What Doesn’t Kill You - A Story of The Greatest Generation

Now that I have grown old, I find my thoughts wandering back, more and more, to the years when I was very small. They were not the simple times people like to imagine. My family came through the nineteen tens the way you come through a hard winter, having lost more than we believed we could bear, and having learned, somehow, to go on anyway. What carried us was ordinary enough. A little learning. A few good neighbors. And more courage than any of us had known we possessed. In the end we found a happiness none of us would have dared to wish for. This is our story. For me, it begins with a dime.

My name is Lily Hartmann. I was born in 1910, when a loaf of bread cost four cents, a pound of butter cost thirty, and eggs passed freely between neighbors who counted such things as kindness rather than commerce. A new Ford, fresh from the factory, ran about eight hundred dollars. They built some nineteen thousand of them that year, give or take, nearly double the year before, for Ford had just opened his great new plant at Highland Park and the motorcar was beginning its conquest of the world. I remember none of that, of course.

My first real memory comes five years later, at Reichenbacher’s General Store, in faraway Youngstown, Ohio.

It was one of those bright mornings that only autumn can give you. The dark had been cool and crisp when I woke, but the moment the sun came up it threw open a clear blue sky, as though it meant to promise the whole world a fine day. And it was a fine day. It was my fifth birthday.

I had spent the morning helping my Uncle George, and this trip was my reward. He pressed a whole dime into my palm. “Spend it on whatever you like,” he said, and then he carried me off to the one place in the county where a dime felt like the keys to the kingdom.

Uncle George was a truck farmer, one of the few men around with a motor truck of his own. That truck made him a person of consequence, for it meant he could carry his produce to the towns the railroad did not reach, which let him sell at retail prices and let those townsfolk buy fresh. He grew tomatoes and strawberries and asparagus, with a patch of cabbage set aside for sauerkraut, planting so cleverly by the season that something was always coming ripe. All summer long he loaded the truck at dawn, sold the day’s harvest in some neighboring town, and came home to work the fields again as though the day had only been half lived.

The moment we stepped through the door, my eyes went wide as saucers. The main aisle ran straight to the back of the store as though it might carry on clear to the next town. The floorboards had been worn smooth, and down the very center ran a groove, a true path, hollowed out by years of boots and cart wheels and stubborn feet. I set my own shoes in it at once, reasoning that if so many thousands had worn that path before me, it must surely be the best place to walk.

Shelves and glass cases branched off into smaller aisles like side streets, and I drifted through the first of them in a daze, gazing up at towers of goods. How was anyone meant to choose a single thing in a place that seemed to hold everything?

Reichenbacher’s had cans everywhere, in neat rows on the shelves, in baskets on the floor, in stacks as tall as a grown man. No wonder everyone kept to the groove. You would break your neck on a basket of cans otherwise. I knew some of the labels, beans and peaches and the like, things meant for supper, and there was even a flat little tin of fish, the sort grown people only pretend to enjoy. I decided then and there that I would not be spending my dime on anything that came in a can.

The store smelled of old wood and dust and paper, with maybe a breath of molasses underneath, until a roll of cigarette smoke drifted over it all and claimed the air for its own. I could not see over the shelves, so when I reached the end of the main aisle I nearly jumped out of my skin.

A man was looking down at me.

Mr. Reichenbacher sat up high on a tall stool behind the counter, like a king upon his throne. A cigarette rested in his fingers on the countertop, its smoke curling lazily upward until a fan caught it and chopped it into ribbons and sent it wandering. Behind him stood shelves crowded with bottles and boxes, and beside him sat an enormous roll of white paper, so big around that it looked about the size of my head.

I pointed at it and said, full of wonder. “You must like to draw an awful lot.”

Mr. Reichenbacher grinned. “Nooooo,” he said, drawing the word out long and playful. “That is for wrapping. Suppose someone is giving a party and comes in for several bottles of wine and spirits. I tear off a piece, wrap each bottle, and then nothing clinks together in her basket.” He showed me, unrolling a strip and snapping it clean off against the metal edge in one straight motion. It was so neat it seemed like a magic trick.

Then he tilted his head at me. “But I am guessing you are the one who likes to draw. Here. Take this piece. I have nothing better to do with it.”

I reached for the paper, careful to keep my fingers well clear of the big knife built into the holder. “Thank you, Mr. Reichenbacher,” I meant to say. What came out was, “Thank you, Mr. Wreckerer.”

He did not correct me. That made me like him.

I lost all interest in the paper the instant it touched my hand, because as I stretched up beside the counter my palm came down on cold glass. I looked down.

Ice cream.

Not a picture of it, not a promise of it, but real ice cream, sitting behind a frosted window like treasure in a chest. I could have counted on one hand every time I had tasted ice cream in my life, and I would have had fingers to spare, all of them in fact. I had heard of the stuff. I had never once laid eyes on it.

“We have a special on the small cups, only four cents,” Mr. Reichenbacher began. “I have vanilla, and …”

He got no further, for just then Uncle George called out from the front corner of the store, where he had been eyeing a great display of potted plants and cut flowers.

“Do you always get that kind of money for flowers?” he started, striding toward the counter, and then, CRASH.

