A Stirring of the Air, A Shifting of the Light

By Wayne Luckmann

Reviewing lost times on Milwaukee's South Side during the 1930s and 1940s and beyond, this chronicle offers memorable events of an extended family of European heritage, some immigrating to America at the start of the 20th century. Recalling those events, the chronicle depicts how feelings and dreams deferred influenced perceptions and responses to the challenges of living in a new social environment and changing culture. Through its search for lost times, the chronicle offers moments that casts a line to the past that contributes to an understanding of the present passing moment.

“Vivid, emotive writing that opens a doorway to a bygone era, this is the work of an acutely observant, perspicacious writer who captures with equal vigor the hubbub of South Side street life and the volatility of family dynamics existing behind closed doors.” – Kirkus Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Squirrel Haven Publishing
• Release date: Jan 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463737439

Wayne Luckmann

Wayne Luckmann, a student of life and of ideas, writes from the basis of what he has experienced over several decades and what he has learned through observation and through close and repeated readings in literature, science, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, languages, and art. After surviving service of over forty years as tenured faculty at Green River College in Auburn, WA, and eleven years in Glendale, Arizona fostering rescued dogs and feral cats, he now resides in Bremerton, WA, his days now focused on continued reading in all his chosen subjects, continued study of the classical guitar, and dedicated attention to Works in Progress.

Book preview

A Stirring of the Air, A Shifting of the Light

A Chronicle of Lost Times

By

Wayne Luckmann

Copyright © 2021 by Wayne Luckmann

What follows is fiction: All characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this work are the products of the author’s imagination and are used as fiction.

Episodes

When Henry Fist was still a boy of seven

Lillian's house that Grandpa Emil built

Grandma Lillian loved gardening

On occasion, the Fists went with Grandpa Emil

Grandma Lillian in addition to gardening and needlework

A few years prior to her passing

Felix Fist always thought odd

Felix Fist gazed at a black and white photo

Felix sometimes wondered

One morning a week or so before his birthday

Felix lived with his parents and brother on Sunfish Avenue

Even before he went with his mother

The day the fighting stopped

Throughout her life

Early autumn, days still warm and bright

When Margaret and her children

Felix and Sonny danced and laughed

Coming out of the locker room

Henry Fist was asleep

Although Felix had missed his ride

The day Henry Fist learned he no longer had a job

Felix stood alone on yellow sand

Growing up with The Fonz

Well, you know what to do

Henry Fist suddenly, without warning, went mad

The Fist family always in want

Another factor possibly promoting Pa's mental collapse

A person's life is like a book,

Felix stayed with his mother until Sunday

The weeks following Felix's return

In an attempt to understand his own character

Uncle Carl had been a thief

Felix received a phone call from his mother

When Fist flew back for his mother's memorial service

Why had he returned?

One day aimlessly searching the Internet

Felix Fist gazed out the small, sealed window

Alone in a silver rental car he had picked up at O'Hare

Sunday morning approaching noon

At one of their meetings for lunch

Two days after his birthday

Now and then when facing yet another crisis

When Henry Fist was still a boy of seven, his father Emil in April, 1921 bought a house on South 24th Street just off Greenfield when the area was mostly swampy, vacant lots, and he refurbished that house into a family home he and his wife Lillian occupied for the rest of their days. In Emil's house throughout the following decades, the Fist extended family gathered yearly for feasts at Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and sometimes celebrated family events in between when they celebrated their bonds by filling their bowels.

Henry's second-born son Felix would later live his early years in that neighborhood on Milwaukee's Southside where German and Polish cultures mingled from the 1920s through the 70s by means of friendships and marriages and then dwindled and died. The last time he wandered through on one of his returns during the '80s to attend yet another memorial, Felix saw the culmination of changes he had heard already being discussed on summer evening porches and over backyard fences in the late 1940s: African-American families moving in at the edges followed later by Latinos, both groups bringing to the streets and alleyways an ambience so different Felix could not have begun to imagine when he as a child of ten had lived and flourished among the sounds and colors and flavors of the German-Polish ghetto secured and invisibly bounded he once had wandered freely as a boy.

What struck Felix about that neighborhood during one recent return was how common it appeared. What struck him about the dwelling that had been the family home on South 24th Street just beyond the redbrick alley off Greenfield Avenue was how typical and ordinary that house suddenly appeared, how diminished, derelict, and old among others of the same kind, its condition brought to stark clarity when Felix drove block after block passing others with more wholesome appearance in other areas of the same district, or how they looked as he had slowly descended from the air over mile after mile of similar anonymous dwellings. And yet, as Felix was approaching adolescence, that house and neighborhood had seemed extraordinary and alive, filled with color and sounds and aromas perhaps because everything had been so immediate, so neatly well-ordered, so familiar while at the same time without Felix knowing they had filled his life and shaped his character affecting what person he would become.

How strikingly ordinary that neighborhood and dwelling became immediately apparent when Felix studied a recovered photo from Ma's old family album. That black and white image of the house brought out the stark presence of the object that Felix had always viewed through the romantic lens of memory, just another house set in its common surroundings with a façade that masked the experiences once lived inside.

As so many others during that era, the Fists were at the time they lived in that house and that neighborhood part of an extended family. And although they were connected by blood and marriage, those families and their lives quite often remained separate. For just as in other families, there were two sides, one from his mother's and one from his father's, so Felix always had been fascinated those two factions that seemed so different could come together and join freely and easily-so it seemed. Somehow they all felt they were connected, especially when they gathered for traditional events of weddings, birthdays, feasts, or funerals, the two sides joined by common values they shared in celebration along with an exchange of gossip of what had transpired since their last close encounter.

