Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times (8 page)

They stayed there even after the sound of footsteps on the gravel got fainter and the car went away, and
they came out only when the sun did. The next day Charlie had a phone installed.

Even that Matilda had been able to get through, but there was a sense of mounting desperation in her now. She remembered first having this feeling when she was ten years old. Riordan had finally married her mother after being forced by a judge to provide for his bastard children—now three in total—and his sisters had found a small apartment for them near the family’s brownstone in Jersey City.

“I’m not going, Grandpa,” Matilda said.

“You have to, kid,” Peter told her. He’d asked Carrie to leave Matilda with him in the Bronx, but the suddenly clan-oriented Riordan had refused. It had taken every ounce of Peter’s will not to make Carrie a new widow.

Matilda tried not to cry in front of her grandpa. “I don’t want to go with them. I want to stay here, with you.” That was it; she started sobbing.

“I know, I know,” her grandfather said in his soft German accent, wrapping his big arms around her. “But I’ll come visit you all the time. And I’ll tell you what, kid: You be a good girl and go quietly, and I’ll get you a new bike. What do you say?”

Grandpa was as good as his word, and Matilda
brought her brand-new bicycle with her when she was taken to Jersey City. After one day with her father, Matilda called Grandpa to tell him that the bike was very nice, and if he didn’t come and get her she was going to ride it off the top of the building. He arrived the next morning to take her home.

Now Matilda could feel chill air coming in through the window panes, and with it came the same feeling of despair. Soon they’d be in the thick of another Saratoga winter, where the snow fell so hard it could block the door, and Matilda, away from her family for the first time in her life, might go for days without seeing a soul other than her husband and daughter. Living on this farm was too hard, even after all she’d been through. Every day was a struggle, and every night more sadness crept into the house. Charlie’s high dreams of being a farmer hadn’t panned out, and he’d sit silent in his Morris chair, unavailable to either her or Carolyn, on whom he’d always doted.

Something had to be done. So, after discussing the situation with seven-year-old Carolyn (there was no one else to talk to), Matilda had taken matters into her own hands.

From the window Matilda watched Charlie come
home from work and go to the barn to milk the cows. She saw him run out of the barn a second later and go to the chicken coop; then he sprinted to the house.

“Tillie,” he said, “where are the cows and the chickens?”

“Gone,” Matilda answered. “I sold them all. The horses too.”

Carolyn looked warily from her mother, who never stopped calmly peeling potatoes, to her father, who was likely to explode at any minute.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph,” Charlie said in disbelief. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“Because,” said Matilda, “I can’t take another winter here. We’re leaving and going to Florida, and if we don’t I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Charlie looked at his wife for a long moment. Then he walked over to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Okay” was all he said.

• • •

“And off we went,” Mom says.

“What about your dog, Happy?”

“Well, you remember he had that habit of chasing
cars,” she says. “One day he just didn’t come home, so either he got chased by a car, or he ran off with one of Truman’s purebred collies.

“Anyway, your grandfather boarded up the house, and we headed for Florida. We had a hundred dollars for the trip and who knew how long after that to tide us over, so your Nana kept meticulous accounts of what we spent along the way …”

OUR TRIP TO FLORIDA

We started off Saturday, November 15th, at 11:30. Stopped at Ballston Library; reached Albany at 1 P.M
.

Gas and oil—$2.91. Candy 30 cents
.

Lunch in Rensselaer at 1:10. Expense: $1.90

Left 1:30

Stopped Po’keepsie 3:30. Cake 70 cents. Oil 50 cents
.

Arrived Midge’s [Charlie’s daughter Mary, from his first marriage] 5:30. Stayed for a bite to eat. Left at 7:30 for Pop’s [Charlie’s father, Edmund]. Charlie bought a flashlight—$1.39. Hard candy for trip—69 cents. New black blouse for me—$6.00. We were surprised to see roses still in bloom in Pop’s yard. No frost there yet
.

