I was put to bed early and would wake up well before my parents, but I was not allowed to leave my room. I couldn’t read so often I took thread and needle to embroider pieces of Kleenex with images of people, houses, and sailboats. Surprisingly, the Kleenex held up. I was frightened much of the time and especially during the night, first by the threat of fire, then the possibility of someone breaking in and hurting me, and later, following the death from throat cancer of a school friend, I added sickness, abandonment, and death to my nighttime terrors.
Whenever Annette would go away to visit her parents in New York or for a vacation with Rex, I would sneak into their room before whoever was caring for me got up and try on Annette’s satin slips and nightgowns and do irreparable damage to them in my fury at being left alone. I stole money in small quantities and lied about almost everything. Annette rewarded these lesser infractions by spanking me with her hairbrush. The big offences my father took care of with his leather belt on my bare ass. These lashings were especially painful because it was Rex whose warmth and humor I particularly cherished.
What little time Rex spent with me was magical. He would animate my huge red-and-white stuffed panda, whom he named Eliphalet Cardinal Glummumajug. The “Cardinal” referred to Eliphalet’s red rather than black markings and provided Rex with another opportunity to mock the Catholic Church. Rex would encourage me to run around the living room clutching Eliphalet to the accelerating speeds of the overture to Die Fledermaus. Other times we would play “tennis” with slide rules and a balloon, my father lying in his bed with a twenty-inch rule as his racket while I ran around the bed swatting at the balloon with my ten-inch rule. Time with Annette was more pedestrian.
* * *
In April of 1945 FDR died, and Hitler met his end in a bunker with Eva Braun. They were just names to me, but I sensed these events meant serious change. Annette was between jobs and took the summer off.
22