My father did a good job of
bringing me up. He needed some help, of
course. He was working full-time as a local
newspaper reporter, so he was not able to be at home all the time. But he found an older woman in town to take
care of me during the day. She cooked and
cleaned and changed my diapers and played with me. Her name was Claire Wahl (rhymes with doll).
But I always called her Aunt Claire because I loved her just like she
was part of my family.
Later, when I was older, I found
out a strange thing about Aunt Claire. That
day, after she had left for home, my father and I were eating supper, talking
about our days—as usual.
“What did you and Aunt Claire do today?” he
was asking me.
I told him.
Then I thought of a question. “Father,” I asked, “where did Aunt Claire
come from?”
He chewed his food thoughtfully
before he answered me. “I put an ad in
the newspaper,” he said. “For a
babysitter.”
I thought about that for a
minute. “But where is she from, Father? Did she always live here?”
“No, Vickie, not always. In fact, she had only been here a day or so
when she saw the ad and applied for the job.”
“A day or
so? Where was she before?”
“I don’t really know. She had some letters of reference—some names
of people I could call to check on her.
But I never did.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know—I just knew after talking to her
for five minutes that she was perfect. I
didn’t need anyone else’s opinion.”[i]
Aunt Claire had ideas of her own
about how I ought to be brought up.
“Girls should know how to cook and sew,” she always said. “And so should boys. How can you live in the world if you don’t
know how to fix your own lunch or repair a rip in your underwear?” That was a good question. I didn’t want to go around hungry … or with
rips in my underwear. Who would? She said, “These are not girl skills, Vickie. They
are human ones.”
And so she taught me how to cook
and sew, and by the time I was in elementary school, I was helping to cook for
my father, fixing the rips in his shirts (not his underwear), replacing the
missing buttons. By the time I was in
third grade I made all my own clothes.
And so I didn’t look much like other girls in Franconia. Usually, this didn’t bother me.
Aunt Claire taught me something
else, too. German. She spoke the language fluently. And when Father was away, she would speak
only German to me. I don’t remember
this, of course (I was an infant), but Father told me that he didn’t know
anything about it for a while. He just
assumed that those sounds I was making were typical baby sounds—nonsense
syllables. But when I started saying
whole sentences in German, asking questions in German, he realized what was
going on.
Aunt Claire told me about it later,
when I was older. (She told me in
German, but I’m going to write it in English.)
“Your father was a little bit upset,” she told
me. “He didn’t know I was talking German
to you.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“I was afraid he would say no.”
“That’s the same reason I don’t ask him some
things,” I said. “I didn’t know adults
did things like that, too.”
“Adults are just children with jobs and larger
clothes,” she said.
“But why did
you teach me German, Aunt Claire?” I asked.
“You’ve never told me.”
She looked at me strangely for a
moment, then said lightly: “Who knows?”
And she would never say another word about it.
My father never owned a TV
set. He said that television was an
invention designed to make people stupid and to want things they can’t afford. We did
own a radio. But Father rarely turned it
on, and he would not let me listen to it.
Not that I ever wanted to.
My father was my television, my
radio. Our books were our television,
our radio. He read to me every night,
even when I was older and could read by myself.
He would sit on my bed and read aloud until one of us fell asleep. When I was really young, I always fell asleep
first, but by the time I was eight or nine, he would nod off before I did. I would gently remove the book from his hand
and then use the edge of the cover to tickle his cheek. Then he would wake up—sort of.
“You asleep?” he would ask.
“Yes,” I would answer. “I’m sound asleep.”
“Good.
I’ll talk to you in the morning.
Guhnight.” And then he would
struggle to his feet, turn off the light, and trudge slowly out of my room and
down the hall to his own.
As soon as I heard his bedroom door
click shut, I would turn my light back on and read on into the night. I don’t think I was fooling him, though. Because every morning my light would be off
and my book would be on my desk—even when I knew
I’d fallen asleep with my light on and with my book open across my chest.
Our house, as you might guess, was
full of books. Every room—even the
dining room—had shelves for books. We had bookshelves in the bathrooms! My father belonged to book clubs, he bought
books at library sales, he ordered them from catalogues, he went on book-buying
sprees in Columbus and Cincinnati. Both
of us regularly brought armloads of books home from the public library.
I never thought anything was
strange about that, not until I visited other houses and noticed that some of them had no books at all. I feel sorry for people who have no
books. It’s worse than having no
friends. Much worse. A friend can move away. A friend can betray you.
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