• • •

Sunday, Nov. 16

Left Pop’s at 10:45. Gas and oil—$2.75. Holland tunnel
50 cents
.

Mom starts to laugh. “And when we were in the Holland Tunnel,” she says, “the brakes failed. We were driving an old Model A Ford—I don’t know how your grandfather thought this thing was going to make it from Saratoga to Miami. And your Nana said, ‘Jesus, Charlie, will you slow down?’ not noticing that his foot was on the brake so hard it was practically going through the floor.”

• • •

Arrived in Elkton, Md. at 4:40. Stopped at a tourist home. Very, very nice. $5.00 for the night. Went out for supper ($3.75). We asked for beer and waitress answered “no beer served on Sunday.”

• • •

Monday, Nov. 17

Left Elkton at 7:40. Went back 7 miles or so to New Castle for Route 13, to Cape Charles, Va. ferry. This is supposed to be a shorter route than U.S. #1. Time will tell
.

Gas and oil—$1.62. Smyrna, Del. Arrived 9:20. Breakfast $1.15
.

Arrived in Princess Anne, Md. at 12 noon. Temperature 52. Clear, very strong wind. In this territory we especially noticed: rest rooms signs say for White only
.

“Coming from New York, we weren’t used to that sort of thing,” Mom says. “We couldn’t believe it.”

• • •

Tuesday, Nov. 18

Left Norfolk at 7:30. Passed through Suffolk, Va. (peanut center) at 8:15 A.M. Saw first cotton on outskirts of Suffolk. Breakfast in Edenton, N.C. at 9:40. Delicious. Southern fried ham n’ eggs. Waitress asks “would you-all like anything else” in the smo-oo-th-est dr-a-w-l. Breakfast $2.00
.

It’s a very monotonous ride from Suffolk, Va. to Jacksonville. Arrived outskirts (6 miles before) Wilmington, N.C. at 5:15 P.M. Stayed at tourist cabin. Nice cabin, but chilly. Heated by gas. And no hot water. To make things more pleasant, it’s raining, and Carolyn has a slight cold. Hope tomorrow is nice
.

Cabin—$4.00
.

Mom remembers that stretch of the trip well. “Generally, we didn’t stop for lunch, just got rolls and cold cuts and ate them in the car as we drove. And this, by the way, was how Nana taught me math: She’d say, ‘Okay, we have two dollars for lunch for three people. If baloney costs this much and bread costs that, and you want a piece of candy, how much baloney can we afford?’ Leave it to her to turn being broke into a game.

“Anyway, there were leaks in the roof of the car, and it was raining as hard on us inside as it was out. We were laughing so much we almost choked on our sandwiches.”

• • •

Wed. Nov. 19

Breakdown outside Myrtle Beach 12:45 P.M. Very desolate road, no houses. Charlie going for tow car
.

“Looking back on that now—the wife and child stay behind in the broken-down car on the side of the road …” Mom shakes her head and sighs. “That could have turned out very badly. But that’s what we did.”

Charlie came back with tow car at 1:40. Staying at tourist cabin. Waiting for car to be fixed
.

• • •

Friday, Nov. 21

Yippee! Crossed Florida state line at 4:46
.

“We got out and kissed Bessie’s old fenders,” Mom says. “The ocean was on one side of the road, and there were groves of orange trees on the other, and you could take as many oranges as you wanted. After those barren winters in Saratoga, being in this place felt like anything was possible.

“A little while later, we got pulled over by a state trooper. We thought,
What now?
He took a look at our license plate and said, ‘Do you mean to tell me that you-all drove here all the way from New York in
this
car?’ Daddy said, ‘Yes, sir, we did.’ And the trooper said, ‘Well, God bless, and welcome to Florida.’ ”

• • •

They moved into a small apartment complex of white stucco buildings on Biscayne Bay, one block from the
beach. The rent for a studio with a kitchen and a small sleeping alcove was eighteen dollars a week—very reasonable for Miami in November. The owner was a Mrs. Krauser, an elderly lady in a wheelchair whose beautiful daughter lived with her because, as Mrs. Krauser whispered, “She had an unfortunate marriage.”

