Chapter One C: Mad Aunt Hattie

Aaron arrived on time for his meeting with Mattilda “Mad Aunt Hattie” Strongman. He had a feeling that she prized punctuality among many other values of a by-gone era. Before he knocked on the door he turned his cell phone to silent. He was certain she would not approve of it ringing in the midst of their interview. As he raised his hand to knock at the closed door of Hattie’s apartment, it opened and Amanda Brown, the nurse who had introduced him came rushing out, nearly toppling them both over.

“Oh! Mr. Case. I’m so glad you are here,” the nurse apologized as they disentangled themselves. “She’s just thrown me out because she is expecting a gentleman caller and doesn’t need a chaperone!”

“Well, I’m glad I made it on time then,” Aaron smiled. “I don’t understand why they always assume they don’t need a chaperone with me. Do I really appear that harmless?”

“No,” laughed Amanda, “that desirable. From what I’ve heard these last couple weeks, you are the most available man most of these old dolls have seen in months. It’s you who should be worried about not having a chaperone.” They laughed pleasantly and Aaron managed a surreptitious glance at her left hand. Married. Darn. “Please knock,” Amanda continued. “Hattie doesn’t like to be barged in on.”

Aaron raised his hand again and knocked gently on the door. He heard a soft but firm voice on the other side granting permission to enter. Whatever he was expecting, it was not the highly composed scene that greeted him. Hattie was seated in a straight elegant dining chair. Aaron had expected that like most of the older people he interviewed, she would be in an easy chair, or perhaps even a wheelchair. He wracked his brain trying to remember what she was sitting in when he first met her. The room was warm, but not over-bearingly hot like so many apartments in the home were.

Hattie wore a lovely flower-print dress, cinched in at the waist. Another big difference. Even when they were trying to impress or flirt with him, the residents of the home, both male and female, were more likely to wear shapeless comfortable clothing or even dressing gowns when they met. Hattie looked as if she were playing the lead female in a Fred Astaire movie. Aaron looked and saw that she was even wearing low, but elegant high heel shoes.

Set next to Hattie’s chair was a small tea table, opposite which was a second straight dining chair. Well, if she could sit properly for the interview, he certainly could. The arrangement was so movie-set-like that Aaron instinctively glanced behind him to see if there were cameras focused on the scene. He approached Hattie and took her offered hand in greeting.

“Thank you so much for meeting with me today, Miss Strongman,” Aaron said as he shook her hand gently.

“If you insist on calling me Miss Strongman, I shall have to refer to you as Mr. Case,” Hattie responded. “I prefer to be on a first name relationship with those to whom I am expected to show my madness. Please call me Hattie, or Aunt Hattie if it makes you more comfortable.”

“Thank you again, Aunt Hattie,” Aaron smiled. He glanced at the table and second chair.

“Please join me at the table,” Hattie said. “I thought you might need to place your tape recording equipment on it.”

“That would be fine,” Aaron replied. “There’s really not much here. I’d just like to place the microphone close enough so that you can speak in a normal tone of voice.” Aaron placed the microphone on the table and a small Dictaphone next to it. From this he connected a discreet wire and placed a plug in one ear.

“My, so small,” Hattie said admiring the set-up. “Will you need a power outlet?”

“No. I believe that I have a well-charged battery. I try not to disrupt the environment too much when I’m interviewing”

“When I was young, of course, they were just coming out with recording equipment. It required a trained professional to operate it,” Hattie paused. “Not that I’m implying you aren’t a trained professional. It just seems less significant when it is so small.”

“No offense taken,” Aaron replied. “In truth, it doesn’t take much training to operate these now-a-days. It’s all digital. I just monitor to be sure I’m getting the voice clearly on the recording.” It was Aaron’s turn to take control. “You have such a lovely voice Miss… er, Aunt Hattie. Were you a trained singer?”

“I not only was; I still am,” Hattie replied. “You may use the past tense when I’m dead.”

“Do you still sing, then?”

“Yes. Once Harper was gone, singing was all I really had left. It forms a kind of transcendent link between us, I believe,” Hattie looked dreamily off into space. Aaron had to remind himself that he was talking to a ninety-five-year-old who was purportedly “mad.”

“Was Harper your husband?”

“No, no. I’ve never been married. Harper was my guardian angel. But I’m not ready to tell you about him, yet. That story will come. Surely you had some questions that you wanted to interview me with. Name, age, social security number, place of birth, that sort of thing.” Hattie reached to a side table and withdrew two aperitif glasses. “Would you care to pour the sherry, Aaron?” she asked sweetly. Sherry at three o’clock in the afternoon. Well, why not, Aaron thought.

“Well,” Aaron began as he poured two delicate glasses of sherry, “our book is an oral history of growing up in rural Indiana across several ages. I’ve done my research and advance preparation, so I already know the basics that you’ve mentioned. What I’m interested in is how rural life has changed over the past century, especially for kids. I’m not asking you to tell me what you think has changed, but to tell me the stories of your childhood and what it was like growing up in the aftermath of the first world war and the depression.”

“My, what a fascinating topic. I’m not sure I’d read my part, but I would love to read the stories of the children today. Are they very interesting?” Hattie asked.

“Oh yes. Interesting and sometimes shocking,” Aaron said. “In my own childhood we would never have imagined doing what some of these kids are doing today.”