The two factions of extended family were easily distinguishable by size, appearance, and manner. Henry Fist's immediate kin were large in body and long in limb, some of the women of a previous generation well over six feet, the men over two meters. Henry's relations were social and talkative, his wife's kin shorter, light in color, more demure. Yet, some on her side displayed a zest for life, frequently testing the rules, bending, perhaps even violating conventions, and often considered wild or delinquent by those on Henry's side.

Origins also defined the differences of the two sides but focused similarities. Henry's family of German heritage also had a branch that had lived in regions which are now within the borders of Poland, a fact that Felix now found somewhat ironic, since there had always been an ambivalence toward Poles among the Fists: His father Henry Fist had Polish friends, one a member of Henry's wedding party, and through marriage Polish relatives. Yet, Pa appeared to have an unexplained animosity toward Polacks who were not immediately connected with him when some event violated his sense of social order or custom.

Similarly, Felix's mother, grandmother, aunt, and uncle, along with other relatives, were all directly from Germany, but here, too, there was a branch whose origins were Prussian, one segment in past generations from Silesia. Thus, the two sides through origins edged toward unity. At the same time, most of both factions were Protestants, but on Henry's side those who were Catholic through his mother Lillian were suspect, considered pariah by some of Henry's kin, and the disputes over religious practices and rituals sometimes led to surprising, troubling conflicts.

Memory's store; Memory's story: How much of what Felix recalled actually happened as he remembered? Part of the difficulty, Felix was never certain at the time what exactly was taking place. After all, Felix was not much more than a child between birth and twelve when he lived in that ghetto, a precocious boy, to be sure, with intense curiosity and an avid interest in everything taking place around him before his eyes and through the other orbits and orifices of his awareness: Melodies, fragrances, flavors, images he savored, ingested, absorbed all, some moments so clear and distinct that they remained just as vivid and immediate for Fist more than three-quarters of a century later as they were when Felix had absorbed them into long-term memory.

Two questions Felix always asked when recalling such moments: Why were they so vivid and why did he still remember them? Why were they so compelling that from time to time they suddenly rose spontaneously into mind and imagination? Other questions always followed: What gave rise to them at various times among the neural, interchange of interconnected ideas? How did his brain store them throughout so many passing present moments?

One idea Felix kept coming back to was that of place. Much of what Felix recalled seemed to be hard wired into images of one place or another or places unique in flavor from voices sometimes Polish if Felix were in the area around Schuster's eight-floor department store on Mitchell Street, but mostly German in his immediate neighborhood of the towering redbrick church on 23rd and Greenfield Avenue and Schmidt's green grocery and butcher shop near 24th just beyond Laynie's tavern, and then, too, in the authentic German bakery on 27th and Greenfield, all places where the mother tongue was heard and spoken until The Second Planetary War when people stopped speaking their first language out of fear of being identified as supporting the enemy and many young men who enlisted to serve their country chose the Navy and more likely be sent to the Pacific Campaign where they wouldn't risk fighting those who might be related by heritage and possibly killing their own kin.

When Felix thought of such places, details emerged fostered by a special quality of light that seemed to create an aura, and that quality of light remembered or seen again often helped him define such places and such moments. For everything opening for Felix's inspection and testing appeared a wonder from his avid curiosity: The steam Felix ran through that billowed from the exhaust pipe of the Jewish tailor's press as if it were a dragon's fiery breath, or the diorama displays of scenes of Artic Eskimos or Aztec temples or Egyptian mummies or Chinese shrines displayed at the domed Milwaukee Public Museum downtown that always held Felix transfixed and slightly in awe with its capitol soaring a hundred feet or more above the polished marble floor and pillars as he entered.

Other images revived through his other senses also summoned up remembrances of scenes past: The warm, mild breeze and fragrances of spring while he toured the old zoo at Washington Park with a blossoming young woman with whom he had gone steady his last year of high school and who had initiated him into the throes of eros. Such places and the resurrected images of them seemed to distill those moments of his life through reminiscence to single drops of time, and those places or the memory of them became beads strung as a rosary eventually perceived as something mystic.

Such moments for Felix seemed to convey what Henri Cartier-Bresson claimed happened when focusing a camera: Capturing images with photons became an act of holding one's breath when all one's senses converged upon fleeting reality and recognized simultaneously and within a fraction of a second both the event itself and the arrangement of visually perceived forms that give the event meaning. Taking photos put one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis. Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother Theo similarly observed that concentrating on a single tree while depicting it and making that tree come alive by making everything surrounding it fall into place where all surrounding objects centering on that tree at the same time placed themselves in a natural perspective around it. And Paul Cezanne in similar fashion first made prolonged study of a scene to absorb its essence before setting pigments to canvas to depict what he had perceived.

So a certain quality of light always seemed associated with the moments Felix recalled people with whom he had lived and who had wandered through his life from dark to dark, while his world sometimes filled with radiant but often shifting light and color when mild breeze with warm fragrances stirred the air filling life with an ambience of security even while some of the most horrible events were being played out upon planet Earth, permeating most people's lives, threatening their very existence.

Yet, as portraits never offer an actual re-presentation of a subject, so, too, photographs never directly re-present an actual person. In all such images actual presences are shaped by whoever is re-presenting the subject while focusing on an aspect that offers a sudden epiphany from an incidental change that renews the subject and often provokes a search: Where the continental open road ends at the edge of the vast Western sea, Felix on occasion would find himself searching for a lost aunt.

So much of what actually happened around Felix always remained obscure, for although he claimed to know those spirits he conjured by means of places where he had witnessed the advent of their lives, he was never certain that what he recalled had actually happened, and the scenes which he tried to redeem remained stubbornly shrouded in shadows that he could never completely dissolve.

