Our dad sounded like he was back in that car, his voice growing louder in the joy of the story. “The exhaust noise was deafening. The fumes were choking us. The water temperature was heading towards steam!” They turned towards New York for the nearest mechanic who could work on sports cars.
Our mother paused to pass the salad. “And then the rain started.” She described how the windshield was at such a sharp angle it left a gap between the glass and the hood. It poured a waterfall of oily rain on their heads and laps. Their clothes were ruined. She laughed, “At least the car kept us warm, too warm.” She shook her head at the craziness of it all. My brothers gazed at my mother with awe, imagining they were in the car too.
Our father exclaimed, “My left shoe was soaked with burning oil coming from the engine. I had to take it off and put my foot under my right leg to protect it.”
He said to us, “The next day was Saturday, your poor mother’s twenty-second birthday. She was such a good sport.” He reached for her hand across the table and squeezed it fondly, before continuing. Frank and Ushi smiled their appreciation.
My parents spent the day in a garage with a French-speaking mechanic, trying to get him to understand to do just the minimum so they could get home. “We didn’t have much money to pay him.” Our father nodded for our mother to continue the story.
She explained, “In the afternoon we left with two cases of oil. I’d found us raincoats at an Army Navy store.” She spoke to the boys, “Your dad put down a sheet of asbestos on the floor to protect us from the engine heat.”
Heading west, they kept stopping because the car boiled over. They had to keep refilling the oil. Then the sun came out. Spring in the mountains of Pennsylvania. She grinned, “It was a perfect birthday.”
He continued, “And then the fun began.” My father’s bald head was glowing with beads of sweat under the spot lights at the table.
A baby blue Cadillac sedan with steer horns on the front and silver stirrups for door handles had pulled alongside them on the highway. That couple thought our parents in raincoats in the purple Bugatti were the funniest thing they’d ever seen this side of Texas. They accelerated to pass. Our father looked at our mother and she nodded. “I put down the accelerator and stayed right with them. The guy in the cowboy hat looked over at us and started to look annoyed. He tromped down on his accelerator with a roar, and we stayed right next to him, effortlessly. Then we sailed on by with a wave. At that moment, we knew the Bugatti bug had gotten us.”
My parents smiled at each other like I remembered when I was a child, in a way I hadn’t seen them smile for a long time. Our father whispered to us all in a stage whisper, “I didn’t tell her that 195 kilometers an hour meant we were going 120 miles an hour.” Our lovely mother smiled and pretended she didn’t hear him.
Then he looked at me and my brothers sternly. “Now don’t you do that when you start to drive.” We looked at each other and knew we all wanted to drive fast too, someday.
Ushi clapped her hands appreciatively, “Bravo. What a marvelous story.”
AFTER MY BROTHERS and I cleared the dinner dishes, our mother brewed coffee and we served dessert. She had ordered an Austrian torte made at Woodie’s favorite old-world restaurant, Lenhardts, in Clifton. Countless thin layers of hazelnut cake were layered with whipping cream, laced with slivers of strawberries and topped with whole berries. As we took our first careful bites with heavy three-pronged Stieff silver forks, my father told Ushi and Frank a story about the source of the mystery dessert wine he would be serving.
He had heard of a vast wine collection that had to be cleared from Mr. Jergens’ cellar, of Jergens lotion fame. He had died and his mansion was being sold. The wine experts from La Maisonette had deemed the French wines worthless and didn’t bother to look at the rest. The executors said whatever bottles anyone wanted, they’d sell for fifty cents a bottle. My father had to check it out. He drove into the city in the VW bus and brought us all along. The wine cellar turned out to be the whole basement, stone-walled, heavy-ceilinged, stone-floored, and filled to overflowing with bottles. We stepped down the stone steps, ducked under beams, avoiding light bulbs swinging on wires. We explored the maze of rooms, all deep-shelved. with heavy wooden structures for carrying their weight in wine. My dad discovered that behind each bottle there were more, going back in time. Wooden and cardboard cases, unopened, were stacked in every corner.
