An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [23]
Oma had grown up an only child, in some luxury. There was something Victorian about her. Her grasp of the great world was slender. She believed that there was not only a telephone operator assigned to her, but also a burglar. She and my grandfather had Cadillacs, one at a time. She referred to the car as “the machine”: “Henry is coming around with the machine.”
At the Lake, Oma wore cotton sundresses and low-heeled sandals. She relaxed there; we all did. She barely resembled the formidable woman she was in Pittsburgh the rest of the year. In Pittsburgh, she dressed. She wore jewelry by the breastful, by the armload: diamonds, rubies, emeralds. She wore big rings like engine bearings, and vast, slithering mink coats. She wore purple and green silk, purple and green linen, purple and green wool—dresses, suits, robes—and leather high-heeled pumps, which drew attention to her long, energetic legs and thin ankles. She looked imposing. She looked, we at our house tended to think—for how females looked occupied most of females’ attention—terrible. We were all blondes; we disliked purple, we disliked green, and were against the rest of it, too.
American Standard Corporation started as a plumbing brass foundry in Louisville, Kentucky. Oma’s grandfather, Theodore Ahrens, came over from Hamburg, Germany, in 1848 and opened that foundry, which kept growing. The family kept holdings in the firm. Our grandmother was not ashamed that she was German. Amy and I were ashamed of being one-fourth German because of her (never guessing that our own mother, whose hatred of things German was an ordinary part of family politics, was in fact half German herself).
I thought Oma was brilliant to have accepted the suit of Frank Doak. He was an uncommonly kind and good-natured man. Oma had met him in 1914, while she was visiting Pittsburgh cousins. He was from an ordinary Scotch-Irish family so devotedly Presbyterian they forbade looking at the Sunday funnies. (William Doak had immigrated from Ulster in 1848 with a cargo of woolens. He wrote home depressed that the socks weren’t selling well. The name Doak was a corruption of McDougal.) Oma had been a spoiled, fun-loving, red-haired beauty; our grandfather handled her with the same solid calm that is reputedly so effective on racehorses.
By the time I knew him, our grandfather was a vice-president of Pittsburgh’s Fidelity Trust Bank. He looked very like a cartoonist’s version of “vested interests.” In fact, he almost always wore a vest, and a gold watch on a chain; he was short and heavy; he had a small white mustache; he smoked cigars. At home, his thin legs crossed under his belly, he read the financial section of the paper, tolerant of children who might have been driven, in the long course of waiting for dinner, to beating their fingertips on his scalp.
From almost every room at the Lake house, you could see Lake Erie and its mild shore. From my bed as soon as I woke, I gauged the waves’ height: two inches, three. The waves disintegrated on the big beach; from the high cliff where our house stood, their breaking sounded like poured raw rice. By afternoon, the waves were two or three feet high. They seemed to rattle the glass porch windows; they broke on the long beaches like seas. On the horizon we saw ore boats—lakers—bringing iron ore east from the Masabi ore range near Lake Superior. Ships had been carrying iron ore bound for Pittsburgh across Lake Erie since the time of Carnegie and Frick. Sometimes a dusting of ore washed up or blew up on the sand beach. It lay in scalloped windrows, as did the powdery purple garnet grains after storms.
Canada, we knew, lay across the Lake. Many times I planned to run away to Canada; I would lie on the canvas raft and paddle with my hands. Instead