Lillian's house that Grandpa Emil built held a festive air for many years until family quarrels left it vacant and abandoned. Rich with flavors, fragrances, and colors, her house in later years was also Felix's home until Henry Fist and his family were forced to move when Grandma Lillian remarried. While Grandpa Emil was alive, the Fists frequently held family gatherings for seasonal events with many of the extended family gathered around the dark mahogany table extended by leaves beneath a fake Tiffany lamp.

These gatherings including discussions that went into the planning were in preparation for days and sometimes weeks before the final event when everyone arrived at Lillian's house. Gathering throughout the day, the festivities lasting from early morning well into night, the course of events following a typical pattern: Preparations begun the night before were continued and brought to fulfillment early in the morning, the women who arrived throughout the day contributing to last minute efforts, while the menfolk gathered in some convenient out of the way place of basement or parlor or Tess' tavern on the corner of 24th and Greenfield.

Wherever they settled, the men's discussion took its typical course: First an exchange of news, reports, or accounts of events involving relatives or friends: who had married, who had conceived, who had been delivered, who had passed away. Then sports were taken up, the discussion becoming lively and warm, until the talk turned to serious topics, those discussions further lubricated and fueled by liquid stimulants of choice. Such discussions sometimes got a bit too heated when the topic of religion was broached, as it was bound to be, since all those gathered were almost equally divided between Lutheran and Catholic, and the line of argument always led to a debate as to which faith was closer to the truth. Fortunately by this time, the woman with most authority declared a truce by asking them if they were ready to eat.

Table arrangements determined by age, smaller children sat at separate folding card tables, older children together at one of those folding table on one end of the big table toward the living room, they measuring their coming of age by when they were placed at the big table with big people, perhaps even allowed a small glass of port before they ate allowing adults who needed one the opportunity of having an extra glass themselves since dry wine was never served with meals. Adults usually seated themselves near their spouses, the women in charge seated near the kitchen door so they had easy access, and they were last to seat themselves having brought the final dish to the table crowded with dishes, the Bird or Ham resting golden and grand at the head of the table before Grandpa Emil ready to carve. On such occasions, Grandpa Emil had just enough port to accomplish the task, piling up a platter that was passed around while he went on carving standing before the sideboard with crocheted doily and bell-shaped, windup clock that chimed the quarter hours and announced the hour in Big Ben tolls.

Most tastes were satisfied by the meal horde: plain hor d'oeuvres of green olives, celery, carrot sticks, sweet-and-sour, bread-and-butter pickles, gherkins, crabbed apples, radishes, pickled relish; jellied cranberries; mashed mushy potatoes made with milk and lots of butter; mashed yams (when Great Aunt Vi was there); peas and carrots; and rarely, if ever, green salad, since seasonal lettuce and tomatoes were dear. Such condiments came with salt and pepper in cut-glass cellars into which one could dip radishes or celery directly. Everyone filled their plates until everything slid into a melded heap. Then they set to, and now there was little if any talk, save for someone asking for a dish out of reach or someone urging others to have more of everything even though they already had plenty. They ate on and on and on filling themselves as much with their sense of family as with the bounty of their food.

Besides the dining room, other rooms in Grandma Lillian's house had their own range of color, aromas, and sounds: the kitchen warm with simmering spices, baking goodies, strong coffee slowly perking, the ever-present bar of Ivory soap resting in the chromed wall dish above the white ceramic sink with ribbed drain board, the bar of soap white and smooth when damp, slippery when wet, its fragrance clean and strangely dry without flowery scent.

Beside their fragrances and aromas, the rooms in Lillian's home seemed on continuous display, each one with its own aura: kitchen cupboards with glass front doors through which one could view china plates with floral design and matching delicate cups stored for special occasions along side green fireware used for utility on ordinary days. Beside the door to the sunporch, a white enamel gas range, a small window trimmed in green enamel beside the gas range overlooking the back yard, a chrome-legged, formica top table with chairs of vinyl seats and chrome legs beside the silver, cast-iron steam radiator beneath a small window trimmed in green enamel hung with filigree curtain, a glass vase with cut flowers radiant in the light from the small window sat upon a small shelf above the radiator.

The dining room through the door from the kitchen had that rich, reddish brown mahogany table and matching cushioned chairs, the gleaming table top draped in a large, filigree tablecloth Lillian had crocheted, the fake tiffany lamp hung above. A complementary sideboard of the same color as the table draped in crocheted filigree cover sat along the wall opening to the kitchen. On top the sideboard, dark chocolates were set out in silver dishes. On a small shelf above, a mahogany, bell-shaped windup clock struck the hours and chimed the quarter hours measuring out the days. At the end of the sideboard, a black rotary-dial phone. In the long sidewall of the dining room, three tall windows overlooked the redbrick alleyway, a strip of rose garden, the concrete walkway and green picket fence leading to the green picket front gate beneath a trellis of blossoming roses. Opposite the windows, a small bedroom through a beige enamel wall with Grandma's soft, quilted bed piled with goose down pillows.

Through the dining room arch, a living room or (as she called it) the parlor with its dark brown leather sofa and matching chair that warmed to squeaky slickness when used. Above the sofa, a tapestry of forest scene with noble Elk. Three tall windows along the front wall were hung with crocheted curtains and nestled by plants in galvanized trays set in white wicker stands. The parlor led to an alcove with a closet closed by purple velvet drapes. The front entrance rarely used opened into the alcove. Off the parlor, another small bedroom that later became a sitting room, then a den after Grandpa Emil spent his last days there, then again another bedroom after Grandma Lillian remarried.

