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BOOK EXCERPT From Chapter 1Wanda Hazel It wasn't always a storybook life, but it was never gloomy. Wanda Hazel Gag was born on a cold Minnesota day—March 11, 1893. Her first home, between a saloon and a blacksmith shop in the small German town of New Ulm, was full of bedbugs. The wingless creatures hid in the baby's brown walnut cradle, nipping at Wanda's plump arms and legs. The Gags moved into more rented rooms, but they couldn't escape the bedbugs. Still, their new home was convenient. Both Anton Gag, Wanda's tall, artistic-looking father, and Elizabeth ("Lissi") Biebl Gag, Wanda's merry, birdlike mother, worked in a photography studio that took up part of their rooms. Lissi had taken the job as an assistant in Anton's photography studio in about 1888, when she was in her teens. It was an odd choice of work for a woman. Women rarely worked outside the home in those days, except as teachers or maids or cooks. And Christian women (Lissi, like Anton, was raised Catholic) never worked on Sundays, the busiest day for photographers. On Sundays, everyone in New Ulm was scrubbed, pressed, and looking their best. They were ready to have their pictures taken. The advertisement in the photography studio window hadn't asked for a man or a woman or for someone willing to work on Sundays. It had asked for someone "artistic." Wanda's mother had worked only as a maid in a hotel, but she liked the idea of artistic work. She had an uncanny ability to make children smile and sit still, a great skill for a photographer's assistant. Lissi Biebl was also smart, pretty, and easy to get along with. She and Anton Gag married in 1892. The Gag family's rented rooms were soon cramped and crowded. After Wanda, a sister, Stella Lona, was born in 1894. The Gags built a house, tall and skinny and brightly painted, on a bare lot at the edge of New Ulm on North Washington Street. But it was one thing to build a house, another to pay for it. When the house was completed, the Gags had to sell it to pay their debts. They couldn't afford to buy it back and move the family in until just before Wanda's fourth birthday, in 1897. Anton set up the photography studio in a back room at the top of the stairs. He'd designed the room to be a studio, so it had large windows and a skylit painting nook, for Mr. Gag was also a painter. The neighbors called him an impractical artist, and who wouldn't? Windows couldn't block the fierce cold of Minnesota's winters. "Think of the coal bills!" the townspeople said. Skylights in those days were nearly always leaky. The family kept a group of pails and pans nearby, ready for rainstorms. In spite of the leaks and the cold, the studio and painting nook were inviting, at least to Wanda. That's where she often found her father. For as long as she could remember, Wanda followed her father around while he did his work as a photographer and while he painted for pleasure. In spare moments Anton Gag painted pictures of the countryside, views of castles in Bohemia where he was born, and still lifes of carefully arranged fruit—fruit that looked good enough to eat. Wanda knew that if she were well behaved, her father would let her eat the fruit after his painting was done. She learned never to interrupt him while he was painting. To occupy herself, Wanda looked at pictures in books stored in the painting nook's built-in bookcase. Or she drew pictures herself. Someday when she was a little older and he was a little less busy, Anton Gag promised, he would train her to be an artist. Until then, he warned her not to copy the work of others. Wanda should draw her own view of the world. Wanda and Stella slept in the room next door, sandwiched between the studio and their parents' front bedroom, with its door to a round, tower-topped porch. That porch, Wanda was delighted to discover, "offered excellent opportunities for climbing." In the hallway was another door, leading up to yet another skylit studio room in the attic. Wanda had never known so much space. She savored the elegant carpet-covered parlor downstairs, where her father played the zither late at night, the dining room with its tall cupboard full of drawers, and the kitchen, warmed by a large stove. Wanda was small enough—a slight, short girl with dark eyes and wavy dark brown hair—that even the crowded pantry off the kitchen seemed large. Wanda and Stella had plenty of time to explore that spring as their mother grew larger and larger with pregnancy, then took to her bed. On April 4, Mrs. Gag gave birth to another girl, tiny and frail. Her parents named her quickly, in case she didn't live long. But Thusnelda Blondine (nicknamed Tussy, to rhyme with "pussy") proved stronger than she looked. One of the neighbor ladies asked, "A boy or a girl?" Wanda was happy to say she'd gotten a new sister. "What, another girl?" The way the neighbor lady said it told Wanda that not everyone liked girl babies as much as she did. When more sisters—Asta Theopolis and Dehli (pronounced "daily") Maryland—arrived in 1899 and 1900, Wanda must have noticed her father's disappointment. Without a boy, there was no one to carry on the Gag family name. Wanda also must have noticed her mother's growing exhaustion from caring for so many babies. Though Mama was more tired than before, she turned plump and healthy-looking again in just two years' time. A new baby, Wanda