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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
February 5, 2006
Published as Fiction
in 1993.
© 1993 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Maples, 1968
© 1968 by Bud Grossmann
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WARMING A WOMAN IN WINTER
(The Second Part of a Two-Part Story)
Mrs. Olhausen had been Al Scheerer’s teacher in second grade, but he’d scarcely thought of her ever since. “Frau” Olhausen, that is. In those years just after the Second World War, some German-Americans were anglicizing their names, but Helga Olhausen honored her heritage and her husband by keeping the “Frau” in front of hers. Childless and widowed—her husband had never returned from U.S. Infantry service in the Pacific—Frau Olhausen kept good order in her classroom but brought humor and warmth to every lesson.
Al recalls now how she dealt with unruly boys. For a first offense, whatever it might be, the child was ordered to stand in the back corner of the room. If, on the same day, Frau Olhausen had to admonish that fellow again, she placed him on a chair beside her desk at the front of the room. Occasionally, someone would act up yet a third time, and then the teacher held the boy in her lap as she sat behind her desk and continued the lesson at hand.
Al had earned this ultimate punishment—if punishment it was—only once, on a spring day in 1947. And yet, today, almost half a century later, he can still feel the scalding blush that crossed his face when his ears brushed the firm pillow of Frau Olhausen’s bosom. He can smell the starched, coarse cotton weave of her dress front; he can feel the weight of his legs upon his teacher’s sturdy thighs. His feet, in scuffed, leather-soled shoes, are dangling above the schoolroom floor.
Al remembers St. Valentine’s Day of 1947. At the end of each school day, the second-graders would line up at the classroom door for dismissal. In turn, each would look the teacher in the eye, solemnly shake her hand, and declare, “Goodbye, and thank you, Frau Olhausen.” With a sunny smile, Helga Olhausen would reply with equal formality. To Al: “Gootbye und thank you, Mr. Scheerer.” If a child were willing, Frau Olhausen would bend low and place a kiss on that student’s cheek.
At the close of that particular Valentine’s Day, Al now recalls, his teacher presented a nickel Hershey bar to every student in the class and bestowed a kiss on every upturned face.
Little Alton Scheerer ran directly home. Clutching his rattling red lunch pail in one hand and a red, lace-trimmed card and the chocolate bar in the other, he rushed in the front door and excitedly showed his mother the candy. He told her Frau Olhausen had given out the Hershey bars, and he said, “She kissed me, Mother! But I didn’t kiss her back!” That remark must have tickled Mrs. Scheerer—Al heard her repeat the line, that evening, to his father at the supper table.
Al Scheerer, the Furnace Man, turns in at the Ulrich driveway and parks by the fuel oil tank beside a bright white machine shed beyond the house. Frau Olhausen, if she were alive, Al estimates, would be in her eighties now. At least. Wasn’t she gray-haired way back when? What ever happened to her? Someone else had the second-graders by the time Al’s younger sister started in the grade school. This Ulrich woman couldn’t possibly have been Al’s teacher. But isn’t it funny how a voice on the phone could bring back what hasn’t crossed a man’s mind in decades?
Al lifts his battered metal tool box and crunches across the brittle brown grass to the front of the farmhouse. A blue jay shrieks nearby; a crow caws in a far-off field. Al hears no dogs, no cattle. His boots thump on the wooden steps and then on the solid flooring of the tidy porch.
Before he gets to the welcome mat, the storm door swings outward, sending a flash of reflected sunrise into the face of the Furnace Man. It blinds him for a moment. He sets down the tool box. He takes one step more and gazes upon the woman in the doorway. Her white hair, parted in the center and gleaming with a fresh brushing, rests on the shoulders of a dark, down-filled jacket zippered and snapped all the way up to her chin. She is wearing denim jeans or overalls; on her feet are rugged leather boots.
The old woman grins. Her eyes sparkle like the sun-blessed frost on her lawn. “Oh, Alton!” she says. “My, but haffn’t you grown!” She is a step above him. She levelly looks him in the eye. Then she leans forward and puts a peck upon the man’s whiskery cheek.
“Frau Olhausen!” Al replies, in a whisper. And, this time, he takes her in his arms, and he warmly returns the kiss.
♦
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