Through a beige closed door in the dining room to the right just beyond the kitchen, gray, enameled stairs spiraled down to the basement, much more Grandpa Fist's place of retreat where he washed or showered after work and chilled his home-brew. A door to the right of the kitchen sink opened to another spiral of gray, enameled stairs with gray shelves along the wall ascending to the attic and a framed-in room in front with lavender papered walls of small white flowers and a spicy odor. Dark areas on either side of the room as well as the large section by the stairs were caverns beneath raw roof joists above bare floorboards worn by the years of traffic, the bare rafters scarred by piled boxes, trunks, abandoned appliances in perpetual storage with a layer of dust. A doorway opened out onto the roof of the sunporch below. Other attics Felix later inspected had the same dim, haunted aura beneath raw joists with worn floorboards reviving images of Grandma Lillian's house.

Through the kitchen doorway beside the white enamel gas range and oven, the sunporch with its line of tall windows forming two walls, one facing the backyard, the other facing the redbrick alley, each nestled by a crowd of dark green broadleaf plants in large pots with black earth, brown roots and tubers. Gray, enameled stairs led with the aid of a black iron railing down to the door with opaque wrinkled glass and a concrete stoop to the concrete walk that ran along the dark green picket fence. Beyond the fence, the redbrick alleyway, the bricks set down in rows by hand.

Felix having conjured Grandma Lillian's house, he suddenly recalled warm, summer mornings, the air already humid and heavy, and the old, grizzled man with horse and creaking wagon of weathered-warped wood rumbling slowly over the redbrick alleyway, the steel banded wood spoked wheels, the clop of horse hooves, and the cry of the man announcing his arrival, Rags! Rags! then stopping before the green gate to bargain for whatever Grandma Lillian offered in exchange, the old horse powdered with dust, colossal, snorting, rattling its reins shaking off flies, offering a strong, heady odor that Felix had breathed in deeply savoring the rich, strong primal essence. Another time, another horse pulling a green wagon with canvas canopy displaying boxes of vegetables and fruit. How immense and powerful the dark brown animal. How amazing to view its calm, steady manner, its only movements a shaking of harness and reins or the quick flexing of powerful muscles to ward off pesky flies.

The concrete walkway snaked around the corner of the house to the back yard bordered by flower gardens and shaded by fruit trees. Along the alleyway closing in the backyard the dark green fence, the yard raised above the redbrick alleyway, the fence set on a low concrete wall Grandpa Emil had laid himself, Henry, his son, helping. In the back, beyond the fence, a concrete, tar-striped alleyway, and at the north corner of the yard a concrete bin that held cans for refuse. Across the alley, the dark, unpainted wood garage weathered by years. Houses lined each side along the alleyway, and cross corner, the white brick towering walls of the storage warehouse nestling a brown wood garage. On one white brick wall, a strike zone outlined in black paint against which Felix and Sonny hurled tennis balls in full-throated games of Strikeout with neighborhood brats.

Sunday mornings at Grandma Lillian's house were delights, especially in summer, with breakfasts of eggs and bacon and yellow melon and crumbled coffee kuchen and fresh perked coffee and sunlight and cut flowers and Sunday colored comics. Afternoons in contrast were dreadful and dull: The breakfast dishes washed and put away in the glass door kitchen cabinets, the comics read, and no small coin allowing admission into the Sunday matinee at the Abby Theatre in the next block on Greenfield, Felix and Sonny moped and looked for something to do. They might play catch in the backyard, or tag football with others in the street, or Strikeout against the white brick wall of the moving and storage warehouse across the alley.

One afternoon, Felix angry because he couldn't hit any pitch complained to Great Aunt Violet who was visiting her sister Lillian. Aunt Vi offered him tea sweetened with honey, an elixir she commended that he had never tried. Returning to play, urged on by his aunt's encouragement, he hit the next pitch into Mrs. Leach's yard.

Now, Mrs. Leach was as stern as she was large, and she did not like such intrusive missiles in her yard. So any hapless kid who came to retrieve them had to deal with her. That day, since Felix had hit it, the strict, unalterable rule said he had to fetch it, his cohorts, of course, compelling him by their pious, whining shouts and cries. Felix soon stood silent and meek beneath her harangue, she raised above him on the concrete stoop at her backdoor on which he had timidly knocked seeking permission, she finally allowing him to tiptoe into her flowerbed to get the round, offending object, perhaps because his grandmother and great aunt were in attendance with whom she exchanged knowing smiles. To his delight, his next shot put it over her roof.

Tired of play or idleness they waited for the dark and the change of light that announced its coming, the softened sun on fragrant roses, on slatboard siding of the house, and Grandpa Emil's red concertina with ivory button keys, the foam of bitter beer, the glow of fragrant cigars. Life seemed filled with the ambience of family then that Felix would always frame and focus through the opaque lens of nostalgic memory:

THE LEGACY

A concertina,

Marbled red

With ivory, button keys

Sang on warm nights

The world became a concertina

The night was ripe with sounds

From rushing air

A red concertina

With ivory, button keys

Sang hushed, sweet sounds

On summer nights

While dark, cold beer

Foamed in heavy glasses

And stilled soft voices

Hidden in the warm, blue night

God! How I feared

That gray-haired man

Who played the concertina

On warm, blue nights

Each Christmas

He gave us silver coin

In exchange for bristled cheeks

Now

The concertina

Lies in heavy dust

Once

We sat on summer porches

Watched the traffic moving by

And heard the distant

Creaking screen door

Slamming

to

Grandma Lillian loved gardening as much as she loved knitting or crocheting, and she spent as much time at gardening as she did at needlework, as much time with trowel and shovel and spade as with needle and yarn. Her gardens exposed her love, responding to her tender care, glorious in color and bloom, burgeoning thick and green and ripe under the spring and summer sun, the spring and summer rain: Iris blue, tulips red, yellow, and white, roses red and pink, red purple peony with hosts of ants. Flowering fruit trees ripened into rich succulent plums yellow and purple blue, red black cherries, yellow green pears that dropped onto the trimmed green grass when no one was watching.

