached her. She sewed on.

Leta heard him sigh contentedly and looked at him curiously. While she could not ascertain if he was awake, asleep or somewhere in between, she noted a slight relaxation and grin of relief, one that seemed more appropriate for an infant that just released itself than a grown man. A couple of moments later, Ora’s eyes opened completely, and he looked at her.

“What?” she asked.

He snarled.

“Why did you just do that?” she inquired.

He cursed gruffly and stood. That’s when she noticed the large wet spot around the fly of his trousers.

“Oh my goodness!” she gasped. “Did you just wet yourself?”

“Shut up,” he snapped and sauntered uncomfortably from his chair to their bedroom.

Leta had also stood, first staring after him, and then after he had disappeared, going over to the chair, still holding her sewing in her hands. She looked at the seat of the chair. There  was a wet spot. In fact, Ora’s water had soaked through and was dripping onto the floor.

She couldn’t help herself and gasped loudly in disgust. “Ora!” she shouted. “Get back in here.”

To be continued.

Smoking

Leta's friend Marjorie always had cigarettes available to accompany the wine brick when their card-playing club met at her house. Hazel usually enjoyed one or two over the course of the evening, but her husband didn’t approve of women smoking. A couple of other friends would also imbibe. They liked to smoke while playing cards, they said, and only then. Marjorie herself smoked regularly, mostly with her husband. She detested smoking alone, however, which is why she shared her cigarettes with her friends.

Leta refrained. Her father was a smoker and sometimes the smell of the them would remind her of those painful years after he returned when she was a teenager and how he would simply sit in the living room, drink beer, degrade her mother and smoke one cigarette after the other. Her first husband Ralph tried cigarettes, but preferred to smoke a pipe.

In 1924, when she was married to her second husband Albert, the Philip Morris company began promoting its new brand with images of women: Marlboros, the company advertised, were “Mild as May.” Bewitched by advertising that featured themselves, many women became smokers at that time. Because Albert smoked, Leta would occasionally take a cigarette, particularly if they were at their favorite blind pig for a hit of gin and to chat with friends. When they constructed their own still, their forays to the blind pig became rare, and consequently, Leta never developed the smoking habit.

She did like, she admitted, the quick light-headedness that came with the first few puffs. After Al’s death, however, she stopped smoking.

When he smoked, her third husband Ora smoked cigars, which she detested. The smoke of these monstrosities started to permeate everything in the house, which made her clean more thoroughly. She rarely noticed the smell on herself, although she must have carried it, she surmised, since she shared a bed with her husband, and he bathed only once per week. She frequently found herself asking him to please switch to cigarettes, but he wouldn’t.

The cigar smoking disagreement became most unpleasant one evening when she was ushering her 11-year-old son Dale to his bath after a day of fishing with Ora. Over the several months of her marriage to Ora, Dale began to adopt some of Ora’s bad habits, including a powerful reluctance to bathe. Leta was wrestling her son out of his clothes when she noticed that there were ashes and brown spots on his shirt. She immediately changed tone and focus, so when she asked her son to blow his breath toward her, he complied, partly out of surprise. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “Now take your bath.” She left Dale, went into the living room and furiously began to shred all of the cigars her husband had stored in a small box on an end table. While she couldn’t prevent her husband from smoking the foul things, she could and would keep them out of her house and away from her impressionable son.

Leta started smoking cigarettes as an occasional habit shortly after she married Leech Hoose in 1929. For her birthday, he gave her a lovely silver and gold cigarette case, and she was so smitten that she took up the habit to express her appreciation. Leta and Hoose would spend two or three nights each week at the blind pig with two other couples that smoked. After two cocktails, the cigarettes tasted better, and she began to smoke Chesterfields; they all did, and liberally shared with each other.

From the 1930s on, Leta continued to smoke, but adapted her tastes to her company and tried Lucky Strikes, Camels, Raleighs and many other brands. In fact, she learned very quickly that a friendly fellow would either light her cigarette for her or ask her if she wanted another one with her drink. Over time, her habit graduated to nearly a pack a day. She enjoyed a cigarette with her morning coffee, sitting in the living room and listening to the radio and, of course, with a drink. This habit continued until 1957 when she read two separate articles in the March and July issues of Readers Digest. The first linked smoking directly to lung cancer and the second shared the high rates of nicotine/tar levels.

