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Chapter 1
Finding Signs

 

See? Here are the men in scarlet jackets with gold braid, the grand stairway with rainbow light, the hall of mirrors where I played. And look, here’s someone carrying me through gardens.” I turned the sketchbook pages of my earliest memories, carefully ren­dered in watercolors. I was eighteen and sure that my art would con­vince her.

My mother had just spread a rectangle of sweet dough with melted butter, chopped nuts, and cinnamon sugar. “No, those were dreams, Hazel. You’ve always dreamed and you’re always drawing. But dreams aren’t real. We never had a garden. Look around this flat. Do you see rainbow light? Men in scarlet jackets with gold braid? Mirror halls? This is Pittsburgh.”

She was right that in 1914, in our German-American enclave of East Ohio Street, men didn’t wear scarlet jackets. My father’s hardware store dealt in silvers, grays, bronze, and brass. No rainbow light ever pierced the narrow stairway to our flat. Black smoke from the city’s steel mills smeared our skies, our clothes, and the faces of men who spent their days stoking coal fires. Yet how could I deny memories as real as my own life?

“Musicians played while people ate,” I insisted as she rolled the dough in a neat log.

“Now that’s impossible. We only have a Victrola.” She wet a finger to seal the roll, adding loyally: “Of course your father’s hammer makes a kind of music.” A kind of music, yes. Every night after dinner he tapped scenes of his beloved Heidelberg into tin plates for other heart-torn im­migrants. “You were so young when we came to America,” she persisted, cutting the log into slices she’d set to rise near our coal stove. “You can’t possibly remember Germany, and we certainly weren’t rich there. Do you remember the storm at sea or that terrible bread?”

“No.”

“Or changing your name from Hilde to Hazel to make you more American?”

“No.”

“Well then? All that scarlet and gold must be a dream.”

Whether memories or dreams, the men in scarlet jackets were real to me, but as distant as the marvelous lands I read about beyond the constant stain of Pittsburgh’s smokestacks: “It was a beautiful blue day . . . The sparkling waters . . . A cloudless morning greeted them with sweet, clear air.” I filled private sketchbooks with green fields hugging a white schoolhouse, forests mirrored in lakes, and bright skies over Paris, Rome, and Venice. Meanwhile, the windows of our flat looked over rolling waves of smoke. Rain sprayed grit against the glass I washed each week, leaning precariously over the street. Factory dust sieved into the four rooms, fading the wallpaper and filming the copper pots my mother scrubbed back to ruddy suns. With equal care, she swept our hardware store, polished counters, and kept the front windows sparkling. She even washed meat from Mr. Schmidt’s butcher shop and vegetables from Mr. Hesse’s grocery. Our cabbage sometimes harbored whiffs of soap. I began each school day in starched clothes and polished shoes, as if my American citizenship must be confirmed with unfailing cleanliness and order.

Yet no matter how hard my mother and her neighbors worked, they could only clean their private realms of Pittsburgh. The Monongahela River was a black swill. Trudging home in midafternoon gloom, we schoolchildren wrote our names in dust that settled everywhere. We stomped off soot and shook our coats before coming indoors. Every­one coughed, for there was no cleaning the lungs. Those who worked in foundries and mills coughed most of all. Pneumonia and dysentery raged through families housed in soggy ravines with open sewers. In the steady gloom, children’s bones grew crooked. In cheap boarding­houses, men slept in dank rooms, in beds warm from those in the shifts before them. When millworkers’ funerals wound through the streets, my parents and their friends were grateful to be shopkeepers, butchers, brewers, cabinetmakers, bookkeepers, and tailors.

Thanks to my good grades and their careful savings, I could enter “the professions,” my mother boasted. Of course I would be success­ful. “That goes without saying.” But she did say it, to my teachers, for example, while I squirmed in embarrassment. She announced my re­markable future in shops and outside our Lutheran church, where we gathered after Sunday services. Their great friends—I called them my Uncle Willy and Tante Elise—heard in exquisite detail every sign of my extraordinary destiny. At the least, I’d be a lawyer, a professor, or doctor and have a fine home in Pittsburgh’s elegant Shadyside neigh­borhood.

