he man who met us at the Cleveland bus depot could have been a
rural visitor to the Belgian orphanage from which I had emigrated two
years before. Uncle Ed Culiman, Nana's brother-in-law, clenched a
pipe in a baby-pink face shadowed by a battered hat. A stooped six-
footer, he wore threadbare blue pants bunched at the top of scuffed
brown shoes which held the bony feet I would come to lovingly wash
and massage at the end of interminably hot days.
Towed by Nana, my foster grandmother who had come to pay a yearly visit with her sisters, I clutched a small valise and stained brown paper bag containing hard boiled eggs and an overripe banana I would eat after our first meager dinner with the Culimans. My era of Ohio summers was under way.
The woodframe houses planted along the length of Columbia Avenue were slumped under the heat of July as if the weight of weariness and time was bearing down on them, sagging the roofs, rusting the hinges of their paint flaking doors.
In a ritual of daily waiting on the front porch swing, I would scrape my feet along the floor's splintered planks and listen for the crunch of tires on gravel as Uncle Ed's Ford coupe belched to a halt in the driveway. The grandfather clock in the hallway tolled the hour as I slid from the swing.
My name was called, pronounced "Cowlette" by Aunt Kate. I winced at the mutilation, believing my name a prized possession shared by few, something precious presented to me at birth to keep for a lifetime. In the kitchen, she husked corn, the definitive vegetable that nourished our days: corn soup, corn salad, corn on the cob, corn omelettes, fritters, bread, muffins, succotash and a concoction called corn oysters blended from cornmeal, eggs, flour, baking powder and cracker crumbs stirred in a hot skillet.
Tall and emaciated, as if sewn together by a stingy seamstress, in a slatternly house dress and soiled bandanna, Kate was an unsettling presence. A fold of skin under one eye, pulled and twisted from its lower lid, gave her face the look of a cat clawed in a back alley fight. The impairment, Nana explained, was caused by a blazing potato hurled into Kate's face by their drunken father at something she had said, something impertinent. Soon after our meeting, I sensed Kate's dislike for me and wondered what sparked her resentment. Was I an intruder, a stranger to clean up after and a rival for her husband's affection which, in any case, she received in scant amounts? I could not fathom her thoughts.
In an unspoken agreement, we avoided each other, although her ear was always patiently cocked to Nana's generous advice. What is to be done about her only son, Bill, whose marriage to a chiropractor--thirty years his senior--Kate believed an abomination? How more might she scrimp to survive on Ed's irregular income as an itinerant piano tuner for the theater trade? Nana, the stylish and confident youngest sister, reveled in her role as counselor and honored summer guest.
Another sister hovered about, communing with the walls and ceilings of the kitchen and parlor. Aunt Agnes, stout and hump- backed, gazed blankly out of a delicate face that hung over her chest like an ivory pendant. In its planes and bones lingered the residue of a former radiance, a glow I had seen on the faces of martyred saints in gilded frames at the orphanage.
Passive and dreamy, she seemed attached to another reality far from the shabby boundaries of our street. But there were times when she would spring suddenly to life, aim a gnarled finger at me and ask, "Who are you, what do you want?" Or she would sidle up to Nana and mutter, "You killed our father." Because he drank, Nana had ceased speaking to her father with whom she had never reconciled, and towards whom she remained unforgiving these many years after his death.
Still licking off telltale bits of crust and meringue on her lips, Agnes accused me of theft on the day she alone bolted down an entire lemon pie Nana had left cooling on the steps.
I was vindicated by Nana with a caution, "Agnes is not right in the head and you are not to challenge or bother her in any way, even if provoked. Especially if provoked. Do you understand?"
Nana's tolerance of the family's middle sister might have traced to Agnes's superior education; among the surviving Miller daughters, only she had earned a high school diploma, followed by informal studies in human anatomy. But hopes for a career in chiropractic medicine were then dashed by the profession's general exclusion of women. Finally discouraged, Agnes toyed with thoughts of marriage.
"She couldn't find a man good enough, and by the time she was in her thirties, all the decent men were taken," Nana said.
"Then she took up with some Hindu guru who gave her ideas about standing on her head and mumbling the same word over and over and god knows what. Little by little, she just became peculiar although she does have clear moments. Ed wants her out of the house and Kate refuses to put her away."
"I've finished with the chores. May I cut some tiger lilies for Uncle Ed?" His garden in the cramped back yard was crowded with beds of marigolds, lilies, petunias, hollyhocks and gladioli separated by narrow strips of grass on which I would stand and imagine myself a giant circled by the garden's swarming population of tiny visitors, transient butterflies, grasshoppers, ants, houseflies, crickets, lacewings and praying mantises.
"A few flowers, what of it, Kate?" Aunt Agnes said, nodding toward the sunlight that flooded through the kitchen window. Over the months, Agnes would confuse me as she took on the roles of ally and foe.
I longed for Uncle Ed who would soon return home. Perhaps he would escort me to another assignment at The Alhambra or The Palace where vaudeville entertainment followed cartoons and double-features. Seated in the front row or with legs swinging down from the edge of the stage, I listened intently while he tuned a grand piano, his fingers reflected in the sheen of the polished faceboard. He was my maestro, flinging bright arpeggios into the theater's shadowy emptiness.
I would peer into the piano's interior, at the trembling ribs wired like a harp across its body. With his freckled bald pate canted forward as if in prayer, Uncle Ed probed the notes along the scale, occasionally lingering, plink-plink on the treble, a throb on the keyboard's bass. He tested the action of the pedal.
"It's where the soul of the piano resides," he said in a hushed voice.