While she didn’t quit immediately, she cut back tremendously, only smoking when she was at the local bar. She had a slight relapse when she married Richard Eckman. They liked to play cards with their adult grandchildren, enjoy cocktails and cigarettes, but by this time Leta became even less interested. The idea of lung cancer and the hacking cough she and Richard both had in the morning weighed heavily on her. When her first great-grandson was born in 1961 with allergy and asthma issues, she stopped completely. As she told Richard, she wanted to be able to hold the new baby, change him, bathe him, and most importantly, that the thought of exposing him to anything that would jeopardize his fragile health was more than she could bear.

Ora at work

Ora had gone nearly two months without work. This was the longest spell, and his lack of employment was wearing on all of them. Stretches like this were not uncommon for a house painter or anyone for that matter during the Depression, but the word in the air was that he was simply not working enough to take care of a wife and two children. The money he and Leta had set aside from previous employments was basically gone, and she was even forced to raid her secret reserve.

No one could accuse Ora of being driven. He was just as content to sit on the porch, sip lemonade tonics spiked with gin and watch the grass grow as he was to work twelve hour days. He enjoyed the company of his wife and step-children, neighbors and colleagues and could chat with them about the weather, baseball, the economy, automobiles and politics all day. He slept like a baby, free of concern. And he rarely argued. In fact, he was so easygoing that Leta would sometimes need to leave the room to calm an escalating anger before returning.

When she would report that all she had to eat in the house was a few pieces of bread, he would nod understandingly and then grin. “Looks like we’re having butter sandwiches for supper then, eh, sweetheart?”

Much of the time Leta couldn’t fault him. When he worked, he worked hard and made a good wage. Aside from a night out to bowl and visit the local speakeasy with friends each week, he kept his own expenditures minimal. Having lived a lifestyle of sporadic employment for much of his life, he was well-practiced in making it work.

Leta, however, was often frustrated. She hated to fret about family finances. As a girl and into womanhood, she had observed such worry not only age her mother, but also create in her a kind of bitterness toward life. She detested borrowing from her reserve, and every time she did she would snap at Ora and even the children for a day or two. Usually when she felt herself descending to her wits’ end, Ora would stride into the kitchen and triumphantly announce that he had a job and would be back to work for a few weeks.

He rarely went more than a month without some work, even if only painting a room or two, but this time was different. He had gone nearly two months, and Leta knew that his options were limited. Day after day the newspaper talked about a particularly hard time for folks. During hard or anxious times, there was no new construction and most people were content to leave their houses as is, or do a little touch-up themselves. In addition, winter was coming on, and there would be absolutely no work during the cold months. She feared what would happen to her family, her children, should what little money they had dwindle.

When she was married to Ralph, she had worked a little when their needs exceeded Ralph’s income, and that had not been pleasant. Ralph resented her for it, even though they needed the income. Once she asked Ora if he would mind if she made a few cents sewing dresses and repairing hats. He adamantly refused, chastised her for not having faith in him and and declared decisively that as always he would have work soon. He did.

This time, however, even he began to show signs of anxiety. The signs were subtle, but Leta recognized them. Early in the morning, as he was drinking his coffee, his hand would shake a little. This happened immediately after he glanced at the clock on the kitchen counter. At lunchtime, his appetite was nearly non-existent. Every couple of days, during the night, which he never had done before, he would get out of bed and go into the kitchen for a glass of milk. And he began taking long walks in the afternoon. He didn’t tell his wife that he was leaving; she would simply step outside to shake a rug or bring him a beverage, and he would be gone. The first time she was startled and waited. When he returned and she inquired about his absence, he replied stoically that he simply felt like walking.

Although she didn’t tell her husband, Leta started a small credit account at the nearby grocery store. Secretly, she began to do piecework with her needle and thread to make a few pennies. This was very difficult, since Ora was home so much of the time. One evening he looked at her at her work inquisitively and asked about the garment she was sewing. She had prepared an answer, but even as she said it was for her sister Nellie, she knew that he caught her in the lie. Fortunately, he didn’t pursue it, but that night he got up for at least an hour, would only take coffee for breakfast and then disappeared for the entire afternoon.