“Well now, think Mr. Case. There has to be some progress. I’m sure some of the things we did in our childhood would have been just as shocking to the past generation.” Hattie took a sip of her sherry. “My childhood. Well, we lived on a farm near Uniondale. Papa had a few hundred acres that had been settled by his grandfather when Indiana was opening up in the nineteenth century. So that set me apart, somewhat at the outset. We were as close to being native Hoosiers as any people of European stock could get. Why, so far as I know, or as family legends have it, our family name came from my grandfather’s reputation before the Civil War. He was a burly man who cleared the property himself, milled the timber into lumber, built the house, and tilled the soil. He was a strong man and adopted the name for himself when the first census reached him in 1840. As a result, we know very little about our family history prior to that. We don’t know where our ethnic roots are, though they are obviously European. We were just the Strongmans of Uniondale.” Aaron made a slight adjustment to the direction of the microphone to pick up Hattie’s gentle, almost hypnotic voice.

“You also must understand that as such an old Indiana family, we had a different economy than many of the later arrivals so that when the depression came life didn’t change significantly for my family. We were always hard workers, well-kept, and comfortable. My father owned the farm outright with no mortgages and his crops were as good as cash wherever he went. I say that as though he traveled a lot, but I believe the furthest we ever went from home was into Fort Wayne, nearly twenty-five miles away. But Papa’s crops kept us fed and clothed, and the truth be known, during the depression his generosity kept many other local families fed. Though he never spoke of whom he was helping. We were all taught to tithe and to give generously to those who were less fortunate than we were.

“But the era that I remember most was that time between the Great War and the Great Depression. That was when I was growing up. And the first great adventure of my life began when I was nine years old, in 1919. We were typical children, my brother’s and I. We had to help with the livestock and crops, but we played. We fished, and we walked. Oh, we ranged far and wide in those days. Papa’s nearly 300 acres was not enough to contain us and we roamed the countryside as far as Markle and Ossian. And one of our favorite haunts was the twelve oaks.

“It was a mystical place: twelve huge trees standing in a circle at the top of a wind-swept hill. There was a new church built up on that hill, though we didn’t know anyone who went to it. But we played any number of games behind that church in the oak grove. It was a mystical place. When we were there we could imagine that we were fairies, knights and fair maidens, soldiers, and dragons. And our favorite was to play hide and seek all along the way from our farm to the twelve oaks.

“It was on one such day that we were playing and I became separated from my brothers. I was the youngest and they often wanted to run off and play boy things that I was ‘too little for.’ On this particular occasion, I became distracted by a flash I saw in a woodlot near our farm. It was something shiny traveling through the woods at an incredible speed. I simply had to investigate.

“Well, what it was I will never know. The surprise of my life came when I burst between the trees and fell headlong into a stream. Getting wet, even by surprise was not a problem for me, but when I fell I hit my head on a rock and was knocked unconscious in the rushing water. You can see, right here, the tiny scar that is left from that blow to the head,” Hattie said lifting a lock of her silver hair and showing Aaron a tiny scar right at the hairline. My own Harry Potter, Aaron thought abstractly. But Hattie was already off on her story.

“When I came to, the sun was in my eyes and a gentle hand was dabbing the blood from my face. And there, silhouetted against the shining sun was the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. About my brother’s age, but a shining blond that seemed to reflect the sunlight. I had to squint my eyes to see him clearly. I knew I was in the hands of God.

“’Are you my guardian angel?’ I asked the vision. ‘I am today,’ he answered and smiled. ‘Are you going to be okay? You took a nasty fall over there.’ I suddenly realized that I was soaking wet and that he must have fished me out of the creek. I jumped up out of his lap where he was holding me and saw that he’d wiped the blood from my forehead on his sleeve. Even when I looked at him without the sun in my eyes, he was still a golden blonde god to my eyes. I didn’t know what to say or do, but I gathered my skirts up in my hands, thanked him very much and ran for home as fast as my little legs would carry me.”

Hattie had a faraway look in her eyes and a gentle smile on her lips. Aaron could see that she still lived in that moment. He could almost see the nine-year-old sitting in the chair beside him and was reminded of the sketches of another nine-year-old that he carried in his briefcase. Funny how you could see the future, or the past, if you learned how to really look at someone. Hattie stirred and brought him back to the present.

“Well, young man. I have to tell you that I became a woman that day. Oh, my brothers caught holy hell, if you’ll pardon my expression. But for me, the days of running like a rag-a-muffin through the woods were over. I became a young lady strolling gracefully through the woods. And that was when I discovered that I could sing, and that I wanted to. My heart was just bursting.

“Now you may think that I’ve romanticized this story just for your hearing, but that is the truth of the matter. That was the day I met my guardian angel and it is forever emblazoned in my memory. When that memory goes from me, lay me in my grave for there won’t be breath in my lungs or warmth in my body any more.” Aaron continued to chat with Hattie for the better part of two hours before it became obvious that after tea the old lady was used to napping. They talked of the economy, the Roaring Twenties, and education, but did not come to anything that inspired quite so much warmth as that one story. Aaron took his leave and asked permission to come visit her again. Hattie set the time for the following Friday at 3:00 and Aaron accepted the date.

Mad? Not that he could tell. She was one of the most charming ladies he had ever met. Friday afternoons were going to be a great treat for a few weeks.

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