West of Omaha about 40 miles, past the “AK-SAR-BEN” racetrack and amusement park and the ever-flourishing hills of Boys Town, and across the Platte River, sits the amiable little town of Wahoo, Nebraska. Famous for being the birthplace of producer Darryl F. Zanuck, the town has a billboard on the outskirts that proclaims:
In those years I was very much involved with my Wahoo relatives. From the age of five, I was dispatched to Nebraska each June. With a huge corsage pinned to my dress, I was taken with my older sisters for a grown-up lunch at an expensive restaurant, where I sat drinking Shirley Temples like some surly midget. Thereafter my mother and sisters gave responsibility for me to a hostess on the Rocky Mountain Rocket, who was admonished to keep a watchful eye on me until the train arrived in Omaha, where I would be met by relatives. Minutes after departure, corsage abandoned, I was in the club car sipping cokes and regaling fellow passengers with the perils facing an orphan traveling alone.
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By the time the train pulled into Omaha I was not so cocky, for the relative who was to meet me was Aunt Tilly, never at her best when the middle of the night found her in a train station and not a cabaret. “Where’s your corsage,” she would roar, looming at the top of the escalator stairs. “Pull up your socks. I hope you ate on the train because there’s nothing in the icebox but vegetables. Ha, ha. Look at your hair. Push that mop out of your face and don’t slouch–you’ll slide right into the escalator and be flattened like a pancake. That really happens you know.” It was a long ride up those stairs.
Those were golden summers. I was Anne of Green Gables and Rose of the Wildwood, lying in the alfalfa field squinting at the sun, hiding in the mulberry tree with forbidden books ever after blurred with purple stains. My life meshed with these odd relatives, and I became part of their web of intrigue. This was a family with secrets. Subjects of importance were discussed only in Bohemian. A smarter girl would have picked up a few key words, but mystery fed my imagination. Pedaling my tricycle happily around town, I repeated all I knew and a lot I didn’t to anyone who would listen–until the noon whistle called me home to dinner.
The letters from Aunt Libby continued through the years. Letters filled with odd details: “Howard fell down the back stairs Saturday and fractured his ovaries.” And “Nadine washes clothes every day because Geo. won’t cooperate, she bathes him & I feed him, he’s bedfast now, and starting to get bored with being paralyzed.” Letters replete with mysterious diseases and failed marriages. Graphic descriptions of funerals and births, and snapshots of strange babies we would never see. Years later, responding to a letter in which I had enclosed pictures of my children and a story I wrote about going to the racetrack with Nelson Algren, Aunt Libby replied: “Dear All of You. What a lovely family you have Mickey & thanks for the pictures, they are hanging in the hall of relatives over the stairway. We all liked your story about the races, Nadine never wins when she goes but Madge, Kate and I went together on one bet & we won $650.00 & I also won $27 on another bet. That was 4 yrs ago. Your daughter looks a little like Sharon’s oldest girl Caprice. Sharon has a professor (English) in Uni. at Ft. Collins, he has his doctorate & does a little writing. They have a lovely home with a large fenced in back yard–she is a dentist’s receptionist but works with garden & flowers, he builds around the place, plans on a family room, if weather clears up–he’ll do most of it himself, his folks are wealthy, but Jim makes enuf on his own–they’re Scotch–Caprice is oldest, a blond, Stephanie is a brunette & Robbi looks like a Scot, girls play violin & tuba.”
My mother and her sisters are long gone. Aunt Libby died peacefully in her sleep; Aunt Tilly, died, appropriately, on a train going west. As often happens when a connecting link is gone, I was remiss in keeping up correspondence with my cousins. So on the occasion of my sister Pat’s death I wrote long letters to them all, vowing anew to stay in touch. A year later when my sister Barb died, I knew Nadine would be devastated upon hearing the news. Nadine’s best friends growing up had been her cousins “Patsy” and “Barbie,” names they detested but endured because Mom said Nadine was nervous and they had to be nice to her. These three played paper dolls together for years, and it says something about Nadine that she still has all of hers. I put off making the phone call as long as I could.
She still sends me birthday cards. And there’s always a dollar inside.