We’d watched our father disappear into the shadows, hunched over to save his bald head from hitting the low beams. His voice echoed through the stone cave, as he enthused, exclaimed, and mumbled questions to himself. Wiping off grime with his now-filthy handkerchief, he squinted through his trifocals as he lifted bottles to the light, checking for sediment, condition of corks, the vineyard, region, and vintage. We heard him swearing under his breath, “Damn, the cork has gone to hell,” or “Oh, my god, priceless.” He filled boxes steadily and waved for us to lift and haul them up the stone stairs to the van.
Soon my brothers and I searched for treasure of our own. I don’t remember who found the stack of cases of 1929 champagne. Our dad was too busy to pay attention, but our mom who was born in 1929, laughed, “What a trip.” She pulled one out of the case, pushed back the crimped metal, slowly inched the cork upward with a worried look. She was afraid the cork might pop and hit her, but it didn’t even fizz. Nor the second. But the third cork flew off and bounced off the ceiling. We cheered and she handled us the bottle to take a little sip, like we did Christmas morning when we had champagne with sweetbreads for breakfast, or at weddings. We cheered, “Wow, cool. It’s bubbling.” We carried box after box of our own treasure up to the VW bus.
Woodie spent days in that cellar, filling the VW bus to the ceiling before driving on the highway out of the city to our house. We lugged box after box into the basement, filling his modest wine cellar to overflowing, each bottle an education. His Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits lay open next to his bed, fluttering with marked pages. He was an archeologist sifting back through layers of history. My father was always the hero, delivering his stories as if he had discovered the ancient city of Troy. And we all sat back that night, willing to be enchanted. For tonight’s dinner party, he brought out the prize to share with his friends, his fifty-cent trophy, to return the favor of the fine wines Frank and Ushi had generously shared with him out of their wine cellar.
HE REPEATED A story he’d taught my brothers and me about Auslese wines. “German wines,” he smiled to all of us, “as you well know, are grown in a harsh northern climate where the hills are steep and the soil rocky.” He explained how, when there is a summer without much sun, there will be no sweetness in the wine. But on a good year, he pronounced, the German wines will be finer than any southern wine. Ushi and Frank smiled politely, knowing my father was making this point because their collection was mostly French. It seemed they had a playful competition between their French and his German wines. But my mother told me that they avoided everything German because of what had happened to their country and to them.
Under the spotlights at the table, as the gardens beyond faded into darkness, the glass wall turned to mirror, reflecting the group of us as my father continued. In the fall, in the finest vineyards, the men who climb those hills for the harvest carry three small bags with them on their chest, in addition to a large sack for ripe bunches of Spätlese grapes. My father gestured like an actor. I watched our reflections, our heads lit from above, leaning towards his sweating face. He mimed a hand picking the overripe grapes and placed them into the first bag on his back. We knew these were to be made into the buttercup-yellow, delightful Auslese we’d had many times.
“The more shriveled ripe grapes, touched by the noble rot, Edelfäule, are placed into the second smaller bag. They are to be made into the golden Beerenauslese.” He pronounced the German with gusto, but I worried how his German, remembered from childhood Sunday dinners at his grandmother’s table, sounded to Ushi and Frank. “The rarest grapes, r
aisinated on the vine,” he showed like a puppeteer with his fingers, were small and withered. He put them into the tiniest bag over his heart. “These grapes,” his voice rose dramatically, “will become the pinnacle of German wines, the rare and treasured,” he pronounced it slowly, so we could hear three words put together, “Trocken-beeren-auslese.”
He displayed for us a grimy, chilled bottle. The stained label crumbled at the corners. Trockenbeerenauslese. 1929. He had researched this. “A very good year, if it is still fit to drink.” He found cases and cases of this treasure stashed away in a dark corner of Mr. Jergen’s cellar. We were held spellbound in the wonder of his discovery, a secret he’d saved for this evening. He lifted his well-worn brass corkscrew to the task. My youngest brother held the bottle steady as he began to spiral down through the soft cork, dark and stained at the top, screwing it down to the hilt, as the brass arms rose like wings. My father placed his hands on either side, and gently pulled down the wings, prying the cork away from the surface of the liquid gold it had guarded for forty years. The cork emerged. The wine was intact, unspoiled.
