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.