The Card Game

In the orchard,

proper in suits

and Panama hats,

Willie Hoffman, Gustave

Ladamacher,

and my grandfather

are playing cards,

the smoke from their cigars

bothering butterflies,

their German insults

knocking apples

off the trees.

Every Saturday afternoon Mr. Ladamacher and another German gentleman come to play cards with Grandpapa. Every Saturday morning Grandmama makes strudel. Every week the German gentlemen act surprised, as if they had never seen strudel before. “Himmel!” they say. That means, “heaven.” “Gussie made strudel for us! So much work just for us!”

Grandmama always replies, “Ach, there’s nothing to it.”

But there is a lot to the making of strudel. I love to watch how it’s done. First Grandmama scoops out a big pile of flour and makes a hole in the center of it. Eggs and water and butter go into the hole. Using her hands, Grandmama squishes the mess together. Then it’s pounded and kneaded. That’s just the beginning. The dough sits for a while, “rests,” Grandmama calls it, as if the dough were snoozing. She spreads a clean cloth over the kitchen table and sprinkles flour over it. Next she rolls out the dough and begins to pull it with the backs of her hands. Little by little, the lump of dough stretches and grows. I get to help with the stretching. When we’re finished, the strudel dough, so thin you can see through it, covers the whole tabletop. By then Grandmama has flour all over her, even on the tip of her nose.

She spreads sliced apples and raisins and sugar and cinnamon over the strudel dough. She rolls it all up into a long bundle and bakes it. Nothing smells better than an oven full of strudel.

When the strudel is all finished, Grandmama puts it on her china platter with the roses painted all over it and lets me carry the strudel out into the orchard where the men are playing euchre. I’m not sure what kind of card game euchre is, but it seems like you can’t play it without a lot of shouting and yelling. Since the shouting all goes on in German, the only word I understand is dummkopf, which means “dumbbell.” I know that word. It is what my grandmama calls herself when a hole opens up in the strudel dough she is pulling and she has to patch it.

One day I climbed up into an apple tree near where the men were playing. After a while they must have forgotten I was there. They were full of strudel. Their Panama hats were tipped back from their foreheads, and their ties were loosened. Their jackets hung from the backs of their chairs, and their shirtsleeves were rolled up. Grandpapa was passing around a box of cigars. Grandpapa saves the rings around the cigars for me. He gives me the cigar boxes, too. I kept the baby mice in one of them. I don’t think the mice liked the smell of the cigars, though, because they ran away.

The men looked over their shoulders toward the cottage. Grandmama was inside washing dishes. I saw Grandpapa take out of his jacket pocket what looked like a small bottle, only it was metal not glass. He held it under the table and carefully unscrewed the top. The bottle was passed around, and everyone took a quick sip from it. Hurriedly Grandpapa put the bottle back in his pocket. I heard them say the word Schnaps.

Later I asked Grandmama what Schnaps meant. “Where did you hear that word?” she wanted to know.

“In the orchard. They were drinking it from a little bottle.”

“Ach! Sie haben Schnaps getrunken. Schnaps is whiskey. Your grandfather makes it himself.”

“But isn’t it against the law to make whiskey?” It was Prohibition, and no one was allowed to buy or sell whiskey.

“It’s just in case someone gets sick. Then we take a little for medicine. Maybe Mr. Ladamacher ate too much strudel and needed a little of the medicine.” She looked at me to see if I believed her. A minute later she was marching across the orchard toward the men. I could hear her scolding them in German all the way up to the cottage.