In his excitement he had walked straight into a pyramid of cans stacked out into the aisle. “I am so sorry,” he said over the clatter. “It is only that I got excited. How can you charge so much for flowers? Where do they come from? How often are they delivered?

Mr. Reichenbacher set down his cigarette, rose from his big chair, and came around to help gather the cans. “Do not trouble yourself, we will have them stacked again in a jiffy. It has happened before. I have been wanting to move these cans anyhow, if only I had somewhere to put them.”

“I have a soft spot for fresh flowers,” Uncle George told him. “When my wife, Mary, was alive, we kept them planted all around the farmhouse. She had that yard looking like the grounds of a French castle. I know how to grow flowers.”

I broke in before they could carry on about anything so dull as flowers. “They have ice cream! Real ice cream! And it is only four cents. Come and see, it is in a cold box by the counter.” I caught Uncle George by the hand and began to pull.

“Four cents is near half your dime,” he said, in that settled way grown people use when they consider a matter closed. “And ice cream is a good deal better when the weather is hot. Surely you can find something finer than that.”

I scowled and very nearly objected. He had said I could have anything I wanted, and now it seemed he meant anything I wanted, provided it came in a stupid can.

Before I could say so, Mr. Reichenbacher pointed toward the back of the store. “Did you know we keep a candy counter back there, young lady?”

I was no lady, I almost told him. But by then I could think of nothing in the world but candy.

“It is my birthday,” I announced, as though the whole store had been waiting to hear it. “I am five years old, and my Uncle George gave me ten cents to spend however I please. And I want candy.”

Mr. Reichenbacher’s eyes crinkled. “Well then, you had better go and look. And on your way you will pass our cracker barrel. There is a little square opening in the top, just big enough for a small hand to slip inside and come out again holding one cracker. Help yourself.” He leaned down, as if letting me in on a secret. “But mind you, only one. Take more than that, and you will get stuck.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rickerer!” I sang out, and away I went. I left the two of them standing there talking about flowers. I had more important business.

The cracker barrel was an old wooden thing about as tall as I was, with the square little door right at the top. I climbed up just enough and plunged my hand inside. The crackers felt wonderful under my fingers, dry and ridged and gloriously plentiful. So naturally I took a whole fistful.

And that was how I learned that grown people are sometimes right in the most aggravating way possible.

My hand went in easily. My hand would not come out. I tugged. Nothing. I tugged harder. Still nothing.

Mr. Reichenbacher ambled over on his way to the candy counter and stopped to watch me struggle, as though it were a show he had bought a ticket for. “Remember what I told you,” he said, kindly enough. “Only one. Hold it between two fingers, and it will come right out.”

I stared up at him and said not a word. I had no intention of surrendering. Not on my birthday. Not with crackers at stake. I squeezed my fist tighter and pulled with everything I had.

The crackers crumbled all at once, to sand between my fingers. My knuckles scraped the wood, and my pride scraped along with them, but I did not care, for the moment my hand sprang free I crammed the broken crackers into my mouth before anyone could think to take them back.

Then Mr. Reichenbacher bent down toward me, and I panicked. Help, I thought. What is he going to do?

He began to laugh. Not the polite little chuckle grown people usually spend on children, either. He laughed until he could not stand up straight. When at last he caught his breath, he wiped at his eyes and said, “That is the funniest thing I have seen all week. You are one determined young lady.”

If only he had known how right he was.

He did not tell Uncle George. He did not make me sweep up the crumbs. He only smiled at me as though the two of us shared a secret, which was a strange thing for a grown man to do, and a kind one besides.

I finished my stolen crackers and went on to the candy counter at a slower, more innocent pace, chewing all the way.

And then I saw it.

Half a wall of great glass jars, ranged in a row like jewels, every one of them brimming with candy. Peppermints and drops and twists and chews, in colors and shapes I had no names for yet. It was so glorious that I stopped where I stood and simply stared.

In that moment, I decided that Reichenbacher’s was the finest place in all the world. Of course, my world was a very small place in those days.

After a long and serious deliberation, helped along by one or two “samples” that Mr. Reichenbacher pressed upon me, we determined that my dime would stretch to four peppermint sticks and one package of Goo Goo Clusters. Peppermint sticks were my favorite, but I could not resist anything called a goo goo cluster. The name alone sounded delicious, and the thing itself looked better still, all chocolate and marshmallow and nuts.

I handed over my dime, and Mr. Reichenbacher gave me a penny back. “Thank you, Mr. Ricker baker,” I said, as properly as a girl of five can manage. “Thank you for the lovely time in your store.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” he said, and slipped my candy into a small paper sack. “Come back any time you like. Happy birthday.” And then, because he could, he added one thing more. He handed me a small cup of vanilla ice cream, with two little wooden spoons.

Ice cream was my favorite, too.

On our way out I caught hold of the door handle and found my fingers had gone sticky with candy. They did not want to let go. They came away from the handle slowly, with a small and satisfying pop. So I did it again. Grab, pull, pop. And once more after that, because sticking to a door handle turned out to be a little bit funny and a little bit satisfying, which is a rare combination at any age.

Uncle George and I sat together in the cold November air, eating ice cream that was even colder, our hearts as warm as could be. I left Reichenbacher’s General Store that day with sticky fingers and the firm conviction that ten cents could buy happiness.