On October 15, as she was picking through the apples at the grocer’s, selecting those that were nearest to rotting, the ones she would bargain down, the grocer approached her and touched her on the arm. “Choose what you like, Mrs. Freeman,” he said. “Your account’s been paid in full.”

As anxious as she was pleased, Leta hurried home. Ora wasn’t there, but he had left twenty-five dollars on the kitchen table with a note that said, “for the bills.”

He never explained, and she knew better than to ask, but at the moment, they were able to meet their financial obligations.

Great-great Grandma Ida Chetister

"Now that I think about it," Grandma Eckman told me as she recounted her history, “I’m pretty sure Ralph wanted me to be more like his mother.”

“What was she like?” I asked, for I had no memory and little knowledge of my great-great-grandmother Ida Chetister.

(Born Ida Geringer to Lewis B. Geringer and Mary Ann Woodring in Wauseon, Ohio, in 1870, she married Louis A. Chetister on May 2, 1891 in Fulton, Ohio. They had two surviving sons: Ralph (born 1892) and Walter (born 1896). In 1918, Ida moved to Toledo with her husband. He died  in 1949, and she died in December of 1963, three weeks before I was born. She was 93 years old.)

“Well, darling,” Grandma Eckman answered carefully, “I believe we should never speak ill of the dead, but I’m an old lady and I don’t have anything to lose either. So let me be clear and impartial. As much as I can. She kept a spotless house. She did laundry every Monday and the ironing on every Tuesday. She didn’t approve of sweets of any kind, so when they were younger, your Grandpa Chetister and Uncle Walter had to sneak them. She would make a pie here and there, but her crusts were always dry. That’s why your Grandpa Ed and even your father, I think, always eat pie in a bowl drowning in milk. Her hair was always tidy and pulled tightly into a bun. And she always had a cup of coffee at the ready but rarely finished more than two a day. And that’s pretty much all she drank. Also, she didn’t like to brush her teeth, a habit your Grandpa Chetister also adopted.”

She paused for a few moments, and I had difficulty ascertaining if she had run out of memories or was simply tired. Perhaps, I thought, she had run out of good things to say. After all, Grandma Chetister could not have been happy to have her son divorced by a woman who would go on to live the kind of life Grandma Eckman had.

Then her eyes opened wide.

“You know,” Grandma Eckman added, “Ida was a member of the Royal Neighbors of America.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“As I recall, and honestly, darling, I don’t remember a lot about this organization, it was a fraternal organization for women and connected somehow to life insurance.” Grandma Eckman worked hard to remember this. “You see, back in those days, there really wasn’t much in the way of life insurance or benefits for women. Not many had jobs, they couldn’t take out loans to buy a house or car or anything. And too many lost everything when their husbands died. Women needed to create their own ways of taking care of themselves. But also, as a fraternal organization, the Royal Neighbors did these activities to help women – poor women, women hurt by men, sick women – that sort of thing. Ida told me when I was still married to Ralph that I should join—and my mother, too, but we didn’t. ‘A woman needs to take care of herself,’ she told us, and she believed it. But at the time, I was a new wife and mother. I thought I had the world by a string. And Ralph, like his own father, thought it was a bunch of foolishness.”

Then Grandma Eckman became very quiet.

“He thought a lot of things were foolish.”

Crying babies get held

Leta and Ralph's little boy Dale was a fussy baby. Like most men of that era, Ralph left nearly all of the child rearing to Leta, but he did on occasion want to hold the little guy and whisper to him about baseball games and fishing. However, Dale seemed to reject his father’s attention. He could be calm and serene at the start, but once he realized that he had been pulled from his mother’s arms and left to his father’s, even with Ralph’s soft voice, he would immediately begin to cry. If he was unsatisfied, the cry would escalate to a scream until the only thing Ralph could do was hand him back and gruffly leave the room.

For her part, Leta devoted herself to Dale, tending to his every whim and whimper. While her physical connection to her husband waned, she lavished all of her attention and affection on the little boy.

“You need to let that baby cry it out,” her mother-in-law Ida told her one Sunday afternoon when Dale was only a few months old. Leta, Ralph and their children Vivian (aged three) and Dale joined Leta’s in-laws and Ralph’s perpetually single brother Walter for dinner. They had concluded the meal and the dishes. The men were in the living room planning their baseball game attendance for the season, and the women were sitting at the dining room table. Vivian was taking her nap.

