The Sweetheart Season

by Karen Joy Fowler

  9

  In the thirties, Henry had been able to handle Maggie’s correspondence by himself, but by 1947 the task had grown enormously. With the end of the war, Maggie began to receive letters from all over the globe. It was a point of pride as well as common courtesy that she answer them all, so writing letters and tracing Maggie’s signature in Maggie’s own beautiful penmanship was added to the other duties of the Kitchen. Some letters required discretion and these Maggie answered privately.

  Some were edifying for everyone. These she printed in a weekly column in Women at Home, between the ads for Fibbs tampons (“Don’t miss out!”)—a giddy slogan my mother once admitted to me she first read as meaning the tampons were the thing not be missed) and the ads for Clapp baby foods. (“Clapp for it”). Women at Home was a postwar magazine with an obvious agenda. “Aren’t you lucky to be back at home?” it asked the postwar women. “Aren’t you lucky to be a real girl?” The editorial staff was primarily but not exclusively female. These women, of course, all had jobs.

  Henry took first pick of the letters. Sometimes he answered several himself. If something caught his fancy he could go on at some length. But other weeks, when he was occupied setting up timed mazes for his rats, or growing vegetables in centrifuges, or hobnobbing with other men of science in hotels in Chicago and Detroit, he paid no attention at all.

  The letters to be used in the magazine were collected in an old milk box Ada had tarted up with painted violets. Any girl who thought she had a letter and answer worthy of publication put it into the box. Fanny read through them, when she had the time, and chose from among them. They were then mailed to the editorial staff in New York.

  Fanny was in charge of the mailing and of soliciting participation in a slow week. She was also stuck with the letters no one else wanted to answer. She got hazard pay for this. It was richly deserved.

  No one oversaw the letters that went out privately. There were simply too many and it was more important to Henry that Maggie answer all of her letters than that he know what every answer was. He trusted his girls. And he believed in Maggie. She was so real to him, she was real. Like Pinocchio. He didn’t have to watch her every moment. She could take care of herself.

  My mother saved some of Maggie’s columns from this period. “I was so touched by the letters,” she said. “All these people in all these different countries, convinced that Maggie had missed them during the war.”

  Dear Maggie,

  I have a tiny farm outside Oslo with one cow, one horse, one pig, one sheep, and six hens. Compared to others, such riches! Yet I think it will take a little time for us to forget and go on as before, with the evidence of such terrible things all around us.

  Norway is too little to be a country, more like a big family. For five long years our family home was lost to us, like Tara in your wonderful American book Gone With the Wind. You cannot imagine how proud we all felt on that day in May when we recovered our country. Now our beloved crown prince is back and the Norwegian colors fly everywhere. When can I begin to get Women at Home?

  and

  Dear Maggie,

  My daughter is now in India doing physiotherapy at a military hospital while I am in Argentina doing missionary work. We write often and speak of you in every letter. She has asked me to tell you how many friends you have in the British-Indian community. May the sun never set on Women at Home!

  and

  Dear Maggie,

  Now the Japanese have gone and even the American liberators are leaving. They used to be more than the population of Manila itself, now GI’s are rare. Before the war I always read you for advice and encouragement. I always thought, someday I will have a problem and I will write to Maggie Collins. Before the war I had a piano, a radio, and a beloved waffle iron. Now I have only three wobbly chairs. All else was sold to keep us from starving, but no word could be gotten to you. And after the war it was still several months before civilians were allowed mail for the States. This letter will go out in one of the first posts.

  These days in the Philippines, you don’t ask people ‘How is So-and-So?’ You ask, ‘Is he still living?’ So I am wondering, my old friend, as I send you my greeting from the Philippines. Are you still living?

  Maggie was gracious and international. “Someday I will be flying down to see the beautiful city of Rio for myself,” she wrote her fans in Brazil. A rare letter from Finland persuaded Maggie to overlook their temporary alliance with Germany and focus instead on the sad conditions of the peace treaty with the USSR. “Kaikki menne mita tulle eika pusaken. Everything goes that comes, and it isn’t enough.” The Finnish was provided by Margo Törngren’s mother.

