Under the Same Blue Sky
Read Under the Same Blue Sky Online
Authors: Pamela Schoenewaldt
For Silvia
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.
Thomas Hardy
from “The Man He Killed”
Contents
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Chapter 1
Finding Signs - Chapter 2
War Games - Chapter 3
Shell Shock - Chapter 4
Why Not Blue? - Chapter 5
Just a Fluke - Chapter 6
The Healing Hand - Chapter 7
Crazy Ben - Chapter 8
Looking for Margit - Chapter 9
There Was No Dream - Chapter 10
Rembrandt’s Lady - Chapter 11
A Constable in Pittsburgh - Chapter 12
Our Mother, Our Bride - Chapter 13
A Million Tins - Chapter 14
Under the Copper Beech - Chapter 15
What You Can’t Say - Chapter 16
A Child Like You - Chapter 17
Breaking the Line - Chapter 18
Crossing Back - Chapter 19
Wasteland - Chapter 20
In-Flew-Enza - Chapter 21
Christmas in Dogwood - Chapter 22
We’re Not the Same - Chapter 23
A Wooden Man - Chapter 24
The Work of Peace - Acknowledgments
- P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
- About the author
- About the book
- Read on
- Also by Pamela Schoenewaldt
- Credits
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
S
ee? 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
Volksblatt
newspaper.
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
.