He wiped the lip of the bottle and poured a taste into the first glass. 1929 Gold Trockenbeerenauslese. He handed it to Frank, who held it to the light. I thought it would be golden and clear like an Auslese. Instead it was deeper, darker, like the burnished shell of a chestnut. He swirled it and breathed it in. It was viscous, clinging to the edges of the glass like a liqueur. A tiny sip. He nodded with a look like pain and pleasure at the same time. My father poured all of us a small sip.
My heart was pounding to taste something priceless. The thick weight of elegance slipped across my tongue. I knew I was too young to appreciate it. I didn’t know if I enjoyed it. It was difficult and heavy, like a crescendo of chords from Shostakovich. Perhaps it was otherworldly like ambrosia, meant only for the gods on Mount Olympus and not for us mortals. Ushi and Frank looked at each other over their glasses with sadness. I wondered if they tasted a world that had disappeared; a time when they were young and life opened with the freshness of dew in their garden. We raised our glasses to the light and toasted the deep bronze impossible sweetness.
SUMMER OF ‘68
The modern movement is a story of high hopes, boundless optimism, innocent social idealism and considerable hubris in which the artists, architects and artisans of the world would make it a better place through a radical new kind of design.
—ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE, “MODERNISM, IN PERSPECTIVE,”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, JULY 12, 2006
MY FATHER’S FIST POUNDED THE DINNER TABLE, shaking the water glasses. “We’ve run every layout we can come up with to keep our concept and fit the smaller area the University is demanding. They are squeezing all the beauty of the design out of it. I keep fighting them on this, but they won’t budge.”
After the race riots in 1967, the University had promised the community of Corryville that they would not encroach any more on their homes and businesses. This meant the University had to build high-density student housing for projected enrollments. That’s why Dad had to design one very tall tower, twenty-seven floors, instead of three smaller dorms to house all the students. The University Committee said they liked his concept of clustered suites, but it was cheaper and used less space to build a dorm the old way, with long halls and rows of rooms. If Woodie wanted to cluster the rooms, he had to fit them into the square footage of the traditional dorm. He came home discouraged. The doubles were squeezed down to two hundred square feet. His frustration reverberated throughout our house.
Before building permits were given, before foundations were blasted out of bedrock, before the building grew from the blueprint rolls, his design for Sander Hall was already controversial. He slammed The Cincinnati Enquirer on the table, day after day announcing each new round of headlines. They claimed the building was a fire hazard, like the Ohio State tower where two coeds died. But after several studies, new headlines blazed. Sander Hall Judged Safe. The Building Commissioner was quoted, “I’d let my son live in the dorm.”
My father’s face got red, sweat gathering in the wrinkles on his forehead under the bright light of the dinner table. His eyes glowered behind his trifocals as he swore about everything he was doing for these kids. Captive to his explanations, we knew not to make a sound or to look away as he shouted, “I designed this building specifically so no smoke can reach the dorm rooms. I have fresh circulating air coming directly into every single god-damned dorm room.” His fist hit the table, rattling the silver and china plates, as he punctuated his design points. We nervously nodded our agreement.
Then someone would pass the green beans, ask for more salad, and we’d remember what we were interested in. My brother Wood, who at eleven read voraciously about ships and life at sea, exclaimed, “Did you know the thickness of battleships in World War II were only this thick?” He held his fingers in a narrow gap of air.
Our father immediately jumped on his words. “You’re dead wrong.”
“But Dad, I just read it in a book. Sure some walls were really thick but some were this thin, so shells would go right through them and not explode.”
“Show me the book. That thickness is impossible. Don’t you think I know how thick the walls of a battleship are?” When my brother was silenced, the attack continued.
He glowered at his namesake. “You have no work ethic. You never apply yourself.” This was an echo of lines we’d heard for years, but his ferocity of attack increased that summer. “You have no integrity.”
Wood stared at the table, his shoulders slumped forward. The bowl cut my father had given him was rough and uneven, like a punishment.