Among their neighbors were the Garretts, whose four children absorbed Carolyn into their fold instantly. They took her to the abandoned naval base at the end of the block, where the buildings were half sunk in the mud. The neighborhood kids were forbidden to go there, so of course that’s where they went to play. The Garrett clan also took Carolyn on bottle runs. People moved in and out of the neighborhood all the time according to the season or the availability of work, and the kids would descend on any newly vacant apartments looking for bottles to redeem for candy money. When enough bottles were collected, one of the parents would stand at the corner and watch as the group of children crossed the multiple lanes of Biscayne Boulevard to get to the convenience store on the other side.

Mr. Garrett worked at the local banana packaging plant, and he regularly brought home office supplies.
“Maw,” one of the kids would drawl, “can you make us banana and peanut butter sandwiches?” Soon the Kallahers were making their own banana sandwiches with the extras Mr. Garrett dropped off at their door.

On Friday nights Mr. and Mrs. Garrett would take their kids and Carolyn to the drive-in movie theater. There was an extra charge for children, so all the kids would pile in the back, and Mrs. Garrett would throw a blanket over them and tell them to be still and keep quiet—far too great a challenge for the five of them. The ticket taker would see the blanket shaking with fits of giggles, with sounds of
shhhhhh!
and more giggles coming from under it, and say, “Oh, just the two of you? Here you go, have a nice time.”

Charlie heard about carpentry work right away, but getting it was another story. Most of the construction jobs in Miami were union run, and he wasn’t a member. That left the option of going to a certain corner where men gathered in the hopes of being picked for day labor. Most of them came by themselves, but that first day Charlie drove up in the Model A with Matilda and Carolyn. He got out and walked over to where the men stood, noting the good, sturdy wooden boxes the carpenters had made for their tools. Charlie looked
down at the old grain sack he was carrying his tools in, turned around, and went back to the car.

“What’s the matter?” Matilda asked.

“I’m never going to get hired,” he said. “Look at me.” He hoisted the sack.

“They
are
going to pick you,” Carolyn said. “Daddy, go back.”

Charlie sighed, but he wasn’t one to look defeated in front of his seven-year-old daughter. He went back and found a few other guys who had grain sacks, a group of Polish workers who nodded to him in greeting.

Soon a truck drove up, and a woman got out. “I need five workers,” she said. “You, you, you two, and you.” Charlie was among them, and Matilda had to smile when she saw that the men the forewoman had chosen were the handsomest of the lot.

Even with Charlie’s new job, a traditional Thanksgiving dinner was out of the question—money was so tight that a twenty-five-cent raffle ticket to win a twenty-pound turkey with all the trimmings was an extravagance. “But I’m feeling lucky,” Matilda said to Carolyn as they headed for the bingo hall to get their ticket.

• • •

“That was one of the best Thanksgivings I can remember,” Mom says. “It was us and the Garretts and Mrs. Krauser and her daughter—they were the only ones who had an oven big enough for that huge turkey. We all ate together, and then we had enough leftovers to have Thanksgiving dinner for days.”

“You got lucky with that raffle,” I say.

“That’s the truth,” Mom says. “We were lucky with the whole trip. When I think of it now—driving down there in that broken-down car with a hundred dollars in our pockets, not knowing where we’d live or what we’d do for money—it sounds crazy. But your grandparents had been through the Depression; what was worse than that? This seemed like a reasonable plan by comparison.

“And you know what?” she says, smiling. “It was warm and beautiful in Miami. Nana had people to talk to, and I had kids next door to play with, and Grandpa worked during the day, came home at a normal time of night instead of at the crack of dawn, and had dinner with us. We were together, and we were so happy.”