Who would have thought I’d turn them into fast friends. Me? They’re bonding like blood. Here I am bringing everybody close, and after all the times I’ve been called a homewrecker. Even managed to tear up my own family. Tore em up and ran away. Now here I am with this lot, bonding. I guess an old ghost can learn new tricks.
My Papi was a determined tower of a man. His colossal arms weren’t made for loving. Like “The Young Giant” in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, he worked as if every day was a chance to prove how hard a man can work. He hit all sixes like his boss might drop him any day. But Mr Champlain—the wine boss—would never fire Papi. Papi was the best vintner in the U S of A. He kept the wine flowing—coulda been blindfolded, hands tied behind his back. Even if the Anti-Saloon League and the Salvation Army and the Klu Klux Klan picketed our vineyards, even if god himself came to seize the wine, Papi woulda kept on.
Papi was Pleasant Valley Wine Company and the Pleasant Valley Wine Company was Papi. Bees and flowers. He came from Beeranuslese and Eiswein vineyardists. He knew the Riesling grape, the Scheurebe, the Ortega, and the Finger Lakes good stuff, the Chardonnay. The grapes were his children, cradled in harvest baskets with care. He would turn the screw lid of the basket press with such piety. Each morning he touched the oak barrels in the same sequence for good luck—finger tap, finger tap, full palm, thumb stroke, finger tap—et cetera.
Next in line for his neat affection was Kaiser, man’s best friend, the German Shepherd. Kaiser learned Papi’s language of whistles and ticks, for which he was awarded with even-thrummed pats to his head.
But on New Year’s Eve, Mama Famke made Papi kiss her for ten continuous seconds as I banged a wooden spoon against a saucepan at midnight. One night a year, I witnessed a real cash kiss, a silver-screen kiss, and I savoured the image the rest of the 364 days. I believed that all men were like Papi and women like Mama Famke.
I was sprout small, but plenty old enough to recall when Mama Famke came to Horseheads with nothing but a sap’s grasp of English and a violin. She came from Holland, but she looked nothing like a little Dutch girl, more like a little Egyptian queen, which the neighbours never hesitated to snicker about.
She came for American Ragtime. She came with the notion that every point on the map was just like New York City or New Orleans, and that soon enough she’d meet Joe Venuti or Eddie South or some other jazz man who would take her on. Mama Famke was no canary; she wanted to be in the ensemble. A lady in a band! I bet she coulda done it too. Her fiddling was killer.
Instead she met Papi, a widower with a daughter only eight years her junior. Papi coolly, but very steadily, rewarded Mama Famke for dashing her musical hopes to become the head of our house. She drank from Papi’s secret champagne cellar. She picked out a new phonograph record for every birthday, anniversary, and for Christmas. When Amelia Earhart appeared in a Lucky Strike advertisement, Mama Famke asked Papi to buy her cigarettes and light them for her whenever he was within reach. She learned English at the State Theatre in Ithaca, where she and I could both see a show for just a Liberty quarter. When entertaining Papi’s friends, she imitated Katharine Hepburn’s ingénue charms in Morning Glory. When she was cross, she sounded more like a wicked Leila Hyams during the wedding scene in Freaks: “Holy Christmas! What must I do? Must I play games with you?”
A great dame through and through, she never had a stovepipe silhouette. All the same, when the winery wives started dressing like flappers, Mama Famke had Papi order her the latest Fifth Avenue styles from the Sears catalogue. And if anyone dared call her a gyppo, she’d calmly snap her fingers and Papi would silently loom over the offender until they excused themselves. When a gentleman asked Mama Famke to dance—and one or two did at every dinner dance—Papi obligingly loomed at the edge of the dance floor until she was done hoofing and then gingerly returned her to their table.