Woodie continued, “Why won’t you do better in school? Is it willfulness that you don’t even try? Why do you sabotage my every effort to improve you?” He demanded, “Answer me.”
Wood couldn’t speak. None of us could. My mother nodded for us to clear the table. We left Woodie at the table making angry sketches with his marker pen that tore the paper napkins, the ink leaving tiny blots that stained the teak table. We slipped away to our rooms.
WHEN WE WERE young and lived in the Victorian house, we all ran to meet Woodie and kiss him when his sports car roared in the driveway. Here we did the same but it was because we were required to, and it seemed he couldn’t get away from us fast enough. He had to walk the boundaries of the land, to watch his creation in every angle of light, and to determine what work we had to do next. Beauty became a cruel taskmaster.
Beauty confronted us everywhere we looked, as if the house and gardens had a voice. I am symmetry. I am elegance.
I must be perfection. I am a place to observe the snow falling on either side of my transparent walls of glass. I am an aesthetic experience for watching late afternoon sunlight trace through the clerestory windows. When we glanced up from weeding in the vegetable gardens, the precise series of windows mirrored everything that was unfinished, the raw incomplete gardens. The house and our father became one, clamoring after us: finish the gardens, finish the spiral granite terrace. I must be complete. The human clutter had to be hidden in drawers or closets. Every surface was to be kept clear to show the sleek design. It was a place for a dazzling life, not the ordinary tedium of homework, housework, or reading the paper. We were trained so we would know how to live in a modern house.
The house was the pinnacle of my father’s success, his monument to every concept of modern design and living he revered. Did we both love and fear this house, admiring the lines and perspective the way we had been trained by our father to appreciate a fine racing car, a stunning sculpture, or a priceless bottle of wine? The house was Beauty more than it was Home. Did the house demand his attention so fully, so jealously perhaps, that he couldn’t see clearly who lived in-side? For the creator of the house, had we become a distraction or a detraction to his monument?
ONE NIGHT AT a dinner that seemed unusually calm, I made sure I used perfect table manners, as I held the heavy silver fork, keeping
my left hand in my lap, while our family ate roast beef and the first salad from our garden.
I had planned my strategy carefully, casually announcing, “Linda and I want to get our ears pierced this Saturday at the mall. I’ve saved up the money from babysitting so I can pay.” I smiled and nodded. Showing him how responsible I was.
I continued, laying the foundation of my argument. “The really great thing about pierced ears is that you don’t have to worry about losing earrings. Maybe you want to do it too, Jo?” I glanced at each of my parents. My father gave her magnificent Mexican silver earrings from New York City or from their trips to Mexico to look at modern architecture in the 50s. She had a drawer of polished hoops, dangling shapes, clusters of shimmering droplets, and layered circles like chain mail that matched her necklace. She screwed each earring tightly to her earlobe to make sure it didn’t get lost. If one did pull off unnoticed, we searched everywhere, heartbroken over its loss. I’d been given a few simple pairs that I carefully screwed into place.
I added my final points with a flourish, “Since I’m just starting to wear earrings and because we are going to Mexico this summer, it seems like starting out with pierced earrings is a sensible choice. Don’t you think so?”
That summer, after the garden was planted and we got our vaccines, we would leave for a six-week trip to Mexico. We would be seeing ancient pre-Columbian ruins and modern poured-concrete buildings by the Spanish-Mexican architect Candela, who had inspired my dad to build soaring roofs based on hyperbolic parabolas. But the trip was not just about architecture. Our dad enthused about hand-woven rugs in Saltillo, black pottery in Oaxaca, and described the twisting narrow mountain road to the beautiful little town of Taxco, the silver capital of Mexico. That was what really excited me. I had saved my babysitting money for a year to buy silver jewelry.
At school, all the girls were going to the new shopping mall’s jewelry store where they felt a flash of pain and were left with a gold stud imbedded in their earlobe. After weeks of conspicuous ear dabbing, their ears emerged decorated with hoops or studs in bright pink or purple. Nicer girls wore small gold balls or pearls on their earlobes. That’s what Linda and I were going to do. All we needed was to get a parental permission slip signed before we headed to the mall.
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