Chapter Three B: Guardian Angel

Aaron was in a very good mood as he made his way into the Memorial Home for his weekly visit with Mad Aunt Hattie. This week had gone much better than he ever expected. Janice/Annabelle had met face-to-face with her estranged father. Mike was beside himself with worry about what she would think, how he should act, what to expect. When they met they were as wary as two teenagers on a blind date. You could touch the tension in the air it was so thick. They both asked Aaron to stay with them as they got acquainted, which was a little uncomfortable at first, but he soon slid into a role as facilitator of the conversation, helping it from staying in embarrassing silences for too long at a time and steering it gently away from topics he thought might be too intense for a first meeting.

At the end of the meeting, both were happy that they had met each other at last. Mike wept when Janice told him of her mother’s death. It was plain that even though he currently lived with a mate of ten years, he had never released his intense feelings of love and guilt over his missing wife. But Mike had been clean and sober for a long time and did not fall prey to that common mistake of dry drunks of dropping into endless remorse over what was past. He knew he couldn’t change the past with any number of apologies, so he stuck with the present. There were no explicit contracts between the two of them when the night ended. They both said they’d like to get to know each other better and agreed to meet again on neutral ground over the weekend. Mike made no mention of his intention of making Janice his heir, and for that Aaron was grateful. The acquaintance would progress in its own way now. His job was finished.

The scene that greeted him when he opened Hattie’s door at her invitation to come in was much the same as it had been the week before. The chairs sat comfortably next to each other with a small table shared between the two of them. This week, the decanter of sherry and the glasses were already on the table, however, and Hattie beckoned warmly to him to have a seat and set up his recorder. Once he was settled, she asked him to pour the sherry and said, “What shall we talk about this week, my dear?”

“Well, why don’t we spend some time talking about what you remember of life as a teenager in the 20s?” Aaron asked smiling. It was really a rarity in this day and age to talk with someone who had been around in the roaring twenties and who was old enough at the time to remember something about them.

“Oh, yes. I suppose you want to know all about the Roaring Twenties, don’t you?” Hattie smiled. “Well, you have to understand that in Uniondale, Indiana the didn’t really roar. They sort of meowed.” Aaron nearly spit sherry through his nose at that one and could see that Hattie was smiling at her own joke. “Of course, Meowing Twenties doesn’t really make a good headline, does it?”

“I don’t know about that,” Aaron replied. “I might make that the chapter heading for the decade if that is what it was like in rural Indiana. Surely there were some similarities brought about by prohibition, at least,” he suggested.

“Well, there were no speakeasies in Uniondale. There was a big Methodist church there, and they were tea-totallers anyway—most of them prohibitionists from the start. But there were a fair number of Lutherans as well, and the amount of beer that was brewed in chicken-coops probably made up for any speakeasies that we didn’t have.

“Of course, as teens, it didn’t make that much difference to us. We were all too young to care until prohibition was almost over. And if anything, that made us into a completely separate party in the arguments over prohibition. As teens we didn’t care who drank or didn’t drink as long as we could dance. Now there was an argument that was just waiting to happen. The Methodists and Lutherans would have banded together to prevent the lewd behavior if it hadn’t been for the Baptists joining in the fray. If there was ever anything that could unite a Lutheran and a Methodist it was arguing against a Baptist. When the Baptist minister started preaching regular sermons on how those who danced were lighting their own hellfires and would burn for eternity, the Methodists and Lutherans re-thought their position on the issue. It must not be as sinful as they thought if the Baptists were against it, was the reasoning.

“So, it was in the spring of my sixteenth year that we were allowed to have our first organized dance. It couldn’t be held at any of the churches or the school, just on principle. The firehouse wasn’t big enough. So we held the dance at the Grange. It was a big one-room meeting house with movable benches, so we could stack them against the walls. It was located just outside of town, so Uniondale could still declare that it didn’t allow drinking or dancing. Of course, our parents assumed we’d be having a square dance, but enough of us had radios in our homes by that time that jazz and blues were what we had in mind. Allie Johnson convinced her brothers to slip the family’s Roger’s Radio out of the house and transport it to the Grange just before the dance. Oh, the sound was terrible by any standard you care to name!” Hattie laughed. “But we didn’t care. We had Count Basie in the Grange, and Allie’s parents were at a complete loss when they went to listen to Will Rogers that night they couldn’t find the radio. They were a little simple, though you couldn’t tell by Allie and her brothers. By morning, they’d convinced themselves that they didn’t really have a radio.” Aaron and Hattie were both laughing by the time she’d finished this story. She had a bit of a coughing fit and asked for more sherry. Aaron wasn’t completely certain that the coughing was anything but an excuse to pour more, but he gladly acquiesced to her request.

“Well, tell me, Aunt Hattie, how did boys and girls interact when you were a teen? Did you ever have any boyfriends?” Aaron adjusted the microphone as Hattie leaned her head back on her chair. A far-away look came into her eyes and for a long moment she sat silently. Aaron thought perhaps he had lost her to some internal memory that she wouldn’t put in words, but sat patiently for her to continue. Sometimes if you asked too many questions in these interviews, the interviewee became confused and didn’t know what to answer first, or what the question was at all. At last, with a sigh, Hattie broke the growing silence.

“Oh yes, such a boyfriend,” she breathed. “I’m not going to tell you about him right away. Because I should say that in the country, boys and girls grew up somewhat more quickly than in the city. We had more than enough opportunity to sneak off alone, to meet in the woods, or to just walk over to each other’s homes if the weather was fitting. There were long summer nights catching fireflies when we were little that turned into nights lying on the lawn just gazing up at the stars holding hands as we got older.

