Millicent Glenn's Last Wish: A Novel

by Tori Whitaker

  Yet today was about my granddaughter’s baby. And though I was last to hear the news, we were still early in this wondrous phase. I had no idea which labor and delivery path was right for her in this day and age. All I knew was this: I needed Kelsey and her baby to be safe more than I needed to breathe in air.

  “I’ll let you guys know what I decide,” Kelsey said. The firmness of her tone suggested she wasn’t going to let this topic blossom into a tug-of-war between her mother and me. Always the peacemaker. She pulled her brown hair into a ponytail—hair almost as long as a real pony’s tail—wrapping what she called a scrunchy around and around it.

  “Besides, regardless of what route Aaron and I take,” she said, “I’ll create a formal birthing plan.” Kelsey explained how such a plan would express in writing her desire not to have, for example, continuous fetal heart monitoring. “I won’t lie confined to a machine for ten hours, that’s for sure,” she said. “Doesn’t help a thing. Except put more dollars in hospital coffers.”

  She certainly was determined. She got that from her mother. Or maybe she got it from me—and I prickled with a mixed bag of pride and dread.

  Then Jane surprised me by saying, “Kels, maybe Aaron’s just being cautious, given your age. Have you—”

  “High risk is practically an obsolete term, based on age alone,” Kelsey said, detecting her own mother’s protective streak. Was that a sheen of perspiration across Kelsey’s forehead? “And trust me, I’ve had all the prenatal screenings and tests known to woman.” She projected the confidence of the professional she was. She’d done her research. “Ensuring my baby and I are well is why I held off telling anyone my news early on. But the OB I saw and the midwives’ group both agree: I’m the picture of health.”

  A voice—a deep male voice from decades before—echoed in my head, and I went weak: Mrs. Glenn, you’re a star patient.

  CHAPTER TWO

  August 1945

  We were soaked on our way to Cincinnati’s downtown celebration, wet with sweat from trekking in eighty-five-degree heat and horrible humidity. But neither my husband nor I minded. Hitler had been dead since spring; now Japan had formally surrendered. Today was V-J Day. The war was over. Thousands of people, many more than when the Reds had won the World Series five years back, crowded the streets en route to Fountain Square. Train whistles blew and steeple bells tolled as if playing duets for our soldiers.

  Today was a turning point for the country—and also for us. What better time was there to be newlyweds looking ahead to our future?

  I crossed my fingers that I was expecting. My sister-in-law Abbie never failed to remind me that she’d gotten pregnant the first month she was married. Dennis’s sister had also birthed a child by her first anniversary. I was three days late in my monthlies, but I’d been late before. I wouldn’t get anyone’s hopes up yet. At least not anyone else’s. The last time I thought I might be pregnant, Dennis and I had gotten all excited. When it ended up I wasn’t, I felt as if I’d done something wrong. He’d laughed and said we just needed to “practice more.”

  Tons of tiny paper scraps drifted in waves from windows high in the buildings on Vine. I’d never heard so much cheering. “No more rationing gasoline,” someone yelled. “No more boys in body bags. Long live the USA.” There was a buzz among the revelers, electricity carrying the current of prosperity to come.

  Though my family was of German blood, we had been in Cincinnati for four generations. Mama had lost her brother in the Great War. She, Opa, and I had long despised what the Nazis were doing in Europe, and we had done our part for this country. I thought of the red, white, and blue poster that had hung in Mama’s front window when I’d lived with them: THIS IS A V HOME. It meant the three of us had taken the Victory Home Pledge. We’d salvaged metal, like bottle caps and cans, so the military could make ammunition. We saved bacon and beef fat for glycerin for bombs. We scrimped to buy a war bond. So today’s celebration was personal to me.

  When Dennis and I first glimpsed the bronze lady atop the fountain that had stood in its spot since before Opa was born, he picked me up and swung me around, the heels of my shoes knocking into other couples doing the same. He set me down and looked into my eyes.

  “You’re the prettiest girl a guy ever got,” he said, “not to mention the smartest.”

  I broke out in a huge grin. “And you’re the most charming guy a girl ever snagged.”