“Or an artist,” I suggested. “Like Father with his tins.”

Uncomfortable silence spread around our table. “The tins are a pas­time,” my mother clarified. “They’re not what he does. With your advan­tages, you could rise above.”

“Like Brunnhilde the Valkyrie?” I suggested. Encouraged by my fa­ther’s twitch of a smile, I threw a wider net: “Or Boudica, the warrior queen?”

“Laugh if you want, but I’ve known from the first that you were destined to be extraordinary. Even,” she conceded, “an extraordinary teacher. I’ve seen signs.” Here all jesting stopped, for her signs were not to be contradicted. They were as much a fixture of our flat as boiled potatoes.

“Well then,” my father said, “are there signs of sauerbraten? Could we eat before Hazel achieves her destiny?” When he touched my mother’s hand as she passed the serving bowl, the blues of their eyes melted to­gether.

In my future dreams, the “extraordinary” meant travel, sketching, painting, meeting great artists, and passing golden hours in a storied café, funding these adventures through teaching and tutoring. It went without saying that my parents weren’t delighted. They were only mod­estly pleased when, at sixteen, I began working at our pastor’s Saturday school, teaching American-born children to read and write German. Yes, it was good to preserve our Kultur, the language of Goethe, and pride in the Fatherland, but not as preparation for “a gypsy life.”

“ What do you expect, Hazel? You’re their only child,” my friend Luisa demanded. She was right: I was the vessel for all my parents’ ambitions, fierce love, and claim to the Renner family’s success in America. I knew my mother’s pain that there was no child after me, no baby for the cradle my father had hopefully carved, and then tact­fully stored away. I knew about the patent medicines she bought with money squeezed from small economies and the Russian herb woman she surreptitiously visited. I saw how hungrily she looked at babies on the street, her tense smiles when neighbors’ bellies bulged, and heavy silences after baptisms in our church. “Don’t cry, Katarina,” my father whispered in their bedroom when they thought I was asleep.

“But a son, Johannes. Don’t you want a good American son?”

“We’re happy. We have a good American daughter. She’ll be extraor­dinary, just as you say. Meanwhile, we have our health, our friends, and the store’s doing well. Best of all, I have you. Come close, come close, my little darling.” Their voices softened into murmurs and I crept back to my room.

Yes, I was my parents’ “real American,” while they’d be forever branded as foreigners the instant they opened their mouths. Every bungled th or w betrayed them. The very cadence of their voices, even the studied perfection of my father’s grammar labeled him as a for­eigner who tried too hard. Because I had no accent, shopkeepers didn’t speak loudly and slowly to me as if I were deaf or dull-witted.

I ached for my parents as their fingers crept down tight columns of the Pittsburgh Post, or they delivered careful thanks to my teachers each June. In German, they never halted or stammered, searching for words. Even their laughter was different, freer and more rolling. They told stories and jokes. They sang. Americans couldn’t imagine how their tongues loosened at home like stout women unlacing corsets, relating their day, the store business, my mother’s shopping, my school grades, and news from Germany in Pittsburgh’s Volksblattnewspaper.

Still they struggled on in English. My mother and I crawled through books from the public library. I’d read one page of Little Women, and then she’d do the next, earnestly mimicking my accent. We worked through The Red Badge of Courage, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and her favorite: Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Terror, until she could read by herself with a dictionary at her side.

“You’re already a citizen,” I reminded her. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Yes I do.”

Perhaps she was right. Everywhere one heard how our country was polluted by “hyphenated Americans”: German-Americans, Hungarian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Greek-and Italian-Americans. Every­thing “ethnic” was an unpleasant mold that must be removed. President Woodrow Wilson himself had warned the foreign-born: “You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourself in groups.” Each month, fewer children came to German Saturday school. They wanted to be Americans. More and more, their parents let them play baseball, stickball, or marbles on Saturday, or gave them nickels to see the Key­stone Cops, Fatty Arbuckle, and Charlie Chaplin.