Felix always recalled her gardening in the same flowered print cotton dresses, her sturdy black oxford shoes with broad short heels, her flowered apron that keep personal items readily at hand, a linen kerchief to dab her lip or brow, and when the sun at midday or in early afternoon became too warm or glaring, a bonnet that shaded her round features, her pug nose, her thin, wire-rimmed spectacles, her short, black hair that streaked gray over the years. There she would be as Felix entered the yard returning breathless and sweaty from some misadventure, coming through the dark green creaking gate held by a heavy, black tension spring that snapped it back into place with a shot that always brought the expected admonition not to slam the gate always too late. There she would be bent over some plant or kneeling in the dirt among the flowers pulling up weeds she heaped in small piles.

Felix often helped, she paying him some nominal wage, which he, of course, thought grand. Always paid in coin, the more the better, he could add to his green glass Mason jar horde that he hid beneath his heaviest clothes in the bottom most dresser drawer from where to his dismay those coins too often went missing.

When she wasn't gardening, she was always working at something, mostly crocheting or tatting, usually something small, a doily, perhaps, which she would spread on the thick arms of chairs or sofa. Or she would fashion some delicate design to give as gifts. But she made larger things, too: table cloths that would fan out in spirals of lacy webs across the red brown grained polished surface of the mahogany table at which were held the ritual feasts in season. From time to time she would try to teach Felix how to handle the needle and thread, and he was always eager to try since what was spun from her bobbing, twirling needle and twisting thread seemed so mysteriously, marvelously elegant he aspired to weave such a magical web himself, but what he produced always seemed grotesque and limp, not the delicate filigree she was able to spin.

Lillian's house always a full bouquet of rich fragrances and aromas, the kitchen added its wafting essences from cooking, fresh flowers always adding to the full range of aromas and colors. Cut fresh, especially in summer when directly from her garden, stems in a clear cut glass vase on the cover of the silver radiator framed by the window with lace curtains, their blossoms caught the muted light while adding a rich spectrum of color and fragrances to the aromas from cooking.

Decades later, in a land far distant from this small island universe of his known childhood, on another island world, actual but just as mystic, Felix discovered again the same ambiance of warm spices and fragrant blossoms. The same ghostly essences wafting through the quilted corridor of a Wessex inn would strike him with a sudden tidal wave of recollection in Wimborne Minster, a place of Anglo-Saxon heritage he had pursued through books and photos for a quarter of a century, his being there at last one dream at least fulfilled with too many others continuously deferred.

On occasion, the Fists went with Grandpa Emil for Fish Fry on Fridays at a tavern on 22nd and Greenfield, a tall, white slatboard building beneath towering, ancient oak. Felix imagined it having been there for a long time, and it seemed to reflect an earlier era when the street beside the concrete stoop was dirt, the stoop once fashioned from lumber, the high vault of trees newly planted saplings, the vehicles that grooved the dirt street horse drawn, the dirt of the road ripe with seedy droppings from the drays. (Felix in a seminar on the 1890s at Berkeley later learned that during that horse-drawn era, one year, a million pounds of manure had been gathered from dirt streets in Milwaukee, and he always wondered who had troubled to weigh it and why.)

A side entrance to the tavern allowed access for families. The floors inside were stained dark and strewn with shavings; the walls as dark as the floors; the ceiling white scrolled plaster, a long polished bar of dark mahogany ran along one wall; a huge mirror ran along the back wall behind the bar. The Fist family sat at tables and ate fried fish and chips in the family section separated from the loud talk and roiling smoke of the men's area in which neither women nor children were allowed to enter.

Sometimes when the Fists went on family outings, Grandpa Emil went along. One summer they stayed at Little Sunfish Lake where Henry would later purchase a cottage, the only house he ever owned. Felix and Sonny spent the warm, bright days fishing from the pier with the rippled texture of sunlight off the open waters of the lake, the ripe odor of tall, seedy grass, of water weed and algae and dead fish. That summer they stayed in a rented cabin where the sleeping areas were hung with heavy velvet, the sleeping areas little more than bunks closed in by dark, heavy drapes. Felix after later reading E.B. White's Once More to the Lake would conjure the cabin they had slept in, the air close and heavy with heat and redolent with musk and mold hushed by dusty velvet drapes. But beyond the screened sunporch where Grandpa Emil slept alone the world opened dazzling with sunlight, rife with living things that flew against the sky among the tall, green canopy of oaks that dropped brown acorns Felix and Sonny for some purpose gathered in tan paper sacks. To have something of such abundance seemed as grand as having gold.

When Fist recalled that summer, his grandfather's presence always filled the frame with his stern manner dominating, squelching Felix's childish excitement at being out in the world away from the narrow, confining boundaries within his Southside ghetto. One day, Grandpa Fist disciplined the boys for showing too much joy and excitement at being alive under blue summer skies and full-leafed summer trees. Or so it seemed, for Felix was never sure what fault he and Sonny had committed, save that their sin was one of omission for not having done something they had been commanded to perform. Ordering them to line up in a procession that marched them past Grandpa Fist, to each he gave a solid kick in the butt with the side of his shoe. Their father Henry objected at first then demurred in an attempt to conserve the positive spirit of that rare family outing. And Fist knew from experience his father's too frequent punishment would have been more severe.