  It was a wonder I’d met him at all—he, the boy from the farm, and I, the girl from the city. We might not have lasted to a second date had we not disclosed our difficult pasts on the first night we met.

  We’d met in July of the year before. Girlfriends and I had giggled our way down the gangplank of the steamboat the Island Queen with its high-pitched calliope music. We had come by river to Coney Island, Cincinnati’s amusement park. “I do adore a man in uniform,” my friend Shirley had said, itching to find handsome men on furlough. We’d ambled through the park in our button-up shifts, rolled-down socks, and brown leather loafers. The boulevard had neatly trimmed grasses and great pom-poms of red geraniums. Shirley’s cousin Ava’s boyfriend and his buddies met up with us at the dodgems. They wore dungarees with crisp, collared shirts—not uniforms, because they were farmers on deferment.

  “I’m Dennis,” said the cute one with dimples that rivaled Tyrone Power’s. He smelled of fresh air and clean laundry, and I imagined his farm with vast green pastures, crops of wheat made gold by the sun, and shady copses of trees. Given I was raised in the city’s basin, the main wood that surrounded me was the clapboards of the tenements. Cars rumbled by where I lived and smokestacks smoked—very different from a farm, I was sure. Dennis’s eyes crinkled as he smiled, blue as a noontime sky on a clear day. But what would he and I have in common? Probably nothing.

  “I’m Millie Kraus,” I said, since he’d introduced himself. No need to be impolite.

  “Everyone’s heading to the games,” he said. His voice was deep, as if he could have been in radio. “Let me win you a prize?”

  He was nice, but I didn’t see the point in going on. Our worlds were too far apart. As the rest of the guys and gals headed off in packs, though, it looked as if I had no choice.

  In the whirl of lights and blaring music and the smell of popping corn, Dennis and I came to the milk bottle game—three metal milk bottles stacked in a pyramid and one dirty softball. “Knock ’em all over, and your pretty little lady wins a prize,” the barker said. Dennis reared back his arm and blasted the ball through the two bottom bottles, knocking over all three.

  “We have a winner!” Red lights blinked. I squealed and found myself hopping up and down on my tiptoes.

  “Pretty girl, claim your prize,” the barker said. The manufacturer of stuffed monkey prizes had turned production over to army gear. So I won a pack of Orbit gum instead. It wasn’t Juicy Fruit—Wrigley’s shipped that favorite only to our troops. But Dennis and I each enjoyed a stick.

  “How about riding the Ferris wheel?” he said. “It’s beautiful at night, isn’t it?”

  “Perfect,” I said. And it was. We soon climbed into a seat made for two.

  “You’re out of high school, right?” he asked on our way up as the seat bucket swayed to and fro.

  “Yes,” I said. I had graduated near the top of my class the year before. But what would this clean-cut country boy think of my being a working girl? I looked out over the park’s lights, from the Flying Scooter to the Wildcat roller coaster. “I grew up in Over-the-Rhine,” I said. Hearing me name my neighborhood, he would know I was poor. Things were a little better for my family now, but when I was a child, I’d once gone a whole winter with only two pairs of socks. I ate stale bread three times a day. But I wouldn’t deny who I was then, nor who I was now. “I work the cash register at Kroger down on Pearl.”

  “Working girl, huh? My parents would like you,” he said with a smile. “Farmers and their wives believe in hard work.” What a kind thing to say.

  �
�You’re on military deferment?” I said. “If we’re gonna win this war, our troops need the food.”

  Dennis looked into the darkness, not out over the lights of the rides and the river. Had I said something wrong?

  “I went to enlist the year before last,” he said as the Ferris wheel made another loop, “when I was eighteen.”

  “Oh,” I said, puzzled.

  “I wanted to serve my country overseas, not just with the crops. I went to the recruiting office, jumped through all the hoops.” He laughed nervously, his eyes meeting mine. “I don’t know why I’m telling anyone this, especially a girl. It doesn’t affect me in the day-to-day, but apparently I have a high-frequency hearing loss.”

  I didn’t understand the significance. But I let my face suggest he go on.