knew by now, would soon be rocking in the brown walnut cradle. Papa, home from work and cranky from a sore tooth, paced the stairs. The kettle was on the boil, the house smelled of olive oil, and before long the doctor arrived. Wanda and her sisters waited for the news. They saw it in Papa's face, lit with joy and a lopsided grin. At last, a boy! Just before Christmas, in 1902, Howard Anthony Jerome was born. As far as Anton Gag was concerned, the family was finally "complete." He was, he told people, "rich in children." Wanda, almost ten years old, found it wonderful but also confusing. Surely her father loved her and her sisters. But the pure triumph on his face at the birth of a son made her question that love: "Had Papa really wanted a boy so much? And why?" Such questioning didn't bother Wanda for long. Her father's happiness at having a boy was so great it seemed to spill over into every part of the family's life. At home, Mrs. Gag was soon out of bed and doing all her usual cooking, cleaning, sewing, and combing (since all the girls had long hair). She tended to baby Howard and still found time to do little things for the girls, like baking bread shaped into square book shapes—Bilder-Bücher, or picture books, as she called them in her native German. The children moved to different rooms, with the older girls taking over the old photography studio and painting nook. Now when Anton Gag wanted to paint on a Sunday afternoon, he headed for the attic studio, puffing on a rare cigar and humming old Bohemian tunes. As long as the children promised to be quiet, they could follow. To stay out of their father's way, the girls took over an unfinished room off the studio. There they played below the pointy front window with their marbles, paper dolls, china dolls, and doll furniture. And there Wanda drew pictures and told stories to her younger sisters, keeping them entertained while Mama watched the baby. Surely some of the stories Wanda told were Märchen, or fairy tales. Wanda had gotten her taste for fairy tales from her mother's relatives, who lived on a farm just outside New Ulm. The "Grandma Folks," as Wanda nicknamed her Biebl grandparents, aunts, and uncles, were especially good storytellers. "Sit down, Wandachen, and I'll read you a Märchen," grown-ups would tell her, speaking in German, as almost everyone in New Ulm did then. Settling into the lap of a grandmother or other relative to hear these tales had always given Wanda "a tingling, anything-may-happen feeling . . . the sensation of being about to bite into a big juicy pear." Fairy tales were easy for Wanda to believe. The woods where Hansel and Gretel became lost were not so different from the "big deep forest" in Bohemia where as a boy Wanda's father had herded cows. Grandma and Grandpa Biebl's place was "all snug and tight," like the house of Snow White and the seven dwarfs. And it held just as many people: Grandma, Grandpa, three uncles, and three aunts. One aunt, Lena, was to Wanda "a princess in disguise . . . fine and fair." Wanda discovered more and different stories once she was old enough for school. Kindergarten was all colored paper, glue, beads, and drawing, and Wanda loved every minute. It was easy for her since the teachers and students spoke German, as Wanda did at home. Beginning in first grade, however, Wanda faced a confusing mix of mostly English and only some German at school. She found it hard to concentrate. At home, drawing was her favorite thing to do. At school, the teacher expected her to hold her felt-trimmed slate and write in chalk: 2 + 3 = 5. Numbers didn't mean much to Wanda, so she couldn't help daydreaming—and getting into trouble. At home, her father encouraged her creativity and dreaminess, saying proudly, "Na, my little Wanda is dreaming again!" But some parts of school were wonderful. Miss Weschcke, who taught German through all of Wanda's years in school, liked to end her lessons with a fairy tale or two. And in Wanda's other, all-English, classes, she gradually grew to love words. "When they're all together, so they make a story," she said, "things happen inside of you." Good things. By fourth grade Wanda was allowed to borrow books from the school library, a small cupboard in the upstairs hallway. There, she found fairy tales and other stories nearly as good—Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, about a brother and sister who help their father recover from an accident, and The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, about a poor family that manages to stay cheerful even after the father's death. Wanda brought them home and read them first to herself and then to her younger sisters. English words came easily to her now, and she devoured every book she could find. Wanda's reading homework took forever, but not because she couldn't understand it: "When we have to look up words for the reading lesson I read and read in the dictionary because it's so interesting I can't stop . . . in between I always see other words which make me look at them." She liked the way words sounded when spoken out loud. She even liked the way words looked and could picture them in her mind during spelling bees at school. As she put it, "You see a word, and when you stand up to spell it, the picture of the word stays in your mind." It wasn't like that at all with math. Wanda eventually learned to add and subtract well enough. In