My father began introducing himself as John Renner. He stocked Popular Mechanics, Scientific American, and Uncle Sam piggy banks for children. But when my mother began preparing American meals sug­gested by Good Housekeeping, he revolted. “In the privacy of my own home, I’d like decent food.” Why the “ridiculous” green of parsley butter? Why tomato bisque when potato soup was clearly better? Jell-O repulsed him. “Is this alive?” he demanded, bouncing his spoon on a crimson square. He refused grapefruit at breakfast, was suspicious of store mayonnaise, and would not substitute cottage cheese for quark.

“You could try it,” my mother argued. “Don’t you like experiments?”

“Not with food.” For Sunday dinners with Uncle Willy and Tante Elise, we did have “normal” meals: sauerbraten, green beans, spaetzle, and rye bread. “Come more often, Willy,” my father pleaded, “and save me from Good Housekeeping.” As belts and tongues loosened and the men moved from beer to schnapps, talk turned to Europe’s troubles: Kaiser Wilhelm’s bluster and blunders, unrest in Serbia, and outra­geous French demands for the return of Alsace-Lorraine, which was clearly German territory.

I eased from the table to the window seat and took out my colors. The Kaiser meant nothing to me; I had many Serbian friends and didn’t care about Alsace-Lorraine. Sometimes my parents felt as far away as Europe, still locked in kingdom struggles. Better to tackle the persis­tent puzzle of my life: the splendid rooms I shouldn’t remember. Where did those memories come from? Was there another Hazel besides this one on East Ohio Street? And another mystery: Why did I always draw the same little blue house in the country, in the same avidly imagined detail, with two vague figures on the porch step? One might be me. And the other?

And why were my dreams so ungrateful, so bent to my own plea­sure? If I went to medical school and became a doctor as my mother often suggested, I could buy my parents a house with a big kitchen, separate dining room, garden, and a workroom for my father’s tins and projects. I could take them back to Heidelberg. We could walk along the Neckar River, visit old relatives, see the church where they were married, and eat white asparagus that was nowhere finer than in the stalls along the Marktplatz. Didn’t they deserve these pleasures?

“Wouldn’t you like to be a doctor, Hazel?” my mother might let fall while shaping rolls or pressing out butterplätzchen,the butter cookies so beloved at our church dinners. “After all, you have the healing touch.” So many times I’d heard the story, the telling as solemn as any liturgy: “When you were just five years old, you cooled your hands in ice water, climbed on a stool, and rubbed your father’s headache away. You knew what to do! Wasn’t that a sign?”

“I’m not sure.”

“But you should be sure. You make my shoulder better in the morn­ing just by rubbing it.”

“Dr. Edson says arthritis is always worse in the morning. Rubbing just feels good; it doesn’t heal anything.” No, she insisted, I’d be an extraordinary doctor. There were signs. Apparently, school prizes in drawing weren’t signs of an art career. An award for memorizing Bible verses was merely admirable. Having my own class in the German Sat­urday school wasn’t a sign for a teaching career. First place in the girls’ fifty-yard dash wasn’t a sign of anything at all. “Why are only her signs real?” I asked Luisa as we sat in Katz’s, sharing a chocolate milkshake.

“I don’t know, but the only signs my mother sees are that I’ll be in trouble if I don’t hurry up and marry a sober, hardworking man with a good job. Your parents want more for you. You should be grateful.”

“You’re right,” I admitted. How many shoeshine and messen­ger boys would rather be in school? Girls my age ironed for hours in steaming laundries or scrubbed for rich people. Children of millwork­ers played with lumps of coal, their only toys. Nobody took them to Carnegie Library on their sixth birthday for their own borrowing card.

“Well then? Will you think about medicine?” Luisa demanded.