“Now don’t you go thinking we were promiscuous and believed in free love or anything. But I remember one time in my teens my grandmother giving a disgusted snort at my appearance and saying that if girl’s skirts got any shorter they’d have two more cheeks to powder.” Aaron nearly lost his sherry again. He’d seen no sign that Aunt Hattie was mad, but she had the assurance of a person who is 95 years old and could say anything she pleased without being judged. “Oh, we were a terror to our parents, and I’m sure they thought we were up to much worse than we were. Children today don’t live with enough animals. We knew the facts of life on the farm before we were in our teens. We’d seen animals in all stages of reproduction from copulation to birth. We understood cause and effect and it took no religious watchdogs to plug our ears when people talked about sex for fear that we’d be corrupted.” Hattie paused and looked directly at Aaron for a moment.

“Now look, I’ve embarrassed you,” she chided.

“No, no, Aunt Hattie. Surprised me, but not embarrassed,” Aaron reassured her, though he could feel a little color rising in his cheeks. It was beginning to appear that Mad Aunt Hattie might give him information that was more blunt and to the point than teens he had interviewed this year.

“Very well. Now if there is any of this that you don’t want to hear, you just say so and I’ll shut my old trap up. But you have to understand that we were young, but we knew what’s what.

“Now you take that dance of ours. There were a lot of couples slipping off for a kiss before the night was over, in spite of the fact that we had a nearly one-to-one relationship of chaperones to kids dancing. But nothing went past the stage of propriety and there weren’t girls being plundered by undisciplined boys. I guess maybe that was a benefit of living in a dry community, but maybe it was just because we all knew each other so well, and knew that one day we’d have our lifelong mates from this group of friends and we didn’t want all our other friends and acquaintances knowing that we’d spread the wealth too broadly in our youth. But, I tell you this because of what happened that night and because you asked me if I had a boyfriend. Well, yessir, I wasn’t always a wrinkled old prune like I am now. I was plenty attractive as a teen.”

“I believe you are beautiful even now, Aunt Hattie,” Aaron felt compelled to interject. “You must have been a knock-out as a teen.”

“Oh, pshaw, young man. The beauty of an old woman comes from inside her, and anyone who sees it has to look there. A sixteen year old girl, on the other hand, well, let’s face it, there really aren’t any ugly ones. Beauty sits on teenagers like dawn on the hilltops. We spent most of our time covering it up, thinking we needed redder lips and rosier cheeks, never realizing that we were beauty queens, every one of us. And the boys! Oh, the boys were beautiful, too. And one boy stood out in my eyes like a bright start on a dark night.

“I’d seen him only twice since that day that he pulled me out of the creek; both fleeting glimpses of him walking through the woods near the Twelve Oaks Church. Once I’d run to try and catch up with him, but he just disappeared. But this night at that dance, I saw him come in. I was dancing with Daniel Ridnaur and I stepped on both his feet. When the music changed he wanted to keep dancing with me, as we’d danced about four numbers prior to that and I think he was getting ready to kiss me. I said, no I needed some lemonade and suggested he dance with Allie for a while.

“I was standing by the punch bowl when he came up to me. Well, really, I was nearly the only one who wasn’t dancing at the moment, so it’s not like he had a great many girls to choose from. He asked me to dance and I turned and fell into his arms. He whisked me around the dance floor to the music and I swear my feet never touched the ground. I was in heaven. Before we knew it, Ben Adsly was ringing the triangle at the door and saying it was 11:00 and we needed to all head home. It wasn’t decent to keep young people up till midnight.

“I stepped out the door with my young man as if he were to escort me home, but my brothers had other ideas about that. ‘Mattilda, they called. Say good night and get over here in the wagon.’ Well, they were only that polite because they were both involved with girls they were trying to get a good night kiss from, whose parents or neighbors were trying to cut out of the herd and corral. But it was my opening to turn to my boy and raise my face to his.

“‘You don’t really know me,’ he said looking in my eyes. ‘Oh, I know you,’ I said. ‘You’re my guardian angel.’ And I kissed him right then and there. ‘Can I call on you?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I said. He looked shocked, but it was nothing to the look he had when I said ‘Meet me at the Twelve Oaks Saturday morning next week at an hour past dawn. We’ll talk about whether you can call on me.’ Why you should have seen the look that came over him then. He grinned so broadly that his face absolutely shone. My brothers started caterwauling then about getting in the wagon and if I didn’t move they’d come carry me there. So I reached up and just touched his cheek, then ran to catch the wagon. I don’t remember anything else about that night; just that I lay in the back of the wagon as my brothers drove us and a few other kids home. I just looked up at the stars and dreamed about my angel.”

Hattie was lost in a dream with her sherry glass halfway to her lips. Aaron smiled. It was not often that he caught an older interviewee in a story that transported her, but it was always a sweet thing to see. He turned off the recorder and packed it away. He stood to leave and reached to touch her hand.

“Aunt Hattie,” he said softly, “I’ll be going now. May I come see you again next week?”

“Oh my dear,” she said coming out of her reverie. “I didn’t mean to chase you away so soon. “But please come again next week. I’ll tell you all about the meeting at Twelve Oaks. You should see that place. I suppose it’s still there, though I haven’t been near it in fifty years. Go north out of Uniondale two miles and then turn right. It’s just at the top of the hill. You’ll love it up there. It is such a sweet, magical place.”

“I’ll do that before I see you next Friday, Aunt Hattie. Thank you for the story you told today and for the sherry,” Aaron said, holding her hand. “’Til next week, then.”

“Next week, dear,” answered Hattie. “Next week.”

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