Poised before the red velvet curtain that opened every night like the Red Sea for Moses, I invented a dance to his rendition of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips." One, two, side, close, back and one, two, back and forth, side, close, turn, turn, blowing kisses to the dark loge and balcony, and then a deep curtsy to imagined applause blooming from vacant seats.
"Look," I called out to him as I gyrated in a pirouette.
"Dance away, my princess." Gruff to his wife, short-tempered even with friends, not on speaking terms with his chiropractor son, for reasons I did not understand, he had singled me out for his steadfast affection.
"I think Uncle Ed really likes me," I said to Nana's scrawny shoulder blades in the sagging double bed we shared.
"Don't let it go to your head. He pities you because you're an orphan."
Uncle Ed's car rattled and wheezed into the driveway. Nana, his passenger, wore her clenched-lip, pinched-nose look when something was amiss. Had she quarreled with him about not putting Agnes away? She belongs in a loony bin, he would insist. Had there been a flare-up about Aunt Kate not wanting me in the house? I was no blood relative, she would declare loudly enough for me to hear. Maybe it was something else entirely. During our bus trip, Nana confided to my delight that Ed had been one of her suitors.
"He was handsome with bright red hair and considered a catch, but not for me. Of course, Ed married Kate on the rebound."
I prodded her for details, bubbling over to learn more about their meeting and courtship, why he was spurned and if Kate ever learned she was a spitefully selected second choice.
"That's enough, not one word more. I was not put here on earth for your entertainment." Years would elapse before I learned her reasons for repulsing Ed. One night he had placed a hand where it did not belong, Nana said, and was rewarded with a slap in the face. Such antics by the old astonished me, thinking of them as sterile and barren of passion as the pack mules our school books told us helped settle America.
"When I found out he also frequented cat houses (an expression Nana explained to me), I washed my hands of him." In another version of the story, she hinted Kate was in the family way before she married and later miscarried, but Ed chose to endure a union in which he felt trapped. Bill, a frail and sickly child, was born to the couple in their early forties.
"Bill looks so different from his parents," I observed on the Euclid Trolley Line carrying us back to the Culiman house.
"Maybe there's a reason for that." Nana's clamped mouth announced she would not be coaxed to say more. But with persistence over the years, I managed to pry loose bits and pieces of the tale.
Ed suspected the dark-haired baby was not his, and withdrew even further from a forlorn Kate who clung all the more needfully to her only child. A gulf opened between father and son. While Nana remained vague about Bill's legitimacy, I supposed Ed might have been as astonished as I that any man would choose to prevail over Kate; her sulky disposition and disfigured face seemed poor incentives for an escapade.
In the kitchen, I filled a basin with vinegar and water, and washed Uncle Ed's long, knobby feet.
"You are my revered foot doctor," he said.
"Am I like Mary Magdalene?" I was aware he knew his New Testament.
"No more than I am like Jesus." His laughter came in loud, short bursts.
Uncle Ed was nowhere to be seen at the local church to which Nana squired me on Sundays. Yet rising to full height, in a booming, theatrical voice, he would quote passages from the Apostles or the Sermon on the Mount, sometimes accompanied with a tap dance or soft shoe shuffle.
I laughed, but was anxious about his mockery of religion, fearing it might deny him salvation. My prayerful wish was to see his soul lift to heaven like the box kite he taught me to fly in Wade Park and along the edge of Lake Erie where we also watched the D.& C. Line passenger boats plying the waters north.
To resurrect the young admirer Nana once prized, my imagination erased the wrinkles and liver spots from his face, planted billowing waves of carrot-colored hair on his bald crown. Above his upper lip I tacked the flowing moustache of a man about town. Only his fine- boned hawk nose and blue, eyes shining in heavy pouches, gave proof of bygone charms.
Like his orations of bible verses, Uncle Ed's orotund readings of daily poems in the Cleveland Plain Dealer were full of sweeping flourishes, outflung arms and eyes rolling heavenward. The diversions of poetry were being presented; I applauded and pleaded for more.
We would retire to the parlor where he cranked up the Victrola whose high, whiny notes flared from a huge horn shaped like a morning glory.
"Music sounds better when you're horizontal." Uncle Ed stretched out on the bare floor. I dropped alongside, the two of us on our backs, side-by-side, but not touching. I pretended we were fish drifting to the surface of a pond, sea creatures washed and lulled by the music of "The Lost Chord," "Song of India," Caruso's "Pagliacci," and Lily Pons singing "The Bell Song" from "Lokme."
"Did you hear the one about the moron who killed his mother and father?" He rolled on his side to face me.
"No," I said with a jolt.
"He wanted to go to the orphanage picnic."
Uncle Ed had forgotten I alone in the house knew what an orphanage was, having been brought to one as a baby and left in the spartan care of the Sisters of Charity. Morons. Orphanages. Picnics. Uncle Ed's jokes. The world contained these things to groan and laugh at, and to wonder about. Still, I was giddy in that world with the pleasure of Uncle Ed's devotion to a child seventy years his junior.
Nana interrupted our wool-gathering and briskly announced that Ruthie was in the hospital. Mama, my pretty, alcoholic foster mother, was ailing.
"Pack up your things," she ordered, "we'll be taking the morning train." Not the bus. The costlier choice of faster travel suggested a crisis.
Uncle Ed's parting gift glowed in my pocket, a green velvet- lined, gold-painted ring box he had fashioned from a walnut. An attached card read: "For my Beloved Foot Doktor for her foot service to me in this summer of l94l." I had just turned ten.
Colette Inez' latest collection of poems is Clemency (Carnegie Mellon, 1998). She lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University. Cleveland Summer, 1941 is adapted from a longer memoir, Notes from an Exiled Daughter.
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