“Yes.” But not today. I persuaded Luisa to come with me to the Car­negie Institute to see great art: Grecian gods and goddesses, English landscapes, and French women wearing clouds of lace, swinging in sylvan glades. “Those ladies never cook,” Luisa said. “I have to go now and help my mother make tortellini.” I lingered, entranced by the skill of artists whose skill soared over mine. They were extraordinary.

On my way home, Mr. Schmidt the butcher stopped me. “Hazel, we’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“What happened?” A fire in our flat? Sickness? A robbery in the store? Were my parents hit by a streetcar?

“You know how they always walk together to the newsstand for the Volksblatt?”

I nodded. Mr. Schmidt could not be hurried in carving meat or tell­ing stories, but now I wanted to shake him. “What happened? Are they hurt?”

“Well, they were coming home, passing my store. Your father was reading the headlines to your mother, as he always does. They waved to me, and I waved back. I was trimming ribs.”

“Yes, and—”

“So he was reading the headlines. Then two hoodlum boys shoved them, ripped the Volksblatt from his hands and threw it in the gutter. They said real Americans read American newspapers.”

“But nobody was hurt.”

“I don’t think so.”

I thanked Mr. Schmidt and ran home. My father wouldn’t discuss the incident or speak to the boys’ parents, who were his customers. “Next time, I’ll buy a Pittsburgh Postand fold the Volksblattinside it.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

“But it’s better that way. Now look at the fine apple strudel your mother made.” As I walked down East Ohio Street in the next week, I studied every passing pair of boys. Were they the ones who insulted my parents? What had they heard at home that made them want to do such things?

“Next Sunday,” my mother announced, “we’re having a picnic at Raccoon Creek Park.” She’d already determined the streetcar routes that would take us there, the picnic menu, and that we would not say a single word about the Kaiser, Serbia, Alsace-Lorraine, or anything in the newspapers.

“Well, Hazel,” my father said, “I see signs that our Sunday is planned.” So we went. The air at Raccoon Creek was silky soft, as clean as fresh linen. Green lawns surrounded a placid lake under a tender blue sky. I helped spread our gingham tablecloth over springy grass and set out a plate of rye bread. My father lay down with a sigh. My mother opened her mending basket. I sketched willow trees bent over the lake. From the corner of my eye, I saw my father’s arm arching back and forth, pulling off chunks of bread he dropped in his mouth. “Don’t spoil your appetite,” my mother muttered, bent over a sock.

“Bread is life,” he answered dreamily.

Suddenly an unearthly gag ripped the quiet. My father was on all fours, shoulders heaving. Then he collapsed like a house of cards, his face a sickly gray.

My mother shrieked and for the first time used his Christian name in my presence: “Johannes!”

Not possible, not possible, I thought wildly. Not on a green lawn by Raccoon Creek Park, under this blue sky. When I yanked him up to sitting, he was limp as a rag doll. Picnickers came running with sug­gestions.

“Hit him on the back!”

“Lift his arms!”

“Shake him!”

“He’s dead,” my mother sobbed.

“He’s not!” I don’t know why I thought of a child’s popgun. With a surge of strength, I squeezed hard under his ribs. Pop the cork. I squeezed again, even harder. A wad of bread flew out of his mouth, landing on my mother’s skirt. She shrieked again. He heaved, weakly breaking my grip as a red curtain rose up his face. Inside that gorgeous scarlet, blue eyes flew open, looking back at me. My chest heaved in exhaustion and relief.

“Johannes!” my mother cried, flinging her arms around him. She’d never done this in public before, ever.

He coughed and gasped: “What were you doing, Hazel, squeezing me to death?”

“No, pal, squeezing you to life,” said a spectator.

My mother seized the loaf and—another first—threw away per­fectly good food. The loaf made a wide arc and plopped into the lake.

“Great pitch.”

“Throw that sucker!”

“You should play for the Pittsburgh Pirates, lady! What an arm!”