  Food was the immediate postwar problem. Herbert Hoover had been appointed by Truman to deal with the difficulties of feeding Europe, and Hoover had begun by asking Americans to voluntarily eat less. In the British zone of Germany, the British reduced the daily caloric allotment to an involuntary one thousand, well beneath the fifteen hundred in the American zone, which was the minimum recommended by nutritionists. In the French and Russian zones there were allegations that the Germans were not being fed at all. The French and the Russians cited the Potsdam Agreement. “Why should the Germans be eating better than the Poles?” they asked.

  France needed cheese and electricity. Just try to imagine France without cheese.

  America wallowed in meat and sugar again.

  The goal in the domestic sciences escalated from clean to disinfected. Maggie Collins was equal to anything. A column on the wastefulness of the milk industry demonstrates her ingenuity. “Almost half the milk products produced in this country,” she wrote, “leave a creamless milk by-product. Although nutritionally top-notch, millions of gallons of this by-product are dumped annually as a matter of taste. When so many are hungry, this is insupportable. Few foodstuffs have the versatility of milk. It can be used to make plastics, adhesives, fabrics, drugs, and penicillin.”

  She included a modest list of proposals. The fashion industry could use the milk by-product to make the plastic coated furs that were currently fashionable; the postal department could use it to make the gluey backs of stamps; the average housewife could use it to make the paste for papier-mâché. Papier-mâché could in turn be used to transform old picture frames, old lamp bases, old vases into brightly colored objets d’art. And housewives with less time or talent but plenty of sugar could cook the milk by-product. The column ended with a recipe for Maggie’s own Skim Milk Almond-Cherry Nougats.

  In early April she ran her salute to the brave people of Holland. It included recipes for tulip soup, tulip mash, and tulip cookies. Don’t make substitutions, she warned her readers in bold-faced type. Serious consequences can follow the ingestion of crocus, hyacinth, daffodil, or gladioli bulbs. She was arguably at her very peak.

  In the mid-April issue, Women at Home ran the following letter from Salem, Massachusetts:

  Dear Maggie,

  Now that the war is over, why not total peace? Tell the beauty experts in your magazine to quit making war on overweight women. Strange as it may seem, there are some women who work to be attractive, but do not see weight reduction as a key to this. Stranger yet, some men admire them. Yours is supposed to be a magazine for women, yet again and again in the columns, not to mention the ads, you attack overweight women in an endless variety of subtle ways. You could use your influence to show these same women in an attractive light. You could build their pride and self-assurance. Instead you try to shame them. You’re the ones who should be ashamed.

  The response ran as follows:

  Dear Salem, Massachusetts,

  I am only a columnist for Women at Home and have nothing to say about editorial policy or advertisers. For what it is worth, I couldn’t agree with you more. Don’t let my official portrait fool you—it was done some years ago. I am sure I weigh as much now as you do.

  The same issue carried, on page 6, an ad for the AYDS Vitamin Candy Reducing Plan. “No exercise, no drugs, no laxatives.
Soldier’s wife loses 57 pounds, becomes a slender beauty,” was the headline, illustrated with a “before” and an “after” swimsuit picture. It is interesting to note, although completely beside the point, that 1947’s slender beauty wore a size 14.

  The letter to Salem, Massachusetts, was easily determined to have come from the Scientific Kitchen. After publication the original was recovered and examined. It had been typed on the mill typewriter and gave no clues as to its author.

  Among the girls, suspicion rested primarily on Fanny May. Fanny remembered having taken the last stack of letters to the mail herself. She admitted as much. And Fanny was also the woman in the Kitchen who weighed the most. Only Henry Collins, set on blaming the incident on youthful high spirits, refused to consider her, because of her age.

  By 1947 standards, Fanny was not fat so much as she was big. Although she was almost thirty and had never even flirted with marriage, Fanny in no way fit the stereotype of the spinster. She was a vivacious, prankish person who attracted male attention at will. Irini, who had given the matter considerable thought, believed her chief attraction was her mouth. She had a very erotic mouth, although Irini would not have put it quite this way. The hollow leading to the top lip from the base of the nose was unusually deep; a man could run his fingertip down it. The lips were heart-shaped when she pouted and very full even when she didn’t. And the things she said with them!