Initially, Leta put Dale down on Ida’s bed with his sister, but he immediately began to fuss. Leta sat with him for a few minutes, stroking his cheek and cooing motherly love. This put Vivian instantly to sleep, but Dale refused to be coddled in this way and expressed his displeasure with loud wailing. Anxious about her mother-in-law’s convictions about stern child-rearing, Leta tried to mollify her infant’s displeasure by rocking him gently on the bed. But he struggled and screamed even louder. With a quick look at Vivian who seemed to be getting restless, too, Leta picked up the squalling infant and rockingly walked through the house and into the kitchen. He almost immediately quieted.

Ida shook her head.

“Vivian was sleeping,” Leta protested.

“We could have moved him to Walter’s bed,” Ida answered, “and closed the door. He would have fallen asleep eventually. They always do.”

Leta continued to gently rock her son.

“A baby that’s constantly held will turn out bad,” Ida continued. “Spoiled, not able to take care of himself.  You don’t let him sleep in the bed with you and Ralph, do you?”

Even Leta was shocked by that. “No, of course not.”

“So what do you do when he cries at night. I’m sure he cries at night.”

“I get up and walk and rock him until he falls back asleep.”

“He’s got you trained,” Ida said finally, turning her attention back to her needlepoint.

Leta’s mother was not much better.

“You baby him too much, Leta,” she would repeat. “He needs to learn to fall asleep on his own. You can’t hold and rock him forever.”

“Of course not, Mother,” Leta snapped.

“How on earth do you accomplish anything if you’re holding him all the time?” her mother persisted.

“We manage.”

“I just don’t see how,” Julia concluded but then turned back. “What does Ralph think of all of this?”

“He understands,” Leta replied. “At least he doesn’t have a screaming baby keeping him up or distracting him.”

“And Vivian?”

“What about her?”

“Doesn’t she get jealous? Act out?” Julia suggested.

Leta thought for a moment. She had heard that sometimes older siblings became disrespectful and jealous of a new baby, but at least in her own house, this was far from the case. Vivian adored her brother and was very helpful in taking care of him.

“No, she likes him,” Leta answered.

“Well,” Julia said finally, “I still think you’re hurting him. Mark my words: All this babying is bound to result in some damage.”

Dale’s crying tapered off over the next several months, but still Leta continued to devote herself to him.

New gloves, part two

Leta wanted a pair of ladies' dress gloves for her fourteenth birthday. When she told her mother, the older woman looked her in the eye and said, “You’re not old enough.”

For Julia, that was the end of the conversation, but Leta felt the sting of her mother’s comment deeply. She decided then and there that someone was going to give her dress gloves for her birthday, even if that someone was herself. When she went to work at the hat shop, the next afternoon, she priced the item. They were more expensive than she thought, but she was undeterred.

Later that evening while her family was  in the living room, Leta stole into her bedroom and retrieved her small tin box from where it was hidden in her larger box of dolls. Even though she had outgrown playing with them a few years ago, she convinced her mother that the toys had sentimental value, and she wanted to share them with her own daughter some day. However, her primary reason was to designate a safe place for her secret money.

As she was still young, had not been working very long and liked the chocolate-peppermints that the grocer recently began to sell, her financial reserve was quite small, not enough to purchase the gloves she wanted. Still, she was close. She went from the bedroom to the living room with her slate to review her financial capability to  purchase the gloves for herself.

“What are you doing, Leta?” her sister Louise asked after a time.

“Math,” Leta answered without looking up.

“Math?” her mother inquired. “I thought you finished your homework already?”

“Yes, I did, mostly,” Leta answered vaguely, for she did not want to lie to her mother, nor did she want her mother to become too suspicious. “I just wanted to figure out one more problem.”

“There’s not a lot of light, so don’t strain your eyes,” Julia warned.

“I won’t. I’m writing big.”

“Plus, I need you to stitch the sleeves on that blouse for Mrs. Wilbur.”

“Yes, Mother.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Leta completed her mathematical task and created her plan. If she focused and took on a couple of side income-earning projects, she could purchase the gloves within a month.

While her birthday had come and gone, the desire for a fine pair of ladies’ gloves had not, and on a bright spring morning, Leta put on her gloves for school.

