WHEN I WAS in the second grade, my mother took a part-time job in a silk mill a couple of blocks from St. Francis of Assisi School. My father didn’t know about it. One of my mother’s sisters was already working there, I think. Mammy Etta took care of Joey. Aunt Kitty, my father’s sister, was in on the secret too, along with Francie and Willy, who owned the greenhouse where my aunt worked. Instead of going home for lunch, Bob and I walked the three blocks to the greenhouse, where my aunt fed us, let us have the run of the place while she ate her own lunch, and made sure we left in time to get back to school.
We usually ate our lunch on a piece of oilcloth my aunt spread on the potting bench. She cooked us canned soup on a hot plate and let us drink tea with milk and sugar, which we never had at home. It was cool and damp in the potting shed, and the soup smells mingled with the raw sweet scent of soil and compost. We ate surrounded by towers of nested clay pots, under the eye of a sleepy old cat who seemed to find us too abrupt and energetic. It hissed at me once, and Aunt Kitty kicked it. (I remember this because it was the first time I ever heard a cat utter anything that actually sounded like meow.)
The potting shed, which faced the street, was also the shop, and a little bell jingled whenever someone came through the door. Above the cash register, a St. Francis calendar hung next to a clipboard, fat with orders, from which a pencil dangled on a piece of twine. In a row on the floor, shrubs waited for Willy to load on his truck. Wherever you looked there were plants and pots; brightly painted ceramic clowns, madonnas, burros, bluebirds, kittens; dirt-caked claws, hand spades, a pruner, shears.
After lunch we would jump down from the wobbly high stools and race through the doorway down three wooden steps into the greenhouse. It was steamy and warm, with light unlike any other, and the air seemed to shimmer, even in winter. Our response was pure, immediate, erotic, exhilarating. We couldn’t help but run. The long tables along the clear glass walls (where here and there, for ventilation, a pane was propped open by a stick) were filled with flats of begonias, marigolds, violets, hyacinths, narcissus, lily of the valley, tulips, in various stages from sprout to blossom. Under the tables were watering cans and buckets, rakes and lengths of hose. Similar tables ran the length of the greenhouse in the center, with another aisle between them. For us it was a rectangular track with another corridor down the middle that made our play more interesting, keeping the pursuer guessing which way his quarry might turn. We chased each other around and around on the packed hard earth until Aunt Kitty yelled, “See here, you hooligans, it’s time to get,” and I don’t remember Bob having any trouble yet. Sometimes I’d catch him and sometimes he’d catch me, and after some laughter and roughhousing the chase would start again in the opposite direction.
The secrecy surrounding my mother’s job both disturbed and thrilled us. Bob’s and my having lunch at the greenhouse once in a while required no explanation, but our going there every day was the little secret that would lead to the discovery of the big one, so we had to take care not to talk about it around my father. The women—my mother, Aunt Kitty, my mother’s twin sisters, Marie and Marietta, and Mammy Etta—acted as if they were planning a surprise party. First they hugged and kissed us into complicity and then reinforced our sense of inclusion by winking. There was a lot of winking. Once, I remember, my father asked my mother where she’d been all day because he’d gone home and she wasn’t there. Aunt Kitty was standing behind me, and she touched the back of my neck. It was just like a wink, and I knew I was supposed to be quiet.
“What the Sam Hill do you care what she does all day?” Aunt Kitty said, keeping her hand there. His big sister, she was the only one who could speak to my father this way.
“What’s it to you? I was close by and I had a little time. Maybe I wanted to bring her a little present.”
“Uh-huh. So where’s this little present? I think you hoped she had a little present waiting for you!”
My father blushed and smiled and shook his head.
I looked at Bob. Both of us worried about what Dad might do if he found out, and we worried we wouldn’t get to go to the greenhouse for lunch anymore.
SOMETIMES UNCLE FORREST helped Aunt Kitty at the greenhouse, especially around Easter and Mother’s Day. He loved to fish, and he loved to tell stories. In one of them he lost all his tackle to a fish so big that he tied a brightly colored shirt to his anchor, the fish swallowed it, and if his outboard engine hadn’t run out of gas, he would have brought the monster to shore.
In the summer he gave us money for worms, a nickel a dozen, whenever he planned to go fishing. I always begged to go along and he always put me off by promising to take me when I got older. “I’m better at catching fish than catching worms,” he said. “I leave that to the experts.”
Dad didn’t fish. “Hell, that’s for guys who want to get away from their wives and drink beer, that’s all. Your mother’s not like that,” he’d say, with a long pull on the tall brown bottle for emphasis.