  “Bold as brass,” Mrs. Tarken complained, even though Fanny never spoke to her at all—she didn’t know the half of it. But hadn’t Fanny, all by herself with the opposition of every Lutheran in town, fought to have Duel in the Sun screened in the school auditorium? She thought she’d won, too. Irini went to see it with her and her sisters, but then Henry had Lost Horizon shown instead. “A delightful surprise,” he called it, and then, catching sight of the three May girls, “a sensible compromise.”

  Henry Collins actually owned a copy of Lost Horizon, so they were delighted with it often. And it did have that one sexy swimming scene with Jane Wyatt, worn a little pale, as if someone had run the footage of that a little more often than the rest. It had that poetic image of the bright, shiny plane and its silly but steadfast shadow. I remember that much and I haven’t seen it anywhere near so often as my mother did.

  Even so, no one was happy, not the Lutherans and certainly not Fanny May. But then this is the nature of compromise, as I don’t have to tell you. You live in a democracy, you know about disappointment.

  Henry called all the girls into the Kitchen and read the letter aloud. He confined himself then to a brief speech reminding them all of how much they owed Maggie. “Maggie is a generous and gifted woman with none of the jealousies or pettiness that tarnish the sex. If she discovers a new use for an old spice, this discovery immediately belongs to women everywhere. A woman in faraway Switzerland can set it on the table before her delighted husband and claim it as her own.” He pulled on his meaty earlobe. It stretched to an inch or more, then bounced back when he released it.

  “The main point is that Maggie is not a stout woman. If she were stout,” Henry said, “she would be the first to admit it. She is not in the habit of dissembling. But she is not. Not by any stretch of the imagination. She has a very pleasing figure.” The ending was all charity. “If we refuse to suspect anyone, we avoid the risk of injustice. Accordingly, let us agree to consider the matter closed.”

  He commissioned a new portrait of Maggie to amplify the main point. She was wearing her usual sashed apron, only the sash was tied more tightly. The bow peeked out from behind both sides of her tiny waist, resembling little wings. Her figure was exaggeratedly hourglass. “And we all thought,” my mother said, “that was the end of that.”

  10

  The whole episode hurt Henry more than he let on. It came at a particularly bad time. Some man up in Alaska had just developed fish sticks.

  Fish sticks were exactly the sort of thing the Kitchen should have developed. Bits of fish with no bones, no scales, and no unpleasant fish taste, rolled in cereal, and cooked in minutes. Fish so transformed that even children would eat it.

  Henry exhorted the Kitchen to produce a rival product. It wasn’t merely or even mostly profit that motivated him. He wanted Margaret Mill to be a part of the bold new world waiting to be built on the rubble of the war.

  Of course the rubble was in Europe and not in America, but you really couldn’t have pictured it any other way. Americans were born lucky; it’s just part of being American. So Henry wanted Margaret Mill to be part of what Americans had fought for. The most intimate part. The part that you ate.

  Cooking fish, as Maggie is fond of pointing out, generally exceeds the grasp of the ordinary cook. It had once stood as a line of demarcation. And now some man in Alaska had brought it all within reach. Since nothing could be added to fish sticks in terms of taste or convenience, Henry focused on shape. “What’s so great about sticks?” he said. His own inspiration was to make fish sticks in the shape of fish. He told Claire to choose her team and work on it.

  Claire Kinser had always been the Kitchen girl he liked best, even though the Törngrens had named their daughter Margo in a delicate homage to Maggie, just to please him. Margo was bright as copper and dependable, too, but no one was sweeter than Claire.