“It was a mistake,” she told me over seventy years later. “I went to school with country girls and boys who had no interest in sophisticated ladies’ gloves. They laughed and teased me for trying to be better than they were.”

“That must have been rough,” I said sympathetically.

“It was, my darling, but I wouldn’t let those mean, rough children break my character. I wore those gloves the entire day. And at the end of it, I think a lot of them sort of admired me for not cracking under the pressure.”

“Grandma, that’s terrific!” I exclaimed.

“It also gave me an advantage with some of the older boys,” she added. “They started to look at me differently. Of course, this made my mother and your Uncle Aaron very anxious. And truthfully some of the boys that were attracted to me were rough and vulgar—farmers, workmen and such. But I learned that I deserved to be treated like a lady.”

New gloves, part one

After David and Julia divorced, and David left to seek his fortune in the West, Julia and their three daughters were forced to fend for themselves financially. This meant that each of the women would have to contribute any earnings to pay for their household expenses. When they were young, they mostly helped their mother with the various jobs she took—laundry, sewing, helping the other farm women with their canning and gardening—but as they grew older, they were able to secure their own employment and income. Even Leta who was only five when her father left was trained to sew and developed a delicate stitch perfect for certain needs.

While Julia utilized most of her daughters’ income to support the household, she did permit each of them to keep a portion for her own personal needs and interests. They had designed a family budget and each person’s responsibility for meeting it. Leta’s was a fixed amount. After she contributed to the household fund, the remaining income was hers. Like her mother, she was cautious and somewhat frugal with her finances. She dedicated a portion to her savings, which she kept in a little box under her bed.

“A woman should always have her own money,” Julia told all three of her daughters shortly after their father abandoned them. As he was the principal income-earner, his abrupt departure left the mother and three young girls with no specific income and several bills, including two accounts he had opened without his wife’s knowledge. The mother and her girls were sitting at the breakfast table with the stack of papers in front of them. Julia had just totaled the debt and monthly payment requirement. With a grim face, she went into a cupboard and removed a small tin. She put the tin on the table and took off the lid to reveal a stash of bills and coins.

“Always,” Julia repeated for emphasis and set about fulfilling her immediate financial obligations.

Although very young at the time, Leta took her mother’s words to heart, as did her sisters, and all three immediately selected small tins or boxes as containers for their own savings.

Sometimes maintaining this reserve was challenging for Leta. She liked pretty things—hats, dresses, jewelry, scarves, shoes, underclothes—and had a rather impulsive nature. So she developed an alternative savings, a pool of money for more immediate purchases. Having this in addition to her tin of emergency money was quite challenging, but she was determined to make it work. When the desire to purchase a particular item came upon her, she would learn the cost and go to this fund. As she regularly contributed to it, sometimes she could purchase the item right away; other times, she would have to wait until she had amassed the needed amount.

Just before her fourteenth birthday, Julia asked Leta what gift would she like to celebrate the day. Initially, the question surprised the girl. Birthday celebrations were rare in the Scott household. Julia had always called them an extravagance that they could not afford. However, she would prepare the celebrant’s favorite meal and leave a few pieces of candy at the birthday child’s place setting, enough candy for the child to have two for herself and one for everyone else in the household. The siblings never considered giving each other gifts. That luxury was reserved for Christmas when they would exchange home-made presents—stockings, handkerchiefs, scarves. Before he left them, their brother Fred would carve wooden animals that they would add to their Noah’s Ark collection. Only Aaron would purchase items, but still these were always practical or needed.

Julia’s seeming to break the family birthday tradition by asking Leta if she wanted something special was startling, and at first Leta did not know how to respond.

“Are you thinking?” Julia asked after a few moments of silence. The mother always asked this question to apply pressure for an answer, and Leta knew she had to respond immediately.

“Gloves,” Leta blurted.

“Gloves?” her mother repeated in surprise. “But it’s going on spring, and you got new gloves at Christmas. What on earth will you do with a new pair of gloves?”

“No, Mother,” Leta clarified, “I mean, a pair of white dress gloves, like the ladies wear, like you wear for church, only white.”

Julia stopped everything and devoted her entire attention to her daughter.

“You’re not old enough.”

To be continued.