  “The medical officer said, ‘Scram, kid. The roar of bomber planes will turn ears like yours deaf. Go back to the farm. Help put fuel in men’s bellies. They’ll thank you for it later.’”

  Had it been hard for Dennis to be called a kid, when the soldiers his age were called men? “Well, I can’t help but think,” I said, thoughtfully, “he did you a favor by turning you away.”

  “Maybe. But I’d wanted to go. It was hard feeling like I’d flunked the physical.”

  I could see from the tightness of Dennis’s jaw, from his lips tucked in at the corners, that this was a difficult admission.

  So we both had our histories. But we’d both been forthright. He held my hand then, and I melted from the snug, rugged warmth of it.

  By the time we disembarked the Island Queen at Public Landing, Dennis and I had danced in the boat’s ballroom to the big band tunes of the Clyde Trask Orchestra. Then we’d scurried hand in hand, weaving through the crowd to the tiny uppermost deck, the one known as the smoocher hideaway. We sat beneath a waning moon in the cooling midnight air, his arms around me. The Queen’s white glow was majestic against the water’s dark depths with its splash of whitecaps. Dennis’s lips came to mine with the taste of mint Orbit gum and a soft intensity that said hello and goodbye and I need to see you again and please don’t make me wait, for waiting I can’t possibly do.

  Now Dennis looked around at the V-J celebration. We had moved to the outskirts of the crowd.

  “Dennis Glenn,” I said, “I can see the wheels in your head spinning.”

  He grinned. “Our success is so close, I can taste it,” he said, his arms squeezing me tighter, smashing the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket.

  “Ahh, and what exactly does it taste like?”

  “Sweet, like Granddaddy’s clover honey.”

  I laughed. “Tell me more,” I said, hopeful that Dennis’s new work would take us into the city. It wasn’t that I was anxious to leave the farm. I’d come to love the peaceful, starry nights, playing with a litter of kittens in the haymow, bursting a ripe watermelon over my knee in the patch, and watching the children make diamond rings by pinching off the sticky lights of summer night fireflies. Mother Glenn had taught me to make noodles and to can tomatoes and to appreciate pink tulips and purple lilacs in the spring. I loved how useful she was, how the work she did mattered to the sustenance of the farm. I loved how the farmhouse had stood in its place for generations. I loved the stability that came with that.

  The idea of leaving there scared me. I had moved seven times when I was young. That’s what people in poverty did—and no way did I want to go back.

  Yet if Dennis and I left the farm, I, too, could get a paying job again.

  You have to have a means of earning, lest you find yourself without a bed or a soupbone to your name. It was Mama’s voice in concert with my own.

  I missed having my own money. When I was seventeen, I’d been waiting to buy bread at the original Super Market opened by Mr. Kroger decades before. The manager watched me helping shoppers in line—older people trying to figure out when butter rations kicked in and when coupons for beef would run out. It was confusing to many, but not to me. When the manager thanked me, I flat-out said, “Why not hire me? I’m good with numbers.” My straight As in algebra convinced him to give me a shot as a cashier. I never lost him a cent. And Mama was so proud. More important, that job had given me a purpose. It had shown me I could make a useful contribution.

  “I can construct houses,” Dennis said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist. “Like Nathan’s house—the prefabricated one he and I built from a Sears and Roebuck kit. Prefab houses are springing up all over.”

  “You mean you’d order the house kits from the Sears catalog, build them, and then sell them?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly. I’d like to become a dealer for a prefab manufacturer and earn a profit. Build the houses for other families who can’t do it themselves.”

  “Oh,” I said. This idea was so foreign to me. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

  “Gunnison Homes is the largest manufacturer,” Dennis said. “I’ve been reading up on ’em. They’ve been around for a decade, and they’ve got several models to pick from—some with two bedrooms, three bedrooms. Some with garages or basements.”

  A cheer went up from the crowd nearby. A sailor had bent his girl over backward and was planting a kiss right on her lips while everyone watched. Other couples began following suit. Dennis and I grinned at each other. He bent me backward and kissed me for the longest time. I came up and arranged my hair, smiling.