“Hazel, you saved him. He was dead and you brought him back,” one cried.

No, no, both things were impossible, first that my father could die and so absurdly, for a bit of bread. Second, that I, plain Hazel, could bring back the dead. “Now, now,” my father said reasonably. “Maybe I skipped some breaths, but let’s not be dramatic. I am thirsty, though. I’d like a beer, Mother.”

“Of course.” She fumbled for a bottle. “But Hazel, isn’t this a sign that you were meant to be a doctor? After all, you knew just what to do. You saved—”

My father wiped his mouth. “Enough. We’re grateful that Hazel was with us and thought quickly. Let’s just enjoy—”

“But she saved—” The blue glaze caught hers and she fell silent, brushing crumbs from the tablecloth. In the next days, her wondering, adoring eyes on me, her heaping my plate with the choicest sausage, and exquisite care in ironing my clothes, all repeated one certainty: I had miraculously saved her treasure on earth. “If you really don’t want to be a doctor,” she conceded, “you could at least be a nurse. I’m sure the picnic was a sign.”

“Mother, not everything is a sign.” Perhaps not, but signs filled her world. Chimney sweeps were good signs; seeing anyone walk between two old ladies was very bad, like a song before breakfast. A knife re­ceived as a present was a sign of coming misfortune. After an Italian friend announced that 17 was even more unlucky than 13, the 17th of many months brought her sick headaches. A husband nearly killed by rye bread and saved by his daughter, how could that not be a sign?

Was it? The question rolled in my mind at night. My future swirled. Perhaps I was as wrong about my dreams of travel and drawing as I was about the scarlet jackets. Why notdo good in this obvious way? I’d helped my father; I could help others. Were there really signs that I had been called to a life of art and not of healing? Was I being arrogant—or simply wrong? If I went to museums, shouldn’t I at least see where doc­tors trained?

I took a streetcar to the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, mounted the broad steps, and wandered through hallways smelling of alcohol, formaldehyde, and oiled wood. Neatly labeled displays lined the halls. In an amphitheater, a professor questioned a one-armed millworker about phantom pain. Students in white jackets discussed a pneumonia case. “Atypical,” said one. “Fascinating,” said another. A young woman was among them, wearing a white coat like theirs, an equal. They might welcome me. But could I share their fascination, their dedication? Would I be a fraud, or worse, if I tended the sick by rote or duty? “Can I help you, miss?” one of the young men asked. “Are you looking for someone?”

“No, just—looking around.” He turned back to his colleagues. I hurried away. I had been looking for someone: Dr. Hazel Renner. But she wasn’t here.

I went to Dr. Edson’s office and waited until the last patient left. “So, Hazel,” he began as he always did, “what brings you here?”

I wasn’t sick, I explained, only curious: “When did you decide to be a doctor?”

“I didn’t decide. I always wanted this life.” He studied me, the mild eyes and soft questions drawing out every symptom of distress. I ex­plained how I’d helped my father at the picnic, my good grades, my mother’s plans for my future, and my uncertainty. “I see. You think you ought to want to be a doctor because it’s an honorable profession, but you aren’t sure it’s the right path for you. Is that it?” I nodded. Dr. Edson studied his stethoscope, as he often did, so intently that when I was small I imagined it held all the world’s medical knowledge. “You know, Hazel, there are many honorable professions.” The old eyes twin­kled. “Plumbing, for instance. Running a hardware store, teaching, or art. You must find your honorable profession, the place where you can do good. If not, if you choose wrong, some damage might be done, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps.”

“Almost certainly.” He tucked the stethoscope into its wooden box for the night. “I hear good reports from your Saturday school class.”

“Some children have stopped coming.”

“They’ll be back. This unpleasant idea that true Americans must forget their father’s culture will surely pass.” He fumbled for his Hom­burg hat. I helped him with the tweed jacket he’d worn forever. “Thank you, my dear. Mrs. Edson is waiting for me, as your parents are waiting for you, I’m sure.” He opened the office door for me and led me to the street, where he bowed slightly and started home, stopping often to greet his many patients.

