Our house was built in the same French château style, but of course was neither as sumptuous nor as large. The entry hall and dining room were paneled in mahogany, but none of the other rooms were, and there were only three bedrooms in the house, not counting the maid’s room, which was on the ground floor behind the pantry. My father’s library was on the second floor at the top of a winding staircase with a banister Linda and I used to slide down daily. The top panel of our front door was made of frosted glass into which my father had had inserted a sort of Tyler family crest he’d designed, beautifully rendered in stained glass, leaded into the original paneclass="underline" two green spruce trees towering against a deep blue sky. The doorknob was made of brass, kept highly polished by the succession of colored maids my mother was constantly hiring and firing. (My father said to her one day, “Nancy, you just don’t want another woman living here, now let’s face it.”) From the time I was seven, however, I don’t think we ever went for more than a month without a maid (and sometimes two) in the house. Whether this was at the insistence of my father or not, I couldn’t say. I did sometimes get the feeling, though, that my mother often longed for the simpler existence she had known in Freshwater, Wisconsin.
She was in the kitchen when I got home that afternoon, but she barely looked up when I came in, being very used to air-raid drills by now. Though, come to think of it, she’d hardly paid any attention to our first air-raid drill, either. That first one had been very exciting to me, because it had come about two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and half the kids in the school thought the enemy was really over Chicago. The sense of impending disaster was heightened by the fact that the teachers sent us running home, none of that hiding under desks, just run straight home, they told us. So naturally we expected to see a Japanese Zero or two diving on the school, or perhaps a few Bettys unloading their cargo of bombs, it was all very thrilling. Coincidentally, a few Navy Hellcats from the training station winged in over the lake just as we were pouring out of the school, and this nearly started a panic, what with our high expectations for obliteration. I ran all the way home that day, and when I got into the kitchen, out of breath, my mother said, “What is it, Will?”
“The Japs are coming!” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“I saw them,” I answered. “Four of them in formation, flying in low over the lake!”
“On earth are no fairies,” my mother said calmly. “You probably saw some planes from the Navy base,” which of course was the truth, but which I wasn’t yet ready to accept. She was standing by the kitchen sink, shelling peas and listening to the radio on the window sill, and her attention never once wandered from her slender hands, a thumbnail slitting each pod, the peas — almost the color of her eyes — tumbling into the colander. The radio was on very loud. My mother was a little hard of hearing in her right ear, and she favored the other car now, her head slightly cocked to the side, as the trials and tribulations of “Just Plain Bill” flooded the kitchen the way they did every afternoon at four-thirty, the indomitable barber desperately trying to turn his lively daughter into a lady, while simultaneously fretting over her stormy marriage to the lawyer Kerry Donovan. I think if the Japanese had really been overhead, my mother would have waited till the end of that day’s installment before running down to the basement. I had never seen her rattled in my life, and she was certainly as calm as glass that day of the first air-raid drill. Honey-blond hair behind her ears, reading glasses perched on top of her tilted head, eyes gazing down at the tumbling peas, she said, “If the Japanese were in Chicago, I’d have heard it on the radio. They’d have interrupted the program. Where’s your sister?”
“On her way home,” I said dejectedly.
I kept watching her in fascination, admiring her calm in the face of certain destruction, yet resenting it as well. She was not a tall woman, five-three or five-four, but whereas I was almost six feet tall, I had the feeling I was looking up at her; it was very unsettling.
“They told us to come straight home,” I said ominously, but my mother went right on shelling peas.
We naturally had a maid living in at the time, a colored girl from the Washington Park section, but my mother never allowed her to prepare meals, mindful of a Wisconsin homily about two women in the kitchen being akin to a horse with a head on both ends, or something to that effect. My mother was a great one for proverbs. Sometimes, when she reeled off one of her homespun sayings, absolutely unsmilingly and with a sense of discovery (as if she hadn’t said the very same thing a hundred times before), my father would roll his eyes heavenward and sigh deeply, and I would remember that she had been his childhood sweetheart and that he’d probably been listening to her words of wisdom since almost the turn of the century. The thought was frightening. She had a proverb for every occasion, the same ones in fact for totally different situations, and I lived in fear of the day she’d come up with a new and entirely fresh one because I knew I’d die of a heart attack on that day and never get into the Air Force.
“Would you like some milk?” she asked me now.
“Another air-raid drill today,” I said, going to the refrigerator.
“I gathered,” she answered.
There was some leftover icebox cake on the second shelf, and I cut a small slice of it. Then I poured myself a glass of cold milk, and took everything over to the round kitchen table under the Tiffany lamp. We generally took breakfast with the fork (one of my mother’s expressions, translated from the English to mean a breakfast including some kind of meat, usually sausage), and since I didn’t get to school each day until nine o’clock, I wasn’t hungry enough to cat very much of the school lunch at noon. But neither did I dare eat anything substantial when I got home in the afternoon because dinner was at six-fifteen sharp and my mother was a stickler for eating everything put before you. So I usually just took the edge off my appetite with a little milk and maybe a chocolate pudding, or a few cookies, and then went into the living room to do my homework. We had a new Philco floor-model radio there, complete with push buttons, and as I worked I would listen first to “Terry and the Pirates” and “The Adventures of Jimmy Allen” in breathless succession on WENR, then a quick flick of the dial at five-thirty for “Jack Armstrong” on W67C, and then back to WENR for “Captain Midnight” at five forty-five. At six on the button. I’d hear my father’s key in the latch, and the front door would open, and he would call his customary greeting, “Hello, anybody home?”
At dinner that night, I decided to reopen the Air Force issue.
My father seemed to be in a very good mood. He was talking about a recent War Production Board memo that eulogized the paper industry and made the printed word sound as important to the war effort as bullets. I always listened in fascination when my father talked about paper. I could never visualize him doing anything but work of a physical nature; his lumberjack background seemed entirely believable to me. When he came home from work each evening wearing a gray fedora and a gray topcoat and a pinstriped business suit, I was always a little surprised that he wasn’t wearing boots and a mackinaw and a turtleneck sweater. He was a big man, still very strong at forty-three, with penetrating blue eyes and a nose I liked to consider patrician (since I had inherited it). The table in the paneled formal dining room was eight feet long without additional leaves, and whereas my father always sat at the head of it, my mother did not sit at the opposite end but instead took a chair on his right, closest to the kitchen. She refused to keep a bell on the table (“Never count the number a bell tolls, for it’ll bring you that many years of bad luck”) and would more often than not rise and go into the kitchen herself if the maid didn’t respond to her first gentle call. My sister Linda always sat on my father’s left, and I sat alongside her, which was not the happiest of arrangements, since she was left-handed and invariably sticking her elbow in my dish.