fourth grade, she faced a new challenge: multiplication. Wanda might look at 6 x 7 = 42 in her book, but by the time she was called on to stand up in class, the answer had flown out of her brain, "erased just as if it had been on the black board and someone had brushed it out with the eraser so it's just black and empty again." Try as she might, Wanda simply couldn't picture numbers in her mind the way she could "see" her favorite words or the way she could see and understand shapes she wanted to draw. One day her teacher, Miss Koch, had her stay indoors during morning recess to practice her multiplication, but Wanda still "got stuck." Miss Koch tried again at afternoon recess, but Wanda did no better. Finally she had Wanda stay after school. "She only let me go," Wanda remembered later, "because she didn't want to stay after school either." Wanda worried that she would "surely stay sitting at the end of the year"—be held back. But she moved on up through the grades. Two wonderful things happened in 1905, when Wanda was in seventh grade. She had been collecting favorite words and names for some time: words like glen or dell or grotto and names like Gwendalyne or Marmaduke or Clover. By seventh grade, Wanda was putting those words into stories. One of those stories, about a boy named Jocko, was ten chapters long. Wanda copied it carefully, trying to avoid making ink blots on the pages, and showed it to her father. He said it was pretty good for a twelve-year-old, and Wanda couldn't have been more pleased. Papa Gag insisted on perfection and rarely handed out praise. The other good thing about that year was meeting Olga Mayer. Wanda had never before had a best friend. Maybe it was because she was nearly always the smallest in her class. (For years, one teacher called her Wandachen, or "Little Wanda," in German.) Maybe it was because she was so dreamy. Or maybe it was because she loved to draw and read until her eyes were so tired the doctor ordered her to bed in a dark room for a week. But in the fall of 1905, the Mayers moved in a few blocks away, and suddenly Wanda found someone who loved words as much as she did. Together Wanda and Olga filled five-cent notebooks with stories they created. Often, Wanda illustrated the stories with her own drawings, signing them with elegant-sounding pen names like Hazel or Edythe Vernon Younge. Sometimes the girls snipped pictures from magazines and used them as illustrations. Words and names Wanda had collected found their way into stories, like the one about a girl named Velva Marche who finds a family living in a glen—a family with girls named Daisy and Clover White. Wanda loved writing stories with Olga, but at times Wanda's tales showed signs of strain. In "Velva's Glen," from 1906 or 1907, Wanda wrote, "Mr. and Mrs. Marche found that the White children's parents were fairly well educated but . . . Mr. White . . . got sick and could not work so everything went out of order." Mr. White might just as well have been named "Mr. Gag." Wanda's father, Anton, had been ill for some time. In the late 1890s, he had closed his photography studio. To feed his growing family, Mr. Gag had formed a business to paint and decorate homes, churches, auditoriums, and other buildings. He had enjoyed some success, but years of standing while painting had left him with pain in his legs. As a young girl, Wanda superstitiously avoided stepping on the newest boards of the wooden sidewalks downtown. Stepping on cracks could "break your mother's back," as the rhyme said, and Wanda knew that stepping on green boards was also bad luck. Maybe it could hurt her father's legs. Even with all of Wanda's care, her father grew sicker. One foot was often bandaged so thickly that Mr. Gag couldn't wear a shoe. By 1906, Papa Gag's foot was the least of his worries. He was frequently too tired and sick to work. He rested for long stretches and had trouble breathing. Doctors diagnosed tuberculosis, a disease that ravages the lungs. Most likely, the doctors said, he'd gotten the disease while painting and decorating damp churches. Mr. Gag traveled to Oregon, hoping the coastal air would bring a cure, but he returned only slightly less tired than before. Mrs. Gag seemed tired, too, although she was gaining weight. At some point Wanda realized her mother was pregnant again. Soon there would be nine mouths to feed, and not one of the Gags was strong enough to put in a vegetable garden. Mr. Gag forced himself to keep working that winter and spring, traveling to Mankato to decorate churches. Only thirty miles separated the towns, but Mr. Gag had no car or horse to cover the distance. He came home only infrequently. He was away when a baby was born on May 24, 1907. Wanda, who believed that names should be "like music or flowers or perfume," helped name the girl: Flavia Betti Salome, whom everyone called Flops or Flopsy. Flavia's birth should have brought rejoicing. But Mrs. Gag was so tired, she had no energy to care for the baby. Wanda spent so much time watching her littlest sister, she almost considered Flavia to be her baby. And Mr. Gag couldn't help Wanda with the baby-watching, even if he had wanted to. When he returned home from Mankato, he took to his bed as well. Like the father in Wanda's story, Anton was so sick he "could not work so everything went out of order." Copyright © 2004 Borealis Books · Send questions to the Webmaster |