A day or so later, Grandpa Email, Pa, Sonny, and Felix walked into Sunfish along narrow country lanes bordered by tall, blossoming lilac. They bowled a line or two at the four-lane bowling alley, the only activity the town seemed to have, Sunfish Beach amusement park with its notorious high roller coaster that drew people from all over the region still not active. On the way back to their cottage by the lake, they stopped at a drive-in cafe' where Grandpa Emil treated them all to double-scoop ice cream cones. The next day he complained of soreness from all the previous day's activity, and Felix so young at the time wondered what pain had to do with being old. Recalling that remark, Felix Fist now wryly smiled at himself. Surely now he knew without the pain of contradiction.

The rest of the week they spent fishing. Sitting quietly in the dark green rowboat, Felix had waited patiently for the tug at the end of his line, the bobber sucked beneath the still surface of the lake creating rings. That summer Felix caught his first and last fish, a six pound rock bass that he kept penned in a wire mesh cage beneath the pier. He named it Rocky and of course thought the name original. When they left, Felix released it back into the lake calling after it as he watched its sinuous movements take it into the dark shadows of the deep brown water of the bay. How quickly it had vanished from his life as so many others he had loved. But just as quickly the living form fades and Grandpa Emil's ghostly presence becomes whole again and therefore saintly:

Emil Fist worked for the Milwaukee Road most of his adult life laboring for years in the flaring heat of a foundry forging steel parts for railroad rolling stock. At Christmas he gave his grandsons heavy, cast-iron toys he had fashioned out of molten metal at his forge, one year guns so deadly real and heavy they made Felix and Sonny the envy of the neighborhood gang of desperado kids. Some years he gave each of them a large, silver coin that Felix hoarded in a green glass Mason jar until it too was purloined to meet his parents' persistent need.

Emil's abuse of alcohol was as heavy as his work. Each day walking home from the foundry in the Valley four or five blocks from his home, stained and stinking from the sweat sucking heat of the forge, he quaffed large glasses of foaming bitter brew he fermented himself, chilling it in a dark, dank concrete vault that harbored a host of crawling things that took on the color of that black, wet cellar vault. In contrast, the rich golden color of his brew glowed translucent in the light from the ground-level cellar window that exposed the underside of rose plants above the gray laundry sink where Emil stripped his heavy shirt and the yellow stained top of his union suit.

Then he washed, his silver hair thrust beneath the faucet, his hair and face foamed or frothed from Ivory soap, he came up bellowing and dried himself in a towel he pulled from one of the black wire lines he had strung across the wooden trusses of the floor above, those lines used for hanging laundry on days when the seasons brought inclement weather: winter's bitter cold and snow, summer's drenching rain. Then reaching finally for the jar into which he had poured dark amber brew that foamed its bitter pungent froth, he drank in deep, gulping quaffs, slacking his ever greedy thirst.

April 8, 1947

Emil's demise was a long and terrible battle of faith filled with terror, both for him and for his grandson Felix who throughout his years would on occasion again see himself as a child standing in the parlor of the family home Emil had fashioned listening to Grandpa's terrible cries issuing from the small room off the parlor, Emil separated at last from his wife and the bed in which he had slept with her, where he had helped conceive their two children, one boy, Henry, one girl, Beth, the act of their conception as much a rape as the fulfillment of conjugal obligations, those violations sanctioned by marriage vows. Now on his deathbed, he screamed against his fear and fate having come to faith at last on this battleground of life, this bed. Felix did not understand, would not fathom until much later the terror in Emil's screams from wrenching pain of his body's self-destruction, his organs consumed by aberrant cells promoted by the agonies of his harsh living and his prolonged, daily consumption of brewed grain or fermented grape.

Emil died in April, 1947, on Sonny's birthday, two days after Easter. The day after Emil died the century plant bloomed in the galvanized tin set in a white wicker stand by the front windows. Felix in wonder had studied at length its naked tubers thrust from the black, moist, pungent soil, the thick, yellow-green stalk, and ivory white bell with purple hollow of bloom that glowed in light through the web of curtains Lillian had crocheted during endless hours in late afternoons and long evenings while her man sat in the nearby corner tavern until ordered out.

Felix thought curious that both Grandpa Emil's name and his father Henry's name were both part of Sonny's name: Henry, first-born son of Emil, following tradition, gave his first born son both his own and his father's given name, as if he were trying to reconcile the bitter lifelong battle Henry had with his father who had always tried to dominate him, just as Henry had tried to dominate Felix, all such attempts ending in unsurprising failure from unsurprising rebellion from both their sons.

Why all that conflict, what purpose that struggle, typical, perhaps, but also tragic, events brought into focus offering a sharp sense of life: For Emil died like the bull at the moment of truth Felix would witness later in la corrida de toros, or like Ivan Illyich who at the moment of death knew the meaning of his life through his existence, Felix suddenly aware he had been reading Emil's story: Rejecting God all his life, Emil having rejected his family he could not dominate, at the end having lived through pain and terror, he accepts the wafered host and dies in the bosom of his family.

Thus Felix had known Grandpa Emil for a while only because he was his father's father. But when Felix tried to know him for what he was-how he came to be who he was-Felix only met darkness. Felix had only known him as he had witnessed him, his firm manner always stern. Rarely had Felix seen him laugh, and when he did, Grandpa's open mouth exposed a perfect line of dazzling white teeth. Felix knew him more from witnessing him in dim taverns where he too often sat, knew him from the strong odor of sweat and stained long underwear, knew him from the cold foaming beer he drank after each day's work. But most of all, Felix knew him from his red marbled concertina with ivory button keys that sang on summer nights.