  “The houses are strong?” I asked. “I can’t even begin to imagine what a kit looks like.”

  His dimples flared. “Just as strong as traditionally built homes. A kit is everything needed to assemble a house—delivered all at once by a truck. Thing is, once a dealership gets up and running, a prefab can be fit for a family to move in within less than a week.”

  My mouth dropped. “Less than a week?”

  “Think about this,” he said. “The construction industry in this country has taken a nosedive, right? While so many men have been gone and resources poured into the military. There’s now a housing shortage.” It was true. I’d seen the headlines. “It’s only gonna get worse as more troops return.”

  I recalled that my grandfather had a friend named Peanut Jim who sold nuts to Reds fans at the ballpark. Opa had taught me that an entrepreneur finds a need and fills it, reports to no one. My husband had identified a need. His older brother was set to take over the farm one day anyway. Dennis would become an entrepreneur. After what had happened to my father and Opa in the brewing industry, I warmed to the notion that my husband might be less subject to losing a job.

  “One of the best parts is this,” Dennis said, sounding serious. “Gunnison dealers get to offer financing. Veterans under the GI Bill require no down payment to buy. So if I couldn’t help the boys on the front line, my work could help them after they’re back.”

  How I adored this man.

  One day soon, though, we’d need to talk of my personal dreams. Of having children and my own job—of being useful both inside and outside our home.

  “You and I will start a family, too.” He winked, and I gave him another big smile. He already understood some of my needs. I was a lucky girl.

  As church bells rang again in the city, I bent my neck to face the warm sky—a sky as blue as Mother Glenn’s hydrangeas—while the odor of my own sweat lingered beneath my arms and confetti sprinkled my forehead like fat summer snowflakes.

  Then I felt a familiar disappointing dampness coming on, one that meant I was spotting and hadn’t conceived.

  CHAPTER THREE

  May 1946

  Nine months after V-J Day, we still weren’t holding an infant. Instead we stood on a concrete block foundation, overlooking a quarter acre of mud. It was Dennis’s new baby, the start of Gunnison Homes by Glenn, his dealership for prefabricated homes. Leading to the street was a line of wood planks marred by our own dirty footprints. In two weeks, a truck would deliver Dennis’s first model home in kit form: numbered joists, preassembled walls, shingles, furnace, and all. E
ven a white picket fence.

  I was helping Dennis prepare for the grand opening. The model home’s lot was on Egbert Avenue in an up-and-coming Cincinnati neighborhood north of Clifton—while we now lived like misers in a twenty-five by thirty-foot flat. We had waved goodbye to the farm life for good.

  The weeks leading up to this day had been hectic for Dennis, what with finding and grading the lot, getting his first permits, hiring a crew that would erect the structure, and arranging for utility hookups. Dennis had asked for my help with budgeting and decor. So I’d postponed my job search. I worried about our financial risk, though. Dennis’s folks had given their grown children each cuts of a recent land sale. They’d sold off some acreage to an aircraft engine factory moving into the county. What if the business my husband invested in failed?

  I spent my days at fabric shops, gathering up swatches of gingham and chintz, or catching sales at furniture stores. At night I studied the Gunnison manual and women’s magazines to glean what young families wanted. I imagined myself at the model home, rubbing the chromium toothbrush holders to a gleam or polishing the kitchen’s linoleum floor to a shine so perfect it’d reflect the new Frigidaire. It was all great fun. And useful. But it wasn’t enough for me. I needed to do something more to assure the company a commission—and to provide myself some money.

  The next morning, Dennis and I drank coffee in our kitchenette within view of our bed and a few feet from our couch. I said, “There’s more I can do for the business than make things pretty. I’ve read the Gunnison dealer’s manual twice.”

  “I’m all ears,” he said. He’d finished his bowl of Cheerios and lit up a smoke.

  “Advertising and mailings,” I said, tightening the ties of my robe, nervous. “Things to get the word out. Gunnison’s budget already allows for modest spending.” Besides, I had seen at Kroger how well-timed newspaper ads and mailers sent droves of customers to the store. Could it work for our grand opening?