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.