  Claire had chosen Helen Leggett and Tracy May to be on the fish-sticks team. Irini was left on the sidelines. It was nothing personal; she just wasn’t Upper Magrit. She didn’t mind. Irini knew she was well liked, but she also knew she had no intimate friends. She was closest to Arlys Fossum and Margo Törngren, but they were closer still to each other. Sometimes she thought she didn’t know how to be close to people and that this was because she’d had no mother to teach her. She had grown up defending herself from pity over her motherlessness and so what she had learned instead of intimacy was self-defense.

  Henry could have used a bit more of this. He persisted in taking the Salem, Massachusetts, incident personally. “Which just wasn’t possible,” my mother said. “We would as soon have hurt Santa Claus.”

  In fact, the two were strongly associated in my mother’s mind. Every year at the mill Christmas party, Henry dressed as Santa and entered in some surprising way. “I’d go down the chimney if I could. But I seem to be fatter than the real Santa,” he told Irini’s father. This was a joke. Henry wasn’t fat at all. “Since I can’t be traditional, I aim for memorable.”

  Once he had popped from the dumb-waiter in the dining hall. Once he slid down the bannister on a large red pillow. One year when Irini was so small she just barely remembered it, he hid inside an enormous box all wrapped with silver paper that the children had been told to open together.

  One year he had a sled made specially, a Flexible Flyer propelled by a motor and a drive wheel, with cloth-covered runners for the wood floors. He entered through the library doors, belly down. He was clearly unpracticed. The motor roared and filled the hallway with smoke. Excessive movement on the steering bar resulted in only small adjustments to the runners. After a brief period of wild and noisy tilting, he ran aground on the Oriental rug.

  This was the year my mother turned thirteen. She wore a pine-colored velveteen dress from Sears with a gathered skirt, puffed sleeves, and a rhinestone medallion set into the bodice. Her coat was old and stained and crushed her puffs. She didn’t want to put it on, not even to walk up the snowy, faintly lit path to Collins House, but her father insisted and insisted on galoshes, too.

  Because they were guests, they went to the front door, up the steps of the porch, and between a pair of stone lions. Her father had been to New York in his youth and seen the public library there. “Reading between the lions,” he had called it. Every social, front-door visit to Collins House afforded him a chance to retell the joke. It was not, to Irini’s thinking, good enough to survive repeated wearings.

  Her father was already weaving, but scarcely noticeably. He asked her to ring the doorbell. Three chimes sounded inside the house, each higher in pitch than th
e last. Inside the entrance was an enormous tree. It was decorated all with angels, every ornament an angel, and none of them the same.

  And the lights! There were still a lot of people in Magrit made nervous by electricity. They all had it, because of the mill. They were all glad to have it. But to use it in such a frivolous way was to court disaster. Hadn’t Madame Nadeau made her last attack with lightning? Had the Collinses ever stopped to ask themselves what she might do with electrical wiring? Upper Magrit came to the Christmas party, ate and drank fast, and then went home again.

  It was too elegant to miss entirely. Even the littlest children were given their punch in thin glasses with gold around the rims. The punch was cranberry. Next to the gold, in the sparkling glass, it was as pretty as an ornament. Her father said she was a vision in her green dress with her shining hair, holding her red and gold glass. It made Irini think of her punch as a fashion accessory. She didn’t want to drink it. Her father didn’t want to drink his either. He told her to behave herself with the other children and wandered off looking for a place to set his drink down.

  If the house seemed oversized when Irini was nineteen, it had been more so at thirteen. The ceilings were high, the steps on the stairs were tall. The yule log burned in an enormous tiled fireplace. The room smelled of pine. The fire hissed and spit and tossed shadows into the corners. Irini looked at everything through her glass of punch, which not only miniaturized the scene, but colored it red. The fire flickered rosy and far away.

  A tiny face appeared in the liquid, altered by the curve in the glass until it was all nose. When Irini lowered her drink, the face’s features normalized into Sissy Tarken. Sissy was also thirteen, but immature even by Tarken standards. She grinned at Irini, lifted her own glass and took a bite out of it. There was a crunching sound. Sissy spit a dime-sized piece of gold and glass onto the floor. For just a moment, Irini thought it was a tooth. Bright red liquid dripped from Sissy’s mouth to the collar of her dress.