How many others had the sense of time and of place, the sense of struggle Felix knew in these his people? How give them life? They had gone about their business and their lives. To often they had quarreled among themselves. And that's where their story and their legacy lies. The sense of place or time having simply faded, perhaps, because Felix had left, or perhaps because they were already old at the moment Felix was squeezed into the light and they had already quieted, having returned to Eve and Adam's dreamless sleep.

Yet the memory of those places where they had lived remained in those still living. And while incremental changes seemed intrusive scorings on the assumed patterns of people's lives responding to the demands of present-day existence, when Felix returned, walked those haunted streets, stood before those dwellings in which those souls Felix once had known had lived out the meaning of their lives, how would he know those spirits who had arrived to displace those of his own heritage? What ancient prophecies or tragedies or legacies had those other spirits lived? How had those separate histories mingled with those of his own kin?

The Fists had lived so long in Emil's house, no matter how ordinary it might seem, Felix thought odd that others should have lived and moved through those same rooms his family had inhabited. Had the wood doorjambs, cupboards, and plaster walls absorbed the voices as they might the odors from the years of human habitation? And if the walls and ceilings were, indeed, repositories of those events, how might anyone play them back and release the captive specters murmuring from the past, like some still, strange melody, or like some silent cinema, their lives played out in mime? What if Felix listened in the mute solitude of the now empty, crumbling rooms, what faint message would he hear? What startling apparition might appear?

As once in a dream Felix had conjured Emil's spirit lingering in a pile of rotting, twisted shroud beside the silver cast-iron radiator in the kitchen of the house Emil had lived in all his life. And when Felix stepped closer toward that shrunken, moldering form curled in a fetal, mummied heap, a pair of bright blue eyes in a rotting black face fixed Felix in a damning gaze, its ghostly features twisted in a horrible, eternal howl turning slowly toward him as Felix approached waking him screaming from his sleep.

After Emil's passing, Grandma Lillian in addition to gardening and needlework often indulged in Bingo and cards at local Catholic schools that, of course, were always connected to Catholic churches. Since the Fists were Lutheran, they, of course, never went into the church, but as Felix and Grandma passed the doors that were always open, they could peer inside to see the byzantine alter with its candles and idols, invoking in them wonder of what spooky, occult rituals were about to commence.

Lillian most frequently went to St. Matthew's (now Principe de Paz) since it was only two or three blocks from her house, and Felix often went with her, he mostly curious about the school because other neighborhood brats went there. Felix was also curious about what went on at such events that would attract grandma and so many others whom she knew quite well from having traveled the circuit of games from one church school to another.

At St. Matthew's, Lillian and the others played cards or Bingo in a spacious room with high ceiling and tall windows and long, tan shades, the room converted by folding tables and chairs into a card or Bingo parlor. Here she went frequently taking Felix along who at first felt odd, almost sacrilegious, going into a building that housed a faith not his own, but since it wasn't the church, his concern eased.

Jimmy, his best friend, a Catholic, was always trying to get Felix to come to Sunday Mass with him, Felix suspected to convert him, and once or twice, eventually, Felix had accompanied him, partly because of Jimmy's urging, more because of Felix's curiosity, he intrigued by the possibility of finally seeing at first hand what he had been able to only glimpse through open doorways when he went with Grandma Lillian to her Bingo.

The strangeness of the school naturally drew him, so he would wander the rooms and hallways while the old people played their games and Felix gorged himself with soft drinks in glass bottles and stuffed his mouth with sweets, both purchased by coins begged from Grandma who willingly indulged his addiction. Felix often the focus of adult attention imagining himself as young Jesus among the elders, all the old people smiled on him and told his grandmother how tall he was getting, and wasn't he such a good boy for coming with his grandmother so she wouldn't have to walk home at night alone.

In the center of the expansive hardwood floor of the room where the old people played their dumb games, an enormous circular cast-iron grate with floral-and-leaf design sent up spumes of warm air into the cavernous room. From time to time, in his typical fashion of keeping himself amused, Felix imagined that the heat from that huge grate came up directly from Hell itself, a vision that seemed odd to him even then since where he stood was after all a Catholic Church school. Yet, his view still felt warranted because he, a staid, pious, self-righteous Lutheran knew from Grandpa Emil just how superstitious Catholics were with all their saints and idol statues and bleeding hearts with crowns of thorns and incense and odiferous candles and their services at all hours, morning, noon, and night still chanted in Latin, that strange, ancient tongue, and their Lord's Prayer cut off at the end just before the really great, shivery part about the Power and the Glory, forever and ever, amen.

When she couldn't get to her Bingo parlor or card parlor, Lillian loved Solitaire, playing it endlessly hour after hour on the dining room table where a hand always seemed arranged in a phalanx of colors and numbers. Or she would do jigsaw puzzles. One of these seemed always under construction, and when Felix visited and later while he lived there, he was enlisted without her asking, so anyone or several would find themselves joined in searching the array of shapes and colors. She, of course, always had to have puzzles with the most pieces she could find on which they worked for hours, hardly talking of anything memorable, stopping for snacks, an assortment of candy always close at hand on the doilied sideboard beneath the shelf that held the wind up grandfather's clock with its slow, steady ticking. Here were always silver dishes of mixed chocolates, some with nuts, some with jellied centers, some chewy caramel. Or they would have cake or cookies recently baked, or pastries or kuchens from the authentic German bakery on 27th and Greenfield. And while they munched bent over the multitude of small, jigged pieces, their gaze intense, trying to match edges, shapes, colors, using the picture on the cover as a guide, when they were through, the last piece pressed into place, she'd let the puzzle rest for days until she tired of it or until by means of some internal timepiece she had seen enough of it, she'd fold it up, pack it back in its box, and start another. The closet just inside the kitchen door beyond the dining room wall was stacked with dusty jigsaw puzzle boxes gathered over decades.

