Chapter Thirty-Nine
By January, the snow was so deep that they could no longer drive Herman’s truck. By February, Lila could tell that she was pregnant again. Veda was sending letters.
February 4, 1947
Dear Lila,
This is quite a snowy year, isn’t it? When you can drive again you should visit our new house. Red built a porch. It’s such a nice place for the children to play when the weather is nice. Most of the yard was a garden when we first moved in, but I’ve had my fill of weeding and watering! We planted an oak tree in the middle.
Looy married Jean Shuda last year. Do you remember her? They now have a baby girl named Rose. Such a pretty name. David will start school in the fall. It’s hard to believe how big the children are getting. Myrtle Joyce must be getting big too. We should plan a visit to mom and dad’s house so they can see their grandchildren.
Hugs and kisses, Veda
Lila sometimes wondered why she kept writing. To brag about her house and family? To make her feel guilty for not visiting more often? Was it possible that she missed her? Lila hardly ever responded, but Veda kept writing.
Herman and Lila didn’t receive much mail. Since they didn’t have a mailbox, the driver had to knock on their door to make deliveries. He was an older man who always had a red nose, so Lila thought of him as Rudolph. She had no idea what his real name was. It made her laugh inside every time Rudolph
came to the house. Lila decided to write to Gladys and tell her that she was expecting another baby. It took her a few weeks to respond with bad news: Alice had suffered a stroke, and Gladys was taking care of her. It was a shock to everyone. Alice had been fine—doing her usual activities—and then one morning she fell trying to get out of bed. When she talked, nobody could understand what she was saying. It made Lila feel sick to her stomach. Alice had become dearer to her than her own mother. Herman borrowed a horse from Vilas to visit his parents; it was the only way to travel in the deep snow.
Lila did not really miss the Slabacks, but Alice’s condition made her think she should give them another chance before it was too late. She wrote to Veda and said she would visit as soon as the roads were clear. As she thought about going to La Crosse, she decided that she also wanted to visit Myrtle and buy some new clothes. If she replaced her dresses, she could cut up the material and make clothing for the children. When she told Herman about her plans, he said that he could use a new pair of rubber boots and gave her forty dollars. It was a lot of money—enough to buy the clothes, the boots, some additional fabric, and even to restock the coffee, flour, and sugar. She put the money in their dresser for safe keeping.
Myrtle and Carl had wasted no time in starting their family. Their first daughter, Laurie, was born in 1946. By the time Lila was finally able to drive into the city that spring, they were both visibly pregnant. They laughed as they hugged over their bellies. Carl was working at the Trane factory. They were hoping to buy a house in West Salem and raise the children closer to their cousins. Her younger sister, Rosemary, would be done with high school soon. Evelyn had married a man from Iowa and moved to be with him. The Johnson family was shrinking.
As they tried on dresses, Myrtle told her that Viola and John were getting divorced. Lila was shocked. Divorces happened in the movies, not in La Crosse. Herman had not said a word about it.
What happened?
she said with astonishment.
Myrtle replied, Well…I’m not really sure. I think Viola was not very supportive when John lost his job. She’s not the easiest person to live with.
Lila nodded and changed the topic, but for weeks she thought about all of the married couples she knew. She wasn’t naïve enough to think that all adults were nice or that all marriages were fairy tales. One of the other waitresses at Carroll’s had been living alone (even though she was still married) because her husband had run off with another woman. But getting divorced in real life? That was nearly unthinkable. Once you got married, it was supposed to be forever. In sickness and health, ’til death do us part.
Notes
I only have one sister, who is two years younger than me. As adults, many of our conversations have been like this letter from Veda to Lila—shallow and one-sided. Veda has good intentions and is successfully building her own life, but she assumes that Lila has the same goals. She is not very curious about the differences between them.
In this chapter, the Schneider family is destabilized when Herman’s mother has a stroke. The shocking news causes Lila to think about her strained relationships with her sister and parents. When she visits Myrtle in La Crosse, she gets even more shocking news—Viola and John are getting a divorce. This was very unusual for a white, working-class family in Wisconsin in the 1940s. Although both men and women could seek a divorce, the state required them to publish the cause (such as cruel and inhuman treatment
) in the local newspaper.
For more information, see Kristin Celello1, Joseph A. Ranney2, and Scott J. South and Stewart E. Tolnay, eds.3
Making Marriages Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).↩︎
“Traditional Values and No-Fault Divorce” (Wisconsin Court System, 1998), https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/history/article45.htm.↩︎
The Changing American Family: Sociological and Demographic Perspectives (Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 1992).↩︎