“Besides, what kind of sport is that? A bunch of grown men sitting around on their fat asses waiting for some dumb fish to come along. They can’t even see it. How would you like it? Think about it: you’re minding your own business, not bothering anybody, and you go to take a bite out of your ice-cream cone and there’s a hook in it and somebody pulls you right up out of your life, boom, just like that. What kind of sport is that?”
Nevertheless, at dusk my father would get out the hose and soak the grass in the backyard, and when it was dark and the yard had filled with lightning bugs, Bob and I would crawl on the grass, our coffee cans ready, while Dad clicked a flashlight on and off to locate the long night crawlers that would emerge partway from the earth and stretch themselves out in the wet grass. More than the merest flicker of light, or a clumsy move, would send the prey back in its hole. Too rough or too impatient and you tore the worm; not quick enough or indecisive and you lost it. Once you had hold of one, the thing to do was keep up a steady gentle pressure so the worm would slowly relinquish the fight and you could put it in your can untorn. Uncle Forrest was strict and half-worms didn’t count.
THERE WAS ANOTHER secret. This must have been later, when I was in the third grade. My mother and Mammy Etta took Bob with them for the day, and at lunchtime I walked to the greenhouse alone. I was not to talk about the fact that Bob was anywhere but at school all day. My father was not to know. Uncle Webb, Mammy Etta’s brother-in-law, was driving them to see a “powwow doctor,” a Pennsylvania Dutch healer.
I had heard my grandmother saying something about it to my mother, and I thought she said they were going to take Bob to a “power doctor.” He had begun falling down by then, mostly in the afternoon on the way home from school. He ran out of power too early in the day. It made sense to me.
“Are they going to fix Bob’s power?” I asked Aunt Kitty.
“Phpht! Eat your noodle soup, and don’t pay no attention to that there foolishness.”
I was frightened, because Uncle Webb was driving. He had a wooden leg. I was under the kitchen table when I discovered it. His pants were hitched up, and he had on a real sock and shoe, but his leg was pink wood. I remember staring at it for a long time and thinking he should take a pencil and draw some curly hair on it so it would look more like the other leg. Did the power doctor cut off Uncle Webb’s leg and give him a wooden one? Was that what he was going to do to Bob? I wanted to ask Aunt Kitty, but she was already upset by the whole thing; besides, I was worried that I was right.
“Does a power doctor give needles?”
“It’s a ‘powwow doctor.’ And you don’t need to know no more about it.”
A powwow doctor had to be an Indian, I reasoned, and that scared me even more. The Indians were pagans and they had medicine men who fixed you up by painting different colors on you. The worst thing was that they prayed to false gods. It was a sin to go to them, like going to a church that wasn’t Catholic. My mother, I knew, hadn’t grown up Catholic, and Mammy Etta and Uncle Webb and everybody else in her family were Lutherans. It was a tension I was usually aware of as part of the confusing interactions of the two sides of my family, but now I felt it acutely. Aunt Kitty did not approve. My father was not to be told.
GROWING UP, I was puzzled and a little bothered by the strange symmetries and asymmetries of my family’s names. For example, my mother’s mother, Etta, was called Mammy, and my father’s father, Edward, was called Pappy. At the same time, his wife, Elizabeth, was called Mommom.
We never met my mother’s father, and it was not until many years later, after my mother’s death, that I discovered that he and Mammy had never been married. Bob and I had always assumed that he’d been called away to something of the gravest importance. We thought of him as Peter or James or John, hauling in his net one day, minding his own business, when suddenly he’s tapped on the shoulder. “Follow me.” Frank Mattes was his name.
“What happened to your daddy?” one of us asked Mom.
“Oh, he went away when I was still a baby.”
To add to the confusion, my mother’s stepfather was named Hoffman. My mother took every opportunity to remind us that, even though he signed our Christmas and birthday cards “Grandpa Kenny,” he was not our grandfather. My father was just as careful to tell us again and again that he was a different Hoffman, not from the Hoffman family that he and Aunt Kitty and my uncles and grandparents were part of.
“I don’t know what rock that guy crawled out from under,” my father would say, sneering.
What’s more, Mammy Etta kept the name Hoffman after she and Kenny divorced. Loving her, and knowing there were two kinds of Hoffmans, I was uneasy on those rare occasions when the two sides of the family came together. My mother’s twin half-sisters, Marie and Marietta Hoffman, Kenny’s daughters, were our favorite baby-sitters when Bob and I were little, and have always been part of our family life. There were other shadowy people, who came around infrequently, some of them Mammy’s family, some of them Kenny’s, who were treated civilly but without warmth.