I passed the next days in a haze of anxiety until on a grimy morning like any other. I made my choice, or rather, seized the choice that had hovered over me for months like a gauzy dream. Not medicine and not travel yet. By next year I could be qualified for teaching in a one-room country school. In a green and quiet place outside the city, I’d draw and paint, capturing light in color. Children would drink knowledge like water. I’d live frugally, save money, and then begin my great ad­ventures.

I laid out this plan to my parents, Uncle Willy, and Tante Elise at our next Sunday dinner, noting that the city’s finest normal school for teacher training was only a streetcar ride away. I could even get a schol­arship. “It’s much cheaper than studying medicine,” I finished hopefully.

My mother set down our potato spoon. “Teaching in a country school,” she repeated. I knew what she was thinking, that there was no “extraordinary” in this plan.

“Teaching is a respectable profession,” Uncle Willy observed, spear­ing a potato.

“And honorable,” I said, but so softly that nobody heard me over the tapping of my father’s fork on the tablecloth like his hammer on tin.

“It might not be forever,” Tante Elise added. “You could stop, like Cousin Ludwig. He taught school for a while and then—” She trailed off, having once again offered a poor example. Ludwig embezzled school funds to pay off gambling debts, left town, and drifted south to New Orleans, where he died penniless.

Uncle Willy buttered a roll thoughtfully. “It is the American way for young people to decide their own futures.”

“That’s true,” my father agreed, rubbing out the fork marks my mother so disliked. “Well then, our Hazel will be the finest teacher in—western Pennsylvania. You willstay close for now, won’t you?”

“Yes, for now.”

“So,” Uncle Willy said loudly, “it’s settled.” We toasted my future with schnapps and prinzregententorte, the chocolate cake that my father claimed could bring back the dead.

“Hazel is restless; it’s in her blood,” Tante Elise observed as my mother poured schnapps. A fork clattered on a plate. Her hand wa­vered; my father had to chase the stream of schnapps with his shot glass. “I mean,” stammered Tante Elise, “that you both left Heidelberg even though your families wanted you to stay.”

“Exactly,” added Uncle Willy. “Crossing the ocean with a crazy tin­smith.” He clapped my father on the back. “Remember what Katarina’s father said? ‘That Johannes wouldn’t keep a roof over her head and he’ll break her heart besides.’ Now there’s a fine store, and twenty years later you still can’t take your eyes off her.” My mother blushed as my father squeezed her thickening waist. Once again he told how he’d first seen Katrina Brandt studying confections in a bakery window, comparing them to her own. Uncle Willy told how he met Tante Elise at a butcher shop and followed her home, carrying her meat. In years to come, I’d think often of that Sunday dinner when the shock of my revelation rolled into memories of the Old Country, the berry-picking parties and hikes, open-air concerts, and river walks in the long days of summer. That dinner was the last time America let us forget we were hyphenates.

six days later, on June 27, 1914, peace blew out of our world like air from a pinpricked balloon. Pittsburgh Postextras blared the news: Arch­duke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had been shot on a bridge in Sarajevo. I knew Sarajevo from geography class as a staid, minor city in a shrinking empire. Who could have pre­dicted that shots fired on a bridge there would ricochet as far as East Ohio Street?

“What’s one archduke more or less?” I heard the next morning on a streetcar. “Thank God it’s not our problem.”

But that night my father hunched over a map of Europe, making lists of countries that might stand for or against the Austro-Hungarians. “So many enemies,” he said. “We’re trapped in the middle.”

“The middle of what?” I demanded. “They caught the assassin, didn’t they? He’ll have a trial. There’ll be another archduke. It’s simple.”

My father ran his hand down my arm. “Hazel, Hazel, you’re so Ameri­can sometimes. Nothing’sthat simple in Europe. Watch. You’ll see.” 

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