A Remembering by Nils Peterson
Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was not large enough to have one. My father was a chauffeur for one of the rich families.
The caroling was held in a large, handsome meeting room where, in the spring, the flower show would be held. A lot of chairs were set out and there’d be a big tree beautifully decorated and boxes of candy for the children to suck on when it was all over. I remember a particularly revolting lime-green ball sour enough and bitter enough to make even the greediest child spit it out. Some of the gathered Presbyterians had begun their celebrating before the sing, because after about the third carol, some wag would start calling for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the last song in the songbook, and the calls, catcalls almost for the calls for it increased as the carols went on, grew until at last the leader with a sigh gave up and we hallelujahed our way out of there.
At home, the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, there would be a supper of Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes and lingonberry and sardines and cheeses and cookies At the right moment, we’d go down the stairs and, across the driveway to the path leading to the big house – crunch of gravel, full moon shining between tree branches, feel of tended grass – to the kitchen door where Marie, the cook, my father’s cousin and my godmother, waited to let us in. Anet is there, the downstairs maid, and Martha, the upstairs maid. They are “the girls,” the three live-in Swedish servants. Marie, the cook, was my father’s cousin, my godmother, and the one responsible for getting my father the chauffeur job in 1932 in the heart of the depression. He had been out of work since he and mother came back from visiting their parents in Sweden to show off how well they were doing in America. Shortly before their return, the stock market crashed. The year, of course, 1929.
Anet was the one who served the Deforests the dinner Marie had cooked. She had her own pantry next to the kitchen where she kept jars of cookies to serve with the lady’s tea. Martha, the upstairs maid, was looked on as being a little racy because she smoked. She quit her job one time and went back to Sweden, but returned in a few months. The rich people never quite forgave her desertion.
“The girls” had their own apartment in the big house, in fact, their own end of the big house. Upstairs were bedrooms and bath, downstairs by the kitchen a sitting room which they shared and in which they each had a favorite seat. There would be coffee served there about 10:30 in the morning, and again at 3:30 in the afternoon for whomever was working about the place, gardeners and handymen, Swedes all, (my father did the hiring and in a way he was kind of a welfare agency for out-of-work Scandinavians, giving a day’s work here and a week’s there for the necessary tasks it took to care for the acreage surrounding the big house). With the coffee, there’d be freshly baked “buller,” the Swedish sweet rolls, and cookies. Often, mother, brother Bill, and I would be invited.
After supper, still in our best clothes from the sing, we would go down the stairs and walk the long gravel path to the “big house,” up its stairs into the kitchen where “the girls” would be waiting for the Christmas Eve celebration for servants. It was a mysterious and marvelous journey to the living room. We walked through the pantry passing the jars of Anet’s cookies, then through the dining room, where, in a corner, was a big ancient screen with a painting of a droopy-bearded Chinaman. Then into the hall where a giant grandfather clock stood with the sun moving and the moon, and zodiacal embellishments, and the great pendulum that moved it all. Anet wound it once a week. In front of the hall was the entrance and to the left was Mrs. Deforest’s office where several days a week her secretary (social secretary? not sure of the right word here because she was not a Swede and was never invited for coffee, not out of a lack of Swedishness, but because she belonged to a different social level).
The rich couple would be sitting, waiting in a sort of lounge – dark paneling, a leather-covered bench affixed to the wall circumnavigated the room which I remember sitting on with my brother. Lots of high windows. I think a fireplace. Anet served the grownups Glogg, (a drink made of red wine and brandy and spices served hot). My brother and I had a kind of deliciously effervescent papaya juice.
The rich woman would have been in her late 50’s, though she seemed Methuslian to me, square-faced, maybe a whisker or two. The man was somewhat older and rather deaf, handsome in an abstract way. My father liked him. And he liked my father. In fact, I think he loaned my father money for a down payment to buy a house when it was time for us to move, though the interest, I’m sure, would have been the going rate. The Mrs. did most of the talking, while he would punctuate her remarks with an occasional harrumph.
At last would come the presents. My father would get some fancy gadget from Abercrombie and Fitch. I’m not sure what my mother and “the girls” got. My brother and I got books. Over several years, at the rate of two volumes a Christmas, we got The Book of Knowledge, a wonderful children’s encyclopedia filled with stories and myths and poems and science facts, a higgledy-piggledy compendium of things an interested child would be interested in. I read it all and loved it, though each Christmas I would also think, “They’re so rich, why wouldn’t they give me a wild an expensive toy.” My imagination could not settle on what sort of toy could satisfy me, but it would have had to very fun and very expensive. Later, when we had all the volumes of the encyclopedia, I would get books with stories about the sea since I had a liking for such tales. The lady took an interest in me and often gave me some of her childhood books filled with the stories of Greece and Rome, and the Old Testament. In Myths from Many Lands, I read stories from my parents part of the world, stories about Odin, Thor, Freya, and Loki. So I fell into a great education though not from the pedestrian, necessary, classes at Evergreen Grammar School. (I mean, you have to learn, or at least you used to have to learn, the multiplication tables.)
Then we would retire to the piano room, which was on a slightly lower level and tiled, and many-windowed. We would sing some more carols. The lady of the house was an excellent pianist, something of a Bach specialist who gave small concerts until the arthritis in her hands made that impossible. The last song of the evening would be O Du Helige, sung in Swedish. I can hear my father’s cracked light tenor as I type. It would have been sung hours earlier in churches in Sweden to celebrate Christmas Eve.
Then the trek back past the marvels (I remember now some glass bits in a case on the wall which were reputed to be Phoenician, no, that can’t be, ancient Venetian? however some ancient shards) through the dining room, pantry, kitchen, down the gravel path up the stairs to our own humble, lovely home above the garage. And so to bed to await the American Christmas.
Christmas morning. I wake early to a strange noise from below, and, in my footed pajamas, holding on to the railing, I creep down the shadowy stairs leading from the chauffeur’s flat to the workroom below. Of all things, there’s my father bending over an electric train whizzing round and round an oval track nailed to a piece of plywood. He doesn’t see me, but I watch him caught as he is in the mystery of train lights, ruby and white, circling in the half-darkness. For awhile I don’t make a sound, but watch him, wondering about his strange smile.
All these years later, I tiptoe down the stairs again, now understanding the poverty of his childhood and the jobless years of the Depression, and I watch him and imagine him thinking – I am able to give to my children for Christmas, this wonder. We kept the train and the track affixed to a plywood board for years. We lost it in a flood at Sidney, Ohio years later when the Greater Miami River overflowed its banks and filled our basement which was filled with memorable family things. But the memory lingers on.