I grew up a dreamer, a flirt, and a ducky dancer. Education in stockings and lipstick outranked learning to can pickles or bake sugar cookies. “Chiffon now; we used to wear silk. But these are only seventy-nine cents, so who’s complaining,” Mama Famke told me. When we couldn’t afford new stockings, she hand-drew the seams up the back of my calves in kohl. Sure, we were frugal, we dined on rabbit stew and Ritz Crackers like everybody else. Still, we painted our lips darker and darker red. “See the woman your little mausi becomes,” said Mama Famke, and Papi would lower his aloof head and turn away.
I turned sweet sixteen in 1936, after we’d all been singing and singing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” President Roosevelt heralded that America had risen “together, rallied our energies together … and together survived.” The Pleasant Valley Wine Company survived, I’ll say. It was the last vineyard standing in New York State after Prohibition, and it had a monopoly all along the East Coast. The Champlain family was fixing to open a second winery at Cayuga Lake. My sweet sixteen party was as grand as the Champlain daughters’ debuts, with candles and bubbly and a jazz quintet.
Mama Famke—who hadn’t yet seen twenty-five years herself—was the real belle of the ball. I didn’t mind sharing the limelight one bit. She surprised us all by joining the band to play “Marcheta.” She was made for fiddling Eddie South. Her fiddle said, nuts to you modernists; behold my older-than-old soul. She really honeyed it thick. We were fried to the hat from her fiddling.
During my shoe ceremony, I kicked off my Oxfords to reveal toenails polished as red as my lipstick. Mama Famke had painted them for me. Papi knelt at my feet with my first pair of heels. Sandals! I was becoming a woman in sandals that revealed my bare toes. The whole ballroom held its breath while Papi’s beefy fingers bested the little brass buckles, then exhaled with a smitten sigh as we danced our first dance.
The first and only time we danced as father and daughter.
Young fellas asked to cut in, and this time it was for me that Papi loomed like a ghoul at the edge of the dance floor. But he couldn’t loom nonstop. Thinking back, my debut meant double duty for Papi—watching over his Sheba of a wife and his ingénue daughter. After a dozen or so dances, it was college frosh Robert Ahlers who led me through the French doors and out into the garden. He’d had tons of practice sneaking off with girls, I’m sure. He said, “Young lady, I’m going be your first. You’re lucky because I’m a guy that knows how,” and I immediately pictured New Years Eve’s silver-screen kiss.
Robert perched me on the arm of an oversized Adirondack chair, fed me a single line about my good looks, and started heavy petting, home run, hit on.
“Lift your gown,” he told me.
“Says you!”
I heard the sound of rayon tearing. White dresses are a pain to mend, I thought. I was such a dumbbell. I didn’t know yet that anything could be worse than a ripped dress.
“Don’t be stingy. This is what turning sixteen is all about.” Robert’s hand was in my jersey skivvies, grabbing the gusset in his fist. I felt his fraternity ring down there—I swear it. I suppose my coming out as a scream queen happened that night. I hollered so that the whole vineyard could hear me.
Robert never knew what hit him, but he had good enough sense to run. Papi’s head eclipsed the moon. The night air around him turned darker. For a split second I could hear the crickets chirping before he took me by both shoulders and shook until I heard nothing. Shook until everything to my left turned black, everything to my right, haze. “Scham,” he said before pulling me down from the oversized Adirondack chair. Shame.
I wish I woulda skipped out that very night. Slunk away like a bandit along the exit tracks Robert had laid.
I stuck around for another year, waiting for Papi to come around, but his austerity only became increasingly austere, his distance, decidedly more distant. I can’t recall a single word he has said to me since my debut. It’s possible that he never spoke to me after that night.
In his silence, a new part of me opened up like a secret door. I stepped through it the night Rebekka Kruken, who debuted a month before me, and I went to the picture show together and I stole too many glances at her face instead of watching the movie. I stepped in further when I pretended I couldn’t find a partner at our annual Foxtrot social and danced with a girl. Secret step by step, in and in, and farther away from my father. He never saw me leave, and I never turned around to look over my shoulder.
The trouble with scham is it follows you forever. Scham undoes a family. I ought to know. Even death didn’t relieve me of Papi’s scham.