My mother had another half-sister, Anita, who lived an hour away, in Reading. Her son, Marty, also had muscular dystrophy. For a while, before my parents understood the disease, they seemed to take this as evidence that Kenny had done something to cause it. Marty died in his teens, a couple of years after Bob. I saw him at a family gathering the year before his death. When Gene, his father, wheeled him into the room, I was stunned. He looked so much like Bob that I felt behind me for a chair. I took a deep breath and blinked back tears.
The last time I saw Kenny was at a cousin’s wedding reception many years ago at the local firehouse. I hadn’t seen him for at least a decade. I was carrying a big pot of my mother’s baked beans to the kitchen. My cousin and his bride hadn’t arrived yet. The band was tuning up.
“There’s Kenny Hoffman,” I said. He was tapping a pitcher of beer.
“The hell I care,” my mother said. “Come put those beans over here.”
I walked over to greet him, and was struck by his ratty mismatched jacket and baggy pants. His tie was stained. I put out my hand, but he had a mug in one hand and a pitcher in the other.
“Grandpa Kenny!”
“Yeah. Yeah. Hi. How are ya?” he said.
“Fine. I hope I get a chance to talk to you later on. It’s been a long time.” I meant it.
“Oh, hell, you know me,” he said. “A half an hour and I’ll be layin’ drunk out in the gutter, and an hour after that I’ll be in jail.” He walked away.
Some of the discord between the two sides of my family came from the time of my parents’ courtship, when, according to my father, much of their time together was spent baby-sitting my mother’s sisters.
“Etta and Kenny. Those two. Hah. They were off in some god-damn barroom every night. Your mother raised those girls. She was the one made sure they ate and had clean clothes to wear. Not those two shitbirds. Agh! I shouldn’t talk like that. Etta was fine once she got rid of that son of a bitch.”
When he told me this, I felt as if I already knew it, and of course I did, and had, ever since I was very young, in the wordless way a child knows things like that.
I WENT DOWN the three steps into the greenhouse. Willy was carrying a large tray of some kind of seedlings down the middle aisle.
“Now don’t you get it in your head one god-damn minute you can come in here and race around like monkeys. Go on. Back in the shop. I don’t need no little dickens like you in my way. Go on!”
I turned to go. Aunt Kitty was in the doorway to the shop.
“Now wait a minute, Willy,” she said. “He’s a great big boy with lots of muscles. Maybe he can help. He’s all by himself today.”
“Well, them there begonias burnt all up. God damn it, I told Francie she had ought to have moved them. They need to go to the lath-house.”
“We’ll take care of it.”
We loaded the trays of young plants on a big wooden cart and took them to the back of the greenhouse, where there was a little wooden shelter with a roof of crisscrossed strips of wood that let in a checkerboard of sunlight.
“This here’s the hospital,” Aunt Kitty said. “You see these here? Got too much sun. You see? You leave them out there and they drink up so much sunshine they get sick. Just like you kids and your candy bars and soda pop. They do all right in here though, if you catch them in time and doctor them back up.”
Maybe there was a place like this for Bob. Maybe they could doctor him back up.
When I got home from school, Mom and Mammy Etta and Uncle Webb were sitting around the kitchen table drinking beer and smoking and eating pretzels from a bowl in the center of the table. No one was talking. Bob was upstairs in our room.
“It was dumb,” Bob said. “They were talking all Dutchy and everything.” He looked okay. They hadn’t done anything to him that I could see.
“What did the doctor do? Was he an Indian?”
“He wasn’t a doctor. He wasn’t even dressed right. It was dumb. He wants me to wear a bag of stupid Dutchy words around my neck, and Mom says I have to, but I told her she can’t make me.”
“Maybe it could help you to not fall down so much.”
“It’s dumb! It’s dumb! It’s dumb!” He threw himself on the bed and cried.
Later, after Mammy Etta and Uncle Webb left, I asked my mother if I could see the bag with the writing in it.
“Never you mind about that bag,” she said sternly. Then she changed her tone. “I’ll show you later.”
My father came in the front door.
“Just what the hell is going on around here is what I’d like to know.”
My mother gave me a look that was more than a wink. I started back upstairs, listening.
“What do you mean?”
“They’re digging up the whole god-damn street. There’s PP&L trucks up and down the whole block. What the hell are they doing?”
“Oh. Well, how should I know? Should I call and find out?”
“Agh! Bring me a beer. How are the boys?”
Later my mother let me hold the powwow doctor’s charm, a muslin pouch no bigger than a tea bag, tied at the top with a red string. She said there were German words inside but no one could read them because they were all torn up in little pieces, and if anybody opened the bag then the words wouldn’t work. She took it from me, dropped it in her purse, and lit a cigarette.
“Will it help Bob to not fall down so much?”
My mother blew a great cloud of smoke.
“Who knows?” she said. She clicked her purse shut. “Nobody can say it won’t.”