Out of Hannibal

By Dean Walley

The door to the penthouse opened and there she was, the glittering star, Mae West, saying in her most seductive voice, Come on in, boys. She is one of many vivid personalities in Out Of Hannibal. There is the Duchess of Devonshire and a picnic with Jackie Kennedy and a Mona Lisa on the Riviera.
And there is always the influence of Mark Twain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781467036023

Dean Walley

When I was a girl, growing up in Odessa, Russia, I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The stories Mark Twain told me made me feel that I knew Hannibal, its streets and alleyways, the river and the cave. I shared the adventures of Tom and Huck and Becky. And now, reading “Out Of Hannibal,” I feel that I am back in that storybook town, meeting old friends and having wonderful times. Rosalie Pompushko, M.D.

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Best-Laid Plans

Mother died in church.

She had a stroke, fell over in the pew, and never regained consciousness. My father said that her last words were I want to go home.

Many people told me that since she died in church, she must have gone straight to heaven. I think that kind of knowledge belongs in the vast and foggy area of nobody knows for sure.

But if there is a heaven, then I’m pretty sure that Mother went there first class, on a direct flight, without any of the baggage that most of us have to carry around.

Of course, my mother’s passing was a source of great sorrow to my father and to my brother, to myself, and to all the people who loved her because there was a great deal about my mother to love.

But the grief that my father felt was accentuated by the timing of her death. Off and on, for years, he had instructed her in things like pilot lights and leaves in the gutters and who to call when something like the plumbing wasn’t working as it should.

And then my mother died first.

She had never instructed my father in the aspects of their marriage that were almost exclusively in her domain.

It never occurred to her to do so, because she was destined to be a widow someday, but he would never be a widower. That was just how it worked. It was the American way.

So my father was left without a knowledge of household things like cooking and grocery shopping. But a larger difficulty was that he was left without my mother’s social skills. She was always the one who planned dinners for family and friends. She was the one who was on the phone, setting things up, bringing all kinds of people into their lives. She furnished their future with her enthusiasm and her imagination.

After my mother’s death, my father told me, I don’t have anything to look forward to anymore.

That’s when I started going home more often to spend some time with him.

We had never been close. My mother had been the go-between and the interpreter between us.

We spoke different languages, when we spoke at all, and she would fill in the silences and smooth over the misunderstandings. Without her, my visits home were awkward for both of us.

My father was not a physically warm and outgoing person. I felt that he kept me at a distance. He didn’t hug. Not that I wanted him to. I think that hugging is an upper-body activity that has to be completed with dispatch and, if possible, avoided.

We shook hands. But even that was incomplete. He never let the handshake go all the way, palm to palm. The valleys between our thumbs and forefingers were never filled.

It was handshake interruptus.

Going for a Drive

One day, when I came home for a weekend visit, my father suggested that we go for a drive. It sounded good to me. Our first drive was so successful that we made it the centerpiece of all our times together.

It has been said that love doesn’t consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward in the same direction. Well, that also goes for a strained father-and-son relationship like ours. It was so much easier to talk when we weren’t looking at each other. We drove to parts of town that were unknown to me. And the surrounding countryside proved to be a source of discovery for both of us.

We passed a dilapidated farmhouse on the verge of collapse. Displayed on the porch railing were thirteen catfish skeletons, each one more than a foot in length. A poor man’s trophy case.

We discovered a small Jewish cemetery. It was on the side of a hill overlooking the Mississippi. Many of the stones had pebbles on top, each one a remembrance.

I found the grave of my beloved pediatrician, Dr. Landau, who had come to the house three days a week when I had rheumatic fever. I was so fond of him that I talked him into being my doctor until I went in the navy. In remembrance of all he did for me, I left a pebble of my own.

We drove past the house that used to be the home of my mother’s parents, Granny Lue and Poo.

This is where your mother and I were married. In the backyard on a fine spring day. All the neighbors came. We had ice cream and cake after the ceremony.

We drove up to Booker Street with its small, ordinary houses and its spectacular river view.

My father pointed to a small bungalow in need of a paint job.

That’s where your mother and I lived when you were born.

It was the house I had seen in pictures in my baby album, the place of my first memories.

Pepper

It was my happiest morning. It was partly because of the sun shining so gold and warm through the window. It was partly because of the smell of scrambled eggs still steaming from the kitchen. And it was partly the way the magic toaster popped up two pieces of soft white bread, made crusty brown.

But the big reason that I was happy was that I didn’t have to sit in the high chair any more. I was moved right up to the table on a booster seat. It was almost like sitting in a regular chair, just as my mother and father did.

My father buttered a piece of toast for me. And then he added some currant jelly, his favorite and mine too.

Everything was so happy and cozy, just the three of us, sitting right up to the table in our chairs.

But the spell was broken when my father got up to go to the Kroger store to cut meat.

Mother got up too. She and my father hugged and kissed. I might as well have been back in the high chair.

Somehow, I had gotten my hands on the pepper shaker.

I was looking down on the little holes on top with grains of pepper around them.

Some strange feeling made me blow into the pepper shaker. Grains of pepper jumped up and into my eyes.

Such a burning! I was crying, bawling. My father just left without saying good-bye or sorry or anything. Mother ran to me and wiped around my eyes with her napkin.

That was the end of the happiest morning.

Skeletons

On a crisp October evening, my father was driving me and my three nieces around town to see the Halloween decorations. The people of Hannibal had embraced the holiday and vied with each other to see who could come up with the most garish and ghoulish displays. This was so much better than the Christmas decorations that so often juxtaposed the Nativity scene with Santa and his reindeer.

There were lots of witches… witches on porches bent over steaming cauldrons; witches on brooms, hanging from eaves, as if in flight; and a chorus of witches dancing the cancan. These were actual people. I think.

Trees were festooned with intricate black webs that were crawling with tarantulas. There were ghosts on porch swings and ghosts peering out of