Lillian loved listening to dramatic broadcasts, and the sounds from the cathedral shaped radio swelling through the room mingled with the swirl of fragrances. Such programs at the time were sponsored by companies promoting soap products: Oxydol which Grandma Lillian used faithfully, and Ivory-99, 44, 100 percent pure, a bar always resting in the chrome dish on the wall above the ribbed, white ceramic kitchen sink. When these programs came on the air, organ music swept through the house from the radio set on a commode in the dining room that matched the sideboard, the deep, dramatic voice of the announcer proclaiming One Man's Family! More swelling organ music: Portia Faces Life! What they were about, Fist couldn't recall, since Felix was too busy with his own misadventures, but Grandma seemed to follow them with diligence and deep interest.

Thus Felix would recall Grandma Lillian's home on South 24th street beside the redbrick alley just off Greenfield with its fragrances and aromas of fresh perked coffee, spices, burgeoning plants, the constant ticking mantle clock that chimed the quarter hour, half hour, then tolled the hour, that house always active, always festive in its own way for all the years while Emil lived.

Lillian spending her time alone after Emil's death, Felix and his mother or his older brother would visit her, or Felix and Sonny would stay over some nights or on weekends or during vacations to keep her company. Felix recalled seeing her sitting alone in the soft yellow from the fake tiffany lamp that cast a circle of light on the dark, polished surface of the mahogany table on which she set out rows of cards in solitaire or over which she spread the thousands of jigged pieces of a puzzle. On occasion later roaming through antique stores, Felix gazed at tables similar to the one at which the family had gathered for so many events over the years and he would wonder whatever happened to that table with its solid trellis that would be pulled out, leaves added for holiday gatherings seating at least ten, more if they tried using folding card tables.

One winter when Felix and Sonny stayed at Grandma Lillian's before their father moved them in, Grandma, Felix, and Sonny went to see A Wonderful Life at the Abby theater in the next block on Greenfield. When they came out they found a light powdery snow dusting the sidewalk. The snow crunched beneath their feet as they walked to Grandma Lillian's house. Car headlights glared in the curtain of flakes. Reaching her house, they had warmed milk and kuchen. They went to bed settling into the quilted comfort of their bed in the attic room. The next morning, they found snow piled against the door in drifts that reached the sunporch windows and the level of the front porch. The dark furnishings of the rooms glowed in reflected light from the snow.

Felix and Sonny jumped from a sunporch window into the piled snow. Buried to their waist, they fought their way free and shoveled deep snow from the door. The dining room cathedral radio proclaimed the whole city and surrounding areas paralyzed by the storm: Stores were late in opening. Streets were clogged, plowed snow piled at the curbs in high banks they burrowed through imagining them as mountain ridges they trekked upon, leaping across chasms where someone had dug through to the street. In the late opening stores, voices buzzed with exaggerated tales of surviving the storm.

Soon after, Lillian, wife of Emil, went to a social club for seniors where she was asked to dance by a man named Edward.

A few years prior to her passing, Felix had asked his mother to set down for him in writing her early experiences upon arriving in America and her first encounters with Henry Fist, her husband. Here is what Felix read in her letters:

"I was born in Berlin, Germany in 1916. Just after my seventh birthday my grandmother who was already in the United States sent for us to come over. My father Paul did not come with us because, as I found out later, he was involved with another woman.

The later part of July, my mother Margaret & my sister Erika who was 4 years old & my brother Guenther who was 9 months old boarded the S.S. Columbus in 1924 to sail to the United States along with a lot of people sailing to America.

One incident on board ship I will never forget happened a few days before we landed on Ellis Island. One night, the captain held a masquerade party for the grownups. Toward dawn, the captain got word that the ship was heading for two icebergs. The captain called everyone on deck, even the children who had been in their cabins. He made us all put on life preservers, & we all watched as we sailed between the two icebergs. The sun was just coming up, and passing between the icebergs was the most beautiful sight that anyone could imagine. We made it through without a mishap. We landed in Ellis Island the 25th of August 1924, I not knowing at the time that I would be married ten years later on the same day.

Before we could get off of the ship, we all had to go through a delousing. All the long hair I had down to the middle of my back was cut off. I was completely bald when we got off the ship at Ellis Island. We were all checked in, and we had to have proof that we had someone in America to sponsor us. My mother had a paper my grandmother had sent her, so we had proof of having a sponsor. I don't actually remember how long it took for us to get checked through immigration, but from Ellis Island we had to go to Quebec, Canada from where we took a train to Milwaukee. On the train we were served food & fruit, the first time that I saw a banana. The porter told me that I should try it, so I did and I liked it. The train ride took a couple of days. We came to Milwaukee the later part of August of 1924. We were met at the depot by my grandma and my uncle's brother for whom she was working as a housekeeper. They took us to his home and we stayed there for a week.

My grandma then took us to her home where she lived with grandpa on the Southside of Milwaukee. Grandma had remarried after she came to America, as her first husband had died in Germany and her other daughter Aunt Ida had sent for her four years before we came to America.

Mother got a job at Harley-Davidson Motors a month after we came to America. There she met a man who was to become my stepfather a year later. He was a widower with eight children. He was more than a few years older than my mom, as he had three of his oldest children married. When my mom married him, we had seven children in the house, my brother being the youngest. As the years passed, three of the remaining older children got married and left home.

Grandpa bought a bigger house after mother got married so we all would have enough room. Grandma and grandpa had the upstairs apartment and the rest of the family had the downstairs and the rest of the bedrooms that were upstairs off the hall from the apartment. The beautiful house on a corner had a big yard which grandpa kept looking nice and neat, with peony bushes along the back walk, rose bushes, currant bushes, and also a vegetable garden